I have a macro for informing the raid who I'm putting the soul stone on. Something along the lines of:

Now this macro will put that information in raid chat even if I click on the macro with the soul stone being on cooldown. There's an addon called AfterCast from 2006 but is there a proper way to check whether an ability is on cooldown or a /cast was successful?

Just tested it myself on the bossdummy. The Imp casts Fireball even before reaching the 180 mana but when the cast is finished he already regenerated over 180 mana and the casting cost get substracted normally. Also, when ordering him to use Fire shield with less than the required 270 mana it will say that he's out of mana.
So either the Imp ignores mana at all or he only casts when he will have the manacosts again at the end of the cast. Because there is a small delay between the casts when he's out of mana.

ForteXorcist contains a module that informs both the raid and your target of you starting a Soulstone cast and finishing one depending on your settings

What spec do you find has the highest dps on Mimiron hard mode?

In a typical Ulduar-25 raid, or at least the Siege and Antechamber parts (this is where my guild is at right now in progression), how likely is an Imp to stay alive under a Soul Link? I'm considering shifting a point out of backlash in a standard 0/13/58 build in order to pick up Soul Link for some damage reduction. There's a lot of RSTS and AoE damage going around there, and I'm not sure if having a soul link on my imp would help the healing team or if it would just destroy my imp.

I'm thinking it'd die in places like Kologarn's hand and Ignis's crotch, but if anyone else has had experience with this, I'd love to hear about it.

Not tested but at a guess this would work

Combined with 2/2 Fel Synergy, Avoidance, and chain heals, the imp has been pretty tough in my experience. The only place I've had imp deaths are Freya and Mimiron and this is mostly due to DD on the imp, not SL damage. I've yet to see an imp death due to Slag Pot or Kologarn grip damage transfer.

I'm curious which AE offers the biggest bang for your bucks as a 0/13/58 lock? Does SoC trump RoF on nearly everything still or does, because RoF can crit quite a bit (as can SoC) does that come out ahead?

Also, for Yogg. I've never started Drain Soul until ~25%. But have heard some talk about starting right away in p3 due to Death's Embrace. Which is better?

It's the same as it always was. Drain Soul is not a better filler than shadowbolt until below 25% target HP.

Speaking from my experience -doing 12-12,5k DPS on that encounter-, I don't do any special rotation under the starlight buff, the only special thing I do is planting a teleport on a light I have checked will last for some time after the flash freeze, and -if possible- try to port there right after the freeze -with storm power if possible, which I usually can get- and proceed to break those Ice blocks with nice 30-40k casts as soon as possible.
Doing so won't result in a much better DPS score for you, but for the whole raid, since each second the adds are free, the better for that encounter.

For the cut-off, I usually ask for 2x salvs on the first freeze, the other 2 being taken by the other warlock on raid. On normal mode, we take 1x salv on each one of the 2 first freezes, and then salvs are "free" for the more aggro-friendly classes who still do 12-13k dps and would end up aggro'ing.

Thanks, I ended up using GetItemCooldown("Demonic Soulstone") and if s == 0. I also wanted to keep it simple so I removed the UnitExists check. Final macro:

Does curse of doom gain damage through the effects of Pyroclasm? I am thinking no


World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

1. Zerg rush people with the storm cloud
2. Keep up your normal rotation
3. Stand in beams
4. Tell your tank you're going to pull aggro and have him taunt and you can soulshatter (this creates a HUGE buffer zone for pulling aggro for anyone in the raid
5. Keep up your normal rotation


And the guy who has their paladins using all sorts of salvs and stuff... I think your tank needs to work on their threat generation ability. Either use a frost dk or paladin or have your warrior pick up some slack!


I tank phase 3. My spec works quite well. I use fel armor because of how little damage I take. We only use 1 tank for mimiron hard mode and he's a paladin but if there was a warrior I could get Vigilance as well for another 3% reduced damage. Stick a disc priest on me and I only get hit for about 8000-11000 and I have 26k hp. It's a pretty solid spec in general since for all fights I'll be taking less damage than everybody else and the only actual DPS loss is not having 3/3 empowered imp.

I never take soul link into raids, your pet is the key to your dps output, adding soul link will just cause it to die quicker. Let the healers do their job.

I see dmg outputs like 5k+ and i cant fathom how they are doing that dps.

Im outputting around 4.6k dps with 2t7.5 , without it im around 4.5k-4.7k (raid dmg btw).

Maybe it's my spell rotation?

Current rotation: Life tap -> CoD -> Immolate -> Conflag -> Corruption -> Chaos Bolt -> Inc -> Inc (rinse and repeat (only adding CoD when it needs to be reapplied)

Should I be using my t7 4 set bonus or be using my higher 25 uld gear? I dont see a huge difference in damage output from either... so I am thinking its my rotation.

I have experimented with a lot of different rotations including CoA and CoE instead of CoD and those actually drop my dps.

Any suggestions?

