I have seen a lot of debates over which Warlock spec is the best. Back in the day, my lock was Destruction. But I am very curious on others point of view on which is the better talent (Pvp) and why?
ds/ruin will be the most common as it will not take up boss debuff slots
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Soul link spec to not die, and be annoying, or SM/Ruin otherwise, for pvp.
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SL is the standard choice. I think nightfall/conflag can do some really scary burst damage once you have some spellpower and crit.
One SM/Ruin in raid, the rest DS/Ruin. SM/Ruin or SL for pvp.
If you plan on just pve ds/ruin
If you play on just pvp sl or sm/ruin
If you want to do both sm/ruin
DS/Ruin must mean Demonic Sacrifice and the Ruin talent. (I have to look up all these abbreviations. )
So DS means you summon your demon and sacrifice it, getting a 30 minutes buff from it. Like kill the Succubus, get 15% more Shadow Damage. Then you just cast your actual spells and don’t do any DOTs.
Ruin makes your crits do 100% more, so double damage crits.
OK, SM is Shadow Mastery, 30 points into the Affliction tree. Now since it’s not for DOTs it must just be for 10% more Shadow spell damage.
So a lot of Warlock builds mention Ruin just so your crits are very poweful. That must be why everyone also mentions how Warlocks can pull threat off the Tank, they can do some high burst damage.
Ok so what about SM/DS. Get the 10% SM spell bonus, and the DS 15% spell bonus. So all shadow spells do 25% more damage?
A 30/21/0 spec. How does that do? I wouldn’t have Ruin.
That 30/21/0 seems like a decent leveling spec. Dot them up, use your demon.
You have a lot of talents in Destruction that are really important. You just stop at Ruin (thus calling it a Ruin spec). Going Aff/Demo wont really be super hot in raiding, as each one mostly is used to supplement your Destruction damage.
SM/DS is at least 15-20% less DPS. You lose Ruin and the 5% crit, but you also have a 0.5sec slower shadowbolt cast which is like 16% less dps I think. That spec is a noob trap.
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i would expect almost every lock to go sm/ruin has it parsed higher since there is 16 debuff slots. It just makes more sense. 3/4 of the fights in MC you can dot adds with corruption and some cases curse of doom to inflate epeen numbers.
The real issue is ZG is being released in phase 4, which means locks will be dogcrap damage for over a year.
99% of warlocks go 30/0/21 because this build can basically do everything. It has siphon life for solo/pvp, ruin for raiding, can freely switch between spamming drain/bolts for whatever you want to do. It’s actually top damage for raiding as well if you can use corruption (which most warlocks can at 16 slots). Even if you can’t corruption, it’s only down 5% shadow vs x/21/21, and keeps the pet out. There’s not much reason to use any other build.
Destruction is not good in classic because you can’t spam fire in raids. It works fine outside raids… but since classic is all about raiding… why would you want respect twice a week just so you can use destruction?
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Destruction and demo will put in work
Frost. Fire at the end of the expac.
sm/ruin or ds/ruin are your optimal raid specs. As for pvp, they’ve got a ton of variants.
I ran SM/Ruin for a while, but switched to builds with Master Demonologist for the versatility. Between that and Demonic Sacrifice, I could tune myself in 8 different ways for different raid bosses and other situations. Between that and my large collection of gear tuned for +fire, +shadow, +general, etc. I regularly topped the DPS charts, to the point I really didn’t want Ruin in my build any more. And then TBC came along, but that’s not relevant here.
Thats mages.
SL/SL is what i used to run way back in the day. fun times…
Conflag if your good.
SL if your a noob.
SM/Ruin if you can be asked to respec for pve and pvp.
^ He speak the trutru.
People constantly forget about this. There are 16 debuff slots, and 40 raiders. Sorry, breh. You can’t cast your corruption unless you’re THE SM/Ruin lock in the raid.
Thanks so much for the kind words.