Since the Alchemist-only [Vibrant Alchemist Stone] gives you a huge benefit to two of the best Destro stats (351 int w/Brilliant Inferno and 194 haste) AND it give you 40% better pots, doesn't that place it at the forefront of the conversation to be BIS, at least until 4.2?

Could you post your exact numbers please?

Zak and I tested the succubus and didn't see it double-dipping on either her glyph or the orc racial.

Where i would normally agree with you, this is proffesion specific, and the do make comment to this in the professions are. What confuses me is of all the enchants out there, they state that Mastery is worthless to us for now atleast, but in the enchants feild they say we should get the Speed increase/mastery enchant instead of the 50 haste enchant. in her rotation she also left out CoE, and im not sure why. are they assuming we should just know? do they just not use it? no guide is perfect for everyone, and noone should follow someone elses guide to a T. they are guidlines...

I'm not sure whether this should go in the Destruction thread or the SimC thread. It's a question of fundamental destro spell priority, so I figured it would go here. I take the current SimulationCraft BiS live 372 warlock (Warlock_Destruction_T11_372) spell priority as currently considered the best dps. There are a few parts in the spell priority that confuse me, though.

First, the action "immolate,if=(remains<cast_time+gcd|!ticking)&target.time_to_die>=4&miss_react". I take this to mean "Immolate, only if: the time remaining on the DoT is less than the cast time of Immolate plus the GCD, or the DoT has expired", etc. Why the cast time of Immolate plus the GCD? Shouldn't this have something to do with not wanting to clip any DoT ticks but the last one, i.e. something to do with tick_time instead (like the Corruption DoT: "corruption,if=(!ticking|dot.corruption.remains<tick_time)&miss_react")? Also, considering that the GCD starts when Immolate is pressed, why is it the cast time plus the GCD - shouldn't it be the greater of these, not their sum?

Second, the action "soul_fire,if=buff.improved_soul_fire.remains<(cast_time+travel_time+action.incinerat e.cast_time+gcd)&!in_flight", which represents the hard cast of Soul Fire. I understand the cast_time and travel_time part: this should be triggered such that the next hard SF cast will land so that the buff refreshes with as little overlap as possible. I assume the Incinerate is there for buffer time because having overlap between ISFs is not as bad as ISF downtime - can someone confirm this? Also, that GCD term again - doesn't the GCD start when Soul Fire is pressed, and end long before SF finishes casting? (It must be there for a reason, though, because I noted ~20 dps loss with the "gcd" term removed and 50k iterations.)

"Also, considering that the GCD starts when Immolate is pressed, why is it the cast time plus the GCD - shouldn't it be the greater of these, not their sum?"

Consider if there's 1.8 seconds left on your immolate DoT, which is obviously greater than the cast time or GCD. So, according to your priority, you wouldn't recast immolate at this point but rather something else. The earliest the GCD of that ability could finish is a second later, with 0.8 seconds left on your immolate, which means by the time you finish casting immolate it will have fallen off for at least 0.2 seconds.

Original post says to put Bane of Havoc on Halfus while you DPS the adds.

However, Halfus takes +100% damage each time an add is downed , so it seems to me that once at least one add is down, it would be better to Bane an add while DPSing Halfus: then 15% of the double/triple/etc damage will be transferred to the add. Similar logic to why melee should target Halfus when cleaving.

There is a difference between doing highest possible DPS and beating the encounter the right way.

Picture the hypothetical case of having only destro warlocks as your DPS.
Everyone would Bane Halfus or a drake at the start and aoe the hell out of whelps for 20 seconds - because that's what does highest DPS.
At this point Halfus takes more damage - so from the DPS point of view you´d bane an add and DPS Halfus.
From the practical point of view - you would reach 50% before another add dies then.
Make sense for the encounter? Doubtful.

Beating encounters isn't always about having high numbers, it's about how you use your numbers appropriately.

Madlax and Mogwei make the correct points here. I do have a variation on the quoted strategy that works for our raid (10m), but it relies on all other dps focusing down the add and keeping Halfus above 50% until all adds are dead.

I begin the fight by keeping BoH on Halfus through the death of the whelps and the first two drakes (we don't release the 5th drake at all). After the whelps and the first two drakes die, I switch my BoH over to the final drake and begin to DPS Halfus. At this point, my BoH damage is comparable to what my single target damage would be if I were on the last drake. (I.e. if conflagrate crits Halfus for 200k, which it often does for more, the drake takes 30k from BoH). Given that other dps are focusing down the last drake, Halfus is at about 75% when the last drake dies.

But, as previously mentioned, the most important thing is that there aren't drakes up when Halfus goes beyond 50%. This strategy would probably not work well if there were multiple destrolocks abusing it, or if other dps are focusing on halfus as well.

This is clearly not true. Three drakes dead means 300% increased damage, BoH is 15% of your total damage. 400% * 15% = 60% of your single target DPS, which is hardly "comparable" to 100%.

Note that I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your strategy - Halfus DPS is useful as well, and since you're not prioritizing it over drake DPS until whelps + two drakes are dead, healing shouldn't be an issue. So like you say, as long as there aren't too many locks doing the same thing, it's a good idea.

Minor point. Your imp does a little less than 20% of your DPS and BoH doesn't transfer your imp damage, only the damage you do. So its more like 12% of your maximum single target DPS than 15.