Actually I've seen a lot of talk on the official forums about people using the FG-DP/Ruin build, and a lot of people are loving it... Its also nice because it gives you a much easier rotation to worry about..

Is it safe to say that skill level determines how effective a spec will be for someone? I'm sure a player must be very skillful to master a deep affliction build... maybe that's why someone would choose the felguard/ruin build over a haunt build...

Let me rephrase that, so I don't insult anyone....maybe it's more of a 50/50 split.... some people can't master affliction because of lack of skill...and then some people just flat out don't want to master it, because its too many DOT's to worry about (and everyone's idea of fun is different!)

How highly do people value crit/hit/haste compared to dmg these days? It seems there's a lot more pure spelldmg gear, and honestly, I dont have a clue how highly to value stuff, especially as you need more of it to get the same result.

I'm also having a worry in the back of my mind, that 25mans wont fit affliction warlocks due to debuff slots, so I'm worried passing on crit.

Are there any spreadsheets that are anywhere near usable for 80?

The Build: 53/14/4 Heavy Affliction

The World of Warcraft Armory

The gist: I wanted a strong PvE build, and I think this is it. While crit is more helpful to affliction than it was before, I seem to be having a hell of a time finding crit on gear. It's all haste, haste, haste. Affliction is being really competitive right now, and I don't think demonology or destro will be able to compete until we start getting a lot more crit from level 80 gear. And then, only time will tell. But for the moment, I'd like to be able to pvp AND pve and not have to respec to do it. They key to that? Soul Link of course. If I were to go straight PvE with this build, I would simply do 53/13/5 and this post would be unnecessary. (And for the record, I'm not maxing out malediction because it annoys me that it's 3 wasted talent points when a boomkin is present. Also, it's only used on bosses. So it seems very narrow for 3 points. The one point that I have in it atm will probably be moved somewhere else in the tree.)

The dilemma: I am giving up 1/5 in Bane to take 1/1 in Soul Link. Now, first of all, due to crit issues on gear, imp sbolt seems wasteful for talent points. Compound that by the fact they HALVED the damage bonus from having imp sbolt up AND they made it so that imp sbolt buff ONLY affects direct damage spells, not your dots...well, this talent is kind of lackluster now. In addition, ruin ONLY affects immolate and sbolt. So I'm kind of thinking the talent is good, but not good enough. I'd much rather have 3/3 Demonic Aegis in place of a heavier destro subspec. Bane still remains a must have for all 3 possible lock specs though. BUT....is giving adding 0.1 sec to my cast time a huge dps loss? Is it trivial? Quite frankly, if it's less than a 1% dps loss, I'd gladly dump one point in bane to get a 20% damage reduction to me through soul link. That damage reduction is awesome in pvp and pve both, and especially for aoe grinding solo quests/dailies. The other thing that bothers me about only 4/5 bane is just simple symmetry. It's hard for me to tell that sbolt is 0.1 sec longer cast (ignoring haste) but my immolate is now a longer cast than haunt and UA and for some reason, that loss of symmetry really bugs me.

My rotation: This changes slightly based on the mechanics of the encounter, but for the most part, I'm doing this on bosses: Corruption, CoA, SL, Haunt, UA, Immolate, Sbolt, Drain Life, repeat. (Throwing in nightfall procs).

Now, before all you pro warlocks get bent out of shape, lets take a moment to discuss drain life in a boss encounter. I know the first thing people will say is nevernevernevernever. But I have tried my rotation out over and over. Sbolt spam vs Drain Life with woven sbolts to keep up the debuff that haunt/bolt puts up (forget the name). With corruption, glyph of corruption, and drain life, I technically have 12% chance at all times of nightfall procs, and corruption is NEVER in danger of needing to be recast. The sbolt comes after the dot rotation and before drain because we don't want to rely on the rng to put up the second stack of the shadow damage debuff that haunt started. The nightfall procs are very frequent. Not only is the drain/sbolt combo more mana efficient, it appears to be producing about 100dps more because I don't have to lifetap as much!! Life tap takes a gcd, and we can no longer chain mana potions even if we want to, so our mana efficiency is super important. Also noteworthy, drain life can be interrupted by ANY OTHER CAST. Unlike most spells, you don't have to stop casting or move to break cast in order to begin another. So I can pop instant sbolts while draining and never break stride. Either casing the drain again afterwards or refreshing dots. So aside from the mandatory sbolt every rotation in conjunction with haunt, I am playing the numbers game and finding that I can get MORE shadow bolts off in the SAME amount of time by spamming drain life and waiting on procs rather than spamming shadow bolt. It is not a rare occurrence for me to get 2-4 nightfall procs back to back. (flame away)

The plea: So despite my rambling, it all comes down to this. Can someone please crunch the numbers, based on MY crit/haste/spell damage from armory link above, and tell me how much dmg/dps I'm officially losing by skipping one point in bane?

