World of Warcraft Guide to Warlock DPS Part 2

A damage cycle is made up of multiple components: casting time, duration, global cooldown, damage output, and mana consumption. A persons performance in any encounter can be broken down into these six factors. Together, they determine the overall damage output your going to achieve when the encounter is over. By considering our spells, the length of the encounter, and how much mana is going to be expended; we can determine not only a "Ideal" damage cycle but also consider factors limiting our achieving this "Ideal" cycle.

First though, a few things.

First I deliver to you the comparison of Ruin and UA that I promised earlier since the two most popular warlock builds are defined by these talents.

Ruin- Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Destruction spells by 100%.

From Wowwiki.com "Ruin increases the critical hit damage bonus of your Destruction spells by 100%. A normal spell crit is +50% damage taking into account all other damage modifiers. Ruin doubles the crit bonus, so you get a +33% damage bonus on critical hits."

Unstable Affliction- Shadow energy slowly destroys the target, causing 1050 damage over 18 sec. In addition, if the Unstable Affliction is dispelled it will cause 1575 damage to the dispeller and silence them for 5 sec.

So the basic questions to answer between these two is which one gives you more damage for that talent point, and what am I sacrificing if anything for either talent? To answer them I will analyze each one WITHIN the context of a build. Since it does not matter if UA is superior to ruin if destruction is inherently better as a tree in someway and provides more damage or Visa-Versa.

For this comparison I will be using standard 41/0/20 and 0/21/40.

For each comparison the fight length is 450 seconds.

Infinite mana assumed. (yes this is unfavorable to the affliction build)

No life tapping or dark pacting.

Two sets of numbers one for destruction without ruin, and one for destruction with ruin to determine gained damage.

No full or partial resists.

No raid buffs/debuffs.

All numbers rounded.