If you stack dmg and stam you can farm monstrously fast with destro. Getting 11k hp and 1100 shadow is not all that hard if you wear some PVP gear and ignore hit, since you won't need more than 5%. Sac a VW for HP regen and 3-4 shot everything (SBx3+Sburn kills most lvl 70s). Tap once and move on. I sustain about 1100dps (while in combat) farming lvl 67/68s for motes. I never need to drain life, bandage, eat, drink, or chase feared mobs. 2/3 Soul Leech helps allot here too, making up the small deficit of life from tapping you don't get back from Fel Stamina.

Thanks for the felguard tips, Nenad and others.

We had our 2nd Gruul kill last night, and I did probably 100-150 more dps with my 5/45/11 spec than I have with my full affliction spec on both HKM and Gruul in the past.

We had two shadowpriests last night, so I took a slot in one of the SP groups - its actually quite easy to keep the FG alive on Gruul. I had to re-summon him twice, but it was well worth it considering the higher level of DPS I was putting out with him up over what I used to, and I really don't think he would have died too much more often if I was not in a SP group.

I'll let you know how it goes after my Kara raids this week =)

well, warlocks have luck to have all 3 builds (afflic, demo, destro) viable for soloing and farming - so I have no doubts that destro can successfuly farm ;p

what I was trying to compare was efficiency of those demo vs afflic or destro in farming, with identical gear. So, unless I'm mistaken in my guesses from previous post, if you had such 1100 dmg gear and have no problem farming now with 3SB+Sburn, my estimate is that if you respec to 9/41/11 you could farm even slightly better - for example you would probably need one nuke less for same type of mobs (due to having 1250 +shadow as demo, and pet doing 200 DPS), which must lead to less downtime no matter what ;p

but again, we already know that all warlock builds can solo nearly as well as other lock builds - which is not case for all classes ;p

Having farmed as both specs, I'd also like to chime in that I think a 0 21 40 actually farms better / more efficiently than my current 7 43 11.

W/ my demon spec, I stack damage, turn pet abilities off, sbolt > start sbolt 2 > charge for stun > sbolt (dead mob up to 71). While I don't take damage, the felguard does when charge is down and I can only kill (call it) 8-10 mobs before I have to bandage, heal the pet or take some sort of action.

Farming motes as shadow destro (with 3/3 soul leech), I'd sac a felhunter for mana regen and sbolt > immol > sbolt > conflag > sburn in a worst case (no crit) scenario. W/ that spec I'd swap in some swanky +crit gear and run around with 25% tooltip or so, +dmg be damned - and I literally would *never* have to eat / drink. Never being defined by me as 2+ hours at a time.

If I ran low on mana b/c I was chaining mobs too fast, I'd just hang out for an extra 20 sec between pulls, go grab a beer or something, then come back to full mana b/c of the felhunter sac.

While demon can also sac a felhunter, you don't have the 70% uninterruptible talent, nor do you have the range, nor do you have the conflag burst, which is an easy 2k dmg on demand. Also, it obviously lacks soul leech - which is basically a 30% chance at a partial healthstone w/ every spell that can proc it.

In short, I was damn surprised at how well destro farms when you've got soul leech and a sac'd felhunter.

Well, our farming method slightly differ ;p It seems to me that you were not using full potential of Demo. Main diffecences that I see:

1) I send pet right away. I think that you lose advantage of pet if you keep it until 2nd SB and only then send it in. If you sent FG immediatelly, and you must have cleave on, it willl keep or regain aggro after first SB in most cases. Also, his full DPS (cleave+melee) from start will save you need for one SB in most farming cases, so you will need less breaks.

2) as i mentioned above, cleave is essential ability for pet DPS , so i keep it on. For some mobs where i know 3+ SBs will be needed even with pets DPS, i keep taunt on too

3) I didnt mention this in last post, but having pet DPSing from start (as i noted in #1) gives you one additional advantage: if there are several mobs close (and usually it is the case), I send pet to next one as soon as last mob is dead. That has big advantage in that it will save FGs Frenzy buffs up, and it will let pet do DPS while i loot , also ensuring my 1st and even 2nd SB wont draw aggro, and ensuring that i need less SBs.

4) i use Drain Soul often, just after my last SB left and is still traveling , so i get 15% mana back, and shards

5) I do not heal pet, I recast new one, with full Mana as well as HP (heal only top HP). With all shards farmed, and with my mana much better due to one less nuke per kill, and due to Drain Souls, recasting pet is definitelly more effective

Above method let me kill about 20 mana elementals before i need to do some regen or pet resummon. On harder hitting mobs like fire elementals in nagrand, I resummon pet more often, but I dont need HP/mana regen more often.

