World of Warcraft Guide to Warlock DPS: Part One

Warlock DPS is, in my opinion, something that appears simple, but really is rather complex. This is demonstrated when it appears that many people in WoW who dps as a warlock have trouble with dealing significant damage, yet warlocks are a primary damage class (three talent trees for dps, no hybrid duties). I seem to see that question come up a lot in WoW themed forums, "how do i do high dps?". In my experience these problems are mostly due to a number of things: inferior assemblage of a damage cycle, lack of understanding their abilities and the way they interact, and a basic lack of understanding of the math or theory (theorycraft) behind it. In this multiple-part guide I will attempt to impart my experience on warlock damage to teach you how to assemble a good damage cycle, and maintain its output.

Spells and Talents

I'll be giving a short rundown of all warlock damage spells and curses, I will also look into some of the more ambiguous or misunderstood talents of the warlocks three talent trees. I'll start by listing the spells and there statistics including damage coefficients a term it seems the majority of WoW players are ignorant of. Spell damage coefficient is a brilliant little device used by blizzard to balance the scaling potential of spells. The way it works is that the coefficient of the spell determines how much of your spell damage is added to a spell. So let's say you have a 50% damage coefficient on a spell and 100 spell damage, so that spell is going to be getting an additional 50 damage on each of it's casts. This coefficient is based on the casting speed of the spell with 3.5 seconds being 100% and 1.5 seconds or instant being 42.86%. Some spells do not follow this rule, DoT's are one such example they have there own rules for determining coefficients.

Shadow Bolt
420 mana, 541-603 shadow damage, 3 second cast, 85.7% damage coefficient.

Corruption
370 mana, 900 shadow damage over 18 seconds, 2 second cast, 93.6% damage coefficient.

Siphon Life
410 mana, 630 shadow damage over 30 seconds, instant cast, 100% damage coefficient. Note: I have seen many people on the net propose that this spell is binary that is it either hits or doesn't then cannot be partially resisted. This is false, just go to http://wowwebstats.com/ and look up any boss encounter find siphon life on a warlocks spell profile and you'll see the amount of mitigation on the spell is greater then zero, so it indeed can suffer partial resists.

Immolate
445 mana, 327 fire damage then 615 fire damage over 15 seconds, 2 second cast, 85% damage coefficient (20% on the direct damage effect and 65% on the damage over time effect).

Incinerate
355 mana, 444-514 plus an additional 111-128 if your target is affected by an immolate spell, 2.5 second cast, 71.43% damage coefficient.

Searing pain
205 mana, 270-320 fire damage causes high threat, 1.5 second cast, 42.86% damage coefficient.

Soul Fire
250 mana, 1 soul shard, 1003-1257 fire damage, 6 second cast, one minute cooldown, 115% damage coefficient.

Drain Life
425 mana, 540 shadow damage over 5 seconds, 5 second channel, 71.43% damage coefficient.

Unstable Affliction
400 mana, 1050 shadow damage over 18 seconds, 1.5 second cast, 120% damage coefficient.

Shadowfury
710 mana, 612-728 shadow damage and stunning all enemies within 8 yards for 2 seconds, .5 second cast, 20 second cool down, does not trigger global cool down, 19.5% damage coefficient.

Shadowburn
515 mana, 1 soul shard, 597-675 shadow damage, instant cast, 15 second cool down, 42.86% damage coefficient.

Death Coil
600 mana, 519 shadow damage, the caster gains 100% of the damage caused in health. Instant cast 2 minute cooldown, 21.4% damage coefficient.

Conflagrate
320 mana, ignites a target already affected by your immolate causing 579-721 fire damage and consuming the immolate, instant cast, 10 second cooldown, 42.86% damage coefficient.

Curse of Agony
265 mana, 1356 damage over 24 seconds, instant cast, 120% damage coefficient.

Curse of Doom
380 mana, 4200 damage after 60 seconds, instant cast, 1 minute cooldown, 200% damage coefficient.

