Im a druid, it seems I know very little about locks sadly. But I also lead raids so I need to know more >.<

I keep seeing references to locks doing 900+ DPS on Gruul. Yet our locks arent anywhere near the top of the DPS charts even with a shadowpriest.

I can't help but think they are doing something wrong in PVE DPS. I don't think it's gear with them having 1000 +dmg or approaching that. They are all Affliction afaik. So can someone tell me what it is that locks use as a high sustained DPS attack style? Is it timing on DOTs? Combo moves? Special talents?

Can some really good DPS locks give me a rundown on their attack method please?

Thanks for any help you can give.

In general you do high damage by being attentive and a active player. Keeping an eye on your DoT's, nuke when you can nuke. And keep a good flow of mana\health re-gen. There is no build that will do that for you though .

I am sure there is a thread here that could help you answear your question, and you should search for it.

Drain Life spam.

Sadly, I'm not joking.

My last Gruul kill offered approximately 850dps with neither CoS nor priest debuffs removing 30% spell damage.

The first trick to warlock DPS is having all available curses up, curses as I recall tick for approximately 400-500 dps with 150dps coming from curse of doom or agony. Gruul is a fight offering much movement and stunning, these dots are going to have an effect in a fight where people are immobilized.

Keep up every dot, throw in shadowbolts while everything is ticking (get DoTimer) and you've maximized warlock dps.

I would say dots over immobilization, and +30% damage. possibly heroism, SP totems and whatnot will cause extreme metre readings.

For reference this is with 1500 spell damage 10% hit +6% affliction (obtainable from crafted and heroics) wet (1210 + 150(flask) + 65(shadowP) + 35(G. arcane) + 40(oil)). When 100 fel armor, a 101 totem, 30-40 imp spirit, 95 spellstrike, and 150 icon are added things die quickly... then multiply it by 10% (CoS), 5% (misery), and 15% (shadow vuln) while everyone's stunned this simply cannot be beat.

The point of all the peak trinket damage throughout the fight is a warlock can trinket, hit +2000 spell damage, then apply all their dots over a short period of time

edit - with item changes, a favored group setup and select positioning a warlock in pre-25man gear can hit over 1000dps over the course of gruul while running an accessory curse (moonkin shadow priest shaman)

He's being funny, don't tell them to drain life =p

Have them use an addon like DoTimer, which will show them the duration on all of their DOTs. They should be re-applying them all the instant they drop for max DPS. You fill in the rest of the time with Shadow Bolts, and Lifetap/Darkpact when needed. Even as full affliction warlocks, they should still be using immolate in their rotations.

If you only have 2 warlocks present, they'll likely be using Curse of Shadows and Curse of Elements, which will make their DPS suffer a bit. Every warlock beyond the 2nd will be able to use Curse of Doom and/or Curse of Agony, which results in a noticeable DPS increase over the first 2 warlocks.

Also, DPS on Gruul can vary greatly depending on where you get to stand. If you're at a spot on or behind a rock, while still in range of Gruul, you can essentially DPS the entire fight. If you're in a place where you have to be standing on the ground in order to be in range, you'll spend a lot of time running around after each ground slam.

The only other idea I have would be to post their armory links to see if gear might be the issue. If they aren't tailors, Frozen Shadoweave and Spellstrike will be quite a DPS boost, even with other armor getting buffed in 2.1.

Questions:

1. Do you use a shadow priest?

2. Are they spec'd into UA?

3. Do they use mods like dot timers to help with their dot cycles?

4. Do they have a really low amount of hit like 4% or lower?

These are the main factors that I have found affect warlock DPS. Answer these questions and you will probably find your answers.

Drain Life will never out damage Shadowbolt spamming, so in just about every situation, more damage will be done my Shadowbolt. However, in fights where there is a constant AoE tick (Netherspite comes to mind) and the Warlock in question doesn't have Intensity, Drain Life becomes a better staple attack.

Shadow bolt does more damage than drain life. To repeat: shadow bolt does more damage than drain life.


The only reason you'd ever drain is

-) You want the health back for some reason.
-) You want to get only a few ticks in and there's no time for a shadow bolt, and you're comfortable with throwing away the mana cost of the spell.


Unless the raid is taking a lot of damage, drain should almost never be necessary to replenish your mana pool as well. If you're draining for damage, you likely have Siphon and Dark Pact as well. These two alone will sustain you nearly indefinitely with good gear.

(By the way, always put BoW on your imp. It's like putting BoW on yourself with dark pact, minus the time saved with GCD!).

Drain is GREAT when you need to heal a few thousand damage, and there's a temporary %increase to damage on the boss (Imp SB proc, Mag is banished, etc), and it's great at getting a spell up there instantly if you Imp SB Proc and you want it for yourself. Let me therefore close with my opener:

Shadow bolt does more damage than drain life.

