The Warlocks Den - WoW Warlock Discussions

Preface
This guide is intended to be a helpful list of gear in the spirit of Canadian Pimp's guide. It's focused on actively raiding 3/14/54 Destro locks, but should be useful for other specs as well.

Now, its hard to live up to the juggernaut that was Gearing Your Warlock, so there will be several caveats. It won't be nearly as detailed, and it will be focused entirely on gear for level 80 raiding warlocks. In addition, I strongly suspect that things aren't as simple as they were at the time. There are now several viable raiding specs, and that means one guide can't perfectly cover all fronts. The values of stats are also not nearly as clear cut as CPimp showed them to be. This means that any guide I could possibly make will be only as perfect as the imperfect scoring system I use. So this can only be a loose guide, but hopefully it can be a useful reference tool for my fellow warlocks.

Table of Contents
I Preface
II Stats 101
III Scoring System
IV Gems
V Conclusion
VI Gear rankings

1. 1H weapon
2. Off-hand
3. 2H weapon
4. Wand
5. Head
6. Neck
7. Shoulder
8. Back
9. Chest
10. Wrist
11. Hands
12. Waist
13. Legs
14. Feet
15. Finger
16. Trinket

Stats 101

The biggest problem with making a guide such as this is how difficult it can be to quantify each stat in relation to the others. This is difficult for several reasons:

1. The value of each stat varies quite a bit depending on your talents. For example, stamina has 0 DPS value unless you have Demonic Knowledge, Intallect has a vastly improved value if you have Improved Soul Leach, and Spirit is much more potent when you have Demonic Aegis.
2. The value of each stat changes as your other stats change. Spell power, for example, appears to be worth less and less in relation to your other stats as your overall gear level goes up. This makes it impossible to pinpoint exact values for each stat even if you assume a particular spec.
3. There is no perfectly accurate way to measure the effect each stat has on your DPS. That is not to say no one has tried. There are several different kinds of spreadsheets, including MaxDPS, Leulier's/Bakka's, and Simulation craft, but none of them agree exactly. They are only estimations based on what we know about how the game works.
4. Different stats are effected in different ways by buffs. Spirit, for example, becomes quite a bit more powerful when you have Blessing of Kings.
5. All the sims and spreadsheets assume you're free to stand and nuke. So, even if all the above variables are static, everything changes again when you have to move during a fight.

Spell Power (Spell Damage):
Spell power is the static stat. All other things being equal, each point of Spell power will always increase the damage a particular spell does by the same amount as the last point did. Spirit is similar since it increases Spell Damage. However, it also affects life tap, so it isn't quite as simple to value.

All other stats that affect DPS do so by adjusting certain multipliers. Hit Rating, Critical Strike Rating, and Haste rating are known as the percentile stats. Because they affect your DPS by a percentage, they will scale differently depending on the amount of spell power you have. The higher your spell power gets in relation to your other stats, the more each point of a percentile stat is worth in relation to a point of spell power. This means that your relative gear level will effect the DPS value of each stat.

Hit Rating:
Hit rating increases your chance to hit an enemy with your spells. Because raid bosses are considered to be three levels above your character, you only have an 83% chance to hit. It takes 26.23 points of hit rating to increase your chance to hit by 1% at level 80. Point for point it is by far the most valuable stat, but once you have 17% additional chance to hit (through buffs, debuffs, talents, and gear) you have reached the cap. Additional points of Hit are completely wasted.

Maintaining 17% hit without overshooting or choosing subpar gear can be quite challenging. It is surprisingly easy to reach the cap while you're still progressing through Naxx, but once you get to the cap, it quickly becomes the biggest issue when valuing gear.

If we value hit rating at its full amount, we get a list of gear that is dominated by subpar, hit heavy pieces. If we give hit rating a value of 0 (assume you're hit capped), we see only non-hit gear at the top of the lists. For this reason, I choose to value hit rating at half of what its actual DPS value would be. This results in a list that more accurately shows which pieces of gear are most desireable.

For more information on Hit and the Hit cap, see: What's the Hit cap Mr. Wolf?

Haste:
Haste rating increases your casting speed, and reduces the global cooldown. It takes 32.79 points of Haste to increase your cast speed by 1%.

There is also a "soft cap" for Haste. The global cool down for spells cannot be reduced below 1 second (from its base of 1.5 seconds). Therefore any haste beyond what it takes to reduce a 1.5 second spell to 1 second has a deminished value. I have often heard people refer to the haste cap as being 33%. This is a common fallacy that stems from the idea that your haste reduces the casting time of your spells by [Haste]%. It does not decrease casting time, but rather increases casting speed. This is similar to how increasing the numbers on a car speedomoter does not decrease the length of the road, but rather the speed at which the car traverses the road. 100% haste does not render all spells instant. It halves the cast time of your spells because you will be casting at 200% of your normal cast speed. Therefore the "soft cap" for haste is 50% or 1640 haste. (about 15.4% or 504 while bloodlust is active, since that stacks multiplicatively)

Critical Strike:
Critical Strike rating increases the chance of a critical hit. A critical hit does 50% extra damage (100% with Ruin). It takes 45.91 points of crit to increase your chance to critically strike by 1%. Intallect also increases your chance to critically hit. It takes 166 2/3 intallect to increase your chance to critically strike by 1%.

