Warlockery: A Primer on Playing a Purple Square (current 4.0.3)

The goal here is to compile several key sources of information about how to most successfully play a warlock in PVE. I'll try to remember to head back here and update things as Cataclysm progresses. First a few caveats: 1) I use ElitistJerks, MMOChamp, WorldofRaids, and so forth, as sources; if you're looking for an original source start looking in those places. 2) If you have a comment, you're welcome to make it. If you're just looking to prattle on about what you "feel" should be a better (fill in the blank: gem to use, spell rotation, stat priority, etc) I'd very much prefer you keep your unresearched opinion to yourself. IF, however, you've got some solid math and/or reasoning to show that I'm wrong PLEASE DO comment and let me know. 3) Each and every one of my comments is aimed at increasing Raid DPS. I understand that personal DPS is one of the most important components of Raid DPS; however, Raid DPS is ALWAYS the end goal of the warlock.

I've been asked to play Destruction in my 10-man (primarily to have a source of replenishment as well as some other buffs), however, I'll do my best to focus this guide on more general warlock guidance as there are some new things to consider in cata. 

Dark Intent

By now, you've become familiar with Dark Intent--the new warlock buff. For the uninitiated, here's what it does:

1. It applies a 3% haste buff to both the casting warlock and that warlock's target (cannot be self-cast). This does stack--that is, if there are 2 warlocks in raid, and they "trade" dark intents (like mages traded focus magic) they will indeed stack additively to a 6% haste buff. Don't do this. It's stupid. Very stupid. Why? See point 2.

2. Dark Intent also applies stacks of dark intent. Stacks are applied on your target when one of your periodic damage attacks is a critical strike. When the target of your dark intent crits with a periodic DoT (or HoT), they apply one stack of dark intent on you. Each stack of dark intent equates to 3% additional DoT damage or HoT healing up to a maximum of 3 stacks. The reason "trading" dark intent is a bad idea is that regardless of how many times you have the dark intent buff on you, one character can only gain a maximum of 9% increased DoT damage or HoT healing. By trading the buff (with one other warlock), you're essentially giving only 2 people 9% increased periodic damage or healing, while you could have 4 people with 9% increased periodic damage or healing.

Who do I cast dark intent on?

This post answers that question in some detail. In short, given that healers are doing much to conserve mana, they may not be throwing out HoTs like they did in Wrath. Their good play may actually make them a less desirable target for your DI. If you cast DI on a healer, it should probably be a resto druid or a raid healing holy priest.

One of the fun things about DI is that it allows for certain class synergies in raids. For instance an affliction warlock who DIs a shadow priest adds about 4.1k raid dps (in iLvL 372 gear). Meanwhile, the identical affliction warlock who DIs a boomkin gets about 3.4k extra raid dps. Here's the cool thing about that: If said affliction lock looked only at his or her own personal dps gain, he's likely to choose the boomkin--he gains more from buffing the boomkin, but the raid loses 500 dps.

Moral of the story: Do - read the above linked post and maximize your Dark Intent usage based on your specific raid's requirements. Don't - be a selfish fucktard who ends up costing your raid 500 dps because you want to squeeze out an extra 9 dps.

Fel Flame

We got green fire!!!! Ok, are you over it? You should be. How cruel is Blizzard to give us green fire in a spell we NEVER cast. MAYBE cast this when you're on the run. OR, if you've got some hella awesome haste buff from something that you want to keep on immolate or unstable affliction. Mostly, this doesn't get cast.

Raid Buffs

Food: You'll most likely be using Severed Sagefish Head (Deepsea Sagefish can be caught, relatively reliably, off the shore of Twilight Highlands--don't look for schools, just fly out to a wrecked boat or small island and cast off) although if you're short on hit you may also opt for Grilled Dragon, and finally, IF you're desperately trying to get to the 50% haste threshold to get another dot-tick you might opt for Basilisk Liverdog. Note, intellect is the best stat a warlock can get, I believe this is true regardless of what spec you play. As a general rule of thumb, your dps will go up more per point of intellect than anything else. It's going to be the safest choice to use +intellect food.

Flask: Flask of the Draconic Mind. Hopefully you knew that already.

Pot: Volcanic Potion. Again, a no-brainer.

Hit Rating

Things changed for Warlocks (and many other DPS casters) with Cataclysm. Hit no longer provides the most dps per point up to the hit cap. (This may be true-er for Destro than other specs, I can't say for sure...ok, I just went and double checked and now I can say for sure). For both pre-raid 346 and late T11 372, Intellect is more important than Hit. What this means is that there may be some circumstances when it's okay--and where you'll bring more damage to the raid--by NOT being hit capped. It's not like hit is something you'd need to avoid, it's just not something one needs to obsess about. This is a substantial change, as I understand it, from the way warlocks have been in any previous release (I didn't play in vanilla, but from what I read, this was not the case).

Presently, the spell hit cap is 1742. Because all gear a warlock would use has Int on it anyway, I've been gemming to hit the hit cap as well. However, I've been careful to use +int +hit gems rather than straight hit gems, in most cases.

Enchants

A post over at EJ (which can be found here) details what you should use, materials and money permitting. One note of disagreement I have is with the glove enchant he suggests. While I do believe that Jmickey (the author of the thread at EJ) is right about the optimal Cataclysm enchant, I think that according to scale values the old Wrath +28 spell power should provide the greatest dps increase unless one was using that particular haste enchant to bump them over a threshold.

Based on the latest simulationcraft outputs as of now, the most conservative haste : spell power scale value ratio is the 372 BiS geared affliction warlock. That ratio is 1.4442 : 2.5882. Meaning this: the glove enchant should, unless I'm missing something here, return 72.21 dps for the haste enchant and 72.46 dps for the spell power enchant. For all other gear levels and specs the difference is more pronounced in favor of the spell power enchant.

Haste Thresholding

I'll probably have to add more about this later too, but I've alluded to the idea of haste thresholds above. They're pretty important, so I'll mention them in some more depth here. Primarily, haste thresholds have the greatest effect on Destruction Warlocks because of the way that haste affects immolate and the way immolate affects the destro nuke, Conflagrate.

I'll make it easy. When you get enough haste, you get an extra tick of immolate. Without any haste on your gear, just through regular raid haste buffs, you'll probably get an extra tick of immolate. You'll only need 10% haste to achieve this. The next threshold is at 581 haste (30%). At 2639, you'll hit 50% haste and get 3 extra ticks of immolate. For present gear levels, a destro lock will probably end up being best off at 581 haste...that extra 2000 haste is just going to be a rough grind with current gear.

Crowd Control

Although you haven't used it for an expansion, it turns out, you do have some crowd control. You can fear humanoids and banish elementals and demons. Please don't fear things without glyphing into fear. You may only fear one target at a time. Same with banish.