TBC Shadow Destro [Guide]

[Chaoren]

Since there strangely seems to be a lack of class guides for 2.4.3 content, I thought I would make this one for warlocks. Specifically, it's for destruction warlocks.

Why destruction?
Simply put, destruction offers arguably the best damage in the game. At low gear levels affliction is very nice, and there's something to be said for having a token affliction lock just for the raid utility they offer. Demonology is more for PVP or leveling, and less viable in a PVE setting. Destruction locks have no rotation to speak of so it's almost impossible to mess up and they are pretty durable for a caster. The biggest downside to playing destruction is that it can be really boring if you go shadow. Fire is also viable at low levels, but in my testing it always seems to fall just a bit behind shadow. I'll focus therefore on shadow, and how to min max it.

Your spec
Your spec is this.

You have a bit of wiggle room here. For example improved healthstone, improved voidwalker, and aftermath. If you want to really min/max, see what rank of improved healthstone the other warlocks in your raid have and pick whatever they don't have, so that you can have three different ranks of healthstone in a raid. The choice between aftermath and pyroclasm is up to you. You rarely use rain of fire, so I prefer aftermath, but they're both filler points. The trick to this build is the combination of demonic sacrifice and shadowbolt. By sacrificing your succubus you gain 15% shadow damage, and since you just spam shadowbolt that's a straight 15% increase to your damage done with a single talent point. This along with the talents in your destruction tree make shadowbolt hit extremely hard. This spec is pretty strong initially, and just gets better with gear as shadow and flame makes the spellpower coefficient very high.

How to play it
It's incredibly easy. Summon and sacrifice your succubus. Keep fel armor up. Then, make sure you apply your designated curse, generally curse of the elements, but if another warlock is using that you can use curse of doom. After that, it's all about getting as many shadowbolts into the fight as you can.

There are tricks to this. The best advice I have is to focus on economy of movement. If you want to maximize your throughput you should try to position yourself so that you have to move as little as possible. When you do move, make sure you are making use of that break in damage. Maybe you life tap and then throw out a deathcoil, reapply a curse, use shadow ward, whatever. I would also recommend using multiple buttons for shadowbolt so that you can spam it as fast as possible. I use both my mouse wheel up and down as well as 4 on my keyboard. Lastly, try to stack and time your cooldowns as smartly as you can and use them as often as you can. Orcs have a great racial bonus to spell power, and if you have on use trinkets make sure you use them as well. Potions, drums, etc will all help you min/max your damage output.

When it comes to AOE, your best friend is seed of corruption. It does massive amounts of damage on AOE pulls when you don't have to single target. The best way to do this is to cast seed, tab target to the next mob and cast another and just keep doing that. If you cast seed on the same target and that target doesn't take enough damage you might end up overwriting your own spell and not do any damage at all. Once the first seed goes off, it will trigger the other rest that you have put out and you'll have a large chain-reaction and see your DPS skyrocket.
However, I will offer some words of caution. If you just lay in with seed you might pull aggro and die. Give your tank a moment to establish threat. Rain of fire is mediocre by comparison, but I will occasionally use simply because I know I will pull aggro and die if I use seed.

Itemization
Your first objective is to get 202 spell hit. This will reduce your chance to miss a shadowbolt as much as possible. Spellpower is your next most important stat. The more you have the better, remember that your shadowbolt scales insanely well with spell power. Because of ruin your spell crits do double damage instead of 50% more damage, so spell crit is also huge. You really can't have too much. Spell haste is something you don't really see much of until you get into the later raids, but once you are into t6 content it is also a great stat to pad. Stamina and intellect are lesser considerations, you need enough to survive and encounter, but you don't need to stack it unless you are doing fight-specific tanking (such as on Illidan or Leotheras). That content is a bit outside the scope of this guide.

Spell penetration is for PVP, so you can basically ignore that when it comes to PVE content.

Professions
First of all, you tailoring should your #1 priority until you get access to t6 level gear. The frozen shadoweave set is BIS until the end of t5 and beginning of t6. It offers a massive amount of shadow damage. The downside to this gear is that it lacks other stats, such as spell hit and crit. Another set you should strive for is the spellstrike set. This set also offers massive amounts of spellpower as well as spell hit and crit, but lacks stamina and intellect.

