http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=IzxMrurAkVVRcst0x

Full Affliction to UA, and pick up 5 in demonic embrace for the extra stam

Forget soul link, with the nerfs to it its still worth picking up, but we can afford not to in exchange for insane amounts of extra damage and healing ourselves through drain life and haunt.

Soul Siphon and Fel Concentration are keys to this build. Picking up 5/5 shadow embrace now is so good. 5% more Dot damage over 12 secs, and it stacks twice, so thats 10% more Dot damage and all you have to do is spam Haunt whenever cd is up, and the occasional shadow bolt.

Pick up siphon life of course, and 5/5 shadow mastery, adding on another straight 10% more damage on any spell AND 10% more life drained from both siphon life and drain life. Go 5/5 contagion, get Dark Pact just because you have an extra point, and it allows you to be able to drain life spam a guy in your face even if your OOM and your HP is falling fast not allowing you to lifetap. Its like the good ole days of full afflic leveling and spamming dark pact with a imp out.

Getting 2/2 Imp Howl of Terror gives this build SO much more reason to be used, an instant fear is the best thing a lock can have, even if its used to have someone burn their trinket and get off you, so you can use a regular fear and fear them for 4 secs.

Get UA obviously and Death's Embrace. Nice talent for a more quick gib on a target or saving yourself from getting gibbed. 3/3 Pandemic is a very nice passive damage boost, of course Afflic locks will not be stacking crit, but even a little chance to do 100% more damage on a dot is golden.

5/5 Everlasting Affliction is just more damage per dot tick, and gives you a way to refresh corruption through your normal rotation of spells. And then pick up Haunt as your final talent, a nice direct damage spell that gives you another 20% more damage from dots and heals you for 100% of the damage done during the 12 secs after Haunt hit the target.

All in all, the increase to Dot damage is astonishing but just from a drain life perspective:

You increase your drain life ticks by 24% alone, with shadow mastery, shadow embrace and the added 4% from soul siphon via UA. My drain life ticks for about 460 roughly now, add on another 100 per tick and your gonna be healing almost 3k damage every drain life channel if they all go through.

In addition to a helluva lot more damage from dots and the huge heal after you use Haunt. Haunt, which lasts for 12 secs after it hits the target has a 10 second cd so you could potentially keep it up on the target all the time.

The only class I see this not working well against, purely from a 1v1 perspective, is rogues. Obviously w/out soul link your going to get ass-#*!#d so I think once you hit 80 and grab soul link this spec will work much better against them. But until then it should still work wonders against all other classes, maybe hunters will give us a bit of trouble. Although I will probably spec Meta just to test it out, I won't stay full demo because it's just a tanking spec, no real damage dealing abilities besides the talent itself and if you go all 51 into demo you're just gonna turn into a 45 sec lock but w/out the cool instant casts and ways to kill people quickly a 2 min mage had.

Let me know what you think.

Well done sir. I would forgo 2 in pandemic in favor of Imp CoA, unless i felt like throwing up CoE... damn that would stomp face too.

Would it be a bad idea to not take dark pact?

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Q u o t e:
Well done sir. I would forgo 2 in pandemic in favor of Imp CoA, unless i felt like throwing up CoE... damn that would stomp face too.

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Has anyone seen yet how effective pandemic could be, given the crit gear? It sounds promising.

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Q u o t e:
Well done sir. I would forgo 2 in pandemic in favor of Imp CoA, unless i felt like throwing up CoE... damn that would stomp face too.

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Thanks, ya with Coe and Cot used against a lot of classes and different combos imp CoA just isn't worth it imo, 10% more damage is not that much anyway.

But you don't have to take dark pact, you could conceivably throw the point into imp Coa or Death's Embrace, or even Malediction and increase your spell damage by 1%.

Given Dark Pact, I would want Improved Felhunter so that he's never oom. I also think I'd rather have Fel Vitality than Shadow Embrace, but I haven't seen how much extra DPS we're talking about with Shadow Embrace.

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=IzxMrurhkiVRcst0xc

this is the spec im going to try as i work my way to 70, should be fun

No soul link? only need 11 points to get it.

Ohh, the Shadow Embrace would be a 30% reduction in HoT benefit if stacked twice, which would be good for PvP, but how do you get it stacked twice? Two DoTs, or two locks?

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Q u o t e:
Given Dark Pact, I would want Improved Felhunter so that he's never oom. I also think I'd rather have Fel Vitality than Shadow Embrace, but I haven't seen how much extra DPS we're talking about with Shadow Embrace.

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=IzxMrurhkiVRcst0xc

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Shadow Embrace is, in my opinion, what makes this spec so awesome, its 10% more damage from Dot's(stacks twice for 5% each time and lasts 12 secs). And in addition, it reduces periodic healing done to the target by 30%, stacked twice(15% each stack), so its a form of MS against druids and priests to a certain extent.

