Thanahtos

No, never.

 

Jukoon

I have been raiding Affliction for aslong as I can remember. Two weeks ago when I was asked to spec Destruction by my guild to bring my personal DPS on par with everyone else in the raid. With the access to the T6 quality loot, it worked tenfold, however I have a different issue that worrys me a little.

My threat is now sky high, I find myself riding the tank/s ass constantly and it leads me to think if there is something more to destro dps than the stereotypical spamming of max rank shadow bolt? If find myself standing around between bolts so my threat can drop a bit before continuing.

Am I really doing something wrong through throwing my curse and max ranking shadowbolt till the cows come home?

 

Arelenda

No, that's pretty much it. Use only destruction spells since affliction ones will be more threat. Make good use of Life Tap and Soulshatter, and never use a wand when threat capped.

 

ninielin

Figured it out, he is casting CoR and I was on CoD ( one mage that night and crappy one so no coe), CoD doesn't have the 10% anti aggro talent ^^

 

Madlax

A little addition to the Compendium

Warlocks in endgame - BT+

What items shall I get myself for SP?
Skull of Gul'dan
Tempest of Chaos / Chronicle of Dark Secrets or Zhar'doom
Nethervoid Cloak
Translucent Spellthread necklace
Mana attuned band
Malefic Shoulders/Head
Cowl of the Illidari High Lord
(to add stuff here)

How to play your warlock in SP?
Kalecgos:
Basic tank and spank fight.
Make sure to keep your curses up on both dragon on demon, recast CoR when you go out of the Demon realm.
Talent wise everything is fine here(in the destro tree)
Nether Protection works on Sathrovarr's shadowbolt volley and apparently on the initial Curse of Boundless agony - still applying the curse but immune to the first ticks.


Brutallus:
Ideally you will end up with spriest/shaman/(MT healing pala) in a group.
With increasing gear level, threat will be a major issue in this fight.
Once you feel that you do way too much startup DPS, make the shaman use tranquility totem for 40-60 seconds.
Shatter and use Wrath of Air again.
Don't shatter too early just because you popped all your CDs and got 5 big crits in, you´ll be gimped later on usually.

What does Nether Protection do in this fight?
Nether protection can proc of the Meteor Slash hit.
You will get damage, but if it procs you will not get the/an additional debuff.
It does not remove debuffs.
It does not proc of Burn.
For the rare case of Brutallus casting Slash and immediately afterwards trying to Burn you, Burn will not be applied as you are in fact immune to the spell.(This is just very rare, don't expect to see this often)


Felmyst:
With a proper group, tank and managing of CDs warlocks are superior DPS on this fight.
Group: Shaman for tranq, whatever group buff you can get(boomkin, eleshaman..)
You will not need a shadowpriest in this fight(don't bother arguing with mages about it).

Downphase 1:
Let the tank get a slight lead. If you have a DPS heavy group, feel free to Bloodlust(again, the tank needs to be able to handle that!) at ~15 seconds before take off.
Keep nuking her in the air for both beams, then CoD and Soul Shatter.

Downphase 2:
Continue heavy DPS, don't waste a BL in this phase as you will reach the threat cap soon again.
Continue nuking while she goes into the air, remember to go to 110% max if you want to play it safe - or up to 130% if you know what you are doing.

Downphase 3:
Soul shatter will be ready by the end of P3 again.
Grab yourself another BL in the group as you go towards the shatter CD and keep nuking in the air again. CoD, shatter.

Downphase 4:
You will want her to be at ~28-30% max! when she comes down now(depending on people alive and other factors).
All out nuke festival.


Eredar Twins:
Nether Protection helps a real load in this fight, unless you are the tanking warlock.
Quoting [Warlock] PVE Raiding Compendium
- If it procs off the Shadow Images Shadowfury, you take the damage but gain immunity to the stun effect.
- If it procs off Flame Sear you become immune to some of the ticks after the initial one, meaning you'll be taking less periodic damage (for example, 600 instead of 1700 per tick) until a Shadow nova clears it off you. Same thing goes for Shadow strike, you gain immunity to some of the dot ticks and therefore less -healing debuffs are applied on you.

Tanking warlocks:
If you do Alythess first, the thing you have to worry about is threat > stamina.
You will have plenty of healers taking care of your HP(a single paladin *cough*) and all the DPS standing there feeling slightly useless as they are threat capped. It´s important to get a good rhythm into your searing pains, and with increasing gear you will find it way easier, even adding 2 SP in a single Blaze cast.

If you do Sacrolash first, you will want to minimize any error that could require you to take additional healing.
Move quick from blazes, make sure to cleanse your debuffs in time and build as much threat as you can meanwhile.
While basic DPS gear is very fine for tanking her(after a bunch of practice attempts/kills), some stamina + spellhit gear helps surviving P2.
In P2 its imperative to cleanse your stacking debuffs with shadow novas, while not leaving blazes anywhere near the raid. Thats where additional stamina gear comes in handy.

