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Guide to Kanrethad Ebonlocke
by Ackthal

Kanrethad is the final encounter of the quest line for warlocks to obtain green fire spell-effects.  At the time of this post, he is one of the hardest solo encounters to date; from experience I’d say it’s more difficult than the benediction/anathema event.  I’ve also been told it’s more difficult than the solo encounter to obtain Teragosa.

There are many ways to approach each facet of the encounter and this guide contains what I have found to work best.  It is by no means an all-inclusive guide but I will try to shed light on some of the more important factors of the encounter.

My video guide of the fight:

Please post reply and +1 if you enjoyed this or found it helpful

Spec:
All three specs work for this encounter but I have found that destruction is the easiest to pull it off with and it is what I’ll be using in this guide.  With destruction you have only one DoT to track and it has one of the most basic spell rotations.  This will allow you to mindlessly cast while dedicating almost all of your attention to the mechanics of the fight.

Destruction contains some very nice burst (both AOE and single target), which will be Important during the Imp and Felhunter phases (covered in detail later).  The ability Ember Tap can also be useful when low on HP.

Icyveins guide to Destruction Warlocks: http://www.icy-veins...w-pve-dps-guide

Talents:

Soul Leach:  Provides you with 10% of your damage as an absorption effect, a nice passive ability that will add a lot of points to your overall HP pool during the fight.

Shadowfury:  Used during the Imp and Felhunter phase to reduce damage received.

Sacrificial Pact:  Used to soak Chaos Bolt or other incoming damage.

Unbound Will:  Used to dispel yourself when you can’t use your Pit Lord dispel.

Grimoire of Sacrifice:  You will be enslaving a Pit Lord the entire encounter so you will not be able to have one of your own pets out, might as well pick up the extra damage and regeneration.  Be sure to sacrifice the Imp for Cauterize Master, which can be used in conjuncture with the Pit Lord Fel Flame dispel and Unbound Will (more on this later).

Kil’jaeden’s Cunning:  There is a lot of movement in this encounter and being able to cast while doing so will dramatically increase your DPS.

Glyphs:

Glyph of Siphon Life:  Provides passive HP regeneration.

Glyph of Healthstone:  100% more HP from your healthstone, nice in clutch situations.

Glyph of Ember Tap:  Provides 5% extra healing from your ember tap ability, but over 10 seconds.  You may choose to not use this glyph if you will be relying on a quick injection of hp (preparing for incoming Chaos Bolt).

Glyph of Dark Soul:  If you have T14 set bonus Dark Soul will be off cool down most of the fight since you will be saving it for the Felhunter phase, this is where this glyph will benefit you most.  You may feel that you can manage the timing of the cooldown to be able to use it in-between each Felhunter phase (I like to use it a second time during each cycle in-between Doomguard and Imp phases), if so, don’t use this glyph, but be warned that having it ready for the Felhunter phase is a MUST.

Glyph of Enslave Demon**:  You need to use this for this encounter as the Pit Lord will Charge you and stun for 5 seconds if you don’t get this cast off fast enough.  You will casting Enslave Demon more than once throughout the fight.

Glyph of Gateway Attunement** (or alternatively a Gateway Control Stone):  Allows you to walk through your demonic gateway to use it, rather than having to click it.  Since using the gateway as much as possible is a necessity in this fight, this glyph (or the stone) is a must.

Kanrethad Abilities:

Curse of Ultimate Doom:  2 second cast debuff- 500 million damage after 7 minutes.  This is Blizzard’s way of capping the time limit on the fight.  It can be easily dealt with by using a Purification Potion to remove it once, potentially extending the time to 14 minutes.  

Excruciating Agony:  A slow ticking DoT that will build up in damage as it stays on you (must be dispelled).

Seed of Terrible Destruction:  A debuff that will expire after 15 seconds, randomly applying one of three effects.

1.)   Annoying Imp: This is an undispelable debuff, an Imp will latch on to you and interrupts casting and stops movement every 2-3 seconds.

2.)  Void Zone:  Knocks you back about 20 yards and generates a void circle about 10 yards in diameter at point of knockback.  If you step into this void circle it will suck you in and trap you while doing continual damage, eventually killing you.

3.)  Backfire: Debuff that provides a 25% damage increase.

Seed of Terrible Destruction must be dispelled before expiring.  The 25% damage buff is nice but you have a 2/3 chance of getting screwed if you allow it to tick off.

Soul Fire:  35k damage – 3 second cast; uninterruptable single target cast, easily mitigated with Pit Lord tanking and self-regen/absorbs.

Chaos Bolt:  450k – 6 second cast; he will cast this on you about every minute, you can choose to line of site Kanrethad to avoid this or absorb it with Sacrificial Pact, Twilight Ward, and Unending Resolve.  I would not recommend using the Pit Lord Charge to interrupt this spell as it will be needed to interrupt Cataclysm.

Cataclysm:  Inflicts 25k damage over 15 seconds, at the end of the 6 second cast it does 1 million damage to all targets within 100 yards.  During phase transition Kanrethad will run to the center of the room and start casting Cataclysm, if this is not interrupted with Pit Lord Charge ability before the cast finishes, it will nuke the hell out of you and you will die a horrible death while being thrown one hundred feet into the air.

Summon Pit Lord:  10 second cast; Kanrethad moves to his gateway and summons a Pit Lord; this thing has a lot of HP and must be enslaved immediately with Enslave Demon (use a macro).  You will rely on the Pit Lord’s abilities and large health pool to complete this encounter.  If the Pit Lord is left uncontrolled you will quickly find out he can make your life very difficult with 100k cleaves.

Summon Wild Imps:  10 second cast; Kanrethad moves to his gateway and begins to summon 60 Imps to attack you; he will continuously summon Imps until the cast finishes.  These will take you down fairly fast if left unchecked.

Summon Felhunters: 10 second cast; Kanrethad moves to his gateway and summons 3 Felhunters, these do some damage and dispel your Enslave Demon on the Pit Lord (more on how to deal with this later).

Summon Doom Lord:  10 second cast; Kanrethad moves to his gateway and summons a Doom Lord to attack you.  The Doom Lord can be banished, but I prefer to let the Pit Lord tank it so I don’t have to re-banish throughout the fight.

Pit Lord Abilities:

Cleave:  His main attack, this should be on passive auto-use and is none of our concern.

Fel Flame Breath:  A frontal cone AOE that does 25,000 damage per tick and each tick also dispels one of your debuffs.  It has a range of about 10 yards and has an 8 second cooldown.  This should be used as often as possible to constantly be dispelling yourself and to provide another source of damage/aggro for your Pit Lord.  Make sure this ability is macroed and bound.  In this guide I instruct you to only use it on yourself with the macro provided below then you can direct it where you want with your own movement.

Charge:  Charges the target and stuns them for 5 seconds, while stunned the target takes 100% increased damage.  Save this ability for interrupting Cataclysm during each phase transition; it has 20 second cooldown.  I recommend binding this ability with a target focus macro.  

Demonic Siphon:  An ability that will heal you for 200k hp, it has a 20 second cooldown.  This should be bound/macroed and used whenever you have some missing HP.

Abilities to pay attention to outside of your “normal” rotation:

Demonic Gateway:  This is your bread and butter for surviving the fight; use it as often as possible (when off cooldown).  Be sure to have the stone or the glyph so you don’t have to click on your gateway to use it.  I found the best positioning for me is to have one end near the center of the room and the other end in front of Kanrethad’s gateway (as seen in the video); this allows you to line up your Pit Lord’s Fel Flame Breath for maximum damage and dispels since Kanrethad sits in the same two spots for most of the fight.

Demonic Circle:  Use it to travel key locations quickly, whether it is to line of site Chaos Bolt or positioning for Imp and Felhunter phases.

Singe Magic:  Use this to dispel your debuffs when you are unable to use Pit Lord’s Fel Flame.

Soulshatter:  A nice aggro dump, save this for Felhunter phase (more on this later).

Shadowfury:  An excellent utility spell, use this to stun Imp/Felhunter groups for reducing incoming damage.

Sacrificial Pact:  Save this for incoming Chaos Bolt’s or emergencies.

Twilight Ward:  Save this for incoming Chaos Bolt’s.

Unending Resolve:  A nice damage reduction, to be used to reduce incoming damage during Imp/Felhunter phases or incoming Chaos Bolts.

Unbound Will:  Very useful for removing debuffs when Pit Lord Fel Flame is unavailable, save this for the beginning of the Felhunter phase (more on this later).

The Fight:
As stated before, this strategy is what I found to work best and is by no means the only way to complete this encounter.  The fight consists of an entry phase, and then it repeats a three phase cycle until the fight has been completed.  There is a transition between each phase that is the same where he will run to the center of the room and cast Cataclysm.


Phase Zero (Pit Lord)
After clicking the soul well, a demonic gateway will pop up and Kanrethad will appear, PUT HIM ON FOCUS.  Whilst bragging about his huge e-peen and talking a little trash, he will walk to one side of the platform.  He is attackable about 5.5 seconds after he turns towards you, during this time I like to pre-pot with Jade Serpent Potion before combat begins.  Make sure that you pot before combat begins as you can only use one potion per combat cycle and you may need to use Purification Potion later in the fight to remove Curse of Ultimate Doom.

You will have a good chunk of time to free-cast on Kanrethad before he summons the Pit Lord.  Take advantage of it and use all your dps cooldowns, throw in a couple Chaos Bolts.  

Enslave the Pit Lord immediately after it appears or you run the risk of being Charged and stunned for five seconds.  Have the Pit Lord attack Kanrethad, use Fel Flame Breath on him and then jump through your gateway so your Pit Lord can get aggro and tank him.  Kanrethad will be almost exclusively attacking the Pit Lord while throwing debuffs on you if you manage your threat correctly.  Position yourself behind Kanrethad and use Fel Flame Breath (macro listed below) to damage Kanrethad and dispel yourself at the same time.  Continue to use your gateway and Fel Flame Breath as often as they’re off cooldown.

**This fight is much easier when Kanrethad is aggressed on the Pit Lord at all times.  I have found that he will cast chaos bolt much less while aggressed on the Pit Lord and you will receive little damage from Kanrethad himself if you are consistently dispelling yourself.  That is why it is so important to constantly use your Demonic Gateway.  

After a minute or so Kanrethad will run to the center of the room and begin to cast Cataclysm, use your Pit Lord’s Charge ability to interrupt Cataclysm and take advantage of the 100% damage increase on Kanrethad while he is stunned.  I noticed that every once in a while during this first phase he will not cast Cataclysm after he runs to the center of the room, if you notice he doesn’t start casting it shortly after he gets to the center, it’s safe to use the Pit Lord stun to take advantage of the extra damage.

Phase 1 (Imp Phase)
After a minute Kanrethad will run back towards his gateway and begin the Imp phase.  He will continuously summon Imps while the spell is being cast (10 seconds).  I like to position my Pit Lord near the front center of the gateway (with ctrl+3), about 7 yards from it, and I like to position myself right in front of the Pit Lord, in between the Pit Lord and Imps.  Save your damage cooldowns. As the Imps begin to flow out toss a couple Rain of Fires on the gateway, wait until all of the Imps have been summoned, then throw down your Shadowfury and cast Fire & Brimstone + Immolate on the Imps.  Right after your F&B Immolate use the Pit Lord Fel Flame Breath on yourself and stand in the Imps.  At this point most of them should be dead, you may need to toss another rain of fire to finish them off and use Demonic Siphon to cap your HP.  Continue damage on Kanrethad.

Phase 1.5 (change phase)
Kanrethad runs to the center of the room and you interrupt his Cataclysm with Charge, SAVE YOUR EMBERS AND DPS COOLDOWNS, you will need them for the Felhunter phase.  Immediately after the stun falls off you will manually move (default ctrl+3) your Pit Lord behind the pillar that is located behind the gateway and to the right (as seen in the video).  This will allow you to move to the center-left of the room and deal with the Felhunters without running the risk of them dispelling your enslave demon.  Continue damaging Kanrethad.

