[Legion] Terryn's guide to Affliction Warlock

[Didrah]

Great guide. Awesome Work.. but I do have some questions:

Note: I'm a mythic raider (completed all tiers before nerfs blah blah) who stopped raiding about a month ago. Also I didn't read or learn anything about the new affliction other than the artifact weapon. This is why I have doubts.

Reap Usage:

The entire affliction gameplay revolves around the usage of Reap, and correct usage of Reap can be the difference between blue and orange parses.

• Burst phases: Any time there’s a requirement of a burst phase, hit the button. It’s a minimum of 10% bonus damage, before all of the artifact amplifications.
• You hit 12 souls. Any more is wasting resources. Hit reap so you now have a 1 minute buff of your artifact.
• Large Wrath of Consumption stacks are a great time to reap. If you're at the 5 stack, this raises it from a 10 to a 20% damage increase. Wrath only stacks to 5, so make sure you're efficient with its up time and get as much out of it as possible.
• Lots of adds with Corruption and / or agony: This is a time where you can get a lot of Compounding Horror stacks. Using reap will double this chance, giving you a flood of bonus damage to the point where you can almost spam UA at 25% bonus damage.

What is Reap? Are you referring to the artifact ability that doubles all other abilities? If so... is this a cooldown then?

- When u spec into soul effigy: U keep the boss as your main focus over it? (Meaning that you should never cast drain life on the effigy right?)


Those are my questions.. thanks!

[SirreASDF]

Great guide. Awesome Work.. but I do have some questions:

Note: I'm a mythic raider (completed all tiers before nerfs blah blah) who stopped raiding about a month ago. Also I didn't read or learn anything about the new affliction other than the artifact weapon. This is why I have doubts.



What is Reap? Are you referring to the artifact ability that doubles all other abilities? If so... is this a cooldown then?

- When u spec into soul effigy: U keep the boss as your main focus over it? (Meaning that you should never cast drain life on the effigy right?)


Those are my questions.. thanks!

Reap is indeed the artifact ability you describe. It does NOT have a cooldown, however, it needs to "charge up" before use. It does this by killing things and at a steady pace while in combat. The maximum is 12 souls stored which I believe yields a full minute of Reap(ing the benefits). I am not sure if new souls can be stored while Reap is active though, but I believe it has been said that you'd most likely want to try to keep uptime as high as possible.

Regarding Soul Effigy, you would indeed not want to cast drain life on it, unless you simply have no other targets available at the moment.

[Deleted]

Right, and that's the trade off. You get Effigy but you lose Siphon and Conduit. Are you actually coming out ahead in that trade? I honestly have no idea, that's some advanced theorycrafting shit that's probably going to need to be simmed on a fight by fight basis.

If you're a bleeding edge progression guild you'll absolutely be switching your talents on every boss. If you're not, there's probably a lot more room for running the most broadly useful talent selection, or even the talent build you find most fun to play.

You could take Siphon life, it's a diffrent tier, but I specced sow the seeds, for some AoE. You could also spec Soul Harvest.

If you are on a 3 council fight with effigy, you can't maintain 3 DoTs on 4 targets and UA, so something has to go. I like Absolute Corruption, more powerful unlimited DoT, but you can't take Contagion or Manatap. I Personally like to juggle less DoT's so I take AC. Might add SL someday, or take Harvest for some burst CD.

[Didrah]

Reap is indeed the artifact ability you describe. It does NOT have a cooldown, however, it needs to "charge up" before use. It does this by killing things and at a steady pace while in combat. The maximum is 12 souls stored which I believe yields a full minute of Reap(ing the benefits). I am not sure if new souls can be stored while Reap is active though, but I believe it has been said that you'd most likely want to try to keep uptime as high as possible.

Regarding Soul Effigy, you would indeed not want to cast drain life on it, unless you simply have no other targets available at the moment.

Thanks! Appreciate the response.

[Fearsom1992]

While reap is active you can get tormented souls (charge up)

[Terryn]

I apologize if this was asked and answered, but I browsed through the pages and didn't see it. At 110 what round about is the dps loss from taking Soul Conduit over Soul Effigy? Is it a huge difference or a moderate one?

I'll be adding this into the FAQ, but I'll post here:
Theres two parts to this. One is a council fight. Agony has a dropoff on shard generation that can me modeled like this (Props to Rez for making this kick ass spreadsheet):

Basically going from 2 -> 3 targets only provides a 20% increase in shards, and from 3 -> 4 targets is only about a 15% increase. What this translates to, is for sustained 2 target fights, you get "A similar" number of shards going ether effigy OR conduit, and any more targets conduit will win out on shard generation. As far as damage, its not 100% confirmed. On single target, effigy is going to be ~10-15% of your damage pending on talents / encounter. I would GUESS that 3 target is where you will see enough shard increase from conduit to make up for the damage lost on effigy + the GCD loss from maintaining a minimum of agony on 4 targets instead of 3.

