my affliction warlock sucks

[Barman]

We are using now: Siphon Life, Curse of Agony, Corruption, Unstable Affliction. Then switch to next target. At boss fights those DoTs are followed by 5 (maybe 4 would be better) Shadow Bolts.
Of course the 2nd Siphon Life comes much too early then. But macro length is limited to 255 characters
At least we got dmg contribution up from 15% to 19% so far.

Thats the armory link

[KvdM]

What level are you characters? At lower levels, most instance mobs will die before the dots have ended (curse of agony for instance does most of its damage at the end of its dot time).

[Barman]

They are level 73. I know about Curse of Agony, I don't care if the warlocks damage output is inferior against trash instance mobs. But the damage output is also bad against bosses. If warlocks damage contribution rises over 20% against bosses, then I am happy
I could omit the CoA against trash instance mobs, but I dont want to micromanagement a DD. I want to concentrate on tank and healer.

So far all replies which keep in mind that I want the least micromanagement possible seem to confirm my spell rotation and maxdps.com does too. I will respec so that I got Haunt at once and will change to:

Curse of Agony , Corruption, Unstable Affliction, Haunt, Siphon Life, 3-4 times Shadow Bolt

[Barman]

Now I got the following macro

/assist focus
/castsequence reset=18/target Unstable Affliction, Haunt, Siphon Life, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt

and another one to start fight or to refresh

/assist focus
/stopcasting
/castsequence curse of elements, corruption


I tried in a duel only, looks promising :-)

[Sekij]

This is my dps macro for affi lock:

#showtooltip
/castsequence [nochanneling:Drain Life] reset=target Curse of Agony,Siphon Life,Life Tap,Haunt,Corruption,Immolate,Drain Life,Shadow Bolt,Unstable Affliction,Immolate,Shadow Bolt,Life Tap,Corruption

I know it looks bad but it works fine for me
ps. this macro is only for long fights because when i fight with nonelites i just use sb

[Barman]

Thanks for that one, especially because of the [nochanneling] I can guess what it does. Didnt know of that before.

But wouldnt it be better to reset corruption with haunt instead of casting it again? And afaik Immolate should not be used if affliction specced.

[Coltimar]

On boss fights be sure you are using curse of elements. You might pick up Soul Siphon. I would say stop using Shadow Bolt, as I never use it except on Nightfall procs, but it's hard to convince people of that. Shadow bolt is shadow damage, but it is a destruction talent. You will get the most output by keeping your DoT's all up 100%. Especially with your talent spec. The more DoT's you have up the higher your dps is because your DoT's fuel procs of other talents.

[Knytestorme]

To add back to this thread with some explanations.

I have an 80 lock that I raid with, I also multibox with him.

While boxing or running guild instances on trash I just hit every mob in the pull with corruption, that's it. It does enough damage by itself without risking agro and allows you, with both the talent and glyph, an 8% chance of proccing nightfall each tick. With the nighfall procs and weaving SB when it doesn't, there is no need to use anything but those two spells on every trash pull.

On bosses my rotation is CoA, Corruption, SL, UA, Haunt, SB spam until dots start falling off and then reapply and repeat. Drain Life is NOT as good dps as SB spam and should not be used on bosses or trash unless you need to get hp back after tapping and healers are busy, and even then you should have imp out and be dark pacting from it for mana before tapping.

You will never get 100% uptime on dots, and SL will be the usual casualty just because of it's length and the fact it's easier to just refresh it when you refresh the others but it has the benefit over something like CoA that it's damage is consistent across it's duration so you don't really lose dps when you reapply it, it's just not as mana efficient as it could be.

The final thing I'll add is that I don't use a cast sequence for my dots, I prefer the granularity of having each one a seperate button due to resists and misses. With the increase in hit rating needed as you level (going from needing 202 hit at 70 to 372 minimum at 80 if you take suppression and bane) you will find yourself missing with dots more regularly and will need to have to try to reapply them, but with them in a cast sequence you won't be able to and you will be gimping yourself more in dps. For example, at 80 now in reasonable mix of pre and post LK gear I'm still only at 286 hit and on a recent Occulus run I saw haunt and UA miss a fair few times on bosses (perhaps the others as well but I don't really pay attention to misses on instants) and if I had a castsequence macro for them I'd have been missing out on some good dps along with heals and other benefits to those spells.

Bottom line for me in helping here is:
* Get DotTimes add-on
* Don't use cast sequence
* Go for +hit gear as you upgrade unless you are hitcapped at your current level each time
* Get glyph of corruption
* Use only corruption and SB on all trash mobs, making sure to dot every mob each pull before starting to SB skull
* Never use drain life over SB on bosses unless you need to heal after tapping

Give a few instance runs a try using those suggestions and compare it to your dps using your current set up and I almost guarantee you'll see a signifcant increase to your damage output.

[Barman]

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Will this Addon help me if the Warlock is not my main? Currently I got xperl which highlights my warlocks debuffs but only on warlocks wow client :-(

[olipcs]

Well, as you are still leveling, why not try demo or destruction, to get a litle bit rid of the 'dot-problem'.
I personaly liked demo, with felguard doing good 'no-brainer-dps', and my lock simply doing only corruption and sb-spam.
A big plus point for destruction would be the chaos bolt, as for leveling in nothrend an instant cast is realy nice to quickly kill trash.