The little time that I have had to play has been a very ‘confusculated’ time, as I try and work out dot rotations, what spell refreshes what, or what gets refreshed by what, why Shadowbolts are crap now and why I’m casting Incinerate like it’s going out of style.

At this point in time I’ll be staying Affliction (to the core, baby!) but that’s not to say that I won’t flirt with any other tree to see what it’s like. It’s very difficult having to get used to the Felhunter again, and having to cope with my pet dying to Maiden’s holy fire or Prince’s Shadow Nova. *sigh*

I haven’t noticed my DoT’s critting either, with Pandemic, I might end up having to run WWS a few nights and scour them to see if they did. I have noticed a few Drain Soul glyph procs, though, which are always fun.

I tell you what, though. If Unstable Affliction wasn’t a pre-req for Pandemic, then I wouldn’t have taken it. The times that I remember to use it are less likely to happen than a GM whispering me and telling me that I now have all the Netherwing Mounts for free (ie, less than zero).

When I work out an efficient, yet powerful, DoT rotation, I’ll do a big post about it, with WWS charts and pictures and all that jazz (:P) but until then, there’s some awesome work being done by others around the inter-tubes. Check out Killing Me Slowly’s take on Afflock Rotations, as well as Lilac’s afflock scribbles.

“Only usable in Ashenvale”

/cry

Apologies to all. I know I’ve left some things unfinished, but Real Life, that old chestnut, has intervened in an utterly major way.

… umm …

… being … less .. evil?

A good friend and I are deciding to mix things up abit. Karazhan for us has been pretty much a grind, the only fight that’s remotely challenging to our group now is Nightbane and the past two weeks we have only had 1 wipe in total on him.

So …

he will be playing my warlock, and I will be playing his Resto Drood. He is alittle bit daunted by the ‘complexity of the warlock class and playstyle’ whereas I am daunted by the whole ‘OK, Lifebloom, Lifebloom … Lifebloom … what else?’.

OK, not daunted, per se, but it’s good to spice things up abit. I shall be reporting on this evenings events at a later date (most likely tomorrow). Expect screenshots of the mass confusion!

I spent most of the weekend taking my druid, who is currently level 61, through the questlines in Silithus. She went down there to nab some enchanting recipes, and ended up starting the Ahn’Qiraj questline. While it’s pointless in the long run (the Gates on Dath’Remar have been open for a looooooong time) it’s still a very nice questline lore-wise (from what I’ve read) and I’d rather do it at an appropriate level than barge through it at 70/80.

On that topic, I have played with the Talent Calculator at Wowhead, and have come up with a tentative spec that I will be choosing when the patch hits and we get our talent points refunded. At the moment, I am specced 0/21/40 (a mage in my kara group and I were having some fun in kara and so he ported me and I respecced), but I am Affliction to the core, baby. My tentative spec for when the patch hits is:
http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=Icgr0zbAoiAoc0tbxc - 51/10/0.

I am really excited about the changes to the Affliction tree, and I want to see if the Felhunter is indeed going to be a better pet for us Ben Afflocks. I also like the new Haunt spell, and the other talents that have been changed to boost up our DoTs. Now all we need is some way to get DoTs to crit …

(And why not? We coult have a talent worth, say, 3 points: DoT Mastery, that reads:

Of course, that’s probably going to be abit OP, but who knows? Stranger things have happened …)

Edit: if I had actually looked abit harder at the new Affliction talents, I would have seen: Pandemic. Granted, this only happens with Corruption and Unstable Affliction, but it’s better than nothing. Reading Skills FTW!

As I was thinking about this, I asked myself a question. “What’s my favourite spell/ability?” So while I wait for the machines here at work to finish their scans, I made a list.