As your Pit Lord is running behind the pillar to LoS the incoming Felhunters you will be unable to use Fel Flame Breath to dispel yourself, use Cauterize Master as much as possible during this setup to reduce incoming damage and then use Unbound Will right as Kanrethad begins to cast Summon Felhunters to remove any further debuff you may have.

Phase 2 (Felhunter Phase)

Right before the first Felhunter comes out use Soul Shatter to clear your aggro table so Kanrethad will ignore you and run over to continue damaging the Pit Lord.  Pay attention to your warnings because he may still cast Chaos Bolt on you while you are dealing with the Felhunters.

As the three Felhunters begin to come out, pop your damaging CD’s and use Chaos Bolt, I like to have at least 3 embers saved for this phase since it is the most difficult one to get through.  Make sure immolate is on all of them and take one down at a time by using Chaos Bolt + Conflag + Incinerate + Shadowburn.  You may need to cast additional Incinerates before you can Shadowburn depending on your gear or how lucky you get with crits.  Remember that you can use Shadowfury on them to reduce incoming damage.

Phase 2.5 (Phase Change)
After all 3 Felhunters are dead command your pet to attack and continue damaging Kanrethad, he’ll go through another phase change by casting Cataclysm.  Deal with it the same way as before, use your embers on Chaos Bolts while he is stunned.  Keep using your Demonic Gateway and Fel Flame Breath!

Phase 3 (Doom Lord Phase)
This is the easiest phase to deal with.  While Kanrethad is casting Summon Doom Lord, take advantage of this time to dismiss your Pit Lord and re-enslave him so you don’t have to worry about losing control of him later in the fight.  Continue to damage Kanrethad while he is summoning, try to time your Demonic Gateway debuff so you will be able to use it right as the Doom Lord comes out, when this happens attack command your Pit Lord on the Doom Lord and use Fel Flame Breath.  Jump through your gateway, the Doom Lord should be attacking your Pit Lord and you can command him to continue attacking Kanrethad.

Phase 3.5 and on to Cycle Repeat

Kanrethad casts Cataclysm and you interrupt it with Charge while continuing to use Fel Flame Breath and Demonic Gateway.  The cycle of phases 1-3 will continue to repeat itself until you have finished the fight.   Use the same strategy for each phase as it repeats.  The only difference is that there will be a Doomguard out, but he should be attacking your Pit Lord the entire time and he will be of no concern.  Deal with additional Doomguards the same way.

**Remember to use a purification potion before Curse of Ultimate Doom is allowed to tick.  Make sure you don’t have the Excruciating Agony curse on you when you use it or the potion may be wasted.  Wait to use it after Fel Flame Breath clears your debuffs.

Macros:

Enslave Macro:
/target Pit Lord
/cast Enslave Demon
/targetlasttarget

Fel Flame Breath (at self)
/cast [@player] Fel Flame Breath

Pit Lord Charge
/target Kanrethad
/cast Charge

Pit Lord Heal
/cast Demonic Siphon

Chaos Bolt Defense
/cast Sacrificial Pact
/cast Twilight Ward
/cast Unending Resolve

Important things to remember and Tips

-Have your Imp sacrifice, Dark Soul, flask, food buff, healstones, and potions ready before starting

-Put Kanrethad on focus

-Use Demonic Gateway as much as possible; get a Gateway Control Stone or the Glyph of Gateway Attunement so you don’t have to click your gateway to use it.

-Use the Fel Flame Breath macro on yourself as much as possible (make sure it’s up for Imps) and line up your positioning so it hits Kanrethad and the Doom lord(s).

-Use Singe Magic to dispel yourself when Fel Flame Breath is out of range or on cooldown

-Make sure your DPS cooldowns are up and you have at least 3 Burning Embers going into Fel Hunter phase.

-Save Sacrificial Pact and Twilight Ward for incoming Chaos Bolts

-Use Ember Tap + Healthstone if you get a little low and the Pit Lord heal is on cooldown, I like to use these in conjunction with their glyphs during Imp Phase while I’m waiting for all of the Imps to appear before blowing them up.

-Use your Shadowfury on Imps and Felhunters

-Save Soulshatter and Unbound Will (to remove debuffs) for when Kanrethad is summoning Fel hunters

-Pre-pot with Jade Serpent Potion, don’t use any potions during combat so you are able to use Purification Potion to remove Curse of Ultimate Doom.

-When you see Kanrethad running to center of the room to begin casting Cataclysm, anticipate it and begin to cast Chaos Bolt before he starts casting Cataclysm.  This way, right as you Charge him with the Pit Lord, a Chaos Bolt will land and you can get in an additional 2 chaos bolts before the 100% damage increase on Kanrethad fades.  This can add up to a lot of extra damage if timed right.  (Remember don’t do this during the change between Imp and Felhunter phase, you need to save embers for that!)

Thanks for reading, if you have any questions you can post them here and I’ll try to respond.  Please rate if you found it helpful.
-Ackthal

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We have always been dedicated to providing guides of the highest accuracy and quality, so we have enlisted the help of respected authorities and top players to review our existing guides and help us improve them.

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even better, after which we go into a bit more detail about the process.

Death Knight

• Blood: Reniat, the author of the Blood Death Knight guides on the Official Forums and MMO-Champion.
  
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• Balance: Imsupersdw, one of the best Balance Druids in the world, who raids in Method.
  
• Feral: Fragnance, one of the best Feral Druids in the world, who raids in Method. You can watch his stream on Twitch.
  
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• Holy: In the process of being reviewed by Atismund, who raids in Envy (25-man), and by Smirk who raids in Paragon (10-man).
  
• Protection: Theck (@TheckPhD), the main author of Sacred Duty (a well respected, and arguably the most valuable Protection Paladin theorycrafting resource).
  
• Retribution: Anafielle (@Anafielle), a respected Retribution Paladin who contributes to Sacred Duty and Morgeine, one of the best Retribution Paladins in the world, who raids in Envy.

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• Discipline and Holy: Jhazrun, one of the best Discipline Priests in the world, who raids in Paragon.
  
• Shadow: Artzie (@Artzieh), a Shadow Priest who raids in Method and Twintop, a Shadow Priest theorycrafter from How To Priest.

Rogue

• Assassination, Combat, and Subtlety: Dryaan, one of the best Rogues in the world, who raids in Envy and frequently stream on Twitch.

Shaman

• Elemental: Leeds, one of the best Elemental Shamans in the world, who raids in Method.
  
• Enhancement: Purge, one of the best Enhancement Shamans in the world, who often contributes to the Enhancement Shaman section of Totem Spot.
  
• Restoration: Zetian, who raids in MCO, one of the most efficient 10-man guilds in the world, and Sonie, one of the best Restoration Shamans in the world, who raids in Method (25-man).

Warlock

• Affliction, Demonology, and Destruction: Gahddo, one of the most prominent Warlock theorycrafters, who maintains the Warlock profiles and rotations in Simulation Craft, and Evrelia, who raids in ScrubBusters, and frequently streams on Twitch.

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• Arms: In the process of being reviewed by Gondlemstyle of Midwinter.
  
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• Protection: Sco, Guild Master of Method, and one of the best Protection Warriors in the world.

Initially, when we first started writing these guides, they were all entirely created by Damien and myself, based on our experiences with playing the classes, and on extensive testing and research. However, as our workload on the site grew (and especially as we finally completed our offering of 34 class guides), the amount of time and attention that we were able to dedicate to each guide dropped.

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For the past month we have worked very hard on our class guides and with the help of top raiders and known authorities, we now have the best offering you can find for World of Warcraft classes.

Not sure if you guys have glanced at the total topics and replies by class forums, but Warlocks are by far the highest representation of any class on Icy-Veins!  By topics, we own 30.77% of all topics across class forums.  In responses to topics, we have 3,275 of the 6,109 total replies or 53.61%!  This is incredible as many of the WoW population websites show Warlocks in the lowest 3 of class representation.

As some of you know, I started doing guides and work here last summer.  My first guide was a Warlock revamped leveling guide posted on July 1, 2012.  Since then, I've been blessed to contribute a lot of what I consider theorycrafting that I find an absolute blast to come up with, publish, and give back to the community.  Vlad and Damien have given me a medium that allows me to do my favorite things: help people and theorycraft.  Many of you have stepped up to the plate, contributed your own ideas, and found a home to help you with all that you do as demonic lords in World of Warcraft.  You've contributed tips, guides, and offered detailed analyses to people who have come here for help and left vastly better Warlocks than when they arrived.

I humbly thank you for your positive and INCREDIBLY helpful output into the community here at Icy-Veins.  Please continue to rockout and do all that you do that makes me leading this board so incredibly rewarding.

~Zagam

Here are some notes on how to better play your Affliction Warlock.  Be sure to read through these series of posts to find other players' thoughts and ideas.  I've done my best to summarize here.

1) DoTs and you
Multi-dotting is not only beneficial, but it's preferred to boost your damage and increase Nightfall procs with multiple Corruptions up.  Take note of the macro I suggest (listed here again for convenience) to spread DoTs everywhere.

#showtooltip Soul Swap
/cast Soulburn
/cast Soul Swap

Maintaining your uptime on your three DoTs is of utmost priority and takes priority over all other actions.  If there is a target that doesn't have your DoTs on it, apply them.

2) Affliction's feel
Affliction feels amazing now!  You actually feel like a Warlock.  Curse, 3 DoTs, then you *feel* like you're draining your enemy's soul, but what you're actually doing is making your DoTs hit like crazy.  Affliction plays in that it maintains its 3 DoTs and you use one of two fillers: Malefic Grasp or Drain Soul.  Use Malefic Grasp on targets above 20% HP and Drain Soul on targets below 20% HP.

3) Haunt and Nightfall procs
RNG finds its way from Demonology into Affliction.  Affliction DPS can be really good one time and pretty good the next, and it's all tied into your Nightfall procs.  Nightfall generates a Soul Shard which allows you to cast Haunt again.  You theoretically are obliged to want to keep Haunt as close to 100% uptime as you can, especially if you played Affliction in the past, but that's simply unattainable anymore.  However, I did notice some streaks where I had too many Soul Shards and kept Haunt up 100% of the time for darn near a minute.  Haunt uptime should be at least 35% and with good RNG can get up to 60%.  Try to use Soul Shards to apply Haunt, but don't hesitate to use your Soulburn macro to apply DoTs to benefit from empowered buffs such as trinkets and profession procs.

4) Affliction opener and Soul Shard management
Affliction's opener should be like this:

Curse of Elements -> Dark Soul -> Soulburn: Soul Swap -> Haunt -> Malefic Grasp until all procs up -> SB: Soul Swap -> MG spam

Pretty sweet, eh?  No more spamming the crap out of DoTs and slowly climbing back into the meters.  You get your damage right off the bat, and it has some pretty neat bursting capabilities.

My general rule of thumb is this: (I have the Glyph of Soul Shards, so 4 max)
1) Boss HP > 20% AND 4 Soul Shards --> Reapply DoTs with Soulburn macro.  This is useful because you save yourself 2 global cooldowns to instantly apply your DoTs.
2) Boss HP > 20% AND 3 or less Soul Shards --> Manually reapply DoTs with priority going to Agony (do not let stacks fall)
3) Boss HP < 20% --> Keep Haunt to 100% uptime, reapply DoTs with Soulburn macro, and Drain Soul until 2 Soul Shards are regenerated.  As soon as you have 2 Soul Shards, reapply DoTs, Haunt, and Drain Soul again.  During execute phase, you can do the following:

1) Boss hits 20% --> Apply DoTs then Haunt and Drain Soul.  Use SB:SS if you had 2 shards when boss hit 20% life; otherwise, apply manually
2) When Drain Soul has ticked FOUR times, you'll have AT LEAST 2 shards.  If you have 2 shards, then reapply DoTs with SB:SS, Haunt, and Drain Soul again until it has ticked 4 times.
3) When Drain Soul has ticked 4 times and you have at least 3 Soul Shards, then you will reapply DoTs with SB:SS, Haunt, Haunt again, then Drain Soul.  Haunt hits for a ton and you'll want to use Haunt when Haunt is already applied to the boss for a major hit.

