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