This might be totally out of the subject here but i didn't want to open up a new thread. With the stats i have, would i output as much damage as i do now with my Affliction spec? It's more of a support spec but when i'm able to do CoD i'm usually amongst the top 3 DPS. We raid SSC/TK, we just killed vashj a few days ago and we're currently trying the Kael'thas encounter. Here's my armory link thank you for your time

P.S.: I tried asking the same thing on the lock forums and i got bashed for having low shadow damage :S If the armory has food buffs or anything on me my stats atm are 197 hit rating, around 16.5% crit (excluding talents) and around 1080 shadow damage (just with Fel Armor)

The World of Warcraft Armory

I'm not really sure what you are asking here since you seem to have left out vital parts of your question. The best thing about these "will I do more damage as X compared to Y" is that they can be answered with one simple link: leulier dps spreadsheet.

Then again no spells scale well with crit.
Basically if someone really wants you can add an "AOE %" and "non-boss %" to the spreadsheet and see the new values you get for hit/crit/damage. Can go more complex than that too (such as seeding hydross).

Something else to consider in all of this is the damage cap on seed (I believe it's 25,000). If that damage cap is static (in other words if the damage cap is always 25,000 regardless of Curse of Shadows, crits, Demonic Sacrifice, etc.) then gear swapping for crit (or even damage) could have less of an affect on aoe fights like Morogrim where a large number of adds causes capping.

I believe the cap is the damage you would deal to 10 targets (as of some post 2.0 patch). I can't imagine that it would be a static number that doesn't take your shadow damage into account. I know when our prot pally and I would round up BM trash (30-40 mobs), the damage on Seed was noticeably lower. Testing this would take quite a bit of time and help, I think, given that Seed has a range of damage, and you would have to gather 10-15 mobs to get an effective test.

Also, the advisors in the Kael'thas fight are 73 elites, the weapons (according to Wowhead) are 70 elites. This shouldn't matter, as the majority of your damage will be to level 73 mobs, and kill shots on Kael aren't going to have much issue getting the weapons down.

Choosing +hit vs. +dmg on trash and bosses is an interesting question. I noticed my +dmg decreased some as I collected +hit. What I did was keep those pieces of gear around to give me more flexibility as I collect gear with +hit. I could be well over the cap now, but I can pick and choose which +hit pieces I need based on the fight demands. I can stack a little stamina for fights like Rage/Najentus, but +dmg for fights like Kael'thas and Vashj, where I don't take bursty damage, and we want to get the fight/phase over.

I'm rereading my posts and maybe I was unclear. I still run around with my hit-set on almost every boss because they're on farm and I aim to make my guild's "DPS" look silly. On new content though, I gear for the part of the fight that is giving the raid the most grief. On many bosses this means making no gear changes and sticking with hit. But if the guild is having troubles with a phase requiring non-73s getting taken down fast, then until that phase is cleaned up, I'll wear gear that helps on that part of the fight. Once we get that down, I'll look to maximize my value elsewhere.

Gives me something to do while they're rebuffing too =X

--On AoE, I know +damage sees lousy returns, and that there is a cap. My understanding is that the cap depends on your non-crit damage, so additional +crit still sees returns. Is that correct?

What I was saying is that to increase your damage by 1% you will need a lot more crit than spell damage/hit, which means your relative portion of the time spent AOEing needing to be high enough to make up for it in order for crit to be worth it.
For example if crit is 30% worse and you AOE 10% of the time, it's probably still worse to stack crit. If you AOE 50% of the time, though, you should definitely stack crit in this case.

I would like some of the people who already posted in this thread to come back to a precise point concerning locks dps.

Basically there are too many affli locks in my guild, and too many shadowpriests, and it is beginning to make our playing durings raids almost impossible with dots going away all the time. I and another lock of the guild would very much like to respec destro, in order to avoid those issues and to try something new, but we are only at a Magtheridon-Lurker stage so our stuff is T4-like (or rather crafts). So the question is: from what stats could a lock benefit from being destro?
The subject was answered partly at differents points of the thread, but it is 94 pages now and I havn't got the nerve to read it all :p I guess as well that I could make some calculations myself but I'd appreciate some bits on information upon that subject.

Thanks a lot

Opinions are divided on the matter. In my opinion, optimal is one affliction warlock (for Malediction, Shadow Embrace). All others can be destro or demo, even at low gear levels. For viable specs, check the compendium.

In my experience, you'll only start having problems when having at least 4 affliction locks and 2 shadowpriests (or 3 of each or thereabouts). There are ways to counter this by less drastic means than respeccing to something you either don't like or don't have the gear for. One of them is to get all your locks to drop Immolate and/or Siphon life from their rotations. Depending on the fight, the priests could be persuaded to drop VE as well. But most importantly, talk to your guild. Do you have hunters serpent stinging bosses? Warriors rending? If they do, tell them to stop it.

