New Warlock: questions about the community, simcraft APL accuracy, noob stuff

[Deleted]

I just recently levelled my Warlock to 100, and have it geared at 680ilvl so far. I come from playing a Mage, and their simcraft apl (Action priority list) is pretty spot-on, but still has some fine tuning needed for the legendary ring/4setT18.

I hear that some classes have it pretty bad, community wise, when it comes to how well their simcrafty stuff is maintained. So I ask here (for lack of somewhere better): If I simulate my warlock, can I place trust in the results? For example, after a quick talent simulation for Affliction, I found that Grimoire of Service+Demonic Servitude is better than Sac/soulburn:haunt. I assume this is correct, because of being lower on gear... but I can't be certain since I don't know how well Warlock APL is maintained, especially with recent patches.

tl;dr: Can I trust warlock simcraft results and base my talent decisions around them?

That leads me to another question: Is there a best place to go for guides? I found Dark Intentions, but it is being abandoned I believe. Is the best place here, MMO champion? I'm looking for somewhere that doesn't slack on details, like multidotting as Affliction or how long an add has to be alive for it to be worth DoTing...

Noob stuff:

I read that the glyph of Demon Training is bad and gives no DPS boost - but I don't understand how this can be true if it increases the imp cast speed by 50%? Unless that brings the imp below it's GCD or something...

Thanks in advance for any part answer!

[Calz]

Noob stuff:

I read that the glyph of Demon Training is bad and gives no DPS boost - but I don't understand how this can be true if it increases the imp cast speed by 50%? Unless that brings the imp below it's GCD or something...

Thanks in advance for any part answer!

The imp has energy, not mana. It will simply run out of energy and then stand there waiting for it to refill.

[Baconeggcheese]

tl;dr: Can I trust warlock simcraft results and base my talent decisions around them?

Generally speaking our simc is a good guideline if you know what you're looking at. We don't have anywhere near the level of interaction that the mage community has with their SimC guy. I know from my mage guildy that the mage simc guy is really active about looking for criticism so that he can fine tune the apl and make it better and better, where our simc guy can be very... sensitive and is quick to disengage from the community.

The good news is we have a lot of rules of thumb to the point where if you know this or that you can get the rest of the information you need from simc. For instance your assumption on talents is correct, sac is very gear dependent so if you're not sporting a ton of gear then sup or serv is going to be better. There's also the rule of thumb that you don't use sac on council, and that the more multi-dotting you're doing the more valuable sb: haunt becomes.

Yeah though... the good news is that locks rules for what to gear and talent really haven't changed much since mop so a lot of dated information still holds true. Which in part is why things either look abandoned or are abandoned, because there isn't often anything to update. I think the stickies in this section are still somewhat accurate, and if not feel free to ask questions.

I read that the glyph of Demon Training is bad and gives no DPS boost - but I don't understand how this can be true if it increases the imp cast speed by 50%? Unless that brings the imp below it's GCD or something...

Pets all run on energy, it doesn't increase the rate the imp recovers energy and requires that the imp has enough energy to cast 3 times + a lil extra that the pet ai saves just in case you want to use another ability so he ends up firing the burst and then standing there for a reaaaaalllly long time.

It averages out the sameish though.

[Joryy]

The warlock apl is decent. Realistically, our class has enough moving parts that a one-size-fits-all apl will never be good enough. But until you can diagnose what it is doing wrong, don't worry about it.

There isn't really a compendium for whether or not things are worth dotting, and opinions vary. Try it out and decide for yourself, or ask someone you believe in. MMOC is the best information dump I have found.

Pets are based on energy, so the glyph is mostly dps neutral. Technically the Gylph can be a very very very small dps increase, but it requires you to micro the pets casts around your procs. Not worth it unless you have infinite information bandwidth.