Another thing to consider, which I'm sure most casters reading this forums is aware of, but I thought I'd mention anyway considering the topic of the thread, you need less rating for 1% spell hit than for 1% spell crit (12.6 and 22.1 rating = 1% respectively). If you take the Attumen gloves, they have around 1.11% hit, while the Mag gloves have 0.95% crit. I'd intuitively take the gloves from Attumen, and the spreadsheet confirms that for my stats (3dps better with the kara gloves). frmorrison's point on Soul Shatter is good as well, nothing hurts your dps as much as having to twiddle thumbs because of a Soul Shatter resist (except being dead, which that scenario has a tendency to lead to =P).

And for the Ruin vs. UA debate, let it die, please, it comes up as often as CoD vs CoA and they've all been answered a bunch of time on these forums... (41/0/20 > 40/0/21 single target sustained dps)

Agreed, I haven't seen a pair of gloves that really beat Handwraps of Flowing Thought until Malefactor gloves. Really, not matter if you have suppresion or not, every Warlock should be shooting to get close to 16% hit because even Affliction spec'd you're going to be casting Demonology and Destruction based spells during the boss fights (and having a Soul Shatter get resisted just sucks).

Keep a soulstone made for just this occasion if you didn't use it on someone already. I did this on Gruul recently.


Quixotic: I've been 42 in affliction ever since we started seriously raiding in TBC. I'm spending the next week or two as succ-sac+destruction, so it'll be interesting to see how the damage turns out. Without a destruction lock of some sort, our ISB uptime juuuuust isn't that great, and I'm curious to see if I can change that and eek out more raid-wide dps without hurting it by dropping my own by too much. I've re-geared to get 1200 shadow, 20% crit, and 12% hit (and I'll reasonably often have the +3% hit from the elemental shaman 41 pointer to make up the loss there.)

I'm skeptical but I'll see .

I just recently changed my main raiding character from hunter to warlock last week and the biggest thing I can see is to get a good rhythm. DoTimer is great but if you're watching it the whole fight you may not pay attention to your threat on KTM. The biggest thing for me in learning is to have an internal feel for the dots. As many have said it's good to start the cast of UA or Immolate when there is 1 sec left on timer. Also,always be doing something whether it be lifetapping, shadow bolting, or applying Dots. If your global cooldown is up it's best to just cast shadowbolt rather than wait a few secs for your DOT to be up and reapply.
In my short time I'v had a wide range of placements on DM's for certain fights as I relearn them and I can say the ones I do the best on are ones where I get a good rhythm and am always doing something (especially lifetapping evenly throughout the fight). when I do poorly is when I'm cancelling a shadowbolt to reapply a DOT, or am at 15% mana and have to lifetap 3 times in a row. Also, as many have said Soulshatter is essential, and not doing it too early (and especially too late) is crucial. I have run into where I was inching my way to the MT, then soulshattered, then again later in the fight was back up there. Perhaps if I let myself go to 110% MT threat then Soulshatter I could have done more overall damage.

I have seen some people say that CoD vs CoA has been beaten to death but I haven't found which is better. I generally use CoD when amplify magic is up and CoA elsewhere. I do like CoD because I don't have to worry about refreshing it as often. Also, how do affliction warlocks typically start a fight. I usually go UA-Curse-Corruption-Soul Siphon-Immolate, then shadowbolt and reapply when needed. Is there a better rotation? I guess I save immolate for last because it has an upfront damage and I don't want to pull agro in case the tank has missed a few times.

It would be very difficult to stack enough crit to notice a significant ISB uptime increase between 41/0/18 +2 and 0/21/40 given the same gear. In the SB spam destruction spec you might spend closer to 60% of your time spamming SB as opposed to the UA spec at around 40% of the time but with 'only' a 20% crit rate on SB that's a difference of only 4% ISB uptime.

Sustainability also becomes an issue, with siphon life and dark pact a UA spec has to LT much less often and can cover the HP costs of their LT fairly easily. As destruction you will essentially be borrowing mana from the healers in order to keep up with the cost of your SB spam.

Conditionally, given you apparently have access to some insane gear (I’d kill for 20% crit with talents AND 1200 shadow at the same time AND 15% hit for SB at the same time) given that there are at least 1 shadow priest, 2 affliction warlocks and 1 fire mage (imp scorch), and given your healers have enough mana to cover the effective health cost of your SB spam you will see an overall raid DPS boost in fights were you can actually spam SB all the time. In movement heavy fights your returns will diminish exponentially.

Yes that's the theory. We'll see. No one else in the guild is destruction, and we're bumping up against the debuff limit on fights and just had another priest go shadow, so...