In our case we sometimes do have 4 affliction locks and 2 shadowpriests in the raid. Dropping immolate (and a post on our forums concerning the debuff real estate issues we're facing) has solved our issues.

The spreadsheet can easily answer about 98% of the repeating questions in this thread...

Yeah, if you are thinking about asking a question, read the first post here http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17008-w...ng_compendium/ and if it's still unanswered, reply in that thread. No sense in have two parallel threads at this point.

It seems like this thread has developed into the "old subjects revisited" type thread and the Compendium thread has become the "new ideas and unsettled debates" type thread. This one seems to be where people post questions that they want opinions in regard to their specific situations or they don't have the time/just plain don't want to search through 95 pages (even though the Compendium is nicely summarized so I can't really explain that reasoning).

But, is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. I bet a lot of people are like me and are bored out of their minds at work and have no problem chiming in for specific-oriented questions.

That being said, I think the whole "wait for SSC/Eye gear for destro spec" is crap. But it relies on how much effort and gold you put in your gear. I was at 202 hit, 23 crit (w/dev), and 1190 dmg (with +70 from Crusade card) at purely crafted/rep/Kara gear. Actually, only 5 of my 16 pieces of gear are actually from raids. The rest is from crafting/rep/pvp/AH. After I made the switch, I saw a large gain in damage.

The big ones to go for are Darkmoon Faire Crusade, Spellstrike set, Handwraps of Flowing Thought, Frozen Shadoweave set. A big bonus is if Belt of Blasting is for sale on your server. The farthest guild in progression on my server is only starting Hyjal/BT and they're already selling their Nether Vortex's for patterns (thus, the reason I have a belt).

Basically, I would say desto requires "SSC/Eye equivalent or better gear". When in doubt, consult the spreadsheet for a rough idea.

Edit: Oh, and for your specific gear level: if your sig is correct and up to date, I'd get that +hit up to 16 asap. You're looking at ~8% less dmg with a hit rating of 8%. I guess it depends on how much dmg you're losing by switching to destro compared to how much you'd lose by taking some dots out of your rotation.

Ok you are right and I am sorry, I did not want to browse through 95 pages of this thread, but forgot there is another one which could as well answer my question.
This being said, thank you for the informations given, they are not necessarily foundable in the compendium thread.

Penta > Actually we are 5 locks and 3 shadows in a raid by now, which is way too much. There must have been like a recruitement problem here, but is it too late to just ask people to leave.

Telkster > The gear you are talking about is the one I have got/am trying to get, I guess there will just be some gems to change if I do respec.

Thanks again, am going to read the *50 or so* pages of the compendium thread now

There is nothing wrong with 5 locks and 3 shadow priests. In fact, especially for early raiding, that's quite good. Just get a good mix of warlock specs and you'll be fine.

The other thread is only 8 pages or so, and you can search this thread specifically to find a lot of answers to most questions that get brought up by people who don't want to read all 95 pages.

Not sure if it's the new Meta (Chaotic Skyfire Diamond) or that we brought a Prot Paladin (3% raid-wide crit), or perhaps even the new "stopcasting" thing, but this week I've posted some of the highest numbers I've ever gotten in BT and Hyjal.

Night 1, Rage through Souls: Wow Web Stats

Night 2, Bloodboil through Illidan: Wow Web Stats

I'm the Warlock tank for Illidan, so my damage always bites on that fight. I also call out bloodboil groups for BB so I always kinda suck on that fight, too, since I'm paying more attention to people being in the right place at the right time and watching timers instead of Omen. Najentus I was thrown into the MT group, so I didn't post as high as I have in the past (usually get around 2k dps if I do CoD). And then I cratered on Archimonde during the very first knockback of the fight (don't ask).

But yea, my DPS was insane this week. For reference, my group for Night 1 was typically 2 Destro Locks, 1 BM Hunter, 1 Survival Hunter, and 1 Resto Shaman. Not optimal, but we had to make due with what we had for the night. For our second night, I sometimes had a Shadow Priest, and a BM Hunter and Resto Shaman for the most part.

Yeah, the stopcasting change bumped my dps up by 200 this week. That's nice, but it's also embarassing that I was so bad at it before :X.

Is there a way to tell in WWS if we're getting debuffs knocked off due to the 40 debuff limit or is this just something you have to watch for?

Also, what is the priority list for what gets knocked off before what?

Get a raid frame like Pitbull or AG Unitframes, it can show 40 debuffs, and watch when the debuffs go past 40.

There is no debuff priority, unless you use the level 60 version of spells. Sadly the powerful melee debuffs (like demo shout and thunderclap) cannot be downranked.

They can be downranked using macros, despite not appearing in your spellbook. Remember, this is still only useful on some abilities: downranked thunderclap still has the same slow effect, downranked demo shout does not reduce AP by the same amount.

So there's no way to tell after the fact if the 40 debuff limit was knocking off debuffs?

By the way, I use X-Perl, and even with that, it's hard to tell if a debuff (especially others') was knocked off because of the 40 debuff limit or a natural expiration.