I would tell them you are sorry for telling them how to play their class.

Haha, seriously though, don't base everything on what the tooltip says.
A heavy fire/destro spec'd warlock will indeed want to use Rain of Fire...the damage is buffed way higher than what a non fire lock will put out.
A heavy shadow (aff or demon) spec'd lock will obviously want to use Seed because it's shadow damage.

There are many other factors involved. Seed has a casting time, and sometimes mobs die before you can even land it.
Rain of fire is much better on mana consumption also.

So on and so forth.

And that is the excact reason why SoC was so awesome in TBC. AoE trash usually took longer to die, especially in MH. SoC requires momentum, and TBC mobs had the HP to give us that momentum.

No, it's not always better. For shadow locks (affliction and meta) it's often better. For fire locks (emberstorm talented) it's seldom better.

For locks with emberstorm (destro and 41/30), RoF is going to be stronger, particularly if there are fewer mobs. SoC hits the number of mobs minus one (the mob on which you cast it doesn't take the AoE damage). So for affliction, when there are small packs of 3-4, SoC comes out pretty even with RoF. SoC also gets worse later in the AoE since it may not pop until other mobs are dead or cast time is wasted if the mob dies between cast_start and cast_finish.

EDIT: D'oh. The "Next page" strikes again, post was answered already!

I'm level 76 (just started playing a week ago for the first time since WotLK came out, sorry...), and I've re-joined my old guild. I'm going to be doing 10-man raids with them in a few days, and I wanted to know what kind of DPS I could reasonably expect from myself at that point.

All of the DPS numbers I see quoted are (1) from 25-man raids, (2) from people who are very well-geared, and (3) from people who are posting precisely because they have such impressive numbers. So I can't really use that as a scaling factor.

Right now, I have the following pieces of information:

1) My guild reports that their top DPS numbers on 10-man Patchwerk are in the 3.6k range, and that they consider this to be quite impressive (I believe they said that these were rogue and hunter numbers; they don't have a raiding Warlock right now).

2) I'm putting out about 1.6k single-target DPS in instances right now, wearing basically the T5-level/badge gear I have from BC.

3) In instances, I can reliably out-DPS non-raiding level 80 non-warlock DPS classes; however, a lot of this reflects the fact that I do ridiculously good AOE damage (wisely-timed Metamorphosis/Immolation Aura/Hellfire on packs). So I can't really extrapolate from that to 10-man raiding DPS comparisons.

So. How much of a difference is four more levels and the gear I stumble on in the next week going to make in my DPS? Because, back in BC, I was one of the top two DPS'ers in my 25-man guild--and I just can't bear showing up doing 2k DPS if their best are doing 3.6k. But I don't want to break my heart aiming for 3.6k DPS if the most I can reasonably expect to put out is 2k.

Thanks!

HPG is definitely better.

Here's the thing you have to be careful with not only on maxdps, but for the spreadsheet and even for the stickies in this forum: A slot under evaluation isn't always insulated from the rest of your gear. For example, T7 gloves are considered to be (relative) garbage on sites like maxdps, and when I got mine I wasn't exactly enthusiastic. When someone asked the exact same question you did, I did the math and was similarly surprised.

The really important thing to remember is that if you want to properly evaluate an item on a site calculator like maxdps, you have to give it your stats in the raid gear/buffs you expect to use with the slot under evaluation empty. By doing that, you have a fair weighing of whether you need hit, whether your haste is approaching cap, so on and so forth. You'll notice that the ranking for items changes dramatically depending on whether you still need to cap out.

I don't understand this...

[Valorous Plagueheart Circlet] (Naxx25, Kel'Thuzad) 228 -> 271 dps

What does the bold (green) number represent?

Why is that a problem with leulier's, since you can update it to reflect your current gear, and customize it to always assume full raid buffs, and easily swap between your equipped items?

Just try changing gloves in leulier's, adjust your hit up/down as appropiate (by changing gems/enchants or maybe a ring/cloak/necklace to a sidegrade). Then look at the new DPS value, and compare it to your old.

Also, I don't get the SP fetish. It is the most valuable stat yes, but for destro haste is definately not one to frown upon. I've seen people turn down 50 haste rating for a mere 10 SP, a thing I would never do.

Ok... so, I know the effects of CoE and Earth and Moon don't stack. Saw that earlier in the thread.

The other warlocks in my guild aren't convinced that CoE isn't needed with a boomkin in the raid. I tell them the effects are the same and don't stack, but they claim the lowered resists are still beneficial. The way I see it, the resist shouldn't matter so long as we're all hit capped, right?

Also... if possible could someone link me some kind of proof that CoE and Earth and Moon don't stack so I can show them facts?

Many thanks in advance.

Yes, but I think I should make sure we're clear here.

Resist and Miss are different mechanics. Previous to 3.0, both effects were both labeled as resist, but now they are specifically labeled differently, to prevent any confusion on the matter.

Miss chance is based on level. As we should all know, we can reduce miss chance with the hit stat, as well as talents and certain debuffs. Spells that fail the miss check completely fizzle.

Resist comes from two places: the magical resistance stat and innate resistance. Magic resistance as a stat can be countered by both CoE and spell penetration, but I am not aware of any bosses that have magic resistance in this fashion. I'm not sure if the behavior of magic resistance has changed for mobs in 3.0, but for players it now appears to impose a minimum amount resisted based on resist level.

The innate resistance is what you'll see causing your spells to not do full damage occasionally on bosses. Your spells will usually do full damage, but there's no way to prevent these small partial resists, so you'll just have to deal with it.

I just spec'ed Affliction to try for the first time in our raid tonight, and have been trying my rotations on training dummies for the last hour or so.

Big problem, every once in awhile my Immolate dont "stick". I remember this beeing a bug some time ago, but is it still around? It happens when I refresh UA and Immo just as it's about to run out. I think it might be when Immolate have like .1 seconds left and my new one hits just as the old one runs out.

Extremely annoying. It's not "miss", I'm 100% sure of that as it's happening on lvl80 dummy to, and I have enough hitrating to never miss on that.

Cheers.

This is a known problem. It has to do with the "more powerful effect" bounce, the one that prevents low level buffs from overwriting higher level ones. But it also sometimes refuses to overwrite a Dot with a less powerful one, if the existing one benefited from a trinket or talent proc that's now expired. With Corruption you'll just get no result and the red error message. But because Immolate has the direct damage effect at the start, it doesn't do the "more powerful effect" test until after the spell is cast. So if your Sundial ran out or Molten Core fell off you can get the direct damage without the dot renewing.

Right now the only solution is to not clip your Immolate when renewing it. An addon like DoTimer will help you narrow it down, but if you're trying to keep a really tight rotation it can be hard to avoid it every time.