Every tree works fine for leveling now. It's really just a play style decision: DoT and drain, caster version of a hunter (i.e., a pet that matters), or a mage.
So guys, I haven't really seen a whole lot of discussion on warlock raiding builds and I really want to know what everyone thinks about different variations. Up until recently I've been doing a 56/0/15 build and I was doing up to 2.5k dps.
I tried 0/31/40 over the last week and was unimpressed with it's damage compared to my aff build. My understanding is that 31/40 is considered better than 40/30, but I haven't tried the latter personally or given it much thought.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
SL is an 11 point talent now so there's a lot more variety.
Felguard/SL seems like it'd do well in arenas.
Eh, not right now. PvP is so insanely bursty that the healing that you are going to be getting from siphon life really isn't very exciting. It might be a good build once Blizzard re-works PvP though.
So guys, I haven't really seen a whole lot of discussion on warlock raiding builds and I really want to know what everyone thinks about different variations. Up until recently I've been doing a 56/0/15 build and I was doing up to 2.5k dps.
I think I logged out in my heroic gear, which has less hit than my usual raid stuff, but I can pull out the full hit cap if necessary. There's usually a shadow priest in our raid, though.
I've played around with destruction and felguard, and stuck with affliction. There's a lot of good talents, but also some fluff points - I went with fel concentration and dark pact because they're very nice farming outland instances for gold, but that does mean less points for hit talents and the like, a pure raiding spec can do without those 4 points.
Anyway, my suggestion for your build: Pull the points out of destructive reach first, since you don't have both reach talents, you need to be inside the shorter range most of the time anyway. EJ theorycraft suggests 1 point in eradication is enough, the internal cooldown eats the benefit past that. So there's 4 points to play with.
Get at least 1 or 2 in molten core - the boost to immolate is nice, even if it isn't that much, it is something, and it actually procs quite often and doesn't seem to have an internal cooldown like eradication. Malediction is also a nice talent all around. Deathknights have a debuff that overrides the 13% increase from your curse, but if that's not up, CoE actually works out to slightly more damage for affliction and less cast time spent refreshing. However, even with CoA, the 3% boost to your own spell damage is always active.
I'm able to hit cap without talents or help from a draeni or shadow priest if necessary (though there's usually one in the raid, in which case I use my DPS gear), which does help squeeze a couple more points out of the talent trees. Otherwise, the hit talents are a good overall boost. Either way, I generally pull 2600 raid buffed now, and have cracked 3500 on Patchwerk 10 man. There's also those AOE pulls in the bat cave that I've broken 20000dps for about 3 seconds. My last couple upgrades haven't been put to the test in 25 man yet, so I'll see how that holds up.
Something that usually doesn't get mentioned in the class forum crying about affliction, though, latency can kill your DPS with the build. You're too dependent on not clipping the last tick off your dots and minimizing downtime. A warlock who I've regularly run vaults and OS with has very similar gear and an identical build to me, but lags 200-400 dps behind me, I tend to suspect it's his latency, which is usually a good bit higher than mine, he has trouble timing his dot refreshes well. He's occasionally shown up felguard/emberstorm specced and easily matched or out damaged me.
I completely agree that my 1 point in destructive reach is really odd, but the only reason I have it is actually because of the threat reduction :P I find that if I'm doing a well enough job of refreshing my dots and I crit a few SB's in a row that I can sometimes come close if not pull aggro from the tank, especially in dungeons where i'm not necessarily with my guild tanks. How does the dps of CoE compare to CoA? Obviously its a huge raid dps boost to use CoE... but from a small dungeon perspective?
Also with my current gear I'm sitting at 15.5ish% hit, hence why I only have one point in the hit talents. However I never considered having a separate gear set with lower hit to push out the other ratings depending on group makeup. Thanks for the idea :P
Taking the hit talents and re-itemizing around them will help a lot. Suppression is a good idea even if you don't (for some reason) want to get cataclysm, becuase of the mana reduction.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Omen has been all up in my ass about my threat the last couple of weeks. Thought at first it was some tanks I was puging with, but that idea was blown out of the water when a DK guild mate who's geared very well was seeing the same thing. My gear is utter crap, I dont have a link to armory since I'm at work but I play on Deathwing and my name is Ravenlock. Someone take a look at my talents and tell me I'm doing it wrong pls. Even a Soul Shatter only helps til I cast a haunt or shadow bolt.