I can post numbers for usual farmed mobs (mana eles in nether 5.5k hp, air eles in nagrand 7.5k hp, fire eles in nagrand 9k hp), that show how Demo lock using pet full DPS will need one less SB per average kill, and will kill in less time.

But in short, our method differs because I use full pet DPS with pet resummons (rarely heals) and i use Drain Soul often for 15% mana regen.

And while I appreciate fact that you can go 2 hrs without regen as Destro, I already noted that my 'regens' are actually kills while i Drain Life and pet melee, so they are not lost time (and Destro can hardly do efficient drain life regen due to no pet). Also, I kill mobs faster than your suggested destro sequence (including DoTs etc) suggest, ( i kill them faster than your Demo sequence suggest too, since you are not using pet from start) so even if i would use more time for 'regen' activities in 2 hours as Demo, i would still kill more mobs in that period. And killing mobs fast is very important in crowded farming areas (if you dont want someone else to kill next two mobs that are close), in addition to providing more mobs per hour killed, which is essentially goal for farming.

Just as side note, you can use VW sacced instead of FH, and have even easier 'never need to regen' time. With improved LifeTaps 20% bonus on that HP, if you have say 12300 HP and 7400 mana (from your armory), your sacced FH gets you 56 MP/s, while sacced VW can get you 74 MP/s - and it can in addition heal you if you get hit. I did lot of 'sacced VW' farming when I was 60, and it was always better than 'sacced FH' that i tried, since with sacced pet you always get hit and need HP regen as well as mana regen. Key is never to be full HP (if not full mana), so regen is always useful.

So I still think that Demo is better than Destro for farming, if pet is fully used and if measure for successful farming is number of killed mobs per hour.

Edit: when I checked your armory for Hp example above, I noticed one thing about your talent points that could greatly improve your farming ability (and your raid DPS), but would eventually make small negative impact on your PvP ability. Namely, you have 3/3 points in Demonic Resilience, and no points at all in two very important talents: Improved Drain Soul and Mana Feed. Personally I use, and would suggest, following:

2/2 in Improved Drain Soul: if you farm, this is must for those +15% mana on each Drain Soul kill (and that can be every 2nd kill on average). If you raid, even more important -10% threat on DoTs

1/3 in Mana Feed: essential for pet DPS both for farming and (even more) for raids. For farming it lets your pet do DPS (cleave use mana) longer, making your pet HP runs out at about same time as pets mana, so you have meaningful pet resummons (ressumon at 50% hp and 0% mana is wasteful). For raid, it is much more important, since without at least 1 point here, pet lose half its DPS early in boss fight.

0/3 in Demonic Resilience: i had 3/3 here long time ago, then changed to 0/3. Difference is slightly noticeable on pet, ie it get hurt bit more, but for farming with Resilience i was often in situation that FG lose mana and still have HP, so i had to resummon anyway, and for raids if pet is getting hurt (AE or such), it needs heal no matter what (SP or HoTs or ...) so 15% is also not much. As for your own resilience, that is important only if you PvP more than you raid/farm

So unless you are hardcore PvPer (ie unless PvP is more important to you than your raiding or farming), I would suggest making above change ;p

Regarding your talent suggestions, Mana Feed is mostly a farming talent since i found the pet died before his mana bar ran out in raids. With cleave on auto, the mana bar with int buff will last about 3-4 minutes. You can just resummon it when it runs out of mana while farming.

Imp Drain Soul is great for farming, however it does not work in PvP/Arenas on the other faction currently, and will likely never work on the same faction.

Demonic Resilience is key, 15% less damage on all sources (except Soul Link) is *very* important for raiding, because it gives HoTs/VE/Tier 5 more chances at healing the pet. However, this talent is not so important for farming/PvP since you can just resummon it when it dies.

Without Mana Feed your pets mana due only to cleave will last about 1min30sec , which is much less than prectically all boss fights, so your pet would be doing 30-40% less damage. Average FG mana with INT buff is something like 4300. Cleave use 295 mana every 6 sec, so it will use that mana in under 15 cleaves, which is 90sec.

As for pet dieing without Demonic Resilience, or pet dieing in raid before mana run out, I must say that in my experience that is not case for majority of fights. And in fights where pets do tend to die (due to AEs mostly), they will die with or without resilience.

So, unless you focus on PvP, i still say Mana Feed + Imp Drain Soul >>> Demonic Resilience


I believe that in my last version of XLS calculator I included voidheart effect (can find link at first post). But in general, it is presumed to be 5% proc chance on spell hit (so not on dot ticks), and some suggestions were made about 45sec hidden cooldown, although on that one there are conflicting informations. Personally, I never tested those, but 5% chance with 45sec CD would have same effect as 3% chance with no hidden cooldown (and those 3% was also reported as measured by some ppl).

