The Warlocks Den - WoW Warlock Discussions

1. Overview
   1. Curse of Weakness
   2. Curse of Agony
   3. Curse of Doom
   4. Curse of Recklessness
   5. Curse of the Elements
   6. Curse of Shadows (No Longer in Game)
      
2. Comparison
   1. Curse of Weakness
   2. Curse of Elements vs Curse of Recklessness
   3. Curse of Doom vs Curse of Agony
3. Conclusion

Overview

Curse of Weakness – Attack Power reduced by 350 for 2 minutes

Talents to Improve:

• Improved Weakness: Increases effectiveness by 10/20%. The result - decreases Attack Power by 420

Thing to Note:

• Weakness does not stack with other Demoralizing Shout/Roar, Insect Swarm, or other such abilities of other classes, in essence rendering it useless.

Curse of Agony - Causes 1356 shadow damage over 24 seconds.

Talents to Improve:

• Improve Agony: Increases damage done by Curse of Agony by 5/10
• Shadow Mastery: Increases damage done by shadow spells by 2/4/6/8/10%
• Contagion: Increases damage done by 1/2/3/4/5%
• Amplify Curse: Increases the damage of your next Curse of Agony or Curse of Doom by 50%

Things to Note:

• Curse of Agony is considered to be subpar when compared with Curse of Doom
• This curses damage is loaded into the last few ticks, which means that unless you are able to get the maximum damage it must tick for its whole duration.

Curse of Doom – Causes 4200 damage after 1 minute.

Talents to Improve:

• Amplify Curse: Increases the damage of your next Curse of Agony or Curse of Doom spell by 50%

Things to Note:

• If not required to use a utility curse this is the hands down best curse to cast
• If your Curse of Doom kills the target a Doom guard spawns that you can enslave or kill.

Curse of Recklessness - Increases melee attack power by 135, reduces armor by 800 and target cannot be feared

Talents to Improve:

• None

Things to Note:

• Often used for a ping-ponging feared mobs. Using fear for crowd control without pulling extra mobs.
• Increases melee damage on a boss mob by 2-3%

Curse of Elements – Increases frost, fire, arcane and shadow damage done to the target by 10%

Talents to Improve:

• Malediction: Increases the damage bonus effect by Curse of Elements by 1/2/3%

Things to Note:

• As of patch 2.4.3 this will include Shadow/Arcane damage

Raiding - Elements? Shadows? Recklessness? Weakness?
Weakness will never be useful in a raiding environment unless you have other classes that are not using their abilities which are considered superior. The only time I could see possibly using it is while leveling as a way to decrease the damage taken by your pets or yourself while soloing. This however could be argued that killing the mob faster by using a damage curse is more effective.

Elements v Shadows - All information in this section is irrelevent as of today (7/15/08)
The rule of thumb tested by math is 2 shadow casters put up CoS, 2 Fire casters put up CoE. Generally if anything gets the shaft it’s CoE. With three warlocks however, until 2.4.3 comes out CoE should be up if there are 2 Fire/Frost casters. Curse of Doom can’t make up for the 10% loss of 2 casters.

Mage Fire Ball (115% w/ imp) 2213
(913+1300)*1.15 = 2544
2544*(60/3) = 50880

With Curse of Elements
(913+1300)*1.15*1.1 = 3218
3218*(60/3) = 64360

Difference between having CoE up and not
64360-50880 = 13480

Considering that mage doesn’t just sit and cast Fireballs but if he’s alone would have to keep up ignites. You can understand that it’s really a breakeven point, however if there are 2 it doubles the amount of damage and there is no way that a Curse of Doom could make up for it.

Curse of Recklessness vs Curse of Elements
There is a lot of discrepancy of where/when to use this curse. Each melee gets a 2-3% dps increase with no other armor penetration (more below on this). This includes tanks, hunters, rogues, dps warrior, feral druids, enhance shaman, ret pallies. Generally you’re going to have 3-4 more of these types of DPS over casters. Though this seems to be minor it actually is a form of armor penetration that scales the more that it is stacked (more on this below).

http://www.raidguru.net/index.php?page=56 : Has a good spreadsheet to show the increase of DPS of all the melee classes with a certain number of armor penetration which Curse of Recklessness in essence is.