The difference is the amount of casting time dedicated to SB really, not so much the increased crit rate. (Well that combined with the higher value that crit has for dps in a more SB-based spell set, allowing you to swap damage for it.) And yes I'm looking at raid dps rather than personal dps. I'm secure in my own ability to put out massive dps when spec'd perfectly for it, and I'm willing to take the hit if we can up the damage output of our locks/spriests. I also always kept my top crit/hit/dmg items still banked for each slot, so it wasn't a big deal to figure out my new ratios for each piece and switch accordingly.

I also expect I'll be able to get access at least sometimes to the shadow priest, which is part of this whole nefarious plan. And our healers really really rock at healing warlocks -- even when I tell them not to, they do. I love our healers.

I'm a tad worried about Mag, but I figure I can always sac a VW if it becomes too big an issue, and then swap to succubus sac with fel-dom when we start to run out of infernals to abuse.


If nothing else it will be fun. I get very annoyed at being able to do anything with my character beyond raid, and respecing periodically, as well as swapping tradeskills, can help keep me entertained.

I also figured out last night that if I need a dps boost, hitting mana pots is more effective in this spec than hitting destruction potions ><.


My gear isn't that insane. Standard tailoring, badge, and rep drops. I have the kara gloves, but don't have prince's back or either kara neck (prince or trash drop.)

When I was affliction I did love my +25 of shadow wrath wand, and +45 of shadow wrath back, however .

I know how sac works, thanks . Read the original context, and the full post you're replying to: it was about how to handle being a healing burden on a subset of a fight where I will be taking damage but needing to cast a lot as well, without the benefit of the self-sustainability of the affliction tree.

To re-iterate with emphasis added: I was saying if there are healing issues during the channeler phase of the Magtheridon fight, I may try sacing VW and then fel-doming a succubus to sac for the rest of the fight. My concern is not my dps, per se, in the channeler phase, as I'm already doing close to double what our other locks are doing on the fight (since I don't lag) -- it's survivability, and not draining too many heals.


Also, as posted in this thread before, incinerate suffers from not having Bane affect it, although with the shadoweaving nerf it does lose some of the ground if you have a reliable scorch stack, it doesn't benefit from ISB so is still less dps than incinerate. I'm fairly certain this includes counting lifetapping time, but I'll admit I haven't actually gone and modelled it, since our primary raiding mages are both frost right now and we have 2-3 locks and 1-2 shadow priests on a raid, making the element choice quite clear. Still, don't commit the fallacy here (more often committed with respect to drain life versus shadowbolt) that just because person A tops the meters in your guild that it must be a better build/technique/whatever.

This is the main reason I think we'll be seeing more Warlocks starting to switch over to Destruction from Affliction. Even when I saw Blizzard state that they were upping the number of debuffs to 40 while decreasing raid size to 25 back before tBC I felt that 40 just wasn't enough. There really just isn't enough debuff slots available to have 3 Affliction Warlocks in a raid with 2 Shadow Priests and all the other debuffs we'll see from other classes as well.

I think Blizzard kind of telegraphed this as well and wanted more of a mix of specs with raiding Warlocks and foresaw a raid having an Affliction Spec'd Warlock, a Demonology Spec'd Warlock, and a Destruction Spec'd Warlock to help alleviate some of the debuff issues. Overall, the DPS of all three spec's is fairly comparable depending on the fight mechanics involved. Looking at the Voidheart, Corruptor, and Malefactor sets, it seems that Blizzard was really leaning that way already by seeing how much +spell crit rating they were putting on the items compared to +spell hit rating. It seems to me that Blizzard wanted one Warlock there being DoT happy and any others beyond that one to be SB/Incinerate spamming with Corruption and/or Immolate thrown in with the non-Affliction Warlock(s) using CoE and/or CoS as other debuffs.

having been all the specs I just cant see how destro competes. I WANT to be destro..but I get smashed by the affliicton locks everytime.

I thoroughly disagree. If that were true, there'd be an affliction set. If you look at how deeply horrible +crit is for affliction, you wouldn't be able to look at T5+ gear with a straight face and say they wanted to see other specs on raids. It's either a deliberate decision (see below) or a lack of communication/understanding of the class.


If there is anything deliberate at all going on with the warlock class design and gearing, it is this (in my opinion -- this is my working theory):

Blizzard does not like dots/affliction in a raid situation. They have been very heavily nerfed, and scale poorly as your gear improves (relative to nukes). They would, in fact, like affliction to be the lower damage tree (due to it having more utility, to force a tradeoff), but cannot actually achieve this without hurting the class further at the base (with more nerfs to dots.)

Therefore they're gimping the itemization in two ways: one, dots scale less well with gear, so affliction loses ground as you gear up. But two, they are shying away from actually creating that affliction-oriented gear, further penalizing the spec.

Well, and three: there's an inherent problem with affliction that further penalizes it with no effort from blizzard: the way the item budget scales to make increasing levels of +dmg more and more expensive relative to gear that spreads out its budget amongst multiple stats.


