How's this for a raiding build? basically Dark Pact/MD 31/30/0
I don't think it's worth it. Demonology tree already is a bit light on the good talents in the mid range(except for DS, which gets rid of your pet altogether). I wouldn't consider more than 21 to be a good investment without soul link, and even then I'd say you need to go all the way to Felguard. For raid damage in general, you want to go either heavy destro for their very nice scaling nukes, or heavy into affliction for the high damage DoTs. The latter will probably retain about as much utility as the spec you listed, and do more damage at the same time.
So, things for my hunter are going really slowly in the high 40s right now, and I'm looking at making a warlock alt.
What would you guys say is the best for PvE soloing? I don't care much for PvP (for now), I just want to crush everything as quickly as possible in PvE. I really have no idea what build to go with; I'd like to stay away from demonology as much as possible, though, other than for Demonic Sacrifice. My hunter's already BM, so I'm looking for a nice change of pace. Sacrificing a pet for an uber buff? Yes please!
Demonic Sacrifice is really more of a high level talent. For leveling, you'll do much better if you go Affliction to Dark Pact and use your succubus as a mana battery and walking DoT while you drain tank. The benefits from DS don't justify the loss of pet damage.
Hm.. with two locks in the raid group, is it better to go 40/21/0 and sac the succy or to go 41/20/0 to get the additional % for improved drain life?
Edit: Additionally, I respecced to 41/18/2 and now I wonder how much shadow damage I need? And I'm not convinced the affliction tree does more damage than the demo tree, even in a raid situation.
Has anyone done the math?
I am currently 67 and my spec is 37/0/21. I am liking the ruin, but I do not have the spell crit necessary to make Ruin more worthwhile than Unstable affliction.
So, I will be picking up UA again, but I need to decide how to spend the other 20 points.
Three options
41/9/11 <--- Stamina + Shadowburn
41/0/20 <--- UA + increase SB range and decreased destruct threat, 5% more crit.
45/16/0 <--- UA + better Fel Armor
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I am currently 67 and my spec is 37/0/21. I am liking the ruin, but I do not have the spell crit necessary to make Ruin more worthwhile than Unstable affliction.
So, I will be picking up UA again, but I need to decide how to spend the other 20 points.
Three options
41/9/11 <--- Stamina + Shadowburn
41/0/20 <--- UA + increase SB range and decreased destruct threat, 5% more crit.
45/16/0 <--- UA + better Fel Armor
Most of the math geniuses on the WoW forums as well as the best warlock I've played with seem to think that the spell crit necessary to make Ruin > UA is some number approaching infinity. I had a spec similar to yours for a bit but once I went UA I don't think I'll ever go back. Especially considering it's easier to gear for straight shadow damage than to balance damage and crit, heh...
I went 42/1/18 for the range/threat. If we had infinite paladins I'd probably throw more points in demo for the stam though.
I hate to "waste" the points in devastation just to get destructive reach, so I'd try and do without that for as long as I can. The loss of threat reduction wouldn't worry me as much as the range, but until/unless I raid with my warlock, I'm not going to bother. The extra health and imp or HS is too nice.
Anyone know if the Empowered Corruption talent that "Your Corruption spell gains an additional 36% of your bonus spell damage effects", also adds damage to Seed of Corruption?
I imagine not, but I am not 70 yet or I would run the tests myself. If it does not effect Seed of Corruption, do you find that this affects whether or not you spend the three talent points there?
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Also, how much crit do I need from gear only to get good/great results with a destro build?
My lock is only 66 but I'd say...
You'll get 8% from the talents.
I'd say you need to get your crit at least above 20%. 12% from gear sounds alright to me, but this is really the min for destruction I think. The more crit the better, the problem is a lot of the crit items tend to have not so much or no stam and just some int and crit. You will see a huge improvement if you go from a little crit to a lot.
Group with a fire mage. It's really an amazing combo.
