Vvandort

As Nether Vortexes are sold for badges and not bound since p2.4 (i.e. anyone can get and trade them pre-raid), [Belt of Blasting] should be added to the list of craftable gear. Too easy to get now, and just too good.

 

Deuel

So i have a question for some of you doing the sunwell. We have recently reached Brutallus in the sunwell, and have a pretty optimal group set up. One of our warlocks at the time is still spec'd ua for this encounter, we have not totally decided if the need for him to go destro is there or not. While doing our attempts we had talked about some ways to up his dps for the encounter with his current spec, so that he wouldn't be to gimped there. So my question is, would a regular dot roation of ua, corruption, immo, and sl be better or just a ua, corr and bolt spam be more beneficial here ?

The World of Warcraft Armory

Here is a link to his amory to help reference his gear. I had him try some points in shadow embrace for our Kalecgos video, and atm he's trying the haste offhand to the Orb offhand. He's a real strong aff lock and i think could do well for this fight as this spec (or close to this spec with some possible changes), but is also willing to spec destro if needed.

 

Darkwand3r3r

Use the dps spreadsheet for that question. As far as i know using all dots does more dps and spam Sbolt as a filler.
And if you really want some results on dps, then he needs to spec 0/21/40.

 

Fizwidget

5/5 Devastate will serve you much better on Brutallus than Shadowburn, for starters.

I would also recommend getting 5/5 SE for the raid. The two reasons to take an affliction lock to a raid at T6+ are 5/5 SE and 3/3 Malediction. Rescue a point from Grim Reach to fill up on SE. If you are having healing problems leave him affliction. If you have several shadow casters receiving a benefit from 13% malediction, you may also want to consider keeping an affliction lock on the Brutallus roster. If you are only considering this warlock's personal DPS, than 0/21/40 is the way to go.

Affliction DPS is always based on the DPSCT of your DoTs. For affliction, your DoTs will always have a higher DPSCT than shadow bolt, even SL. Affliction locks should always refresh DoTs as they fall off, there is no true "rotation" because of the differences in DoT length. (see first page)

Dauntless: "Incapable of being intimidated or discouraged; fearless"

 

galzohar

1. Destruction will do more DPS, especially at sunwell gear levels. There's no way around it. And DoT rotations are harder to perform over shadowbolt/lifetap on top of that.

2. Unless your tanks and healers have absolutely no issues, shadow embrace is very useful, and the only real reason to spec affliction. Having an imp out in the tank group and malediction are nice extras but probably not enough to justify the lower DPS of affliction. 5% reduction to boss damage, while harder to actually notice, is actually a lot more useful both for reducing the required healing and effectively increasing the HP of the tank by significant amount (generally more than an imp would). This means drop a point from intensity and shadowburn for a point in shadow embrace and devastation.

3. He could use some easy gear fixes. MSD > 14 spell damage. CSD is better than both for destruction but not for affliction. Same goes for the 51 damage offhand from badges which is better than the haste offhand (remember DoTs don't tick any faster even though you lower the GCD so a noticeable benefit of haste is lost even in 2.4).

At the end while the raid may lose a bit of DPS (not as much as his personal DPS loss as malediction is somewhat better than the extra ISBs destruction provides over affliction for most raid setups), but gain a lot of survivability on the tank in return. in 99/100 progression fights it's simply more than worth it, it seems. If your tanks don't need those increases and you're having DPS issues you should most likely just replace a healer with a DPSer...

 

Morwen

I would spec for Ruin over UA with that gear, easily (say, wowhead 40/0/21). It will result in about 40-50 more personal/raid dps in theory, and in practice it is probably even better because you're less likely to hit your UA max potential because of increased DoT gaps, UA suffering from pushback, and the debuff limit. Don't give up Intensity for Brutallus either, each point there is worth another 30ish dps.

Unless you have an exceptionally shadow-heavy raid, Malediction will not beat the benefits of being Destruction. Malediction is 2.7% above a normal CoS, so assuming about a 300 dps gap between personal affliction and destruction, you'd need well over 11000 shadow dps excluding yourself even before accounting for ISB differences, and that's not going to happen unless you're the 7th shadow user. Malediction is not so much support as it is a talent to make affliction dps tolerable for the one person who's getting Shadow Embrace anyway.

 

galzohar

I suppose if a fight is extremely movement-light and pushback-heavy you could drop a point from affliction range talent instead of dropping a point from intensity.

I never said malediction will beat destructions, but the survivability gains on the tank are probably more than worth it unless tank survival/healing/threat on that fight is a lot more trivial than people make it sound. Remember a dead tank causing a wipe is a lot more common than lack of even 300 total raid DPS (and the difference in reality will probably not be as high due to malediction).

