My current template is 0/21/40, with points chosen for SB spamming. To keep this test simple, I only took Improved Shadowbolt (5/5), Bane (5/5) and Ruin. Since I have more Shadow damage than Fire damage, I wanted to check if casting Immolation was useful or a waste of time.

Here’s a simulation of a pure shadowbolt spam, with +1000dmg to all, 18% crit and 11%hit.

Pretty straightforward, we get 776 DPS. We’ll compare other results against this sequence.

Now, we’ll include an Immolation spell :

Obviously, the DPS is higher (4.3%)…not bad ! To get the same increase in DPS while keeping the DPS spam, we’d need to increase our shadow damage by 65 !!

Since many warlocks have more shadow spell damage than fire spell damage, I tried to see how low we can go with fire spell damage to make it useless to cast Immolation :

To get my DPS down to 776, I had to get my Fire spell damage down to 350 ! So unless you have a difference greater than 650 between your shadow and fire damage, you can keep casting Immolation.

Obviously, you’re always better to try all this by yourself on the calculator :

http://www.livingroomfun.info/WoW/Warlock.html

For this small test, I assumed that the warlock has chosen to go deeply in the affliction tree. All spell damage and hit rate have been set to 0, to make it easier to compare.

The first sequence shows what most warlocks, including myself in the past, would do. We start with Curse of Shadow, then we fire the offensive spells :

Let’s try a different approach. Since we know that Corruption does not tick until three seconds have elapsed, and that the same mechanism is applied for Unstable Affliction, we’ll apply Curse of Shadow last. Here’s the updated sequence :

So what happened ? We lost a bit (12) of total damage, because the first tick of corruption occurred just before Curse of Shadow was applied. However, we reduced the running time of the DOT sequence to 21 seconds instead of 22.5, giving us an increase in DPS (6.4%).

Of course, this example only works for short fights. But it shows that good timing of the spells you cast may increase your DPS. In our case, if we wanted to keep the first sequence and check how much more spell damage we require to achieve 84.2 DPS, we’d see that +59 to spell damage would be needed - quite huge !

You should try this on the calculator to verify it all works with your setup :

http://www.livingroomfun.info/WoW/Warlock.html