Depending on cooldown interpretation, effective +dmg from set bonus is between 18 and 28 +dmg. And due to global cooldown, no 'silly way to abuse' is more appropriate (if you try to do max DPS) than normal use of your dots/nukes.

My FG had Judgement of Wisdom last time I used Demo in a raid, the mana bar lasted longer than 90 seconds. If you don't have Pallys keeping up Wisdom, I concede that 1 in Mana Feed is important for raiding.

I still think Demonic Resilience is important, so if I speced Demo again I would drop 2 points in the the crit talent to get imp Drain Soul.

I can confirm that Voidheart can only proc on a spell hit, I have no idea of the proc rate, but it is low.

There is no cooldown on 2 piece tier4. It can double proc fire/shadow, fire/fire(refresh) and shadow/shadow(refresh).

From looking at WWS parses of fights, Flameshadow (the buff I care about) ends up being active for about 10% of my DPS time during a fight. Shadowflame goes up a few times as well, but I could really care less since the buff is shorter than Immolate's duration, meaning the one fire spell I use will never get the benefit of it.

And yes, as others have said, there's no internal cooldown on the proc.

I wasn't looking for advice, or telling anyone how to spec.

I was telling you that destro farming is faster than demon farming. Lvl ~71 mobs die in the time to cast 2 shadow bolts, and an immolate. I don't see how you letting your pet do 140 (at best) DPS is any better than the 1500+ DPS destro can pump into a mob in ~3 seconds as 0 21 40 with sac'd felhunter (not even a succy).

Pretty much the same concept for demon farming, only use your felguard to stun(lock) the mob and nuke it down - to keep it off you in the absence of soul leech. When intercept isn't up that's when you have the thing tank whatever, then nuke it when you know it's going to die in 2 hits (because that's how much time you have before it deaggro's your pet and comes for you).

Net net, it's safe to say I have a de minimus interest in theorycrafting about how to farm for primals, and an even smaller interest that you might kill 99 mobs in the time I kill 98.

Enjoy the afternoon


Eh, also, I'm probably wearing my pvp gear in my armory - was doing some wsg when I logged last night. Pve gear nets me 209 hit rating, 1200 shadow dmg and about 17% crit rate (tooltip). I farm in approx 120 hit rating, 1250 dmg and whatever crit that gear nets me

Anyone got any experience with different mixtures of T4, T5, FSW and Spellstrike they can share with me please? I'm not quite sure how to go about mixing them up, at the moment i'm just sitting with all tailored gear.

This is something I've been trying to wrap my head around myself. I guess it's more along the order of trying to figure out a good gear progression. So I've been thinking about it, and here are my thoughts on the issue, covering from hitting 70 to when you step foot in Hyjal and the Black Temple (they seem so far away, I'm not yet focusing on those dungeons).

Some slots are easy to fill, because they're not part of a set: bracers, waist, rings, trinkets, weapon, offhand, wand. Those are easy to upgrade - go for items that are better than what you're wearing! But for the set items, it seems there's a dance you have to go through - or at least you have to think about stuff in advance, or you find yourself taking upgrades that are upgrades in name only.

At 70 you've got 3 or 4 possible set boni:

- Frozen Shadoweave 3 piece (Shoulders,Chest,Feet)
- Spellstrike 2 Piece (Head, Legs)
- Voidheart 2 Piece (Head, Shoulder, Chest, Gloves, Legs)
- Battlecast 2 piece (Head, Legs)

Added to that is the various desiribility of certain pieces for your spec (damage on each individual piece, and +crit vs. +hit), not to mention sockets. And of course each piece varies as to the difficulty of procuring it, so upgrade paths are naturally tied to your guild's progression.

My goal here (somewhat obvious, but never hurts to state it) is to prolong the useful bonuses as long as possible, without gimping damage.

Assuming you merge the Spellstrike/Battlecast bonuses, since you can obviously get only one (feel free to substitute Battlecast for Spellstrike if that appeals more to you), a newly minted 70 would probably start out with:

FSW (Shoulders/Chest/Feet)
Spellstrike (Head/Legs)

Now you hit a roadblock, because you can't get the Voidheart bonus. In practice, I've found that while FSW can be decent for farming, the 3 piece FSW bonus is the least important bonus of all, because it's healing vs. extra damage. The first time you start getting those heals from your FSW set, it's overwhelming, and sent a chill down my spine to see all the green numbers flying by - but if you look at them, it's a crapload of small heals and in a raid environment it's not gonna save you from a 13k arcing smash or repeatedly being lighning bolted. So after being at 70 a while I think you're looking at moving toward:

Spellstrike (Head/Legs)
Voidheart (Shoulders/Gloves)

To me Spellstrike makes the Voidheart Crown and Leggings superfluous (and really, I feel the Leggings are sorely lacking compared to what's available from tailoring or Karazhan, but that's another issue).