Heck, 11000 shadow DPS is not that extreme anyway (say 3X 1300DPS SP + 2X 2000 DPS lock + 1600 DPS aff lock give 9500, and with top-end gear it's possible to get higher), but even if you only get 6000 shadow DPS which is less than I'd expect for a sunwell raid that only brings 2XSP and 2Xlock with one of the locks being aff, it already makes up for 150 out of the 300 lost DPS. There's more to it than that though, refer to the spreadsheet to see the exact DPS differences (that also answer your ruin VS UA question). Again I'm not saying malediction will beat destruction in terms of total raid DPS (at least in most realistic cases), but the DPS gain is probably not worth the tank support loss.

Just ask your tank/healers what they would give for +700 HP as well as +5.26% effective HP (for physical damage). If multiple people in your raid are losing DPS due to threat it's even more useful as it allows the tank to trade more survivability for more threat, although that shouldn't be the primary issue, but tank death wipes just really suck.

Regarding UA VS ruin, go purely by the spreadsheet, but make sure to enter the correct DoT gap you're expecting. That way you won't be able to say "but UA does less than spreadsheet-dps due to DoT-gap"... In fact the default dot-gap on the spreadsheet is 2s which is probably quite higher than reality if you're actually focusing on DPSing to your max, so UA DPS is actually (slightly) under-estimated in my opinion. Remeber it needs to be the average gap you get, not the maximum.


At the end if your tank never dies and your healers never have issues healing and nobody in the raid is threat capped *but* there is no way you're doing this fight with 1 less healer, then go ahead and spec destruction instead. If your raid actually meets all of those conditions then destruction would help you get through the fight better than affliction.

 

burnz68

Hey guys, this is a quasi-tanking question, but since it is a warlock ability, and I'm the warlock asking, I'll pose the question here first.

The question is "when should I use Soothing Kiss?" and it is primarily addressed to tanks, since it is a melee attack speed debuff. In particular, I'd like to know when this would help the most, particularly on MH/BT bosses, which is where I'm at for progression.

I'm a 5/35/21 and so from my perspective I use a succubus already, but mostly on passive simply for the added damage buffs and the shield of soul link. Since I already have her out, maintaining Soothing Kiss on a boss is quite easy, with rare exceptions like where death and decay spawns and there is so much AOE that she dies too easily to keep her in melee range.

Here's the relevant description in the tooltip, for those that may have overlooked it. "decreases melee attack speed by 10% for 10 sec". As far as her mana pool is concerned, I can cast it indefinitely as long as I can keep her alive.

A good example of a fight where I'd expect it to be very valuable is Azgalor. An example of a fight where I'd expect it to be useless is Kael, (or any caster-style boss, for that matter).

It does take up a debuff slot, but it also gets over-written quickly by stronger debuffs as it is a very low-priority debuff, so I don't think that's a concern for anyone to worry about too much.

Thoughts?

 

Gumibear

Soothing Kiss is weaker than Thunderclap and can't stack with it. I wouldn't bother.

 

burnz68

So I'm guessing when I do successfully apply it on a boss, that means Thunderclap isn't up? Edit: since it is also a -threat modifier, I bet it can be up simultaneously, it just doesn't carry an effect. Thanks for the heads up, this is just the sort of feedback I was looking for.

I do know that a druid has nothing equivalent to a Thunderclap, and I'm guessing prot pallies as well. So, if I had one of them tanking, probably not so useless?

 

corsair

Well in raid scenarios there should probably be a dps warrior responsible for getting TC (and other debuffs) up, but I'm glad you asked your original question, as I searched around for the answer a bit ago and didn't find anything.

 

Arelenda

This all makes sense, can I get confirmation on TC overwriting Soothing Kiss, before I add it to the OP?

 

Vlar

It is too bad that the Voidwalkers special debuff has such a crappy CD.

I wonder if the debuff would be worth the DPS loss in the beginning of a fight to reduce initial spike damage or a few extra seconds during an enrage.

Suffering - Spells - World of Warcraft

 

Akj

Unless it was changed recently, I do not believe it works on bosses.

 

Cronjob

Are you guys even hitting the enrage timer? If so are you doing it consistantly? We carry one affliction lock in our raid for Brut. You can scroll back a few pages and check out the WWS log of our attempts and the one of us killing him. Every lil bit of damage reduction we can get helps us for that fight. So having him for the SE and Mal for the shadow priests is pretty helpful lets us Desto locks DPS pretty much non stop.

 

galzohar

You're mixing shadow embrace with malediction's extra mana regen from shadow priests. While shadow embrace is a huge benefit, the extra mp5 you get by giving malediction to the shadow priests is equivalent to like 6 mp5 per warlock... That's quite tiny of a benefit and the last argument I'd bring in favor of having an affliction warlock.

