First, thanks for the responses to my question. And on a side note, I've found that popping a speed pot while under Heroism and RF, I can't get off any Steadies at all because it's very difficult to time it right where it's not running into the GCD keeping you from casting it. I do have some haste from gear, but I'm far from stacking it. Does anyone else run into this issue when under many speed buffs?

I can't help with the haste but I believe the arp cap before considering the proc of trinkets and such is in the 560's, or that's a safe place to be. There was a good post on the subject either towards the begining of the thread or mabye about 5-6 pages back. I would recommend always stacking Agi gems besides getting what you need for the meta but my info could be wrong.

It is very hard to extract the tier set calculations from the damage formulae: they are integrated into each of the appropriate TNS-* sheets.

That said, it's relatively easy to figure out how much they mean to you. Put your gear in, then hard-code the bonus state in the Advanced Infos sheet. For example, my lock has 4/4T9, so the Advanced Infos sheet shows "Tier 9 2/5 bonus" and "Tier 9 4/5 bonus" set to TRUE. When I type FALSE into the 4/5 bonus, my dps drops by 100.

@Rosethorn

What you're describing is the effect player skill has on dps. SimulationCraft executes the rotation perfectly, which includes interrupting Drain Soul at the exact moment a tick occurs when needed. The affliction execute phase is especially subject to latency and player reaction time because you don't benefit from the spell queue.

Interrupting Drain Soul is to be expected, it is your filler and you should not expect to be able to let it tick indefinetly. Just as sometimes during the normal rotation you will only cast one Shadow Bolt before doing something else, there will be cases where you Drain Soul for only one tick and then have to cast a higher priority spell.
The affliction thread has a few tricks (most requiring mods) to accurately anticipate Drain Soul ticks.

Yes, it is great for us as we don't really see end game mana issues often. It's ability to snipe a heal with little to no overhealing is great. It may be mostly a meter padder, but it can also heal a target in need. It seems like a similar effect to Ancestral Awakening - Spell - World of Warcraft but only every 45 seconds for us. The chance to proc of a HoT tick is good for us, but it is also not that much better compared to other heals/sources. In any fight where you are spamming heals (be it as a druid or any other healer), this trinket will be off CD for 1-4 seconds on average. It is a good throughput trinket for any healer. We like to be greedy because of the SP on the trinket as well as no regen (which other healers gear a little bit more for). A+ trinket for restoration druids, high SP, decent effect.

The best dps spec has no mana regen/conservation talent points? You may be able to get away with that on single target non-movement fights, but in encounters where you have to move your totems often you will be oom quite a bit. The dps you would gain from the extra point in Imp Shields does come close to compensating for the dps you would lose from movement fights. I suggest moving one point in Imp Shields to Elemental Focus. Also, we may want to consider moving this list into a new thread for organization purposes. A lot has changed for us in 3.3 leaving a lot of the posts/discussions in this thread outdated and irrelevant.

WTB Addon that tracks all buffs that roll with corruption and then once you have them all, whispers a designated rogue to give you tricks and then once you have tricks it gives you an on-screen warning to APPLY CORRUPTION NOW!!!!! lol.

I got to do my first 25 man ICC last night after having gained the knowledge of the tricks of the trade thing and pre-potting. I must say, it increased my dps substantially. However, I think pre-potting would serve me a little better if i actually used a 2nd pot at some point during the fight. :P

Pulled off about 8500 on marrowgar, 8300 on deathwhisper, 8800 on saurfang, 9000 on rotface, and pulled agro and died early on festergut. Are those numbers pretty on par for what they should be right now or am I way behind?

Threat was a real issue when our top rogue was giving me tricks... and not as much when a slighty lesser rogue was giving me tricks. Probably coincidence, but either way it was getting bad enough that I almost specced into threat reduction. Almost.

My current armory is destruction (for heroics), but i raid almost all bosses as affliction and swap out the T10 helm for my T9 helm to keep the 4 pc. My intention is to keep 4 pc T9 for affliction until I get 4 pc T10 until I find out that's wrong.

Two points of clarification:

@ Flyfunner:
As stated earlier in the thread, %dmg debuffs on target do not carry over on corruption refreshes. Buffs on YOU (like TOTT) may do this, but I suspect it'd be a DPS loss to actually wait on them, and TOTT on a warlock is certainly not something I as a raid leader would want to see in my own raids, for several reasons. Ultimately all we can or should control (that I can think of off-hand) are maximum normal raid buffs, pre-combat potion, and NIC.



Which brings me to the current topic.

I don't think 4T10 is going to be BAD for affliction. Maybe less powerful than for other specs, but whether it is unlikely to be "ideal for affliction" also, well that depends on your definition. Such is the nature of procs, however. Trying to work around them beyond the first moments of a pull is just not worth it for affliction in pure DPS terms.

When the proc activates, you will get the benefit for several shadowbolts, at least 1 Haunt, and may or may or may not get a UA or a CoA, but you will still be spending all 10s casting (hopefully, rather than running away from oozes, fire, rockets, etc.). Either way, it's 10% more damage for those 10s than you would have done in those 10s.

Given the obscene amount of achievable haste from ICC gear, we're looking at getting out a lot of spells in that short window.

P.S. I'd add too that clipping a tick of UA to refresh before the proc falls off would actually be a DPS loss, unless my early morning brain skills are lacking. I THINK the same is true for CoA, but admittedly that's a guess without bothering to look up the % of the spell's dmg the last tick grants.

Perhaps you are not doing as good a job timing when to cut off your drain soul as Simcraft does. Remember, it's a perfect player. We are not.

On that note, perhaps the compendium would do well to include a recommended castbar or timer mod to assist warlocks in estimating the timing of ticks of drain soul to optimize that part of the rotation, which is probably the toughest thing to do well when you consider ever-changing haste values week to week and even moment to moment during a fight.

Cower - Spell - World of Warcraft

Seems not to be worth spending 20 energie for -3474 threat, better to stop attacking or asking a paladin or priest for thread reduction buff

I disagree because you while you can say cooldowns help for bursting a slime down, there are also slimes where you DON'T have those cd's up, which means your dps at that time is probably lower than fire because fire is pretty consistent all the way throughout. Arguing that you suddenly "popping cd's to save the raid from a whipe" is a pretty ridiculous notion since that implies that you are in fact constantly saving your cd's for those rare opportunities, which would be a big dps loss.

Furthermore to add to Elemento's points, fire also has much better mobility for P3 so you could essentially keep moving with the boss and not lose any dps (more on Pyro and LB), while arcane, even if you use blink, that's still a dps loss because you're using a gcd every 15 seconds for blink. And while there is PoM to use on moving, there can be lots of times to move in P3 (slimes puddles going out, slime puddles expanding, malleable goo, boss kiting, etc).

I definitely think when heroic hits and P3 becomes the real hurdle for guilds to overcome, fire may definitely be better.

As an arcane mage, even if your IV, PoM, AP and trinkets are all down... as long as you have a mana potion, mana gem and/or evocate available, you can burst with AB spam. Fire would definitely have a small advantage over arcane with a slightly longer range, and increased damage in p3, but arcane has a lot more burst possibilities with or without trinkets and cooldowns. Arcane simply tranfers mana into damage better than fire.