Hello guys,


I'm rather new here and could use some advice on some upgrades. Our guild is currently raiding SSC 3/6 and ZA 6/6 and we began raiding TK 1/4 aswell.

I'm still working on my hit gear but was wondering if some of the following items I will post are concidering a (major) upgrade:

Cowl of the Grand Engineer - Items - World of Warcraft OR Hood of Hexing - Items - World of Warcraft to replace my Spellstrike Hood

Blade of Twisted Visions - Items - World of Warcraft Haste ftw?

Hex Shrunken Head - Items - World of Warcraft Dont I need the hit from the Scryer trinket?

Cord of Screaming Terrors - Items - World of Warcraft to replace the belt

Which should be the next upgrade for FSW ? Chest that drops off Hydross?

What about my OH? I do need the hit, so I wont replace it by Orb of the Soul Eater will I ?


I need some advice ^^


Armory link: http://armory.wow-europe.com/charact...grand&n=Kunlun

Okay, I know that I need 202 spell hit to hit cap for all spells. Right now I am at 130 (10.3%) with 5/5 Suppression. I've read that you don't gain anything from keeping Suppression at max once you hit cap for affliction spells. Can I move points out of Suppression now? I'm thinking I can move 2 points out of Suppression and still maintain cap for my affliction spells. Or am I wrong on this?

1. The Hood of Hexing is slightly superior, but both are in the same ballpark.
2. The Nath Mindblade is a good weapon and the sword isn't a huge upgrade. Alternatives are the Leotheras Sword or the Dragonhawk dagger.
3. Craft a Belt of Blasting, which will last you deep into t6 content.
4. Hydross Chest is better, but its not a huge difference. If you can kill Vashj, the Robes she drops are better than t6 and they are an endgame item. T5 chest is also an upgrade but requires Kael.
5. Hex Shruken Head is better than the Bloodgem regardless of whether you need the hit or not. The same is true for Orb of the Soul Eater (though I would take the Primal Gods OH) over the Netherspite one.

If you could get the cloak off Prince, that would be a solid upgrade as well.



Correct.

If you read up the page a bit, you'd know you could use the spreadsheet linked on the first page to tell you relative values for different stats.

Thank you for your response

About #2. How well is haste to see any diffference in dps? If I would take the sword from Zul'Jin and the Primal Gods OH. Would I see any difference at all?
#3: Nobody on Horde side who can craft it yet (1y old server and slow progress)
#4 Hydross, got it wont down Vashj or KT soon ...
#5 Knowing 202 is the spell hit cap, what should be the absolute minimum for when i win Hex Shrunken Head for example and take Primal Gods OH ( 2 spell hit items that I 'll replace? :<)

I've got an issue that i'd gladly take some advice on. Please dont give me the "Dps Less" either -_-.

Im a Shadowbolt Turret, through and through. Destro lock with T5 and BT/Mh gear.

I'm sitting at:

1347 Shadow Damage with Fel armor (no succy sac or shadow and flame)
193 (15.3%) hit
22.99% crit

Its nothing great, but it works. Compared to other casters my gear is equal if not slightly lower in comparison. I've always been able to manage my threat fairly well (mainly via resists lolz) However, i recently picked up the [Blind seers Icon] and the +24 hit off that gave me that little edge i needed to somehow give me problems. I normally wait till about 70-100K threat (totally fight dependent, but lets say a normal tank and spank) to soulshatter. But its getting to the point now where im having to pause 6-10 secs every bolt or dot like an affliction lock for the first 30K of the fight. I then slowly open up and get a string of 7-8K shadowbolts and immediately end up on the tanks butt with aggro. With all the multiple tank swap fights in BT this has gotten very annoying.

It used to be that i was #1 on dmg by 100K. Now i'm #3-6 because i have to sit down and play poker in between spells so i dont rip aggro. I'm about to regem for +dmg and reduce my crit. I dont want to, but i feel it may be my only option. ISP is my only friend :*(

Any suggestions? I've been crunching numbers and still no answers.

If you're threat capped, don't use affliction dots as Destro, they're more threat than destruction spells.

I use immolate and Life tap if I'm close to the threat max and don't want to Soulshatter just yet. That's about all I can do, though.

