Conflag is pretty much always a loss of dps (unless you have to move anyway or something).

Ty for the response, I know for a fact due to this thread that immolate is always worth throwing into the rotation for sustained dps.

I would do the calculations but I must say I havn't the slightest idea on how to go about it.

As for giving up conflag alltogether in favor of other utility talents... I view conflag as a utility in itself, great for burst dps when mana isn't an issue. Also, to avoid imp immolate and conflag alltogether you would have to grab emberstorm or something else... goign all shadow as you said would defeat the purpose.

Personally I hate being focused on one school of magic all together, I like to have the option of changing on the fly given circumstances like shadow priest, fire mage, immune to eitehr school, silenced in one school etc..

Right, I when I am moving on the run and don't need to lifetap or recast curses etc I throw a conflag out.

Conflag is VERY useful for keeping up your Crusade stack.

There are a couple ways you can figure those numbers out.

First you can grab one of the handy spreadsheets around these forums, plug in your stats/spec and see what the DPCT is for Immo V SB (some let you use conflag and you can see if it's moving your DPS up or down).

Second is checking past raid logs and seeing how much damage Immo does over X casts compared to SB damage per Y casts.

As far as conflagging while running, realize that this might make that immolate you cast earlier a waste of cast-time. Imagine the case where you you used 1.5 seconds for immolate, only to kill the dot with conflag 5 seconds later. You waste 10 seconds of the dot, which means those 1.5 seconds would probably have been better spent casting Shadowbolt.

As far as avoiding all fire talents in 21/40, it certainly can be done. At a certain point, it's not worth casting immolate, and then those talents are wasted. Personally I specced destro for debuff slots primarily, so even with immolate being equal to SB, it's not worth casting.

Using my item values, even for Affliction Handwraps are better (although only 0.1 higher) than Anger-Spark. T6 beat everything by a long shot (another example of having a little bit of everything to make a very strong item).

For FG locks, the pet gets 30% of the master's stamina, or 7.2 stamina from the gloves, so it isn't much but every bit helps.

2.5 CoA
vs
1 CoD & 0.9 SB

Malediction on shadow, and imp CoA with sm, contagion, and ignoring imp sb.

At +1000dmg 12% hit + suppression and 20% destro crit. (fairly generous hit/crit for this gear level on an aff lock)

CoA
2.5*(1356+1200)*1.1*1.13*1.2*1.05*1.05*1.1*0.99=11443.5 dmg

CoD
4200+2000*1.1*1.13*1.1*1.05*0.99=8812 dmg
SB*0.9
(572+857)*1.1*1.13*1.1*1.05*1.1*0.9*0.95= 1929.5 dmg
Total = 10741.5

So ya CoA is better in a vacuum for an aff lock in raid situation(even in this horrible karazhan gear level), 6.5% more dot damage isn't gonna be made up by 0.18 imp sb procs per minute. Ofcourse I make the assumption that all the mods are multiplicative and ignore extra latency hit on half a cast extra per minute and ignore the penalty from dot down time. So at this low low gear level doom is probably better overall, but in a real gear scenario these little factors would not push it ahead.

Last time I was an aff lock in a fully buffed scenario I was running like.. +1620 shadow, 9% hit + suppression, 20% crit and thats almost all just kara/crafted/world gear.

Also despite agony being better it is only slightly better at average gear levels so you could very well just get a different talent instead of imp CoA, especially if you hit is low and you need 4 or 5 in suppression. At high high gear levels(but pre 4/5 t6) agony is significantly better and suppression is near worthless so if you are still affliction at this point I would be using CoA for sure.

For the two numbers bolded(the 1.1 and 1.2), why is CoA's 1.2 while CoD's is 1.1? Contagation and Improved CoA are already accounted for, and I don't believe there is any other talent that affects only CoA and not CoD.

Unless there's a reason for that 20% increase to CoA over the 10% given to CoD, then it will turn out to be 10489.875<10741.5 in favor of CoD.