I'd love to be wrong, because I love the unique way the warlock plays when affliction. And perhaps I'm just creating order out of chaos, and it really just is the left hand of blizzard not understanding what the right hand is doing.

Given that shadow priests have tons of crit on their gear too, I very well could be wrong, and it really just is the itemization team saying "casters are casters" and copying and pasting the damage stats on our gear, and then doing a cursory tailoring of the sta/int/spi on a per-class basis.

So theorycraft:
ampedCoD > CoS for long fights with you as the only warlock?

With destruction you're able to milk the /stopcasting macro much more, which ends up saving a lot of time over the long run. It's not as practical to stopcast on dots (and stopcast currently seems to mess with DoTimer's coding, making debuffs not get tracked). For stand-and-nuke fights destruction certainly can hold its own, I gained about 100 dps after switching from UA to 0/21/40. (1081 dps on today's Gruul only casting CoD/Immo/SB.)

My performance was sufficiently similar that I'll probably be sticking with destruction.

Yes, it was a bit lower -- moreso on Gruul (had to choose between my rock and the elemental shaman totems), but I still was #1 by a very comfortable margin (took CoD because I wanted to do as like a comparison as I coulld -- next week I'll take CoE and let an affliction lock pick up CoA. Would've still been #1 without CoD, but it would've been a lot closer.)

Comparing my damage on Gruul to other weeks with the same people I think this spec can perform just fine on Gruul -- which, without a nice rock, is pretty destruction-unfriendly. My group was what I usually am in: magex2, spriest, elemental shaman, me.

The lack of the threat talent didn't hurt as much as I thought (although I did start a bit later and took the beginning just a bit slower -- and was prepared to switch curses with another lock if need be.)

And honestly... it was so embarassingly easy after running as affliction for so long. "You mean I only have to maintain THREE DOTS?!" Rather pleasant actually, other than that all my habits of what dot I'd refresh when were gone, so I kept screwing up and missing them, heh.


For reference, previous spec: 42/1/18. New is 1/21/39 (might go 0/21/40 if I decide I'll be less likely to use corruption due to stupid annoying range issues.) I re-geared when I re-spec'd, swapping in pieces that were higher dps for the new build. I would not have seen as good a performance without a gear swap.

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. The reasoning behind why the Voidheart, Corruptor, and Malefactor sets have so much crit is to try to force more Warlocks to go into Demonology and Destruction to help alleviate the number of debuffs on the mob. You remember the outcries in the past when there were only 8 debuffs, then 16 debuffs, and finally 40. Well, in order to not have to increase the debuff limit again, Blizzard has probably designed these sets around the aspect of trying to get less Affliction Warlocks into the raid. So by pushing +crit rating, the two specs that have a better use for it would find more of a home in a raid, thus lowering the total number of debuffs that would be put up, thus having Blizzard less likely to have to raise the debuff limit again. Hope that clears up what I was trying to put forth.

As for the itemization team, don't get me started. Someone I know stated that the itemization team has one person that knows how to itemize well while the remained of the team doesn't. As such, those times were you see that incredibly well itemized piece come out that one person had a major role in it's design, the rest of the time, it's the other members of the team that can't get the itemization right. :p

Yeah so we're agreeing -- except the logic doesn't extend to shadow priests, who are in the same itemization boat.

So as much as I'd love to think this is deliberate itemization (as I posted), I think it's probably accidental or laziness.

Even assuming optimized build and abaove average DoT management, I would say that warlock DPS is basically divided on two tiers - tailors and non-tailors.

Difference between a warlock using 3/3 frost/shadow BoP set and 2/2 spellstrike and lock that uses "normal" gear is pretty significant. So, one of the best suggestions to the original question might be actually "become a tailor".

1/21/39 has only a very small DPS advantage over 0/21/40 under ideal circumstances. And you lessen one of the advantages of a destro build, the fact that you need fewer debuff slots (In 0/21/40 Corruption is not worth it). Plus you have the range issue, which is why I really prefer 0/21/40.

Actually, for warlocks this is not nearly as much of an advantage as for mages, since the fire/arcane set is more damage oriented, and has imho the better set-bonus.

Regarding the Frozen Shadoweave set (all this is from the perspective of a 0/21/40 shadow-destro lock):
- The set-bonus does not really improve DPS, so breaking up the set is not such a big deal.
- I get more DPS out of the Robe of the Crimson Order than out of the Frozen Shadoweave Vest. Don't trust me, use Leulier's spreadsheet and see for yourself. Of course the Frozen Shadoweave Vest has the advantage of 30-36 additional stamina.
- Once the 2.1 patch hits, the T4-shoulders will be better than the Frozen Shadoweave shoulders, and the T4-chest will be better than the Frozen Shadoweave vest.