All evidence I've seen points to a two roll system for spells. The game rolls to see if you hit with a spell, then rolls to see if you crit. Because of this, Hit rating will indirectly increase your chance to critically hit. In addition, it takes many more points of crit to increase your chance to critically strike by 1% than it takes haste to increase your speed by 1%, or hit to increase your hit chance by 1%. For these reasons, crit is the least important of the DPS stats.

Spirit:
Spirit increases your Spell Damage by 0.3 per point with Fel armor active. It increases Spell Damage by 0.429 per point with Fel Armor, Demonic Ageis, and Blessing of Kings. Spirit also increases the size of your Life Tap by three per point, reducing the number of times you have to tap during a fight.


Weight System
The DPS values of each of the stats relative to SP are as follows:

Spell Power	Hit	Haste	Crit	Spirit	Intallect
1.00	1.80	0.75	0.55	0.55	0.20

These weights are based loosely upon Simulationcraft and Bakka's spreadsheet. They are intended to represent a 3/14/54 Destro lock with Gear from Naxx 25 and/or Ulduar 10. Hit would be worth about 1.8, but I will undervalue to 0.9 when creating lists for the above mentioned reasons. The resulting list ranks gear in order of desirability with a reasonable level of accuracy. However, I must emphasize that there is simply no way to be perfectly accurate. This is just a guide, and you have to take it with a grain of salt.

Basically, in order to get the lists you see below, I went to Lootrank and input the values you see above. The same thing can be done by going to WoWHead and creating a Weight Scale under the filter options tab, though it's a bit more complicated there. The process is actually quite easy, and I encourage everyone to familiarise themselves with it. If you're longing for a list of Best in Slot gear for your spec, or you simply want to see what your upgrades are as demonology, you can easily alter the numbers ant repeat the process yourself. Whenever there is a change to warlocks as a whole, or a new batch of gear is added, you can go to either site, and see how the new gear measures up.

So the final Weights are:

Spell Power	Hit	Haste	Crit	Spirit	Intallect
1.00	0.90	0.75	0.55	0.55	0.20

Any sockets are to be filled with the best gem according to the final weights.
None of the set bonuses are included in the DPS scores of the individual pieces.
The guide always assumes your hit rating is not capped.


Gems
When gemming your gear proprely socketing your gems can make an enourmous difference. It's something you can do to improve your DPS without needing to run higher level instances, and it's one of the main things many guilds look at when appraising your gear, since proper socketing indicates a well read player. For simplicity's sake, I'm not going to include uncommon gems in my list. If you wish to use them, just choose a gem type and look up it's uncommon equivelant.

Gem	Score
Rigid Autumn's Glow	28.8
Veiled Monarch Topaz	23.4
Runed Scarlet Ruby	19
Shining Forest Emerald	18.8
Reckless Monarch Topaz	15
Potent Monarch Topaz	13.4
Purified Twilight Opal	13.4

This table values hit at 1.8.

If you're not hitcapped you should always socket for Hit. Once you have reached the hit cap, always socket with Runed Scarlet Ruby unless there is an impressive socket bonus or you need a blue gem for your meta.

Speaking of Meta Gems, there is no way that I'm aware of to measure the effects of a meta gem, since they scale directly with your own gear. These, however, are the top four meta gems in order of DPS value:

Meta Gem	Score	Additional Effect
Chaotic Skyflare Diamond	11.55	3% Increased Critical Effect
Ember Skyflare Diamond	25	2% Increased Intallect
Tireless Skyflare Diamond	25	8% Increased Run Speed
Bracing Earthsiege Diamond	25	2% Reduced Threat

Chaotic Skyflare Diamond is the clear choice here because of the amazing 3% additional crit effect.

Conclusion
Well there you have it, finally completed. Hopefully I will have plenty of time to make corrections, and keep this guide up to date in the comming months. If there are any questions or comments regarding this guide, just leave a post in this thread and I will get back to you as soon as I can. I'd like to send a big thanks out to CPimp, who was a massive inspiration with his original guide. I think there are a great many of us who are indebted to him for his excellent work during BC. In addition to him, I have used the following sources for this guide:

• The Warlocks Den
• Loot Rank
• Wowhead
• WoWWiki
• Elitist Jerks
• Leulier's/Bakka's spreadsheet
• Simulationcraft - code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/

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