Hello

I've read conflicting accounts on the usefulness of 5/5 Shadow Embrace for a raiding warlock. As a heavy affliction lock I feel that debuffing is, well, important, and have for a long time felt that using 5 points in this location could provide substantial to a raid for the tank's survivability. Recently though some testing of my own and posts elsewhere have thrown its usefulness into question, and I am curious what people here think of the spell.

As with most descriptions Blizz's tooltips leave much to interpretation and inference, and SE is no different. The tooltip states I interpret this to mean that mobs with 5/5 SE deal 5% less physical damage to whoever they hit.

Two thoughts have come to mind to explain why this spell may suck. First is that the effect may in fact only be for damage dealt to the caster (me) and would not reduce the damage dealt to, say, the main tank. The second, as per the DnT link above, states that the 5% reduction is applied before armor is accounted for, meaning that the effective physical damage reduction is far less, like 2% (after mitigation) and not accounting for parry, etc.

Does anyone have any experience with the spell, either through empirical testing or statements/links elsewhere that explain how the spell actually works? Truth be told I've always felt that SE was too good to be true, and if in fact it does little extra good I may have just freed up 4 talents points.

Thanks!

If you're specing purely for PvE raiding I'm pretty sure you can get 5/5 shadow embrace and not miss out on any of the +damage talents, so the real question is even if it's a minuscule reduction, why not get it?

If you're specing for a hybrid of solo PvE, raiding PvE and PvP though I would agree that the 4 points could be spent better elsewhere.

For a pure raiding you could use:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IyMMbRftVtcoZxx0xM

It's worth it for PVE raiding for sure, and I even like having it for the arena. 5% less damage taken is 5% and it works whether it's a boss attacking your raid's MT or a warrior beating on your arena partner.

For pure raiding, I would try to incorporate imp HoT in there. You should also consider getting either Mal, SE or imp CoA with the other locks in your raid.

My warlocks have a specific debuff duty each. I am the SE lock (with imp CoA), I have a Mal CoE lock (with 1/5 SE - w/o imp CoA), I have a Mal CoS lock (with 1/5 SE - w/o imp CoA) and a Shadow Destro lock to keep ISB up at all times.

The reasoning behind this is that if you have Mal then you're wasting 2 points in imp CoA and that if you all have 5/5 SE you're wasting some points as well (considering one lock keeps it and the others put it elsewhere).

If you tend to do alot of 25 man's, there should be more than 1 warlock in the raid and atleast 3, so I would try and talk this over with your other warlocks.

You may go look at my spec on the armory, Extih @ Mal'Ganis. You will notice that I only have 4/5 SE because I have 5/5 Suppression. A couple weeks ago I got the Eye of Mag and will most likely respec to gain the full 5/5 SE soon.

As for imp HoT, it's very useful for SSC trash, Mag adds and even Karazhan. It rules in Arena's and general pvp.

I have tried CoD personally and it's just a pain more than anything. I always found myself to do more dmg with CoA. That's something personal as it works better for me.

Were not at Vashj yet so I haven't considered it for now.

Eye of Magtheridon. I have 3% hit, so I purposly nerf my hit so the trinket procs and just enough so I can still maintain a excellent dps. You should check out my armory if you want to know about my gear (Extih @ Mal'Ganis). That's what it's there for you should know by now that you should research before posting on these forums.

Because we don't use CoEx and you need 1 point to continue to the next tier. 1/5 Shadow Embrace gives them the debuffs for Drain Life outside of raids (some people have to farm to pay for repairs and pots). I personally don't have the talent as I almost never use Drain Life (but most of my other locks do). As I said earlier, we don't use CoEx because we don't need it. When we do, it will be different.

You really should think deeper before posting.

That's fine, and I have complete understanding that people might prefer different cast-routines. However, and I am positive you agree with me here, advice given on these forums should generally be based on theorycraft, parses or simulations, not anecdotal evidence or personal preference. All of these show CoD to be superious to CoA, hence my comment.

Please do not confuse the anger in my previous post with stupidity (in hindsight it came across a bit harsh, sorry, I'll try to refrain from posting while angry at work-stuff in the future). I'm an avid reader of these forums, and among other things I've read quite a few posts regarding the eye. This thread contains quite a few good posts on the subject:
[Caster] Eye of Magtheridon

Posts 2, 5 and 9 are particularly good.

To reiterate the conclusion of the thread:
If you want it more related to your gear, I did some quick calculations using your stats, and came to the conclusion that you should be able to cast a spell that can be resisted (i.e. not LT) about every 2.3 seconds, disregarding lag and movement, if you need Life Tap/Dark Pact back the mana spent (i.e. a sustained dps situation). Or conversely, you do around 4.3 casts per duration of the proc. At 4% hit you'd then have the following uptime:
1-(0.87^4.3) = 0.45
while at 3% you'd have:
1-(0.83^4.3) = 0.477

In other words, you gain ~2.67% uptime, or an average of 4.54 +damage at the cost of 1% hit. At your level of gear, that's pretty much a loss in dps

(If I didn't manage to explain that well, here's a post on the subject from someone who's better at both math and explanations than me: Mage trinket advice)

It's a bit oversimplified of course, but close enough I would think.

NB: I'm not bashing the Eye, with the added static 54 +damage it's a great trinket, I'm just bashing the concept of nerfing your hit for it =P

I think you misunderstood what I meant. When I still raided, the debuff-limit was most definetely a problem for us. Perhaps you have good enough control on the debuffs for that not to be a problem, but speccing so you automatically add an extra debuff when using your regular spells for no extra benefit does not strike me as a particularly good idea. Especially with so many affliction warlocks as you seem to have. What you take instead does not really matter, you'd only be switching one point that does increase dps for another point that doesn't increase dps. (I'm at work so I can't check, but if I now remember wrong and seperate ranks of SE doesn't consume extra debuff-slots, this was completely pointless and please accept my sincere apologies.)

And please do not confuse the issue with bringing up activities outside raiding please, you were the one who started with a "pure raiding" spec, so that's what I commented on. Besides grinding as an affliction warlock is so fast that an extra 5% healing from Drain Life isn't necessary to excel . Anyway, skipping some stuff and getting Fel Concentration makes for better grinding anyway =P.

I completly understand and agree with this up to a certain extent. I'm replacing the hit with crit and/or more +dmg and so the 1% loss most certainly is not a "loss" in dps as the stats are redirected else where. I'm in a kind of stump right now on the subject, I have gold to change my gems but I don't necessarly want to do so just to test the eye with more hit. My dps is already awesome as it is, I am never below top 5 and usually will be competing for first with my other lock buddy. It works, therefore I don't feel a need to change anything at the moment. (NB: I got the eye two weeks before 2.1 and have not found a need to re-gem for Veiled gems)

"pure raiding" was in the previous post I was quoting from. I merely bolded it to make sure he/she paid attention to it.

Your question was answered.

I have 5/5 in SE and I've always felt like it was beneficial. Whenever I've asked the tank if it makes a difference he's said it does, and that's good enough for me.

Here ya go, I posted the exact same kinda thread here:

How does Shadow Embrace work?