With the GCD. and accounting for lag, I can't see any benefit in cutting the cast time below one second. Am I missing something?

PvP purposes only (well, i love it for farming). It allows you to cast Corr on the go.

Movement fights

You can cast it while moving with 5/5.

Having it be instant cast can be a huge benefit, since you don't have to even be facing a target to cast affliction spells. Anytime you run away from something being able to dot and tap/Dark Pact, has always seemed more then worth the investment.

I was just thinking about this today, as I currently have 5/5 in the talent. As mentioned above, it's great when you're on the go - when farming the eels NW of Shattrath, I typically swim around hitting Corruption, Curse of Agony, and Siphon Life then tabbing to a new creature. I never have to stop until I run out of mobs or until I want to loot. Not having to face mobs when you're casting instant spells is a very powerful ability, and contributes a lot to my enjoyment of the Warlock class, funny enough.

In a more serious vein, I think you could get by with fewer points in it, but it's difficult to get to 41 points in the Affliction tree without doing so. The only way I was able to get there was by putting 5 points in Suppression, which was also something I was trying to avoid (given I was trying to avoid putting points in Shadow Embrace *and* Malediction too).

So I guess the bottom line is: if you're not Affliction heavy, you can certainly get away with putting 1 to 3 points in Improved Corruption. For an Affliction Warlock, however, it's much more difficult. Personally, I love having it as instant cast and can't imagine changing it.

If in the course of a lengthy fight, when you are trying to keep all your dots up as close to 100% of the time as possible you get into this scenario:

(pretend this an accurate picture of your dot timers )

1.8 sec Corruption on Blah
1.5 sec immolation on Blah

This might not happen as part of your "perfect" rotation, this might not be ideal, but this will happen. What do you do? In theory, you want to start to cast a new dot so that it goes off just as the previous cast of it falls off, but in this scenario you have 2 dots that are going to fall off very close to each other and its impossible to start to cast them in such a way to have no down time, unless, of course, your corruption in an instant cast.

If you're moving, you're not casting anything else anyways. So refresh corruption (even if it isn't down) and lifetap the mana back (works as long as you're moving for at least 3 seconds) -- little reason not to, unless you're very health-constrained, and you can save time later you would've otherwise spent refreshing corruption.

See also: siphon life, curses, shadowburn (if you're good at jumping and turning -- if not, it's easy enough to learn.)

Using it in that way does gain you damage over time from the points, even if it doesn't change the dps of the spell in a perfect, standing-still, theory-crafting world.

Gruul while flying/shatter. Aran while running out of blizzard. Prince while repositioning. The channelers on Mag if you can afford the global cooldown while you're moving towards an infernal that's about to break CC. etc.


It also comes down to, where else will you put those early affliction points? Too many points in suppression is of dubious value since you need +hit for soulshatter and shadowbolts also. I'm not a big soul siphon fan (maybe if we had 40-man raids with lots of warlocks and I was using drain life a lot on raids, but.) You do need to find a home for 10 points in the first two tiers before you can move on.


(edit) I should add, I always have affliction points in my raiding builds, because I find range and -threat talents to be too important to how I'm happy playing. So the "where do I spend 10 points" comes up a lot. I'm 42/1/18 now. I was 21/0/40 before.

(edit2) There is something to be said, however, for only 2-3 points in for the ease of being able to cast one dot and then just hit the next. I pretty frequently mistime the global cooldown but I'm great with timing my spells. (thinking about this, it's probably because I don't have a cast bar for the global cooldown. I wonder if someone's written a mod that makes a cast bar. Hmm. Off to troll wowace.com.)

As redundant as this may be (I've known it for a while, but I *know* I read this on a different thread here at EJ in the past two weeks) taking Improved Corruption increases the damage done in a short term fight (ie, trash) of Corruption because the damage starts ticking three seconds after the mob is afflicted. By taking the talent points, your damage done per trash pull will increase (albeit, only 1 tick) and over time, this damage will add up as a major contribution to raid DPS. Still, I feel the mobility factor for both farming, PvP, and PvE fights where you need to be constantly moving outweighs the damage. Nothing more than a perk.

