Shmots Level 80 Destruction warlock Rotation

Also, PvP rotations..

There's no rotations in PvP
I'm so making a guide on this ^^

I'll start on it tonight!

Yeah.. so.. where shall I start..

The build, the PvE rotation and the Gear section doesn't make sense, at all (maybe the PvP part does, as I don't PvP with my Warlock).

This is a guide for a Destruction Warlock. I'd like to start on your build: It's a total mix of PvP and PvE talents.

You should create a PvP Build and a PvE Build. This is a link to my own Destruction Raiding build, it has no raid support and it is a pure DPS build. I've specialized like this as I don't need the raid support, our guild doesn't need it as of now. You can either take my build or take a build with Soul Leech and Improved Soul Leech, but this will knock out the talents that improve the damage your Imp and you do.

Onto the PvE Rotation.. it's.. well.. you get me.

Your opening: Curse of Agony. NO!
If you are opening this way, open with Curse of Elements, it adds much, much more DPS than Curse of Agony can do.

But still, that's not quite alright.

If you've checked out my Talent Build, you'll also see I have Glyph of Life Tap, depending on your Spirit this increases your Spell Power. On average it adds 50 Spell Power up to 100 Spell Power. THAT'S NICE (!)

This is my rotation for Raiding and Heroics:

Open with Life Tap (Rank 1!) -> Curse of Elements -> Immolate -> Chaos Bolt -> Conflagrate -> Incinerate until Chaos Bolt gets off CD -> Chaos Bolt -> Conflagrate.

This way you can get off 2 Chaos Bolts and 2 Conflagrates within one Immolate, which improves your DPS significantly. After this, Immolate will have run out, so rinse and repeat from Immolate on. Make sure to always have the Life Tap buff on, it DOES increase your DPS!

After a fight, just use Life Tap (Rank 8 is the highest, I guess?) and annoy your healer(s) a little bit

The Gear section.. not bad, but you forgot the MOST IMPORTANT THING!

Hit rating, hit hit hit!
You can have as much Spell Power as you want, but when you're in Trial of the Crusader without being hit capped, you're well.. fucked.

You want to go for gear in this order: Hit rating -> Critical Strike Rating/Haste Rating/ Spell Power -> Intellect -> Spirit -> Stamina (fuck it).

Spirit, why Spirit? As you (may) know, you want it for Fel Armor (and of course Life Tap)

Well, that covers it a bit I guess. Anyone that wants to add something to this, please do so.

Edit: This is such a wall of text >.<
Second edit: Why are you writing a guide about a Warlock when your main character is a Death Knight and don't have a high-level Warlock?

Destro PvE is more a priority list than a rotation because due to lag, procs etc. you can't sync the cooldowns on chaos bolt and conflag.

1. Keep Curse of Elements active if noone else keeps a similar debuff active (Earth and Moon by a Boomkin or Black Pleague by an Unholy Dk). Else cast Curse of Doom.
2. Keep Immolate up.
3. Conflagrate
4. Chaos Bolt
5. Incinerate

Note to point 1: An Destro Lock loose about 180 dps by keeping CoE active. Not having a Debuff at all means loosing more than 180 dps.
Note to point 2: Casting a Chaos Bolt or an Incinerate without the Immolate Debuff is more of a dmg loss than clipping the last tick of immolate. The debuff has to be on the target when the spells hit the average flight time is about 2s from max range.
Note to point 3: On the beginning of a fight wait for the small gap until Conflag is useable.

Anything else provides less Dmg per Casttime and is thereby not worth casting. Though you can pop a Corruption if you are forced to move and do not need to Lifetap.

Stat value:
Hitcap above all. Hardcap is 446, with 420 Dranei Aura, 368 with hitdebuff and without Dranei Aura and 341 with Dranei aura and hit debuff.
The other values are about:
Sp -> 1.5
Haste -> 1
Crit -> 0.9
Spirit -> 0.4
Int -> 0.3

Note: That this are very rough values with better gear the value of all other stats except Sp tends to grow. So exact numbers are to be taken from the latest simcraft on EJ.

