WARLOCK RAID MACRO AND SPEC

Warlock raid spec -- http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Smolderthorn&n=Retet



This came from 1 of my old rading guilds Malignant.

Well it's been a while since I have critted you all with a Wall-Of-Text so here you go.

I've been doing a lot of DoT Rotation research lately, between talking to other warlocks, watcing Dr. Boom DPS test videos and a few other things I've come to some conclusions that should increase Warlock DoT DPS (and overall DPS) in raids.

The first common mistake is to try to make all of your DoTs expire at the same time. Thats bad, particularly if theres many of them all expiring at once because then you have downtime with nothing ticking.

Ideally you want a rotation where one dot ends it's cycle, then you re-apply it, then time passes, and another one drops/re-apply, rinse and repeat.

The one exception is UA - corruption. When you recast UA, corruption is just dropping so it makes it easy on you, and you dont waste any time. They're also your primary dps, so its a good idea in practise to keep em together.

But it can be tricky sometimes too, particularly when something happens to mess the rotation up (resist, lag, punts, etc). Keep in mind to be a good aff lock you need to be constantly juggling

And don't forget your shadowbolts, any time between re-applying your DoTs that is not taken up by Dark Pact or Life Tap, you should be pushing out as many shadowbolts as you possibly can.

My general rotation is my DoT sequence, a shadowbolt, dark pact twice, another shadowbolt, and then the sequence tends to be up again.

Here are the two macro's I am using now for Karazhan/Instances and explanations why.

BOSS FIGHTS
/castsequence reset=target/combat Immolate, Unstable Affliction, Corruption, Curse of Agony, Siphon Life


The boss fight macro is based on your DoT times and Global cooldown. With your DoTs set at the following times:
Corruption - - - - - - - 0:12
Immolation - - - - - - -0:15
Unstable Affliction - - 0:18
Curse of Agony - - - - 0:24
Siphon Life - - - - - - - 0:30

You will max out your effectiveness.

So on boss fights you start off with the Immolate which will eat up your GCD, so as soon as it's cast you can pop ou your UA, again this will eat up your GCD allowing you to instantly get your corruption on your target as soon as UA is finished casting. Now you'll be inside the 1.5 second Global Cool Down, so you wait for that to finish, pop Curse of Agony, wait the 1.5 again, and drop you siphon life.

Your total cast time at this point for the whole cylce will be (ignoring lag or resists) 6 seconds, maxing you out at 7.5 seconds until the sequence is complete and you are outside of GCD.

So now your Immolation should have 6 seconds remaining (again, ignoring lag and resists), so you should be able to pop 2 Dark Pacts (3 seconds in total), and a shadowbolt (2.5 seconds for a total of 7 seconds with GCD).

Once that is done, your Immolation will have been off the target for 1 second, by the time you recast, UA/Corruption will be down, so refresh them, leaving just enough time to life tap, pop a shadowbolt, and your CoA is going to be back up. Redo that, get mana or Shadowbolt, and refresh your Siphon Life.

By just repeating like that you should be able to maximise your DPS. Remember, you are going to get the occasional resist, your connection speed might change some of that up, as well as your own reaction time, and mobility needed for certain boss encounters.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to constantly keep your DoTs up, let them run their full course, but make sure they are re-applied as fast as possible once they are off. And any time you aren't DoTing you need to be spamming bolts, life tap, dark pact, drain life, or using bandages.

Though all this aside, I'm pondering replacing CoA with CoD on boss fights, it increases my overall DPS slightly on paper, and lowers mana usage. I'm going to play around with it and I'll post here how it goes.

TRASH PULLS
/castsequence reset=target/combat Unstable Affliction, Corruption, Curse of Agony, Siphon Life, Immolate

Now on trash pulls I use a different rotation, mostly because fights don't last as long, so your DoTs aren't going to gain their full potential (note: certain trash does last long enough for a full 30 second DoT rotation, if so, use your boss macro), and as such we want to use more shadowbolt DPS than DoT DPS.

I open up with UA/Corruption because they gain the most coefficient from your shadow damage, and are your primary DPS, and also they can be chain cast with UA eating up the GCD allowing you to pop an instant corruption. On some fights I will stop there and just start spamming bolts, depending upon the health of the mob, other fights I will toss out one or two of the other instant cast DoT's.

The thing you want to remember on trash, is to put out the most DPS in the shortest amount of time without pulling hate. By getting your DoTs ticking first, you will only start to spike hate near the end of the fight, at which point in time you can just finish it off, or your tank will have generated enough aggro you won't need to worry about pulling.

I try to Dark Pact/Life Tap as few times as possible on trash pulls, instead, relying on the few seconds of downtime between pulls to regen my mana.

If you follow these simple steps and you should see yourself near the top of the Damage meters every time.
_________________
All noobs are . But not all are noobs.