If you get comfortable with this rotation, you can follow my golden rule during execute phase.  It goes like this....
-Do my DoTs have at least 10 seconds left on their duration?  If so, I skip reapplying DoTs, Haunt, and go back to Drain Souling.  If not, reapply DoTs, Haunt, then Drain Soul.  10 seconds is my magic number (4 ticks of Drain Soul end at 8.2 seconds for me).

5) Agony
After you open your rotation, just pay attention to your DoTs, but pay the most attention to Agony.  Letting Agony fall off of its 10 stack is a horrible DPS loss.  If you have to choose between which DoT to refresh first, ALWAYS choose Agony.  Agony hits like a TRUCK, and you don't want to miss out on it.  My top 3 damage dealt was always Agony, Corruption, and Unstable Affliction.  Agony was ticking for 36k at a 10 stack at level 85 but only 3k at a 1 stack.  Here would be the DPS loss if you let Agony fall off:

Letting Agony fall off and refreshing after:
Stack 1 = 3k
Stack 2 = 6k
Stack 3 = 9k
...
Stack 10 = 36k

Total = 234k damage

Reapplying Agony to make sure it doesn't fall off
Stack 10 = 36k * 10 = 360k damage

Pretty clear here to see that focusing Agony and making sure it doesn't fall off will optimize your performance.  This impact will be much higher at level 90 (EDIT: it IS much higher at level 90.  Don't let this fall off) and should be a priority in all situations.

6) Mastery, Haste, & Crit
Crit sucks.  Reforge out of it the best you can.  Let's just get that out of the way.

A deeper understanding of Haste and Mastery is needed, I feel, from the responses in the community.  Let me make something vividly clear: HASTE AND MASTERY ARE GOOD AND VERY CLOSE TO EACH OTHER IN VALUE.  This means that the two work well together and you can't shove all of your secondary stats into one and expect a huge DPS gain.  If your DPS is lacking, it's not your secondary stats that are holding you back.

The majority of Warlocks out there right now are getting Simulation numbers where Haste = 2.1 and Mastery = 2.07.  This does NOT mean that you reforge out of Mastery into Haste...this means that the difference you would get between both stats is so small that you need to look at the bigger picture.  Haste and Mastery are both beneficial in their own way, but more magical is the way they act together.  As you accumulate gear and it becomes easier to reach haste thresholds, these are what you should follow:

Haste breakpoints and their resulting extra ticks

1) 3043 Rating (+1 Corruption, +1 UA, +2 Agony)  (ideal for ilvl 463-475)
2) 4717 Rating (+ 2 Corruption, +1 UA, +2 Agony) (ideal for ilvl 476-489)
3) 6637 Rating (+ 2 Corruption, +2 UA, +3 Agony) (ideal for ilvl 490+)

Goblin Numbers
1) 2592 Rating
2) 4249 Rating
3) 6151 Rating

After you hit these thresholds, keep your Haste value as close as possible to the value of your Mastery.  While the difference in DPS is small and a majority of the missing DPS comes from incorrect playstyle, I felt it necessary to clarify these values for people.

7) Dark Soul
Dark Soul:Misery is now Bloodlust/Timewarp for 20 seconds with a 2 minute CD.  30% Haste is an incredible cooldown.  Use it often and love it.  Try to time it before applying DoTs so that they benefit from the increased Haste thresholds.  If you already have DoTs applied, reapply them.  With Pandemic, you'll receive the bonus damage from the DoTs while extending the duration.

**4 piece Tier 14 set bonus reduces cooldown of Dark Soul by 40 seconds.  This increases your Dark Soul uptime from 20/120 (16%) to 20/80 (25%).  This is a huge DPS gain and your tier bonus should not be avoided at any cost.

8) Execution phase
Execute phase: Affliction Warlocks got an even better execute than they had before.  During execute phase (20% or less), you will replace Malefic Grasp with Drain Soul.  Drain Soul no longer refreshes your DoTs, but that's ok because every time it ticks, it makes all of your DoTs do an additional tick at 125% of their base power at that instant while increasing your Drain Soul damage by 100%.  Also, by performing Drain Soul, you'll have more Soul Shards than you'll know what to do with.  Basically, your execute phase should be Haunt, refresh Agony, Corr, and UA with your Soulburn Soul Swap macro, then hit Drain Soul.  After Drain Soul ticks 4 times, reapply Haunt, refresh DoTs, and back to Drain Soul.  You'll enjoy monster crits.

9) Seed of Corruption and AoE
Seed of Corruption change: SoC is no longer triggered by your allies.  Gone are the days where you could spam one target with SoC and watch the explosions happen.  Now, you can set up some amazing AoE.  Seed of Corruption only blows up after YOU do damage to it, not raid wide damage.  Simply apply a Soulburn:Seed of Corruption to one target and fire a Haunt at the same target.  This should trigger the explosion and put Corruption on all targets.  After applying a Soulburned: Seed of Corruption to put Corruption on all targets, simply tab and put Seed of Corruption on as many enemies as you can.  The Corruption on each will do enough damage to trigger a Seed which will explode and trigger all the other seeds.  For prolonged AoE, maintain the Soulburn:Seed of Corruption part of your rotation once every 16 seconds.  For 4-6 targets, after doing this, just use your Soulburn:Soul Swap macro to put more DoTs on 4 targets and Malefic Grasp one of them.  Use Drain Soul to replenish shards for more DoTs.

10) Hit capping
Hit capping is an option up for debate.  Currently at lower item levels, hit does not have as high a weight as Haste does, so a lot of Warlocks are pushing Mastery and Haste over Hit.  This is acceptable and does simulate higher.  However, hit capping removes a lot of human error and judgment and allows you to focus on other things in a fight such as the mechanics and phase transitions.  You can choose one of two priorities:

1) Mastery > Haste > Hit > Crit
or
2) Hit (to 5100) > Mastery > Haste > Crit

If you decide to hit cap, reforge first out of all your Crit, then your Haste.  If you still need more and can't reforge anymore, remember that you can reforge into Expertise and benefit the same as if it were Hit rating.  For example, if your legs have Hit and Crit, you can reforge the Crit into Expertise.

11) Empowered DoTs and maximizing your Warlock (for the elite player)
There is a lot of complexity to maximizing Affliction's DPS. It's all about knowing what trinkets are proc'd, what buffs are currently on you, and what debuffs are on the boss. To simplify everything, I prioritize keeping my DoTs up with minimal effort which is what SB:SS does. Obviously RNG plays into your Haunt uptime, but a rule of thumb is to never overwrite a powerful DoT (applied during Bloodlust, Dark Soul, or a potion) with a lesser DoT. Sounds simple, but it's not.

Take these scenarios for example:

Let's say you don't have any trinkets on. You can test this at your local test target. Apply some DoTs. They will tick for the same damage at the same time interval all the time. The only modifier to their damage will be critical hits. Let's say (these numbers are SO wrong, but I'm using for simplicity) you have 3 DoTs running.

Corruption ticks for 10 damage and has 14 seconds left
Agony ticks for 15 damage and has 22 seconds left
UA ticks for 12 damage and has 6 seconds left

With no buffs present on these adds, they will continue ticking for that damage and only the time left matters. Feel free to extend these DoT durations whenever you see fit. Reapplying UA will make UA continue to tick for 12 damage but now the duration will be 20 seconds (14+6, because 6 is less than the maximum allowed to be added to 14 via Pandemic, which would be 7).

Now let's say you're a tailor or engineer and you use Synapse Springs or have your Lightweave proc. If you do NOT reapply DoTs, your DoTs will continue to tick for the same damage. However, let's say you're alerted to one of these procs and you reapply your DoTs. Again, remember these numbers are made up for simplicity, but you see the effect...

Corruption ticks for 13 damage for 24 seconds (16 + 8)
Agony ticks for 18 damage for 36 seconds (24 + 12)
UA ticks for 15 damage for 20 seconds (14+6)

Now we have empowered DoTs ticking for their maximum duration! Let's JUST look at Agony. Let's say Synapse Springs lasts for 10 seconds (not sure, not an engineer). So at that point, you'd have Agony ticking for 18 damage with 26 seconds left on its timer. If you were to reapply Agony at 18 seconds to get back up to 36 seconds, you would LOSE the empowered DoT. You'd go back to Agony ticking for 15 damage for 36 seconds. In this scenario, it's better to NOT reapply DoTs until your empowered DoTs are about to wear off. Follow?

Now let's add trinkets to the mess. At the beginning of the fight, you will have all of your procs line up. Lightweave, a potion, Dark Soul, two trinkets...I call this the "works." You won't get the "works" at any other point in the fight because of different timers. However, you can use knowledge of internal cooldowns on trinkets to see if you can line up things you can control, such as a potion or Dark Soul. If you set up some auras or classtimers (I do this with TukUI) to notify you of stuff procing, you can use that moment to reapply DoTs for a bigger effect. You can also see when Dark Soul or a trinket has 4 seconds left on its buff, you could reapply DoTs again benefitting from Pandemic AND receiving the damage buff for the extended duration. At the beginning of the fight when you apply your DoTs, they are going to be mega DoTs. Now, I'm using Light of the Cosmos and the Relic of Yu'lon, so both are proc trinkets. I'm also a Tailor and I use a lot of potions. At the beginning of a fight, I'll see my static raid buffed Spell Power of 22500 soar up to 39850. THIS is when I pop my DoTs. I think Lightweave wears off after 15 seconds, Relic of Yu'lon after 15 seconds, Cosmos in 20 seconds, and Dark Soul at 20 seconds. Basically I open my rotation with Curse, SB:SS to get my DoTs up, Haunt, and Malefic Grasp. By the time MG channels twice, all my stuff has proc'd. I then reapply all of my DoTs one by one to get maximum duration, Haunt, and MG again. When Lightweave and Yu'lon are about to expire, I reapply DoTs again to get maximum durations. Then I just MG and Haunt on procs until my DoTs are about to wear off. I do NOT reapply DoTs again until they are almost gone because reapplying them early would put up 23k spell power DoTs instead of 39k spell power DoTs. This is what Pandemic is designed for. Affliction is as good as you make your DoTs last, but if you want to excel, learn to REALLY understand that empowered DoTs remain empowered throughout their duration even after your buffs wear off. Take advantage of this and see your numbers skyrocket.

12) Pandemic and Fel Flame and Doomguard...OH MY!
Fel Flame should not be used to refresh DoTs, period. It should ONLY be used if you're moving, don't need to Life Tap, and Agony is not about to fall off. Felflame costs a non-trivial amount of mana and only adds 6 seconds to two of your DoTs. I don't think everyone understands how Pandemic works. Instead of embracing the ability, people are trying to weave Felflame into their rotation which is actually a major DPS loss. Blizzard makes it easy for us and the player base goes out of their way to make it more difficult.

When you refresh your DoTs with Felflame, they automatically update and add 6 seconds to Corruption and Unstable Affliction. Let's take a look at this situation.

Current DoTs on target (seconds remaining)
Agony (14)
Corruption (6)
Unstable Affliction (2)

Casting Fel Flame would result in...
Agony (13)
Corruption (11)
Unstable Affliction (7)

You would have gained a total of 12 seconds worth of DoTs for 1 global + a noticable amount of mana.

Casting Unstable Affliction and Corruption separately would result in...
Agony (12)
Corruption (27)
Unstable Affliction (15)

For two globals, you now gained over 24 seconds worth of DoTs for a trivial amount of mana.

Now, we've done all of that without really looking at Pandemic. With Pandemic, it states that when you refresh a DoT, up to 50% of the maximum duration will be added to the current casting DoT. Maybe it sounds confusing, so I'll lay it out here.