You do risk your felhunter going oom, but obviously spamming dark pact will do that no matter what, dark pact is really only used in a oh !*%# situation where you need mana to throw up siphon lifes, deathcoil or get a fear off.

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Q u o t e:
No soul link? only need 11 points to get it.

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As of now with the patch we only get 61 pts still so 11 in demo would be 50 in aff meaning no Haunt.

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Q u o t e:
http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=IzxMrurAkVVRcst0x

Full Affliction to UA, and pick up 5 in demonic embrace for the extra stam

Forget soul link, with the nerfs to it its still worth picking up, but we can afford not to in exchange for insane amounts of extra damage and healing ourselves through drain life and haunt.

Soul Siphon and Fel Concentration are keys to this build. Picking up 5/5 shadow embrace now is so good. 5% more Dot damage over 12 secs, and it stacks twice, so thats 10% more Dot damage and all you have to do is spam Haunt whenever cd is up, and the occasional shadow bolt.

Pick up siphon life of course, and 5/5 shadow mastery, adding on another straight 10% more damage on any spell AND 10% more life drained from both siphon life and drain life. Go 5/5 contagion, get Dark Pact just because you have an extra point, and it allows you to be able to drain life spam a guy in your face even if your OOM and your HP is falling fast not allowing you to lifetap. Its like the good ole days of full afflic leveling and spamming dark pact with a imp out.

Getting 2/2 Imp Howl of Terror gives this build SO much more reason to be used, an instant fear is the best thing a lock can have, even if its used to have someone burn their trinket and get off you, so you can use a regular fear and fear them for 4 secs.

Get UA obviously and Death's Embrace. Nice talent for a more quick gib on a target or saving yourself from getting gibbed. 3/3 Pandemic is a very nice passive damage boost, of course Afflic locks will not be stacking crit, but even a little chance to do 100% more damage on a dot is golden.

5/5 Everlasting Affliction is just more damage per dot tick, and gives you a way to refresh corruption through your normal rotation of spells. And then pick up Haunt as your final talent, a nice direct damage spell that gives you another 20% more damage from dots and heals you for 100% of the damage done during the 12 secs after Haunt hit the target.

All in all, the increase to Dot damage is astonishing but just from a drain life perspective:

You increase your drain life ticks by 24% alone, with shadow mastery, shadow embrace and the added 4% from soul siphon via UA. My drain life ticks for about 460 roughly now, add on another 100 per tick and your gonna be healing almost 3k damage every drain life channel if they all go through.

In addition to a helluva lot more damage from dots and the huge heal after you use Haunt. Haunt, which lasts for 12 secs after it hits the target has a 10 second cd so you could potentially keep it up on the target all the time.

The only class I see this not working well against, purely from a 1v1 perspective, is rogues. Obviously w/out soul link your going to get ass-#*!#d so I think once you hit 80 and grab soul link this spec will work much better against them. But until then it should still work wonders against all other classes, maybe hunters will give us a bit of trouble. Although I will probably spec Meta just to test it out, I won't stay full demo because it's just a tanking spec, no real damage dealing abilities besides the talent itself and if you go all 51 into demo you're just gonna turn into a 45 sec lock but w/out the cool instant casts and ways to kill people quickly a 2 min mage had.

Let me know what you think.

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i think death's embrace is garbage and waste of points. trim down the tree to either get soul link or shadowburn. I'm leaning towards shadowburn.

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Q u o t e:
Ohh, the Shadow Embrace would be a 30% reduction in HoT benefit if stacked twice, which would be good for PvP, but how do you get it stacked twice? Two DoTs, or two locks?

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Haunt puts up one stack, and it lasts 12 secs, and Haunt's cd is 10 secs, so you could potentially only use Haunt to keep SE up. But shadow bolt also stacks SE so you can use that too to keep it up.

As for soul link, you're basically giving up Death's Embrace, Everlasting Affliction, and Haunt for Soul link so its just a matter of preference really, like I said before, soul link is gonna be missed vs rogues mainly. Any other class our insane dmg and healing this spec offers will counteract the loss of SL, especially because SL was nerfed to only 15% dmg reduction and no 5% dmg boost.

But at 80 obviously you can go 56/15 or something similar with Soul link, making this spec very awesome at lvl 80.

Until we can learn Blink, Frost nova, and Ice Barrier, Soul Link will be required for any serious PvP build. We're forced to tank melee, there's just no way around it.

has anyone noticed the changed to malediction, now includes 3% extra spell damage, think its worth it for the 3pts?

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Q u o t e:
has anyone noticed the changed to malediction, now includes 3% extra spell damage, think its worth it for the 3pts?

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i would like to know the answer to that question also

Bookmarked.

Bah my brain is losing all abilty to think logically. Only two of those points can be taken out in order to continue down the tree, but i do believe Improved Healthstone is more usefull than Grim Reach. Please tell me why i'm wrong this time if i am.