I have the drain soul glyph, but that shouldn't affect how many soul shards I get from outranging my pet. And yeah, only seen it happen in wintergrasp lag.
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
Do you guys know if the effect from Forge Ember and Sundial of the Exiled will stack? I'm going to assume they do not, but I just wanted to make sure.
I've saved up about 70 Emblems of Heroism and I'm not sure what to spend em on first. I was originally going to get the Sundial but then unexpectedly that Ember dropped for me and it seems like a bit of waste of 40 Emblems to get the extra 75ish spellpower effect.
Elessar Elfstone on
Tobias: Or it could be your colon. I'd want to get in there and find some answers.
So how much spell damage should a lock have going into Nax? I sit at almost 1100 right now but I do have about 5 green pieces of gear still that need to be replaced.
If that's without fel armor, that seems on the low side, but I had t6 level gear with lots of lovely gem sockets to help me out. I'd bump that by a few hundred if you could: there's good stuff like the kirin tor revered blade to help you out.
If that's with fel armor, oh god, that's really low.
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
0
FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
edited January 2009
There are also some very good high-end Blue staves to be won from questing in Icecrown.
So how much spell damage should a lock have going into Nax? I sit at almost 1100 right now but I do have about 5 green pieces of gear still that need to be replaced.
er.. most locks at 70 had ~ 1400 in endgame raiding gear, no?
How does aff work nowadays? I haven't been aff since pre-Felguard (waaaaay before WotLK) doing the draintaking thing. Does it still play similarly? What pet is usually out?
What are some must-have glyphs for demonology spec? For aff? (I'm not really interested in Destro.)
damn didnt know I was that far behind spell power wise. Yes that is with fel armor and my spell gem. Can you guys point me to some instances that I should be farming for certain drops? Also I havent completed but like 5 quests in Ice crown and I here there are a few nice blue quest rewards there. I'm a bit shocked to be honest.
Do you still have to socket/gear for hit cap? I've seen a lot of locks aren't, I assume that has to do with raid buff and/or whatever raid set up they run in their guilds.
Ok well since i sit at 1100 with fel armor up, whats a good number that I should shoot for to compete as good dps in Nax. You guys are starting to wake me up a bit, I just thought since I was rocking with Northrend blue's I would be good to go. You have saved me from utter phail.
Do you still have to socket/gear for hit cap? I've seen a lot of locks aren't, I assume that has to do with raid buff and/or whatever raid set up they run in their guilds.
Erm, well, you aren't going to hit the hit cap without having hit on your gear, and there's gear without hit on it, so...yes? It still has a bit better scaling than spell power, by at least some calculations/simulations.
It wasn't hard for me to hit the talented hit cap, but I currently do have to regem on occasion based on upgrades.
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
Hitting the hit cap is pretty trivial when you consider talents and raid buffs; there's no need to gem for hit unless you find yourself slightly under the cap and need to meet metagem reqs or something.
In mostly 10 man/badge gear, there have been times when I've wound up having too much hit, actually.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
0
Kevin CristI make the devil hit his kneesand say the 'our father'Registered Userregular
edited January 2009
I'm sitting at 1547 spell damage unbuffed and 2186 with Fel Armor + Demonic Knowledge. That's with two pieces of Naxx25 loot.
I'm also at 12.05% hit (316 rating) with no +hit gems.
Ok well since i sit at 1100 with fel armor up, whats a good number that I should shoot for to compete as good dps in Nax. You guys are starting to wake me up a bit, I just thought since I was rocking with Northrend blue's I would be good to go. You have saved me from utter phail.
Heres a list of a good set of Lock gear you can work towards outside of raiding. I wrote it out on mmo-champion to argue with some horrible scrub who was whinging about getting kicked from a PuG nax because his gear and dps was awful and claiming he couldn't get epics unless people let him free-load off their Nax'. I'm glad my negativity towards people can now serve a useful purpose
Psycojester thank you so MUCH for posting this for me. I did a old kingdom run last night and took a look at recount. Least to say I was not pleased with my uber 900 dps in a lvl 74ish instance... I will start working on the above upgrades right away. Also a quick question, can I start farming some of the rep listed ubove on my own, without going into a instance. I.E. solo daily quests. I know wyrmrest accord has some daily action, any others? Thanks again.
