The Warlocks Den - WoW Warlock Discussions

Leulier’s Spreadsheet for Warlock DPS is a popular item on the Elitist Jerks Forum, initally used to calculate average DPS for different spell choices and talent selections. Since the warlock class hasn’t undergone any major changes in the last few months, there’s no longer much serious discussion about the best talent/spell choices at various gear levels. For more information about these, check out the user-friendly guides at The Warlock’s Den. The spreadsheet now allows users to examine the DPS contributions of individual pieces of gear, so it’s of interest to any warlock who is interested in upgrading his or her equipment.

As a beginner, the important thing to know about this spreadsheet is that you probably aren’t going to be entering numbers into any cells. Instead, you’ll choose items from pull-down menus inside certain cells, and letting the spreadsheet calculate numbers for you.

Getting the Spreadsheet to Open Properly

Before downloading the spreadsheet, make sure that you are ready to use it. If you are using MS Excel, make sure that the macro security is set at a low enough level for Leulier’s sheet to work. In MS Excel 2007, use the Tools Menu, select “Macros” and click on “Security”. Set it to “Medium”. Excel is set up to work with VisualBasic enabled, so if you have disabled it, you need to turn it back on again. Instead of MS Excel, I use OpenOffice Calc 2.4, which is set to medium-macro-security as a default.

Download the Warlock DPS spreadsheet from WoW Warlock DPS Spreadsheet and open it. You’ll have to choose “Enable” when the Excel or Calc asks about whether to run macros.

Configuring the Spreadsheet

There are multiple worksheets in here: I recommend starting with “Gear_Buffs”.



Start by setting up “Gear_Buffs” with your warlock’s current raiding gear (you may want to check what he/she is wearing in the WoW armory, if you log out in raiding gear). First thing to do is set the character’s race. Click on “gnome” in cell D4 and a menu button will appear on the right of the cell. Click on that to pull down the menu and choose your character’s race.



Go back up to D1 and choose your character’s current raid level, which will give a list of gear that that character is likely to be wearing. Click the “Load Item Set” button, then go down through the list and correct it to reflect what your character is currently wearing. Click on item names in the D column to choose new ones. As you do, you’ll notice that the numerical values in the columns to the left are automatically updated and the character’s stamina, spell hit, etc. are recalculated. Make sure to choose the correct gems and enchants for each item as well. This spreadsheet includes the average value of effects that proc periodically or have to be procced (“on use”) by the wearer.

If an item is not on the list of possible items, you can choose “custom” and just punch in its stats. However, the item you are wearing may be inappropriate for raiding-warlock DPS: i.e. the Lightning Capacitor. You can then save this list by going back to D1, pulling down “Custom Set 1”, and clicking the “Save Item Set” button. You can’t rename gear sets.

With the buffs at the bottom, either ignore them or shut them all down using the check boxes or pull-down menus (have a “-->” on the left of them), but whatever you do, be consistent so that you can compare item sets, talent builds, etc. later on. They start at pretty reasonable levels for a T5+ 25-toon raid.

Once the spreadsheet gear set reflects what your ‘lock wears to raids, go to the “DPS” spreadsheet and choose your talent build in cell A17.




Most raiding locks will be “0/21/40 Shadow” or “UA”. The worksheet will then load your probable talents, spell rotation, pet, etc. for a typical tank n’ spank single-target fight in which the warlock is not tanking, kiting, experiencing random attacks or AoE, or even fighting to survive, just focused on DPS. This spreadsheet deals with maximizing AoE and the only health loss involves is Life Tap. If your actual talents, spell rotation, or pet choice for such a fight is different from Leulier’s recommendations, you may want to think about why. One nice feature that you may want to stop and look at is “The Next Stat” box in yellow starting on row 36. If you are hit-capped, ignore “+1 hit rating”, but otherwise, the box will tell you how much a point of crit, spell haste, etc. is worth compared to a point of spell damage with your current build and gear. These numbers will determine the relative value of potential upgrades.

Interpreting your Results

So what are those upgrades? Click on the “Items” worksheet to find out. Basically, this is a collection of the pull-down lists for every slot, with all of their stats, but also with a calculation of how much each item could contribute to your DPS in columns S and you. One column, S, factors in +spell hit. If you are struggling to reach or to stay at the spell hit cap, then this is the column to sort by. If you have BT on farm and more +spell hit than you know what to do with, sort items ignoring hit! Your current gear has a relative value of 0.0 (in blue). Upgrades have their DPS difference marked in green. It’s a pile of work to look them all up, but if you’ve been reading your raid guides anyways, you know roughly what the upcoming loot tables look like and you can compare the items on them to this spreadsheet.

N.B.: This is the master sheet for item stats. If you find an error and you are feeling brave, you can correct those numbers directly in these cells. For example, the Merciless Gladiator’s Spellblade has 225 +spell damage, not 247.

Other fun things to do with this spreadsheet include:

• Trying out the different sample talent builds (compare potential DPS for “Affli/Ruin” to that for “UA” for any gear set) and spell choices in the DPS worksheet

• Fiddling with pet DPS

• Experimenting with different raid make-ups in the “Raid ISB” worksheet (for shadow users) and in the buffs section of the “Gear_Buffs” worksheet (for buffers like boomkins, shamans, etc.)

• Comparing the effect of different pieces of gear/flasks/food/etc. on your DPS in cell B1 of the “Gear_Buffs” worksheet

References

WoW Warlock DPS Spreadsheet (WoW Warlock DPS Spreadsheet ) by Leulier

Warlock DPS Spreadsheet ((another) Warlock DPS Spreadsheet - Elitist Jerks) by Bolche (a.k.a. Leulier)

Kaliban’s Class Loot Lists (http://wow-loot.com/): Has user-friendly loot tables by instance in the “Raid Content – Expansion” menu

Other Warlock’s Den discussion of Leulier’s Warlock DPS Spreadsheet:

• Theorycrafting: My experiences with Leulier and CPimp (Theorycrafting: My experiences with Leulier and CPimp - The Warlocks Den Forums) initiated by ydnandrew

• Leulier questions (Leulier questions - The Warlocks Den Forums) initiated by Ox of Knox

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