Unstable Affliction = 14 second base duration with a tick speed of 2 seconds. With Pandemic, you can add up to 7 seconds of your previous remaining time to a new cast. Let's look at some reapplying methods and timings for emphasis:

Refresh UA at 2 seconds left --> UA with 16 second duration
Refresh UA at 5 seconds left --> UA with 19 second duration
Refresh UA at 7 seconds left --> UA with 21 second duration
Refresh UA at 10 seconds left --> UA with 21 second duration
Refresh UA at 14 seconds left --> UA with 21 second duration

As you can see, the optimal time to refresh UA is ANYTIME below 7 seconds remaining. If you do this, you gain the maximum duration via Pandemic. Hopefully here you can see using Felflame to up your duration is a complete waste of time and should be avoided at all costs.

Using Pandemic and stat snapshots is what separates Warlocks who do 60k and 80k in raid gear. Knowing how Pandemic and snapshot for stats works, you can monitor many things. The way I work my DoT application is based off of trinket procs. For example, right before Dark Soul:Misery wears off, I reapply DoTs no matter how much time is left on them to get the maximum benefit of additional ticks with the 30% spell haste buff. This is importat at the start because all of your trinkets and enchants would have proc'd as well. Typically the way the stars align, right as my Dark Soul is about to wear off (3 seconds left), my trinkets are about to fall off as well. With 3 seconds left, I refresh UA, Corruption, and Agony. Now, for the full duration of these DoTs, I will NOT refresh them. They are super powerful DoTs that if refreshed would revert back to your current stats which are nowhere close to what you were just under the effect of. If, however, you were to use Fel Flame before Dark Soul or your trinkets wore off, you'd gain a measly amount of time for a lot more mana. Cast your DoTs. Cast your DoTs. Cast your DoTs.

For the Doomguard, he doesn't do a whole lot more damage when he's under execute phase. Execute phases are typically shorter than the minute duration you get him for so when the boss dies, you'd likely be standing there next to your big friend and he has nothing to target. This means you wasted potential DPS. Your Doomguard also benefits from snapshot stats. I prefer to use my Doomguard at the beginning when my static spell power of 22,508 soars to 39,895. While I haven't done the math on it, I know I get full uptime with super mega stats that likely won't be nice enough to align when the boss hits 20% for optimal use. It is, however, to note that your Doomguard should be used on any part of the fight that requires an extra push (Elegon 100%-85% to only have 2 Celestial Defenders).

**There has been some studies on the Doomguard in the Warlock community and after several tests, we have found that the Doomguard is NOT benefiting from the haste given by Bloodlust in any shape or form.  Until this is bugged, only use your Doomguard when the enemy is BELOW 20%.

13) Talents

All of our talents have some fight dependency and can be flexed in and out.  Have plenty of Tome of the Clear Mind so that you can easily swap in a beneficial talent.  I've included recommended talents per fight in my raid guides, so here is just a general useful application of each talent for Affliction.

Tier 1
Dark Regeneration - defensive cooldown that heals you and increases healing received.  Typically only needed to recover from heavy damage that your healers need assistance with.  Inferior to Soul Leech in most situations.
Soul Leech - passive continuous healing that will provide a majority of the healing done to your Warlock.  So powerful that you will often heal yourself for MORE than your healers will heal you.  This should be your staple raiding talent.
Harvest Life - lackluster AoE talent that doesn't provide a whole lot of power.  If you require AoE for a fight, consider Demonology.

Tier 2
Howl of Terror - generally inefficient in raiding situations.
Mortal Coil - 15% of max HP heal every 45 seconds?  Incredible.  This should be your staple raiding talent.  Use liberally when taking damage during events like Force and Verve.
Shadowfury - great when you need a stun on adds.  Otherwise, extremely lackluster.

Tier 3
Soul Link - Provides 20% extra HP when combined with Grimoire of Sacrifice.  This is substantial in that all of our healing is based on percent of max HP.  Higher HP = higher healing.
Sacrificial Pact - you won't be using this because you're sacrificing your pet.
Dark Bargain - This can be used on some fights if you alert your healers to it.  Sure, not taking any damage from a Force and Verve is great for 8 seconds, but for the next 8 seconds, you'll take 50% of the TOTAL damage you would have taken during Dark Bargain PLUS any additional damage you might incur.  If you can safely use it to avoid a mechanic and alert a healer you'll need a little extra TLC when the effect expires, then it might have its uses.

Tier 4
Blood Fear - pointless for PvE
Burning Rush - has its potential to be useful on fights where an on demand sprint can boost DPS.  So far, I've only seen it effective on Blade Lord Ta'yak to get down the hallway faster.  Note that you will suffer 4% of your max HP per second that this is active which is a pretty pricey sprint.  If combined with Dark Regeneration, you can negate a majority of this, but this typically isn't worth it.
Unbinding Will - staple raiding talent.  You can use this to instantly break out of magic effects such as the petrification effect by trash in Mogu'shan Vaults or the Amber Prison on Wind Lord in Heart of Fear.  Use liberally and alert your healers they can use their dispels in other places.

Tier 5
Grimoire of Supremacy - neat souped up minions from hell.  Too bad they serve us better being sacrificed.
Grimoire of Service - mediocre demon with an additional mediocre demon for a short period of time.
Grimoire of Sacrifice - the bread and butter of Affliction Grimoires.  This will sacrifice your pet, give you a cooldown associated with your pet, regenerate 2% of your max HP every 5 seconds, and empower your Malefic Grasp, Fel Flame, and Drain Soul by 25%.  If you use Soul Link, your max HP will also go up 20%.  Typically, you'll want to sacrifice your Void Walker to gain the Shadow Bulwark CD, which increases your max HP by 30% for a whopping 20 seconds.  If interrupts are needed, you can sacrifice your Felhunter.

Tier 6
Archimonde's Vengeance - neat concept.  Dull in execution.
Kil'jaeden's Cunning - pre 5.1, this was rather lame.  5.1 brings a wonderful, wonderful change to the Warlock's ability to DPS while moving...at NO CASTING PENALTY!  This means you don't have to break Malefic Grasp channels to move out of fire, avoid a Wind Bomb, or while dealing with Pheramones on Garalon!  You can freely do all casting while on the move at 70% of your initial movement speed.  This should always, always be used as your Tier 6 talent unless no movement is required.  There is no boss in Tier 14 that requires no movement.  Take KJC.
Mannoroth's Fury - boosts the area of AoE abilities by 500%.  The radius is increased by a factor of about 2.27 so while your reticle won't look that much bigger, it is actually covering 5x the original area.  This is usually unimportant, but it may come in handy some day..

http://www.icy-veins...ehensive-guide/ World of Logs Guide.  Useful for helping you understand how to read World of Logs.

EDITED: 03/04/2013 (Patch 5.2)

I've created an Excel spreadsheet with all the loot tables from MoPs dungeons.  I'm going to be putting a raid one together, but for now, I only have the dungeon one available.  I've created tables of where you can find your gear based on the following gear classes:

1) Cloth with Spirit (Priests)
2) Cloth without Spirit (Priest, Warlock, Mage)
3) Leather Int
4) Leather Agility
5) Mail Int
6) Mail Agility
7) Plate Int
8) Plate DPS
9) Plate Tank
10) Trinkets

http://www.icy-veins...en/mop-gear.xls

Damien has posted the spreadsheet to Icy-Veins database, so feast your hearts out.  Any feedback is appreciated, negative or positive.  I'll casually begin working on the raid gear in the same format.  A few notes:

The first page shows the model I use to monitor my guild's gear.  Feel free to use it and modify names, colors, and anything you want.  It's an incredibly handy tool for handling loot structures such as the one I use, loot council.

The 2nd tab has all the loot dropped.  The rest of the tabs have the loot filtered out to fit specific roles.

The Cloth No SP tab has some purple on it...I marked that to show how I've planned my pre-dungeon BiS lists based on Affliction's stat priority.  Feel free to wipe that color and pick your own.

Greetings, demonic Warlocks!  I'll be doing my best in keeping this guide up to date.  Below is information that I hope helps you get a good grasp on how to better play your Demonolgy Warlock!

1) Demons and you
Demonology is all about your pets and utilization of Metamorphosis.  Being Demonology, your default pet should be a Felguard.  Your Felguard comes with two useful abilities: Axe Toss and Felstorm.  Axe Toss is a classic 4 second stun on a 30 second CD while Felstorm makes your Felguard a mini-Arms Warrior for a few seconds on a 45 second CD.  Felstorm is a single target DPS gain, so it should be used on cooldown unless you know there is an opportunity to hit more than one target coming soon in which case Felstorm should be saved.

As you progress into higher levels of gear (520+), Grimoire of Sacrifice becomes a very solid single target Grimoire so long as you have the Unerring Vision of Lei Shen trinket.  With this Grimoire and trinket combination, you will be commanding legions of Wild Imps.  Wild Imps is a very important part of Demonology DPS.

Glyph of Imp Swarm is a sustained DPS gain but only if used properly and with a large burst DPS gain.  Because Glyph of Imp Swarm cooldown is reduced by Haste, it is recommended to use this at the beginning of fights while Berserking, Bloodlust/Heroism/Timewarp, and Tempus Repit are running live.  After this, you will never want to use Imp Swarm without it being combined with Dark Soul: Knowledge
-Thanks goes out to Gahhdo for this note!

2) Demonolgy's feel
Demonology requires a great deal of attention to be paid while playing to perform optimally.  You will be stance dancing in and out of Metamorphosis, keeping DoTs applied, and monitoring your charges of Molten Core.  Demonology has good on-demand burst given that you have an appropriate amount of Demonic Fury saved up.

3) Demonology Resources
Demonology has 2 resources to maintain: Demonic Fury and Mana.  Mana is your typical spell resource that requires the use of Life Tap to replenish.  Demonic Fury is a resource that is gained through the use of spells in caster form and is consumed through the use of spells in Metamorphosis form.  Demonic Fury has a cap of 1000 and gradually declines or increases to 200 out of combat.  For most raid boss pulls, you will start at 200 Demonic Fury.

4) Demonology opener and Charge management
Demonology's opener should be like this:

Curse of the Elements -> Dark Soul: Knowledge -> Corruption -> Hand of Gul'dan -> Grimoire: Felguard -> Hand of Gul'dan -> Metamorphosis -> Metamorphosis: Doom x2  -> Metamorphosis: Touch of Chaos spam until you run out of Demonic Fury then go into normal rotation.  This rotation allows you to apply an empowered Doom at a 90 second duration while Touch of Chaos will have boosted your Corruption time to 20+ seconds.  As long as you pop Meta before the 2nd Hand of Guldan connects, that HoG will be modified by Meta as well as the resulting Shadowflame damage.

There are two rotations to worry about: 1) Caster form and 2) Metamorphosis form.

In Caster form, you will focus on generating as much Demonic Fury as possible while using your proper priority spell queueing.  Spells you will use to generate Demonic Fury: Shadowbolt, Soulfire, Hand of Guldan.

In Metamorphosis form, you will focus on using your Demonic Fury to deal as much damage as possible.  Spells you will be using to consume Demonic Fury: Touch of Chaos, Doom, and Soulfire.

Hand of Guldan has a charge system.  There are some intricacies to using Hand of Guldan properly and understanding the charge system is where this starts.  Hand of Guldan has two charges that may be used in quick succession or spread out, and the charges will replenish one at a time as long as the caster does not have two charges.  Hand of Guldan leaves a DoT when it hits called Shadowflame.  Shadowflame can stack, so applying Hand of Guldan twice will create a 2 stack of Shadowflame doubling its efficiency.  Hand of Guldan and Shadowflame also cause splash damage meaning anything within 5-10 yards of the primary target will suffer the same damage as your primary target, so increasing the potency of Shadowflame is a primary need of Demonology Warlocks.

The proper way to execute Hand of Guldan is to cast it once and cast it again approximately 5 seconds later.  What this will do is allow you to have Shadowflame ticking for 5 of its 6 second duration.  When the 2nd HoG hits, Shadowflame will become a 2 stack of Shadowflame for the next 6 seconds giving you an 11 second duration.  Strive to maintain at least 30% Shadowflame uptime while pushing towards 40% (theoretical maximum) is ideal.  The way you'll do this is you will use Hand of Guldan and then cast two other spells, either two Shadowbolts or two Molten Core Soulfires.  As soon as the 2nd Shadowbolt or 2nd Soulfire is casted, cast your 2nd Hand of Guldan.  You should have sufficient time to apply the 2nd stack with two spells cast in between.  If not, consider getting enough Haste so that you can pull this off.  You will not cast Hand of Guldan until 1 charge has completely regenerated and the 2nd charge has about 4 seconds left on its recharge.

