General guide for dot rotations is Longest duration to shortest. On average this gives you the largest "window" for casting SBs.

Is this something that has been changed, because I am pretty sure that in the past when I have died with a fully buffed imp, when it was re summoned it retained all of its previous buffs?

Is it possible at all to get a summary of the warlock dps rotation. As bored as I am here at work, I really don't want to read through 50 pages of speculation.


Thanks in advance.

There is no rotation due to the variance in dot length.

Interesting.


Well for someone who is UA build with some points in bane and improved shadowbolt, what would be the most effective spell usage. I don't know if that sentence makes any sense, but, yea. Basically I am looking to maximize my dps, I have dot timer installed and I watch that religiously, I am still however, outdps'd by just about everyone. Granted, my gear is lacking, but I would think I would be able to outdps a feral druid. I'm looking for tips, basically.

while watching it religiously do you make sure all your dots are up at all times?

if so, you wont get beaten by a ferlol.

Basic tips are:

Don't ever overwrite a dot, always let it fun its full duration even if you are dark pacting/lifetapping or firing off another shadowbolt instead of standing there doing nothing.

Also have a look at how many shadow priests and affliction warlocks you are bringing to the raid, could it be a case of the debuff limit being reached and knocking off your dots? If so start cutting down on which dots you are using, the first one to go is immolate.

Just make sure you keep all your dots up all the time and shadowbolt in between.

While the order doesn't matter alot, because eventually the timers will run over each other and such. The cast order of UA -> Corruption -> Immo tends to be bad, because you WILL lost dot time when recasting Immo. Immo->UA->Corruption tends to work better from my experience.

Nyarlathotep, just some quick questions:

Do you use macros to control your pet? If yes, would you be kind enough to share them with us?
And what are the raid frames you're using? I like the group number ontop of your portrait =)

I would drop immolate first not only because most affliction warlocks go for pure +shadow damage but also because their hit rateing might not be capped yet making immolate more likely to miss. In my destruction build I drop casting Corruption before I Immolate but that is because my own immolate can crit rather high. I don't recommend cutting any DoTs until the debuff limit is reached though.

Coming to think of boss fights. I took a look at your profile and I saw you had 7% hit. Is this your trash gear or do you acutally have that in a boss fight aswell?

Having just specced back to 7/44/10 from Destro/Affliction on some first time boss kills, Felguard is my preferred spec.

This spec does beat Destro on DPS if you effectively use your pet. If you cant manage it / it dies, you wont compare to Destro.


I can pull 1000 TPS with salv as Demo..and then add my pets DPS on top of that.

I have tried both builds, but I left the demo build once we started focusing on 25 man content since I had problems keeping the pet alive on Gruul and the other bosses we went after. If you can manage I am pretty sure Demonlogy will be equal to or out preform any other build. But in the end I do think it comes down to the particular warlocks playstyle and the ability to micro manage. Some people can handle the pet while others can't. Other can handle DoT timers and are good at refreshing DoTs at correct times. They of course make very good affliction warlocks. I firmly belive that all warlocks builds are usefull and viable in raids as long as they are played by the right person. So if you are bored with you current build and find it mundane and not challenging then I recommend trying something new. The warlock talent tree is almost to good and there is fun and good stuff in every tree .

I am sure someone here can provide more math behind their statement than me though. I am just thinking about the pure human aspect.

I'm having trouble maintaining competitive DPS in raids, especially apparent yesterday. My guild is progressed through all of SSC and 2/4 TK, and still working on getting a few of the latter fights on farm.

I'm running with a 21/40 Shadow Destro build, and starting to wonder if this is even appropriate for my gear level. I recentally regemmed everything I was wearing to Great Dawnstones for the added +hit, but I really feel like I lost a great deal of +damage in doing so. I'm sitting at 161 hit, a tad under 900 shadow, and close to 22% crit unbuffed.

I'm consistently the lowest warlock on damage meters, sitting usually between #4-7. In comparison, other warlocks in guild are almost always in the top 5. I'm mainly just spamming shadowbolt with this build. Here's the WWS from last night, just for reference:
Wow Web Stats.


I understand that the general concensus in stat preference is +hit until capped, then +damage / +crit, but is it worth it to get hit capped at all costs? I can get 200 hit by swapping in a few things (blue neck from Shadow Labs for Ritssyn's, Seal of the Exorcist, t4 gloves with +hit enchant), but I lose a good bit of +damage in doing so.

I'm toying with the idea of regemming with full Veiled Noble Topaz and respeccing to 43/0/18 to see how I do. I just feel like it would be more appropriate until I acquire a few more select upgrades to round out some of my stats.

Stryn,

At full clear of SSC, and 2/4 TK, you can hit cap without Great Dawnstones. I'm at about 180 hit right now, but I haven't finished sorting out my gear, though I have access to the last pieces I need. Just from memory:

• Spellstrike Hood, Cowl of the Grand Engineer
• Brooch of Unquenchable Fury (Kara - Moroes, I think)
• T4 or T5 shoulders
• T4 or FSW Robe with VNT gems (or Vestments of the Sea-Witch if you've gotten lucky)
• Handwraps of Flowing Thought (Attumen)
• Cord of Screaming Terrors (not a good upgrade until BT, I've been told)
• Spellstrike or T4 pants
• FSW Boots with VNT gems, or Boots of the Shifting Nightmare (SSC - Hydross)
• Ashyen's Gift (CE Exalted)
• Seal of the Exorcist (50 spirit shards)
• Scryer's Bloodgem (Exalted, if you chose Scryer faction)
• Tirisfal Wand (Kara - Shade of Aran)

Check Wowhead Listing for more options.