I wonder if the build below would work in BT/hyjal. i know that most locks in T6 content are DS/SnF spec due to the horrible scaling of afflic tree. but since i dont wanna go stick to that single button spam spec til blizz can be bothered to fix it. So i wanna try this one out.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

yup, i plan to use succubus as a source of dps as well, i tried felguard raiding before as well and most fights in BT/Hyjal are either impossible for pets(Archimonde, Naj'entus etc) , or just very easy. With the exception of illidari council where luck decides everything.
I wonder how much dps can a succubus of afflic lock do with the imp.LoP talent ? i dont expect it to be high but i think that surely is better than just having an imp out there waiting to be dark pacted. Although with this build it's perfectly possible to use imp as well in those totally impossible fight for pets.
would like some comments plz

Would rather put 2 points from impr LoP into Destructive Reach.


And this is a common 41-0-20 build, nothing special at all.

LoP consumes ISB charges. Do not use it if you like your fellow warlocks :P

Threat capping shouldn't be this big of an issue. Keep in mind you can go up to 130%. Only fights I find where threat is an issue are lol Reaver & Bloodboil, occasionally RoS. On most other fights, I keep a ~7k threat buffer and a soulshatter at ~70% will suffice.

Only other thing I can say is that your tank needs to get more threat.

The answer is as simple as "download the spreadsheet and plug in your numbers"

The spreadsheet will calculate the value of damage, crit, hit, +shadow and haste for you.

A lot of people like you have this misconception that you max hit first then you need 25% crit then this then that.

None of that is exactly true. The ONLY truth is this. Hit, until caped, is worth the most in terms of DPS gained. Damage is second. Then things get blurry depending on your gear level. However, choosing between an item with 20 hit and 40 damage and an item with 80 damage is not really hard. 80 damage wins by far. So you never focus or one or the other. Damage is almost always (if not always) better than crit. And hit is always better than damage until you are caped. But items do not come tailor made. Also keep in mind that an item with +crit, +hit and +damage is better itemized than one with just +damage, as it makes better use of the item level. This is due to the fact that the cost of next stat is more than the previous point of the same stat. So, 40 str 40 int item would be lower ilevel than 80 sta or 80 str item.

Bottom line, get the spreadsheet, it's an invaluable tool.

Yea, im at the point of finding some nub guild and getting an AQ40 run for a fetish of the sand reaver. lolz


It's more or less the huge jumps in threat due to the massive numbers that i put up. A constant stream like a fire mage for example, would be easy to maintain the 130%. But i need to keep ~90% since at any given time ive got 2 bolts in the air, and will buffs/consumables i can pop 2 9K shadowbolts and become the new main tank. I may not have it long enough to pull, but i may have it long enough to screw the tank out of the immunity from an ability.

Hm try to use soulshatter as late as possible, talk to your tanks so that they will try to put more TPS, use MD multiple times and tell your healers to give your tank more healing aggro (PoM i.e.). Other than that.. if you get a shamy, tell him to drop a tranquil air totem.


Threat really shouldn't be an issue. If your tank will do ~1000tps (should be possible for a bt tank on a bossfight) you will need 1300tps to over-aggro. Taking salvation + 10% less aggro (because of talents) into account... we will have

your TPS = Damage x 0.63


In order to gain aggro, you will need 1300 tps

1300 = D x 0.63
D = 2063.49....



So if you have a 1000tps tank, you will have to do more than 2000dps to pull aggro (assuming salvation) and you still have soulshatter. Maybe your tank is doing something wrong, but there really shouldn't be an issue with aggro.

Magic numbers (25% crit, 1200 spell damage, etc.) generally don't work. You really need to evaluate the DPS increase from each new piece of gear. You can try to do the math, or you can use the spreadsheet everyone talks about to do the math for you. 1 spell damage may be better than 1 spell crit. That doesn't tell you anything about the value of 5 spell damage vs. 8 spell crit. All values are relative to how much of each stat you already have, so there's no universal truths.

Since it seems to come up about every three pages on average, let me explain an important thing about gear scaling.

Hokay, so, let's say you have 15% crit and 1500 shadow damage, which is unreasonably low crit for that damage level. People will often ask, what crit should I shoot for before working on damage again? The answer is the amount of crit until the dmg:crit ratio is about 1:1 again in the spreadsheet that we tell everyone to look at.
HOWEVER, there is an important thing here that most people don't seem to realize. How much damage should you now stack before going back to crit? About one. Yes, one spell damage. Then crit becomes favorable again and you should go back to stacking crit rating. For one whole crit rating. And so on. Every so often you will want two instead of one, but the point stands. You have not reached the point where crit is less good than damage, you have reached the point where it is as good as damage, and you now focus on both, not on one.