Soulfire also has a charge system via Molten Core procs.  Molten Core procs make Soulfire cost 50% less mana and cast 50% faster making it a more ideal choice than Shadowbolt.  Soulfire also always crits and has its damage modified by Critical strike raiting.  Molten Core procs should be consumed via Soulfire as a high priority in caster form. It is a very small DPS gain to use Molten Core procs during Metamorphosis.  This is only a DPS gain if you have Dark Soul up and using Soulfire will not make you run out of Demonic Fury before Dark Soul wears off.

Your priority spell queueing should be as follows:
1) Doom applied during Metamorphosis with procs and Dark Soul: Knowledge
2) Corruption applied and maintained via Touch of Chaos.  When Corruption is about to fall off, pop into Metamorphosis and extend its duration with three uses of Touch of Chaos.
3) Soulfire used to consume Molten Core procs (in Meta only with Dark Soul up)
4) Hand of Guldan rotation (HoG -> 2x Shadowbolt/Soulfire -> Hand of Guldan)
5) Shadowbolt

Unerring Vision of Lei Shen Opener:
Curse of Elements -> Dark Soul -> Corruption -> Hand of Guldan x2 -> Metamorphosis -> Doom x2 -> Touch of Chaos x1 -> Imp Swarm -> (Service:Felguard if Grim of Service) (Felstorm/Wrathstorm) Shadowbolt x2 -> Hand of Guldan -> Metamorphosis -> Soulfire until out of procs then Touch of Chaos

This opener will apply CoE, get your DPS buff going, apply Corruption, and get a two stack of Shadowflame ticking.  Unerring will proc while your 2nd Hand of Guldan is dropping which is EXCELLENT.  Pop into Meta before it lands, drop 2 Dooms, one Touch of Chaos to extend Corruption and make it crit 100% of the time, then drop out, pop your Imp Swarm, do your Felguard/Wrathguard thing if using them, use Shadowbolt twice to generate some Demonic Fury until Hand of Guldan comes off CD.  Fire this, pop back into Meta, and spend the rest of your Dark Soul proc throwing out mega Soulfires.  With Glyph of Everlasting Affliction and this rotation, your opening should be over 500k DPS.  Your Dark Soul empowered Shadowflame DoT will be Haste proc'd with 100% crit chance, you'll have Doom running for 2 minutes and 15 seconds with a 100% crit chance, and you'll have a mountain of Imps out ripping your target to pieces.


5) Corruption & Doom
Corruption should only be applied one time.  Each subsequent application should be done via Touch of Chaos in Metamorphosis form.  Touch of Chaos will add 6 seconds to your Corruption duration up to the 27 second maximum.  Doom should be applied at the beginning under the explained opener.  Doom needs to be maintained at 100% uptime and should be maintained with a high spell power coefficient.  You can track this through the addon Affdots.  Do not worry about Corruption's spell power coefficient as it will be modified often via Touch of Chaos.

Unerring Vision of Lei Shen Doom
This trinket is a game breaker.  Once you acquire this trinket, you'll want to modify your playstyle a bit.  Your absolute utmost priority is applying Doom when Perfect Aim procs.  The reason behind this is Doom provides not only extra damage on a critical hit, but it also provides you an extra Wild Imp every time it crits.  Guaranteeing extra Wild Imps is a HUGE DPS gain.  While Corruption isn't to be worried about, Doom is very powerful when utilized this way.  Because Perfect Aim procs are tied to RNG and can be spread out, in order to maintain as close to 100% crit chance on Doom as possible, you'll want to take the Glyph of Everlasting Affliction.  This will enable you to have a Doom duration of well over 2 minutes.

6) Mastery, Haste, & Crit
If your DPS is lacking, it's not your secondary stats that are holding you back.  Currently, Demonology's stat weights are so close that you really don't need to push stats into one or the other.  You can set up your playstyle how you like.  For those that dual-spec, this is good as you can keep your Affliction or Destruction reforge for Demonology and be mostly unaffected.

Haste breakpoints and their resulting extra ticks:

http://www.totemspot.../entry.php?b=44

These thresholds are not terribly important for Demonology, but they should be obtained as a formality.  Haste has no benefit in Metamorphosis form as your Touch of Chaos will be instant cast.  However, with RealPPM trinkets, the new legendary meta gem, and the playstyle change of using Soulfire in Metamorphosis under Dark Soul, and sometimes while not, you'll want to stack Haste and Mastery over Crit.  Haste and Mastery work well together and will be your biggest DPS gain.  Prioritize Haste slightly over Mastery for faster rotations and prioritize Mastery over Haste if you need bigger on-demand burst.  Either way won't net you a large difference.

Doom is not listed on that chart because you don't really care about the haste thresholds for the Doom ticks.  What you need to care about is reapplying Doom when Unerring Vision procs regardless of anything else.  The Doom damage is nice, but we're digging for Imps, Imps, and more Imps.

For those who like thresholds, here are the following relevant Doom thresholds (thanks to Brusalk for his work):

Unglyphed Doom
0 rating = 4 ticks
5312 rating = 5 ticks
15936 rating = 6 ticks

With 5% Haste
0 rating = 4 ticks
3036 rating = 5 ticks
13153 rating = 6 ticks

With 35% Haste (5% + Bloodlust/Tempus Repit)
0 rating = 4 ticks
0 rating = 5 ticks
310 rating = 6 ticks
8097 rating = 7 ticks
15876 rating = 8 ticks

Glyphed Doom (Everlasting Affliction)
0 rating = 6 ticks
3541 rating = 7 ticks
10623 rating = 8 ticks

With 5% Haste
0 rating = 6 ticks
1349 rating = 7 ticks
8094 rating = 8 ticks
14840 rating = 9 ticks

With 35% Haste
0 rating = 6 ticks
0 rating = 7 ticks
0 rating = 8 ticks
1608 rating = 9 ticks
6799 rating = 10 ticks
11987 rating = 11 ticks

Cast Spell Haste Thresholds

This is a look at what Demonology's HARD Haste cap is.  This is the amount of Haste required to get spell casts down to 1.000 seconds.

Shadow Bolt
No Haste buffs: unobtainable
+5% Haste: unobtainable
+Bloodlust: unobtainable
+Tempus Repit: 40.84% Haste = 17,357 Haste Rating
+Berserking: 17.4% Haste = 7,395 Haste Rating

Soul Fire
No Haste buffs: unobtainable
+5% Haste: unobtainable
+Bloodlust: unobtainable
+Tempus Repit: unobtainable
+Berserking: unobtainable

Soul Fire (Molten Core)
No Haste buffs: unobtainable
+5% Haste: unobtainable
+Bloodlust: 46.5% Haste = 19,763 Haste Rating
+Tempus Repit: 12.6% Haste = 5,355 Haste Rating
+Berserking: 0% Haste = 0 Haste Rating

*Wild Imps*
Imp Swarm is an interesting Glyph in that it alters the CD based on Haste Rating.  Here, we can see some various CDs along with how long the base CD on Demonic Calling is.

Wild Imps should be summoned when all of your Haste procs are live in the opener.  These procs will be +5% Haste + Bloodlust + Tempus Repit.  If you are a Troll, using Berserking will have an even greater effect.  Note the following Imp Swarm CDs with these procs live:

+5% Raid Haste + Bloodlust + Tempus Repit = 77.5% Haste
0% Haste = 67.6 sec
10% Haste = 61.5 sec
20% Haste = 56.3 sec
30% Haste = 52.0 sec
40% Haste = 48.3 sec
50% Haste = 45.1 sec

(Troll) +5% Raid Haste + Bloodlust + Tempus Repit + Berserking = 112.9% Haste
0% Haste = 56.4 sec
10% Haste = 51.2 sec
20% Haste = 47.0 sec
30% Haste = 43.4 sec
40% Haste = 40.3 sec
50% Haste = 37.6 sec

Remember, Demonic Calling's base CD is 20 seconds.  This value can be reduced by Haste as well.  The synergy of these two effects has some importance tied into Haste.  Demonic Calling remains on CD while Imp Swarm is on CD and using the Glyph of Imp Swarm adds a 4 sec CD to Demonic Calling, so we're looking at 24 sec baseline if using the Glyph.  Here are the two scenarios, glyph and no glyph:

NO GLYPH OF IMP SWARM (assuming only 5% Raid Haste for Imp proc rate)
0% Haste = 19.1 sec
10% Haste = 17.3 sec
20% Haste = 15.9 sec
30% Haste = 14.6 sec
40% Haste = 13.6 sec
50% Haste = 12.7 sec

Looking at 30% Haste, we see a 14.6 sec CD on Demonic Calling which translates ROUGHLY to 4 Imps per minute.  If we look at it on a 2 minute baseline, we'd see roughly 8 Imps proc in 2 minutes.  This number would vary as Tempus Repit and Bloodlust were applied, but to keep things simple, let's just assume none of that applies.  If not using the glyph, there is no Haste threshold for Imps.  More Haste = more Imps, plain and simple.

WITH GLYPH OF IMP SWARM (assuming only 5% Raid Haste for Imp proc rate)
0% Haste = 22.8 sec
10% Haste = 20.8 sec
20% Haste = 19.0 sec
30% Haste = 17.6 sec
40% Haste = 16.3 sec
50% Haste = 15.2 sec

These values tie into the CD of Imp Swarm when used.  The opening Imp Swarm will have a greatly decreased CD because you'll have all of your procs running live.  The following values assume that you are popping Imp Swarm with Dark Soul and letting Imp Swarm be available but not used until Dark Soul comes off CD (120 sec).

0% Haste: Imp Swarm CD = 114 sec, Demonic Calling CD = 22.8 sec = 6 Imps per 2 minutes
*This would mean Imp Swarm would come off CD 114 sec in and Demonic Calling would proc an additional Imp.  6 seconds later, Dark Soul would be available, so you'd apply Dark Soul and pop Imp Swarm imposing an additional 114 sec CD on Imp Swarm.  What we try to find here is the thresholds of maximum Imps proc'd between Imp Swarm uses.*

10% Haste: Imp Swarm CD = 103.9 sec, Demonic Calling CD = 20.8 sec = 6 Imps per 2 minutes (next Imp would be at 125.7 sec meaning you'd have to delay DS/Imp Swarm for 5.7 sec)
20% Haste: Imp Swarm CD = 95.2 sec, Demonic Calling CD = 20.8 sec = 7 Imps per 2 minutes (next Imp would be at 136.8 sec meaning you'd have to delay DS/Imp Swarm for 16.8 sec)
30% Haste: Imp Swarm CD = 87.9 sec, Demonic Calling CD = 17.6 sec = 7 Imps per 2 minutes (next Imp would be at 123.1 sec meaning you'd have to delay DS/Imp Swarm for 3.1 sec)
40% Haste: Imp Swarm CD = 81.6 sec, Demonic Calling CD = 16.3 sec = 8 Imps per 2 minutes (next Imp would be at 130.5 sec meaning you'd have to delay DS/Imp Swarm for 10.5 sec)
50% Haste: Imp Swarm CD = 76.2 sec, Demonic Calling CD = 15.2 sec = 8 Imps per 2 minutes (next Imp would be at 121.8 sec meaning you'd have to delay DS/Imp Swarm for 1.8 sec)

Remember, this is worst case scenario (no Bloodlust used, no Tempus Repit procs) so you'll likely see higher Imp rates than what is listed here.  However, the value we want to see is at what Haste % you JUST get another Demonic Calling proc and Dark Soul and Imp Swarm come off CD.  You can see that value lies somewhere between 10% and 20% and another between 30% and 40%.  Those values are:

14.29% Haste: Imp Swarm CD = 100.0 sec, Demonic Calling CD = 20.0 sec = 7 Imps per 2 minutes
33.40% Haste: Imp Swarm CD = 85.7 sec, Demonic Calling CD = 17.1 sec = 8 Imps per 2 minutes

14.29% Haste = 6,074 Haste Rating
33.40% Haste = 14,195 Haste Rating

These thresholds are not meant to be aimed for when reforging and gemming.  This is just a value that shows how many additional Imps you would get if you didn't use Bloodlust or have 0 Tempus Repit procs.  The actual required Haste Rating will be much lower because of temporary procs.


