I can't tell much from these figures, excluding on XT-002's kill shot there. Overall is nice, but that includes a lot of factors. In one fight where you killed them is what I was looking for, and so far as I can tell you were neck and neck on a boss kill, which comes up almost precisely as I expected on a standstill fight like XT. Unless you get bombed, you just stay in the group.

I'm finding it really does depend on the fight for what one comes out on top. I think later fights pets are going to become a significant problem for a lot of players. What made my numbers top all others really was mastering the Destro Weaving of Soul Fire. I noticed on some attempts where I got sloppy doing that you totally lose a lot of damage. You must get that weaving down, and yes, its not possible to maintain it perfectly - but get it as close as you can its a huge boost.

And I'll go back and amend my statement about the "death" of the spec. I'm answering some messages I got from others asking me if it was really dead, not that Supplicium stated it was gone.

Sorry I've been tottally side tracked by IRL and In game stuff, in such a way that I haven't been reading enough.

This does sound promising for deep destro builds though. I think you are right and I will amend my first post when I get some time (really sorry about the laziness If any one wants to try and tackle some edits let me Know and I'll change them)

Pretty sure I told you this yesterday in guild chat!

Also, how exactly is the simulator working with lifetap? I keep seeing these, you must lifetap every 20 seconds posts. The question is, if the boss is sub 20%, and it will take 30 seconds to kill him or something and you have enough mana to last those 30 seconds - do you lifetap? I don't think the simulator takes into account active mana and mana required to end a fight vs. lifetapping anyways. It's a fairly interesting question. Also, if you're full mana mid fight, do you lifetap and spend the gcd even if the mana back has no substantial dps increase? Deep destro with replenishment has very little need for lifetap in comparison to other specs (you still have to, but nowhere near as often).

EDIT: Nevermind. Stupid question.

Remember- you are LTing to keep the buff up - you can put rank 1 on your castbar/macro it. On fights with a lot of raid damage, I make primary use of rank 1 - I max-rank when I know I am not expecting the raid to take much damage for a few moments. Example: Ignus - I rank 1 on the leadup to the flamecast, and I max rank inbetween (once the raid is caught up - I keep the whole raid up on my ui in order to facilitate this).

Yeah - sorry we didn't get in far enough to see a variety of kill shots - we're going back in tonight.

We definately were close on the kill shot, but I was sidelined dealing with a sudden surge of healbots from my corner - on a lot of the 1% wipes, there was a bit more of a gap between us.

On the pets issue - I am not having issues yet - I was pretty good at keeping my imp alive on Sarth 3d, so I hope I can micro him enough to keep him from being a liability - time will tell though.

We're working our way through ulduar 10 and 25. 10 is close to being cleared (2 bosses left) and in 25 we're reaching the tier bosses. Now for us warlocks a very important question related to the life tap glyph pops up.

The life tap glyph has its current value thanks to the 4 piece T7 bonus. Very soon, we'll start replacing those tiers with T8. The T8 2 set bonus is good enough to make you replace your T7.5. For me this means I basically already lost my T7 4 set bonus.

Now for the question at hand: Is it still worth casting life tap every 20 seconds without the T7 4 set bonus? Even better: Is it worth HAVING the glyph of life tap without the T7 4 set bonus?

About 40/31 --> It is very much alive, although I'm pushing out much higher numbers as affliction. On XT the battle is between me and the rogues. Our (very skilled) 40/31 Warlock doesn't come close.

I'm not sure about the casting of life tap every 20 seconds, but as for the second part, there aren't many glyph choices for Affliction since they removed the need for both SL and Immo glyphs. I doubt the LT glyph is worse than UA/SB/Corr/etc. glyphs.

Could it be because it's much harder to do the Weave rotation than the Drain Soul rotation? Anyways, 40/31 has been nerfed and it's been proven that Alliction now beats it as seen in THIS post.

As a side note, 41/30 is higher DPS than affliction right now unless you use a DG. Once Ulduar geared Affliction is said to be the better of the two.

And just a note to those who are currently running the 41/30 build. The builds that have been listed have 3 points in Molten Core. If you take one point out and move it into Demonic Tactics you should see a slight DPS increase. This can be seen by using SimCraft.

