You are putting way too much stock into Soul Shatter. Soul Shatter, while very good, is definitely not a huge liability in current end-game raiding. There's maybe 1-2 fights where I feel I must use it at some point no matter what, specifically void reaver. For every other fight, I never feel like I'm going to rely on Soul Shatter to sustain my DPS. If your tanks have good TPS, you really shouldn't be worrying about it that much. Gearing around Soul Shatter resists is dead wrong. (At least at this point in the game)

you still need to make sure your hit is enough to have your shadow bolts land! even as affliction we know it's about 36% of your dps. supression is not a replacement for hit!

It's really annoying being told this over and over when that's clearly not what I am suggesting.

Fact: Suppression uses talent points that would otherwise go to utility talents that have little to no effect on DPS, so they are not wasted DPS wise.
Fact: After hit capping your DoTs, even at very very high levels of +dmg, 1 +hit rating is worth less, DPS wise, than 1 +shadow damage or 1 +all damage
Fact: Putting together a high +hit weapon swap is a viable choice for hit capping soul shatter

This doesn't mean that hit rating is worthless after you hit cap your DoTs it's just not worth more than +dmg point for point.

CoE and SE are not DPS boosts and are only marginally useful in a raid build. Maldiction and imp CoA are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. I cannot think of a single situation where CoS w/ maldiction is not preferable to imp CoA even w/ amp curse. There are times when amp is handy for CoD but you can easily fill in every DPS talent in affliction, including amp curse and maldiction or imp CoA, and still have space for points in supression. The extra point will, at best, make farming easier.

It doesn't matter if you need soul shatter or not all the time, there is going to be sometime when it fails you when you need it most and that is my point. Also, people that keep saying hit isn't important are glossing over the need for it with Shadowbolts and other spells that are not Affliction we cast. (Have people forgotten about Banish and Enslave?) For all intents and purposes, Suppression is a crutch that Warlocks should not rely upon to make sure their attacks do damage. As has been noted several times, Shadowbolt makes up a large amount of an Affliction Warlock's DPS whether they want to realize it or not. And every +% hit you get increases the chance of ISB being up to further increase Affliction DoT DPS.

I feel it necessary to point out that you yourself valued one hit rating at less than one shadow damage and less than one all damage in your last gear comparison. I do not think anyone is going to argue that hit rating is uselee for an affliciton lock no matter the situation, more so with high +dmg levels. The fact still remains that the realtive value of hit rating is lower if your DoTs are capped and that capping them with supression and having a high hit weapon swap for soul shatter and any other utility skill you need to use like banish or enslave, covers all the bases quite handily.

What about your Shadowbolts? Banish? Enslave? Maybe even Immolate? Suppression does nothing for these at all. Are you going to swap in a +hit weapon whenever you have to cast one of these while trying to DPS? There's a reason Suppression is Tier 1 in Affliction, it's not something that you should be relying on once you start raiding. Sure, the points would go into other talents that are marginal at that level, but they atleast will help in some way where Suppression is only going to help you with your Affliction DoTs against a Boss, but that leaves you with problematic issues in other areas. Suppression does not lead to achieving a high DPS, it leads to mediocre DPS because only your Affliction DoTs will be hitting near 100%, yet those Affliction DoTs make up only 50% to 60% of your total potential DPS.


Ummmm...ok... 5% less damage on a hit is very helpful in a raid. Given it ends up around 2.5% against a tank with 50% damage reduction, it is still useful, far more useful that Suppression is (Raiding is about the team doing what needs to be done to down the boss).

For personal DPS, Imp CoA is better than Malediction, the reason why CoS with Malediction is better in a raid situation is you are boosting all Shadow and Arcane damage across the raid which benefits not just Warlocks, but also Shadow Priests, possibly Hunters with Arcane Shot (this is still a really strange area with this skill), and Moonkin with a couple of their spells. If you are out farming, Malediction does little for you.

When you're out farming, does that 5 points in Suppression really help you (even 1 point)? I don't know of a single Warlock that has been raiding atleast Karazhan that doesn't have a base hit of 6%, so where is even this one point in Suppression helpful while soloing?

For now lets ignore soul shatter (as that can be handled with a weapn swap if necessary). I think we also can agree that every warlock can spend a few points in suppression without affecting the overall DPS, as he would otherwise have to pick filler talents in the lower Affliction tree. Further lets work with your number: 40% of the overal damage is from Shadow Bolt.

Now say you start out at (randomly made up) 14% hit. You now have two items available, one with 25 spelldamage, one with 25 spell hit rating. (Damage and hitrating should be of roughly equal value in the item budget.)

