Me and a RL friend are thinking of starting an AoE grinding group, with the intent of pretty much AoE grinding instances to level, with a pally tank, shaman healer, shadow priest, mage (either arcane or frost) and a warlock. On trash, the lock/mage DPS while the SP provides some support in the form of extra heals and a mana battery, then have all three DPSers do single-target DD on boss fights.
I'm planning on being the warlock, which for the purposes of levelling means I'll be spamming rain of fire on trash, and providing a lot of damage on boss fights.
As such, since the primary focus of the build would be to increase AoE speed, I would want to increase my AoE damage potential (both the raw damage I can deal, and the damage I can deal without pulling aggro) as much as possible. The secondary goal, where filler talents and/or subspec would be, would be to have a fair amount of single target damage dealing ability, so that on boss fights we can still get through quick.
It appears to me that an affliction spec would not be the way I would want to go. Until 70, affliction appears to have no AoE in it at all, and on 10, 15, even 20 mobs (we'll overpull a bit) tab-dotting wont do the trick. Thus, I am left between a 0/40/21 build, which would give me the ability to do rain of fire spam with my imp out for tremendous damage, or if health/threat isn't an issue I can put him away for 15% more damage. On boss fights my gatling imp would do quite a bit of damage compared to a normal imp (over double if I did my math right) and I could make use of SB spam.
Or I could go with a build that puts at least 41 points into destro, to get shadowfury, and then use a splattering of single-target fire damage on the boss fights. Considering the mage will probably be using a fire sub-spec on boss fights, in this build I would get extra fire damage from him, and I could swap out CoS for CoE.
This depends on a few things...first off, if imp shadow bolt procs affect the shadow priest, I almost have to go with the 40/21. If shadowfury does not provide enough damage to be worth it, 40/21 is what I would want as well. I guess what I'm asking is this:
On trash fights, how much difference would there be in AoE damage I can do with rain of fire (and shadowfury if specced destro) in the demo build or a destro build, and which spec would do more damage? Assuming I'm levelling in instances and have mainly instance blues to use.
On boss fights, how much difference would there be in damage I can do with the two specs, one being SB spam as 40/21, the other being fire spell rotation with a destro build? Again, assuming levelling in instances and using mainly instance blues.