Just wanted to recommend adding a "Recommended Addons" to the OP. I remember reading a post on what people were using to monitor Lite Tap buff uptime, but I cannot seem to find it now.

I use Power Auras. Puts a little texture effect around your character and you can enable a timer.

I'm considering swapping over to Affliction, and I was curious why you spec 2 points into Demonic Power. From the looks of the pie charts and DPET graphs on page one, Lash of Pain is on par with a Succy's melee. I'm considering throwing those two points in Imp HS.

Am I missing something in regards to Lash of Pain or is it a case of a very marginal DPS increase and 2 extra points laying around?

Edit: Sorry, I realize I should have taken this question to the Affliction thread.

AS a side Not about addons, I refuse to post about addons in this thread, every addon thread in every forum has any where from 3-4 reported posts a day, filled with people who don't listen to the rules of the thread about said addons. As such there will be 0 discussion about addons in this thread from here on out. IF you so choose to make a post about addons, feel free, I won't stop you, but there are so so so manny addons for warlocks, or that can be used by warlocks, I see no point in making a specific post about "which one is best" because there are none, there are literally thousands of options.

I'm in the middle of a major edit for some of the specs I will update the OP when It gets done.

You are correct, we are picking up Demonic Power because it is a small DPS increase with two extra points laying around. It may be a good idea to pick up Imp HS instead if no other lock is picking it up for your raid.

The Ember Skyflare was recommended as best for all builds on one of these threads. I think it was the Mage Equivalent - Destro Lock thread.

3% increased crit damage comes down to about 0.6% to 1% total damage increase presuming crit rate of 20-33%. The 21 crit component of the gem supposedly translates to 8SP using a conversion factor from that same thread (0.40) but is only barely relevant as is the 2% int increase and slight crit that comes with that. The 35SP from the Ember Skyflare approaches, and will dip below, a 1% increase as SP from all the other sources increase. A simple way of looking at it is like this:

Assume you have 2000SP. The bigger the number, the smaller the fraction of the damage that is the base damage so I'm setting base damage aside for the purpose of this example. 35SP out of 2000SP is about 1.75% and hence roughly as much an increase in your DPS. If you have been busy and have accumulated 3500SP, 35SP is down to being worth 1% of your DPS.

It's a bit of a see-saw with crit and SP to determine if the Chaotic is better than the Ember. As a deep destro with only a small chunk of the T7.5 grade gear on and a crit rate only nearing 20% UB, it's not even close to being able to take the Chaotic over the Ember yet.

But the way the 3% increased crit damage interacts with Ruin means you get 4.5% extra damage on crits. And real raid-buffed crit rates are exceeding 40% these days, so the real damage increase from the chaotic skyflare gem is more like 2%.

And calling the equivalent of 8SP barely relevant compared to 35SP is kinda silly - why don't you just replace 35SP with 28SP in your spell power evaluation? (Or, actually, 30SP since 2% int works out to approximately 2SP using the 0.40 sp/crit conversion factor.)

At which point you end up with 1% damage increase from the ember skyflare if you're at a pretty conservative 3k raid-buffed SP. Meaning chaotic skyflare is almost twice as good.

EDIT: Or, you know, much more than twice as good, since both your numbers and your assumptions were off.

Is it more like 9% ? From simcraft on a 0/40/31 build :

incinerate Count= 97.2| 3.0sec DPE= 8366|39% DPET= 4829 DPR= 17.2 Miss=0.0% Hit=5328 Crit=11135|13152|52.3%

11135/5328 = 209%

Yes. 209% is 4.5% more than 200%.

Looking back at the forums, I could not find out definitely if Imp SB stacked with Scorch. I just tested on the Boss test dummy with a Mage and the answer is yes. Both debuffs stayed on the test dummy.

Can anyone else confirm this is correct?

The both stayed on the dummy, but the effect still doesn't stack. All it accomplishes is taking up another debuff slot on a target.

Both stay, correct. But only one should actually be taken into account.


That said, I run with an Affliclock in Ulduar10, and I've noticed we are constantly knocking each other's ISB debuff off, replacing it with the other's.

It isn't intended, but apparently they were stacking for a few days. This was fixed just a few hours ago: