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CoE is still the spell that you cast if and only if you are the only person in the raid that can provide that buff.

why not Incinerate ?

In response to your comment, Soul Burn SoC IS a necessary PvE (raiding) talent in Wrath dungeons/raids. The trees, however, are designed with Cata dungeons and end-game raiding (lvl 85) in mind. Soul Burn SoC is a PvP talent in Cata, so not necessary for the 31-points we need to put in to the Affliction tree. Remember, Cata will focus on crowd control and will not be the AOE fest that Wrath was. Fear and CoW will be much more useful in Cata. SoC, not so much.

This depends on your specific gear setup, the anwser at high end gear levels is likely yes. However also depends on latency.

Corr->UA->BoA->Haunt. The reason we previously used a shadow bolt first was solely due to crit rolling. Now that crit rolling is fixed and sp/haste/crit are updated every single time corruption gets refreshed, the extra ticks you'll get from applying dots first will outweigh the benefit of having a % more damage on 1 o2 r ticks, but also 1 or 2 ticks less in total. The reason I put haunt higher on the priority list than UA/BoA is because haunt is also responsible for Shadow Embrace esspecially below 25%), and 3 stacks of shadow embrace falling off and needing tobe re-applied will cost you a ton of damage.

Nope, Shadowflame. When they removed the horror effect from this in beta they decided to buff it's damage so it wouldnt be totally useless. Unfortunately now it's so powerful that we should use it in our single target DPS rotation.

I actually haven't done any testing or looked at base damage / spellpower co-efficient for shadow burn, I'm not 100% sure if we should be using that or not.

Since you can now use CoE while also using your damage banes, using CoE is often a good idea.

And yeah- I'll check out glyphs.

PS. Please edit the large quote out of your post.

First off, Excellent job on getting this up so early. Good work. I know this will be a living document as things change but it is great to have this as a start. Excellent start at that.


Threat is an issue if you are using SP from the start, but you're right it will give you much more dps/damage. I did equip a level 60 trinket just to add an additional threat dump from [Fetish of the Sand Reaver] for testing purposes. It helped but only for a short amount of time. However when I soul shattered at 50% began my SP spam I had no major issues. I did have a Paladin in raid assist me with Hand of Salvation (might want to save those for locks after 50%) as well during that time, but dps was insane. I kept my rotaion Corrup>Immo>Conflag>BOD>CB>Incx2>SP x(3-5) Always hit my conflag and CB off cool down and tried to get back to SP as fast as possible while not letting my BD rot.



I agree. I also was getting good dps from Incinerate but SP spamming was putting me around 2.5 -5k higher in certain fights. 20K threat is still going to be tough for most tanks to compete with so warlocks might become more annoying to tanks this expac, hehe. Wonder if Blizzard will just take the threat away from SP?


For the meantime, I'm going to continue to use the threat dumping trinket, so I can continue to work SP in my normal rotation till the treat issues of SP get worked out or they buff incinerate so that it will out weigh SP again.

Because of the Backdraft buff provided by Conflagrate, I'd imagine that being able to cast it as soon as possible would be more beneficial than the damage increase from Glyph of Imp.

However, considering that Incinerate is the lowest on the priority list of spells, perhaps replacing the Glyph of Incinerate with Glyph of Imp would prove beneficial. Hopefully one would not be using Incinerate as more than the last line of filler, so its glyph's benefits wouldn't serve much purpose.

Also not sure about getting Shadowburn or shadowfury at all. I was thinking of Nether protection for raiding. Seems to give you more bang per talent. I most likely will not use Shadowburn or Shadowfury in my rotation unless I'm pvping.

Why wouldn't you? DPS is calculated from the moment your first spell hits. So hardcasting a soulfire at pull actually increases your dps and allows you to save your 3 shards for SP. Whenever imp soulfire expires you sould also hard cast it for the buff.

I'm sorry I meant to say I would. Thank you.
Mainly in most fights you can pre-cast soulfire as well.

There's nothing wrong with Soulburning then immediately soul harvest prior to the pull to get your 3rd shard back. Plus this way it enables you to put up doom immo corruption with out insta 25k SF crit to pull right off the bat.

I find personally that, since we pop hero at the start of the fight, saving a backdraft proc for CB's cd if < Conflag CD of course, then use the two other backdrafts on incin (they're all going to be 1 sec or below). If you don't have Backdraft AND Hero/BL then use SP.

Little side note, but it does actually feel good to have to THINK, albeit not THAT much, but you still have to think while playing destro vs Ulduar destro. Doesn't it feel good to be spanking the melee now or is it just me? Getting crushed by ArP warriors for the last year...well yeah anyways. GL and have fun.