Suppression reduces the chance for your enemies to resist your affliction spells by 2% per rank. Suppression is a nice talent, but not a great one. Any enemy marked as a boss in world of warcraft, that is, they have a skull icon in place of there level is always treated as 3 levels above your level, so that means they have a 17% chance to resist your spells to a minimum of 1%, and this is called miss chance. Suppression reduces that chance by 10%. That sounds great right? Well it's decent enough but even if your a full affliction lock 30-40% of your damage or more should be coming from destruction spells which hamstrings it's usefulness. I recommend getting this talent into your build if your not maximized on spell hit rating, and if you can fit it into your build which is often tight depending on how much your guild requires a warlocks support talents.

Amplify Curse increases effect for your next curse of doom or curse of agony by 50%, or your next curse of exhaustion by an additional 20%. This talent is actually a nice damage boost for one talent point, providing that you use it right. Amplify curse will only multiply the BASE damage of your spell, but not it's coefficient. That means it's best to use amplify curse on curse of doom. Consider you can only use curse of doom every 3 minutes. Therefore every 3 minutes amplify curse contributes half the base damage of the spell for curse of doom that's 2100 damage, and for curse of agony thats 678. The winner here, is clear.

Dark Pact drains 700 of your pet's Mana, returning 100% to you. This spell is a great talent to have. It lowers your dependence on lifetap, makes your pet useful, and it has a higher coefficient then lifetap bringing the two talents almost in-line for the amount of mana restored per cast after getting two points in imp lifetap. It does not however increase your dps over lifetap as it still consumes a global cooldown to use same as lifetap, and with two ranks in imp lifetap they restore about the same so your not going to be saving global cooldowns by using it less. Tip: use this with a phaseshifted imp who has all his abilities off, he regens mana really fast.

Malediction increases the damage bonus effect of your Curse of Shadows and Curse of the Elements spells by an additional 1% per rank. This talent is a requirement for at least two locks in the raid. I know that many warlocks express doubt about it in the form of "but it's only 3% increase in damage" well, let's see what 3% is. Here is a guilds performance on wow webstats wowwebstats.com/kwhcsmtqtm5ymif we total the damage dealt by all the shadow and arcane users in this encounter we get 2,891,640 damage. Now they probably already have a malediction lock boosting damage, but let's just assume for a moment they don't, so now we figure how much 3% additional damage would be so we multiply that figure by 0.03 and come up with 86,749 damage. You will find that for three talent points you would be hard pressed to find that much more additional damage, but you can find single talent points such as ruin or unstable affliction which do. Chances are though at least two locks are going to be curse of shadow and curse of the elements duty, for those three talent points 86,749 damage isn't too bad.

Bane reduces the casting time of your shadow bolt and immolate spells by 0.1 sec and your soul fire spell by 0.4 sec per rank. First of all this talent Does Not lower the coefficient of those spells, for that is only a quality given to mage talents of similar nature. Secondly it seems I've heard many times, "but it's only 0.5 seconds off". Well, back to the math, yes? To find out how much of a damage boost a time reducing talent provides to your spell you divide the old cast time by the new cast time so 3/2.5=1.20 therefore a increase in damage of 20% for five talent points. That's not a bad boost to your shadow bolt.

Improved Immolate increases the initial damage of your immolate spell by 5% per rank. This talent increases the initial damage of your immolate spell by 25% that goes on after gear so it multiplies the spell damage you receive from your coefficient. Overall okay, but not great you'll often get more damage out of full points in emberstorm, even if your not a primary fire user.

Shadow and Flame Your Shadow Bolt and Incinerate spells gain an additional 4% of your bonus spell damage effects per rank. This talent is great. Remember what i said about coefficients? Well this increases the coefficient of shadow bolt and incinerate by 20% which is a great damage boost.

Well that's all for this part. I skipped going over some spells/talents like Ruin and Unstable Affliction because i felt they were important and complex enough that they deserve a larger section in a future part of the article.

Next article "A World of Warcraft Guide to Warlock Dps: Part 2 Analyzing the components of a DPS Cycle"