The Felguard really fills in a lot of what I felt was lacking with my warlock outside of a raiding environment, both now and back before the talent revamps. A backbone for the warlock, a melee presence not as impotent as the voidwalker with utility (+Damage, +Spell Resist, Cleave, 3 second stun) and some real punch. I switched to affliction for a short bit and just couldn't stand it. Perhaps at 70. If I make it there.
Compared to everything else you can pick up in that tree... mostly yes. It's worth picking up, but is it worth picking up over what you'd usually be giving up to take it? The answer is no.
The Felguard really fills in a lot of what I felt was lacking with my warlock outside of a raiding environment, both now and back before the talent revamps. A backbone for the warlock, a melee presence not as impotent as the voidwalker with utility (+Damage, +Spell Resist, Cleave, 3 second stun) and some real punch. I switched to affliction for a short bit and just couldn't stand it. Perhaps at 70. If I make it there.
Mm, I was affliction to 60 but got annoyed with it when I started leveling in HFP and tried the felguard. It was really really hard to give him up, he's so versatile soloing and in 5-mans. But relying on your pet staying alive or there goes half your talent points is kinda frustrating. Good thing endgame affliction is stupidly overpowered too.
I never had the chance to try out a felguard in instances, but when I specced for it on the test server, I couldn't stand the loss of killing speed as compared to affliction. I would possibly consider specing into it at 70, but in the lvl 70 instances(or maybe just heroics) I here he underperforms, and then I'll have more incentive to go destro as I won't be levelling solo anymore.
I was the opposite. I leveled 1-60 demon and when I finally brought my lock over to HFP I struggled balancing downtime and keeping my felguard alive. Affliction has been a fresh breath and once I got the hang of it I'm enjoying it more.
He actually kicks a lot of ass in instances to the point where I can understand all the "lol felgaurd is ezmode" posts on the official forums. He's aggro-free, decent dps that you send in and forget, and gives you good buffs. And at least in leveling five mans, he was an awesome off-tank. (Never did a heroic with that spec myself but I imagine he'd get rocked much faster.)
I don't know the math but I have always assumed there will be a point where his scaling starts to suck compared to affliction or destruction people as gear improves. It's hard to compare accurately with the warlocks I play with, though, because us affliction and destro are outgeared by something goofy like 200-300 +damage by the demonology guy who also farmed his ass off for crafted epics. Once we're more even we'll see...
I am trying to balance PVP and Raiding in my spec. I was straight affliction before and tried out a Destruction centered spec for raiding and mostly hated it. This is my idea of a spec for balancing arena pvp with raiding:
The main idea is to focus on affliction to dot up enemies and then spam shadow bolts while waiting for my dots to wear down. I can then drain life to refill life which I lifetap away. The healthstone points are for helping my teammates in arena.
When I played tonight I did heavy shadow bolt / immolate/incinerate and it seemed like the shadow bolts did about as much damage as the immolate/incinerate. So if I focus on affliciton and add shadow mastery to the mix that ought to get my DPS up for raiding and allow me to keep doing affliction in arena.
That's pretty similar to my build, and I've been using it for a month or so now. You get the big crits ruin can bring, without losing Dark Pact, so your mana stretches out quite a while.
I suppose it also depends on how much +shadow vs +spelldmg gear you have; I've got the frozen shadow set, so Immolate/Incinerate don't get as much use from me, but my dots and shadowbolt get the full use from it.
edit: also, the top warlock in my battleground group last week was an Affliction warlock using a not terribly far off build from that.
The people in my raid basically said, "We don't know much about Warlock specs...but we want you to do more damage." So I needed a group to whom I could turn for info.
I'll run this spec by them and see how they like it. Thanks!
I am doing the Warlock "orb" quest. I chose the infernal quest (because I didn't know what the difference was) but, of course, that means my reward will be +fire damage. Can I abandon the quest before I turn it in and get to re pick? Or do I lose it if I abandon it? Thottbot and others seem to have completely conflicting answers to this.