/shrug He makes it work for him. I think he wanted to try something new and be self-sustaining to boot. Considering the DPS he's putting out with it, I'm not going to argue with him.

Siphon Life is all the healing affliction warlocks need to be self-sustaining for almost ever fight. It's his choice, but it's an unnecesary loss of DPS.

Draining life for dps is not the way to go. Affliction already has the best sustainability from dark pact and siphon life. Especially on fights where there is an enrage timer mechanic you don't want to hold back. The idea that "it seemed to work for him" is fallacious because it simply means other raid members will be forced to pick up the slack.

As far as the original question: it's all a matter of refreshing dots and throwing out some bolts when possible. I wouldn't call warlock dps terribly complicated, even as affliction. If they are reasonably geared with a shadow priest with a few pots, the only reason I can think that they wouldn't be pushing 900 dps *easily* is that you have too many debuffs on gruul, and the lock dots are getting knocked off.

DoTimer

You can still be self-sustaining without Drain Life spam between DoTs (you may need a few Drain Lifes, but mostly use Shadow Bolt). Even without Bane, Shadow Bolt will out dps Drain Life even with 12 debuffs on the target.


The answer to the question is get hit gear, spec UA/Bane, get DoTimer and recast *after* the DoTs have hit 0:00 on the mob, and cast Shadow Bolt between you DoTs.

Also: never sit "not casting" waiting for a dot to finish. Cast a shadowbolt even if it means a dot will wear off in the interim. (or lifetap/dark pact.)

Have them go practice on DrBoom, working on getting their dot rotations solid, learning when they need to be paying attention, etc. in a calm, quiet situation where they don't have to care about anything else.

Someone else mentioned this, but: never refresh a dot before it's expired, just refresh it as soon as you can.

Make sure they're casting immolate even if they're a "shadow" warlock -- it's worth the damage even if they have tons of +shadow-only items.

Lag can really really hurt a warlock, particularly if it's a fight where their optimal dps is switching between targets. Even if not, we have so many short-cast-time spells that lag kills us more than it does a mage or an elemental shaman.

If you have one good warlock, use the data in SWStats to find out what's "wrong" with your other locks. You can see the number of dot ticks: this should be about the same if dot uptime is good. You can see the number of SB's cast: this should be about the same if they are using their non-dotting time effectively.

Make sure it's a "fair" fight: it takes a lot of practice for a warlock to be good on fast-dying trash if they're 41 points into affliction. You need a very good feel for the mob HP's and exactly how many dots to put on (or whether it's worth refreshing.) It's really best to look at a boss fight, which is where the class is stronger.


Gear: +dmg is always better than +crit even if you're spec'd into destruction (unless perhaps you're fire-destruction.) The ratio for my gear is 2.4 dmg ~= 1 crit rating. This means pretty much all gear choices with +crit will be inferior, due to how the item budgets work (but often you have no choice in that slot.)

Talents: Suppression doesn't substitute for +hit gear, because it only affects dots, not the mainstays of shadowbolt and soulshatter (the deaggro). So don't let them tell you"I don't need hit gear, I have 5 points in suppression!"


SB is always better than DL, no matter what anyone tells you about DL being "new" or "different" it's still inferior dps. (it has it's place, but it's inferior dps.) No one's saying a DL-spamming lock can't top the meters (depending on fight, others' skill/gear, etc.), but they could top it by more using SB.



Further refinements are things like
- re-casting instant dots when you can (having to run around for whatever reason)
- timing your dots so they are up during a running/silence/frozen period so you still do dps
- timing your trinkets so they overlap as much as possible with your dot re-casts but you don't lose a lot of time waiting to hit the trinket

But if they're really low on damage it's probably not things like that which are causing the problems.



P.S. DoTimer!

P.P.S. I have my UI with a separate action bar (I use bongos) SMACK in the middle of my screen with just my trinkets and racial on it. This reminds me to use them whenever they're up. The bar is positioned right below my feet so I'm always seeing it. This has been probably the single biggest raid-dps improvement for me :p.

If you want a small tip, use a dot timer which has "ghost bars". I set mine to linger for at least 5 seconds. Often something comes up and I can't refresh one or more dots (moving, casting, reverb, whatever) and it's much easier to figure what needs to be put back up by seeing the ghost bar, instead of trying to think about "Hmm, what's missing?" Anything to cut fractions of seconds off your reaction time so you're always doing something.

If you're confused and need time to figure out what to do next, need time to glance at chat, raid warning, threat, trinket timers, whatever, cast a shadowbolt. The long cast time let's your character be doing something while you evaluate your situation.

If you know you will have to move, do it during instant casts so you can stay mobile while damaging.

Curse of Doom is always more damage than Curse of Agony on a boss fight.

