You should ALWAYS wait until the last corruption has run out before refreshing it, casting a new corruption say 1,5 sec before the last tick runs is a nono. It's better to start casting a shadowbolt and be late on your dot then refreshinging before it's done ticking. Doesn't matter what build you have refreshing dots before they're done is a /slap unles there are very special reasons to.

Well the spec and gear bonus is still new to me. Im still feeling a little dot happy coming off aff. where i could cast ua, and corruption in a perfect rotation, to having to wait a sec or right after a bolt. i feel like i lose dps waiting to recast corruption and immolate that way, but i'll just have to get more practice with it.

It might be, but the items it's still on are generally terrible, specifically the crafted ones.

Also, you lose 20% of the benefit due to the dps loss of having to lifetap more.

Ya comparing something like waistwrap of infinity (ilvl 141) with belt of blasting (ilvl 128) does leave me scratching my head somewhat (although obviously waistwrap spent some of its budget points on sta/int). Is it really worth giving up 23 spell hit, 30 spell crit and 2 sockets for 6 spell damage, 32 spell haste rating and some sta/int? Even a 0/21/40 shadow lock is going to want to keep immolate up and will have to lifetap, both of which are 1.5 second spells and wont benefit.

Ok, so my guild is only in kara right cause of numbers issue. We down everyboss every week and usually im neck in neck with our fire mage in most fights (we are top 2 in dmg). Like most locks I was affliction through lvling so I probably know that class the best, but enjoy destro and feel like I know that equally as well. As afflict I have around 1200shadow dmg buffed with abouta 15%crit and in destro im about 26%crit with around 975shadow dmg. I recently from 41/3/? (rest in destro) to ?/?/40 for destro. I am thinking that with a higher bonus dmg in shadow that 20/0/40 would be a better way to go than 0/21/40. With kara being only a 10 man raid, theres not that much stress on group bonuses but i'm just wondering what spec I could use to completely maximize dps. I have the frozenshadow weave stuff and the spellstrike hat and pants, and everything else is from kara cept for my 2 trinkets. Just any input as to how i can maximize dps would be great.

p.s. I am very good at keeping up dots (have just about every addon a lock needs) but it just seems like 0/21/40 would be able to do more overall dmg for most of kara's bosses.

Yeah pretty much. Mainly because no spell haste items are socketed, and sockets are generally worth more than they're itemized for, because you can pick and stack specific stats, and they're itemized assuming lower ilvl gems than the epics.

We'll see if the T7 quality gear from Sunwell can make spellhaste more interesting, I guess.

Well, stacking all the haste items from BT, including the illidan staff and 2x trash rings, you would have a shadowbolt cast time of 2.15 seconds. This seems quite appealing, but yeah when you compare those items to other end-game items, you lose a *ton* of hit/crit and even damage because of lack of sockets.

I've raided exclusively as Affliction since TBC came out and am looking to go over to destro now that I'm hit capped and will be able to pick up more crit without losing too much raw +damage. At first the spell haste items seemed amazing, but in the end they're not really worth it. Maybe a setup like having a shadow priest and a sacrificed felhunter would give you enough mana regen to not lifetap more often, but it seems like quite a stretch. I suppose we have to leave the items to the mages for now.

Seeing how Warlocks have an endless mana pool, wouldn't it make more sense to stick to spells with higher DPCT rather than mana efficiency? This is the first time I've heard of someone using soul-fire in their rotation so I was a tad surprised.

A bit embarassed asking this, but I could not think of a better place to do so. I am UA specced with no talent points in either of the "less interruptions" talents, and while I have no problems with my sustained DPS even at my gear level, I do have issues with burst damage at times- namely on Vashj's Tainted Elementals. While I do get them down *most* of the time, It's usually a very close call, and I was wondering what other similarly specced locks cast exactly to ensure their death.

What I do is open up with a corruption, chain 2 shadowbolts then shadowburn and hope none get resisted (I am at 15.85% hit). However, due to my habbit of stopcasting my spells, If I get unlucky and get hit by a poison volley just as I am going to stopcast my shadow bolt, I would end up getting interrupted and stop-casting it too early and as such wasting a whole 2.5 seconds of my valuable kill time (I am just letting my Shadowbolts go unstopcasted when killing Tainteds nowadays to avoid such accidents, but with 500 latency on average thats 1 second wasted during my 2 shadowbolts).

Has anyone else been in a similar situation, and possibly have some pointers that could help me get them down with more ease and consistency?

Thanks.

Curious what a good mark for stats to aim for is to go 0/21/40? planning on speccing it here this week as we reformed a new guild and im looking to get the best dps spec and don't like affliction.

Basically we were up to fathom lord so that will give an idea of where we will be once we get this guild moving again.

*edit* ignore my sig i was naked for netherwing race when i logged :P

im at about 150 hit 15% crit and 1032 spell dmg with fel armor.

Generally you want to have hit capped before you go with destruction. Plus you want to be around ~28% crit. I realize that doesn't answer your question, but I do believe you will see a dps loss.

(corrected my typo above btw, I said "use" when I meant "lose")

I'm not sure what you're saying here.

The reason lifetapping matters is you can't just look at spellhaste and say (for example) "My SB's cast 30% faster now, so I have a 30% dps increase" because as warlock, we lose a non-trivial amount of our DPS to lifetapping time, so you also need to calculate the mana-per-second increase and then decrease your "real life" dps by an appropriate amount to account for the additional taps.

I looked at several haste levels, and it was always 20% (as destruction) of the dps gain was lost to lifetapping.

