Shadowbolt does not refresh Corruption. 5/5 Everlasting Affliction tooltip is: "(...)and your Drain Life and Haunt spells have a 100% chance to reset the duration of your Corruption spell on the target."

I repeat: it's questionable if Hit is more cost-efficient stat than Spell Power even before you reach that partial hit cap. By the time you get enough Spell Power to make it worth gemming for Hit you will probably have capped it anyway, at least for talented spells. I would make a bet that it's worth capping Shadow Bolt hit for Affliction (when Affliciton is capped with Suppression) no earlier than at 5000 Spell Power, and then you still may benefit more from other ratings.

In order to want to cap hit for Soulshatter first of all you must make a reasonable assumption that you may need Soulshatter if everything goes fine. Reality is that when everything goes fine it doesn't seem to be needed.

While Haunt miss is indeed an issue, DOT miss is more of a nuissance than a catastrophe, since in reality you don't have any rotation to screw to begin with.

What I remember is that around 2000 Spell Power, Chaos Bolt wins this race for Spell Power. The breakpoint is somewhere between 2500 and 3000 (a guess), but those calculations done didn't really account for Immolate and Corruption misses taking away damage from Incinerates rather than themselves, they only accounted for Chaos Bolt never missing which happened to be absolutely enough at that gear level.

I've been running 14% hit, +3% from Suppression to cap Affliction. Absolutely necessary to not have Haunt resists, not so much for the sake of the debuff, but rather to keep Corruption rolling. Getting something like +940 Spellpower Corruption rolling (Renew Corr. when Sundial procs and activate Mark of the War Prisoner) keeping this larger tick up is quite important.

If Destruction stays at 14%- not a huge deal, but more likely than not the slack will be picked up by Misery/Imp FF anyway.

I'm pretty sure that every time Corruption is renewed by Haunt it recalculates the damage rather than continuing with trinketed damage from the previous application.

I'd like to see more comparisons between cataclysm and ISB for an affliction-capped warlock.

Regardless of whether or not spelldamage is better than hit in a pure mathmatical sense, most warlocks are still going to want to wind up wanting to be hitcapped.

Hit scales like haste; the more damage and crit you have, the more you like hit. Since hit is cheaper in terms of item budget than haste (or crit, but that's more complicated) and should produce similar returns, a warlock trying maximize DPS using real gear should be prioritizing pieces that provide hit, assuming equal item levels. Probably hit will be prioritized over haste anyway, because at a fairly low level of gear (ilvl 200-213) the combination of haste from gear, talents, buffs and procs starts bumping you into the hard GCD cap. For a class doing a large part of it's DPS using GCD casts, this is something to be avoided when possible.

The real discussion with hit for affliction is about the opportunity cost of cataclysm. Suppression should be mandatory for both affliction and destruction builds, both because of the mana cost component and because there isn't much else in the low end of the affliction tree. Taking cataclysm in a standard 56/0/15 build costs us 3 points of ISB. The -3% mana cost lets us cast 3% more shadowbolts over the length of a fight (time spent not-lifetapping), so the question is whether or not 3*(uptime) percent more damage is greater than the flat 3% more SB damage you get from the +hit. Should be a pretty easy question to answer given some study of the buff's uptime, and until gear gets to the point where going over the hitcap becomes a concern, it should come down pretty decisively on the side of cataclysm.

I think destruction takes both hit talents regardless, just because of where they fall in the trees.

Sorry about the slipup with Everlasting Affliction. That increases the cost of a missed haunt by 3/5 of a shadowbolt, effectively making a haunt resist similar to a DoT resist. Since you're losing a lower-damage spell than the one you're casting it's less than 1% DPS per 1% hit, although much more comparable than it used to be.

Kana, if I'm understanding you right, you're saying that since hit is still affliction's best rating (which is probably true), and gear has multiple DPS stats, we're going to end up with hit because we'll be going for dmg/hit pieces rather than dmg/crit or dmg/haste. While I agree this is true that we'll end up with a good amount of hit, that doesn't necessarily mean we'll end up hit-capped. I haven't paged through various levels of gear, but if you were to need gems to hit-cap, it would be better not to and go for raw +dmg instead.

Kana - You also have the option of taking 1/3 Eradication and no Dark Pact, or 2/3 Erad and 4/5 ISB. There are several combinations if you wanted 3/3 Cataclysm. It just depends on if the second and third points from Erad, or the fifth point in ISB are worth more dps than 3% to SB/Immo.

I think 3/3 eradication is probably still better.

I can't find the post now, but depending on how you think eradication's ICD works, the last point adds 4-5% more uptime for the buff, for a net gain of about 1% DPS (20% haste 5% more often = 1 percent native haste), maybe a little bit less. The first and second points contribute more.

If you assume SB is contributing 1/3 of your damage (possibly even a high estimate based on the WWS I've seen linked) and that you crit enough to keep the buff up 100% of the time, every talent point in ISB is generating .66% more DPS. And between haunt eating charges and current gear levels, no one's coming even close to 100% uptime.

Edit: and yeah, I could lose dark pact. But it's such a useful ability on fights when lifetapping is sort of dicey (like loatheb, for example) that I have a hard time dropping it.

To each their own. I prefer to be prepared for the occasional catastrophe, rather than assume it won't happen.

I realize that I don't have a rotation per se. Affliction DPS isn't a rotation; this has been well established over and over again on this board. However, 'rotation' is a word most will recognize; if I refer to a Haunt miss 'screwing up my priority queue in the affliction DPS scheduling algorithm.' that will fly over a few heads.

Where was this shown? I would like to see because I have a hard time believing it especially when talking about raid bosses.