EDIT: and I also found out that my initial calculations were way off, simply because my mouse double clicks at random and I initially did it with the window's calculator. I'm a little annoyed at getting different results each time I do this, but now I'm finding that with 16% hit and 15% crit that you'd need 1285.1 +dmg for CoA to beat CoD. And for your example, with 20% crit and 12% hit, I'm finding that you'd need 1248.14. Granted you'd have less uptime loss with CoD, I'd tack on a decent amount of +dmg onto that requirement.

Your math is flawed, CoD does not get 10% more shadow damage talent factored in (to keep its damage in check).

Looking at Dr. Damage as UA spec, (I don't have imp CoA), CoA will do 3159, Doom will do 6438, SB will do 1823. Since DrDamage knows the modifiers + talents, I can quickly see the results: CoA would do 7897 vs Doom/SB doing 8078.

Plus add some lost dps because tracking so many DoTs is going to leave gaps, at least for me, so Doom/SB wins, even with another 10% damage to CoA, not to mention more chances at imp SB.


Also, for Shadow Destro and Demo, Doom wins by quite a large amount, so Doom > Agony in a raid, the people where Agony > Doom would need like +1600 Shadow damage, not much crit, and perfect DoT uptime.

I searched but did not find much regarding this.

Darkmoon Card: Wrath Darkmoon Card: Wrath - Items - World of Warcraft

Has anybody done any research to see if this is worth it for maintaining more ISB uptime for a 21/40 lock? It seems at first glance to be like "oh this is cool, I guarantee pretty much that I will get a crit pretty soon to refresh ISB" but then I was thinking about it, it seems like the better your gear gets, the worse this does, because you will be critting more often.

So is this card just a piece of crap that can possibly shore up some crit weaknesses until you get better gear? Or is it actually pretty cool?

The thought entered my mind because I see a cheap Ace of Storms on the AH (250g) so I was just wondering what the feedback was on it.

Just tested it and you're right, thanks for the information. And yet, this is why I read forums, for a chance to learn something I didn't know.

Care to show us how you calculated this? I just read a bunch of math saying CoD was better, yet you claim CoA "WILL" do more damage.

This is not a straightforward math problem it is a problem of discrete damage versus 'constant' damage.

For argument sake let's say that for a given spec that casting CoD does 20 dps more than casting CoA. Also say, for this spec CoD is about 8500 damage, that means that in the 60 sec 'tick' time, if you did not cast CoD you would have done 1200 damage less, ie 7300.

So if casting CoD instead of CoA and the difference is 1200 per cast, then you need to get to the 7th cast of CoD before you are ahead enough to account for an 8th cast where you do no damage from CoD since the mob dies or it is bumped at 59secs. As in that 59 secs you would be doing about 7300 from CoA (it could be less as CoA may be lost or bumped).

This means that if all you do is cast CoD the fight must go at least 8 minutes or else the total damage you do from CoD will (in the worst case) be less than using CoA.

If the average case is that the last CoD is cut off at the 30 sec mark, then casting CoA would have been 3650 damage that you didn't do and would need 4 successful CoDs to have caused more damage, than have been casting CoA

In other words:

CoD dps - CoA dps = 20 dps = 1200 pm
CoD = 8500 pm (once every 60 secs)
CoA = 7300 pm (more or less constantly)
Average CoA cutoff = 30 secs, CoA does 3650 dam in 30 secs.

You risk 7300 more or less certain damage from CoA in 60 secs for a possible 8500 using CoD.

CoA is much better than casting CoD, even if CoD does more damage, because it is not doing constant damage and does not do any damage if it fails to get to completion. And it WILL fail to get to completion when the mob dies.

Additionally depending upon spec and gear, CoA can (easily) be higher DPS than CoD, even allowing for SB, ISB uptime, dot maintenance etc (which is what the spreadsheets do).

As a rule of thumb, I am sticking to the 'bad myth' that +1000 shadow dam means CoA is a far better choice than CoD. As not only is CoA more dps than CoD it will on average do more total damage even if it was slightly less dps.

There is a point on trinkets which you can activate for a big +dam, which makes casting 1 CoD worthwhile --- if it doesn't get bumped!

Your argument is based on the last CoD not completing? Simple solution: use CoD until the boss will die within a minute, then use CoA. We're not talking about trash mobs that die quickly, on bosses you should be able to estimate if they'll live for another minute or not.

