Destro Lock, Cho'Gall Ready?

[Videcaa]

On all my gear I automatically reforged my Mastery. If I'm below Hit I'll reforge my Haste/Crit to it to get me back to cap. Right now with my Hit rating though I can't lose my Hit on my Bracers or else I'll fall well below the Hit-Cap again and same goes with my Boots. Also regarding Inferno/Doomguard I'm told that they both do as much damage and most other Locks I see use their Doomguards.

My DPS on the Trainer's Raiding Dummy is still only 12.5K DPS, Any help whatsoever?

[Hejoro]

EJ states inferno is higher dps, tested this myself too.

[Vakarian]

Your PRIORITY (Destro is NOT a rotation) should be as follows:

Improved Soul Fire (You should try to have as close to 100% up time as possible, you need to try to start casting this when the buff is around 3 seconds, due to travel time of the projectile)
Immolate (don't use Fel Flame to refresh this, it's a DPS loss)
Conflagrate
Bane of Doom (Bane of Agony sucks, don't use it)
Corruption
Shadowflame
Chaos Bolt
Shadowburn (during execute phase)
Incinerate

And obviously CoE should be on the mob/boss, unless your group has a Boomkin or Unholy DK (or hunter pet, but this is less likely). If possible, like on Maloriak, use Curse of Tongues. And if you already have 8% magic damage and they're immune to Tongues, use Curse of Weakness. It almost always works on bosses and helps prevents spike damage on the tank.


Assorted other advice:

• Your neck piece currently reforges crit to hit, it should be mastery > hit.
  
• If you have Corla's Baton, you should be using it over your PVP wand.
  
• Depending on your trinket options, you should exchange the Stump for the Bell, the Heart, the Mirror, or DMC:Volcano. Stump's proc is weak, so if you can manage to get near 17% without it your DPS will go up. (Don't be fooled, you don't need 17% hit to be the highest DPS, the 372 BiS gear list for Destruction has nearly 15.5% hit but it's doing 27.5k or so on Simulationcraft.)
  
• Doomguard is terrible. Infernal is superior, even on single target. Blizzard is buffing Doomguard damage in 4.1 to compensate for this.
  
• You should be using Glyph of Life Tap instead of Healthstone (or Soulstone, but I don't know your raid comp's needs). Life Tap is a DPS increase, the others are utility.
  
• Fel Synergy > Demonic Embrace in terms of talent choices. There's plenty of raid encounters where your pet can die.
  
• Only use Fel Flame if you have the 4pc Shadowflame Fel Spark buff, or if you're moving. (And Conflag, Corruption, and Shadowflame are still on a higher priority)
  
• Dark Intent a Shadow Priest, Fire Mage, DPS Druid, or Surv Hunter in that order. If you don't have any of those, I weep for your soul.
  
• Depending on your gear and raid comp (you need the 5% spell haste for this to matter), you want to try and get 1993 haste. At that point, it easily outweighs crit as it gives you an extra tick of Corruption, so I'd suggest reforging away crit before haste.
  
• Also, Curse of Elements both your Bane of Havoc target and your main DPS target, it double dips and is a DPS increase, which is awesome.

I think that should help clear things up in case you were confused. Destruction is pretty difficult; I'm slightly biased, I guess, (I've played many classes/specs so I'm not that myopic) but I'm willing to wager it's one of the hardest if not the hardest DPS spec currently in the game). You have to juggle so many things at once and you can easily "screw up" your damage if you make the wrong priority decisions on the fly.

ALSO, come 4.1, unless more things change, Affliction is boss. But you still might need Shadowfury for Cho'gall if you're in a 10 man guild.

[Videcaa]

Your PRIORITY (Destro is NOT a rotation) should be as follows:

Improved Soul Fire (You should try to have as close to 100% up time as possible, you need to try to start casting this when the buff is around 3 seconds, due to travel time of the projectile)
Immolate (don't use Fel Flame to refresh this, it's a DPS loss)
Conflagrate
Bane of Doom (Bane of Agony sucks, don't use it)
Corruption
Shadowflame
Chaos Bolt
Shadowburn (during execute phase)
Incinerate

And obviously CoE should be on the mob/boss, unless your group has a Boomkin or Unholy DK (or hunter pet, but this is less likely). If possible, like on Maloriak, use Curse of Tongues. And if you already have 8% magic damage and they're immune to Tongues, use Curse of Weakness. It almost always works on bosses and helps prevents spike damage on the tank.


Assorted other advice:

• Your neck piece currently reforges crit to hit, it should be mastery > hit.
  
• If you have Corla's Baton, you should be using it over your PVP wand.
  
• Depending on your trinket options, you should exchange the Stump for the Bell, the Heart, the Mirror, or DMC:Volcano. Stump's proc is weak, so if you can manage to get near 17% without it your DPS will go up. (Don't be fooled, you don't need 17% hit to be the highest DPS, the 372 BiS gear list for Destruction has nearly 15.5% hit but it's doing 27.5k or so on Simulationcraft.)
  