Breaking the FSW bonus means your chest and feet are now "free" to upgrade. My feeling is that the next step is to replace the chest with Voidheart, since at this point, you can probably kill Magtheridon. And the feet go on their merry way alone, since no sets from here on out involve footwear.

Once you procure the Voidheart chestpiece, this frees up either your shoulders or gloves for replacement, both of which have pretty good options: shoulders can be replaced with the Corruptor Shoulders, and gloves can be upgraded from the Handwraps of Flowing Thought from Karazhan of all places.

Problem is, though, you can't upgrade both of those slots, and at this point in your progression you're probably looking more for Corruptor gear than Karazhan drops, so you're probably going to upgrade the shoulders.

Assuming you go for the shoulders, your gear now is:

Corruptor - no bonus (Shoulders)
Voidheart (Chest, Gloves)
Spellstrike (Head, Legs)


At this point, I think you probably have enough good options to break up the Spellstrike set. The various upgrades from SSC and TK are such that it probably compensates for the set bonus. Once you do that, you have a lot of options available:

Head: Cowl of the Grand Engineer or Corruptor Hood
Legs: Seventh Circle from Kazzak (if you can stand no stamina on them), or the Trial-Fire Trousers (still useful I think at this point!), Corruptor legs, or Astromancer leggings.

That leaves you with the Voidheart 2 piece bonus only, unless you filled one of those slots with a Corruptor piece, in which case you have the Corruptor 2 piece bonus (free pet heals, woohoo!).

So you're decked out in:
Corruptor (Shoulders, Cowl and/or Legs)
Voidheart (Chest,Gloves)

Now comes the hard part: you have to wrestle with breaking the Voidheart 2 piece bonus. It's unclear to me whether you come out ahead at this point or not. Certainly someone could run the various gear setups through the warlock damage spreadsheet to see whether that's the case or not (and, um, yeah, maybe I should have done that). The upgrades I see at this point are for your chest, either Corruptor or Sea-Witch, depending on whether you still need a lot of spell hit or not, and how important the 4 piece Corruptor bonus is (and to be sure, if you're Affliction spec, you probably want the Corruptor bonus if you're breaking up your Voidheart bonus).

So that's it - certainly not definitive, but it's something I've been thinking about, so that I don't waste my time upgrading slots with gear I don't want or won't use - stuff that looks good at first glance but doesn't help in the long run.

I often had those questions myself, and that is reason that I included options to compare DPS benefits from set and trinket bonuses and to compare two different items in my Warlock DPS XLS calculator .

When I want to decide when it pays off to break set, I do following:
- set up my basic data (stats and talents) in XLS, without any set effect selected
- include effects from set bonuses i want to replace (in "used trinkets/effects" area) , and check equivalent in +dmg shown (for example, with Spelstrike effect checked, i get that Spellstrike effect is equivalent to +16 dmg)
- now I want to compare old item from Spellstrike set that I consider replacing with new item, and see how much better is new item in +dmg equivalent. I use for that "Item replace" area.
- then I compare if more +dmg that new item(s) brings will offset lost equivalent +dmg from old set bonus


For example, I enter in left column data for Spellstrike legs, and in right column data for potential replacement (like Leggings of the Corruptor) , with gems stats included, and check how much new item is better in +dmg. In this case it says that Corruptor legs are actually worse than Spellstrike legs for DPS, ie -14 dmg equivalent. Conclusion is that if i replace Spellstrike legs with corruptor legs, i lose equivalent of 14 dmg on legs and 16 dmg on spellstrike effect, so I would lose 30 dmg equivalent. So I decide not to break untill i have more corruptor items, and that i need to check all those individual items against old items that i would replace.



Same method could be applied for different items and sets. Naturally, if you plan to complete new set, you need to select that set bonus effect in addition and see how much it would increase your +dmg equivalent. For Corruptor set bonus I also included calculation (although based on my guesstimate how it works, not on real data), and it shows that equivalent of that bonus is +20 dmg.

Bottom line is that I compare and decide on breaking sets on case by case basis, and I want new items and new set bonus if exists to bring me more equivalent +dmg (ie DPS)than what i would lose from old items and old set bonus. Some people would not put raid DPS as primary goal so decision on what is best would differ.