I can tell you right now that using gear with more spellpower will benefit you much more by not bothering with the 4piece t7 bonus. You should also change your Glyph of Imp and Glyph of Life Tap to Glyph of Incinerate and Glyph of Immolate. Lifetapping to keep the buff up (especially the 4piece bonus) is not worth it. 20 seconds is better however in my gear lifetap is 118 spellpower and the spellpower coefficients for each spell does not outweigh the increased damage of immolate and conflag thanks to the glyph. The immolate glyph will increase immolate by enough each tick to almost outweigh the spellpower increase to spells like chaos bolt and incinerate. Also conflag hits harder and things just keep on scaling better and better...

There's plenty of points in Ulduar fights where you are running which is perfect time to cast corruption and life tap. Otherwise dumping your mana bar will benefit you more than wasting GCD's keeping up Glyph of Life Tap.

Recap:
- Glyph of Imp should be Glyph of Incinerate
- Glyph of Life Tap should be Glyph of Immolate
- As long as you are keeping up a decent amount of DPS your imp shouldn't die other than really reallyyy big hits. I don't recall him dying from grip or slag pot. Grip doesn't do enough damage anymore to even kill your imp if he's topped off though.

edit: I should have asked... just what is the "better" ulduar gear? If we're talking like 2 pieces it probably isn't making a huge difference :p

Well I was messing with some of the spreadsheet and simcraft things and glyph of imp had more output than immolate or incinerate.

I will test getting rid of life tap.

My other pieces are:
[Handwraps of Resonance]
[Cowl of the Absolute]
[Soot-Covered Mantle]
[Conqueror's Deathbringer Robe]

-Edit-

Nevermind about my dps dropping, i was using the wrong spell rotation and my pet was on passive

I recommend using chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner and going to the character planner and loading your gear from the armory. Do this in 2 windows so you can see what your gear is beforehand then make changes and you can click between the two and see what the changes are. It'll help out a lot with gear choices!

I don't see how the imp glyph was ever rated above the other 2 glyphs. 5% damage on incinerate is such a ridiculous buff and I don't know how you weren't using it!

Honestly, low level pvp for warlocks is a dread because bg's are riddled with rogues or pally's.... High level pvp however is very fun and in 3.2 we will get pet buffs (sorta) that make them survive longer, etc which will help immensely since a warlock is 80% dependent on their pet in pvp.

Thanks blgdinger for the tips, I appreciate it.

I did use incinerate for awhile but, to be honest I was getting higher dps with the imp glyph.... But that was before with a different rotation, im working out the kinks in my rotation and didnt focus on making sure to use the BD rotation more effectively.

It's also important to change your gear for this particular fight. You can't really simulate it with SimCraft as it doesn't support either buff. However, it's not desperately tricky to work out what to change. You get a haste buff, and you get massively increased critical strike damage. As a result, your ilvl 239 item with haste and spirit is less useful than your ilvl 219/226 item with crit and whatever else. Get to the hit cap and increase your critical strike chance as high as you possibly can. Honestly, that storm power buff is HUGE, probably bigger than anything else in the game. This is a reasonable guide to gearing for the encounter.

In threat terms, if you get "lucky" with those buffs, yes, it will get very silly very quickly. The amount of RNG in the fight is largely down to how good your co-ordination is. If you're able to co-ordinate it well enough, once you've got a full stack of magic damage vulnerability buffs on the boss, just leave your two highest on threat keeping those up (in a beam if possible), have the next half of remaining ranged on threat group up in a beam and the rest separately group up in another beam. Then when someone gets the buff to throw around, take it to the group of ranged who are low on threat. You won't get anyone doing 15-20k, but you will get a lot of people over 10k, which is more than enough for this encounter. Having threat-capped DPS is bad here. Your paladins should spam HoS on the people highest on threat to give a bit more headroom and your tank doesn't have to spam-taunt the boss, and you'll probably only need to shatter about once every five tries at worst.

As far as your rotation goes, just do the normal one. Your Conflagrate will hit for incredibly silly numbers - something like 70k - while you have that buff, and the haste buff means you get big advantages from Pyroclasm.

This has been bugging me for awhile. Let's say your immolate left 1s but your already casting Incinerate which by immolate would have already fall off, given the only warlock in raid, do i still gain the FnB on incinerate dmg bonus?

No immolate has to be on the target at the time the damage occurs.

Not really. The damage is calculated at the finished casting of Incinerate. If Immolate runs out during the "flight time" of Incinerate, it will still gain all the bonuses from Immolate, since it was there when the casting finished.

I have a question about switching from 3/13/55 to 13/58 when you have the appropriate hit rating.

Wouldn't you gain more dps from switching to a 19/52 like this one?


I'm sure I can't be the first to have though of this, but why is this not more popular? Improved Imp nets a 15% increase on the firebolt (and increased crit for you), while the additional Unholy Power would gain you another 16%. If the only alternative is ISL, which isn't technically a DPS increase (although it could be argued that less life tapping is more DPS), why not choose Unholy power, which is a straight DPS increase?