After tailoring, any crafting profession that benefits your character is good to have. The goggles from engineering are fantastic and better even that the spellstrike hood. Enchanting gives you ring enchants, jewelcrafting gives you epic gems before they become available with t6 content. Leatherworking gives you drums, which are basically like a mini-bloodlust/heroism that you can use for your party every minute or so. Once you get to Sunwell, the final raid of the expansion, most guilds require all dps to go LW for the drums. If you want to be really hardcore, you can give the bonuses of multiple professions simultaneously. For example, you could level enchanting, enchant your rings, then drop it and pick up jewelcrafting and get your epic gems, then drop it and pick up leatherworking for drums. Unlike in WotLK, you do not need to maintain these professions to obtain the benefit they offer once leveled up, only tailoring requires that you be a shadoweave tailor in order to have the FSW set and engineering at 350 to wear the goggles.

Crafting professions are not really helpful at all, aside from making you some extra gold. I would recommend leveling an alt to farm mats for you, and save more useful professions for your main.

Add-ons
Omen
This is must have for anyone that wants to play PVE. In Wrath and subsequent expansions, threat was built into the default user interface, so you could get by without an add-on to track it (though the add-on does a much better job of it). In vanilla wow and TBC, that functionality doesn't exist, so the only way to know if you're going to pull aggro is with a threat meter. With this spec, your threat is extremely high, so you have to really pay attention.

Some type of buff/debuff tracking addon
There are numerous add-ons that can accomplish this, so pick whichever suits you best. You need to know what duration is left on your curses, demonic sacrifice, etc.

Enchants
Head - Glyph of Power (The Sha'tar, Revered)
Shoulder - Aldor/Scryer Inscription (faction dependent)
Cloak - Subtlety (300 Enchanting Thrallmar/Honor Hold/AQ40)
Chest - Exceptional Stats (345 Enchanting)
Bracer - Spellpower (360 Enchanting)
Gloves - Spell Strike (if under 202 Spell Hit, 360 Enchanting) or Shadow Power (300 Enchanting)/Major Spellpower (360 Enchanting)
Legs - Runic Spellthread
Feet - Boar's Speed (360 Enchanting)
Ring - Spellpower (360 Enchanting, only works on the enchanter's own ring)
Weapon - Soulfrost (375 Enchanting)

Boar's Speed for boots might not be obvious, but remember that you really want to try to maximize your throughput, and being able to move more quickly means that you can get more shadowbolts into the fight. This is your BIS enchant list. Obviously, some of these slots can be enchanted with less expensive versions of these such as 40 spell power to weapon instead of Soulfrost or Mystic Spellthread instead of Runic Spellthread.

Gems
So let's assume you know next to nothing about how gems work. Some armor has slots for gems that you can put in it which will let you customize it to suit you. Gems come in a variety of types. Meta gems are only for some head armor items and will only fit into a meta gem slot which has a white color to it. Some helms don't have a meta gem slot (such as the spellstrike hood) but have three regular gem slots. Some helms don't have any gem slots at all.

Regular gem slots come in three colors, red, blue, or yellow. You can put any color of non-meta gem into any regular gem slot, but if you want to activate the item's socket bonus you have to match the colors. Yellow sockets can be activated by yellow, green, or orange colored gems. Blue sockets can be activated by blue, purple, or green colored gems. Red sockets can be activated by red, orange, or purple colored gems.

Your meta gem is Chaotic Skyfire Diamond (you'll need 2x Glowing Nightseye to activate it).

If you are below spell hit cap, gem Great Dawnstone in everything else. If you're going for a head slot that doesn't have a meta and you're below hit cap, then don't worry about the Glowing Nightseye. Once you have your spell hit capped, gem for spell damage with Runed Living Ruby. If the socket bonus is good and you want to gem spell crit with a Potent Noble Topaz or spell hit with Veiled Noble Topaz have at it.

Blue slots can be ignored other than when you're trying to activate the meta, as they don't offer much in the way of DPS and the socket bonus will rarely be better than the lost spell power.

