Warlock
So I guess this is the end...
Scaron — Tue, 03/24/2015 - 20:26
This is a pretty pointless exercise, I suppose. As dissenting voices are clearly no longer allowed in guild...this was going to be a comment on the no longer existent, evidently too controversial thread. Also, it was substantially nicer.
_________
Deleting dissenting voices and silencing posts that simply ask for questions followed by systematically kicking alts without hearing conversation is not what I signed up for.
This is no longer Downfall. This is a gulag.
Elapsed, you've lost it. Take some time. Get it together bro. You can't run a guild like a totalitarian dictatorship.
If you can't handle dissent, you're not able to handle the job of GM. I will miss Downfall. I've missed Downfall since it died long ago.
Not so much goodbye as see you periodically...
Scaron — Sat, 11/19/2011 - 10:31
Hi Friends,
By now most of you know that I've transferred servers on Scaron and am now raiding elsewhere. Just making that known and official. I believe my DK is still in guild and will stay parked on Gorg so that I can periodically log on and fill the Green chat with all sorts of philandery. So, to my friends, I'll miss you...and when I do...I'll log and chat for a bit. DF has been a really fun group and so thanks for all the good times.
One point of order is that at the end of the current Vent-year (sometime in March) I will be discontinuing my role as DF vent administrator. Given that Eric, Grasen, and Myself had been doing most of the ventrillo heavy lifting, y'all may wish to think about whom you'd like to take over that responsibility early next year.
Holla,
Scaron (Brandon)
Useful Demonology Macros
Scaron — Wed, 09/07/2011 - 17:43
Here's what I use to Pop my Moonwell Chalice, Demon Soul, and Metamorphosis (and my Immo Aura, with one button). Here's what the macro does, on the first press you will simultaneously pop your Moonwell Chalice (provided it's located in slot 14) and demon soul, the second macro press will pop metamorphosis (you want a slight delay between these two...testing has shown that chaining them w/o the castsequence results in a metamorphosis that doesn't benefit from the mastery of moonwell chalice) and the third press will pop your immolation aura. If metamorphosis is up, holding down the alt key and pressing the macro button will result in demon leap. So in total, you've got 5 abilities bound to the single button.
#showtooltip [stance:2, mod:alt] Demon Leap; [stance:2] Immolation Aura; [nostance] Metamorphosis
/castsequence [stance:2, mod:alt] Demon Leap; [stance:2] Immolation Aura; [nostance] reset=20/combat 14, Metamorphosis
/cast Demon Soul
And this one for pet switching mid fight. (If you're not farmiliar with macro-ese this macro does the following: When you have no pet out, probably after a wipe you'll summon your felguard, if your felguard is out pressing this macro button will automatically cast a soulburn and then your felhunter with one press, if your felhunter is out this macro will hardcast a felguard...this allows you to demon soul: Felguard midfight while still mostly playing with your felhunter...the optimal playstyle.)
#showtooltip [pet:Felguard] Summon Felhunter; Summon Felguard
/cast [pet:Felguard] Soulburn
/cast [pet:Felguard] Summon Felhunter
/cast [pet:Felhunter] Summon Felguard
/cast [nopet] Summon Felguard
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();
Finally, I've been getting questions about how to do this demo thing for people with warlock alts.
1. Do the dailies and get your Moonwell Chalice. It's the BiS trinket.
2. Never think that you're waiting too long to pop your metamorphosis or trinket/DS. You ALWAYS stack them up.
3. Always pet switch before demon soul. Yes, it's a long cast. If you're timing it correctly, you're only losing 2 shadowbolts worth of damage and the value of the Demon Soul: Felguard is about 4x the damage of a Demon Soul: Felhunter.
4. Using your pot with heroism is not worth it. Use your pot with your CD popping.
5. If you've managed to get an unempowered Bane of Doom up, reapply it after you've popped your CDs. The reason BoD is so good is because half of the time it's juiced by Metamorphosis/MWC/DS. Also, be careful not to refresh BoD until AFTER a juiced BoD has expired...you don't want to lose your last juiced BoD tick.
6. Profit.
Epat probably coming back
Epatrick — Mon, 06/13/2011 - 11:45
Hey guys,
a lot of you probably dont know me, but my two job days are one for a while (probably a long while) so ive decided that ill be resubbing soon. i probably wont be looking to join anything more than randoms, but ill be back in game soon on a semi regular basis. miss you all, hope that raiding and cata are as cool as the screenshots ive been seeing.
epat
Warlockery
Scaron — Wed, 12/29/2010 - 17:25
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.
Warlock Curse Usage
Scaron — Tue, 12/21/2010 - 17:03
With new warlock Banes and Curses being separate, it occurs to me that most fights will have an optimal warlock curse debuff depending on boss abilities.