In short: If you're asking about threshold values for your gear, you're doing it wrong. Unlike hit rating, there is no point where crit magically goes from awesome to useless. The idea of "build to 25% crit and then do damage" is wrong, and not just because of the number 25 (which is too high anyways). The idea is actually "your gear favors damage to crit at 1:0.75, so you should look for gear that prefers damage over crit, regardless of what absolute values you're looking at."

I'd have to agree with this. I only have threat problems on these 2 fights (although I have a tremendous threat issue on RoS p2 on Ome which I haven't figured out).

To give you some numbers, this is the highest DPS I have ever done on a single target fight, and I finished at about 98% of tank threat or so (after shattering), so I still had a way to go. There are plenty of other WWSes of locks doing more damage than me as well.

I just moved from 0/21/40 to 0/40/21 mainly to compensate for Tank aggro. Plus, my party-mates like having a 3/3 Imp in the group a lot, and I enjoy threat reduction and more Shadow Damage than I had before.

My DPS time is way low otherwise, because I end up sitting around waiting for room for a Shadow Bolt or Immolate.

Your tank needs help. Using Curse of Reck and get Hunters to use Misdirect.

In addition, you can use lower ranks of shadow bolt so you don't get too much threat at the start (I use rank 8 for that).

From the 'fake' patch notes posted on worldofraids boards.. (Worldofraids forums :: 2.4 on EU PTR)

- Incinerate: The cast time has been increased to 3 sec, from 2.5 sec.
- Bane: This talent now also reduces the cast time of Incinerate, but no longer reduces the cast time of Soulfire.

Assuming that this change was made, what kind of effect would it have upon fire vs shadow scaling? I do not know how to test this properly myself, but thought it was worth bringing up.. seeing as such a change is probably likely at some point in the future (in my opinion).

Given that currently the difference as quoted from page 1 of this thread is

"Incinerate and Shadowbolt gain the same from spell damage in a standard raid environnment, the only differences are ISB vs better mana efficiency (and ISB > mana efficiency).

Base coefficients :
SB : 85.6%
Inci : 71.4%

In a desctruction build, both SB and Inci gain +20% from S&F, fire gets x110% from emberstorm. And in a standard raid environnment, SB gets x110% from shadow weaving, inci gets x115% from improved scorch.

SB : (85.6+20)*1.10 = 116,16
Inci : (71.4+20)*1.15*1.10 = 115.62"

With a same base coefficient from casting time, incinerate would go up to 133.58 which seems quite substancial. as well as added gained mana efficiency.

Obviously a huge factor is improved shadowbolt, but there from first thoughts I would guess that assuming you already have say 1 40/0/21 lock, and another 0/21/40 shadow lock keeping Imp.SB up a decent amount of the time for themselves and the shadow priests, a fire lock would see good results which would be a net benefit overall. Luckily for us, the only talent needed to be dropped from a traditional shadowbolt turret build would be Cataclysm allowing one to adapt to the current raid makeup easily regardless.

I wouldn't waste DKP on the belt, the Belt of Blasting is better and with your guild regularly doing SSC/TK it should be pretty easy to get the vortexes. For the Helm, the Hood of Hexing is better (tons of hit) and would probably be "free" (I'm assuming you don't use DKP for 10 mans). That trinket is a best in slot item for a warlock (along with the Illidan one), you would certainly want to take it if it dropped. You can always regem or switch some other things around to get more hit.

As far as the mainhand, the sword is nice but I consider the Dragonhawk dagger/Leo sword to be better - and theres always the S2 mainhand (225 damage and nice +hit, pretty easy to get). For the offhand, I'm assuming you're using the Kara one with damage/hit - I would say go with the Orb of the Soul Eater. Its just so much more damage. Yes, you should prioritize hit - but only to a certain degree, you shouldn't be completely gimping your spell damage (especially if you are affliction where you have suppression to help you out). As far as FSW, T5 robe would be nice since apparently you are in desperate need of hit.

I couldn't see your armory for your spec/gear, so this is all just based off of what you said in your post. This is just general advice, the truth is you need to use the spreadsheet and evaluate each gear/gemming/enchanting choice in regards to your own current stats/spec.

You need to know which encounters its safe to be in the 100-129% range and which encounters its not. General rule of thumb: if the boss never de-aggroes, for lack of a better word, the tank (IE: Rage/Teron) you are fine to be above him, you will never pull aggro (as long as you are under 130). Keep in mind, randomly targetting someone to cast a spell (Ice Bolt/Shadow of Death) is not de-aggroing the tank. On fights where the boss completely de-aggroes the tank (IE Bloodboil going to Fel Rage and them coming back into P1) it is not safe, when the boss goes back to his normal state he will go to the highest person on the threat list.