The World of Warcraft Armory

I would really like to keep soul link if possible, and I want to know if I just have to give it up and move that point to bane. Thank you for reading my long winded post

I've asked this myself and come to the conclusion that it will be most likely be a greater DPS, but not by fear and really: Is it worth it to lose 20+ shards in ONE fight, just to increase your DPS by maybe a 100 (at the most)?
Don't have any math to back me up but I don't think the increase is worth it.

Actually, affliction does scale with crit as well, but crit is (and probably always will be) not giving as much bang for the buck as spelldamage, hit and even haste. Even spirit does something now. The only thing you still don't want as a warlock is mp5 as this is just not how our class works.

Leuliers spreadsheet might not be perfect at the moment, but its still the best one around. If you fill in your specc and equip you will get a much more precise answer to the scaling question than anywhere else.

I still cant come to agree with you that getting to the hit cap is not needed. The magical spell fairy descends in that your DoT juggling is easier, because things arent getting resisted. I agree that you dont need to worry about hit capping for destro (while spec'd affliction), or at least to go out of your way to make up that 3% gap. 3% gap for 30% of your damage for 65% of the fight just isnt worth the stat budget for the extra hit.

I guess I'm still not following how you think that sitting under the hit cap intentionally isnt hurting yourself. There is no way around the fact that missing with spells hurts you, so get to the hit cap and get your spells to stick to the target. I've raised my hit % ~3% in the last day and I've noticed significant DPS gains, purely from the hit.

People also keep mentioning 25% for DS, well, if you are aff you should be spec'ing for 35% (Death's Embrace) to leverage common Bloodlusts and the synergies raids usually put around the 35% mark of a boss.

One thing to keep in mind is that more often than not, most DK's will be Blood or Frost spec, not very many Unholy DKs will be in a raid putting down EP. I've ran with quite a few DK dps and tanks and I've never had them put up EP. E&M is nice and I love a Moonkin

Is there an available spreadsheet with gear listings similar to that of ShadowPanther for rogues? My gf plays a warlock and she sees me looking at ShadowPanther alot and wanted to know if one was available.

There's Leulier's spreadsheet, which has its own topic in this subforum, found here.

While hit capping is a good mark, and every point of hit closer you get to the cap, the more valuable the next point becomes, that doesn't mean it's the end-all stat. What the poster before you means is that if there's a choice between 50 damage and 25 hit, you should absolutely take 50 damage. At level 80 now though, between 50 damage and 50 hit, even this mark is blurry atm, and for affliction it's highly possible that 50 damage still wins easily.

Remember, even at 70 when hit was a much cheaper stat, damage was a better stat point for point than hit for Affliction, even without maxed out Suppression. The reason hit became so valuable was from the huge switch over to Destro at later gear levels. Let's see what happens with the gear levels, the stats might stack up again and Destro could once again reign above Affliction.

This is a good point, and any players reading this whose raid leads don't follow this should let them know, it's a significant dps increase point for almost every class.

IMO move that 1/3 Malediction point to make 5/5 Bane. If you think 3 points for 3% dmg increase is a slim use of points, 1 point for 1% dmg is even slimmer, especially considering that 0.1 second off your Shadow Bolt or Immolate will be effectively 4% or 6.5% haste, respectively. Also if you're really going for a pvp viable spec, I'd move that 3/3 demonic aegis to 1/1 Fel Dom and 2/2 Grim Reach, but that's another issue entirely, and just my view.

I was working on some math on this last night, and keep in mind that I'm affliction and will be for awhile. The 4 piece T7 bonus is a huge bonus and is greatly underestimated and not really talked about much. As affliction T6-4pc is nice, but its only raising a certain portion of our DPS, where back pre-bc it was raising ALL of our DPS.