And we're mana-inefficient enough that we are guaranteed to need to tap often on any engage (and many trash pulls even) so that dps loss isn't just a theoretical one on a very long fight.

Pidge is agreeing with you Jynx, he just means that you'll be casting shadowbolts faster/more often, and doing the same with Lifetap, so it sort of cancels out. I'm wondering how viable haste would be for a destro warlock if they were grouped with a spriest and sacced their felhunter though. You wouldn't have to lifetap as often, but the fact still remains that all of the items with spell haste are pretty poorly budgeted (No hit, no crit, no sockets) and would therefore be worse than using the equivelent non-haste items.

Looking over the spell, with full destro talents and whatnot, soulfire is quite possibly the best nuke in the game aside from the reagent cost and cooldown. It costs less than a single shadowbolt, the casting time reduction means it gets 50% more damage from gear than it should obviating the need for an "empowered" talent (55% with emberstorm), it crits for double, and it procs a stun at 26%. Additionally it's extra-long cast time means that lag has a proportionally smaller effect on it. I think it also has higher single-cast burst potential than an LO lightning bolt but I might be wrong on that one. So I think that Soulfire wins on both DPCT and on mana efficiency. The only thing it might lose on is ImpSB.

I think it would be worth adding to warlock spreadsheets. Personally my soulshards tend to be too scarce a resource when learning a boss fight (summon the half the raid outside of rez range!) but maybe it'll work for someone.

Our point is, you're NOT lifetapping faster or more often, just lifetapping more. Spell haste has no affect on the global cooldown. This is why we're saying we don't think it's that useful. Not to mention, sacrificing a felhunter for a 15% DPS and damage per mana loss in order to make spell haste work strikes me as rather counter productive.

I also wasn't saying it cancels out -- it doesn't, you do gain dps from spell haste, just not as much as your gut would lead you to think. I was saying, explicitly and specifically, that 20% of the dps gain from spell haste is lost to having to lifetap more frequently.

So if you would otherwise gain 100 dps from the spell haste item, you actually only gain 80 dps.

That warlock-specific "tax" (really, "lifetap-specific") eats into the gains more than you'd think.


Unless my math is wrong of course =). But even if my exact numbers are off, the principle is correct.

Lifetap gets ignored far too often when people are modelling warlock stuff. In my experience (mid-game: 6/6 ssc, 3/4 tk), you don't move nearly enough to 'consume' the lifetaps -- I usually use as many mana pots on a raid as our mages do and I'm still wasting critical dps time lifetapping.

e.g., it's why "on destructive spell cast/effect" trinkets are worse for us (than mages/shaman/spriests) and activated trinkets are average (with said other classes.)

For 0/21/40 Spec what would people put into the lootzor.com - World of Warcraft search and rate items - profile your wow character stats?
int = 0.12, crit = 0.4, hit = 0.75, shadow = 0.9, damage = 1? Or should crit be valued much higher?

You can very easily arrive at coefficents specific to your stats and build by using the warlock spread sheet. The sheet's thread is currently on page one, no searching required.

Without knowing anything about your stats it is extreamly difficult to weight any of the DPS stats although I'm willing to bet that hit is at least as much as +dmg if not more for a destruction build. Crit should probably be higher as well.

That "tax" is elevated when Haste comes into play if there are mana-regen sources that are unaffected by Warlock haste.

I apologize that I wasn't more clear. The point I was trying to make was that Haste doesn't negatively impact your mana pool, because you ultimately cast the same number of shadow bolts per Life Tap. I do agree that, since Life Tap is unaffected by it, Warlocks don't get the full benefit of Haste if they are Destruction, and especially not if they are Affliction. In that respect, you do lose some DPS for Haste by not having it's equivalent in item budget of other stats like Hit/Crit/+damage.

I already had commented on that in the post you replied to -- explicitly and specifically. To elaborate:


Maybe BT/Hyjal totally change the model, yes, you are right, I haven't done those fights yet.

But I've heard the same claims made about SSC/TK, and I haven't found that to be true. I think people just aren't realizing how much they lifetap and when.

At my raid +dmg level (1400-1500 buffed, with crusade up, with an elemental shaman) I need to lifetap every 13.6 seconds -- or 1.5 seconds out of every 15. Are you telling me *every* fight in BT/Hyjal you are guaranteed to have to move for at least 1.5 seconds out of every 15 on average? (since unless it takes you a full 1.5 to move, you're still losing part of the dps.)

And that in each of those movements, of course, it's safe to lifetap down -- you're not straining the healers by tapping down when they're healing others, you have enough health to be able to tap down as much as you want, etc.

A mana pot only buys us about 4-5 nukes (although I still use them because, hey, it's 4-5 nukes!) so that can only tide you over past one of those 13-14 second periods.


(unbuffed I have to lifetap once every 12 seconds -- or 1.5 out of every 13.5 seconds. +dmg is important for our dps in more ways than one.)

I would say that hyjal/bt are more forgiving of lifetaps that most of the earlier fights. Al'ar is the big exception though, especially in phase 1. If you know when to lifetap/darkpact on al'ar you can DPS nearly 100% of the possible time, and lifetap when every other DPS class is either standing around or running. Warlocks easily win the meters on al'ar because of that.

Most fights do have times where you can lifetap and not lose any DPS, but its hardly every fight. And even in the fights that do require movement, most are not as often and predictable as Al'ar. This makes it very difficult or impossible to not lose any DPS to lifetap.