On add cleave fights, which theres 2 of in nightmare, you will gain more out of conduit if your raid needs you REALLY focused on adds, and less if you are just throwing stray UA's out on adds that are closing in on death (Remember you get the shards back if they die with UA still on them) and focused more on boss damage. Also: Any time you have to replant effigy more than once or twice in a fight, you will want to run Conduit. Ilganoth mythic you will PROBABLY want to run conduit becuase theres no real places to put an effigy up (this is all pending on PS not lining up to be useful on this fight).

[Faust843]

Hey Terryn, i have a question regarding our artifact: as far as i know in early alpha our artifact was spawning killable souls, and we were able to proc out golden traits from them. Actually it was designed and balanced around this fact. Now souls are just consumed and it makes our golden traits that proc from kills much worse (even useless in some situations). Is that true that our artifact was balanced around those souls and now it's a lot worse than it was? Because it looks like that

P.S. : Also is that possible to be fine at raiding with affliction? Because i don't really like destro, but numbers show that affliction currently underperforms comparing to it. Thank you

[Kirroth]

Hey Terryn, i have a question regarding our artifact: as far as i know in early alpha our artifact was spawning killable souls, and we were able to proc out golden traits from them. Actually it was designed and balanced around this fact. Now souls are just consumed and it makes our golden traits that proc from kills much worse (even useless in some situations). Is that true that our artifact was balanced around those souls and now it's a lot worse than it was? Because it looks like that

Designed and balanced are two very different things. The change in Reap Souls came late enough that they didn't completely redesign Ulthalesh and its traits around not having the souls to kill. However it came early enough that the Devs had plenty of time to balance the artifact's overall numbers around the more soul dependent traits having less impact.

Well, in theory. Those sort of compensatory buffs can be a bit tricky to stick exactly, without undershooting or overshooting the target. So we'll see how it plays out. But Beta reports didn't raise any massive red flags.

[Faust843]

Designed and balanced are two very different things. The change in Reap Souls came late enough that they didn't completely redesign Ulthalesh and its traits around not having the souls to kill. However it came early enough that the Devs had plenty of time to balance the artifact's overall numbers around the more soul dependent traits having less impact.

Well, in theory. Those sort of compensatory buffs can be a bit tricky to stick exactly, without undershooting or overshooting the target. So we'll see how it plays out. But Beta reports didn't raise any massive red flags.

Well, at least in theory, i can see a very big difference in our dps in fight with and without adds. And it's not like something situational, it's just our artifact doesn't completely working on such encounters. It doesn't seem right to me

[Kirroth]

Well, at least in theory, i can see a very big difference in our dps in fight with and without adds. And it's not like something situational, it's just our artifact doesn't completely working on such encounters. It doesn't seem right to me

I refer you to my own earlier post in this thread. Because seriously people, it's a new thread and not at all long, would it kill you to just read the thing? When the fourth person is asking the same thing it starts to get old.

[Faust843]

I refer you to my own earlier post in this thread. Because seriously people, it's a new thread and not at all long, would it kill you to just read the thing? When the fourth person is asking the same thing it starts to get old.

Sorry for missing that. I hope you are right and we would be viable outside of council fights

[Terryn]

Hey Terryn, i have a question regarding our artifact: as far as i know in early alpha our artifact was spawning killable souls, and we were able to proc out golden traits from them. Actually it was designed and balanced around this fact. Now souls are just consumed and it makes our golden traits that proc from kills much worse (even useless in some situations). Is that true that our artifact was balanced around those souls and now it's a lot worse than it was? Because it looks like that

P.S. : Also is that possible to be fine at raiding with affliction? Because i don't really like destro, but numbers show that affliction currently underperforms comparing to it. Thank you

Those golden traits actually are meant as a bandaid for things dot classes generally suck at, which is quick adds that die. Soul flame and Wrath both give affliction locks ways to pull ahead on add fights when you wouldn't be able to otherwise. Sure they add almost nothing on pure single target / non add fights but frankly those just don't exist any going into tier 19, so I really wouldn't worry about that.

As far as the artifact now, the souls accumulate quite quickly on add fights, its RPPM based on shadow damage that you deal. This means you should be able to maintain a pretty high up time on a 10+% damage buff on council fights. When adds are involved this jumps to almost a 100% uptime plus you take into account artifact amplification of your UA crit chance, your Agony, Wrath of consumption and it being amplified, amplifying procs for Harvester or Compounding Horror. The artifact is a lot more exciting than it first seems

[Deleted]

Btw you need to tag every single add to benefit from its death, right? How effective are normal untalented seeds? Should we generally expect Sow the Seeds to be necessary on fights wil many exploitable adds that die quickly (so need to be tagged quickly)?

