I was looking at that build and also something like an inverse of it with more Destro tree, but getting farther down the Demo tree for imp and self buffs. I was looking at a 20/51 build....thinking either of these gives you some nice pop from destro...one gives you empowerment and tactics from Demo and one empowered Imp Soul Leach and Chaos bolt. Mine doesn't take advantage of both the talant buffs, (which is why I like the above) but I'm not sure the extra 5% crit is worth the loss of chaos bolt SL and S+F.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...00000000000000

This is actually the build I was messing with (similar to the one posted) http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...21500135100000

Since CB macros were discussed earlier I thought I'd post my findings.

First tried
/castsequence reset=12 chaos bolt, incinerate, incinerate, incinerate, incinerate, incinerate

note, it does not cast incinerate forever as suggested by a previous poster, it casts it 5 times unless you stop casting for 12 seconds

The macro works but there is a gotcha in there, in that it doesn't chain properly. I am no macro expert but my guess is that because it's a castsequence, unlike a simple /cast spell, it won't actually start casting the next spell until it's been told by the server the previous spell has finished. So your casts are affected by your lag.
do not use this! Use the one below

/castrandom chaos bolt, incinerate
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

This works fine for spammers, if you're a clicker I'd not recommend it. You could get unlucky and have it not cast chaos bolt well past the cooldown, but on average it should cast on average less than 2s after CD is up. The downside to the macro is you have to press it 1.5 times on average to get it to cast incinerate, it *is* a slight DPS loss depending on how fast you click.

Whilst I dislike dumbing down my rotations, on any learning fight watching 1 less timer is a winner in my book, and casting CB early when its on CD is a big nono.

BTW, don't do
/castrandom chaos bolt, chaos bolt, chaos bolt, incinerate
unless you are the worlds uber button masher.

The best macro from a DPS POV is
/cast [modifier:shift]chaos bolt; incinerate
and use a mod to monitor the CD such as Ghost Pulse or TellMeWhen

But seriously, don't use macros for cast rotations. If you can "figure out" macros, you can figure out the rotation. The macros will just lower your dps.

Spell priority is the key now, not rotations. Having a bound key to modify chaos bolt to incinerate works but it really should be about spell priorities. This is how shadow priests have been playing for a long time, and it looks like its the model that Blizzard has in mind for most classes.

I've only raided destruction and demonology since the patch and have settled on destruction. I don't have backdraft and my priority is:
Corruption > Chaos bolt > Immolate > Incinerate

I would think that with backdraft it would be
Corruption > Chaosbolt > Immolate > Incinerate except when you conflag it becomes 3x Incinerate then reapply Immolate

From the posts on the last couple of pages it may make sense to use improved CoA and free up three talent points to use in something else (if you are not going for imp lifetap). On the weekend raids I again did not have to lifetap at all, so the points in imp tap appear to be wasted currently, it may change at 80. I'm using Cooldown timer 3.0 so I can see when a spell is ready to use and it is making life easier on my shaman and rogue as well.

If you try to create a macro to manage your rotation I think you will just wind up constraining your ability to react.

Can you guys look at this 22/3/46 spec and see if I'm missing anything blatantly obvious? Because it seems to me that this spec outperforms all other specs for raid DPS by a huge margin., especially if you have another Warlock doing Immolate for you to piggyback off of.

The idea behind the spec is you first focus on keeping your three Shadow DoTs up. All of them have better spellpower scaling/cast time than any direct damage spell you could cast. Curse of Agony is especially nice as it will apply 144% of your spellpower for 1 second of casting time. All the DoTs will also proc Molten Core for you a lot. You never actually cast Shadow Bolt if it would have a cast time, which is why I can skip Bane. You only cast it off Nightfall procs or Glyph of Corruption procs. Casting it as an instant, again, lets you get a lot more scaling/cast time value out of it than any other DD spell you could cast. Besides your DoTs, you use Conflag on cooldown and spam Incinerate. You get access to all the good Destruction talents which help you maximize your Incinerates, as well.

Well the first thing that comes to mind is that Bane doesn't just affect Shadowbolt, it also reduces the cast time on Immolate. If you can always rely on having Immolate up from another Warlock then I guess that isn't a problem, but if your other warlock respecs or isn't around then it might become an issue.