I usually start my fights by running in with Amp Curse up (it has a long duration), and as soon as I hit my position I hit trinkets + DoTs as fast as ever I can. Because our threat only starts to build after ~15 seconds there's almost no situation where you can't start immediately hitting the boss as hard as you can, even if the tank whiffs a lot.

More general class non-specific advice: the GCD / cast time is always up a few fractions of a second before it displays on your screen due to lag. You'll need to find the "sweet spot" where you hit the next cast even as the cast bar is still ending on your screen to chain spells with the least possible delay. If you can do this for shadowbolt, and figure out exactly when the GCD will end for you so you can apply your next DoT, this will increase your damage substantially.

Excellent times to lifetap / dark pact are when you have a DoT that will need refreshing in the next second. This avoids a loss of uptime but also a loss of time where you're not doing anything.

Never lifetap / dark pact when your mana deficit is smaller than the amount you tap / pact for.

Don't dark pact if your pet is under half mana (unless you really need the mana now), because you'll get less mana than a full pact and it's a less efficient use of time.

Always make sure you have enough mana for a full 15 seconds of pure nuking before your trinket comes up, so you don't waste trinket time.

I like to make sure I'm always about 90% life, so my siphon life is always healing me back up and not wasted.

Another quick question for people. On bosses I used Amp'd CoDoom but with trash I use CoA.

Other warlocks are telling me that I should be using CoS.

Which is it and does anyone have any links to some math that would show which is better?

Ooh! I didn't know I could do that in DoTimer! That will really make it easier on me visually on multiple adds.

Another mod which is helpful, for this situation in particular is 'Supercast'. Supercast will show the overlap time on your cast bar of when your spell is actually ending. This will let you know to start smacking that SB key earlier when a cast was not synched with server/client. Often times if I start casting a Shadowbolt directly after running then stop my cast bar will add anywhere from .3-.5 sec than what the cast actually started serverside.

Use CoS if a 10% (or 13% with malediction) increase in shadow damage is more than the damage from CoA/CoD. Lets say your CoA does 100dps (3000dmg over 30secs, I'm just using a round number). This would put the cutoff at 1000 shadow dps. With 2+ people CoS wins hands down, with 1 CoA/CoD probably wins. The other thing to consider is that CoS also lowers targets' resists. So this tips scales a bit more in favor of CoS in some cases.


As for the question of the thread. Getting 16% for affliction spells goes a long way. And dot timers. Nothing sinks warlock dps faster than lost dot uptime. Make sure at least 1 of them is using CoS as well.

As an affliction lock I've found that one big addition to my damage has been adding some +hit gear. In my first attempts on Gruul, I was shocked at how many of my shadowbolts were being resisted - appalled really. So I made it my goal to go get some decent +hit gear, which I put on for bosses. My +hit gear sacrifices a bit of damage (maybe 100?) but I have +13% to hit, which more than makes up the difference. I only have maybe 4 pieces of gear in my +hit set but that's enough for the big increase in +hit (my normal +hit is around 3%). From memory, there's that Crimson Order robe, Gloves of Oblivion with +spell hit on them, a trinket from the elite slime in Netherstorm and - maybe my Voidheart Shoulders?

Aside from that, my damage comes from (lots of these are noted above, but for completeness' sake I'm including my own list):

1. Keeping my DoTs up all the time (using the timer in Necrosis to monitor that)
2. Using my trinkets when the cooldown is up on them (as an Orc, I have my Blood Fury macroed to with my trinket use, so I use that whenever it's up too)
3. Being consumabled out the wazoo (typically I use a flask, adept's elixir, +spell damage food, and Wizard Oil).
4. Having all the enchants I can

Thanks heaps for the responses so far guys, gives me a good starting point to work with my ppl. My view has always been the difference between average DPS and top DPS is a fairly small but significant step up, but finding that step may not be so easy.

Ahh, lost my long message. Short version cause im lazy. Plus, you dont have to read as much:

Recap:
1) use a dot timer mod
2) use a mod/macro to cut lag out of your sb casts *

Suggestions:
1) use 2 trinkets, macro them to spells. Use them to refresh dots.
2) when in doubt, spam shadowbolt. Dot in between SB turret sessions.

Now, the big points have been covered.

Immolate. Now, this isnt going to make or break a warlocks dps, at least when I use it. For a long long time immolate wasnt used because MC/BWL were generaly fire immune. I have been meaning to do the math, but have not. I do not use immolate when I am going for max dps. I am wondering if I should.

Do you use Immolate as a shadow spec warlock?

Edit:
* I use a macro thats very, very simple.
/stopcasting
/cast shadowbolt rank 12

This effectively does the samething as a complicated mod, but with out error protection. With this mod, you can reduce the effect of lag. Do you know how you can start moving before a spell stops casting, yet still goes off due to lag? If you "recast" shadowbolt in that window of lag, you can start casting a new bolt before the last one goes off.