Maalaki, you using the standard Chaosbolt, Immolate, CoA, Incin fillers? and yeah you getting every conflag? I tend to miss 2 every fight.

Yes.

Pretty sure I got every single one on Patchwerk. Messed up a few times on a boss or two throughout the night due to these odd 1 second "lag spikes" Alleria gets from time to time.

Hi, I'm specced Affliction 56 0 15 right now, still wearing some of my level 70 gear

I noticed that a lot of you guys don't specc into Improved Drain Soul, and I'm kinda confused about that... I guess my damage is pretty good in comparison ( 3800dps on Patchwerk -> Wow Web Stats ), but I find myself having constant problems with my aggro... in raid situations, I'm kinda good, don't even have to Soulshatter, so I there's some wriggle room to drop IDS, but I can't see myself playing 5-Player Heroics without the -aggro... How do you do in those situations, do you respecc outside of raids, or do you just massively slow down on your dots/damage?

Any other hints/pointers you might have would be appreciated

In my experience running heroics with tanks known to be solid; it isnt an issue. If you are pulling aggro it's probably the tank or some shadowbolt crits which are not reduced by the talent anyways. Or the big AE spamfest that all 5 man's seem to be right now!

What is the exact rotation you have been using?

Normally mine would go like: Corruption, Agony, Immolate, CB, Inc until immo has 3 secs or less, conflag, immo, cb, incin... while refreshing corruption and agony as soon as they fade. Am I doing something wrong?

From looking at his latest parse he is using Agony alone to maintain MC. Also, considering he has a sick amount of haste conflag probably comes closer to the last 1s of his immo. (Spamming conflag at the last ~200ms of a incin cast for the win). Only thing I cannot tell is during backdraft if he uses 3x incin / immo and 2incin / or if he tucks a chaos bolt into the backdraft. Regardless, what a beast. Glad to see someone pushing destro to the limit!

He will be probably doing 3 Incinerate bercause he has another warlock in his raid who keeps up Immolate on the mob. You gain greatest dps from 3x incinerate if there is an immolate on the mob. Else you have to recast Immolate first then Incinerate.
Because Incinerate during backdraft outdamages Immolate if the mob is afflicted by another Immloate.
As long as your Chaos Bolt does not get gc capped you can cast this as well. But not 100% sure about the last point.

Last time I checked (by setting aguf to show 4 x 11 = 44 debuff slots), they all got filled. Is there something I've missed or are you all just assuming the debuff cap is still 40?

Comparing the parses in this thread to my own (Wow Web Stats) it looks like ISB can still make a difference. I'm going to spec 4/5 ISB and 1 point in MC.

Is everyone using felhunter for the spirit buff? Imp seems to do more dps, so I would use that for at patchwerk when we have a disc priest in the raid.

Maalakai, are you using the healer trinket only for the passive spellpower?

After reading the entire thread it seems all of you are on the same page that Affliction is "the shit" atm pushing out huge numbers in raids on bosses (where it counts) and is, I wouldn't say easy, but more forgiving than Destruction. I'll probably try it out next raid to see if I can push out anything to provide a WWS.

Anyway, I've been trying the notorious Nihilum build that most warlocks in that guild have been using which is 0/20/51 with as much as possible to improve the Imp and ofc the spells you use frequently such as Immolate, Incinerate and Chaos Bolt. It does pretty well on fights where you don't have to move much (such as Patchwerk for example, I made around 2000-2100 DPS in 10-man some nights ago). The only problem is that when the Imp dies, it really shows. It's a machine gun on it's own and shouldn't be underestimated. With Glyph and talents it gets a total of (15+30+20+10=)75% increased damage. I don't have Backdraft so I hardly Conflagrate, that talent was merely taken as a filler to improve grinding and maybe open it up for PvP with Shadowburn (Shadowfury is actually pretty good due to all the AE encounters with adds).

Now what I'm wondering (if someone is more willing to test it) is how 0/20/51 is rated against 2/13/56 which most people seem to have tried in raids.

Yes, but UA crits show as Pandemic, don't forget to include those when you count total UA damage.

Well I do not know what your aguf is showing but I know that we have the problems that debuffs are falling off. So I guess we ran out of space

Have been destro for months of raiding and want to try affliction tonight - wws coming - curious about results.

I read a lot in this thread about using Drain Soul while under 25%. Is it really better than going for the normal rotation? And would anyone here give me some advice about their 56/0/15 rotation? That would be really helpfull.

After 25% Drain Soul becomes a much better filler. With all my DoTs on heroic bosses I've been able to achieve 6.5k ticks alone, imagine how that would be in 25-man raids.

As for rotation, don't bother with any specific, it's much better if you find your own but to summarize:
- Always keep all your DoTs up: UA, CoA (or CotE if you're only one with this type of buff), Immo, Corr, SL.
- Always keep up 2/2 Shadow Embrace.
- Always keep up the Haunt debuff but remember that SB has a higher DPCT than Haunt so if the Haunt debuff is up but the CD is down, cast a SB rather than a Haunt.
- Thanks to Everlasting Affliction you only need to cast Corr once in the beginning then (if you don't make a mistake) you won't have to recast it again.

I usually start off with CotE, Corr, UA, Immo, SL then Haunt, SBx? until it's time again for anything of the other. It's really situational.

Patchwerk

Last night I ran 54/0/17 (had to tailor Cataclysm to fit my current hit with gear and ran hit food).
Ran with Corruption, Immolate, CoA glyphs.
Used spellstone, Flask of the Frost Wyrm, and Potion of Speed(had no wild magics on me).

I think DS would have been nice for the sub 25% but the other warlock isn't Affliction and I don't think thats gonna be enough affliction debuffs up to have DS outscale my SB.

