wowaddicts.net

Its easy: pay attention, all the time, that’s it. Players that are 100% focused to the raid will always do better then those that “phone in” their contributions.

So what does “pay attention” mean? Don’t die, the biggest influence on your damage done on a boss fight is how much of it you were alive for. Cast sequences (see my 2nd post), gear selection (1st post) and talent selection (3rd post) are all minor influences compared to being able to stay alive for an entire encounter.

If you push out 900dps for 60% of a 5 min fight you will do a total of: 162000 damage

If you push out 600dps for 100% of a 5 min fight you will do a total of: 180000 damage

About an 11% increase, just from surviving the entire fight.

After mastering staying alive the rest is just minor tweaks, make sure you pop your dps trinkets when ever they are available (Personally I macro all of mine to my core spells), make sure your dots are always ticking, and squeeze out Shadow bolts all the time.

Stay alive and keep your dots ticking and you will climb the metres

There is a talent tree that is correct for your current gear.

New locks (Green 70s, 5 man, kara, gruul) should spec affliction.

Why? Because until you get to the hit cap, suppression will help you out, a lot. Very little gear outside raids has +spell hit, unfortunatly Supression only effects affliction spells, so you may as well max out the damage of those spells least likely to be resisted. Basically, before you reach the hit cap, affliction will give you the highest dps for your gear.

Mid tier raiding locks (SSC/TK) once they get the 2 piece T5 set bonus and/or the Void Star Talisman should spec demonology and use the Fel Guard, whilst still focusing on maxing out spell hit. Demonic Knowledge and Soul Link give you a significant boost to your raw +damage. However the Fel Guard can be difficult to keep alive. The T5 2 piece set bonus and the Void Star Talisman greatly increase his suvivability. Making this spec ideal for mid tier raiding.

Once you are comfortably at the hit cap, and are over 20% crit and 1200 shadow damage Destruction becomes the best talent tree for maximising your dps. This is further enforced by the T6 set bonus to Shadow Bolt Damage (An extra 6%)

There is cast priority, and the simple rules are:

• Cast spells with the longest duration 1st .

It gives you more time to cast Shadow Bolts in the long run.

• Don’t refresh a DoT if it is still running.

Wastes mana, and in the case of CoA lowers your dps to refresh it early

• Don’t refresh a DoT if the target will not live for at least 75% of its duration

Dots are only efficient if they get to run their full course.

• When in doubt, cast Shadow Bolt.

Unless you’re threat capped (about to pull agro), in this case cast Life Tap. There will be times when a dot has 1s left and everything else is still running, instead of standing still waiting for that DoT to finish, cast Shadow Bolt or Life Tap.

• Use Curse of Doom over Agony on bosses

Because you need to refresh CoD half as much as CoA it allows you to cast (roughly) 5 extra Shadow Bolts every min. This extra Shadow Bolt damage makes up the difference in damage between CoA and CoD. Don’t forget point 3 though, if the mob dies before CoD detonates then you’ve lost dps. Switch to CoA when the boss gets to around 20%

Until you get to 204 hit rating (16%), regardless of spec. Yes that includes affliction locks. Why?

Over 60% of a raiding warlocks damage comes from Shadow bolt (Assuming near 100% uptime on all dots).

The Suppression Talent increases a chance to hit for Affliction spells only, this does not include Shadow bolt.

Point for point (1 spell hit vs 1 spell dmg) Spell Hit will give you the greatest boost to your dps until you reach the hit cap.

So resist the urge to buy those Living Rubies and buy Dawnstones instead, on the plus side because so few people know to get to the hit cap these gems are usually pretty cheap on the AH