I'm just wondering at what time it would be ok to spec 6/44/11 for Raiding and PvP. I currently have 2/3 Frozen Shadoweave set and am still gearing up currently as Affliction (43/x/18) I have 773 Shadow Damage but I just enjoy the FG so much, his great for grinding, great in arena/bg demonic resilience, 1 mana feed, soul link and demonic knowledge are absolutely insane not to mention the FG does absolutely great on trash and it gives me more time to spam Shadow Bolt(s) with my /stopcasting macro.

Thanks in advance, peace =)

For obvious reasons FG spec is much more effective with higher end gear, but even with mediocre gear FG spec would likely outperform affliction/destro in that respect. Affliction is very gear heavy, and destruction even more so. Felguard spec ups your base damage a bit and offers a separate dps'ing entity that scales damage on buffs etc.

You're aware you don't need to ask permission to respec, right? Your post is full of the pros for FG, and you clearly spend time doing (and value) other things than just raiding. Just respec?

thanks for the replies, will do =)

Yeah if you have 775 shadow damage, chances are your guild doesn't care what spec you are. Just spec whatever you want and have fun. If you don't know much about the class it helps to armory more experienced players from sites like wowjutsu or wowmetrics, then log on their server and pester them with questions about their spec/gear.

I think we're all aware of how to search for said gear. However, it seems rather silly to have everyone duplicate that searching effort.

I had forgotten the shadow neck...when I wear it most of the time anyway! I suppose the Pendant would be very fight-specific.

In my opinion, the cord is better because many fights require a minimum HP level, and I always like to have a little more than that due to lifetaps.

The trousers I put on that list if you're not needing hit. They blow T4 away for +dmg due to socketing, and stats-wise they're far superior to Spellstrike. We'll all get drops in different orders, this is just some gear to mix and match while you find that optimal gear list.

What do people think of the T4 4-piece set bonus? For an affliction warlock in raids who is getting better and better at SB spam between dot refreshes, is there a value to getting it?

I'm currently at 3 pieces: gloves, shoulder and legs. I very much want the robe but don't see it coming anytime particularly soon. The helm I might be in a position to pursue. I'm currently wearing the engineering warlock goggles so neither the T4 helm nor spellstrike hood seem to be huge upgrades (arguably they are downgrades) but getting the T4 helm would give me the 4-piece bonus. I was thinking that since I'm keeping all my dots running now and with increasingly good uptime (Deneba - WWS is my latest raid attempt) having that bonus could allow me to squeeze in even more SBs.

I'd love some suggestions on how to 'encourage' our one destruction lock to cast SB rather than incinerate. I've laid out the math for him, the fact that with his current gear and spec (no sacrificed imp) incinerate is less DPS, and the fact that ISB uptime would be a nice boost to raid DPS, but he continues to use incinerate as his primary nuke. I'd never want to force some to spec a certain way, but as we've been progressing, our DPS has been the biggest issue (killing VR 10secs after enrage, Gruul to growth 14 etc). Here's the parse from our best Lurker kill to date (fishies respawned in the middle of the fight ><): Wow Web Stats. The lock in question is Zenophobe; myself Krivand and Drmcnasty are all heavy affliction.

slap him in the face and point him to this thread

Incinerate has a higher base damage, but a smaller damage multiplier. ( 3sec cast time vs 2.5) I believe the only situation Incinerate takes over ISB as better dps is over 1750 spell damage..and even then you arent getting the ISB debuff that everyone loves so much.

Tell him plainly he is wrong, and all the math is here to prove it. Welcome by Leulier and Piztai is also a godly resource.

@Tyvyr: Spend him the money for respeccing and let him have a try. I also first ran fire destro and then started a guild internal project for high-warlock-dps inside our class. We all picked up imp. SB, two destro warlocks and three affliction. Even the affliction warlocks were amazed on how much their dps increased due to the buff we destros gave them. The only reason fire destro has its right to live is when you have no shadow priest.

E.g. at the beginning of 25-raids we had no SP, but three fire mages with scorch. So when respeccing to shadow destro, my personal dps went slightly down, but the raid dps of the warlocks increased. Now with one to two SPs in the raid I can again laugh about the mages dps.

Normally the fire destros are keen on that for its a bit better for pvp in my eyes. Also farming is easier as fire as long as you don't learn to sacc your voidwalker and spec Soul Leech.

Does spell haste affect your pets attack speed? Heroism affects its attack speed, and other character stats modify the pets dps

If not - should it?

If so..do you by how much?