Now you have two options:
A) Take the 25 spell damage, and put a point in suppression so your DoTs have 16% hit.
B) Take the 25 spell hit, bringing you to 16% hit for all spells.

It should be easy to see that option A) will result in higher overall DPS. So putting points in Suppression does indeed increase the overal DPS.

Missing with a Shadowbolt sometimes can be compensated by higher damage on the shadow bolts that hit and by higher damage on the DoTs.

I find this funny to the extreme. Improved Corruption and Improved Shadowbolt are Tier 1 talents as well, and arguably some of the most significant dps boosts for a raiding warlock. Unless, of course, you rely on siphon life, shadowfury and unstable affliction as your main damaging spells, seeing as they're all so high in the talent trees.

Going back to a post I made just a couple back, this thread is about maximizing overall DPS, not Affliction DPS. Imp Corruption and Imp Shadowbolt help maximize overall DPS, Suppression only helps maximize Affliction DPS. People are forgetting that an Affliction Warlock still depends on a destruction spell to give them roughly 40% of their DPS which Suppression does *nothing* for. In effect, Suppression does not maximize your overall DPS, which is what this thread is all about.

True, but there are other factors that go into overall hit equation. Every percent less hit is also a fraction of a percent less in ISB uptime. In order for ISB to go up you have to hit in order to crit. So your chance of ISB going up is going to be:

(level mod hit requirement + spell hit) * chance to crit

level mod hit requirement is the hit needed depending on the level of your target, +3 being 0.83, +2 being 0.93, and so on.

So while your example above shows only a slight difference in the chance of ISB going up, someone that is depending on Suppression to cap out their Affliction spells while not bothering to go any higher than 6% hit is really just saying that their crit % is roughly 0.9 multiplier lower that someone that tried to go for the hit cap of 16%. This is the crux of the arguement, maximizing your overall DPS, not just hit capping your Affliction spells and thinking that that is enough to maximize your DPS (it does for Affliction based spells, but it does not for overall).

Umm, no?

Shadow Bolt to the best of my knowledge uses a one-roll system.

Thats what I used to think too.

But ... take a level 65 warlock, with 25% crit. Have him attack a level 71 mob. He will crit a LOT less than 25%, in fact it will end up 25% of the hits that land. THe +6 level difference is about 50% miss IIRC, and half the shadowbolts (25% of total) don't crit.

There is still a healthy debate in the 1 / 2 roll system for spell casts.

No, it's a two roll system. The first is to see whether it hit or not (old white resist), the second is to checks for crits and resists. I know someone proved it somewhere on these forums or pointed to the proof elsewhere from a reliable source.

I'm just curious, where are you finding a weapon with +120 spell hit rating? Best I can come up with is about 24 spell hit rating, which isn't really anything close to making up for the 10% hit of full suppression.

Tirisfal Wand from Kara is worth getting anyways. And then, yeah, skip the offhand from Netherspite and just pick up the Staff of Polarities from non-heroic mana tombs. That's what I did.

No it's not 10% worth of +hit, but it's very very hard to avoid +hit on your gear once you get out of karazhan. And very easy to pick up a bunch if you have half a mind to do it. (even more so if you're scryer.)

So the best way to get 16% hit from gear alone is from the following that is available to me:

Spellstrike Hood
Ritssyns Lost Pendant
Voidheart Mantle
Ruby Drape of the Mysticant
Robe of Hateful Echoes
Bracers of Havok
Handwraps of Flowing Thought
Cord of Screaming Terrors
Spellstrike Pants
Boots of Shifting Nightmare
Ashyen's Gift
Band of Crimson Fury
Darkmoon Card:Crusade
Icon of the Silver Crescent
Nathrezim Mindblade
Orb of the Soul Eater
Tirisfal Wand of Ascendency

Anyone thought about making a gear progression chart that would maximize DPS for an affliction warlock? Lootzors is ok but difficult to use and doesn't account for the stats off other gear. (I.E. it either suggests gemming with nothing but +hit gems or +dmg gems regardless of how far over the cap you are based solely off preference for a particular stat). I can certainly understand why up to this point there is not one as I was getting a headache and a stomach ache sifting through my memory of what dropped where and what had hit/crit/dmg in what amounts on it. If anyone can come up with a more detailed list than I've made charting progression for each slot based off the bosses available to you I'd appreciate it.

Say from Crafted to the End of Karazhan, then from Karazhan to Magtheridon/World Bosses (Gruul doesn't have any huge upgrades really), From Mag/WB to SSC Clear, From SSC Clear to The Eye Clear, Eye Clear to BT/Hyjal (Most guilds I know of are ignoring Hyjal right now as the reward:time invested isn't as great as BT is.)

Okay. I have some nubish Warlock questions come up from reading warlock strat threads here.

