If you involve some thinking when using it, it's perfectly fine. Not to mention that the shields only last for a couple of seconds, after the shield is down it is safe to swap again.

Normally we stop dots on the fire guy when he is at 58 energy to avoid breaking his shield. Ideally my dots will finish ticking as the shield is going up. But after shield is down, I just swap everything back to him. No need to remove the glyph, it makes warlocks very good in this fight. Just watch out out for the shields and you will be fine.

Good luck.

Alot of ppl have asked familiar questions, some say it's better to refresh with Fel Flame in case this happens and some say you should simply refresh with another Immolate, but which statement is correct?
I hope this haven't been answered already, but regarding the priority lists for demo and destro where is Soulburn + SF placed. I checked the threats and the comments, but I couldn't find anything.

Quick question: Does 2pc T11 also reduce the GCD on Haunt as its cast time is equal to it? Like Glyph of UA does for UA?

I have a two questions that I have been searching for answers to and couldn't find it.

1: If you use Drain Life as filler in your AfflictionSpec do you clip the DL(just after a tick) just as you would a DS or do you loose out on DPS by doing that due to increased usage of Life Tap?

2: When you have 2 bosses that you engage at the same time (like V&T in BoT) it's a DPS increase to keep up your dots on the secoond target using Soul Swap, but how often? If I want to maximise my DPS should I do it every 15 sec(when UA runs out) to keep all 3 dots at 100% uptime or every 18 sec(when Corruption drops off) or should I even wait 24 sec betwen the Soul Swaps to not override my BoA?

I think you are trying to fool me, I tried resfreshing it as soon as they droped off and lost about 1k DPS by doing so. So I decided to do some simple math:
I assume that a UA uses the same casttime as 1 GCD (that would push the result in your favor if anything) and to simplify it im ignoring that haste changes the duration of the DoTs

on a 5 min fight (300s) with your way of single dot resfresing you need to cast:
1x Soul Swap "inhale"
1x Soul Swap "exhale"
12xBoA (24x12 =288s) 66% of a normal GCD to simplify = 8 GCD
16xCorr (18x16 = 288s)
19xUA (19x15 = 285s)

Thats 45 GCDs with only 2 of the generating any damage (excluding the Dots that I assume have 100% uptime in both cases and therefor can dismiss)

With using Soul Swp every 15 sec i need to do
20x Soul Swap "inhale"
20x Soul Swap "exhale"

Thats only 40 GCDs with all of them generating almost 3k damage, 5 GCD and 114k damage more than make up for the damage you loose by refreshing BoA and loosing the bigger ticks.

So back to the original question, have anyone done the more advanced maths that state if you should go 3 seconds without UA on the secondary target or its bether to keep a 100% uptime on all of the dots and loose more GCD in the process?

Edit: forgott pandemic

I'm not trying to fool you. Whether you personally lost dps or not is anecdotal. Your simple math completely discounts clipping the last tick of corruption and the last 40% of every bane of Agony, which is not only hits *very* hard but whose dmg is also heavily backloaded. Per the simcraft thread BoA has a DPET of just over 60K in 359 gear. Even excluding the backloaded nature (not to mention the extra corruption dmg) that's 24k per cast you lose. 24*12 = 288k, far greater than the 114k you cited. It's really not even close.

Well that theory want you to have more than 100% uptime on your dots on the secondary target? We both assume 100% uptime then we can ignore the cliped Corruption and calculate the loss from the bigger BoA ticks and focus on what we loose in casttime for keeping up the dots...

The last tick of BoA does ~20% more dmg than the first one and since the damage itself is so low (mine is ticking 1055 at the start and 1252 at the end) you only loose a very low amount of damage for each tick you clip, in total you should end up loosing less than 200x6 ticks =1200 dmg/refresh => 1200*20 = 48k not 288k.

Btw you can't use the DPET from simcraft for your calculations since you wont have Haunt/Shadow Embrace up on the target and im assuming you took those numbers from your normal rotation, if not then ignore that statement.

What is currently believed to affect pet crit chances, if anything?

Some test dummy testing I'm doing right now seems to suggest that hand of gul'dan doesn't actually boost pet crit (or at least felguard's pet crit rate), and I suspect the fury warrior/feral druid crit auras don't either (plan to test that later). Only done about 600 felguard hits with hand of gul'dan up, and 600 without but the crit rate for both was about the same.

As a quick tip while questing/solo-play-shenanigans, it's a good idea to give Dark Intent to a random non-partied member, preferably a top-rated class for your personal DPS, as the range of the periodic damage buff is absurd.

This seems fairly obvious, (because it is) but it only dawned on me recently, so I figured I'd share the tip.


On an unrelated note, how does Soul Swap function in terms of haste/crit/whatever? Does it take the haste, etc, from the time you took the soul from the target? Or does it take the haste from the time you put the soul into another target?

Have you tried using Soul Swap every 15 seconds? You alternate your Banes so that you Soul Swap only Corruption and Unstable Affliction as to not preemptively refresh Bane of Agony. For example, you throw up UA/Corruption on Target A, then Soul Swap to Target B, then BoA Target A. In 15 seconds, you Soul Swap to Target B again, this time it puts up Agony. In 13 seconds, your BoA will have fallen off Target A, you Soul Swap from Target A, put up Agony on Target A, then Soul Swap to Target B. Repeating this will net you GCDs/Soul Swap damage at the cost of a small amount of BoA uptime. You could even do it more precisely every 14 seconds, but it's harder and I don't really think it's a gain.

I posted a sample calculation for this in the old thread here.