Alright so I'm a 43/7/11 Afflock and I'm looking at these two gloves:

http://www.thottbot.com/i28507 - Handwraps of Flowing Thought

http://www.thottbot.com/i28968 - Voidheart Gloves

Now, I know what you're thinking - the HoFT pwn the voidheart gloves; 2 sockets & sexy spellhit while voidheart just has crappy crit.

BUT, the thing is, I will be getting the Voidheart Helm soon. So the real comparison is whether the 2pc set bonus of Voidheart is worth giving up the great stats of HoFT for.

What do you guys think?

The correct answer, since you have 375 tailoring, is to craft the Spellstrike set and keep the Handwraps of Flowing T hought and leave the tier 4 helm to someone who needs it more...

You are correct, sir. The only upgrade to HoFT is T6.

Anger-spark gloves http://www.thottbot.com/i30725 are better than either in terms of damage output and available prior to Tier 6.

I don't like spellstrike, it's very expensive to craft and it has horrible stamina.
I'd rather not run around with 6k health thanks. I don't know if you've done any TBC raiding or not but there are a lot of encounters where everybody will take damage and stamina is important.

The trick is to get some PvP gear to swap in for those encounters. Mages and locks I know are full tailoring (unless they've upgraded to t5 or such) and will switch gear when they need stamina. No sense gearing for stamina when you don't use it all the time.

Is completely correct. By and large, T4 is not necessary for warlocks.

My alt rolls with 2 piece spellstrike and 3/3 frozen shadow weave. He rocks 1045 shadow damage with just fel-armor (43/0/18 spec) and he doesn't have a single raid epic.

Granted, i have like 6800 health or something completely unbuffed, but imp, fort, mark and kings get me close to 9k, which is more then enough.

Oh, and if you are too cheap to pay for spellstrike, then you have no need to worry about serious raiding....it's not for the cheap/lazy. Either work for the best.....or don't, and be an average warlock.

Tier 4 gloves with spell hit enchant plus tier 4 shoulders along with Spellstrike can bring some nice DPS pre-Serpentshrine loot or whatever. You have to break up FSW bonus but whatever.

Excepting for extenuating circumstances, this would be the way to go.

Personally I don't have the Spellstrike set despite being tailor, because HoFT has only dropped once during all my Kara runs (and needless to say I didn't get it), and I also very much like the Engineering goggles, so my usual setup is Destruction Holo-gogs + Voidheart Gloves/Pants + FSW (or switch to 4pc Voidheart, most of which I picked up just to save from being rotted since all of our warlocks and most of our mages are tailors, if I feel like playing around as Fire).

I'm still trying to get Either Handwraps of Anger-Spark to get some more hit though.

In my opinion the only 2 pieces of T4 worth picking up for affliction warlocks are the shoulders and robe. And that's pretty much only if you aren't a tailor. There are better pieces for all the other slots. (Handwraps, Trial-Fire Trousers/crafted pants, a couple of different hats).

completely agree with Kestrel. Shoulders and Chest T4, Spellstrike helm and pants, frozen shadoweave boots and soul eaters or the handwraps is the way to go. I gem with all +9 spell dmg and have found that is the best way to go. Even though you are going to lose shadow dmg from losing the craftable chest and shoulders you gain around 25+ hit rating along with some stats with the T4 proc.

Back to the OP's point - what effect does the 2-piece Voidheart bonus have on HoFT vs Voidheart Gloves? I realize that the Voidheart Crown is a sticking point for a lot of people, and there's obviously no debate that Spellstrike Hood is better for DPS, so let's just imagine that his other piece is Voidheart Mantle instead.

The two piece bonus would be better to have than the stats on the handwraps.

Actually, on a related note, the proc chance on the two piece bonus is 10%, is that correct? I've searched before but didn't find a definitive answer.

I'll procwatch it tonight and I'll update you on it tomorow.

10% is what the Wowhead description for Shadowflame/Flameshadow (two of the most unimaginatively named buffs ever, by the way) used to say is the proc rate, and from my personal experience, it seems "about right". And since the +fire and +shadow are distinct buffs, you can have both on you, which is kind of annoying in that you're wasting a proc.

Don't cast immolate and that won't happen :P

Do you never lifetap?

IMO, as a warlock it is my responsibility to have my hp at "comfortable raid level + 2 lifetaps", because for many encounters the incidental damage is unpredictable and could occur immediately after a lifetap. I make it 2 lifetaps because a single lifetap and drainlife results in over-healing.

I cant think of an encounter where taking damage as a ranged caster isnt predictable. 10k buffed HP is fine for any encounter outside of BT/Hyjal. If you are having mana problems you have dark pact, lifetap or heaven forbid a mana pot or two. I know its blasphemy to say take a mana pot being a warlock but it does not invoke the global cooldown that a dark pact or lifetap does and unless you have to save the cooldown for a healthpot or destro pot I dont know what you are saving the cooldown for.

I lifetap quite frequently -- whenever I need to. In fact I've started being even less "nice" about my lifetaps: rather than consistently tapping at certain amounts, I've been timing it for movement, etc. to get more DPS out.

Fact is everyone on a raid has more HP than they really need 99% of the time, and it's very easy to get your extra stamina boost because you can do things like get pure stamina rings, which mages can't as easily. And for the handful of fights, you can swap in gear.


But you say drain life, so it sounds like your healers don't heal warlocks. Ours very rarely have issues getting a renew/rejuv on locks (and no we don't run exceptionally healer heavy -- we were 7 healers last night.) They know when it's important to top off the locks, and when they can just let the renew tick (e.g. if you're really low before lurker's adds come out, a direct heal probably important. otherwise, renew/rejuv work just fine.)


Stamina in raids is overrated. Even in TBC.



(edit to the above) Yes I use mana pots on raids. It's a very nice dps boost, not sure why you wouldn't in situations where dps matters. Destruction pots are actually pretty poor unless you weren't going to have to lifetap before it died.

I believe it is most effective if you have spellstrike hood/pants, and then t4 gloves/shoulders to get both set bonuses. Then you can fill in with shadoweave chest/boots or other raid equivalent.

I suppose my current valuation of stamina is based on where my guild is progressing.

Tidewalker is not a 100% clean kill for us yet, though stacking the raid with aoe makes it pretty easy. Still, there are very few times you can safely lifetap.

Standard play is like: watery grave (potential 6-8k dmg), 10 seconds later earthquake (potential 4k damage) followed by very lite raid healing because we want the murlocs to agro the paladin not the other healers (this is where i drain life), followed by heavy murloc aoe with little time to lifetap, followed by a brief period in which I can lifetap and drainlife back to full before the next watery grave. Having more hp as a buffer makes this all a lot easier, and being "safe" at 80% max hp lets me take advantage of heal over times and the shadoweave set bonus, which actually heals a noticeable bit of damage when used with seeds of corruption.

*nod* Exactly. So wear stamina gear for those fights where it's a concern, and have your main gear (and your gems) reflect what's important the rest of the time. That's what I mean when I say stamina is overrated -- not that it's never important, just that it's overrated.

I have three slots where I am exceptionally low on stamina, and I carry my pvp items or older pve items (gemmed with +stamina gems) with me on every raid to fill in there.

Although, since you're using paladin tanks for the murlocs, you can lifetap then and have them healing you to gain the heal aggro they want.