I wouldn't want to play without a good instant damage spell without drawbacks. Without talents, we only have two instants, a curse and deathcoil. Making more spells instant is good, especially at a low cost of talent points.

Another use of instant corruption is the boss of Heroic BF, he does a "get over here" move and then you must run or take a lot of damage.

Ofc the PvP usage makes the spell invaluable.


Sorren's Timers (on wowace) shows a cast bar from the GCD.

personally I found 5/5 helping with dot rotations in movement fights or fights where DPS breaks (stuns etc) are forced upon you every x seconds.

It gives you an entire global cooldown that you can move without losing DPS. It also opens up Improved Life Tap to the non-affliction locks (Who really don't need many points in suppression compared to deep afflic locks).

Don't forget that on fights with constant AE damage, without 5/5 improved corruption, you're going to take pushback while you cast it, and lose more than a few seconds over the course of the fight.

For all non-Rogues, Global Cooldown is 1.5 seconds. Only rogues have a 1.0 second global cooldown. So, technically no ranks of corruption would be any different.




Note: I am only 90% certain this is still true. Could someone verify that I'm not incorrect?

Even though you don't gain any cast time on having it full out you will have so many fights where you benefit from refreshing your dots moving to A to B, or being stunned. Then you have more time to spam shadowbolts when you finally can stand still.

Corruption's base case time is 2.0 seconds, not 1.5. You need two points in Improved Corruption to drop it's cast time by 0.8 seconds for it to become <= the global cooldown.

As a raiding warlock with 41/0/20 affliction specc i really think 5/5 imp. corruption is the key for the perfect dot rotation.

use unstable affliction and instantly corruption. you get 2 dots that will end at the same time.
i think having ua and corruption up AT ALL time is key for maximizing dps.

Instant corruption is a must have talent for me, like previously said is not about maximizing you dps output or perfecting rotations is about utility. I rate improved corruption with Grim reach and Destructive reach, two talents that in theroy won't make you do more damage but open alot of possibilities.

It is a huge difference between a instant cast spell and a spell with cast time, it opens alot of possibilities, casting while moving, casting while being attacked, no possibility of interrupting the spell. Think about all the times you need to move for a couple of seconds, everytime you waste a global cooldown cause you are moving, you could be casting corruption if you had 5/5.

The way I see it, a Warlock makes up their own personal rotation...there isnt one rotation to rule them all.
I use immo - corr- UA - CoA - siphon.

then bolt

then refresh immo - corr- CoA then bolt..rinse repeat.


works for me...the amount of dancing these new bosses require, insta corruption is worth every point imo.

You don't recast UA???

I think its obvious now that imp Corruption is pretty important. What you should really be asking is how useless is nightfall.

For 99% of Locks, this is true if you want to PvP/Arena well.

However, for that 1% (think Clan Hexx), 42/19 is the best PvP build (this Lock runs with 3.5 DPS and 1.5 Healers) so he needs the extra DoT protection given by UA and to counter not having Soul Link a bit, getting the survival given by 19 Demo (fast demon summon and better Armor) in order to make his team work.

I don't know what pet he runs with (I would assume start with Puppy to get a few dispels and counterspells, and swapping to VW if needed).

Hum, I don't know about you but Nightfall procs alot for me and most of the time it will give me an extra chance to have Imp SB up there. Nightfall is not useless by any means.

Although my current spec is 41/3/17, I do use the same rotation.

UA > Corr > Immo > SL > CoA

Then I have time to cast approximatly 2 shadowbolts (depending on movement or lag), after that it is time to refresh UA/Corr/Immo while its last ticks are going off.

I personally do not think I could live without instant corruption after using this dot rotation.

If you want to look from a completely dps point of view, the instant corruption is up at the beginning of the global cooldown, as opposed to the end with a 1.5sec casted. 1.5seconds earlier uptime probably doesn't mean much, but it is something. :P