• Doomguard is terrible. Infernal is superior, even on single target. Blizzard is buffing Doomguard damage in 4.1 to compensate for this.
  
• You should be using Glyph of Life Tap instead of Healthstone (or Soulstone, but I don't know your raid comp's needs). Life Tap is a DPS increase, the others are utility.
  
• Fel Synergy > Demonic Embrace in terms of talent choices. There's plenty of raid encounters where your pet can die.
  
• Only use Fel Flame if you have the 4pc Shadowflame Fel Spark buff, or if you're moving. (And Conflag, Corruption, and Shadowflame are still on a higher priority)
  
• Dark Intent a Shadow Priest, Fire Mage, DPS Druid, or Surv Hunter in that order. If you don't have any of those, I weep for your soul.
  
• Depending on your gear and raid comp (you need the 5% spell haste for this to matter), you want to try and get 1993 haste. At that point, it easily outweighs crit as it gives you an extra tick of Corruption, so I'd suggest reforging away crit before haste.
  
• Also, Curse of Elements both your Bane of Havoc target and your main DPS target, it double dips and is a DPS increase, which is awesome.

I think that should help clear things up in case you were confused. Destruction is pretty difficult; I'm slightly biased, I guess, (I've played many classes/specs so I'm not that myopic) but I'm willing to wager it's one of the hardest if not the hardest DPS spec currently in the game). You have to juggle so many things at once and you can easily "screw up" your damage if you make the wrong priority decisions on the fly.

ALSO, come 4.1, unless more things change, Affliction is boss. But you still might need Shadowfury for Cho'gall if you're in a 10 man guild.

Thank you for your very good advice, I guess I'm kind of over whelmed right now because I've been playing my Lock for 2 years and really do enjoy the Destruction Spec & I honestly thought I had it all figured out, But after reading all these other Lock Guides I realized I don't know what I'm doing and I want to be as good as an asset I can with my 10M Guild right now because I fear I'll dissappoint them.

[Vakarian]

Thank you for your very good advice, I guess I'm kind of over whelmed right now because I've been playing my Lock for 2 years and really do enjoy the Destruction Spec & I honestly thought I had it all figured out, But after reading all these other Lock Guides I realized I don't know what I'm doing and I want to be as good as an asset I can with my 10M Guild right now because I fear I'll dissappoint them.

Absolutely, it's my pleasure. And don't worry; just play your class as best you can and if you do it right, you'll be constantly topping charts (maybe not with a hunter in your group ) and impressing people. And to do that, especially with a spec as complicated as Destruction, you really need to know the ins and outs, which requires time and research.

Just be patient and try to get the priority down. It's difficult but definitely doable. And for Cho'gall, don't worry too much about damage, it's really more of a control fight. If you learn to stopcast (jump or make a /stopcasting macro) and Shadowfury people out the way I do (aka not letting the boss get the worship buff) then you're doing your job. It's just another priority system, where Shadowfurying people out of Worship is on top of your list.

By the way, if you don't, use Elitist Jerks' Warlock forum. It's extremely well maintained and has easily digestible information about your class. The priority list I mentioned, trinkets ranked by DPS, what exact haste rating you need for an extra tick of Immolate, how exactly much better 1 haste rating is than 1 mastery rating, etc, all pretty easily found.

[Tarin]

And obviously CoE should be on the mob/boss, unless your group has a Boomkin or Unholy DK (or hunter pet, but this is less likely). If possible, like on Maloriak, use Curse of Tongues. And if you already have 8% magic damage and they're immune to Tongues, use Curse of Weakness. It almost always works on bosses and helps prevents spike damage on the tank.

CoE is also provided by Assassination Rogues, and most tanks can apply the Curse of Weakness debuff themselves with minimal loss (Death Knight tanks lose extra survivability keeping it up themselves though). If there were a boss that benefited from the reduced regeneration effect though, it'd be pretty sweet, but I'd personally save the GCD for other stuff.

[Videcaa]

^.^ Well, My first raid after re-gemming/forging etc, I downed Magmaw with.. 16.7K DPS. So seems like I'm on the right track & I can now pull 30K+ DPS on Halfus.

thanks all for advice!

[G l o w y r m]

You should also be using Shadowflame on cooldown as long as you're in range for a DPS increase.

Some decent advice in this thread so far but this is a big thing lots of locks should be doing. You should consider yourself a melee ranged caster for the sake of using Shadowflame for extra DPS. This is possible on most fights.

Immolate (don't use Fel Flame to refresh this, it's a DPS loss)

Except if you're moving though, right?

I would consider the Warlocks in my guild to be excellent and I checked my WoL logs and they are definitely using Fel Flames, just not a lot. It's usually 2-4% of their damage maybe, depending on the fight.

...use Curse of Weakness. It almost always works on bosses and helps prevents spike damage on the tank.

Every tank class already has a debuff that does this and lasts much longer, so I'm sure your mana/GCD is better spent somewhere else unless a non-tank spec person is tanking something.

[Videcaa]

Alright thanks, I didn't use it on Magmaw tonight since I was never in melee range.. But I'll be sure to use it next raid!