Tap Tap Fizzle?

I promised a friend I'd do this one a while ago; apologies for the delay in posting it up. Its a basic rendition of why newly leveled locks often don't see the damage output they were expecting once they finish leveling...

So, here's the scenario... Your main toon is a tank or a healer, you're the unsung hero of every group you find yourself in, and your questing/grinding sessions are wars of attrition where most mobs die of boredom or old age. As everyone knows the most OP class in the universe for damage, survivability and, lets be honest here, sheer sex appeal is the warlock. The maths speaks for itself, so you decide its alt-time and you roll yourself a lock and get your own piece of the action, 'cause that's how you wanna roll. You grind away, laughing manically as you continually kill 2-4-6-8 mobs at a time and never find the need to stop and eat or drink. The day finally arrives, you ding level 70, you get yourself a group of like-minded hearty adventurers to run *insert whatever normal instance floats your boat here* and get ready to bedazzle and amaze all-comers with your overflowing awesomeness.

*Insert heart-breaking account of high, lows, tears and laughter here, worthy of a WWF title fight*

To cut a long story short, last boss drops, someone links the damage meter, you're not on top, you did a good 1/3 less damage than the mage and even the *snicker* ret pali has out-damaged you.

What... The... Hell... Did you do something wrong? Is there a flaw in your cast rotation? Do you not have the max rank of shadow bolt on your cast bar or something? Is it a devious WoW conspiracy to discourage up and coming warlocks from further diluting the collective talent pool?

While the answer to any of those questions could in all probability be yes, its doubtful that any of them are the main reason. See, here's the scoop that no one ever seems to tell young locks - on a normal instance, unless you greatly out-gear those around you, if you don't modify your cast sequences and are still depending on dots you are seriously gimping your dps. With the exception of the shadow mage build, the majority of your damage is going to come from dots in most situations. Let's review what the word "dot" - Damage Over Time. Your damage is going to come over a period of time; if there is no time, then there is no damage (deep, i know).

Here's a very basic 3 dot rotation (this gets worse the more dots you rely on, and most locks will have at least these 3 they cast regularly):
CoA (24 secs) - Corruption (18 secs) - Immolate (15 secs)

Most trash in a normal instance dies in under 10 secs once you're focusing on it if you're in a decent dps group. By the time your dots are up the thing is half dead, you get a couple of ticks, maybe a shadow bolt (or two if you're lucky), and its all over. This kind of dot cast rotation (plus for affliction locks, any others you have in your bags) are great (and essential) for bosses where they will have a full and long life, but for the standard trash you run into its unnecessary. CoA does almost half its damage in the last couple of seconds its up, so if the mob isn't going to live for the full 24 seconds forget about it. If your corruption isn't insta-cast, I'd advise you probably forget it as well - if it is insta-cast, throw it up while you move to max range for casting immolate. The other reason I say open with corruption vs immolate is the lack of immediate burst damage, giving your tanks that little bit more room to move while they build agro. I do like immolate - decent burst damage up front, plus a tick for added goodness, its all around value. So, stick with those two at the most, maybe even just immolate if you have a good tank and fierce dps, then sit back and spam shadow bolts. For the destro-locks with conflag - unless its going to land you a killing blow, resist the temptation... Conflag may be an insta-cast, but it does set off the global cool-down timer, meaning you have 1.5 secs before you can cast again - on a pure dps scale, casting conflag is going to cost you damage in the long run, you're better off spending your time on another shadow bolt, or refreshing your dots depending on the situation.

Oh, and I don't care how you're spec'ed, forget about life drain for dps - its very unlikely you'll ever do as much damage with life drain as you will with shadow bolt under any circumstances (there's several posts over at ej confirming this, I won't go into the maths of it here); shadow bolt or incinerate is a better choice in nearly every situation. Life drain definitely has its place as a fantastic farming tool so you can theoretically never have to sit and drink regardless of your spec, but it has very limited use in a group setting - pretty much only pull it out to give your healers some respite. Personally I lean towards shadow bolt spam, largely due to my spec, but also because shadow damage scales better, especially at higher levels. If you have loaded yourself with fire damage gear, or you're hitting fire weak mobs, then by all means incinerate away (and I'll admit it - no matter how many times I see it, I never get tired of watching that slow, seductive ball of hot firey death eke its way across my screen, bigtime kudos for that animation Blizz).

Damn... in my head this was a short answer, too >.< Well, you shouldn't have got me started... I'll talk more about dps and cast rotations another time, be warned!