Psycojester thank you so MUCH for posting this for me. I did a old kingdom run last night and took a look at recount. Least to say I was not pleased with my uber 900 dps in a lvl 74ish instance... I will start working on the above upgrades right away. Also a quick question, can I start farming some of the rep listed ubove on my own, without going into a instance. I.E. solo daily quests. I know wyrmrest accord has some daily action, any others? Thanks again.
Kirin Tor has cooking dailies and a couple of normal quests you can run for some minor rep, but the best way to get rep with them is through wearing their tabard and doing heroics, as far as I know.
Also that tuskarr faction and the knights of the ebon blade have blue gear with decent hit on it. It is pretty easy to get the rep for them too, so if you really need hit there's a place to look.
Psycojester thank you so MUCH for posting this for me. I did a old kingdom run last night and took a look at recount. Least to say I was not pleased with my uber 900 dps in a lvl 74ish instance... I will start working on the above upgrades right away. Also a quick question, can I start farming some of the rep listed ubove on my own, without going into a instance. I.E. solo daily quests. I know wyrmrest accord has some daily action, any others? Thanks again.
You went to regular Old Kingdom at 80 and did 900 DPS? Yeah, you've got quite a bit of work to do before Naxx. Of course, the mediocre Naxx run I did had the bottom feeder DPS doing around 1200 in non-AoE spam situations, so depending on your build, skill, and what your raid expects of you, you might not be that far away from being allowed in.
Something I always ask: was that overall or just bosses you were doing 900dps? A level 74 is going to have weak trash, so it's really going to bring your dps down unless you are AoEing your way through it.
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
Rawr, top dps on Patchwerk with about 3800 at my best. I'm getting better at timing my casts to avoid overlapping too much. On another note, ran heroic Nexus tonight with a few buddies and another warlock. This warlock was specced something like 53/18/0, but he was specced for imp Succubus. He proceeded to do 800dps consistently with the rest of us doing 2500+. Bad people are bad.
Posts
SL is an 11 point talent now so there's a lot more variety.
Felguard/SL seems like it'd do well in arenas.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Just today i switched to a 0/40/31 build http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IZcxczsgRV0sxZqcRVr0uV0o . The dps boost was HUUUGE. I did 25 man vault and was topping the charts at 3.6k dps.
Heres my armory http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Drak'Tharon&n=Saroo . Let me know what you guys think and also post your own raiding builds. I want to know what the best ones are!!!
I tried 0/31/40 over the last week and was unimpressed with it's damage compared to my aff build. My understanding is that 31/40 is considered better than 40/30, but I haven't tried the latter personally or given it much thought.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Eh, not right now. PvP is so insanely bursty that the healing that you are going to be getting from siphon life really isn't very exciting. It might be a good build once Blizzard re-works PvP though.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Scarlet+Crusade&n=Abnot
I think I logged out in my heroic gear, which has less hit than my usual raid stuff, but I can pull out the full hit cap if necessary. There's usually a shadow priest in our raid, though.
I've played around with destruction and felguard, and stuck with affliction. There's a lot of good talents, but also some fluff points - I went with fel concentration and dark pact because they're very nice farming outland instances for gold, but that does mean less points for hit talents and the like, a pure raiding spec can do without those 4 points.
Anyway, my suggestion for your build: Pull the points out of destructive reach first, since you don't have both reach talents, you need to be inside the shorter range most of the time anyway. EJ theorycraft suggests 1 point in eradication is enough, the internal cooldown eats the benefit past that. So there's 4 points to play with.
Get at least 1 or 2 in molten core - the boost to immolate is nice, even if it isn't that much, it is something, and it actually procs quite often and doesn't seem to have an internal cooldown like eradication. Malediction is also a nice talent all around. Deathknights have a debuff that overrides the 13% increase from your curse, but if that's not up, CoE actually works out to slightly more damage for affliction and less cast time spent refreshing. However, even with CoA, the 3% boost to your own spell damage is always active.
I'm able to hit cap without talents or help from a draeni or shadow priest if necessary (though there's usually one in the raid, in which case I use my DPS gear), which does help squeeze a couple more points out of the talent trees. Otherwise, the hit talents are a good overall boost. Either way, I generally pull 2600 raid buffed now, and have cracked 3500 on Patchwerk 10 man. There's also those AOE pulls in the bat cave that I've broken 20000dps for about 3 seconds. My last couple upgrades haven't been put to the test in 25 man yet, so I'll see how that holds up.
