This may have been answered in another thread and I apologize in advance if it has for my laziness. This may also be a stupid question, but I just want to make sure what I'm thinking is correct.

When your target is below 25% health and you begin to cast Drain Soul over Shadowbolt, is it essential to not let Haunt run it's full duration? Haunt has a 12 second effect as does Shadow Embrace. With the cast time of Haunt, you'll lose any accumulated Shadow Embrace stacks, assuming you let Haunt run it's full duration, correct? So would it be correct to basically cast Haunt every time the CD is up during the last 25%?

My starting rotation is UA > Haunt > Corr > CoA > SL > bolt
UA then Haunt makes sure no second of Haunt is wasted, UA will benefit from it, corr applied soon as possible.No bolt for SE before dots. I'd rather have Corr up asap, -5% less for that tick, but it ticks earlier!

I suspect the DS thing is a common question so it should probably be added to the guide.

You do not need to let DS run its full 15-second duration. Do not treat it as a 15-second channel. Treat it as 5 3-second channels. I know we've drilled into your head previously never to interrupt a spellcast before, but that's because we were dealing with casted spells, not channeled spells. Shadowpriests already know, and we're finding out, that the reason you don't interrupt a casted spell is that you lose the *entire* cast, and there is no spell whose DPCT is worth it when you add a 0.5s deadtime to the beginning of it, which is basically what you're doing when you cancel (or wait for a duration/cooldown, which is the same thing). This logic does not apply to channeled spells, because if you cancel it early you still get some of the spell. Your mana efficiency goes down, but don't actually lose DPS or DPCT. With Drain Soul it's imperative to cut it as close as you can to the ticks, since three seconds between ticks is a long time (longer than shadowbolt). But remember, DS is only better than shadowbolt, not any other affliction spells in your rotation, so if you can interrupt it with no* damage loss you should.


*Ok fine, lifetap time. If you're a smart warlock you'll have tapped to full and be ready for 25%.

I am pretty sure this is actually 180 base +damage at level 80.

My fault, changed it (and some other small things).

My next plan is to do the calculation of dps/dpct of all the spells used with the stats used above (and naxx10-stats and naxx-25-stats as well) and give a good estimation of "normal" dps. I can then easily derive the values of hit, spelldamage, crit and haste and start to rate equip and gems based on that (a little bit like the "Gearing your warlock" system from canadiangimp).
I'll also add some of the specs from the spec-discussion-thread.

MaxDPS.com - Affliction Warlock DPS Gear Rankings

Can be used as a rough guide on the pieces of interest to Affliction and Locks in general.

MaxDPS is generally a horribly inaccurate reflection of what gear/stats are good and bad. People would be much better off using the sim (and the spreadsheet when it's updated) to figure out their stat EPs. You can then use LootRank (I think?) to plug in the EPs and get recommended gear.

I started to link the Talents/Spells for better reading.

I added calculations for damage and dpct for every spell and an estimation for overall damage. As the result is obviously wrong (should be 3k+) I'm now searching for the error(s) in the calculation. There are also some questions left:

-How does "Amplify Curse" work exactly? Does it really reduce the Base Cast Time of all Curses to 1s ? What about haste then, is it still applied afterwards (as I remember no spell should ever be faster than 1s)?

-Did I get all the damage coefficients right (probably not)?

-Any other mistakes?

Haste has no effect on Curses past 1s as the GCD has a hard cap of 1 second minimum. As for DPCT calculations, fallenman has some good ones: Affliction Raiding Rotations/Guide

I think we should merge the discussion from the two separate affliction threads into one single thread; just need to ensure that the proper information is updated on the first post.

I'm still testing this myself. But Immolate's DPCT is not that high. DS kills it, especially at 25%. I'd rather just maintain aff debuffs and DS at 25%. Testing will tell, but I have a feeling thats going to work out.