Thanks for the input.

Is loggerhead still "the" addon to log the combatlog and wws to parse it? (Want to post wws later on).
And last question: Shadow embrace effect. Is the warlock who casts the first dot getting the benefit - due to bug - or the one who casted the last dot?

Using Drain Soul in the execute range is an amazing boost for your DPS. You are basically just using DS as your filler instead of SB, you should still keep your dots and Haunt up. Personally I'm dropping Immolate in execute range to free up more time for DS. Remember that with Soul Siphon every Affliction debuff on the target adds to your DS damage, as well as Death Embrace boost. In a 10 man raid with two affliction locks, I got DS ticks in the 9-9.5k range which is an extra 3k DPS on top of your normal dots. On a semi long fight where a mob is in execute range for some time, you shouldn't be surprised to see Drain Soul account for 10-15% of your total damage done for the fight.

The tricky part for me is to know when DS is going to tick so you dont abort it to soon (to refresh dots and esp Haunt). You want to abort it just after it has ticked, that way you dont waste any dps time, and just some mana. It's better to let a dot, say UA, be off the mob for 2 extra seconds and wait for a DS tick and then refresh UA.

Remember that your dots (and debuffs like Embrace) boosts both your DS damage and other warlocks DS damage, thats why you all want to keep them up.

Like any dot class, you cant think of it as a "rotation", you need to use a priority list since a rotation for affclition is way to complicated after like 10 casts. Personally I use something like this:

Is Haunt up? If not, cast Haunt.
Is Corruption up? If not, cast Corruption.
Is Curse of Agony up? If not, cast Curse of Agony. (or your assgined Curse)
Is Unstable Affliction up? If not, cast Unstable Affliction.
Is Siphon Life up? If not, cast Siphon Life.
Is Immolate up? If not, cast Immolate.
Is my mana ok? If not, cast Life Tap (or Pot if too risky to Tap)
Is all the above conditions met? If yes, cast Shadow Bolt.

Note that on spells with cast and/or travel time, those would have to be taken into account. So it should really say "Is Unstable Affliction up and have more than 1.5s (with adjustments for haste) left on its duration?"

Have this mental checklist in your head and go through it before each cast. In practise, you want to be maybe 2-3 casts ahead in your mind as you are casting to see what you are going to do next. This changes abit on some bosses and phases and the above mentioned execute phase. But thats what I do on a single target fight where my job is to pump out the most damage.

Edit: Had to do some work while writing, most points had allready been said above

@Maalakai:
I haven't found a definitive answer on what [The Egg of Mortal Essence] is/isn't procing off for locks, but I assume it's procing off of something if you have it equipped. Care to enlighten us all? I'm particularly interested in whether it procs off Fel Synergy.

To my knowledge, it only procs off of the Fel Armor heal.

Now that I tried it with 4x24, the max amount of debuffs I saw on Thaddius was 50. That looks to me like a plausible number for a cap.

Interesting. I saw us hitting the cap on fights like Patchwerk and Loatheb, but I never saw anything of mine get pushed off. I have my aguf at 4x10, but I'll stretch it out tonight and see how many we get up to.

As Presarc mentioned in the post after yours, it procs off of our Fel Armor regen ticks. I stumbled upon it by accident a couple days ago when I bought it purely for the massive spell damage it gives (I usually raid as Affliction and Spell Damage is so huge for the spec). I was out farming Eternal Life to make Darkmoon Cards (finally completed the [Darkmoon Card: Illusion] by the way) and saw the proc go off on me at some point. So I stood there and Life Tapped and just waited and sure enough, it proced when my Fel Armor healed me. Not sure if it's intended for it to work like that, but I'm not gonna stop using it.

Reason for only 2/3 MC and 2/2 Imp CoA is because I forgot to respec before the raid. Was testing MC uptime using both Corruption and CoA on the target at the same time on the dummies using 1/3 MC, 2/3 MC, but never got around to 3/3 before the raid started. Got sidetracked buying consumables on the AH and forgot to go back and redo the spec. Shortly before the raid started, the Warlocks agreed to not use Corruption for the night because people were complaining about debuffs falling off and we wanted to see if it made a difference.

I don't really have a "rotation". More like I have an opening sequence and go with the flow from there since haste procs can change things on the fly.

Opener goes CoA -> Chaos Bolt -> Immolate.

From there the pace has been set and I spam Incinerate and Conflagrate when Immolate has less than 3 seconds duration left and refresh CoA as it falls off.

I use my 3 Backdraft charges on Immolate and then Incinerate x2 unless Chaos Bolt has come off cooldown in which one of the Incinerates will be replaced by Chaos Bolt. I had totally forgotten how my Incinerate will be boosted by another Warlock's Immolate so I should have used 3x Incinerate, which I'll be doing from now provided it still works (I know it did pre 3.0, not sure if it's changed or not since then).

If Chaos Bolt comes off of cooldown a tad before or during my Conflagrate, then I open my Backdraft sequence with Chaos Bolt, then Immolate, then Incinerate.

I always try to cast my Chaos Bolt and CoA sometime before reapplying Immolate (if possible, meaning CB is off cooldown and CoA has ran it's full duration) so that I have the most free time during Immolate's duration to maximize Incinerate usage.

Not sure if all this is optimal, but it seems to make sense and is definitely working for me.

I just tried out the same build, with 1 pt in demonic empowerment. Just macroed it into immolate.

Wow Web Stats

4574 dps, although i wasn't flasked. I do think its a solid build initially, but I question its scaling power without SNF.

0/41/30, 0/30/40 +1, and 0/13/5x are all very similar in the sense that your cast sequence is the same. Hopefully the data sorts out any differences.