Seed of Corruption

Without a doubt, this is my favourite spell. Not just for the awesome numbers and potential for insane damage, it’s great in a variety of ways:

Last night I was in a Black Morass run with some friends to get one his Karazhan key. Chain casting SoC’s onto the trash as it gets rounded up prior to the event makes for short work (although the AoE cap was reducing the detonation damage from each seed to about 300-400 each *cry*)

Also in Black Morass, casting a SoC onto the main mob at the portal at the right time meant that the patrolling mobs that go from the portal to Medihv get tagged and aggroed onto me. While this isn’t the best thing to happen, we had an awesome healer and DPS who were able to pick them up off me before I got squishyfied. Saved alot of running from the portal to Medihv because we missed one or two.

Karazhan - Illhoof fight: ’nuff said. Haven’t tried this fight without a Warlock doing Seeds and I don’t think I want to. Chucking one up onto Illhoof himself for instant detonation of the others (if it kills them) is a ‘WHOA’ moment and a half.

Zul’Farrak: well, a level 70 spell in a level 40-45 instance is always going to be cool, but SoC makes very short work of the Pyramid event. While I’m not yet able to solo it (leather armour puh-LEEEEESE?) it makes that section faster when helping out friends.

Isle of Quel’Danas: as you know, there’s nothing more annoying than casting a spell and having someone else tag your mob right before the spell lands. Then you have initial aggro AND get no XP/Rep out of it. SoC + Shadowburn will help tag other mobs when it detonates, which is great for those dailies when it seems EVERYONE is out there following you around, Moonfiring your mobs before Shadowbolt hits. I love using it with the Demons and the Dawnblade guys.

What is your favourite spell/ability and why?

I’m going to be using our Karazhan run from Friday as an example. I’m also going to link the anonymous report so that people’s actual character names are not shown.

Step One - Logging

WWS collects its data from the combat log. You know, that log that is hidden behind your General chat window? Yep, that’s the one. WoW doesn’t record all that information normally, so you have to actually tell it to record it. You do that by either:

• downloading and running an addon like LoggerHead;

• typing: /combatlog

If you use LoggerHead, you get asked when you zone anywhere for the first time if you want to enable logging for that zone. Can be interesting if you are flying from one end of the continent to another.
For the non-addon users, you will see a default message that says: Combat logging is enabled to …\World of Warcraft\Logs\WoWCombatLog.txt

Step Two - Fight!

I trust you don’t need any explanation here. Just totally forget that you are recording everything that happens (and I mean everything).

Step Three - Run the Client

Go to the WWS website (www.wowwebstats.com) and click on the big link:

This will download and run a Java Applet. You might have to click on some security warnings, so double check that they look OK before running.
When you start it up, you will see something like this:

If you have run it previously, then your last Caption will be in there.
Click on ‘Add a Combat Log’ and it should take you straight to your WoW/Logs directory, where you can see what logs are what. But first …

Step Four - Truncate

What happens if you enable logging on a whole lot of fights? My current WoWCombatLog.txt file has about three months of data in it (roughly 120MB in size). We don’t want to upload all that data (and the WWS client has a 24-hour restriction on the log) so we need to truncate the data.

Open the file in Notepad (or your other favourite text editor):

Dont worry if the first few lines of your file are blank - this freaked me out at first, but if you scroll down like you see I have done, youw ill see the data appear.

We need to find where the combat that you want to upload starts. I was fortunate in that the run I wanted to upload was the only thing I had logged that day (29th August) so I did a search for ‘8/29′. If you copy from this point to the end of your file (or the end of where you wanted to upload, if this is the last thing you recorded before coming to upload, then go to the end of the file) you can paste the data into a new text file and call it something meaninful.

Save this file and go back to your WWS Client window.

Step Five - Upload

You might have to close the open file dialog and open it again to get the new file you created to show up (and if you saved it to another directory, you will have to navigate to it):

Click Open. You can enter a new comment or title for this file in this screen, as shown below:

Once you like what you are calling it, click Host Report.

It won’t take too long to upload (depending on the size of your log) and once it’s finished, your browser window will open at something like this:

Step Six - Review

[example link: http://wowwebstats.com/qursg5tivaejs]
You will be taken to your private report screen. In the [manage report] window, you can see a link to the public version, which gives anonymous names to group members.

