Good point, I had overlooked that.

But Affliction does not really have survivability issues, due to high mobility, Dark Pact, Siphon Life, Blood Pact and if necessary Drain Life.

Neither does Destro, due to the 21 points demonology.

The self sufficiency point is valid. No doubt about that. Especially for starting guilds, having to heal warlocks that have been tapping might put a strain on undergeared healers.

However, the build is undeniable much worse in terms of dps versus 0/21/40. Losing 8%crit AND Ruin AND SnF(vsSM) for increased personal self-sufficiency is harsh. Especially if survivability is an issue, because you don't have an imp out. Blood Pact will boost hp pools of classes that actually do have issues with staying alive at low gear levels (Mooncloth Set being the prime example).

Not to mention beginning groups actually need high dps from dps classes more than anything. Just compensate with healthstones, healing/mana/rejuv pots, and if push comes to shove, bandage/drain life. Or ditch the 30/21/10 guy and replace him with a healer. As long as you don't tap too aggressively you'll get hots or other mana efficient heals anyway, by a raid healer. If you're concerned about self-sustainability, FSW or Soul Leech will help mitigate the problem.

The builds in the Compendium aren't set in stone, the compendium itself mentions that. By design, it mentions standard builds and explains their strengths and weaknesses, giving reasonable alternatives. This spec has too limited use to warrant its inclusion, in my opinion.

Does anyone have a link to anything conclusive that proves that CoD is not affected by SM? If it is indeed not, shouldn't this be a bug that Blizzard should fix? It seems kind of silly, and the first time I have seen this noted was on this site, although I did notice that doom seems to hit harder in my 0/21/40 build unamped.

Shouldn't be hard to find out. max rank CoD hits for 4200 + 200% * spellpower. It should take exactly one minute for a SM warlock to find out whether it's affected.

I realize there's a trinket simulation based on spec, but I'm curious to hear feedback from players who have the Ashtongue Talisman of Shadows. In a couple of weeks, I should have it. Which will give me access the following trinkets to rotate in/out.

Ashtongue Talisman of Shadows
Void Star Talisman
Darkmoon Card: Crusade
Icon of the Silver Crescent

Assuming I can keep 10x Crusade up, it always gets a trinket spot. Depending on the resists involved, I may or may not use VST as my second trinket with a Felguard out. The question is, for a single target burn encounter, would ATS be better than the Icon? I'm not concerned with anything 2+ targets. I know the ATS is better in that situation, assuming it has no internal cooldown. But everything I've ready has the both of them very close for single target encounters.

There's no mention of Siphon Life in the Affliction section. Its damage per cast time is pretty high; is there any reason not to cast this?

(I realise it takes a load off your healers, I just mean in pure dps terms).

That would depend. Its base damage is 630 + spellpower over 30 seconds. Casting time is 1.5seconds. It's affected by SM. So it's damage-per-second-cast-time is (630+sp)*1,1 / 1,5s.

It's probably worth keeping in the rotation for the life drain, but it doesn't seem exceptionally good damage, on first glance. Far below other dots for dpsct, but better than Shadow Bolt.

30 second duration is long, though. Losing tics will make it worth less, so only worth it if your target is going to live for 30 seconds.

You can test for yourself using Leulier's spreadsheet for theorethical values, or ShadowSeer for some recorded data.

Affliction has good survivability but comes with a smaller health pool.. this can be bad in fights with large damage spikes. The classic example for a starting raider that I'm thinking of is a bad shatter on Gruul.

Destro can survive large damage spikes but has crap for personal healing and self-sufficiency.

Is this sarcasm or a typo?

I agree with most of this.. but if you're 0/21/40 and you have to DL/bandage to get your mana your dps will suck compared to any build with siphon life for that extra bit of self-sufficiency.

FSW is such a minor offset, I admit that it's something but it's a far cry from self-sufficiency. Soul leech has two problems.. 1, there's no way that it covers the health needed to self-sufficiently output the high dps of 0/21/40.. 2, you can only get health back from soul leech while standing still and casting (if there's any movement in a fight, you won't get any healing during that movement).

So I decided to put the build to the test using leulier's spreadsheet. I picked some reasonable figures for low gear levels.. 900 shadow damage, 10% crit, 16% spell hit before talents.

946 dps with 0/21/40, -5000 hp/min
953 dps with 43/0/18, +2200 hp/min
969 dps with 30/21/10, -700 hp/min

For reference, at these dps figures the value of FSW healing is about 1000 hp/min.

