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?

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.

It's also useful in fights with cast time increase debuffs. In cases like that corruption is going to be a bigger part of your damage than your lengthened-cast direct damage spells.

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.)

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.

If you PVP as a 'lock, you'll be some form of:

5, X, 11

Affliction or Demonology heavy, but always with 5 points in Imp. Corruption and 11 for Shadowburn in Destro.

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?