DPSing warlocks:
Depending on your group, you might want to keep your imp out for increased chance of (mage) survival.
As you will be threat capped in P1, no matter who does first, anyway.
Tranq totem also comes in handy over the first minute of the fight, at roughly 60% of the boss HP you should make use of your shatter.


M'uru:
There are various tactics and assignments for warlocks on M'uru, but I'll just give a few words of advice.

When using Omen and seeding Void Spawns, make use of the AoE mode Omen offers.
You will quickly see when and how heavy you can nuke them.
Also make sure to not have SoC on a dieing Sentinel, there is a common bug that will make the explosion hit the newly spawned spawns.
When a sentinel is about to die there shouldn't be any SoC going off.

DPSing Sentinels needs to be done with pinpoint knowledge and oversight or you will quickly end up killing yourself.
Usually a Sentinel does a void blast 12-15 seconds after spawning - when using a tanking and spell-reflecting warrior that is the point where you can go all out usually.
Before that, get used to your own threat values.
You don't SB when the tank has 2k threat and its dragging the mob.
You don't touch when he barely even hit it.
And you don't overaggro during a void blast cast.

Enslaving void spawns for DPS is a good benefit, BUT make sure to control them properly.
- Volleys into humanoids or sheeps are nothing you want to do.
When using a spawn in P2, thats a good DPS gain, BUT
- If you die they will be loose and quickly slaughter your raid.
If you want to use Spawns in P2, enslave them on the 2nd last Sentinel and have them help aoe down the last set.

When would you want to use Shatters and CDs?
Depending on how quick you can finish P1.
If your P1 takes 7 minutes, you will have a margin for error within the first 2-3 minutes to shatter.
If your tanks threat in P2 is naturally low, you might want to save it for then.

Time your cooldowns to be ready 20 seconds after you reach P2.
You will likely be aoeing spawns or finishing off humanoids till then.


Feel free to make additions/suggestions.

 

taybul

Burn follows the same rules as dots when it comes to Nether protection: it can proc off initial application, but not off any of the ticks.

Proof from recent Brut kill:

20:06'02.187 Malocadi's Shadow Bolt hits Brutallus for 4835 Shadow damage
20:06'02.765 Malocadi gains 7 from Aura of the Crusader
20:06'02.812 Malocadi's Soul Leech heals Malocadi for 609
20:06'03.187 Malocadi gains Nether Protection
20:06'03.187 Malocadi is afflicted by Burn

Few more things:

Felmyst: During air phase, when she's about to start her breaths, put up a CoD, threat-permitting. Should go off before she lands.

Twins: Nether prot can proc off conflag which is nice if your pvp trinket is down.

 

koalachan

Very spot on analysis Madlax. I also had no idea I could enslave Void Spawns.

At Brutallus, you can summon in an Infernal when you're about 70 sec into the fight. They are Immune to Fire and will be up until just after your raid can survive. You only get to try once every hour but it's about a quick 60k dam in total gained.

Another notable mention: you can use the gauntlet after Felmyst to restock Shards. We use basicly the Warlock tank for the coming Twins fight to stand in front of the raid to grab all the gauntlet Imps. Warlocks in the raid can use those Imp as well if they position themselves up frontish to Drain Soul their bags full.

For the Twins fight, Nether Protection can be the enemy too. As of today I've started using a "/cancelaura Nether Protection" macro after dying twice to ill timed immunities.

 

Latas

Is it just me, or does the item value distribution of our tier 6 robe suck compared to the others? I was just looking at the tier 6 shadow priest robe and then looked at the tier 6 mage robe and saw that yeah we get 8 more hit and 30 more sta than the shadow priest robe, but sta is calculated at a .667 ratio so that 30 difference is about 20 points. However the mp5 on the priest robe is calculated at a 2.5 ratio so the 12 mp5 is 30 value our robe doesnt have for a difference of 10 in the priest robes favor. Now we have 8 more hit than theirs but they have 21 crit in place of it. So the end question is, is 8 hit rating worth 4 mp5 (12 mp5 - the 8 mp5 that is negated by our 30 extra sta) and 21 spell crit rating?

 

Madlax

Our T6 robe is, bluntly spoken, "crap".
Set your eyes on Sea-Witch or Rhonin.

 

Shailom

If you don't need the hit, the new badge vender robe is descent as well.

 

Tassadaradun

I dont know if this was stated in one of the posts in the 130-odd pages of posts, but I noticed while reading the main post concerning Nether Protection that perhaps the fight where Nether Protection is almost invaluable is Hex Lord Malacress. Having a 30% chance to proc, while getting hit by multiple sorces of shadow damage every second, you will notice you will have some of the highest survivability rates during this encounter, and higher DPS than many other channeling casters or casters not using an abundance of instant cast spells, since while Nether Protection is active, Spell Pushback caused by Spirit Bolts does not occur.
Just my 2 cents

 

Smurrf

Indeed. It also makes Banishing MUCH easier...bad timing of banishes breaking vs HLM can hurt if the lock does not have Nether Prot.