As you can see, this page defaults to show the Damage Out from the raid, but there are tabs for Damage In and Heals. There is also a dropdown menu where you can select the boss (and even the boss attempt) that you want to look at. You can also click a players (actor, WWS calls it) name to go to their individual stats, like so:

That’s a whole lotta information! Basically, without going further into detail, you can see every point of damage that this player caused, what the spell/ability name was, how much it hit for as a min/max/average, etc. Some of those spells are unique Karazhan abilities (from the books you pick up).

You can also see a player’s ‘pets’. In the example above, you can see my Imp and also my Eye of Kilrogg. Clicking on their names will take to you their own stat page.

Deaths are listed there as well, at the times (Server Time) that they occurred.

The amount of information that this site provides is staggering, and I find it’s an awesome tool for refining your playstyle. For some reason, WWS shows my talent tree as 41/0/20, whereas I respecced prior to this fight to 40/0/21 (Mal/Ruin), but this may be due to Armory updates.

You don’t need to be in a you-beaut raid group to run this either, or need permission from your fellow members. Some people might take offence at seeing their names next to sub-par results, but thats what the Anonymous feature is for.

You can also do it while running around Elwynn Forest, if you so wish. The number of different people that appear in your combat log makes no impact to WWS: they will all be shown.

Good luck with your WWS reporting! Missed something? Am I wrong? Let me know below

Shas hasn’t done much this week. A few dailies here and there have been the highlights of her WoW-time as we get into baby delivery mode on the RL front. Last night, however …

Step through the CoT portal with me, back to January 2007 ………

The scene is Blackrock Depths. Shastarian has just completed a run of BRD (finishing all but one of her quests there) with her current guild, SoulJaz, and getting attuned to the green swirling portal that’s called Molten Core. She is around the 55-57 level mark, and very excited that she can, one day, walk through that portal into the world of raiding

….. aaaaaaand back out of the portal.

Present day: Shastarian hasn’t set foot in or near Molten Core since that day. Last night, her enchanter, Shasmo, reached the lofty peaks of 265 enchanting skill, which means both Fiery enchants and the awesome druid trinket: Smoking Heart of the Mountain. The only thing that is preventing Shasmo from making said Heart is: a Blood of the Mountain, which grows inside Molten Core and various Dark Iron Ore deposits.

Shastarian went looking for some deposits, but found nary a Heart. She was so close to BRD, and apparently there are some deposits inside …
Oh, hello! You’re the chick who stands there all the time, handing out the quests to get attuned to Molten Core. I remember you. Oh, whats this? You can TAKE me to Molten Core? Why not?

Oh, I need to be in a raid group? Hrm, lets see … <convert to raid> done! Lets go!

Oh, what? You can’t do Molten Core on Heroic? Pfft, that’s just silly. OK, Normal mode selected, lets go!

-

Whoa. This looks sooooo cool (in a OMGEVERYTHINGISONFIRE kind of way). What the–? These giants are only level 62 elites? Pfft.

Um … just in case, let’s equip a Soulstone. You never know …..

(for the record: I can see that I read the tooltip wrong. These guys are level ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY TWO ELITES!!! My Goodness they hit hard.)

Now I can honestly say that I have been inside Molten Core. Now to find a couple of foolish 70s to come through it with me to farm these Hearts. I figure that I only need a decent tank, and my resident awesome Druid healer. One DPS should be enough, right? Right?

The very first time I go into Alterac Valley

My Hunter’s Ghost Cat takes the lookout!

My Rogue, LeGhost, finishes a questline from LBRS and comes face to face with a dragon who he though he was Honoured with …

My Dwarf Hunter makes use of his new Matrix Trap whilst taming.

I tried to get onto the side to get a better look, but was too stout :-(. You can see it on my minimap, though.

Now Shastarian can pretend to be a Rogue! Thanks, Gruul!