[Selaya]

few pointers

at lower (ie, t4 gear levels) crit tends to be more important than spellpower, esp for dungeons as it significantly improves your isb uptime and thus dps, you should aim for at least 20% crit unbuffed or you're likely better off playing firedestro as it isn't crit-reliant

also, unless you have a lot of shadow sp (full fsw, soulfrost, rissyns, souleaters) you should likely want to play immo-isb which is basically isb that uses immo on CD (ie, whenever the debuff's expired) as it has the secondmost dpct after doom.
your spec would look something like this
http://calculators.iradei.eu/talents...12200413230250

you can even go further all-in by dropping points outta nether protection and/or soul leech, but that isn't really advisable

finally, if you happen to play on A you likely will never want more than 190 of hit rating because the chance that you won't have a draenei (shaman) in your group should be nil. (find a better guild if yours don't :^])
Other useful hitcap numbers:
*13% (with a non-draenei eleshaman): 165
*12% (with a draenei eleshaman): 152

also the nax40 spaulder enchant's the bis one.

edit: oh and finally there's absolutely no reason at all to use runed living rubies, potent will just oustscale them as a 4sp > 4crit trade will always be in crits favor

[poepinjehoofd]

No offense mate but a lot of your information on specs and spells is plain wrong.

1) Optimal Destruction spec is this: http://rpgworld.altervista.org/talen...12200510130050

Why? Shadowburn because it is an extra instant cast during movement. Improved Immolate because Immolate is a DPS increase, even if you are Shadow, and even if you have a lot more Shadow gear than Fire. Immolate should ALWAYS be up. There is no wiggle room if you are going for maximum DPS. None at all. You can choose to trade DPS for survivability of course (Nether Protection) but you will lose DPS.

2) Rotation:

Keep up your assigned curse, which is Curse of the Elements, Curse of Recklessness (this is a DPS increase in 25 mans and should not be ignored) and the 3rd Warlock has the choice of using Curse of Doom, not the second.
Keep up Immolate as the highest priority. After that you can think about Shadowbolts. Not using Immolate is a serious DPS loss.
Maths here, assuming Shadow Weaving, ISB and Imp. Scorch are all up, with 5/5 Imp. Immolate and 1/5 Emberstorm. x is Fire Damage, y is Spell Crit chance, z is Shadow Damage.

Damage per cast time by a full duration Immolate:
((1+y)*1.25*(327+.2x))+(615+.65x))*1.02*1.15 / 1.5 sec

Damage per cast time by shadow bolt:
((1+y)(572+1.0571z))*1.10*1.20 / 2.5 sec

Assume 20% spell crit, 650 Fire Damage and 829 Shadow Damage (full FSW set gives +179 Shadow).

Immolate DPCT: ((1.2 * 1.25 * (327 + 0.2*650)) + (615 + 0.65 * 650)) * 1.02 * 1.15 / 1.5 sec = 1439 / sec.

Shadowbolt DPCT: (1.2 * (572 + 1.0571*829)) * 1.10 * 1.20 * 1.15 / 2.5 sec = 1055 / sec.

Immolates DPCT is almost 1.4 times higher. Not using it is a big mistake.

3) Demonology

You mention Demonology and that it's not all that viable in PvE. This is the biggest mistake in your entire guide. Demonology has, theoretically, the highest DPS of all Warlock specs in TBC until really late game. Why do I say theoretically? Because it relies on your pet being alive. If your pet dies, then yes, Demonology is going to suck. If it's alive however...

There are 3 main Demonology raiding specs, 2 being Felguard and one being Succubus (quite similar to 0/21/40 in playstyle).
Felguard 1: (takes instant Corruption and Imp LT)
http://rpgworld.altervista.org/talen...00000000000000
Felguard 2: (takes 5/5 Devastation and 1/5 Imp Corr to reduce the cast time to just above GCD)
http://rpgworld.altervista.org/talen...10000000000000
Succubus:
http://rpgworld.altervista.org/talen...00200010000000
The two Felguard builds are very close in DPS and are the top DPS in lower gear (until high T5, low T6).
The succubus build is, theoretically, the highest DPS spec until endgame. Succubus is quite fragile so you can expect it to die. Shadow Destro does overtake this spec but it needs a lot of gear to do so (T6 gear).