I'm presuming that we'll never be using CoE as it should be brought by someone else in raid. Meaning the choice of curses is between Weakness (10% physical damage mitigation) and Tongues (30% casting time increase). This will serve as a placeholder and I'll throw out some conjecture based on Saedo's strat pages:
Magmaw: Curse of Tongues
Omnitron Defense System: Curse of Weakness
Chimaeron: Curse of Weakness
Atramedes: Curse of Weakness
Maloriak: Curse of Tongues
To be continued...
4.0.1 Raiding Warlock Guide
Scaron — Fri, 10/15/2010 - 11:58
I'm bored at work so I'm going to use this as a place to compile some raiding Warlock thoughts for until Cataclysm. I'm not going to do a Demo spec at the moment because, well, I don't really see it as raid viable yet so long as an elemental shaman is around the sp buff is now the same.
Word of Warning: This guide is in a state of constant flux as what's live is also in a state of constant flux. For example, presently Demonology is testing as the second strongest DPS spec, ahead of both DL and SB affliction locks...so I may need to write up one of those guides soon. We'll see.
Destruction
Destro looks to be the top warlock spec at the moment, even after the nerf to Searing Pain (which you had to know was coming).
Glyphs: Top main performing prime glyphs are Conflagrate, Imp, and Immolate
Other valuable major glyph: Lifetap (unless your haste is high...1400ish).
Fear, for CC issues is nice too. When glyphed targets cower in terror rather than run around and pull mobs.
Gear: First, get up to 17% hit. 446ish. Remember spirit is worthless, dump your purple purified dreadstones for veiled dreadstones (int / hit). Reforging is okay if you have gear with crit on it, but in many cases it won't be that helpful, since you've probably been stacking haste for the last little while anyway, haven't you. If you can reforge hit (if over cap) or crit to haste or mastery, you should do so. Haste is very slightly better than mastery at the moment, unless you're over the 1406 haste cap. Anything beyond that point should ABSOLUTELY get reforged into Mastery. But, let's be honest...you're only at that point of haste on your gear w/o any more spellstones if you're mostly 277/284 gear...and those folks aren't probably the kind of person who needs to read guides like this. :)
Spec: Pick the dps talents as much as possible to 31 in Destro. Then hop over and pick up some points in Dark Arts and Imp Corruption.
Pet: Imp
Rotation:
Start with a Shadow Burn --> Soul Fire to keep up the Imp SF buff (15% haste buff for 15 seconds if target is over 80% health).
Keep these dots up all the time: Immolate, Bane of Doom, Corruption.
Keep Conflagrate and Chaos Bolt on CD.
Use your instant cast SF when it procs.
Pop Doomguard / Infernal (for multi-targets) if it's up.
Collect loot.
EDIT 3: Neither edit 1 or 2 was helpful. Things are correct as originally posted.
Affliction
Affliction is still a strong contender for a dps spec. Many things remain the same in terms of rotation for affliction. There's technically a viable Drain Life spec which is very different than the Shadowbolt spec. The thing is, if you want to be a DL warlock, your reforging is very different than either a SB afflock or a Destrolock. That means that if you want to be at an optimal level you'd have to reforge if switching between DL Affliction and Destro or SB Affliction.
Personally, my dps has been about equal between DL Affliction and SB affliction and I like to be able to switch to destro, so SB is the way I'm choosing. DL is substantially harder to play and requires you to micromanage each and every facet of your gameplay (no simple button spamming for your filler spell, your range from the target is a substantial issue in order to keep up your 15% dot damage debuff, lots of math in terms of figuring out when to "clip" DL). All in all, if you can manage all that, knock yourself out...but Ghostcrawler says you'll be casting SB again in a few months anyway.
Glyphs: Haunt, Bane of Agony, Lash of Pain
Other major glyphs of importance: Shadowbolt, LifeTap (until haste > 1400). Fear, for CC issues is nice too. When glyphed targets cower in terror rather than run around and pull mobs.
Spec: Pick all the regular dps shit in Affliction to get to 31. You'll have to pick some optional stuff. I only put 1/2 in Jinx as Jinx has only really valuable application on trash. Same reason I skipped on the Seed of Corruption talent. I did pick up Curse of Exhaustion, for potential kiting. Then I grabbed 3/3 Bane and 2/3 Shadow and Flame in the destro tree.
Gear: Here's where DL and SB playstyles vary. The reason DL is viable is that it benefits from mastery. If you switch just about every piece of gear (after hit capping at 17%) so it has mastery on it, you get an added 33% (ish, that's what it was for me) periodic damage increase. What that means is that essentially ALL your spells have an extra 33% damage bonus.
For either DL or SB you should be dumping spirit. (As above). Gearing for a SB focus the stat weights are basically the same as for Destro gearing as described above. (Mastery is a little more valuable for Destro locks than SB afflocks, but probably not so much that it changes gear sets between the two.)
