Well, that is kind of strange. Looks like its only about 5% now (or always has been?). Nevertheless, since it is a factor for all spells, it is not really important for the results as a whole (of course it changes the results, but it does not change the ratio between stats, for example). Nevertheless, I will change that - either to 0.95 or by removing it completely.

In general, if something affects everything negatively equally and is random chance such as boss mitigating resists are, it would be best to not compute it at all. The Warlock DPS spreadsheet just ignores them and has been updated to include all worthwhile LK gear. It's only missing a few enchants/gems at this point in time:
Leulier's Warlock DPS Spreadsheet

I personally recommend looking through that to verify your equations. Also, your spec is definitely not what I would call standard for high dps Warlocks. You put a full 3 points into Cataclysm which is decent, but definitely not ideal. Most specs will include at least 1 point in Molten Core and only 1 point in Eradication as the talent is quite bad. I recommend reading:
World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> Talent Review: Eradication
To summarize for Eradication:
Q = 0.04, 1 point invested: 2.4%. Benefit from the first point: 2.4% spell haste.
Q = 0.07, 2 points invested: 3.3%. Benefit from the second point: 0.9% spell haste.
Q = 0.10, 3 points invested: 4.0%. Benefit from the third point: 0.7% spell haste.
It is silly to go 3 points in considering the rapidly diminishing returns that you get. Just get the first point and then go spend elsewhere.

Dam I thought If he fails to apply it and once you c the debuff in your dot rotation it will again benifit you. Anyway Can a US player PLZ PLZ report this again on the Damage dealing Forums. GC read the crap there quite often and hopefully can hear something soon.

Also what Meta are you guys using ?
From old habits and stuff I went for the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond
though you have to have 2 blue slots which is annoying and on top of that I just saw in here its rated really low. But I'm quite sure the guy did not calculate the 3% extra damage and did the Lazy mans just 21cri rating.
Will Bracing Earthsiege Diamond or Ember Skyflare Diamond better? Ofc reduce treat is still nice as You have fights like malygos where you will be treat caped and have more TPS than tank after the 1st air phase alone. But this mean using 1 blue gem. Ember one is really nice and also the highest DPS from the looks also.

I am using the Ember one due to lack of Blue gems, but come to think of it Socketing 2 blue gems for 21 crit rating and 3% crit damage is quite a waste for an affli lock. So I'll keep my Ember one and probably only resocket if I go destro.

Update:

• I included life taps in the calculation. I think the results are good enough now to spot the final errors and start filling other parts like the different talent builds - I will just stick to what the talent build discussion offers there.
• Included Spirit now, and added the effect of BoK to the computation.
• Removed the "Boss Level" damage decrease. It is still there as it seems, but it's not 15% (more like 5%). As it is a general factor, it does not change the results as a whole, so I just removed it.
• Changed the way Malediction affects the damage output: It's just +3% total damage now. (I was confused by the german tooltip, but the Ironforge dummies weren't).
• Still have to look into the eradication thing

I added a note making clear that all the dps-values are based on the model data and therefore are not to be taken without thinking what they mean. The purpose of this thread is to understand the basic math and effects behind affliction dps and every single spell as well as the way affliction works in general, not to find a perfect equip comparison - that's what spreadsheets are for (and a lot better at it!).

To the +crit-damage meta gem discussion above: I ran this through my simulation programm and wrote the result into the thread. To make it short: For an affliction spec, the gem just does not hit it anymore. As the difference is just a few dps, it does not really matter, though.

This is what puzzles me: Regardless if it "doesn't really matter" or not, isn't it still the "best" option still? Some people might debate if it's worth it or not, but since it improves your critical damage (and since most affliction specs also include Ruin) isn't it still worthwhile? I'm a bit tired but hopefully you get what I mean.

One issue to consider on the demonic aegis question is whether or not you include immolate in your dot rotation. If you do, the relative value of aegis goes up, because you have an extra dot to leverage and SB time goes down.

I think on an immo-free rotation, ruin is no-brainer better, at least once you start getting fairly geared. With immo, it may be a bit closer.

Not using Immo is a no-brainer, hauntwise you are gimping yourself skipping it, unless you tot around murlock level gear. And I'm not even so sure about that murloc thingy.

I would really like to see proper calculations around DA, since arguments so far were: "everyone can see apples are better than oranges" and "IMO..."

With huge weight behind Spell Power as Afflock, it seems reasonable to me that DA'ed spirit should give more dps, point to point, than crit. My math's weak, but just increasing Namnalia's value (I know it's not very accurate, but that's all I can do) you get DPS Value for 1 point of Spirit = 0,4(4). Let's say that less tapping and stronger Firebolts equalize lesser DPS/ Spellpower of 53/13/5 (compared to baseline 56/0/15), that's pretty significant outscale of 1 crit, even allowing pretty heavy margin of (my) error.

And that's still assuming item budget for 1 spirit = 1 crit, which is obviously false.

This means to me, that if you can find Moonshroud-type gear for enough of your slots, and just anything with some spirit and no crit for rest, stacking spirit should give somewhat bigger results than 56/0/15's get from stacking crit (an even haste).

I recognize possibilty of being wrong, but still I think some people didn't wholly woke up from out of TBC...

PS. This is all theory, since lock's tiers are obviously optimized for ruin builds.

The budget for 1 spirit is that of 1 crit rating. That was the entire reason they put in ratings in the first place.

Any implicatoins of the shadow embrace bug being fixed? That 10% dot damage loss is pretty huge. We run with two affliction locks which really doesnt help, seems theres a race who can get the first shadowbolt/haunt up which is very dissapointing.

Is there any way to make quarts divide the channel bar to see DS ticks? or is there any way to really make them stand out?