Is there something I'm missing? That seems really obvious.

True about tanking, I use macro for that:

#searing pain
/cancelaura nether protection
/cast searing pain

and I spam that button like madman

I happen to think that it is difficult to predict that there is at least 60 secs left in a boss fight, especially with Arcane mages using up all their mana at the end of the fight and increasing their dps enormously, not to mention the tank doing dps at the end of the fight etc. And if you get it wrong, then using CoA would have been more damage.

Secondly, CoA can be more DPS than CoD, depending upon gear and spec. Unfortunately there are a number of factors to take into account --- you need to use the spreadsheets that are discussed in this forum to work it out for a given spec.

(read next post)

The Black Temple:

All these bosses and screenshots I was doing Curse of Recklessness on targets that had melee users on them, if no melee users were on the target I did Curse of Agony or Curse of Doom.

High Warlord Naj'entus:

I was playing here with an imp to give raid as high stamina as possible for obvious reasons. I tried soul linking an imp, which wasn't that smart. Shield explosion hit so hard imp died fairy fast.

Not even SP + tier-5 2/4 bonus kept imp up. I resummoned imp three times. I was still highest warlock in damage, mainly I guess because other warlocks had to keep imp up as well (as destruction isn't the best for dps).

This fight, by far, seems hardest fight for demonology build. It surely needs good SP who will constantly heal with VE, void star and possibly (downgrading) to tier-5 2/4 bonus to be done with felguard. Plus very high amount of stamina as well. Even with 2.2 patch tier-5 set bonus and if you could keep felguard up here, I think warlocks should use imp for blood pact here, since bigger HP members have, more time healers have to react and less unlucky deaths you get.

No screenshot, melee was dominating in damage. Best build for this boss would be affliction surely.

Screeshot with IMP, just to show how build works, haven't dared to test felguard yet:



Supremus:

Fight was much easier with felguard what I first expected. Volcanos do nasty damage, but other than that, it's pretty easy to keep felguard up here as long as you keep it on relatively tight leash. I left my felguard on Supremus when he's loose, which lead to my pet dieing. I think when Supremus changes targets, he might briefly attack closest attacker highest in threat (aka pets/melee and only my pet was there).

I got one bloodlust in this fight, which gives a major damage boost for felguard warlock.

Good fight for Demonology warlock, not so boring as you need to do some pet control.

First kill with felguard:



Shade of Akama:

Another easy fight. I was on duty to kill spawning adds on left side, so it's bit hard to compare here. Pet can intercept which is nice thing for this fight. At some point our raid leader told me to go nuke channelers, so can't really say this is fair comparison to some people with different roles.

Very high base damage + Seed of Corruption works like dream here if you have loads of channelers up and felguard cleaves channelers for very high damage.

In my opinion this fight is very good fight for demonology warlock, no matter what ever task you're assigned on. However depending on your role in this fight it is very hard to compared damage to another guilds WWS / screenshots. I'm sure I would reach ridiculous numbers if I was left on channelers for whole duration as an example and got bloodlusts.

Killing channelers most of the time:



Teron Gorefiend:

I previously had many try screenshots, cause I never took screenshot of a kill with felguard, so I post one typical damage spread screenshot here.

Fight itself is very straight forward and you can send your pet attacking Teron right from start. Pet does enormous damage on Teron, critting up to 1,3k. But again this isn't best fight to compared damage, since some people get to be ghosts etc. That's why I posted four screenshots from tries where we did fairly well, except of course missing the actual kill.

Also melee groups got all bloodlusts here, which needs to be taken into account when evaluating damage.

Best build you can have by far for this fight.

Teron try:



Gurtogg Bloodboil:

Felguard managed to keep alive with VE very well here, but it was low hp from time to time. If you get fel rage, then it's bye bye felguard and might as well click re-summon macro right that moment to dispel pet and after fel rage, re-summon it.

Gurtogg cleaves, so leave your pet behind the boss on attack and make sure when boss moves, you don't leave it front of the boss. Other than these, I don't think there's anything special to this boss.