 

Latas

Unfortunately last i checked nether protection only had a chance of proccing off of the inital casting of the bolts, and not each individual bolt. As far as banishes on that fight go, if you start with rank 1 and then switch to rank 2 for the rest of the fight your rebanish times will not be during spirit bolts.

 

Arnath

I'm fairly certain it can proc off of every bolt. I have NP proc wayyyyy too often in that fight for it to just be off the initial cast.

 

Pyralissa

Yes it's every bolt, and Malcaras is easily *THE* fight for having Nether Protection. I've had Shadow Ward up before bolts began and had the buff still active the bolts finished simply because of chain Nether Procs. It can't be stated how powerful that talent is on that one particular boss (which might seem pointless to talent for but Malcaras is a pretty significant block for guilds or guild groups trying to push through ZA in tier4/badge/Kara gear).

 

Latas

I've been wondering, do the healing procs from Soul Leech add extra threat, and if so is it worked just like regular healing threat or is it calculated differently?

 

Arelenda

I vaguely recall no threat for Soul Leech heals, or any life drain spells. (unlike FSW set bonus)

It might have changed in the mean time, or I might remember it wrong. Can anyone confirm?

 

Benafflock

I just did a basic test in the Cenarion Thicket with some of the Vicious Teromoths there under the assumption that if Soul Leech did produce threat, then a significant heal from it would be able to pull a Teromoth off of my Voidwalker.

So, I sent my Voidwalker to strike a Teromoth one time, which he did for a crit of 262. I also struck the Teromoth with my staff for a hit of 169. I then walked around the thicket and opened fire on other Teromoths with Shadowbolts until I got a decent amount of Soul Leech procs; I stopped after I got around 6 procs, three of them in excess of heals of 1000. At no point did the Teromoth on my Voidwalker ever attack me. Even factoring in threat reduction from Destructive Reach, which I'm not sure would even apply to Soul Leech, it would appear that Soul Leech heals do not produce threat.

I repeated the test on the Dreadfang Lurkers in the area, because I noticed that the Teromoths had a Wing Buffet ability, and I wasn't sure how that might have affected my results. The test with the Lurkers led to the same conclusion: that Soul Leech does not create threat.

Of course, if my basic assumption is incorrect, then the conclusion is flawed.

 

Torq

I'm curious about the other drain spells, as well as health funnel and/or lifetap. My only source is Omen, which has them all "exempted" from threat sources, but I'm pretty sure that isn't correct. I'm relatively sure Health Funnel generates threat, but I don't know about drain life (additional threat beyond the damage, anyway) and drain mana.

I'll eventually get around to testing these myself if no one has any answers,

 

Flamingcloud

I am 100% sure that health funnel generates threat I can pull a mob off a pet just by healing it, and I am 95% certain drain life generates threat. It could be he was full hp when the soul leeches went off, over healing doesn't generate threat. Even if soul leech does generate threat I hardly see that as a reason to not get it.

 

Suggestive

From 'testing' done on razorgore adds, the only form of self mana/hp regen we have that actually generates threat would be sacrificing a fel hunter or voidwalker. I believe dark pact generates threat also, but i can't begin to remember what happened to convince me it does. Oh and health funnel definitely generates threat, it only takes 2 minutes to check.

 

Torq

So it looks like I should test and see what the exact values are.

If life drain generates threat, I'd assume it'd be the normal damage threat + .5 of the amount healed. I think mana gains are the same as healing, so .5 of the mana gained, but I'm not sure about the amount of mana drained. Another thing to test would be to find out if the health/mana gain threat is split between all targets, like healing aggro is (if I recall correctly, anyway).

I'm not so much worried about the threat generation in a raid environment. Soul Leech overheals most of the time anyway, so more often than not, you're not getting any threat from it. Also, in a raid environment, threat usually tends to come in chunks of 1-2k+ so a .5k split across all mobs isn't going to be much.

Another one I'm really interested in is Lifetap. I would think it would generate threat, being a mana gain, but it may be truly exempt.

 

Arelenda

This takes three minutes to do yourself. You go to terrokar and use a voidwalker..

Anyway: tests confirm:
Things that don't give heal threat
Drain Life
Death Coil
Soul Leech
Drain Mana (in fact, seemed no threat at all. I didn't double check this because drain mana is useless in pve anyway)
Life Tap


Things that DO give heal threat
Health Funnel
Bandages
Demonic Sacrifice VW (not tested: DS Felhunter but reported to give threat)


Compendium updated.

 

holovic

Can someone post a list of the ratios of crit to damage, haste to damage, haste to crit and so on?

Found it quite easily for my mage but finding it difficult on this thread.