Succiu's Guide to Reforging for Warlocks in 4.0

*Updated to reflect the hotfix to Searing Pain. 

       Reforging is a pretty daunting project, and it is easy to get overwhelmed with all the choices and throw your hands up in the air. Breathe. It's not that bad!

        When you go to reforge your warlock's gear, your goal is to turn less useful stats into more useful stats. Approach it in the exact same way you do the rest of your gear, think about the order in which stats affect your DPS. You want to start at the bottom, turning your useless stats (spirit, excess hit) into your highest performing stats (mastery and haste) and turning over a good deal of crit as well. The devil, of course, is in the details. You cannot reforge an item to have more of a stat already on the item. The best reforging candidates, then, after the aforementioned empty stats, are items that do not already have your best stats on them, like haste. Start with hit, and then treat each item individually, from the bottom up. Scaling is still a little up in the air, and it can vary by spec. But here is the basic priority order you are looking for, based on the numbers we have.

Affliction: Haste > Mastery > Crit > Hit (above 17%) > Spirit. 
Drain Affliction: Mastery > Haste > Crit > Hit (above 17%) > Spirit
Destruction: Mastery = Haste > Crit > Hit (above 17%) > Spirit 
Demonology: Haste > Mastery > Crit > Hit (above 17%) > Spirit 

(Note on scale factors: Subject to change! There was a hotfix to Searing Pain sometime on Wednesday night that seems to have halved it's base damage and reduced it's spellpower coefficient, making Incinerate more efficient. Incinerate scales much better with Haste than Searing Pain did, and so Haste is now more valuable than it had been for Destruction and Demonology. Keep this in mind when you reforge, and re-reforge, as we will likely see a lot more number juggling in the near future.)

       Here are some basic guidelines to get you started.

Before you go to the forge:

• Re-itemize. First, change out your spirit gear. Lots of warlocks have a piece or two, and those of us who were Demonology have more than that. If you have any comparable alternatives, switch them out. Your spirit is now an empty stat. If you don't have any comparable pieces, that's okay. Spirit is a cheap source for reforging.

• Re-gem. You are hitting every socket bonus now. With haste roughly equaling the damage per stat value of intellect, it is still always worth it to gem full Reckless Ametrine's in all your yellow sockets. In a blue socket, you will want to gem Veiled Dreadstone. The reason for this is that you can forge your hit elsewhere if you go over the hit cap, but here you get to pick up the socket bonus in the bargain. You are aiming for 17% hit now. If you are lucky, you will easily be over the hit cap before reforging. Pre-4.0 Affliction locks will have the most trouble with this, and may even end up reforging to pick up a little hit. Any Spellpower/Hit gems you were using before are purple now, so make sure you replace them when you look at your socket bonuses.

Across all three specs, your first priority is to become hit capped. If you find yourself needing to reforge to reach the cap, this is the priority order you should use.
 

Now that you are done with that, here is the priority order for reforging when are above the hit cap. Go through and reforge your pieces in this order.

When you reach the hit cap, stop. You may end up juggling the last piece or two back and forth to get the most out of your hit reforging. Don't be scared to spend the gold to try it a couple times, or get out a spreadsheet and do the math yourself. (26 hit rating= 1% hit). Then follow these guidelines for your remaining items.

       Unless you are insanely over the hit cap, you will probably end up with an item or two that doesn't need to be reforged. It's tempting to think you should reforge everything, just because you "can,"  but you don't. You can't turn those stats into anything more useful. You need that hit right where it is, and why would you turn your most useful stat into something less good? If you are using haste trinkets, like Dislodged Foreign Object or Charred Twilight Scale, leave them alone.

      There might be cases, when you are over the hit cap, where you backtrack to trade stats with another item. Maybe you are sitting half a percent above the hit cap, but your only remaining gear has haste and hit on it. You can't reduce even one piece because it will take you below the hit cap. But maybe you have some spirit gear that, instead of forging mastery, you can forge enough hit that would let you reforge the hit on one of your other pieces into a greater amount of mastery than the spirit was giving you. You'll be able to see these patterns as you finish reforging.  

       The reason that Mastery is a better stat for Drain-Life Affliction is simply that more haste, for affliction, usually just means more Shadow Bolts. When you aren't casting Shadow Bolt, the increased shadow damage from your Mastery will give you greater returns. Drain Life Affliction does not yield as high numbers as Shadow Bolt using Affliction, but it has great potential for higher survivability.  
         Finally, lets look at Destruction. Destruction values mastery and haste about equally, with mastery having just the slightest edge. You will want to pick up as much mastery as you can, without turning over any of your haste. 

       Above all, don't let reforging intimidate you! In a couple months, all of this will be second nature, but for now, just take it step by step to get rid of the things you don't want first, and work your way up the ladder.