1. Broke again: after purchasing my epic mount and training, I then proceeded to trade Badges for nether Vortexes, and got a tailor to make Belt of Blasting for me, replacing an old Moroes drop.
2. Re-gemming so that I’m not abominably over the spell-hit cap has seen me reach 201 out of 202. GRRRRRRRRR
3. OMG Swift Blue Gryphons are so fast!
4. New Guild: Cellar Door. Nothing wrong with Void at all, it’s just they stopped recruiting for some reason, which meant that our chances of seeing BT/MH went to a divide-by-zero.
5. Nearly have enough Badges again for Soulcloth Pants. Just gotta decide if I should start gearing for spell crit or go for more damage (am at 1027 with Fel Armor on atm).
6. Haven’t had time yet to go DPS test these trinket setups. Hopefully this week.
7. While I respect those of you who can do it, I will not be making videos of myself for public consumption. I have too much respect for the meals you eat to run the risk of you bringing it up again

A Real Post ™ coming soon! I promise!

For awhile now, I my trinket line-up has been my Icon of the Silver Crescent and Quagmirran’s Eye. The Eye procs for me quite often, often enough to make a noticable difference to my DPS. But now …

… now …

… I have a new trinket. I may swap the Eye back in for certain situations, but I will need to do some major DPS testing to work out the best trinket to use for when.

What’s the new trinket? None other than …

Darkmoon Card:Crusade!!

YaY! Finally, after months of collecting, I found a cheap (circa 500G) Ace of Blessings card to complete my set. And, as luck would have it, the Faire was set up outside Shattrah City this month, so a quick hop, step and a jump over and I have it!

Bask in it’s glory! Revel in it’s awesomeness! Learn from its … learn-ed .. ness *sigh*

[Darkmoon Card: Crusade]

This weekend, between raids, I will be heading out to Dr Boom with my Eye and Card and see what my DPS is like when I swap one for another (my Icon is tied to my Shadowbolt Macro, so I don’t want to give that up yet). Another few hours of messing with WWS *sigh* should give me an indication of which I will want to use for what fights. Wish me luck!

All Drains

#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:ctrl,nochanneling:Drain Mana] Drain Mana;
/cast [modifier:alt,nochanneling:Drain Life] Drain Life;
/cast [nomodifier,nochanneling:Drain Soul(Rank 1)] Drain Soul(Rank 1);

Ah! This macro, while looking similar to previous macros that I’ve listed, introduces a new conditional operator: nochanneling:spellname. As you might be able to guess, this checks to see if we are currently channelling spellname, and, if we are, it doesn’t go any further. This has the benefit of saving mana in case you activate the macro in the middle of another cast of the same spell. Your mana efficiency goes waaaaay down if you keep casting Drain Life while it’s still channelling, and you get no additional benefit.
So, the macro lets us use Drain Mana if we are holding down the <ctrl> key, Drain Life if we hold down the <alt> key and Drain Soul (Rank 1) if we don’t hold down anything. (Drain Soul’s DPS is a pittance at high levels, and you should only use Rank 1 in all situations).

Minion Re-Summon

So, you’ve specced far enough into the Demonology tree to get Fel Domination, and it’s close relative Master Summoner. All your minions now take 4 seconds less to summon, bringing the total time to 6 seconds, but with Fel Dom, that gets slashed to only 0.5 sec. Not quite insta-cast, so you can’t do it on the run, but very helpful.
Raiding Warlocks know that when your pet dies, all the buffs that were on it are not there when it’s resummoned. This is a major PITA when you consider that the +stam/+int buff on your FelGuard was giving you extra spell damage. So, how can we help the situation?
This macro (build for Felguards, replace Felguard with appropriate minions name):

#showtooltip Summon Felguard
/run [pet=exists] PetAbandon();
/cast Fel Domination
/cast Summon Felguard

So, when we activate this macro, it checks to see if we have a pet. If we do, then it runs the PetAbandon function, which … abandons out pet (dismisses it). Not being Hunters and relying on our minions feelings to perform their duties, we don’t care about dismissing them.
Next, it casts Fel Domination, reducing the cast time of our minions by 5.5 seconds. If you took Master Summoner along with FD (and you should have), then the minion summoning spell will only take 0.5 seconds.
Then, it summons your minion (Felguard in the example.)
Note: I like to only use FD when I have a pet out, so I put this line above the /run … command:

/stopmacro [nopet]

and change the (now third) line to read:

/run PetAbandon();

Now, when you dismiss your minion, it keeps all the buffs that it had when it was dismissed. Also, when it’s resummoned, it comes back with full health and mana. Very useful if your pet is near death and you want to keep him around for longer.