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We are aware that Hunters and Warlocks still have problems with their pets, when taking off on their flying mounts (The pet is still running and aggros all mobs, or it lands off with its master and then disappears). We recently said that this problem would be solved for Hunter and Warlock pets and in regards to that, we would like to inform you that we expect to have that issue resolved in the patch 2.1.
When the Hunter or Warlock is mounting a flying mount, the pet will automatically be “saved” and then un-summon, and dismounting the flying mount will cause the pets to re-summon immediately (This will also happen when using a flight path).
Drat. I liked being able to change pets for free when using a flight path. Oh well, guess I need to use the "Go on...get out of here!" method of hitting stay and running.
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Drat. I liked being able to change pets for free when using a flight path. Oh well, guess I need to use the "Go on...get out of here!" method of hitting stay and running.
Um, I don't think that refunds the shard cost. At least, the one time I tried it it didn't work.
Drat. I liked being able to change pets for free when using a flight path. Oh well, guess I need to use the "Go on...get out of here!" method of hitting stay and running.
Um, I don't think that refunds the shard cost. At least, the one time I tried it it didn't work.
Refunds me .... sometimes
I have had my pet constantly lag out and I'd lose shards but when a pet goes "out of bounds" I get my shard ... most of the time.
Drat. I liked being able to change pets for free when using a flight path. Oh well, guess I need to use the "Go on...get out of here!" method of hitting stay and running.
Um, I don't think that refunds the shard cost. At least, the one time I tried it it didn't work.
Refunds me .... sometimes
I have had my pet constantly lag out and I'd lose shards but when a pet goes "out of bounds" I get my shard ... most of the time.
Are those times when you put it on stay? I think it's pretty reliable at refunding the cost when it accidentally goes out of range, but maybe not when you put the pet on stay.
Drat. I liked being able to change pets for free when using a flight path. Oh well, guess I need to use the "Go on...get out of here!" method of hitting stay and running.
Um, I don't think that refunds the shard cost. At least, the one time I tried it it didn't work.
Refunds me .... sometimes
I have had my pet constantly lag out and I'd lose shards but when a pet goes "out of bounds" I get my shard ... most of the time.
Are those times when you put it on stay? I think it's pretty reliable at refunding the cost when it accidentally goes out of range, but maybe not when you put the pet on stay.
I have always been refunded when I put it on stay and run out of range. Everytime.
I have also not seen a time where it did not give me a shard for blowing up my pet when I went on a flight.
Putting the pet on stay and running out of bounds refunds the shard almost every time for me. Even though I'm very glad this change is going in, I'm going to miss trawlin' for mobs with my Felguard and a flying mount. "I'm too pathetic to fight my own battles, eh?" The lava in Shadowmoon gave similar opportunities for abuse.
Drat. I liked being able to change pets for free when using a flight path. Oh well, guess I need to use the "Go on...get out of here!" method of hitting stay and running.
Um, I don't think that refunds the shard cost. At least, the one time I tried it it didn't work.
Refunds me .... sometimes
I have had my pet constantly lag out and I'd lose shards but when a pet goes "out of bounds" I get my shard ... most of the time.
Are those times when you put it on stay? I think it's pretty reliable at refunding the cost when it accidentally goes out of range, but maybe not when you put the pet on stay.
Yeah, if you put it on stay and run out of range you get a refund. I do it all the time when I'm following a road going from one mob type to another and know I'll want a different pet when I get there.
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Yeah, getting the Soul Shard refund once your pet gets out of range is certainly nice. Also, has anyone found a great reason for rolling PvE with your Felhunter? Is Voidwalker still the best way to go, or what?
All depends on what your fighthing. If you have caster types go with felhunter, if you need a mini tank for a bit pull out the void. You have to have situational awareness on what your fighthing and where. There is no solid answer for all pve stuff.
I am tempted to make a blood elf warlock spec them daemonology in addition to my undead affliction spec'd warlock.