I tried a 0/31/40 spec a bit at level 80, although not with really good raid gear. And it outperformed the deep destruction spec although only slightly, I have to admit though that I didn't play the deep destruction absolutely perfectly, theorycrafted I think deep destruction performed 0.5% better or so but the risk of doing just a single mistake during the rotation is too high for me at this stage at least, leading to 31/40 yielding the higher numbers on average. Thing is, Fire and Brimstone, Empowered Imp and Chaos Bolt struggle to compete with some raw +5% damage and the +5% crit kind of cancels out any benefit that empowered imp gives.

Of course, none of them has gotten even close to affliction in my tests. I easily perform 10-15% higher as a deep affliction spec. So if anything, I'm having doubts of destruction's raid viability in WotLK.

Here's some really brutal back of the envelope math for my hypothesis that fel armor may be better for Affliction builds at level 80 than Ruin.

Based on my level 70 stats, I can get about 1800 dps out of 1500 spell damage and 25 crit. With immolate in my rotation, I find that about 25% of my dps comes from SB. So that 450 dps from the SB. Basically without ruin, assuming one in four SB's are crits, that means about 50 of the 450 dps comes from the crit. With ruin that would obviously double.
Also, ruin would also add a little dps to immolate.

If the SB % increased to 40%, then the additional dps from ruin would increase to about 80 dps (plus immolate damage).

Improved fel armor, at 500 spirit, would add 99 spell damage, which, applies to 100% of your damage. If you want to do a really really brutal calculation, and assume that your dps would continue to increase at a ratio of your spell damage, would be worth around 120 dps. Then you would add the extra damage you get from improved imp.

As I said before, there's also the issue of scaling. Ruin will continue to scale with gear, while improved fel armor will only partially scale with gear (only the spirit component). So it may be that at higher levels of gear, ruin outstrips improved fel armor quite a bit.

I apologize for some really hack and slash math here, but I think this deserves more discussion among the affliction lock community. We are assuming that level 80 affliction builds should go for ruin, but are we sure that is optimal, considering the number of dots we have to keep up and how that severely restricts how many SB's we are going to be pumping out?

The assumption you're making that affects the end result is that your DPS is roughly proportional to your spellpower. If 40% of your damage is from shadowbolt (I suspect if you spec ruin you would not use immolate), all it takes to tip your results the other way is to say that more than 1/3 of your affliction DPS comes from the base damage of your spells. I would recomend finding a spreadsheet and finding how much DPS an extra 99 spellpower gives you (I can't check myself, I use openoffice).

Where are you getting those numbers from? Spread sheet would put 1500 spell 25% crit at 2450DPS and 34% from shadow bolt with ruin, without ruin and with 100 more spell damage (your estimate for fel armor) shows 2430DPS.

Movement is not going to change the relative values a ton because ground gained by spell damage on instants is going to be lost to repositioning with a shorter range on shadowbolt as any fel armor build will be without destructive reach.

I was wondering a affliction locks out there having issue with their felhunter dps-ing at Brutallas? I have realised my felhunter does not dps at all despite manual clicking petattack, aggressive, shadow bite etc. I have noticed that imps turned out fine except felhunter. It is only just Brutallas that has such problem for me. Am I the only one?

Additionally, what is the actual spell hit needed without count the Talents(Suppression & Catacylsm)?

-----
kindly delete this thread post of mine. i have posted at warlock pve compendium instead and had it answered. Thank you.

Haven't been able to find it on the forums yet, but would it be worth to drop immolate when the boss gets below 35% health so I can get some more sb's in?
I am using immolation in my current rotation and it comes out ok, but since Death's Embrace only increases shadow damage, I was wondering if it is worth changing my rotation at 35%. (Yes, I love making things more complicated for myself, I am affliction after all!)

My current spec is 56/0/5

Hello fellow Warlocks.

I am raiding as a Felguard-Destro Lock right now (Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft), and I am not that happy with it. The dps is okay as long as the minor corruption glyph keeps giving nightfalls - if you have bad luck, youre not doing any dps.

I tried affliction, but I am (right now) seriously not able to keep a stable rotation (maybe because I didnt use any other spell than shadowbolt for the last few months?). I read the last pages, and hoped to find a post with a good dps raiding specc - but I didnt. Maybe I overread it, but could anyone give some specc infos he is using and some infos about dps relative to other classes?

greetings,
smoo

I dropped Immolate completely - my dps didn't suffer at all. With all the stuff affliction has to throw out, I find it just adds complexity to a rotation with no tangible dps gain.

Good to know. Dropping immolate would be huge on the rotation and my fingers. I don't need arthritis before we see Arthas.