One Button Emergency Heal

#showtooltip Master Healthstone
/use Master Healthstone
/use Super Health Potion
/use Bottled Nethergon Vapor

All three of these items restore health. All three are on seperate cooldowns. And you can mash this button if you like to use each item in sequence if you are in that state of “OMGINEEDHEALZNOWNOWNOWOMGOMG”.
Very easy to add in other items, too, but watch the 255 character limit! There is a nice variation of this macro at wowwiki.com that’s called BearPot. Designed for druids, this lets you use all different types of healing items, and by using the item number instead of the name, you can fit more in there.

If you have a macro that I haven’t written about yet and you feel like letting me know about it, go for it! Either comment or use the contact page, any way will do. If you think there’s a better way of writing one than how I have, tell me that, too

Shas out.

So I wont (except to say that this is my proposed WotLK level 80 spec (for the time being) :P)

I’ve been trying out the FelGuard, yet again (*sigh*) and have found him to be quite useful in getting my dailies done on the Isle (set him to aggressive on the Dawnchaser boats and let the SoC/Howl of Terror fly!) but I don’t think I want to raid with him again at the moment.

For one thing: I miss my DoT’s and de/buffs! It’s such a PITA to have to Life Tap (not to mention Health Funnel) when I’ve come to rely on Dark Pact to keep going and going like the Energizer Bunny. The extra stamina/int/spell damage is nice, but I haven’t seen a dramatic boost in DPS since respeccing. I ran a Heroic Underbog the other night with some friends, and was doing (self-buffed and with GotW) around the 500DPS mark on the bosses (thats including the FG damage) when I’d be rocking around the 600 mark or so as Aff. It might be the group makeup for that particular run, I don’t know, but I can’t see myself sticking with this for the long term. More power to those of you who can, though, and I may be missing something totally obvious in either my rotation (CoE/A, Corruption, Immolate and SB Spam) or the way I micromanage Haaghun. Either way, I realise that I am, still, an afflock to the core.

My significant other has a Mage that she has managed to get up to 53 without breaking too many¹ keyboards along the way. We were rockin’ it up in Un’Goro Crater the other day, killing Gorillas for fun, when I asked her if she wanted to have a go at a 70 character, specifically a level 70 Warlock. After a few simple instructions that I got in trouble for voicing, she was off, dot, dot, dot, dark pact, dot, dot, dotting and I was following on her mage. She got the hang of it quite quickly (she has watched me play for awhile now) and seemed to like it. I suggested we take Shastarian over to the Isle of QD, but she wasn’t keen on the idea of playign with mobs that could actually kill her. I’m hoping she’ll come around, though, because I want her to take Shastarian on a Karazhan raid one week. I am not sure if she will get to level 70 with the will to raid, but there’s no harm that I can see in letting her taste what it’s like (and our group meshes that well that she won’t be in (much) danger of wiping the raid).

¹ - 2 at last count.

Image courtesy of http://www.cyclonefanatic.com/forum/cf-archive-bin/5193-emus-kangaroos-cannot-walk-backwards.html/

Bonus points if you get the funny.

There’s nothing more annoying than running from one fight to another and having people demanding warlock summons because they are lost. We have asked everyone to go in after a full clear and get to know the place. Most of the running around that you do for the quests in there will have you finding out how to get to point B from point A, so I don’t understand why people still don’t know which way to turn once they get out from behind the bookcase that leads to Illhoof, or after Aran.

So we made our “Veterans” group, some of whom I hadn’t run with in awhile, but who’s skills and abilities I didn’t question one bit. First pull was on time (for once) at 7:30pm, and we were off!