[HeavenDenies]

I'll be adding this into the FAQ, but I'll post here:
Theres two parts to this. One is a council fight. Agony has a dropoff on shard generation that can me modeled like this (Props to Rez for making this kick ass spreadsheet):

Basically going from 2 -> 3 targets only provides a 20% increase in shards, and from 3 -> 4 targets is only about a 15% increase. What this translates to, is for sustained 2 target fights, you get "A similar" number of shards going ether effigy OR conduit, and any more targets conduit will win out on shard generation. As far as damage, its not 100% confirmed. On single target, effigy is going to be ~10-15% of your damage pending on talents / encounter. I would GUESS that 3 target is where you will see enough shard increase from conduit to make up for the damage lost on effigy + the GCD loss from maintaining a minimum of agony on 4 targets instead of 3.

On add cleave fights, which theres 2 of in nightmare, you will gain more out of conduit if your raid needs you REALLY focused on adds, and less if you are just throwing stray UA's out on adds that are closing in on death (Remember you get the shards back if they die with UA still on them) and focused more on boss damage. Also: Any time you have to replant effigy more than once or twice in a fight, you will want to run Conduit. Ilganoth mythic you will PROBABLY want to run conduit becuase theres no real places to put an effigy up (this is all pending on PS not lining up to be useful on this fight).

This is exactly what I was looking for. Much appreciated. Thank you.

[Faust843]

Those golden traits actually are meant as a bandaid for things dot classes generally suck at, which is quick adds that die. Soul flame and Wrath both give affliction locks ways to pull ahead on add fights when you wouldn't be able to otherwise. Sure they add almost nothing on pure single target / non add fights but frankly those just don't exist any going into tier 19, so I really wouldn't worry about that.

As far as the artifact now, the souls accumulate quite quickly on add fights, its RPPM based on shadow damage that you deal. This means you should be able to maintain a pretty high up time on a 10+% damage buff on council fights. When adds are involved this jumps to almost a 100% uptime plus you take into account artifact amplification of your UA crit chance, your Agony, Wrath of consumption and it being amplified, amplifying procs for Harvester or Compounding Horror. The artifact is a lot more exciting than it first seems

Thank you Terryn, now i feel safer for affliction

[Fallensaint]

Btw you need to tag every single add to benefit from its death, right? How effective are normal untalented seeds? Should we generally expect Sow the Seeds to be necessary on fights wil many exploitable adds that die quickly (so need to be tagged quickly)?

Assuming it hits at least 2 targets, Seed of Corruption is the best way to spread and maintain Corruption. Corr has a 1.5 sec gcd and costs 3% mana, and SoC has a 2.5 sec cast and costs 4.5% mana plus the 120% sp explosion. So, on 2 targets it's more efficient in both effective cast time and mana cost, plus some bonus damage. The downside of course is that you need to actually pop the seed for it to be effective.

As for Sow the Seeds, I haven't done any deep analysis, but based on the cost vs. UA I'm assuming it'll be optimal if you can get at least 3 seeds per shard and ideally you'd want the full 5 seeds per shard.

[Deleted]

Thanks!

/10corr

[Terryn]

Btw you need to tag every single add to benefit from its death, right? How effective are normal untalented seeds? Should we generally expect Sow the Seeds to be necessary on fights wil many exploitable adds that die quickly (so need to be tagged quickly)?

You have to be on the threat table for any adds that die to gain benefits of souls, soulflame, and wrath, so yes. This can be anything, from seeds, tab corruption / agony (Probably corruption unless that add is going to be up for 10+ seconds) or soulflame from other adds you've already tagged.

- - - Updated - - -

Assuming it hits at least 2 targets, Seed of Corruption is the best way to spread and maintain Corruption. Corr has a 1.5 sec gcd and costs 3% mana, and SoC has a 2.5 sec cast and costs 4.5% mana plus the 300% sp explosion. So, on 2 targets it's more efficient in both effective cast time and mana cost, plus some bonus damage. The downside of course is that you need to actually pop the seed for it to be effective.

As for Sow the Seeds, I haven't done any deep analysis, but based on the cost vs. UA I'm assuming it'll be optimal if you can get at least 3 seeds per shard and ideally you'd want the full 5 seeds per shard.

I'd argue that you should just focus on what ever your priority is. In even a 3 target situation i'm sure one of those 3 needs to die before the others. If you want an exact breakdown, its probably 4 target due to the cast time involved (You could ua + another spell almost in the same time as a Seed). All things considered if you have 3+ targets that are going to be up for 10+ seconds, you should always considering using Seed to save GCDs on Corruption (3 gcds vs 2.5 second cd).

[CuchuCachu]

Also, a suggestion for Terryn.

The Adds and Multi-Target sections may be easier to interpret if you make two sections regarding stacked and non-stacked adds since the strategy is pretty different, especially in the multi-target section

Not pestering, just dont want advice he complimented to be forgotten

[Iax]

Could you explain why GoSac is 33% weaker in Affliction
<snip>

I saw this hadn't been answered yet. It was patched during a tuning pass. http://www.wowhead.com/news=254233/7...uning-hotfixes