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!)

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 haven't seen anyone discuss when it will be worth replacing 4 piece t6. It's clear to me that there are many upgrades to t6 but there are no upgrades to the 4 piece bonus. Since the 4 piece bonus allows for additional scaling of shadowbolt and incinerate I would think that it would be valuable for a while still until the upgrades for bracers/belt/boots and a BT/Hyjal piece of your choice become totally blown out of the water by upgrades. It seems to me that if you upgrade each of those pieces with upgrades that provide 25 additional dps to each respective piece it still does not meet the 6% increased damage to shadowbolt and incinerate.

The main thing I'm questioning here is scaling. The pieces are not very impressive in of themselves but I still find that 6% damage to shadowbolt/incinerate impressive.

I would assume affliction builds would not find the 4 piece attractive, destruction and demonology builds might benefit a lot.

I've never been very good at theorycrafting on my graphing calculator because I miss little things in equations, and I have yet to see a calculator that will provide an accurate representation of level 80 warlock raiding. Anyone have any insights on this?

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.

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.

Change the table that holds the rating needed per 1% of hit, haste, crit, and then use those values in an online item database with a filter.

As for the 4pt6, consider your DPS and the % of it that comes from your filler-nuke. Multiply 0.06*Nukefiller_ratio*dps = DPS gain from the bonus. Compare that to the DPS gained from upgrading items that lose the bonus. So if we're affliction and do 3000 DPS and 40% of that comes from our SB, then .4*.06*3000=72. Using the spreadsheet we can see how much theoretical DPS is gained per point of spell power (for me comes in around 1.4), so 72/1.4 = 51.4. So it's worth ~50 spell power in that scenario. If the items you would use to replace the set contribute more than that, you can mourn the death of your 2.0 gear.

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.