No Paladins at all, so we didn’t have Blessing of Salvation at all. Bummer, must remember to watch the aggro carefully. As it turned out, that aspect wasn’t a problem at all, since our tanks are totally awesome and can build up enough threat to let us DPSers let loose.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bosses fell left, right and center. We got Curator down totally before he finished his first Evocation, which we were all excited about. An accidental pull of Aran before we were all ready saw a wipe, but we regrouped and knocked that sucka down! And at 11:30pm, a mere 3 hours4 hours (thanks Moz) after our first pull, we saw Nightbane hit the dust and yield up his loot. All bosses down (we don’t count the animal bosses), spirits high!

If it wasn’t for the fact that we had a scheduled run of Zul Aman on Saturday night, we would have powered on through that. But it was all good. Someone suggested Heroic MgT, and when I confessed that I hadn’t finished that instance on Normal, we powered through that, too! We ran out of time to do it on Heroic, but no matter; I finally got that quest finished and attuned.

Saturday night, I had bought my flasks/consumables/etc and was ready to go, but was skipped over in favour of the organiser’s friends who wanted to come along. I was, to put it midly, pissed off. I ended up doing my dailies and them bumming around on my shaman and rogue while I calmed down.

Seriously thinking of respeccing to Felguard and not letting myself spec back to Aff for a few weeks. Everytime I give him a go, I get bored, he feels clunky, so I go back to Aff. Depending on what kind of mood I’m in this evening, I think I might end up bringing Haaghun out from retirement.

Funny note: I have made myself a Runecloth Robe, that suits my SSO Tabard really well. I saw out that my robe (minus Tabard) matches the Clerics in the Chess event exactly, and all I am missing to look just like them is a white chapeau. Any ideas on where I can pick on of those up? (The one from SM is red *cry*)
Edit: image below:

Warlock

* Aftermath (Destruction) - Now a 2-point talent, down from 5.
* All demon abilities and spells will automatically be learned as pets gain levels. Demon Master trainers will be removed.
* Blood Pact now works raid-wide (not just in party).
* Cataclysm (Destruction) - Now also increases your chance to hit with Destruction spells by 1% per point.
* Curse of Recklessness will no longer prevent Fear effects, only prevent NPCs from fleeing (e.g. at low health).[Shastarian: boo! No more Fear-kiting in Instances!]
* Dark Pact: Tooltip updated to be more consistent with other similar effects.
* Demon Armor - Now increases healing done by spells and effects by 20%, but no longer has in-combat health regeneration.
* Demon Skin, Demon Armor and Fel Armor are no longer Magic effects and cannot be dispelled.
* Fel Armor - Now increases your spell damage equal to 30% of your total Spirit, but no longer increases healing done by spells and effects by 20%.
* Fel Stamina (Demonology) has been merged with Fel Intellect into Fel Vitality.
* Howl of Terror now costs 15% of base mana.
* Improved Curse of Weakness (Affliction) is now “Frailty” - Increases the amount of attack power reduced by your Curse of Weakness spell by 10/20%, and increases the amount of armor reduced by your Curse of Recklessness by 10/20%.
* Improved Enslave Demon (Demonology) is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 4.
* Improved Lash of Pain (Destruction) and Improved Firebolt (Destruction) have been merged into one talent, Demonic Power.
* Improved Shadow Bolt (Destruction) - Now increases damage by your next Shadow damage spells by 3/6/9/12/15%, down from 4/8/12/16/20%.
* Mana Feed: Tooltip updated to be more consistent with other similar effects.
* Master Demonologist �?? Felguard (Demonology) - Now increases all damage by 1/2/3/4/5%, and reduces all damage done to you by 1/2/3/4/5%.
* Master Demonologist �?? Imp (Demonology) - Now increases Fire damage by 1/2/3/4/5%, and critical hit chance with Fire spells by 1/2/3/4/5%.
* Master Demonologist �?? Succubus (Demonology) - Now increases Shadow damage by 1/2/3/4/5%, and critical hit chance with Shadow spells by 1/2/3/4/5%.
* Master Demonologist (Demonology) - Most effects have been altered.
* New Talent: Demonic Empowerment (Demonology) - Grants your Summoned Demon power for a short time.
* New Talent: Eradication (Affliction) - Your Corruption, Siphon Life and Curse of Agony ticks have a 5/10/15% chance to increase your spell haste by 20% for 8 sec. This effect has a 10 second cooldown.
* New Talent: Molten Core (Destruction) - Your Shadow spells and damage over time effects have a 5/10/15% chance to increase the damage of your Fire spells by 10% for 6 sec.
* Pyroclasm (Destruction) - Now also includes Conflagrate.
* Shadowfury (Destruction) - Can now be cast while moving. Stun duration increased to 3 seconds, up from 2.
* Soul Link (Demonology) is now an 11-point talent (used to be a 31-point talent), but the 5% bonus damage from this talent has been removed. In addition, the damage absorbed by Soul Link is now 15%, down from 20%.
* Soul Siphon (Affliction): Now also increases the damage of your Drain Soul.
* Suppression (Affliction) is now a 3-point talent, down from 5. Now increases your chance to hit with Affliction spells by 1/2/3%, down from 1/2/3/4/5%.
* Unstable Affliction (Affliction): Silence effect reduced to 3 seconds, down from 5.

