0/21/40 Shadow

As many of you know, my ally main is Manos, a shadow warlock.

The 0/21/40 spec gives a killer opportunity for amazing dps, fire or shadow, but since I'm expert on the latter (thanks to my math mentor Strang/Grief), here are my tips.

Stats to stack:

Hit (until cap or near cap) - 12.62 rating to 1% (up to a maximum of 16%)
> Hit rating is a more important than other stats, in addition to its high percentage-to-rating ratio, as a hit is another chance to land a critical strike, proc chance-on-hit trinkets, etc.

Damage (for power) - Shadow Bolt has a very, very high spellpower coefficient in addition to talents that will make it even more valuable.
Haste (for speed) - 15.77 to 1% (also reduces global cooldown)

Stats that are good, but not worth stacking:

Stamina (for more HP to life tap from, to burden healers less)
Intellect (for more mana so you can dps more before needing to life tap)
Critical Strike rating - at 22.08 rating to 1%, spell critical strike rating isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sure, improved shadowbolt will have more uptime; however, 22.08 rating for haste would be 1.4% haste, 1.75% hit, or 26.5 spelldamage (2.21% of Manos' unbuffed spelldamage, in fact), all of which are more valuable than the crit rating.

Rotation:

I shouldn't need to go over this, but here's a tidbit about cursing:

If there are multiple warlocks in a raid, the two with the lowest spelldamage should curse Elements and Recklessness on the enemy, as this will greatly increase the damage output of almost every class.

Higher spelldamage warlocks should be using Agony, as it has a higher coefficient and DPS than Doom, even though there is slightly more than a 1-second GCD interruption to shadowbolt casting over Doom.

After Cursing, a shadow lock should just pound the hell out of the boss with shadowbolt, keeping a few things in mind:

If you know a shaman in your group is going to be popping Bloodlust soon, you should try to stay near full mana to make the most of that time.

Any time a haste effect is placed upon you, it does two things:
1. Stacks multiplicatively with your haste rating and other effects (suppose you have 20% haste naturally and you get a 20% proc, say Quagmirran's Eye. The result is 44% haste, not 40% - 1.20 * 1.20 = 1.44)
2. More spelldamage at this time is more efficient. If you have a spell-power item like Hex-Shrunken Head or Icon of the Silver Crescent, that 20 seconds of spelldamage bonus is gonna affect more spells if you're under a haste effect.

Also, don't be fooled by the simplicity of a spam - you still need to focus for timing casts and situational raid conditions. You can't be healed through everything (despite Fel Aegis x3 talent and Fel Armor, we are not invincible)

And that just about wraps it all up!

Wow! Strang is your math mentor?! LOL

On a completely other note: nice guide

Sure is a nice guide think i will use this guide to help with my warlock if he ever hit's 70 as manos know's he's lvl'd 2 in bout 2 months or sumat like that

Yeah, I'm gonna do guides for Enh and Ele shams soon... but it just takes so much time and I'm kinda nab at Enh.

Strang is majoring in mathematics at graduate school.... he knows his stuff

Scythe / Valkyar wrote:Sure is a nice guide think i will use this guide to help with my warlock if he ever hit's 70 as manos know's he's lvl'd 2 in bout 2 months or sumat like that

as is the case with oddball........

Manos wrote:Strang is majoring in mathematics at graduate school.... he knows his stuff

which kinda sucks cuz i get bored more often since he's out of state. and yes he is a genius