Why does Demonology have a higher DPS than Destruction? Demonology gets a huge chunk of free Spell Damage through Demonic Knowledge, more crit or instant corruption and better lifetap and a Demon that actually does quite neat DPS (Felguard does around 250 DPS after armor reduction with Might!), but trades it for worse Shadowbolt scaling. Even intuitively it makes sense that at lower gear levels a flat added Spell Damage is better than a higher percentual scaling.

Theoretically it's easily tested with this spreadsheet: http://files1.guildlaunch.net/guild/..._dps_v1.20.xls
Practically there are more than enough examples of Demonology Warlocks destroying Destruction Warlocks: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=4g65p5&s=9#.WXIJMlElGUk

4) Itemization
Spell Hit is not worth more than Spell Damage by default. It's the other way around in lower gear settings in fact. For example if you have 750 Spell Damage, 23% crit and 0% hit, Spell Hit = 0.97 Spell Damage. It's only when you have a serious amount of Spell Damage and crit that Spell Hit becomes worth more (like 900 SD and 25% crit) and then only if you have low hit. It's best to check these things with spreadsheets. The Spell Hit cap is not a magical cap that must be reached at any cost, it's only worth reaching the Spell Hit cap if your other stats are high enough.

[Selaya]

you should probably drop cataclysm for impr immo/emberstorm instead of the defensives tho, cataclysm is like an extremely weak dps talent

[Chaoren]

Great discussion. Hopefully this will be helpful to new players. Does anyone have any math for the relative values of bonus damage, spell hit, spell crit, and spell haste? I would be very interested in looking at those numbers, and I'll update the guide accordingly. I'll update for the Draenei racial bonus, I wasn't even considering that since I've only played TBC warlocks as horde.

[Selaya]

http://web.archive.org/web/200812181...ng_compendium/

tl;dr everything fire scales to ****; incinerate has the same sp scaling as sbolt jk no isb so 20% less dps while immo scales to absolute utter dog**** with crit, play isb if you have gear

[sequpe]

Selaya rly? you talking .... here. you must trolling this ...

Edit: i play this spec http://calculators.iradei.eu/talents...02210510531050
Seems now pretty good but need move to T5/T6 :)

[poepinjehoofd]

Great discussion. Hopefully this will be helpful to new players. Does anyone have any math for the relative values of bonus damage, spell hit, spell crit, and spell haste? I would be very interested in looking at those numbers, and I'll update the guide accordingly. I'll update for the Draenei racial bonus, I wasn't even considering that since I've only played TBC warlocks as horde.

I don't know how to calculate those but that spreadsheet I linked gives the relative values in a table, so it does the calculations for you. Guess it should be possible to get the formulas from the spreadsheet but it's a lot of work :p at least compared to just entering stats in the spreadsheet and watching the magic happen.

[Selaya]

there's no way firedestro is still competitive if you have correct t4/t5 gear, incinerate has the same sp-dpct scaling as a sbolt without isb, so bascially shadowbolts scale for 20% more than incinerate does (actually slightly less due to no 100% isb uptime), and immolate just scales really badly with crit the more sp you have

[sequpe]

Yea thats is why i dominate aganist shadowlocks,and you dont have truth with sp scalling

[Selaya]

outdpsing *****s doesnt count you know
besides this is the isb thread, go create a firedestro thread if you do insist

[sequpe]

you start tallking ..... in this tread and fake info here without scaling etc.

[Selaya]

- Shadow Bolt: 3s/3.5s = 85.7 + 4% per talent point in SNF (up to 105.7%)
- Incinerate: 2.5/3.5s = 71.4 + 4% per talent point in SNF (up to 91.4%, 100% with emberstorm)

if this isn't worse scaling then please tell me what is!

[sequpe]

Emberstorm increases the damage done by your fire spells by 10% hmm seems like SNF :)
,, incinerate has the same sp-dpct scaling as a sbolt without isb,,,

[Selaya]

it says 100% with emberstorm tho, and 105.7% for sb and last time i checked 105.7>100