And also:

The combat log now differentiates between a spell failure due to resistance and spell failure due to missing the target. Where once both events reported as a resist; a spell missing the target is now reported as a miss.

I really, really, REALLY want to get in on this beta!

(Using my WWS Report thats found here http://wowwebstats.com/qe1yqf4ls4zdk) as a working example.

Looking at the above image, we can see that my DPS time was 4 minutes and 45 seconds. This translates into 285 seconds.
All DoTs tick every 3 seconds, so we divide the number of seconds by 3 to see how many ticks we should have.

285 / 3 = 95

Now we look at the actual amount of DoT ticks I had, per DoT:

Corruption: 89 [93.6%]
Siphon Life: 92 [96.8%]
Unstable Affliction: 87 [91.5%]

In a perfect world, all these DoTs would have had 95 ticks, however, circumstances do change. Two Dots might finish at the same time, one might finish in the middle of a ShadowBolt cast, or during a GCD. I am happy enough with these results, even though I do understand that they are not a real world example. I will be recording all Boss Fights from here out, and will attempt to analyse them in the same way.

What is a good number to aim for? I can’t really answer that, since I haven’t collected any actual boss-fight data, and I dont want to use just my Dr Boom test. Currently, I am going to be aiming for a 90% DoT Uptime, since that’s my bread and butter as Affliction. I won’t cancel a current SB cast to refresh a DoT, nor will I refresh a DoT that hasn’t expired yet. I was fortunate in this test in that I rarely got two DoTs finishing at the same time. I will see tonight before shutdown what happens when I introduce Immolate into the equation.

Something wrong with my math? Did I assume and make an ass of myself? Let me know!

Last night, I had nothing important to do after dailies, so I headed out to Dr. Boom and proceeded to wail away.

The parameters I had set for myself were:

1. Only curse with Curse of Shadows
2. Only Shadow spells to be used
3. Test will run for the duration of one (1) Curse of Shadows (5 minutes)
4. DS/SnF spec will be 0/21/40 - http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IZbxszIbzZEx0tr0khhi
5. Afflock spec will be 41/2/18 - http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IVMrcRctVtcokZxx0tM [Edit: fixed]

DS/SnF

This test was probably the least Real-World in my eyes, as I didn’t move from my safe spot in the entire 5 minutes. In theory, it would also be the most boring, too, but the reality was I was squeaking over Vent about my 5600 Shadowbolt crits, especially when I crit two or even three times in a row. With the DS/SnF spec, my crit got up to just over 14%, which is still waaaaay too low.
Link to WWS Report
The problem with this test is that WWS shows the fight going for 9 minutes. I had a false start and ended up waiting for a long time for an Orc Hunter to kill him off, but after a few minutes I realised that it wouldn’t make any difference if he was attacking the good Doctor at the same time.
DPS: 870
SB%: 100%
Crit%: 17%
Miss: 3.8%

