I used to moonlight as a Warlock before the expansion. I typically switched from MD/Ruin to SM/Ruin, to SM/DS depending on my mood.

Since the expansion, I've switched over to a protection warrior. My warlock knowledge has diminished a bit, but I still enjoy the theorycrafting aspect of the class.

What I'm trying to get to is a team talent spec for my guild's five warlocks. Right now, we have our warlocks specing DS/SF because it will individually give them the greatest damage numbers. This, of course, is happening at the expense of the raid. These guys can't dps with their imp out, and I am forcing them to keep their imp out if they are in my group.

Here is my thought. I'd like some unfiltered feedback before I spend the gold to respec these turkeys:

Warlock 1) 0/21/40. Improved shadow bolt. This guy's job is to stack as much crit as possible and spam shadowbolts on the boss. He can dot, but his primary job is to get as many shadowbolt crits as possible.

Warlocks 2 and 3, +2 Shadow priests) Dots out the wazoo, and life drain. Shadow bolt ONLY on nightfall procs, and only if your crit rate is high enough to break even on your improved shadowbolt debuff.

The theory is, build off of the shadowweaving and misery debuffs, and keep the improved shadowbolt debuff up by not consuming charges with direct damage spells.

I am not sure how to go about constructing a model for this, but in my mind, it seems that it would be exceedingly difficult for a group of warlocks and shadow priests to outdamage this raid set-up.

Any thoughts on this? Should the warlocks use their nightfall procs? Is there a better way to set this up?

That is an eleven page argument about individual lock dps. The closest they get to discussing a team model is talking about "isb uptime". That is a distinctly different thread than the one I was trying to create.

It looks like I'll need to go build my model in excel and do some in game testing-which is pretty much what I figured. I was hoping someone already tried this and had results.

I'll post the results when they are in for those that understand what I am talking about.

actually there's already a model for this build into the warlock spread sheet if you really want to play around with it which can be found here:

http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.p...706#post397706

ISB is a lot more complected than just average crit rates. Download the custom version of the sheet and play around with the raid ISB options.

This is a *very* poor practice, because using Drain Life vs Shadowbolt means a huge (about 100 dps) lost, plus those Warlocks could crit as well.

If your Warlocks like using 40 Destro builds, perhaps have 1-2 try 21/0/40, with Siphon Life and Nightfall so they can dps while the imp is out.

For best results of great dps with the imp out, the standard UA build works well, plus they could get improved Imp via 41/3/11 with talent points left over to as they see fit, http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IiMrmRftqxbo0xZxx0z is a starting place.

I think 2 warlocks with malediction (something like 46/0/15) is pretty much a requirement to max your raid's DPS. It's already a never-ending argument between affliction vs destruction, many fights favor affliction and the 3% extra shadow and fire/frost damage to your raid is just awesome. Extra locks can have more of a variety, can be actually good to have a high crit 0/21/40 lock to increase imp SB uptime for the DoT-heavy locks and the shadow priests. Even consider telling the shadow priests to not eat up the imp SB charges when they're up and to only MB/SW if imp SB is not up (or at least has 3-4 charges up). I would go through numbers on this, but using a MF with 20% damage increase and having imp SB stay up for all the raid's DoTs including any MFs used is *probably* better than using a single 1.2X mind blast.

The underlying question in my mind is not if shadowbolt does more dps than drain life (including extra LT/DP). That's been clearly established quite some time ago.

The question to me is the math of what mixture of 3x warlock and 1x shadow priest is best for overall dps-and whether the above statement still applies in a group environment.

To simplify matters, assume you have 3x 41/0/17 +3 locks with full devastation. My feeling is that three of them, dotting x5 and lifedraining would have enough nightfalled shadowbolts to keep ISB up the majority of the time, even with a shadow priest or two nuking away and eating charges.

This ensures that those ticking dots receive the full 20% shadow damage bonus. So it's the triple point of ISB uptime <vs> DL + NF SB <vs> SB nukes with no DL.

The waste and contradiction of stacking crit gear on an affliction build to generate enough ISB charges probably destroys any advantage this strategy would have offered.

Still, it would have been kind of cool to see 3 life draining locks doing massive dps with ISB.

Actually 3 locks using DL and NF would maintain a lower ISB uptime than 3 locks using SB and NF. You can easily arrive at this conclusion by simply using the model for raid ISB uptime already provided in the warlock DPS spreadsheet thread.

The Imp SB calculation is reading cells from the NF row that aren't populating when you put 2 talent points in NF and set it to use 1.

Might be my excel bugging out, but I think the model may have a bug in it.

As far as raid DPS goes it's nice to have a spread of build amongst your warlocks. Having one warlock with Improved CoW and\or Shadow Embrace will be a good support for your healing as the MT will nok take as much damage. You can argue that the warriors shout can do the same reduction as CoW but if your warlocks have points there they can't spent the 5 points it takes them somewhere else. Shadow Embrace is a "waste" for a single Warlock but the damage reduction in a raid is great and really helps the healers in a fight where a mob hits very hard.

Malediction is also a great talent to have as it increase your caster damage by 3%. Nothing you personally gain a huge ammount on, but the raid gains tons.

Having a destruction warlock with high crit rate will help your shadowpriests and warlocks doing more damage by keeping Shadow Vunrability up. This is a proc and can never really be trusted to be up. But when it is your raid DPS goes up.

The model uses the cast ratio and effective cast time cells that are populated correctly with every possible combination of NF talents and the NF binary toggle.

When it's just warlocks, it doesn't matter how often you cast shadowbolt as long as the times when imp sb times out and doesn't get used is neglicible, which is generally very true.
When you add a shadow priest that doesn't eat charges, things stay the same.
When the shadow priest is eating charges, imp SB time will naturally be reduced. No matter how much you spam shadowbolts, it'll never be as high as if you didn't have a SP eating charges in the firstplace, but the more shadowbolt casts the less effect the SP charges eating will have on imp SB time.
My "theory" (untested and uncalculated but can probably be shown as true if you do the numbers) is that 2 affliction with malediction locks and the rest destro. You should have a warrior in your raid with imp demo shout - if not the MT then one of the DPS warriors should easily be able to grab both that and imp TC.