After looking over all the supposedly "good" specs for Warlocks, I've decided to dual spec thusly:

my whorelock

The biggest advantage I found for speccing this way is that both specs value gear similiarly, and because of the points in suppression less itemization needs to be used for +hit. Both of these specs are hit capped at 11%, and value

SP > Haste > Crit Rating > Spirit > Int

With ratios of about
8 : 12 : 14 : 15 : 48 (in terms of their respective benefits)

So 8 spell power is worth 12 haste is worth 14 crit, etc.

This means you don't have to worry about gearing up two different specs, and can concentrate on maximizing your gear/gemming/enchants using the above weights.

The other advantage to this dual spec is that you have flexibility on boss fights. For fights where there is a lot of movement you can utilize your dots to help keep your dps up while running. For fights where there is little movement you can use the naturally higher sustained dps of the destro spec, and have a nice rain of fire for trash pulls.

Hope this helps someone.

[edit] Fixed ratios to make more sense.

Last edited by Sarrael on Wed Aug 26, 2009 12:34 pm; edited 1 time in total

thanks sarrel,
gonna try the afflic spec. as is. gonna stay with my destro spec but will add one point to suppression. Am already at 430 hit.

i ran heroic nexxus today and couldnt get past 2k dps. then went to H UP and pulled 2500 dps. different group members helped, equin and meaty in upguard vs. two pallys in nex.
will see how it goes... let u know

mac

The specs I'm using utilize glyph of life tap, and the rotations are as follows..

Affliction:

Life Tap>Shadow Bolt>Haunt>Corruption>Unstable Affliction >Curse of Agony

The life tap used should be rank 1 initially since you probably don't need the mana, you just want the glyph buff. After that you can use normal rank. Then just use shadow bolt as filler while keeping up your dots.


Destruction:

Lifetap ->Curse of Doom -> Immolate -> Conflag -> Choas bolt -> incin -> incin

Same deal with lifetap here as both specs use glyph of life tap. Then just keep your immolate up and cast your other spells on cooldown. Obviously you can skip the curse if the mob wont live long enough for it to hit.

well deeps in 5 man are generally below 2k in either spec unless im aoe. but in tonight's 10 man naxx run i hit 3k + a lot of the time and didnt get below 2400. thoes numbers came from the destro spec. i didnt try afflic at all. more later.
mac

maclee wrote: well deeps in 5 man are generally below 2k in either spec unless im aoe.

Yeah well 5 mans are all about aoe. They're not very complicated, and nobody focuses in them except perhaps melee dps. Just go destro, and RoF ftw (or affliction + seed)

8 : 12 : 14 : 15 : 48 (in terms of their respective benefits)

In keeping with these weights for gemming/enchanting your first priority is to get hit capped. If you're using the specs above, you have an 11% bonus to hit mobs your level you should be able to hit raid bosses 100% of the time. Once you have this, you'll want to enchant & gem your gear using the weights described above.

Some practical examples:

Lets say you save up your badges and get yourself a nice Conqueror's Deathbringer Robe

It has a red socket, a yellow socket, and a +7 SP socket bonus, and we'll assume you're going to buy epic gems just to make the example easiser

Well the red socket is a no brainer, put the +23 spell power gem in it and move on.

The yellow socket is a bit of a tricky choice. You could go straight spell power for +23 SP total. Or you could go with +20 haste yellow gem. Or you could do an orange combo with +12/+10 SP/Haste. Either of these last two options will give you the +7 SP socket bonus, so...

+20 haste translates to 13 SP(rounded down), we add the +7 SP from the socket bonus for a total of +20, and we see that the +23 sp gem is clearly a winner over pure haste. But the combo gem may give different results.. +10 haste translates to 6 SP(rounded down) we add the +7 SP from the socket bonus giving us 13. Then we add the remaining 12 SP on the orange gem itself and we see that it's the equivalent of +25 SP.

So clearly for this piece we will want to gem +23 SP (red) and +12SP / +10 Haste (orange) in the two socket slots.

Also keep in mind that the only meta any warlock should be using is Chaotic Skyflare Diamond. It requires 2 Blue gems. Blue gems are terrible for us. The best you can do is the +SP/+Sprit gems, and those are only good because of the glyph of life tap. So try to make the most of it by choosing items with blue sockets that have a decent socket bonus and put 2 of these into em. Otherwise avoid blue gems like the plague.