User:Llamacon

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Attributes
Stamina is one of the key Warlock attributes, especially for Demonology Warlocks. The main reason for this is that Warlocks can convert their health to mana through the spell Life Tap, thus allowing stamina to mostly fill the role for intellect as well. Many Warlocks also depend on large health pools as their main source of defense.

As a primary spell caster, the Warlock also has great use for all the standard caster attributes, such as intellect and spell damage. Consequently Warlocks have no use for strength and also little use for agility. Spirit regenerates health and mana for Warlocks very slowly, giving it no practical use when compared to abilities such as Life Tap and Dark Pact. However due to the changes to Fel Armor spirit is now a viable stat for a warlock to have. The value of spell crit depends on the talent build. With Ruin and the use of direct damage spells, it is very good. But for an Affliction Warlock that mostly uses DoTs, it is worth very little. The exception to this is if you put pointing into Pandemic which allows your Spell Crit to increase SOME of your spells damage. However Spellpower is still the more important attribute. The Demonology talent Demonic Knowledge gives the Warlock bonus spell damage of an amount equal to 4/8/12 percent of their active demon's stamina + intellect, which are bolstered by the Warlock's own stamina and intellect values.

In a raid scenario, Spell hit rating becomes significantly more valuable, taking precedence over all other stats and it is advisable that you reach the spell hit rating cap (17% as of 3.0.2). After this point, however, spell hit rating is useless. Spell-hit-crippling debuffs are too few and far between to be considered.

The value of item attributes varies greatly for Warlocks depending on their talent choices and their main focus in the game whether it be leveling, raiding or PvP. Below is an example of the Attribute values for a raiding Warlock (in descending order).

Affliction Spell hit (until capped with Suppression) > Spellpower > Spell haste & Spell Crit

Demonology Spell hit > Spellpower > Spell Haste > Spell Crit

Destruction Spell hit (until capped with Cataclysm) > Spell Crit > Spellpower > Spell Haste

In PvP for Warlocks the focus is somewhat different as survivability takes precedence, often forcing Warlocks to greatly sacrifice DPS in order to obtain higher survivability in high end arena regardless of talent choice although all these stats have to be balanced relative to each other for the best results.

Resilience (until the 400+) > Stamina (until 12k-13k hp) > Spell Damage > Spell Crit

See also Resilience, Spell Damage and Stamina for more information

Items To Get
Argent Crusade

Kalu'ak

Frenzyheart Tribe

Oracles

Wyrmrest Accord

Kirin Tor

Ebon Blade

Hit rating caps for level 70 & 80
A common question among casters is how much hit rating is needed to hit the 100% chance to hit cap. As stated earlier, this depends on the level of the targets one expects to encounter, and any talents that add chance to hit with spells. The following table summarizes how much hit rating is needed for a certain level, after all talents and buffs are taken into consideration. To use the table, first add up how much hit you already have (don't forget the possibility of a draenei in your group or debuffs on your target that can increase your chance to hit with spells), then look up that row to find the hit rating cap for targets level 70 up to 73 or 80 up to 83. End-game raiding casters generally use the level 73 or 83 columns, as the effective level of bosses is 73 or 83 (for level 70 and level 80 content, respectively).

The hit rating numbers in the above table are all rounded up to the next integer number. E.g. 26.23 (1% at 80) becomes 27, 393.47 (15% at 80) becomes 394. While this may seem counter-intuitive at first, the intention is to provide the number which will give 100% spell hit (i.e. the "hit cap"). If they were rounded to the nearest integer, some would still leave a small chance to miss, e.g. rounding 393.47 to 393 only provides 14.98%, leaving a 0.02% chance to miss. It is up to each individual to determine whether they are willing to tolerate that very small chance to miss, or if they wish to completely eliminate it. The assumption in the table is that it is desirable to guarantee that spells will not miss. The hit rating chart above provides the ratings to 2 decimal places for those that wish to consider the merits of rounding up or down in more detail.

With the hit changes to several talents that gave spell hit in patch 3.0.2, notably Shadow Focus, Arcane Focus and several Elemental shaman talents, the ability for a few classes to get very high passive spell hit has decreased significantly (before the patch, draenei Elemental shamans were able to achieve 13% passive hit through talents and Heroic Presence). Currently, the only way for a class/race combination to surpass 4% passive spell hit is through debuffs on the target (Improved Faerie Fire and Misery)

As a rule of thumb, a level 70 player against a level 73 boss needs +12.615*k hit rating, and a level 80 player against a level 83 boss needs +26.232*k hit rating, to achieve +k% chance to hit with spells. That means that on 70-vs-73 fights each point of +hit rating contributes about +0.079% chance to hit with spells, and on 80-vs-83 fights each point of +hit rating contributes about +0.038% chance to hit with spells.

Also bear in mind that if you have a draenei in your group their Heroic Presence will get you one scale lower from where you where in the above table thus enabling you to swap 1% hit rating from your gear for more useful stats. The inspiring aura buff does not stack of course.