Only have screenshots as affliction when killed, so posting those will serve no purpose. Next time we go there (will be a while) I will go as demonologist if possible.

Reliquary of Souls:

Essence of Despair: Demonology works great here, since you have 20% damage absorbtion, which makes you a viable tank for phase 1. Also warlocks greatest strength is Life Tap, that is very unusable in first phase. Felguard will keep dpssing the boss as long as it's alive for free.

Essence of Desire: As far as we got it worked great, but I can't say we did got too far. We were only learning the boss and lot of things might be different when I would get to kill it one day.

Best try with felguard:



---

Also I lack void star talisman which makes some bosses unplayable with felguard, but then again some bosses like naj'entus I always have to keep imp for raid most likely.

Here's summary of demonology raiding per boss (some being estimates):

Serpenshrine Cavern:

• Hydross the Unstable, demonology works great.
• Lurker from Below, demonology works great.
• Tidewalker, demonology, demonology works great.
• Karathress, demonology, demonology works great.
• Leotheras, demonology would be great build. Needs precision with whirlwind though.
• Lady Vashj, demonology would be great build here.

The Eye:

• Al'Ar, demonology works great, hard to play very well though.
• Void Reaver, demonology works great.
• High Astromancer Solarian, demonology works great.
• Kael'thas Sunstrider, demonology works great.

Moun Hyjal:

• Rage Winterchill, demonology works great.
• Anetheron, demonology works great.
• Kaz'Rogal, demonology works great.
• Azgalor, demonology damage compares to other warlock build damage, needs good pet control (void star talisman is must for this fight).
• Archimonde, demonology damage compares to other warlock build damage, this fight I would classify as very hard, but doable with SP (void star talisman is must for this fight).

Black Temple:

• High Warlord Naj'entus, demonology is totally unplayable here from my experience.
• Supremus, demonology works great.
• Shade of Akama, demonology works great.
• Teron Gorefiend, demonology works great.
• Gurtogg Bloodboil, demology works ok.
• Reliquary of Souls, demonology works great as far as we went.

---

On average it seems demonology damage is higher than other warlock build damage. There's some fights where you can offer being imp warlock and still have decent damage with buffed imp. Void Star Talisman your pet to stay alive in all elemental fights that you have problems. Shadow Priest is must to keep pet up. For resistance fights, pet gains portion of your resistances, so those are totally doable with high resistances.

At the time of testing, Thooghun the idiot had 8320 HP fully raid buffed, which seemed to be enough for most cases, wouldn't mind some tier 6 parts though. Pet does very high damage and peaks up to 3-3,5k AP when all +damage stuff procs.

I have changed my raiding build to be felguard build for good as long as it is as good as other warlock raiding builds.

I hope you liked reading this. Feel free to give feedback or requests.

Hello, I updated my post and it got spread over 4 posts so I edited old posts and put the material there I wrote about earlier instances and posted this post now here, just to keep them in logical order.

Links:

Part 1: The Eye
Part 2: Serpentshrine Cavern
Part 3: Mount Hyjal

If you are looking for easy to read forums, I posted them to warlock's den forums as well and got reserved spot from there to keep the diary/guide there.

Link:

These posts at Warlock's Den Forums.

edit: I will update WWS, say on weekly basis to first post (TK post) since I gotten quite some requests to add WSS via PMs and ingame whispers.

We used two warlocks as primary and secondary in threat like I'm sure many others do as well due to conflagrate and no it wasn't a problem. Of course bulletproof way would be to lose nether protection.

Just for the viability records:
RoS has -zero- armor after 5 sunders, unless your tank is starving from rage don´t bother using CoR there.
Running MobMitigation | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com lately to check whether CoR is even useful on a boss and whether "Ignore armor" items are useful to melee.
On RoS it's not.

I'm the secondary tank for Capernian due to not having any Fire Resistance gear at the moment. I normally position her with a curse of agony so that the main tank can pick her off at max range and not get conflagorated.

We use hunters to misdirect and we just run off Capernian to tanking spot, me leaving bit behind to dot him on the way so that I will be secondary when healers start healing tanking warlock.

@Madlax: Great info about Reliquary of Souls, thanks