Afflock

Normally, I include Immolate in my rotation, but for this test, I wanted only to use Shadow spells. Affliction has the additional bonus to the Curse of Shadows, making it 13% instead of the normal 10% increase to shadow damage. In my Affliction spec, I have Dark Pact (less healing from Life Taps required) and I still have Improved Shadow Bolt.
Link to WWS Report
I have had the most experience with this style of fighting. Most of my DoTs are Instant cast, meaning I can cast them on the run, if I need to be.
DPS: 823
SB%: 53%
Crit%: 15%
Miss: 0

Conclusion

For an increase of 47DPS, I make myself more vunerable to lost DPS in mobile fights, lose alot of raid buffs/debuffs. At my current gear level, I will be staying Afflock specced (and to be honest, if I can raid in Tier 5/6 raids as Affliction, I will). Although, I will be recording data from boss fights as much as I can from now on, so I may find that DS/SnF is better in the long term.

PS: An interesting thing to note is that as DS/SnF, my tooltip crit chance is 14.56%, and WWS showed me critting 17% of the time. Whereas as Affliction, my tooltip crit is 11.39% and WWS said I critted 15% of the time (granted, I cast less SBs as Aff than DS/SnF).

It’s been explained in alot of places, by lots of people. WowWiki has a good write up on it, found here. In essence, though, Warlocks are going to want to have a +Spell Hit Rating of 202 to reach the ‘cap’ (Against a level 73 raid boss, you have a 17% chance to miss. 202 HR gives you +16% chance to hit, leaving the unavaiodable 1% to miss). Affliction Warlocks can put 5/5 into Suppression, a Tier-1 Affliction talent, but this only affects Affliction spells (Curses, Corruption, Drains, etc). Now, you can go into Kara without having hit this cap, but you should gear for spell hit first and foremost, because it does most definately improve your DPS; whatever spec you may be.

I have been striving to hit the cap, gemming everything I have that has a socket with +8 Spell hit gems, and slowly obtaining gear that brings me up. On Friday night, I got the last piece of gear that brings me to the lofty peaks of Spell Hit Rating.

Moroes was kind enough to drop Brooch of Unquenchable Fury, which has a healthy +spell hit rating of 15. Combined with my gems and my Jewel of Infinite Possibilities, I now have 206 spell hit rating (slightly over the cap).

I am not going to be re-gemming my gear anytime soon, because until I get more gear that has +spell hit, if I take out a +8 spell hit gem, then I go below the cap again, and I am worse of than I am now. However, my main focus is now changed to be +spell crit and +spell damage (and maybe +spell haste). My low, low crit rating of 11.30% is shocking, so I won’t be able to try out the Shadow Mage spec just yet, but soon, with some ZA, TK and SSC runs, I could be in a position to start killing off my Succubus.

I did get pulled into a Magtheridon attempt on Friday night, and was one of only two warlocks there. Both of us kept getting yelled at for not taking care of the Infernals, even though we tried to explain that we can only Banish one at a time, and Fear one at a time, and that doing this eats into our DPS considerably. As this was a guild/pug group, due to us not having the numbers on the night, we kept having difficulty taking down the last two warlocks, and the main tank wasn’t grabbing aggro from Mags fast enough, so he always went for a healer as soon as he released. Not a fun time, really. Hopefully, we can get a few more guildies to come with next time, who understand each others skills and limitations.

I have been levelling my baby shaman up, with the intent of having her as a raid healer at 70. Currently, she is Elemental spec, but at level 40 I want to take her to Enhancement with Duel Wield. Once I have done my dailies (or all the dailies I can stand to do) on Shastarian, I generally log onto her for an hour or so until RL intervenes.

Patch 2.4.3? I dunno, let’s see what the FINAL patch notes are. I will be holding off buying my shaman her mount, even if she hits 40 before the patch comes out, just for the chance of a reduction in mount training cost. That’s about all that interests me (I am unsure if the CoS/CoEl change will stay).

Thanks for sticking with me over this break. I promise you that I will try and do something interesting enough to write about in the future. Maybe even try my hand at some Pee Vee Pee!