Bosses you don’t use CoR on:
(Most of these recommendations are swayed by the gear level of your tank and whether or not you have improved demo. Shout. )

1. SSC/TK – Tidewalker, Fathom Lord
2. MH/BT –Azgalor, Bloodboil, Reliquery of Souls, Illidan Phase 3-5, Archimonde

As of 2.4.3 the argument now exists only if there is 1 lock in the raid and which curse should be up and the following section becomes a much greater argument again.

For recklessness, to clarify, 2-3% increase in DPS is to melee who have no armor penetration on their gear, as the amount of their armor penetration increases so does the DPS increase. The maximum benefit would be ~10%, an average would be around ~6% to ALL melee DPS. Take the amount of armor penetration of your melee into consideration if you are the only lock.

With the change to CoE that it now affects Shadow/Arcane/Fire/Frost this becomes a much bigger curse and the loss of it becomes a bigger detriment to the raid, as it is a flat 10% increase to each of their DPS.

Lets look at some scenarios:

On average you will have 17 DPS members of raid, including the tank (8 healers)

If you have 9 casters and 8 melee doing 1500 dps each (remember theoretical)

- 9 * 1500 = 13,500
- 8 * 1500 = 12,000

Take these values and multiply them by their coefficients of 6% and 10%.

- 13,500(.10) = 1350 RAID dps increase
- 12,000(.06) = 720 RAID dps

The only side benefit that exists of having CoR up is the increased threat generation that is provided by having it up so you can nuke harder. In general it depends on your raid set up, if you have a raid that is caster heavy and melee light CoElements would definitely be your choice at this stage in the game. If you have a raid composition that is melee heavy the obvious choice is CoRecklessness.



Curse of Doom – Curse of Agony
Unfortunately an affliction lock will hardly ever get the opportunity to use Curse of Agony or Curse of Doom even though theirs would be the most damage out of a group of locks. Curse of Agony is end loaded as stated previously, in the same regard so is Doom however it’s easier to manage. If you accidentally put up a Curse of Agony too soon, you will lose a substantial amount of damage. Curse of Doom on the other hand has 1 minute cool down that once up disallows you to put it up before it ticks. In this regard however it’s not so great for multiple targets, because you can only use it once a minute.

On trash that doesn’t die quickly putting up a Curse of Doom or a Curse of Agony on a mob that won’t be killed right away, that isn’t being crowd controlled, will increase your damage, however using them on the mob you are currently killing will actually lower your dps because of the use of the GCD preventing you from casting an extra shadow bolt, and the fact that the mob will probably die before the end ticks off.

1300 Shadow Damage – non-affliction

Curse of Agony (120%) – (1356+1300)*1.20 = 3187/24 = 243dps

However the ticks are broken down like this:
56.5, 56.5, 56.5, 56.5, 113, 113, 113, 113, 169.5, 169.5, 169.5, 169.5 – coefficients of each tick

150, 150, 150, 150, 300, 300, 300, 300, 450, 450, 450, 450 – actual damage done by each tick appx.

Curse of Doom (200%) – (4200+1300)*2 = 11,000/60 = 183dps

Even though this shows the Curse of Doom is less dps when you factor in the likelihood of accidentally reapplying agony too early you can begin to understand why doom is the preference. It also scales better with damage because of the greater coefficient.


Conclusion

In summary, basically CoR/CoE > CoR/CoE > CoD >Curse of Agony >CoW. However this will not always hold true, but is circumstantial and based on your individual raid makeup.

1 Warlock
1. Casters out number Melee + Tanks (without threat issues) - CoE
2. Casters out number Melee + Tanks (with threat issues) - CoR
3. Melee + Tanks out number Casters - CoR

2 Warlocks
1. Both curses and win!


Credits to Wowwiki for the formulas to The Den for other information that I gleaned from many posts.