The third and final posting in the series Notlupus wrote on warlock DPS. Yes, I am aware this is not a warlock focused blog. No, I am not turning away from my shadow priest to do nothing my play my lovely little warlock. Yes, Lupus is as attractive as his writing indicates. I believe he is engaged. Having answered all the question I got emails about in the last couple days, what follows is actually kind of useful.
Destruction
This tree, while the lowest of the 3 in terms of dps, offers better burst damage and some measure of utility through stuns (Shadowfury) and replenishment (Improved Soul Leech).
Stat weighting in T10 gear is as follows.
- SP=2.1192
- Crit=1.4179
- Haste=1.1847
- Spi=0.9287
- Int=0.6531
This one requires a bit more clarification. Haste scales more poorly with destro than it does with affliction and
demonology, but it remains a better stat to stack than crit UP TO A POINT. Eventually you’ll start reaching <1 sec cast times with your backdraft procs, which only results in lost dps. At that point you want to focus on crit through your gear, though never with gems. That number still remains fairly high, in the thousand range.
Talents
Most people tend to take a 0/13/58 spec with 2 points in backlash. I find that to be a fairly useless talent, and it’s better to take one point out of backlash and into Soul Link in the demo tree. The 20% damage reduction is very nice with all the raid damage in ICC, and I’m sure your healers will be grateful. Regardless, both will be listed.
The gain in 20% DR outweighs the 1% crit, especially with your talents already increasing your crit rate.
Improved Soul Leech is mainly for you. It lets you focus less on life tapping and more on pew pew, increasing your dps. Shadowfury is situational, though useful on fights like Saurfang where you need to slow the bloodbeasts and Lich King with the Valk’yr.
Glyphing
With the changes to immolate, and it’s ability to crit, Glyph of Immolate has actually become pretty attractive. You might consider that in place of Glyph of Lifetap, depending upon your amount of spirit. Generally, you’d want immo over life tap.
Glyph of Immolate
Increases the periodic damage of your Immolate by 10%.
Glyph of Incinerate
Increases the damage done by Incinerate by 5%.
Glyph of Conflagrate
Your Conflagrate spell no longer consumes your Immolate or Shadowflame spell from the target.
Very important, as you want immo up on your target at all times.
Rotation
Again, more of a priority thing.
Curse of Doom (or Elements) > Immolate > Conflagrate > Chaos Bolt > Incinerate
When first starting, keep in mind that there is a small bit of lag between you and the server. For this reason, after your first immolate, you want to start casting chaos bolt and then conflag, instead of waiting for conflag to register. Otherwise follow the priority list.
Also, there is a macro you want to link with your incinerate cast.
/cast [pet:imp] Fire Bolt
/cast Incinerate
Because of issues with the spell queue system, the imp won’t fireball as often as he actually can. Using this macro will increase your dps by about 100.
And remember
I DON’T CARE WHAT SPEC YOU ARE, USE SEED FOR YOUR AOE GODDAMMIT
“Yes, Lupus is as attractive as his writing indicates. I believe he is engaged.”
I also do the best/most disturbing moans. Ever.
Yes, yes you do.