I'm currently around 1100 shadow with 180 hit, and I can maintain that up to 202 hit, I think, and we aren't killing Vashj and Al'ar yet.

Regarding rotation, I would theorize that you want to cast the highest available damage per cast time spell at all times, and that determines the spell order. Damage per cast time is dependent on how long the dot will last and if casting that spell will decrease damage from previously applied dots.

There are a few times you get more damage by overwriting a dot. For example, during bounce on Magtheridon, you can overwrite Corruption and Siphon for gain.

In practice, my opening 3 spells are usually CoE/CoS - Siphon - UA to somewhat delay early threat, and then I mash buttons from there.

In my experience and what I've read in this thread, it seems like DoT management is the hardest part of DPSing as an affliction build warlock. There's a lot of discussion of opportunity loss and I think that the lack of a "perfect DoT cycle" illustrates this well.

My point is, at least for me, I find that adding immolate into my DPS rotation hurts my overall DPS by about 10% when I use it. Theorycraft says that immolate should do about 10 more damage per cast than shadowbolt, but the real world implications of casting and watching DoT#5 seem to increase the chance that I'll miss another DoT.

When I was specced SL/Ruin, I found I managed to get higher uptime on DoTs than I do currently.

Am I the only one that finds this? Could this be part of the reason why demonology/destruction warlocks seem to do better in game than the spreadsheet would indicate?

If you can't juggle all those DoT, then yea, you're going to take a dps hit. You may want to consider dropping UA and picking up Ruin, as it's probably not immolate that's hurting you, but just watching an extra DoT. You might as well strengthen your ability to shadowbolt spam if you can't repair your ability to maintain more than two or three DoTs.

Alternatively, get yourself on a utility curse so you don't have to maintain a damage curse and reduce your DoT maintenance requirement.

What I'm wondering is if it really is just me or is this broader than that?

It's intuitive that managing more stuff is harder, but couple that with interface lag and the global cooldown, and I'd argue that heavy affliction has a much greater chance to fall behind spreadsheet estimates.

Consider a 5 minute fight with two warlocks with 1 talent point in improved corruption:

Warlock A casts only shadowbolt, Warlock B Casts shadowbolt, corruption, and curse of agony

In theory, assuming no lag,
Warlock A casts 100 times
Warlock B casts 113 times

If you introduce even a small amount of latency between keyboard, software and operator, Warlock B gets nailed harder than Warlock A does. Even with a stopcasting macro, how close can someone get to dropping inteface lag to 0?

I think the main difference is not so much the lag, but the time spent actually doing damage to said mob. If you consider that an affliction lock is maintaining 60% of his DPS (assuming they are not using a utility curse) while doing nothing more than running around refreshing a DoT cycle, they are going to come out on top.

Most people look at the maximum DPS on spreadsheet calculations to determine which build is "best". If you have the gear to support it, a straight nuking build, like 0/21/40, you can put out a ton of DPS, but anytime you aren't standing still chain casting you are essentially doing 0 damage to the target.

I recently tried 0/21/40 just to see how it would compare as I mainly raided as affliction. On bosses like Lurker or Al'ar where you can stand still chain casting, my total damage went up a bit. More importantly my actual DPS values were much closer to the ones theory crafted using a spreadsheet. On fights that require movement my overall damage went down, which is pretty intuitive. Granted, I didn't regem any of my gear except the half cast meta gem to help out, which is probably not worth it due to the restrictions on how you gem the rest of your gear. However, my theory crafted values for affliction have a much larger disparity with actual values and I'd like to think it's not directly my fault.

As to the other posters talking about DoT casting cycle, if you have 4 piece T5 cast Corruption last, at least that's what I do and I don't see a reason to change that unless someone has some compelling information otherwise (especially after the current patch goes live).

Just at a glance it's pretty obvious that your problem is simply that you're not casting enough spells. You have much lower DPS time than the other two 'locks, and they both have about the same number of nukes cast plus some other assorted spells. You're simply spending too much time not doing damage. As a warlock, you should ALWAYS be casting something, or be on your GCD from a lifetap or instant.

Affliction locks have a higher DPCT for more spells than Destro, so you'd think that if there are movement fights they'd do better. This is true under ideal circumstances (namely, casting windows are only available when a dot should be recast). This is the case because ideally all cast time would be spent on very high DPCT spells compared to Destro who is casting a lower DPCT spell (SB) in those windows.

However, because of this Affliction locks suffer higher opportunity cost per second of not casting a dot that can be re-applied. So depending on the mobility of the fight, destro-locks could be at an advantage since they take equal advantage of any casting window, where as affliciton locks need their windows at very particular times.