7) Dark Soul
Dark Soul:Knowledge grants you 18000 Mastery for 20 seconds which greatly buffs your damage in Metamorphosis form and, to a lesser extent, caster form as well as giving all of your pets a healthy buff.  Dark Soul:Knowledge should be used on cooldown and you should make sure you have at least 600 Demonic Fury as DS:K comes off cooldown.  This will allow you to spam Touch of Chaos without popping out of Meta for the duration of DS:K.  With the 4pc T15 bonus, you will consume much less Demonic Fury while Dark Soul is up making Soulfire take precendence over Touch of Chaos.  Remember to only use Soulfire during Molten Core procs.  Never hardcast that beast of a spell.

8) Execution phase
Execute phase: nothing really special to note other than that each Soulfire casted will proc Molten Core if it hits a target below 25% HP...this means after 25% HP, you won't be using Shadowbolt anymore.  Just remember that if you have Demonic Fury and the boss will die soon, go into Metamorphosis and spend your Demonic Fury.

9) AoE
This is where Demonology shines.

In 5 man dungeons, all you need to do is use Hand of Guldan twice and Felstorm packs of mobs.  They will melt like butter on a hot summers day.  For even better burst, pop into Meta, slap on Immolation Aura and then spam Void Ray while everything else is running.  Using Felstorm coupled with this should make you top DPS in every 5 man you go to.

For raids and sustained AoE on fights such as Wind Lord where you have multiple mobs to hit, you should strive to maintain Corruption and Doom on each target.  The way to do maximum AoE is to do the following setup:

1) Apply Corruption to all mobs
2) Use Hand of Guldan twice
3) Pop Meta and use Void Ray twice.  This will extend the duration of each Corruption by 8 seconds.
4) Apply Doom to all mobs that will live long enough for 1 tick
5) Use Void Ray 6 times.  This will extend the duration of Corruption to its maximum.
6) Spend excess Demonic Fury on Immolation Aura and continue to use Void Ray.
**Always use Felstorm on CD.

When you run out of Demonic Fury, recast your double Hand of Guldan and use your plethora of Molten Core procs with Soulfire to regenerate Demonic Fury quickly.  When the mobs' Corruption timer gets to about 8 seconds, pop back into Meta, use Void Ray to get the Corruption ticks back to maximum, and dump excess Demonic Fury in Immolation Aura.  Perform this correctly and you will see massive sustained AoE damage.

10) Hit capping
Hit capping is not a debate for Demonology.  Get hit capped.

11) Pandemic and Fel Flame and Doomguard...OH MY!
Fel Flame should not be used to refresh DoTs, period. It should ONLY be used if you're moving, don't need to Life Tap, and you do not have any Demonic Fury. Felflame costs a non-trivial amount of mana and only adds 6 seconds to Corruption.  Instead of using Fel Flame, when you need to move, pop into Metamorphosis and move while casting Touch of Chaos.

Pandemic will be used to extend Corruption up to 27 seconds via Touch of Chaos and Doom up to 1:30 duration by double casting it when procs are up.  These values adjust to 40+ seconds for Corruption and 2:15 for Doom with the Glyph of Everlasting Affliction.

For the Doomguard, you're better off using him when extra damage is required in a particular phase of a fight.  If it's a burn like Gara'jal or Protectors, just use it at the beginning when your stats are the highest.  The Doomguard updates dynamically, so if you prefer to use him elsewhere, remember this tidbit.  He will cast 17 Doombolts and then despawn.  This number cannot be modified via Haste.

12) Talents

All of our talents have some fight dependency and can be flexed in and out. Have plenty of Tome of the Clear Mind so that you can easily swap in a beneficial talent. I've included recommended talents per fight in my raid guides, so here is just a general useful application of each talent for Affliction.

Tier 1
Dark Regeneration - defensive cooldown that heals you and increases healing received. Typically only needed to recover from heavy damage that your healers need assistance with. Inferior to Soul Leech in most situations.
Soul Leech - passive continuous healing that will provide a majority of the healing done to your Warlock. So powerful that you will often heal yourself for MORE than your healers will heal you. This should be your staple raiding talent.
Harvest Life - lackluster AoE talent that doesn't provide a whole lot of power.

Tier 2
Howl of Terror - generally inefficient in raiding situations.
Mortal Coil - 15% of max HP heal every 45 seconds? Incredible. This should be your staple raiding talent. Use liberally when taking damage during events like Force and Verve.
Shadowfury - great when you need a stun on adds. Otherwise, extremely lackluster.

Tier 3
Soul Link - Not really useful as Demonology.
Sacrificial Pact - extremely useful and the best survival talent in this tier and perhaps the entire game.
Dark Bargain - This can be used on some fights if you alert your healers to it. Sure, not taking any damage from a Force and Verve is great for 8 seconds, but for the next 8 seconds, you'll take 50% of the TOTAL damage you would have taken during Dark Bargain PLUS any additional damage you might incur. If you can safely use it to avoid a mechanic and alert a healer you'll need a little extra TLC when the effect expires, then it might have its uses.

Tier 4
Blood Fear - pointless for PvE
Burning Rush - has its potential to be useful on fights where an on demand sprint can boost DPS. So far, I've only seen it effective on Blade Lord Ta'yak to get down the hallway faster. Note that you will suffer 4% of your max HP per second that this is active which is a pretty pricey sprint. If combined with Dark Regeneration, you can negate a majority of this, but this typically isn't worth it.
Unbinding Will - staple raiding talent. You can use this to instantly break out of magic effects such as the petrification effect by trash in Mogu'shan Vaults or the Amber Prison on Wind Lord in Heart of Fear. Use liberally and alert your healers they can use their dispels in other places.

Tier 5
Grimoire of Supremacy - neat souped up minions from hell.  Good choice if you don't want to worry about another cooldown.  Wrathguard will be your pet of choice.  Remember to Wrathstorm on CD or when a number of adds will present themselves.
Grimoire of Service - demon with an additional demon for 20 seconds on a 2 minute cooldown.  Great for AoE burst and even single target burst.  Time with Dark Soul for best effects.
Grimoire of Sacrifice - a very solid choice in single target situations.  As a Demonology Warlock using Grimoire of Sacrifice, a priority in damage will be in your Wild Imps.  Unerring Vision of Lei Shen solidifies the decision to use Grim of Sac.

Tier 6
Archimonde's Vengeance - neat concept. Dull in execution.
Kil'jaeden's Cunning - pre 5.1, this was rather lame. 5.1 brings a wonderful, wonderful change to the Warlock's ability to DPS while moving...at NO CASTING PENALTY! This means you don't have to break Malefic Grasp channels to move out of fire, avoid a Wind Bomb, or while dealing with Pheramones on Garalon! You can freely do all casting while on the move at 70% of your initial movement speed. This should always, always be used as your Tier 6 talent unless no movement is required. There is no boss in Tier 14 that requires no movement. Take KJC.
Mannoroth's Fury - boosts the area of AoE abilities by 500%. The radius is increased by a factor of about 2.27 so while your reticle won't look that much bigger, it is actually covering 5x the original area. This is usually unimportant, but it comes in handy during fights where mobility is limited but the range of Hellfire/Immo Aura is important.

Glyph Choices
Glyph of Imp Swarm - very solid DPS increase when used with Dark Soul.
Glyph of Everlasting Affliction - solid DPS increase when used with Unerring Vision of Lei Shen.  Increase is magnified when multiple targets present themselves
Glyph of Siphon Life - survivability glyph; provides a healthy sum of healing.
(minor) Glyph of Shadowbolt - DPS increase because of the increased number of spell hits used to proc RealPPM trinkets and meta socket

http://www.icy-veins...ehensive-guide/ World of Logs Guide. Useful for helping you understand how to read World of Logs.

Updated: 4/26/2013 (Patch 5.2)

I was a long way into Outland when finally one day my BF had the time to come help me with some quest.
"OK, lets mount up" he said and started to fly.  "Wait, wait! I cant fly from here" He stared at me startled as I climbed a tree and took off from a branch.  No one told me that hitting space would make me lift off the ground.....

Giveaway #39! This week-end, we are giving away a Winged Guardian mount.

We will pick the winner randomly, in 48 hours, among those who posted something nice in this thread. We will be watching out for dummy accounts.

Here are the winners:

• Peelyon: 303 points
  
• Alierya: 222 points
  
• MadMonk: 160 points
  
• LCSscallywag: 111 points
  
• Stoove: 110 points
  
• meukow: 106 points
  
• Neridae: 99 points
  
• Zagam: 87 points
  
• Redcross: 86 points
  
• HardBeatZ: 85 points

We are very happy with the way things turned out. Forum activity is definitely on the right track and the contributions have been great! Also, the results did not give us a headache as the winners are clear and the 11th contestant only has 68 points.

We will now contact the winners, who will be encouraged to post a screenshot of their prize(s) in this thread

Two years ago on this day, Vlad and I launched Icy Veins. You can go to http://old.icy-veins.com to see the site exactly how it was on the day of the launch. At the time, we had only 1 raid encounter guide (Chimaeron) and 3 class guides (Fire Mage, Frost Mage, and Holy Paladin). It probably doesn't seem much to those who recently started coming to our website, but back then, putting these guides together felt like a lot of work. Anyway, we kept working and over a year later, we had a complete offering of class and encounter guides (plus a few other goodies, like transmog and event guides). Then Mists of Pandaria hit the shelves, and our 5.0.4 class guides got heavily linked on MMO-Champion, which is when most our of current visitors discovered us.

Thanks to this exposure, our traffic increased enough that we now both make a modest living off the website. This is great news for us because our efforts have finally paid off. We've been working full time on the website since day 1, so we took a huge gamble, as we could have both probably had successful careers in our respective fields. It's been difficult financially for the both of us, but those days now seem to be behind us. This is also great news for you, our readers, because it means that we will be able to keep working on the website for the foreseeable future, and we have many plans to make Icy Veins an even better resource.

This 2-year journey hasn't always been a pleasure cruise and there have been a few hard moments, like when our Dragon Soul encounter guides were not as successful (traffic-wise) as we had anticipated them to be, or when Diablo 3 was released and our traffic was divided by 2 over night. Fortunately, our work has always been very positively received, and whenever we were going through a bit of a crisis, there would always be a message in our mailbox to praise our work, and it would make us confident again, ready to get back to work.

So, many thanks to everyone who has supported us over the past 2 years, your kind words never went unnoticed (be sure of that). There are people that we would like to thank especially, because they really helped us a lot:

• our respective wives for putting up with our hobby-turned-main-occupation;
• Michael Oglesby, for helping us (originally in his spare time) with design work and usability issues;
• Zagam, our Warlock moderator, who is doing a terrific job with his Warlock section;
• Boubouille and Chaud from MMO-Champion for pushing our website into a different category when MoP was released and for the continued support since then;
• the Ask Mr. Robot team, and Vee in particular, for the all interesting discussions on stat weights/priorities and for the advice regarding advertising solutions for our website;
• all the community team at Blizzard, especially Zahrym and Nethaera, for noticing our work and often promoting it, and for sending us those awesome prizes for our Christmas contest;
• the development team of Simulation Craft for making such a wonderful and useful tool.

For the last few days, I haven't been very active in the forums. The reason is that I was working on a new feature that will make it very easy for everyone to add properly formatted links to items, achievements, spells, talents, skills, quests, NPCs, etc. on wowhead.com.

This new feature is now live and you should all be able to see it in the editor (the big Wowhead button in the editor toolbar). Let us know what you think!