Something that usually doesn't get mentioned in the class forum crying about affliction, though, latency can kill your DPS with the build. You're too dependent on not clipping the last tick off your dots and minimizing downtime. A warlock who I've regularly run vaults and OS with has very similar gear and an identical build to me, but lags 200-400 dps behind me, I tend to suspect it's his latency, which is usually a good bit higher than mine, he has trouble timing his dot refreshes well. He's occasionally shown up felguard/emberstorm specced and easily matched or out damaged me.
Also with my current gear I'm sitting at 15.5ish% hit, hence why I only have one point in the hit talents. However I never considered having a separate gear set with lower hit to push out the other ratings depending on group makeup. Thanks for the idea :P
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I'm really confused why this is happening though. Well, ok, lag has something to do with it.
http://DocumentingLaziness.blogspot.com/
I've saved up about 70 Emblems of Heroism and I'm not sure what to spend em on first. I was originally going to get the Sundial but then unexpectedly that Ember dropped for me and it seems like a bit of waste of 40 Emblems to get the extra 75ish spellpower effect.
Forsake, Warlock of Stonemaul
If that's with fel armor, oh god, that's really low.
er.. most locks at 70 had ~ 1400 in endgame raiding gear, no?
When 3.0 hit and I switched back to affliction and regeared/gemmed some of my stuff, I increased my spell power by about 150 but lost a bit of haste.
How does aff work nowadays? I haven't been aff since pre-Felguard (waaaaay before WotLK) doing the draintaking thing. Does it still play similarly? What pet is usually out?
What are some must-have glyphs for demonology spec? For aff? (I'm not really interested in Destro.)
And I mean, just run every instance really; badges are nice, and cloth gear drops everywhere.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
that's not me, though :P
Actually, that warlock should have an almost identical amount of spell power as me.
Erm, well, you aren't going to hit the hit cap without having hit on your gear, and there's gear without hit on it, so...yes? It still has a bit better scaling than spell power, by at least some calculations/simulations.
It wasn't hard for me to hit the talented hit cap, but I currently do have to regem on occasion based on upgrades.
In mostly 10 man/badge gear, there have been times when I've wound up having too much hit, actually.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I'm also at 12.05% hit (316 rating) with no +hit gems.
Steam: YOU FACE JARAXXUS| Twitch.tv: CainLoveless
Heres a list of a good set of Lock gear you can work towards outside of raiding. I wrote it out on mmo-champion to argue with some horrible scrub who was whinging about getting kicked from a PuG nax because his gear and dps was awful and claiming he couldn't get epics unless people let him free-load off their Nax'. I'm glad my negativity towards people can now serve a useful purpose
Flameheart Spell Scalpel- Revered with the Kirin Tor http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44173
Sandals of Crimson Fury- Exalted with Wyrmrest Accord http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44202
Girdle of Bane- King Ymiron, Heroic Utgarde Peninsula http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37408
Ward of the Violet Citadel- 25 badges of Heroism http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40698
Herois' Plagueheart Gloves- 60 badges of heroism http://www.wowhead.com/?item=39500
Heroes' Plagueheart Robe- 80 badges of heroism http://www.wowhead.com/?item=39497
Sundial of the Exiled- 40 badges of heroism http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40682
Runecasters Mantle- BoE trash drop, H Utgarde keep http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37196
Rod of the Fallen Monarch- Anub'erak H Azjol Nerub http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37238
Azure Cloth Bindings- Cyanigosa H Violet Hold http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37884
Mark of the War Prisoner Cyanigosa H Violet Hold http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37873
Encircling Burnished Gold Chains- 25 Badges of Heroism http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40680
Woven Bracae Leggings- Loken H Halls of Lightening http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37854
Death Chill Cloak- Crafted epic http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41610
Crown of Unbridled Magic- Eregos H Oculus http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37294
Kirin Tor has cooking dailies and a couple of normal quests you can run for some minor rep, but the best way to get rep with them is through wearing their tabard and doing heroics, as far as I know.
Also that tuskarr faction and the knights of the ebon blade have blue gear with decent hit on it. It is pretty easy to get the rep for them too, so if you really need hit there's a place to look.
Also, rocking 2.1k with fel armor.