I had this same issue beforehand and was really struggling to optimize my DPS sub-25% when we needed to drain soul.

Best way I found to deal with this is to create a new custom event in SCT (named it Soul Tick), that would sticky crit in my scrolling combat any time Drain Soul dealt damage to my target.

Here's an example of a Drain Soul custom event:

http://mpu9aa.bay.livefilestore.com/...ustomevent.jpg

Trying to do a similar function in Power Auras, but since it's specialty is tracking debuffs and buffs, not damage, the closest I got was making an aura for when drain soul is active on an enemy, with a timer, so I can at least get a general idea of how many seconds have passed since i started draining.

Some errors with how you are calculating damage done.

Talent damage modifiers are additive of each other, not multiplicative. So for example, shadow mastery and contagion should be added, not multiplied with each other. The only exception to this I know of is malediction. The passive bonus is multiplicative.

Also, I don't see improved corruption in your math there? Improved corruption is also additive, by the way.

Here is some sample math showing my corruption DPCT calculations (note that my "stats" used were 2000 spell power, 40% crit raid buffed, and hit capped):

1080 base damage + ((120% coefficient + 36% empowered corruption + 30% everlasting affliction) * 2000) =
1080 + (1.86 * 2000) = 4800 base damage.
Modifiers:
4800 * (10% improved corruption + 15% shadow mastery + 5% contagion) * 3% malediction * 13% earth and moon * 3% sanctified retribution (ret pally) * 20% haunt * 10% shadow embrace =
4800 * 1.30 * 1.03 * 1.13 * 1.03 * 1.20 * 1.10 = 9874 modified damage.
Pandemic: 9874 * 1.22 = 12046
12046 / 1.5 second GCD = 8031DPCT


All affliction warlocks should be using immolate. It's a no-brainer. I presume that's what you meant, but figured it should be clarified. Especially considering the immolate glyph is one of the best glyphs there is for an afflock.

This isn't really correct. ?? or lvl83 bosses have an inherent 24 magical resistance to all schools of magic. That doesn't equate to anything near 15% mitigation. I believe it's closer to around 3% mitigation.

Glad to see you updated more of your guide. By the way, feel free to copy/paste anything you like from my other thread about affliction rotations into your own here.

For a rading affliction lock I typically cast 8 different spells

Shadow bolt 2.5 seconds
Haunt 1.5 seconds
Unstable Affliction 1.5 seconds
Immolate 1.5 seconds
Corruption 1.5 seconds (GCD)
Curse of Agony 1.5 seconds (GCD - no talent)
Siphon Life 1.5 seconds (GCD)
Life Tap 1.5 seconds (GCD)

In my gear and with raid buffs I have the following haste
20% base from gear/spell stone
5% from wrath of air totem
--- possible 30% from bloodlust
--- possible 20% from eradication

If I proc eradication and 7 out of the 8 spells (any thing but shadow bolt) I am clipping the global cooldown bottom end cap of 1.0 seconds right?
The same goes for bloodlust.

Am I wasting any haste above 33% for 7 out of the 8 spells I cast?
If so perhaps I should look for more gear with + crit instead of + haste (currently I have been giving about the same value to each for comparing items).

The problem as I see it (and as I noticed last night) is that you should just keep it up as usual but you WILL encounter problems with DoTs clipping if you have to much haste on your own. My 1.5 casts (UA, Immo) ended up at 0.8 sec which wasn't very good and made things harder, especially if Eradication procced as well (can't recall if 0.8 casts was /w Eradication or not). I'm seriously considering getting less haste so that with Bloodlust DoTs end up as 1sec casts.

This is something that I am currently puzzled about. Previous week I tried to keep full "rotation" up during both hero and eradication, and it was indeed annoying in terms of watching dot timer to make sure that no dots are clipping. And honestly I had a feeling that I am missing something, I guess a desire to nuke it was.

I wander if it worth trying to keep SB/Haunt(to refresh corruption and SE) only during Hero/Eradication (or DS/Haunt if it's below 25%), besides that, the proc rate of 2T7 is quite high so its bonus might be more useful in the current scenario?

I am going to try myself tomorrow, but would be interesting to hear from somebody who is running with 500+ haste on gear what do they think.

I try and refresh my dots before bloodlust is cast, especially if its a 25% or so bloodlust.

It is still recommended that you keep all your dots up. I only have 475 haste atm and I'm still doing that regardless of what haste buff i'm under.

Edit: Formerly this was evidence in support of SE working for all locks, but after another round of tests with my aff lock pal, we have realized we're incorrect and SE is not working for everyone, just as has been stated. The initial tick increases we were seeing in our first casual test were smaller increases probably just due to Soul Siphon. To those who saw the post before, I still don't know how to explain how close our dot ticks were on the boss - that seemed to be the "true" evidence that with similar spell power we had almost identical dot ticks. But clearly that was due to other factors which would probably be explainable if researched enough. So, sorry for posting what ended up being a useless post. It's clear to me now that SE does not work for more than one person.

While testing we did figure out that they removed the old double-casting of drains to benefit from soul siphon, not sure if that has been reported/verified. Drain life not increasing second lock's drain life, same with drain soul, so drains are not benefiting from drains of the same name from any warlock.

The tests done on this might all be on target dummies. And maybe the bug only exist on those?

That's odd because in our guild you can tell who got the SE buff: Wow Web Stats - take a look at Luxury and Minarets

Note that Minarets was not glyphed for Immolate or Siphon Life. But if you take a look at our values:

Shadowbolt: 3882 vs 4129
Corruption: 1527 vs. 1812
UA: 1232 vs. 1475
CoA: 632 vs. 795

Our gear was about at the same level at the time, I've gotten quite a few upgrades since then. Maybe we should test on Dr. Boom?