A few examples:

Classic Raider
Ashbringer
Armageddon


In addition, I added a number of bbcode tags, in case you want to write text in specific World of Warcraft colors. See examples below.

[dk]Death Knight[/dk]
[druid]Druid[/druid]
[hunter]Hunter[/hunter]
[mage]Mage[/mage]
[monk]Monk[/monk]
[paladin]Paladin[/paladin]
[priest]Priest[/priest]
[rogue]Rogue[/rogue]
[shaman]Shaman[/shaman]
[warlock]Warlock[/warlock]
[warrior]Warrior[/warrior]

will give
Death Knight
Druid
Hunter
Mage
Monk
Paladin
Priest
Rogue
Shaman
Warlock
Warrior

[hated]Hated[/hated]
[hostile]Hostile[/hostile]
[unfriendly]Unfriendly[/unfriendly]
[neutral]Neutral[/neutral]
[friendly]Friendly[/friendly]
[honored]Honored[/honored]
[revered]Revered[/revered]
[exalted]Exalted[/exalted]

will give
Hated
Hostile
Unfriendly
Neutral
Friendly
Honored
Revered
Exalted

I must say, this is wonderful seeing others' advice being just as good if not better than what I would have delivered.  Thanks Cruz, Gravy, and Omaric.

I made this map because I was getting lots of questions from new 90's about where all the daily quest hubs are located, and as I was searching, I didn't find anything like this.  The Shado-Pan dailies are not available until you hit revered with golden lotus.  The golden lotus dailies start at the Golden Pagoda, but there are two more sets available after your reputation goes up with them.  The dailies tell you where to go each day.  Also, there is a quest below the flight master platform in your major city to obtain 90 lesser charm of good fortunes, which is done weekly.  When you turn these in, you get 3 greater charms of good fortune, which can be used to roll on additional loot in LFR, The Sha/Galleon, and in normal/heroic raids.

Hi guys,

I was a "clicker" when i started playing WoW several years back and it took me quite a lot to move to keybinds, but, tbh, its much, much easier to play with keybinds, here you are few reasons:

1) When your clicking, you have to looks at what spell are you clicking, taking off your eyes of the middle of screen. Its a short period of time, but in both PvE and specially PvP its a disadvantage.

2) When your clicking, you need to move your mouse from the middle of screen, which is again bad thing, not allowing you to be able to fast cycle trough targets. This issue does not affect PvE as much as PvP.

3) "Clicking" with your mouse and using "keybind" is two different things that game "register" in a different manner. "Clicking" cast/use spell/skill after mouse click release, while "keybinding" casts/use spell/skill on "key press". This doesnt give you possibility to "click and hold" mouse button, but it does cast your spells slightly slower than "keybind."

That being said, as a PvPer, you are in slight disposition from "keybinder" with equal skills as you.


Here is how i bind my skills, on left side is my bind key, on right default key on action bar:
q = 1
e = 2
r = 3
f = 4
g = 5
1 = 6
2 = 7
3 = 8
4 = 9
c = 0
v = -
b = =

Since R is for wisper i bind it on Shift + y
Since C is character Frame, i bind it on X, which is, by default "/sit"

Now, my complete action bar is macro-ed, giving me different spells on pressing Shift or Ctrl. If you look at this bluntly, it will look like i have 3 action bars binded under my fingers. Some of macroes are retroactive, they are changing them selfs depending on combat state and target.

Here is example of my shaman active macro:


#showtooltip
/cast [nocombat, dead, help] Ancestral Spirit; [mod:shift, help] Chain Heal; [help, nodead] Greater Healing Wave; [nomod, harm] Lightning Bolt; [mod:shift, harm] Chain Lightning; [@player] Greater Healing Wave;

Now, this one is a good one, lemme explain what it does, its doing several things, depending on your combat state, target and button pressed, this one is my baby lol.
Now, if your targeting dead party/raid target and your out of combat you will cast ress, if you are in combat and friendly target is alive you will cast Greater healing wave, by holding shift and targeting friendly you will cast Chain Heal, otherwise, if target is hostile you will cast Lightning Bold, holding shift chain lightning, if you have no target it will cast on you Greater healing wave. Best used with 5stacks of MW.

I love clean and micro UIs that are leaving my screen wide clean, so, by doing all this, i have all spells that i need in every situation binded/macroed in one spell bar.

As i said, if you look at this bluntly, all this looks confusing and to much, it will look like i have 3 action bars binded under my fingers, but when you look at keyboard usage, it will look like this:



Red = action buttons,
Blue = movement keys,
Green = Modifier buttons for macros.

So, as you can see, i have all buttons under my fingers.

Im not here to brag or anything, i wanted to explain disadvantage of "clicking" over "binding" and added some info on macros. I value both, clicker and binder since im not so much "hard-core" and only thing that is matter is to have fun and enjoy playing this game.


It was really hard for me to switch form clicking to binding, but i would like to suggest you to try it, start from simple things like moving second part of num row around your fingers, when you get it right and find best binding combo that suites you, it will boost your skills and improve your overall enjoyment in game.

Rather than derail the HGWT thread I thought I would post the full changes to the guild perks currently on the Beta.

The following is taken from my thread on the EU forums found here

There are a number of differences to the current Level 1 - 25 perks which are as follows.

• Level 10 (currently "Chug-a-lug") - The Doctor Is In - Increases healing from bandages by25% (not in arena or battlegrounds)

• Level 20 (currently "Happy Hour") - For Great Justice Rank 2 - Increases Justice Points by 20%

• Level 21 (currently "Have Group Will Travel") - Ride Like the Wind - Increases flight path travel speed by 25%

• Level 22 (currently "Chug-a-lug Rank 2") - Working Overtime Rank 2 - Increases chance of profession skill up by 20%

• Level 27 perk - Time Off - Increases rest gained by 100%

• Level 30 - Otherworldly Discounts - 10% off Void Storage and Transmog costs

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So my personal comments.

• From looking at my alchemist on the beta there are currently no new recipes for cauldrons to learn (after checking the new alchemy recipes at the trainer and looking at guild rewards vendor).  This suggests that they wont be using cauldrons at all during MoP with the removal of both Chug a Lug and Happy Hour.

• Have Group Will Travel removed. Plenty of discussion already going on here

• Time Off - Hopefully this will be reworded and re clarified. I am unsure if this means the speed you gain rest is increased by 100% (so you rest twice as fast) or the maximum you can be rested is increased by 100% (so you rest at the same rate you just have double the amount of rested available to you)

• Otherworldly Discounts - Will this eventually include reforging? Im not sure what other players are like but on my main character my void storage is already FULL with the various items from seasonals etc and I see it very rare that I will even begin to swap things around in there so the savings will be minimal.  Reforging is obviously the reason why most players visit the etherals and I feel it should be included (especially as it is currently the highest perk possible)

General points:

Obviously there are no current perks for levels 26, 28, 29. I hope that these will be filled rather than just bypassed, as there seems very little incentive to level your guild at all with the two perks planned.

Sadly I think Otherworldly Discounts seems a bit of a poor perk for level 30. It doesnt seem to have the "wow" factor that Mass Resurrection has for being the highest level perk.  I think it would be better to see a more powerful perk at level 30 (not that I have any ideas currently) and perhaps see Otherworldly Discounts slotted in at 26, 28 or 29.

I just recently came back to Azeroth and rolled a new main. A Brewmaster Monk. For the most part, I was very confused with how the class worked. The information provided on this website has been excellent and I have a much better understanding of how to play a Monk Tank now. Easily one of the best information sites for WoW I have come across in my 5+ years of playing.

During the Christmas period, we will be holding a screenshot contest with awesome prizes! There will be 3 categories: Feast of Winter Veil, Best Scenery, and Best Action Shot. For each category, the prizes will be as follows:

• First place
  • 1 Collector's Edition of Mists of Pandaria, signed by the developers
  • 1 mount and 1 pet from the Blizzard Store
  • 6 months of free Premium Access on Ask Mr. Robot
  • 6 months of free Voice Server from TypeFrag
  • 3 month of free Premium Access to Curse network (including the client for your addons)
• Second place
  • 1 Standard Edition of Mists of Pandaria
  • 1 mount and 1 pet from the Blizzard Store
  • 3 months of free Premium Access on Ask Mr. Robot
  • 3 months of free Voice Server from TypeFrag
  • 3 month of free Premium Access to Curse network
• Third place
  • 1 mount and 1 pet from the Blizzard Store
  • 3 months of free Premium Access on Ask Mr. Robot
  • 3 months of free Voice Server from TypeFrag
  • 3 month of free Premium Access to Curse network

Guidelines

All submissions need to feature your character in a setting that matches the category that you are entering.

• For Feast of Winter Veil, the screenshots need be related to the theme of the world event of the same name.
• For Best Scenery, you must take a screenshot that features your character and any place in the World of Warcraft, instanced or not.
• For Best Action Shot, the screenshot must feature your character in combat, or in the process of performing some class or role specific task.

We will judge based on your character's appearance (transmogrification is not required, but it is certainly allowed), the landscape/background you chose, and how the two mesh together.

Entering the Contest

To submit your screenshot, you need send us an e-mail that will contain the screenshot and a link to the armory profile of the character in the screenshot. You can make more than one submission, but remember that we will judge quality, not quantity. The e-mail addresses for submitting are:

• Feast of Winter Veil: winter-veil@icy-veins.com;
• Best Scenery: scenery@icy-veins.com;
• Best Action Shot: action-shot@icy-veins.com.

You are not allowed to use any software to modify the screenshots. We advise you to set your settings to the maximum your computer can handle, for the purpose of the screenshot. Also, make sure to set your screenshot quality properly: http://www.wowwiki.com/Changing_the_screenshot_format.

We will not divulge the e-mail addresses that you will use to submit your screenshots. We will also never use them to send you unsolicited messages, except if you win the contest, of course.

Timeline

You can start submitting screenshots as soon as you read this message. The submissions will close on the 31st of December at 23:59 GMT.

From the 1st to the 4th of January, the judges will decide on the 10 best screenshots for each category.

On the 4th of January, we will announce the screenshots that made it to the final round. We will add them to specific albums on our Facebook page, where everyone will be able to like them. On the 11th of January, at 21:59 GMT, the winning screenshots for each category will be those that will have received the most likes. Basically, 1 like equals 1 vote.

Finally, we will contact the winners and we will make sure that they get their prizes.

Eligibility

The contest is open to anyone over 13. We will cover the shipping costs, if any.

More on the Prizes

The main prizes are the Mists of Pandaria Collector's Editions, which are all signed by the developers. These priceless editions are a present from the North America Community team at Blizzard, and we thank them heartily for giving us a chance to organise such a nice contest.

The licenses in all the Mists of Pandaria editions are US-only, which means that they can only be used to upgrade a US account. If you have a US account that is already upgraded to Mists of Pandaria, you can upgrade it again to the Collector's Edition (to get the in-game goodies), and you can ask Customer Support to refund you a Mists of Pandaria key. European players, shall they win a Collector's Edition, will not be able to benefit from the in-game goodies or a Collector's Edition Mists of Pandaria key. They will, however, still be able to enjoy the remaining contents of the box.

The mounts and pets from the Blizzard Store will be provided by us, as we usually do in our weekly giveaways. Winners will choose 1 mount and 1 pet from the Blizzard Store, and we will oblige.

Ask Mr. Robot, our partner for everything pertaining to stat priorities, gems, reforging, and best-in-slot, will be offering free access to their premium features. More information on their website.

TypeFrag, one of the best voice server rental services out there, will be offering free access to their services for the winners. They will be able to choose the voice server they prefer: Teamspeak, Ventrilo, or Mumble. The size of the server (10 slots or 25 slots) will depend on whether the guild of the winner is raiding 10-man or 25-man.