This is supposed to keep things in proportion. Affliction warlocks are great to have, but the reason is not the fact they help the shadow priests regen some more mana for the raid.

 

Cronjob

I was talking about the VE we get back lets us lifetap without too much fear of being slashed to death which helps us DPS pretty much non stop and allows the healers to concentrate on other things besides keeping our group up.

 

Arelenda

I believe it's common knowledge by now that affliction is all about Shadow Embrace. Imp Blood Pact helps but is by no means vital (unless your tanks are very undergeared) and Malediction helps offset the dps loss due to being affliction.

Shadow Embrace is incredibly useful for progression if you're having issues with tank deaths, which tends to be the number one concern anyway in raids. Especially given the current buff to bosses in Sunwell and how much physical damage they dish out.

 

Cronjob

I agree, Brut is definately the Patchwork of TBC.. Unless you've attempted him you wont understand. Every little bit of survivability you can give your tanks the better. Just like everything you can do to increase raid DPS the better. Personally I dropped herbalism for Leatherworking for the drums. Although I didnt have them last week when we downed him it wont hurt having them this week.

 

Parzifal

First time poster here... You all have a very valuable collection of information here. Between this and Leulier's spreadsheet, I've learned an awful lot about fine tuning a lock.

First, a question: although there is a lot of discussion about the impact on ISB uptime to a raid's dps, this does not appear to be a particularly painless process via the spreadsheet. Is there a general rule of thumb for this? i.e., in SSC, generally 1% increased ISB uptime -> 20 dps or something of the kind? I'd like to be able to assess my total contribution to the raid more easily. Even a ballpark figure would tell me more than I know now.

I have an observation about a realistic casting sequence, something not currently addressed by the spreadsheet. Because being threat-capped is a real problem for me (I'll talk to this more below), I tend to begin fights with CoA, Corruption and Immolate, followed relatively soon by Lifetaps to keep my mana up near 100% so that once the tank firmly establishes aggro, I can spam SB for longer without worry for flying past him. After all, early on, an SB crit for 5-6k is a much larger percentage change in aggro than it is later on. As far as I can tell, while working with a "threat-challenged" tank, this is a good strategy. Any comments?

Also, I think it's worth noting if it hasn't already been said, Fire doesn't seem to me to be as viable as shadow in pre-T5 gear levels since +shadow is considerably easier to come by (viz., FSW, Ritssyn's, Dalaran, etc.)

Ok, one final question... but first some explanation... Though I enjoy raiding, my six week old daughter doesn't allow it much now. As such, I spend 95% of my time outside of raids and am consequently mired in slightly different issues than I might be with the guild raids. As my +shadow rose over 1200, I've found that most tanks in 5 and 10 man pugs (and even guild runs) are not the aggro-machines that raiding tanks are. As a result, my dps suffers greatly since I have to frequently wait for the tank to build aggro.

So my question is this: are there any tactics for 21/40 (other than what I mentioned above) that would mitigate the problem or should I respec to the attractive (and potentially more dps) 7/43/11 demo or something similar? Mind you, I'm most interested in non-raids, so if you all don't mind the brief diversion from raid theorycrafting, I'd appreciate some more generally applicable spec advice. Thanks in advance!

 

LockApologist

For 5/10 mans, some variation of Felguard spec does well, as will UA. Unless you can kill the mob in the time it takes for it to move from the tank to you, 21/40 doesn't make sense. If you really want to stay destro, I would choose something like 7/7/47 (aka pvp destro).

5 mans are not about make dps/efficiency. More about coordination.

 

galzohar

For 5-mans if your tank can't generate a lot of threat at least team up with people who help you kite the mobs (rogue stuns/crip poison, frostshock, frostbolt or just frost nova/blastwave/DB etc etc). With good enough DPS you should be able to intentionally pull aggro knowing the mob will die before it gets to you or you'll be able to run away from it without dying while others are killing it. Remember when something doesn't need to be tanked not only you can do more DPS, but so can the other group memebers, if they're actually good enough to do more DPS than the tank can generate threat of course. Worst case the instances are easy enough for slow DPS to be good enough to clear it - other than pulling aggro and killing the mob without a tank there's absolutely nothing you can do to help it (other than soulshattering every 5 minutes...).

While multi-dotting with affliction sounds really nice for 5-mans, the fact is it gets that much less effective to pull aggro and nuke more than 1 target at a time. Not to mention the focused mob generally takes significantly less time to die than the time it takes DoTs to tick off, even worse for the DoTs that were applied last.
Felguard may be a sweet alternative for being threat efficient but will not nescessary help your cause over destruction.