I tired it out in the test server when they had them first up awhile ago but I agree with the reduced damage for a daemon that could dps and tank was not for me.
I had played my warlock as affliction for almost 2 years at that point.
It would be interesting to try it but I don't know if I can stand playing a daemonology warlock
I do have 2 dagger rogues one 70 night elf the other one a 33 blood elf.
I know of someone who rolled a blood elf priest just to spec his undead one shadow and that one to heal.
Well if your going to hate then don't do it. Spec the Be full destruction and make it a pvp twink for BG's. Besides, Destruction just seems to fit with BE's more. At least to me anyway.
Yeah, getting the Soul Shard refund once your pet gets out of range is certainly nice. Also, has anyone found a great reason for rolling PvE with your Felhunter? Is Voidwalker still the best way to go, or what?
As someone else stated, the different pets have different uses. I do not profess to be an expert (having only played for a month or so now) but through trial and error I've found where I like to use my pets best. Felhunter for casters, Void for high damage melee mobs or groups, Succy for general purpose grinding single mob action, and Imp for general purpose group action. I don't have any other minions yet, so I can't say for the rest. Also, YMMV.
It took a bit of practice to find their niche. I remember thinking "How useless" when I first got each pet, but then realizing how they can be used later on.
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The only time I've used the felguy in kara is for adding dps to those damn magic immune worms after cura. Every other fight he would have either been owned in the face by AoE or it was worth it to have the 20% thread buff from my imp. Don't underestimate the power of the imp by the way. Mine's doing over 300 per firebolt, and with the 2 set bonus from the dungeon set and a possible shadow priest in the group along with 1/3 mana feed means he'll be keeping up his 150+ dps for a long while. Felguard tends to get mitigated the hell out of especially since we have a bear MT.
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I don't think it's worth it. Demonology tree already is a bit light on the good talents in the mid range(except for DS, which gets rid of your pet altogether). I wouldn't consider more than 21 to be a good investment without soul link, and even then I'd say you need to go all the way to Felguard. For raid damage in general, you want to go either heavy destro for their very nice scaling nukes, or heavy into affliction for the high damage DoTs. The latter will probably retain about as much utility as the spec you listed, and do more damage at the same time.
Demonic Sacrifice is really more of a high level talent. For leveling, you'll do much better if you go Affliction to Dark Pact and use your succubus as a mana battery and walking DoT while you drain tank. The benefits from DS don't justify the loss of pet damage.
Edit: Additionally, I respecced to 41/18/2 and now I wonder how much shadow damage I need? And I'm not convinced the affliction tree does more damage than the demo tree, even in a raid situation.
Has anyone done the math?
Edit: How's this built?
So, I will be picking up UA again, but I need to decide how to spend the other 20 points.
Three options
41/9/11 <--- Stamina + Shadowburn
41/0/20 <--- UA + increase SB range and decreased destruct threat, 5% more crit.
45/16/0 <--- UA + better Fel Armor
Most of the math geniuses on the WoW forums as well as the best warlock I've played with seem to think that the spell crit necessary to make Ruin > UA is some number approaching infinity. I had a spec similar to yours for a bit but once I went UA I don't think I'll ever go back. Especially considering it's easier to gear for straight shadow damage than to balance damage and crit, heh...
I went 42/1/18 for the range/threat. If we had infinite paladins I'd probably throw more points in demo for the stam though.
I imagine not, but I am not 70 yet or I would run the tests myself. If it does not effect Seed of Corruption, do you find that this affects whether or not you spend the three talent points there?
2. It's still three of the best spent points in the Affliction tree.
My lock is only 66 but I'd say...
You'll get 8% from the talents.
I'd say you need to get your crit at least above 20%. 12% from gear sounds alright to me, but this is really the min for destruction I think. The more crit the better, the problem is a lot of the crit items tend to have not so much or no stam and just some int and crit. You will see a huge improvement if you go from a little crit to a lot.