Anyone done any math on ISB uptime? I know we all hate the new one with a passion, but being a self-buff doesn't seem that bad. Sneaking in enough Shadowbolts evenly across the rotation would seem to give a pretty decent (if not close to 100%) uptime.

I'd have to say ISB is a waste of time all-around. Even if it was up 100% of the time, which it cannot be due to it's own mechanics, you're not getting the same bang for the buck that you used to. Remember, you used to get 15% spell damage boost, now it's only 10%. Plus you used to get the combined efforts of all the locks in the raid to basically keep ISB rolling. Now that it's a self-only buff, you are limited to 12s uptime cycles, whereas before you were sharing the uptime cycles of your fellow locks. It's better than nothing, but for Destruction, Shadow is basically dead.

I'm well aware that it doesn't affect DoTs. But it's still 12 seconds, and it's still 10% to your Shadowbolts, which isn't a terrible thing. Personally when I gave 56/0/5 a try I was definitely sneaking in at least 3 bolts in any given 12sec window. With bolt still supplying the most dps as affliction from any one spell (and even moreso with the removal of Immolate), it would make sense to see a pretty high uptime with any critrate above 25%. Time to go play with simcraft.

Edit-
QND Napkin Math: ~35% total damage from shadowbolt + 75% ISB uptime = 2.625% dps boost?

OK, so 5 points isn't exactly giving the boost that we could hope for, but we probably can't expect ISB to be changed much at least until 0/21/40 is 10 levels and a patch or two in the rear-view mirror.

If this were the case (and I understand that you are running off my assumptions, which were very cavalier, then I would say fel armor would be more dps in imp-friendly fights, unless the spreadsheet was also taking imp into consideration.

Doesn't an imp go OOM without mana feed or improved soul leech after about 2 mins give or take 30 secs depending on raid buffs? Granted after going OOM it's DPS doesn't strictly drop to zero but proper usage, turning it off until full mana, would put it out of commision for at least 30-60secs out of every 150-180 secs. I'm unsure of the exact uptimes because I do not think the sheet takes all the raid buffs into proper account on pet OOM times but there are posts in this thread that have corroborated this OOM issue in relation to the value of the patched improved soul leech.

Edit - Strictly speaking, swtich to fel armor assumes the loss from destructive reach is negligable. Under that assumption, however, the optimal 17 points in destruction woul include demonic power which would offset any gains from improved imp. This would leave the comparison almost stricly at demonic agis vs. ruin.

I think most affliction locks will probably not take grim reach, which is another reason I believe lack of destructive reach would be negligible.

I agree with your point that demonic power would pretty much cancel out improved imp from a dps standpoint.

Altogether, I still think demonic aegis has some potential as an alternate or perhaps slightly preferrable affliction build. My hypothesis is that in a patchwerk style fight, ruin will win, but in fights that require enough movement to get the player consistently out of rotation rhythm, demonic aegis will provide higher functional dps.

Hey guys.

I picked up a dot rotation macro that works pretty well (I dont really like macros but its helping me solidify my rotation before going about it manually). Its a castingsequence ment to be cast after an immolate/corruption initial cast. >>> Macro Rotation is Haunt, UA, CoA, Siphon Life, (cooldown prevents use until haunt can be recast, filler here with SB...usually get 2 off) then Haunt, UA, Immolate. Then filler SB's until haunt comes off cooldown.

This does keep all the dots up, but i find my dps to be a bit dissapointing. my overall damage isnt bad but dps is like 900-1100....im confused at the people posting 2.5-3k dps using an affliction spec on a single target mob...im not poorly geared but not super geared either. 1 piece of t6, rest mostly a t5, t5+ mix. im currently specced 56/0/5, my crit isnt superb at 22-23% base but my spell damage raiding is 1500 self-buffed. I'm sure the problem is related to my filler shadowbolts happening much less often then people currently in a ton of haste gear but as affliction i cant seem to imagine why i would want to gear more for haste then crit at this point.

Should i just keep siphon life and maybe immolate out of my rotation to make more room for filler sb's?

P.S.
I recently got a timbrals...is there any way to distinguish and measure its proc rate since the log lists it as a shadowbolt? If nothing else its skewing my average shadowbolt numbers.

I think the 2500 dps numbers are at level 80, not at level 70. Also, I find that most damage meters tend to undercount affliction dps because they tend to assign us with higher amounts of time doing damage (so your denominator is higher than other classes).

Dps numbers are good for talking theorycraft, because it's the only apples to apples number we have between players in different raids. But when looking at your performance in the context of your own raid, pure amount of damage done is more important.