Even at lower spirit levels T7-4pc can still get you +50 dmg AND larger subsequent life taps. As affliction you will commonly find yourself tapping while your dots are up before you have to refresh them so that you have the mana to get them all back up. It will be very nice to have this bonus up while you are refreshing your dots.

So in theory, to me it seems that stacking spirit to leverage the T7-4pc is going to benefit all of our specs more so than the T6-4pc benefits all of our specs currently. Might be harder for straight destro people to break the T6-4pc, but even they are casting sb/incin less than they were pre-wrath so while the bonus is nice, I would not go out of your way to save it (aka. passing on obvious upgrades).

From what I have seen there isn't a gear listing on this spreadsheet unless I am mistaken. The way ShadowPanther is set up is that it has a gear listing for each slot, with stat weights comparing which is better. She isn't looking for a dps spreadsheet she just wants a listing of gear to go by that way she knows what to upgrade and where to get it.

I also believe wowhead has a way to do something similar but I have a tendency of not trusting wowhead stat weights.

Best way that I like doing the 'gear upgrade search' is to leverage the spreadsheet and look at the calculated stat weights based on my specific toon.

Then I go to wowhead.com and utilize their item weight scale comparison tool and it will give a score to the gear based on these weights.

Works like a dream.

Is Rain of Fire/Hellfire worth casting over SoC as Destruction? Demo? Aff?

Yes, I assumed that affliction would not find the 6% bonus to shadowbolt very attractive, but demonology and destruction would.

Also, it's possible to maintain T7-4pc and T6-4pc if you have T6 bracers, belt, and boots. I doubt using t6 4 piece over t7 4 piece would be a wise decision, but we can use both.

Ty for the reply. Unfortunately, that point in malediction is a point that had to be placed somewhere in the tree to get to the next tier of talents, so it cannot be moved to the destro tree. This is the problem with the somewhat bloated top of the aff tree when it comes to a subspec imo. I think I will be moving that point to Amp curse though. So I need to drop SL and add that point to bane, which after running wrath heroics is pretty apparent. I can really feel the 0.1 cast time for some reason, and it makes juggling immolate harder when it doesn't jive with the other cast time dots.

One further question though. Is the build 53/13/5 possibly stronger for affliction than 53/0/18? It seems to me that demonic aegis is really, really valuable to an affliction lock, with the damage modifiers our dots get. Plus, in a mix of 80 blues, my crit rate is atrocious and seems like ruin is not very valuable compared to aegis. Candemonic aegis replace ruin or will gear scaling make that an obsolete option?

In my experience they are situational now, where before SoC was the choice all the time, RoF/HF actually have been buffed and are useable in more situations now. And due to AOE's situational use, you are best to find which one works best for you on each encounter. Keys being that the mobs are dying and you arent

Yes you are right there. I would just use the calculation posted earlier to see when/if its worth swapping out for you with what you have available.

Yeah, that's what i am doing. T6 bracers/boots/belt/headpiece, T7 shoulder/chest/gloves/pants. As it was said, I love the four piece T7 bonus. It gives me 117 spelldmg with imp fel armor for 10s and increases my lifetap from 2351 to 3251, unbuffed. I was hoping it would stack and tapping three times in a row would be giving 4k+ mana, but it only refreshes the buff's duration.

For the set pieces, I don't see myself replacing them any time soon. The two specs I have used so far are 30 demon/41 destro and 41 demon/30 destro, both immol/incin/coa specs. Incinerate makes up 70-80% of my damage according to a nax10 and nax25 WWS. 6% increase to that is huge. The random drop replacements for the good t6 parts are mainly a stat upgrade. You don't gain dmg/hit/crit/haste, at least not much. Only the BT/Hyjal T6 item hurts but the 6% makes more then up for that imo.

One thing I was trying to figure out is if it's worth casting Corruption now after the coefficient buff. I have over 2200 spellpower self buffed with FG and Demonic Knowledge, so in raids that easily 2350. But still Corruption lacks 3% hit and does not gain from the massive crit that spec offers. Not really sure if it's worth casting or if it is just immol/coa/incinerate.

SoC will probably be your best choice as Affliction as you get a lot of shadow damage bonuses from your talents. I think however that RoF is superior to SoC as Destruction, mostly because of Molten Core and that RoF doesn't seem to have a cap, which SoC does (need correction on this though).