Group with a fire mage. It's really an amazing combo.
Mm, I was affliction to 60 but got annoyed with it when I started leveling in HFP and tried the felguard. It was really really hard to give him up, he's so versatile soloing and in 5-mans. But relying on your pet staying alive or there goes half your talent points is kinda frustrating. Good thing endgame affliction is stupidly overpowered too.
I don't know the math but I have always assumed there will be a point where his scaling starts to suck compared to affliction or destruction people as gear improves. It's hard to compare accurately with the warlocks I play with, though, because us affliction and destro are outgeared by something goofy like 200-300 +damage by the demonology guy who also farmed his ass off for crafted epics.
I am trying to balance PVP and Raiding in my spec. I was straight affliction before and tried out a Destruction centered spec for raiding and mostly hated it. This is my idea of a spec for balancing arena pvp with raiding:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IVMrizfzVtbZbZxx0tr0z
The main idea is to focus on affliction to dot up enemies and then spam shadow bolts while waiting for my dots to wear down. I can then drain life to refill life which I lifetap away. The healthstone points are for helping my teammates in arena.
When I played tonight I did heavy shadow bolt / immolate/incinerate and it seemed like the shadow bolts did about as much damage as the immolate/incinerate. So if I focus on affliciton and add shadow mastery to the mix that ought to get my DPS up for raiding and allow me to keep doing affliction in arena.
Thoughts?
I suppose it also depends on how much +shadow vs +spelldmg gear you have; I've got the frozen shadow set, so Immolate/Incinerate don't get as much use from me, but my dots and shadowbolt get the full use from it.
edit: also, the top warlock in my battleground group last week was an Affliction warlock using a not terribly far off build from that.
The people in my raid basically said, "We don't know much about Warlock specs...but we want you to do more damage." So I needed a group to whom I could turn for info.
I'll run this spec by them and see how they like it. Thanks!
I am doing the Warlock "orb" quest. I chose the infernal quest (because I didn't know what the difference was) but, of course, that means my reward will be +fire damage. Can I abandon the quest before I turn it in and get to re pick? Or do I lose it if I abandon it? Thottbot and others seem to have completely conflicting answers to this.
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Just fyi.
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Um, I don't think that refunds the shard cost. At least, the one time I tried it it didn't work.
Refunds me .... sometimes
I have had my pet constantly lag out and I'd lose shards but when a pet goes "out of bounds" I get my shard ... most of the time.
Are those times when you put it on stay? I think it's pretty reliable at refunding the cost when it accidentally goes out of range, but maybe not when you put the pet on stay.
I have always been refunded when I put it on stay and run out of range. Everytime.
I have also not seen a time where it did not give me a shard for blowing up my pet when I went on a flight.
Yeah, if you put it on stay and run out of range you get a refund. I do it all the time when I'm following a road going from one mob type to another and know I'll want a different pet when I get there.
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I tired it out in the test server when they had them first up awhile ago but I agree with the reduced damage for a daemon that could dps and tank was not for me.
I had played my warlock as affliction for almost 2 years at that point.
It would be interesting to try it but I don't know if I can stand playing a daemonology warlock
I do have 2 dagger rogues one 70 night elf the other one a 33 blood elf.
I know of someone who rolled a blood elf priest just to spec his undead one shadow and that one to heal.
But I just don't know.
UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons
Watch out for the daemons...clearly scarier since vowels in Unix cost money.
As someone else stated, the different pets have different uses. I do not profess to be an expert (having only played for a month or so now) but through trial and error I've found where I like to use my pets best. Felhunter for casters, Void for high damage melee mobs or groups, Succy for general purpose grinding single mob action, and Imp for general purpose group action. I don't have any other minions yet, so I can't say for the rest. Also, YMMV.
It took a bit of practice to find their niche. I remember thinking "How useless" when I first got each pet, but then realizing how they can be used later on.
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