The Warlocks Den - WoW Warlock Discussions

10. Every raiding build needs 5/5 Improved Shadowbolt and 5/5 Bane. No exceptions. The highest DPS builds is 0/21/40, only rivaled by 0/40/21 when a Succubus is free to attack. Before your gear improves, raiding as 41/0/17 is probably the best DPS build. Shadow destruction > fire destruction at a T4+ gear level because of Improved Shadowbolt, and Shadow Bolt scales better than Incinerate with spell damage because it has a higher spell coefficient.

9. Drain Life is NEVER more DPS than Shadowbolt as a filler spell. Pretty much the only time you should use it is for emergency self-healing.

8. Unstable Affliction out DPS Ruin until the point where you should NOT spec Affliction anymore for DPS.
7. Socket bonuses should almost always be ignored except when the bonus has spell damage in it that and sometimes spell hit. Blue sockets are the worst sockets for PvE. Veiled Noble Topazes are your friend until you are hit capped. Once one is hit capped without sockets (at a T6 gear level), +12 spell damage gem is the best DPS increase.

6. Immolate is always a DPS boost for Affliction and Demonology builds. The only times you should not use Immolate is with 0/21/40 with Tier 6 level gear and when you are reaching the debuff limit.

5. Curse of Recklessness is a huge raid DPS increase, just as much as Curse of Shadows and Curse of the Elements. All bosses have over 6000 armor so CoR will benefit raid DPS for any one of them. Preach to your guild to use it on bosses that don't hit extremely hard.

4. One of the best ways to increase your DPS is by Life Tapping intelligently. The optimal time to Life Tap/Dark Pact is when you are moving in a fight or when you do not have to refresh DoTs.

3. Frozen Shadoweave and Spellstrike can last you to Tier 6 instances. They're that good. The only major upgrades that you can pick up along the way is the Hood of Hexing from ZA, Tier 5 Shoulders off of Void Reaver, Vestments of the Sea-Witch of Lady Vashj, and Boots of Blasting.

2. Stamina and Intellect are NOT needed on PvE items. They are a waste of item budget points, and you should almost always prefer items with DPS stats over more "balanced" items. I know that our health essentially becomes our mana, but that doesn't matter because we are healed when we Life Tap. Leave the stamina to PvP. Warlocks already have naturally high health.

1. Spell hit is a very good DPS stat, but don't sacrifice too much to get hit capped.. It is NOT worth giving up a lot of spell damage though. At the very most, 1 spell hit will be worth 125% of 1 spell damage. The reason why spell hit is more important than spell crit and haste is not because we are losing tons of damage with spells missing, but because the conversion ratio is much better than spell haste and spell crit. When Affliction, spell damage gives more DPS than spell hit, but you will want to slowly start building up your spell hit so you can drop points in Suppression and eventually respec Destruction.

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