Well, I just went through this upgrade dilemma.

I've had Spellstrike and FSW forever. I've been trying for Flowing thought for 4 months with 0 drops. On Tues reset, I got T4 shoulders to match my gloves for the 2pc bonus (and increased badass look over FSW). The proc was nice, and seemed to proc 'not terribly often' (not nearly as often as spellstrike).

Then last night, Flowing thought drops, and I have to decide between T4 Shoulder + glove or FSW + Flowing thought. Ugh. What to do, eh? ~1% crit, T4 bonus, 15 Int, and some stam vs ~35 dmg.

So, off to Dr. Boom I go (yes, I know all about how biased that is). Load up WWS to count T4 procs and proceed with a few kills. The DPS numbers were fairly close after several runs of each set (FSW+FT: 970-1040, T4: 940-970).

Loaded up the WWS and compared (I didn't host them anywhere, or I'd link). The high FSW run had almost twice the nightfall procs as the others, so I think that can be considered an anomaly. The low T4 was truncated due to having to go to the arena. What I found was that the T4 set proc'd 3-4 times over the kills, which was about the same as I used my Icon (basically a free trinket, assuming no overlaps). Spellstrike proc'd twice as often.

It seems that FSW + FT give more consistent performance where T4 is at the mercy of the proc. On avg, it will be near equal but could be higher or lower. And, like spellstrike or nightfall, can proc at 'useless' times (mob death, as you enter a shatter, etc). Admittedly, I have a very small sample set.

Does anyone have a XLS that accurately models the T4 proc?

Regarding set bonuses, FSW is a weak bonus especially if your Affliction and have Siphon Life.

The only piece of FSW that I find hard to replace with Tier 4+ is the boots (you could use Shifting Nightmare, but I value FSW boots more). Also the Attumen gloves with the sockets and hit I also find that hard to replace, even to get the 2/5 Voidheart set bonus.

Spellstrike is stronger for Affliction than Destro, because you are casting more spells, that is a stronger set bonuses than Voidheart.


Because of the competing priorities, I think the spreadsheet is the best way to figure all that out, and the best way is a Dr. Boom session.

I have 'accurate' model of T4 proc in my XLS, based on assumption that proc rate is 5% and that there is no hidden cooldown.

For both of those assumptions people reported some different data - some said there is 45sec hidden cooldown, but many people reported seeing it proc back-to-back, so I presume my second assumption with "no CD" is correct. As for proc rate, some people reported 5%, some reported 3%. I used 5% since it is standard proc rate for majority of trinkets and sets effects.

Equivalent +dmg that XLS shows from T4 bonus for my stats is 24 +dmg. If i change in XLS that proc rate is 3% instead of 5% , I get equivalent of 17 +dmg. Therefore I believe right answer about value of T4 set bonus is somewhere between those two values - of course, it depends to certain degree on your current stats.

Speaking of T4 bonus, I have watched all these warlock threads for weeks but had yet to see this addressed.

The four piece bonus. How is the damage calculated for Corruption and Immolate? Does it just add on another tick of the same amount of damage or is the co-efficient altered for the spell?

Thanks for any insight. I'd like to know because I have access to four piece now and want to figure out what would be best for me in relation to my other gear.

It adds another tick and modifies the co-efficient, so you get an extra tick of dmg.

You obviously did not search or "watch" very well. I have answered this many times already.

I am aware that it adds and extra tick, the tooltip says as much. What I am looking for then is the new co-efficient. Do you know it?

If this non-specific answer was what you gave many times already then I probably saw it and it wasn't what I was looking for. So I asked here.

Based on my handful of tests, 24 dmg seems about right. But, in all the tests, Spellstrike proc'd twice as often as T4. I'll try to get exact stats when I get home (I guess I should just install ProcWatch again...), but I don't think they can both be 5% chance.

I have tried farming with two builds this week: 41/0/20 and 24/37/0 (pvp). I have also done a full demo/destruction 0/20/41 build in the past.

By far, the affliction build has been the best farming build I have ever come across. I am only sitting at a meager +900ish damage and I out farm most people around me easily.

My technique is to:

- open with a shadowbolt + UA
- dot x3 (siphon, corruption, agony)
- dot more mobs (3, 4 or 5 mobs easily)
- Instant HoT
- Life Drain the mob with the most health.

What happens is that all the mobs run away for 8 seconds, recharge my health to full and when they get back to me they are dead (or they will be in a couple seconds). Dark Pact a couple times and you continue on your way.

p.s. I also have the Frozen Shadoweave Set so that helps me regen my health also.