I've always loved theorizing with gear and dps options on my lock. I spent countless hours comparing gear and stat choices. And the best tool for that is a Warlock DPS Spreadsheet developed by Leulier. The link to his site is - http://www.leulier.com. This amazing spreadsheet along with the Lootrank.com and the ElitistJerks forums are the best tools for maximizing your DPS and gear choices.

But I digress. The reason I love to play wit this spreadsheet so much is because it is so convenient and comprehensive. You can input you gear and talent builds and then you can play around with all the different option as far as buffs, changing talents changing gear etc. And as soon as you make a change you get a DPS number update. So it is an amazing tool to see how much dps you will get if you make a gear or talent choice. For example, on the ElitistJerks forum there is a great post for Affliction Warlocks - Dots and You. And it has great high level gear upgrades. However, how do these upgrades relate to you?

When it comes to upgrades that drop in the raid and few others want, there is no brainer, you take them and you use them. But what if you decide if you should get some piece of gear with your hard earned badges or PVP honor points. Will the upgrade be worth it? It seems that the item you going to get is better then the one you have now, but how much DPS will you get out of it. Well use the spreadsheet, and boom if it's only 10 points of extra dps them maybe you should save badges and wait for a better drop, but if it's 60 or 80 dps upgrade, then maybe you should buy that piece.

You can also keep a lot of the higher level gear and then compare different combination. Maybe a piece that before only gave you a small upgrade because you needed more hit, and another piece gave you a lot of hit in that place. Well now you got plenty of hit, and this piece you saved can actually give you more dps. This is also a great tool to see how re-gemming will change your dps and stats. So use and abuse this spreadsheet!

One more quick note, the spreadsheet now has amazing feature to pull your talent build and gear right from armory. This is a recent update that makes this spreadsheet better then ever!