All AoE have caps, but they've been balanced to be nigh-unreachable under non-exploitative circumstances. I'd have to go dig around in the mage thread, but it took something like forty targets to cap out some of the mage AoEs, and the ones with a lower cap were admited to be an oversight and fixed. I'll see if I can find it. The thread may also have warlock spell caps as well.

If RoF procs Molten Core, should you switch to SoC while MC is up?

[e] Well that was easy, it's in the Table of Contents.
http://elitistjerks.com/f75/t30655-w...sion_part_two/
All Mage AoE is capped at 25k damage per second cast time (or tick separation in the case of Blizzard). Until contradictory evidence is provided I think it's a reasonable assumption that warlock AoE is similar. This means a cap of 25k per tick Hellfire, and 50k each for one cast of SoC or one tick of RoF. And I don't think SoC would behave differently, since Living Bomb also behaves like a normal AoE, and it's comparable.

I tried all specs quite a lot on beta. I generally like the playstyle of affliction, but the dps never delivered for me. It always ok and very good on some fights, like Sapphiron, but it never put out the numbers I did with the hybrid demon/destro fire builds. I am not sure if a bugged pandemic might have been the cause of that, so far I have done all 10 and 25 men raiding as those two hyrid specs. I was always the only warlock so I had no direct comparison, but I could keep up with or beat pretty much any dps class, it was mostly a juggling back and forth, who got more crits/procs/whatever.

At this stage it's pretty tough to say as gear upgrades with every raid. I think I am pretty much done with the easy gear upgrades now though, so I'll test specs a bit more throughly now. But in all 'dps checks', as far as there are any, it seemed like destro was putting out more dps. Standing in two sparks at malygos10 and shooting 20k Incinerates was greatly entertaining at least. :P

Also I am a big, big fan of SF, if only to proc Molten Core for Rain of Fire (which is clearly superior on most trash and aoe in general if you are fire/destro). If the mobs survive long enough for seeds, I do something like seed/seed/seed/SF/RoF. You are pretty much guranteed a MC proc by then and RoF hits for 2k and crits for 4k, pretty decent.

But I think the FG version is superior. On average 75% of your damage is Incinerate. S&F only buffs those 75% while Fel Knowledge buffs the other 25 too. Being above 30% self buffed crit is quite nice while those specs offer a great deal of survivability with -5% dmg taken from FG and Soul Link as well. The weak link is not having Fel Synegy and it's not really possible to get it either. Means your FG really needs to get some chain heals and on fights like Sapphiron or Heigan it seemed impossible to keep him up and I just had a shifted Imp. A full demon build with 2/2 FS can just dps-heal through such aoe effects without looking back.

Even with 2/2 Fel Synergy and 2pT5 (was worth trying) I couldn't keep my pet alive on Heigan because depending on where the tank stands in the first phase, the felguard was often ending up standing in the fire trying to dps. Apparently the Heigan fire doesn't count as an AoE for Avoidance, so he was taking the full brunt of the damage, and nothing can heal through that.

How does the spreadsheets mentioned in this thread calculate the value of hit rating?

The reason I ask is because SimulationCraft seems to arrive at a different conclusion where hit is valued higher than Spell Power.

There must be same mistakes in the rating calculations, maybe it's still at level 70 conversions. All those ratings are way too high compared to spell power.

To the topic of T6/T7: the 4pc T7 bonus does not seem to be that great for me, considering that most of the set parts have better items in slot. Maybe a spreadsheet will help here.

On a sidenote, there are only few bosses where drain soul can be used effectively. Most have some sort of aoe spell (which almost always completely interrupts my drain soul or forces me to move), like anub rekhan, faerlina, maexxna (well, timing wins here), grobbulus, thaddius, loatheb, 4 horsemen, razuvious, sapphiron, kel thuzad, sartharion, malygos,.... you see the list includes almost every boss currently ingame. For some, channeling a spell for over 4s before it deals damage is just too long, if you have to move immediately on some occasions. For others, damage spells by the boss interrupt your channel (for whatever reason I don't really understand, as it should have the mechanics of a normal channeling spell?). So the options of using it are limited. It certainly works on encounters like Patchwork or Heigan, but well, that's not too much of a use. Has anyone encountered different behaviour?