Haste don't affect pets attack speed. Only mods affecting pet from player are:

Spelldamage
Stamina
Intellect
Armor

I think all should have equivalents, say:

penetration - armor pierce
spellhit - melee hit
spellcrit - melee crit
int - int
sta - sta and damage reduction (so that pet would have say 30% reduction with talents)
spellhaste - melee haste

thinking just felguard now and raiding. This would end up meaning that felguards base stats attack etc would come down and high end raiding locks felguard would be quite a monster. I would love this though if everything would scale up same fashion with other classes.

I have respecced from 42/2/17 to 7/44/10, even though I do not have access to 2T5 yet (Kara down, Leo next week normally. I'll make sure to ninja the T5 :p).

Using Nyar's guide as a pointer, here's what I found:

Lurker
The pet barely has enough life regen with the shadow priest.
We were healer light compared to usually, so I didn't see fit to stress them to have some heals on the pet.
I actually had to use health funnel ("captation de vie" on WWS), and bandage my guard after the adds phases.
It might be wise to put the pet on follow when Lurker whirwinds, in order to worry less about him.
Still, I did 20% less dps than the top warlock, and than what I was doing before as affliction.
I was using CoR, except for the last seconds of Lurker's life, to make sure he died.
Wow Web Stats

Magtheridon
An unknown fight because Nayr didn't post anything about it :p
Absolutely no problem with the guard's life/mana.
I ended second on total dps after a rogue, while the other locks as *far* behind (40% more dmg :p)
I was also using CoR on Mag himself during the entire time.
Wow Web Stats

I didn't really know what to expect, and here my impressions.
I think it's totally true that FG spec isn't really less dps for now (11.6% hit, ~1050 dmg self buffed), and I see it increasing dramatically with 2T5 (before -sneaking a life tap or two to get some healing love- and after patch), and scaling better than destro/affli.
If people want to try this spec with less stats than I do, I'd recommend putting at least one point, even two, into health funnel to minimize "regen time".

Still, I wouldn't recommend having all your locks with FG spec: malediction'ed CoS/imp imp is just too good for the raid to pass :p

I'll be posting updates as we go further, as I feel the gap between Nyar and me justifies this

One question: the mana feed point is there for solo play, right? Because by turning off the taunt ability, my guard stays at 90% mana at minimum.

Morogrim
We did some tries on Morogrim (having downed him twice in the past) yesterday without an efficient lineup (2 warlocks only), and I wasn't in the SP group because we were healer light again. That was a *real* pain without 2T5. I had to disactivate Soul Link because the mages couldn't get the nova right... But even like this my FG was getting pounded, not lasting more than 2 murloc pops.
When our 2nd SP arrived, he was told to not use vampiric embrace because it was pulling aggro on murloc pop... Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait untill I get my 2T5.

BTW without SP, on trash my FG died every single trash pull. You can imagine how annoying it is!

I currently am 1/44/16. This is not so much for personal DPS (where 7/44/10 is about equal in theory), but to increase ISB uptime, where another 5% crit does contribute.

From the amount of orange on that WWS I'd say you have bigger problems

As I'm finding out, it takes a lot of time and practice to get used to maneuvering the Felguard around during encounters in order to keep him alive and placed at a position that he won't risk your MT getting 1 shotted by a freak parry or cleaved down like nothing.

Usually we bring 2 maybe 3 shadow priests to our raids so therefore SP groups are pretty hard to get in being a Warlock. Typically I'm in the BM Hunter/Shaman group and that puts a lot of stress on me in terms of keeping the pet up when he takes AoE spell/physical damage. I have the 2p Tier 5 but normally in order to utilize it I have to pre-emptively lifetap a bit to get healers to notice me on Grid and spam me with some heals.

The build really shines when you can just stand still and keep the full dot train up while spamming SB's and keeping your pet choppng away at the boss, but in a fight involving a lot of movement and AoE mechanics, even with Voidstar Talisman it can sometimes be a chore to keep the pet up. Maybe I need to beg for the Shadow Priest group more

with a SP + the 2 pieces T5 bonus, it should be easy enough to keep the pet up unless it get one shotted by a cleave.

That's pretty obvious.

I suggest making your healers watch him, or, if a shaman is chain healing melee, chances are it will bounce to the FG when he takes damage.

In my personal experience getting our healers to toss my pet some heals is sadly a very difficult thing to do.

As long as Grid doesn´t support pets, I´m afraid my FG will not get much healing either. But with a shadow priest and thanks to chain healing shamans it can survive most fights. I recently got my 2nd T5 piece and hope that, after the patch, the healing from my damage is sufficient.

Sorry if I'm bringing up old questions, but how would a 30/21/10 build do? I'm pretty undergeared (Kara and blues) and I just got accepted into a guild that's just making headway into Hyjal/BT (Rage down). It seems at first glance that it's superior to 40/21, but can anyone help?