Pet: Succubus
Rotation:
Starting off, it's no longer as valuable to stack Shadow Embrace with shadowbolt and haunt, so you're just as well starting off by throwing up your dots on the target as you run in because dots automatically readjust to crit, haste, and spellpower levels upon refresh.
Keep Haunt on CD at all times.
Get up your Dots (Bane of Agony, Corruption, Unstable Affliction).
SB filler (or DL if you're a drain life focus...also as DL you probably will need to stand way closer to the boss so you don't lose Shadow Embrace w/ Haunt's long travel time...you'll also need to keep an eye on the 5% crit debuff if you're the only one bringing it--see, I told you it was hard).
When boss is <25% health, use Drain Soul (which can now crit) instead of ShadowBolt.
Pop Doomguard when available.
Pretty much the same rotation as before for SB focus.
Warlock Cataclysm Discussion
Scaron — Mon, 05/10/2010 - 10:23
After Saedo posted the leaked talent calculator from MMO Champion that outlines the talent "changes" for Cataclysm. I started rooting around a bit just to see what things might look like.
Of course, almost all of this could change, I haven't gotten a good feel for what the mastery system might add or tweak talents, but here are some very preliminary thoughts.
1. Not much change in any of the three trees.
2. Unless they really make Elemental shaman's Totem of Wrath competitive, there's not much change likely in terms of having a DP warlock in most raids. We're just going to be a fixture until ToW competes. ToW will certainly see some buffing in Cata, the question is if it will be so substantial of a buff as to make the DP warlock ineffective. I'm guessing not, or at least not for long. With that said, I'm envisioning this sort of talent tree as a demo-lock. Getting down to devastation could be a nice boost, how valuable this is, though, depends on how well crit scales and how this works with the mastery system.
3. I hate to say it, but a secondary spec that seems, at least initially to be a winner in the new xpac could well be a shift back to destro. The main change I see here would be Destro locks would finally have the ability to get down to master conjurer. I envision something like this. Also, the destro tree might find itself with a bit more flexibility to pick up talents which could potentially buff various pet utilities. If they're hoping to make pets more interesting in Cata, the most flexible spec here to use a variety of talented pets might well be destro.
4. Affliction looks to be about the same as it's always been. I see the big change there as a spec down to devastation (same as demo). Bottom line though, in order to get down to devastation, the afflock ends up taking a lot more unuseful talents along the way. Something's probably going to change here...I think that an affliction spec basically requires 5 points to get devastation, might not be the best option.
So, I'm sure lots will change. I hope so. These changes seem really run-of-the-mill for us at the moment.
Lock break
Lilpuddinpop — Tue, 04/13/2010 - 10:13
Last night in attendance in KB raid we had present 3 locks, so i wanted to make a comparison to finally decide best spec for dps. The worldoflogs parses show us the difference in our dps + our stong/weakpoints.
First thing you will notice is that the dps between the 3 classes is quite similar in our parses. BUT, the greatest dps was easily destruction. Destruction was consistently about 1-1.5k higher then affliction on any fight which is so considerable, I am wondering why we are even bothering with aff lock in raid. Yes some fights may be more running around, but all we have to do is look at the demo lock(another stand still caster like destro) to see how much variation there would be in dps.
With a comparison of rotface(a kite fight) and festergut(a caster fight) we see ~800 dps increase. which is relatively small. comparing the aff to destro from these fights though, there is ~1400-1500dps increase. Now if the dps increase for demo is so slight, I would see no reason why destro dps would be any different. This begs the question if aff lock is really worth speccing into at all? http://elitistjerks.com/f80/t48311-simulationcraft_warlocks_3_3_3_numbers/ would state that affliction locks would have top dps, but this would be in a perfect world where fights were boring and no one had to move.
Affliction locks, like demo locks, are dependent on the Sbolt spam between keeping their dots up for roughly 50% of their dps. Thier dots do significantly more damg then demo, while demo is dependent on thier castables moreso. In kite fights(rotface, sindragosa) I see the appeal of Affliction, but numbers have shown(assuming our locks have a perfect rotation) that the dps between demo and Aff are almost exactly the same. (rotface fight last night had a difference of ~100 dps between the 2 classes which can be attributed to gear difference)
Another point I would like to make is about demo lock dps. for most of a fight, demo lock dps is not even comparable to the other 2 specs consistently about 2-3k dps lower. however, for the last 35%(thanks to decimation http://www.wowhead.com/spell=63158) demo dps is unsurpassed spiking as high as 20K+. This makes the overlooked demo lock top dps in certain situations as well. Putricide and sindragosa come in mind. I honestly think that having 3 demo locks for sindragosa will help us immensely with the final phase.
My Look into this has shown me that the only 2 viable classes for warlock dps really are destro + demo with affliction being very situational. I would really like to post some dps numbers on a dummy or to have a better review, perhaps have all all 3 lock specs present in raid this week.




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