30/21/10 doesn't come out all that bad.. top damage, almost self-sufficient (it is SS with FSW), and a big health pool. I would personally take deep affliction with a few sacrificed points for the extra utility, but I really can't say that 30/21/10 is a useless build in this context.

Sorry duplicated post, please remove.i'll try to add some positive feedback to the current discussion. Sorry again.

The biggest survival talent for 30/21/10 in the demo tree is DE. DA is nice, as are the other talents you mentioned, but with all the self-sufficiency talents from affliction the biggest concern would be spike damage.

41/5/15 offers more utility and still gives you DE. Also you end up with dark pact which is a better survival talent then any of the early demonology talents (except possibly DE) in my opinion because you life tap less, meaning your health pool is topped off more often, in addition to this you'll almost always be using an imp which gives you another 700 hp or so to deal with spike damage.

As far as the early raiding gear comparison, I ran some numbers through Leulier's spreadsheet using the following, 900 shadow and fire damage, 12% base crit, and 6% hit rating. Used the base spread sheet assumptions of 60% ISB uptime, 1.13 CoS, 1.1 CoE, full scorch stack, misery, and full shadow weaving.

30/21/10 - 903 dps (-14.81 hp/s) (Note 30 more spell damage because of DA)
41/5/15 - 895 dps (+32.71 hp/s) (Note this build has 4% more crit because of devastation)
21/0/40 - 871 dps (-21.8 hp/s) (Note this build has 8% more crit because of devastation and backlash)
0/21/40 - 906 dps (-111.62 hp/s) (Note this build has 8% more crit because of devastation and backlash, and 30 more spell damage because of DA)

And some comparisons at 1200 shadow and fire damage, 16% base crit, and 13% hit. Going to leave out the notes on adjusted crit and spell damage for talents on this one but they'll be in the calculations.

30/21/10 - 1180 dps (+8.07 hp/s)
41/5/15 - 1155 dps (+51.48 hp/s)
21/0/40 - 1248 dps (+16.78 hp/s) (Note that the math here has been double checked and proven to be wrong, best I could reproduce for this spec was about 1180 dps with a similar hp/s)
0/21/40 - 1215 dps (-103.14 hp/s)

Conclusion, 30/21/10 scales better then UA builds but doesn't match the efficiency of dark pact. Granted it's drain life is more beefy thus allowing you to recover from spike damage faster then a UA build would.

Rather or not the 8 dps gain at early gear levels or the 25 dps gain at later gear levels is worth the trade off in ISB uptime or possibly losing malediction (keep in mind all these numbers use shadow malediction in the calculations) we can debate all day but there's the numbers for anyone that was curious.

*edit* Something I forgot to mention in these number comparisons is that every spec was put on curse of elements. Given that running a damage curse over a debuff curse would be an option the spec that would gain the most would be 30/21/10, followed by 0/21/40, 41/5/15, and 21/0/40. All sac builds used a succubus sacrifice, all casting rotations where for optimal damage allowance according to the spreadsheet except life tap which was simply left 'as needed', the filler spell was shadow bolt for every spec, and no pet damage was used in any comparison.

It's probably worth mentioning that if you raid with four warlocks 30/21/10 could produce some pretty good numbers. For one you'd have three other warlocks helping to maintaining ISB, you'd have three other warlocks to take care of curse of elements, shadows, and recklessness leaving you open to using doom or agony, and most likely you'd have at least one affliction warlock maintaining SE and/or Malediction. Debuff space however could be an issue especially if more then one of the other 'locks was affliction and more then one shadow priest was in the raid.

These are all good comparisons as are the ones done by IDK. All of which shows the point I was trying to make earlier, which is 30/21/10 is not complete crap as some try to make it out to be and SHOULD be included in as a hybrid build especially if you already have other locks filling the support roles.

I'll state this again, non of the spreadsheets account for the intangibles of each encounter. Movement, incapacitation/silencing effects, having to pick up CoR/CoS/CoEl if that lock dies and everything else thats not tank and spank without aggro issues. Its just like the old SM/Ruin build pre BC, not the best at one particular thing but just a good all around versatile build.

An entry in the first post concerning 21/0/40 may be warranted too. While it doesn't scale quite so well with crit rating as 0/21/40 and uses more debuff space it showed to be a pretty solid build both in dps and self-sufficiency at later gear levels according to the spreadsheet. It also offers a more versatile play style because of it's combination of dot damage and high damage shadow bolts while maintaining blood pact for your group.

Something I forgot to mention in my comparison above was that all the builds where assumed to be using a debuff curse as opposed to a damage curse. I'm going to edit it to include that information and point out which specs gain the most from being on a damage curse.