Which leaves only the boots.

Spellstrike, on the other hand, I will wear for a long time it seems, but that set is accessible (and almost as good) for non-tailors.

To me there is several kinds of damage. You have your trash DPS, burst DPS, boss DPS and long boss fights DPS. The reason I point this out is because the different builds is stronger depending on what you are fighting. Personally I think it's important to have high trash DPS aswell as a high boss DPS. Trash needs to be cleared to get to the boss anyway so it's nice to get them out of the way quickly. At the same time it's important to be able to substain a high damage output on bosses so you can get the epics.

I am currently 21/0/40, with Siphon Life and Backlash and I am very happy with it. The reason is because it gives me a a lot of burst damage to clear of small stuff. At the same time I get regen to be able to substain my damage During boss fights I usally open with my curses and DoT's before I lifetap and put on Siphon Life. I do this to stay below the healing radar and start my own health\mana regen. With healers many times very active in our guild I usally get fast heals if I lifetap to much. To save the healers mana I try to not show the lifetap. I try to never stay with full health acutally to keep the regen going from Siphon Life. If it ticks in and you have full health it really only does half it's job. With that going I can start chain nuking with either Shadow Bolts or Incinirate. I choose Shadow Bolts if there is either no shadow priest or a fire mage in the raid. If there is a fire mage I choose Incinirate. I refresh my DoTs when I can and I try not to overwrite a DoT with a few seconds left. But I do refresh them if I know there is a longer stun or something else that prevents me from refreshing the DoTs for a longer period of time.

What curses I use do depend on the fight and who else I got with me. Meaning if I have a fire mage in the raid on the Prince fight I use CoE instead of CoD because I increase both me and the fire mages damage output. But on Cruator I will never use anything else than a CoD when the fifth flare spawns making it tick in during his evocation. What curse you will use really depends on the fight you are currently fighting. If I use a damage curse I prefer to use CoD myself because I sometimes get sloppy with the refreshing the DoTs. (Since I often lead the raids I have more stuff to keep my eye on than just DoTimer)

Being an active player and trying to predict what is going to happen the next few seconds is very important. Using your damage trinkets whenever they are ready is a large boost to your DPS.

In the end it's not really about you being on top of the damage meters, but if the boss went down smoothly without any real trouble. Yes, damage is a very important factor in this but remember that you have you share the damage over the entire raid. And even though I like to "win" SWStats and be on top I know that all that matters is that the boss went down. So if I have to sacrifice my top posistion to make sure the raid goes smoother I will do so without a second thought.

I understand your point, but it's not really valid for the test I was doing, which was comparing my own damage and my own performance. I already know how I perform versus our affliction locks. Changing curse, group composition, AND spec would've been worthless as far as actually learning something about relative spec performance.

For me, as I said, I was comparing across weeks: so I deliberately took the dps curse and the same group setup, since other weeks I had the dps curse and the same group setup.

Vary one parameter, in this case, spec. The answer was as I posted: it didn't lose nearly as much as I expected it to, and we saw a definite improvement in ISB uptime. It's worth it for my guild since we run so affliction-lock heavy, IMO. If other guilds are in the same boat, and you have enough gear with hit/crit banked, it could be worth a try. I feel comfortable that I can provide an additional raid utility (higher debuff uptime plus reducing the number of debuff slots) while still maintaining almost equal DPS.

For the 0/21/40 crowd, how are you sustaining your high dps for fights like Gruul? Are you dependant on a shadowpriest/shammy group for mana regen, or are you popping mana pots every 2 minutes as well?

I'm wondering how the spec is maintained over longer fights. I'm used to full affliction and how self-sustaining it is, though going destruction has a lot of appeal for me.

Finally, is there anyone that sees much success with more pvp oriented 7/7/47 destruction spec, or the like? I know from the spreadsheet that the theoretical dps is quite a bit lower, but....I just hope I'm missing something that is only born out in practice

we could even remove Gruul from the equation...how do you sustain dps over 10 minute fights in TBC....cos I just couldnt do it as Destro. I recall a post earlier in this thread where somebody said a Fire lock with sacced Felhunter using Immo/Incin/CoD was top of the charts...and it got me intrigued. Post 82.

Destruction perspective - yes, I can agree with that. It's probably the same with demo/ruin builds. But my perspective is of affliction lock of 42/0/19, 40/0/21 or 41/0/20 build.

From affliction point of view (shadow priests, that are actually affliction warlocks in disguise share it), frozen shadoweave is THE SET. Not Tier IV, not even Tier V (which you have to kill non-trivial number of bosses for, so you need DPS first, not after). Just fill all the gem slots with +9 spell damage (ignoring small +hit bonuses) and watch the numbers flow.

And difference in spellstrike if are a tailor is noticable. It's still good without set bonus of course, but it loses most of its charm.