(Background: I was a raiding lock over a year ago through MC/BWL switched to a healer. I'm not raiding as seriously anymore, and while still doing 25mans as a priest, I'm playing my warlock again to support a group of friends in Karazhan.)

1. Use of a /stopcasting macro.
I've seen using this mentioned to take advantage of shadowbolt/incinerate cast time, but I'm foggy on the actual implementation. How/when is this used, and what are the mechanics/benefits there?

2. 1/29/31 specs.
I've seen this mentioned/linked but haven't explicitly seen why the 1 point in corruption is done. My assumption is that lowering the cast time to 1.6 sec is close enough to the GCD incurred from casting corruption that it's approaching the most efficient way to invest time/talent points on corruption, so long as you don't need to cast on the run. Confirm/deny?

3. Affliction or Destruction?
Keeping in mind that the extent of this character will likely be Karazhan raids and Karazhan gear (Unless we desperately need a lock in Gruul's/Mag) is Affliction a much better choice? I will have access to a shadow priest, and a fire mage in these groups, and I've been leveling destruction thus far, but I've been reading that affliction is better dps at lower crit/hit/dmg levels than in a destro build.
Is destruction a vastly inferior choice? I don't need to minmax this to the yinyang, but I would like to perform as well as I can, and the idea of having the shadow/fire flexibility especially with our group makeup.
I'm not a tailor, and after dropping mining to powergrind tailoring on my priest I am really hesitant to grind it up *again* and lock myself into school specific gear, when I'd do better with fire in small groups with my fire mage fiance, and shadow in Kara raids.

I apologize if this is retardedly overnubish for this arena; I wish to learn but a lot of the theorycraft here is a step or more beyond what I know, and the content I will be seeing.

1. It essentially cuts your cast time by a small fraction of a second, and the reason this happens is due to standard latency. Shorter cast time = more casts in the long run = more dps, simple.

2. I'm not sure about this, so I wont comment for now.

3. I hate answering questions with this, but I have to in this case. It 'depends'. There are several factors into play here, ranging from what you personally feel better playing with, to the actual boss encounter. I can definately say from experience that some encounters are better tackled with an Affliction spec (for example: Supremus) and others with Destruction (for example: Shade of Akama).

Pre-patch, you could stack on +dmg with items such as Frozen Shadoweave and get amazing 'relative' dps with Affliction. With patch 2.1, it feels that epic items of t4 and above quality have increased in quality to the point a destruction spec could scale better than affliction. What I mean by this is, you forfit less stats for others, in this case spell damage for hit and crit.

While directly responding to the thread title;

I am using one of the UA / Bane re-incarnation specs, and DPS by the means of DoT cycles and keeping all my DoTs up, while Shadow Bolting in between. The DPS is excellent over substantial periods of time, but quite sub-par when 'nuking down' targets fast.

I will most likely not know the full potential DPS of the spec in a raid environment however (inluding the use of CoA in your cycle, with the imp CoA talent) as we only take two affliction Warlocks to raids, both which are forced to spec Malediction and put curses up. I can safely say, that in balanced fights even though negating the use of a damage curse, the DPS is still on the level of fire mages (most recently full arcane with the 2 set bonus from Tier 5), Shadow Priests, Rogues and Destruction Warlocks.

I don't believe this has been covered in this thread, but a guildmate and I were discussing the effects of latency on the damage dealing capacity/viability of particular lock specs, particularly with reference to a 41/0/20 (or some variation therein of affliction with imp shadow bolt and bane) spec and a 0/21/40 spec. My gut feeling is that latency won't impact these two specs very differently, but I'm a little fuzzy on how the math would play out.

Without factoring in damage percentages, it would first seem that it would impact an affliction lock more severely, simply because they are casting more spells over a given period of time than the destruction lock, and my understanding is that latency is only truly a factor when looking at the end of previous spell (or global cooldown) and the beginning of your next cast.

However, the majority of an affliction lock's damage (60% or so, I believe) comes from dots, or less than 60% of their casts. Has anyone bothered to math this out, or is the impact small enough that I shouldn't even bother thinking about it?

Use a good cast bar and make /stopcasting macros and latency will play a much smaller part in your DPS.

So after not finding some numbers and comparison's of the Mag's eye trinket and crusade trinket, i decided to just post. Its been about half a month since people have had the crusade trinket made available to them. So i wanted to see what people think about the trinket, what comparison's have been made and what the results were. At the moment like a lot of the locks i come across I use the icon and quag's eye, so hopefully somebody has had this combo and compared. I am looking for information of how it does in places like SSC and TK as that is where we are currently raiding. Thanks ahead of time for any information.

There's a "Eye of Magtheridon and +hit" thread. The comparisons are there.