In 10-mans there's no way out of it. Bad tank = bad DPS = slow run and even wipes if the group is bad enough. Run 10-mans with good players of face the concenquences, there's no way around it.

Fire is indeed pretty pointless at FSW gear levels maybe unless you're willing to respec spellfire but even then the raid ISB losses may be bigger than the DPS increase of fire depending on your raid and gear.


The spreadsheet already counts ISB uptime into the part that tells you how good it would be to add 1 point of each stat (TNS - To Next Stat) if you enable it to use raid ISB model and add raid ISB DPS to TNS. If you just change your crit chance in your base stats part it won't include the raid ISB DPS in your own so you'll have to just go look at the ISB uptime change and multiply it by 0.2 of the shadow DPS of the rest of the shadow users in the raid (your own extra ISB DPS is already accounted for). And obviously crit's effect on ISB depends quite significantly on what other shadow users are in your raid - their DPS, the warlock:SP ratio, and warlocks' spec and crit chance matter. Just remember when you parse their DPS on WWS look at your own DPS as well - WWS DPS is usually lower than theorycrafted DPS but the spreadsheet requires you to enter their theorycrafted DPS (assuming they lose as much DPS as you to skill/movement/etc issues). You could also multiply your own DPS by the inverse of that factor but that would be harder to actually do on the spreadsheet.


This makes me think it would be nice to add an option on the spreadsheet that would take your input of "WWS DPS" value and assume the reason it's lower than the theorycrafted DPS is because you only spend X% of the time actually casting, and calculate TNS accordingly.

 

Clandestine

[Shadow-Cloak of Dalaran] is not actually a shadow damage only cloak, you're just an idiot.

 

Lite

Hi, I was wondering what my warlocks spell hit cap would be if I only had 1/5 in suppression.

 

Arelenda

I wrote ShadowSeer for this. The data I got varied wildly per fight. ISB differs tons on trash and bosses, and it's insanely hard to model. I'm currently rewriting ShadowSeer for 2.4 so you may want to check it out when it's done, and see for yourself who's contributing to ISB and who's gaining from it. I'm fairly convinced that the spreadsheet does a reasonable estimation and you won't get much better than that.


If you have long term aggro issues, the last thing you want to do is cast affliction spells, they're more threat per damage than destruction spells (assuming 0/21/40). Start with Immolate, and a debuff curse like CoR/CoS if applicable. Corruption and Agony are only useful when you don't care about long term aggro, but can't risk an immediate threat burst.

If you find you're consistently going over the tank's threat, I'd suggest any of the following.
- get a better tank
- teach your current tank how to play
- on trash: make sure to divide your damage over tanked targets. Spam CoA on all offtanked ones before bolting.
- make sure the tank's not overgeared and therefore not getting rage, have him adjust his gear accordingly
- use coR
- Misdirect / Prayer of Mending / Earth Shield
- go demonology with imp and get the -20% threat reduction
- just wait a bit longer. Unless you risk enrage timer, you simply shouldn't risk pulling aggro.
- Enchant Cloak: Subtlety




It currently looks as it's raid setup dependent. There are indeed quite a few bits that are really good and only do shadow damage, not to mention the Soulfrost Enchant. I haven't bothered with experimenting with fire yet for exactly the reason you mentioned.


For 5-10 mans: These aren't exactly gear tests, these days. I'd opt away from a 0/21/40 to obtain some more versatility and variation. My choice would be a x/x/40 or x/x/41, or a demonology hybrid (x/40/x, x/21/x, x/41+/x)

Here's a quick overview of my opinions on the subject:

Destro: Destro nukes things, hard. You need to be careful with aggro as a consequence. When the party lends itself to it, I prefer a "don't tank skull" strategy, where on each pull the group focus fires on one untanked target while the tank grabs everything else. When done right, the target dies too fast to be able to do real damage. Works in low level pugs and in heroics alike. Death Coil, Shadowburn, Succubus Seduction and tailor nets work nice with this. Not super for soloing as longevity is an issue, resulting in a bit of downtime.

Affliction: Affliction excels in pvp and for solo grinding. It is just not very effective in parties -my main reason for disliking the play style- due to the points made by previous posters. Typically groups will try to do maximum burst damage and affliction sorely lacks this. If you're going for a 5 man spec I'd recommend against heavy affliction.

Demonology: Demonology is all about having a demon out (or sacrificing it) and making good use of that. Good demon selection and management is what separates the good from the average demonologists. Especially the succubus is notoriously hard to use effectively, and will require good micro management. There are multiple good ways of going demo for 5mans, from all out Felguard to any form of hybrid in between. Any sensible spec will serve.