Stamina is something you can almost forget about for raiding. If your gear is good enough dmgwise for an encounter you should always have enough hp for lasting through incoming aoe until your healed up by raidhealing. Though be careful using Lifetap. Downranking may help.

I wish people not familiar with locks won't check these sort of "guides" for dps rotations etc. I wish the ones writing these sort of guides were actually familiar with their class and role. If I compare this guide to Jiyambi's Resto druid guide, I can off the bat say that Jiyambi knows his class well, thus trust what he says on the guide to be quite correct. I can't really say the same thing about this one.

Maybe you do pvp and don't know about pve that much, or maybe you're not that familiar with either of them. Are you talking about solo PvE or raiding/instancing? Do you play rated arena games (and really use your 'rotation' there)? Do you raid with a guild, not just with weekend faceroll naxx-pugs? What is your main focus in the game? What is the main focus of your talent build? In which situations do you intent your rotations to be used? You should clarify these type of things before anyone can even start correcting you.

Since zerinj already told you about the correct simple rotation, I won't go into details about the rotation stuff. But still... You're using Shadow Bolt instead of Incinerate? Why? Searing Pain, why? Drain Life / Drain Mana in a rotation, why? (Use Life Tap)

There's more than that to it, but I'm mainly used to playing as affliction, so I don't want to tell something that I'm not 100% sure is correct. Basically, for pve (raiding/dungeon), this is the destro spec you might want to take a look at: 0/13/58.
Glyphs: Glyph of Conflagrate(a must-have for destro pve dps),
Glyph of Immolate
Glyph of Incinerate
(yea, would be best not to forget about glyphs, and how about gems?)

Regarding gear, there is so much more than just spell power, stamina, intellect and spirit. Spirit is not just for health&mana regeneration, are you forgetting Fel Armor? - not to mention the extra boost you get from Demon Aegis. In terms of dps, haste, crit and spirit are all above intellect. Hit rating is "above all" until you reach the boss hit cap (17%) with gear, talents and other buffs. Take a look at this EJ thread: PvE Raiding Compendium v3.1 and you'll understand the complexity of things. The fact that you can get "up to 10,200 criticals" isn't something that is of importance. You could get 10k criticals with Shadow Bolt already in Sunwell. That's just about what sort of gear and buffs you got. Occasional big numbers doesn't mean the best possible gear.

Uhm for PvP you can't really have a set rotation, at is a lot more fluid and dynamic.

Also for PvE it is much better to use Curse of Doom -> Immolate -> Conflagrate -> Choas Bolt -> Incineratex2
then it becomes dynamic, atleast that is what the rotation was last patch.

Hi Shmots! First of all let me thank you for writing this guide. Also, good job in using the table of contents function.

However, your guide could definitely use some work. Here are a few things that you might improve on:

• Capitalization/grammar/spelling - This is essential if you want people to take your guide seriously. Your very first sentence isn't capitalized, and I see lots of missing capitalization and "leet speak" (such as u instead of you) throughout the guide. It makes people think you just threw the guide together without any effort, whether or not that is actually the case, and it tends to lower their opinion of you.
• Titles - While you are using a table of contents, it's a little messed up. I notice you are using mediawiki syntax, and that's fine. However, I would make the Gear section the same "weight" as the Talents and Rotation section (use the same number of = before and after the title).
• Formatting - You do have some formatting here, and that's good. However I feel like it could be cleaned up and improved.
• Content - While this does have what I view to be the "essentials" of a spec guide, I think you could probably include more. Perhaps a gear list, or more specific advice on rotations, or a description of each spell and it's purpose. This isn't a must, but it could improve the guide. If you want an example of a class guide, you can check out my Healing Druid Guide. Also, I don't play a warlock so I have no idea of the accuracy of this stuff, someone else will have to comment on that.

Overall, good start and I hope you continue to improve it!