Judges

Your screenshots will be judged by:

• some of our moderators: Peelyon, MadMonk, and Auracle;
• Mr. Robot, your gear optimization guru;
• Chris Hanel from The Daily Blink, the famous World of Warcraft Webcomic;
• chaud, who brings you news every day on MMO-Champion;
• Noelani and Ironyca, who run WoW Roleplay Gear, a fantastic resource for transmogrification;
• David Grampa, CEO and Founder of TypeFrag;
• RM, Guild Master of Inner Sanctum (EU-Silvermoon);
• Michael Oglesby, who made (and continues to make) this website so easy to navigate;
• Jamie Syke, who designed our logo;
• Dawn Moore and Anne Stickney from WoW Insider;
• Zastaph, Guild Master of Fury on EU-Shadowsong, a good friend of ours;
• Arielle, from The Inconspicuous Bear, the go-to site for Guardian Druids.

The judges have been listed in the order in which they have replied to us. We may add a few more names, as we are still expecting answers.

If we happen to receive hundreds and hundreds of submissions, Vlad and I will trim them down to a reasonable number before passing them onto the judges.

Conclusion

We have been doing weekly giveaways for more than a year now, but this is the first time that we organise something of this magnitude, and with such prizes. Please be indulgent, we will probably not get everything right, this time.

If you notice anything wrong with the rules of the contest or the timeline, please let your opinion be known!

Analyze



This tab is where the magic of World of Logs comes alive.  This is where you can toggle things to see every possible bit of information you could possibly ask.  Note above, this is just a DPS look at total damage done.  Notice the left hand side where there is a button option of 'by source' 'by target' or 'by spell.'  These are the options we'll take a look at below.  Since we've already explored the damage done by individuals, let's utilize the Analysis option to see Damage Taken.  See below:



Now, we naturally would suspect that our tanks would take the most damage.  (Notice we are looking at Stone Guard now).  So we can see overall damage taken, but let's say your healers are complaining that people are taking way too much damage.  Are your healers complaining or do they have a legit complaint?  Let's take a deeper look.  On the left hand side, go to 'by spell' and click it.  Now, under Source, you want to change it to Amethyst Guardian.  Let's see what that looks like:



Wow.  How baller is that?  Now you can see all the damage that is ONLY coming from the Amethyst Guardian!  You can change this to look at any one target.  Let's go back to our Elegon talk...is your raid group wiping to all the adds at the end of the 3rd phase of a cycle?  Are those Celestial Sparks wrecking your healers?  Who is taking all the damage?  You can do exactly what you do here, put Celestial Spark instead of Amethyst Guardian to see some answers.  Is your Hunter taking a ton of damage to the Sparks?  Tell that fool to start misdirecting to the tanks!   Resto Druid getting owned by the Sparks?  Use Hand of Protection on him!  Finding out who is taking the damage can help you mitigate it.  Let's get back to our Amethyst Guardian.  As you can see in the above picture, I've hovered my mouse over Amethyst Pool to see who is taking the most damage to this.  Notice the window pops up below showing that my Mage and Hunter LOVE to stand in these things!  Or do they?  Both are competent players, so perhaps it's possible that they just got unlucky and had the pools spawn on them more than anyone else.  Overall, this 2.4M damage is very healable over the duration of the fight.  This can be useful for seeing who is messing up Jasper Chains, who is standing in fire on Feng, or who doesn't reset their stacks on Elegon.  An extremely useful tool, you can basically see who is doing what, when, where, and how.  Let's take another look into specific targetting with the Analysis Tab.

Let's say you're curious as to who is destroying all the adds on Elegon.  What's your strategy?  Do you CC?  Who's doing the AoE?  Which tank is tanking them?  Well, I'll show you what we do:



You can see right now that my Mage and Warrior dominate those adds.  How?  We stack them up on a tank, pull them inside, and let the Mage and Warrior do a majority of the damage while the rest of us get back on Elegon.  The Warrior pops "Die by the Sword" while the Mage pops his Frozen Orb.  These two together melt the adds like warm butter on a hot summer's day.  This type of look would also be useful if you think some DPS aren't switching to adds when they should be.  This type of tool was extremely useful for finding out what classes were best on Heroic Spine with the burst damage on the Tendons (I know, a bad, bad memory).  We've played with damage taken and damage done...what about our often forgotten healers' roles?!  Let's look...



Nice.  You can see what is doing the most healing here.  Rejuvenation FTW.  The same goes here as it would for damage...hover over any ability and you can see how much healing that ability did and to whom it healed.  I hovered over Healthstone here to see how effective these are.  I notice the healing is a bit low...are people not using my amazing cookies?!  Did you think this couldn't be answered?  Check this out:



Hey Warlocks, want to call your raiders out for dying and not using a Healthstone?  Did they say they used one but you KNOW they didn't?!  USE THIS TO PROVE THEM WRONG!  These are Healthstones used for Elegon.  Now, I've given my raiders very explicit directions.  We ALWAYS are to use Healthstones after the 3rd charge dies during Phase 2 of the first cycle, after the 3rd charge dies during Phase 2 of the 2nd cycle, and as soon as you can during the final burn phase.  How many are listening?

Grave = 2
Guidenstern = 3
Cazlek = 3
Zagam = 2
Keitel = 2
Grant = 2
Kavelier = 2
Mageaclysm = 1

Notice anyone missing?  We didn't 8 man it.  Larce, my Resto Druid didn't use them one time.  Neither did my Protection Paladin, Varalus!  They got yelled at.  This is a valuable tool for finding out if healers are using their mana potions, too.  Also, while we're looking at this chart, you might go 'hmmm, it healed Grave for 254k but everyone else around 120k.  Remember if you use any healing inside the bubble on Elegon, you get 50% additional healing!  This means that Grave and Zagam are getting the benefit of the bonus (Healthstones heal 20% of YOUR max HP now) while everyone else was using them outside, losing 50% of its potential.

Really neat stuff you can do with all of these analyses.  Now, for those who truly excel, I introduce to our final tab, the Ranking info.



What we are seeing here is the Gara'jal kill that I was referencing earlier.  This shows several things.  This records your damage done, your healing done, your damage taken, and then it uses an internal flag to see if you are a healer.  Notice here that it only uses DPS (e) and HPS (e).  This is so people can't break records doing obscene amounts of damage in very short ranges thus skewing the numbers.  Only your effective DPS and effective HPS can be used to rank.  Now, let's look at Zagam's numbers.

Zagam's DPS (e) = 81809
Rank Limit = 85484.

The Rank Limit is what you would need to rank, or be in the top 200 of all parses across the world.  The % of Limit column shows what % you scored based on your spec and how close you came to ranking.  You can see that Zagam did 95.7% of the required DPS to hit the top 200 on this fight as Affliction.  Check our Mr. Mageaclysm!  His % of limit was 103.6% meaning he ranked in the top 200 in the world as a Frost Mage on this fight.  You can see all rankings on the home page of your log on the right hand side.

This concludes the World of Logs use guide.  I hope that some of you gained some newfound skills when analyzing your raid's logs.  Hopefully you can look at your own logs and assess your own situation and possibly help a guildie out as well!  Remember, World of Logs is a tool and is only as sharp as its user.  Hopefully today I've helped you sharpen your skills!

Greetings, users of Icy-Veins!  There have been lots of questions on how to improve DPS, figure out why you're wiping, how to fix other raiders' mistakes, etc.  This guide will contain a plethora of answers to those questions and answers to questions you didn't know you had!  Let's get started.

World of Logs - if you're unfamiliar, head on over to http://www.worldoflogs.com/ to Register and get started.  All of the instructions are there on how to get you set up.  Once you're set up, you will start logs by typing "/combatlog" in your chatbox.  You'll get a message saying that combatlogs are being recorded in your Logs folder in your WoW main folder.  To stop recording logs, you type "/combatlog" again and you'll end logging.  Once you do that, exit WoW, boot up the client you downloaded, and load your log.  Now let's dig in.

The first page you'll see is the title page.  It contains a whole bunch of crap you don't really need to see.  What we're interested in here is the top menu bar.  It looks like this:


What you'll see here is your guild name, the date and time, and some other drop down menu items.  We only really care about Dashboard and Full Report.  Highlight over Dashboard, and you should see the following menu:


Some notes on each item:
Compare Fights - ignore this.
Analyze - super useful tool for analyzing details within a fight.  Covered later.
Damage Done - everyone's favorite menu.  Personalized fight details for individual members of damage done.
Damage Taken - everyone's least favorite menu.  Personalized fight details for individual members of damage taken.
Healing Done - Healing details
Healing Taken - ignore this.
Friendly Fire - ignore this.
Deaths Overview - ignore this.  You know when you died.  If you're interested in seeing who died to what in combat, I highly suggest the add-on "Fatality."
Survivability - ignore this.
Log Browser - ignore this.
Expression editor - ignore this.
Ranking info - details information on ranking performances.  Detailed later.

Now, highlight over the Full Report button.  You should see the following menu:


Some notes on each item:
Bosses - ignore this.
Kills - shows combat parses of boss attempts in which you won!  Celebrate your glory with this tab.
Wipes - shows combat parses of boss attempts in which you did not win.  Learn from your mistakes with this tab.
Trash - ignore this unless you're really hyped up on how good you are on trash.
Full Report - ignore this.

Now that the menus have been explained, lets see what's under the hood.

The first menu most people will care about is the best for analyzing single player's damage measures.  Let's pretend you are Zagam, a Warlock, and you want to see your performance on Gara'jal.  Under Dashboard, you'll click Damage Done.  Under Full Report, you'll go down to Kills and move your mouse over to the kill record and click it.  You'll be rewarded with the following window:


We now see everyone's damage contribution for the Gara'jal encounter that lasted 4 minutes and 53 seconds.  There's a spiffy chart there, but that's not what we came for.  Take a look at the numbers.  You might be thinking 'Wow, your Hunter is TERRIBLE.'  He's not, I promise you.  The reason I picked this fight is to demonstrate the difference between DPS and DPS (e).  Gara'jal is a unique encounter in which some players will go into a different realm for a period of time.  World of Logs is not able to pick up those players' combat logs during that, so they appear to be idle during this.  This provides me the opportunity to show you the difference between DPS and DPS (e).

Look at Zagam's record.  He shows 81,952 DPS but 81,509 DPS (e).  DPS is a measure of your damage done divided by your ACTIVE time.  Notice that my active time is 99.8% because I was there and doing things the entire time.  DPS (e) is a measure of your total damage done divided by the TOTAL time of the encounter, regardless of what you were doing.  Take a look at Cazlek, the Hunter.  His DPS is 68,399 but his DPS (e) is only 28,648.  This is because when he went into the other realm, the combat log basically assumed he stopped for that period of time.  Since his active time is 42.0%, you can see that he spent 58% of his time in the other realm executing those mechanics.  His DPS is a measure of how much damage he did in the time he wasn't in the realm, but his DPS (e) is a measure of his total damage done NOT in that realm over the total time.  Take this as an easier to understand example:

Mage 1 does 500k DPS for 30 seconds and then dies.
Mage 2 does 300k DPS for 60 seconds.
The fight lasts for 60 seconds.
World of Logs will parse Mage 1 at 500k DPS but only 250k DPS (e) because he was active 50% of the time.  This fight's parse is an exception with the phasing issue...typically on other fights, all players should be over 99% on their active time percentage.  If it's not, that shows the greatest opportunity for improvement.  They need better focus and to be active at all times.  Follow the caster's cardinal rule: ABC = Always Be Casting.

One other thing to notice here: notice the white triangles by certain players names.  This indicates pet usage.  Clicking the white triangle will create a drop down menu where you can see how much a Warlock's Doomguard did or laugh at the fact the Beast Mastery Hunter's pet almost beat the Hunter himself.  A Doomguard parse is an EXCELLENT way to see DPS vs DPS (e).  The Doomguard will only be out for 1 minute.  Let's say a fight lasts 5 minutes and he's out for a full minute.  Let's say while he was out, he did 10k DPS.  Under DPS, it will say 10,000, but under DPS (e), it will say 2,000.  This is how you see how much certain pets contribute to your OVERALL DPS.

Alright, with that explained, let's take a look at Zagam's details.  You can see anyone's details you care about by simply clicking their name.