Aff Warlock

[Cempa]

Hi, i was surprised to read that people are having trouble getting some numbers with aff, after personnal try i'd say to go arround 50% hate / 50% mastery if you can, im at like 8700 haste and 7500 mastery and there is literally no fight where im under 180K, wich is still nothing compared to other classes but enough to not be kicked ...
Most of the time i dunjon with a rogue and a dh, so my lack of dps on trash is not that big of a deal and on short MM bosses with BL i can spike at 260-290K depending on procs and crit.

Glad to hear that man thanks .. a glimmer of hope because I love affliction and do not enjoy any other spec .. I have no idea how I can reach 50% haste m8 but thanks I'll keep that in mind ..

[Deleted]

Glad to hear that man thanks .. a glimmer of hope because I love affliction and do not enjoy any other spec .. I have no idea how I can reach 50% haste m8 but thanks I'll keep that in mind ..

He means your focus on stat staking to be 50/50 haste/mastery..not to reach 50% haste rating.

[Onizuka]

Glad to hear that man thanks .. a glimmer of hope because I love affliction and do not enjoy any other spec .. I have no idea how I can reach 50% haste m8 but thanks I'll keep that in mind ..

I think he means to actually gear up with values of 50%-50% between haste - mastery.
For example an item that has something like +550 haste / +550 mastery instead of +800 haste / +200 mastery
I don't think its achievable to have +50% haste and +50% mastery even with the EN raid gearing...

[Blythy]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for all the useful information.

Hish, Could you go into a bit more detail mate.
I tried your rotation to the letter and got around 140k at the high point of my dps.
Gear Level 844, 94% Mastery (8140) 24% Haste (7623) while its a little lower than your Mastery it wont account for another 50K dps.

[Deleted]

I began leveling my warlock alt yesterday as affliction. I must say i really enjoyed the class quests and i love to play affliction. I hope it will get some raid time in the future but it seems like warlocks are in a bad position atm. Well i dont care, i really like the gameplay.

[FrostyButt]

Why wouldn't Warlock do well on boss fights? Especially if you can keep 100%UA on the boss. It has a ramp up time, but doesn't the damage stack each time you cast UA on the target? Over a 6 minute fight, assuming you have 100% UA uptime.. You're going to have a MASSIVE dot ticking away on the boss. Just take the talent where you have 20% chance to refund your shards on UA cast.. You can quickly stack it that way.

Or am I wrong on how UA works?

[Jessicka]

Why wouldn't Warlock do well on boss fights? Especially if you can keep 100%UA on the boss. It has a ramp up time, but doesn't the damage stack each time you cast UA on the target? Over a 6 minute fight, assuming you have 100% UA uptime.. You're going to have a MASSIVE dot ticking away on the boss. Just take the talent where you have 20% chance to refund your shards on UA cast.. You can quickly stack it that way.

Or am I wrong on how UA works?

Good luck getting 100% up time on UA. And no, the damage doesn't 'stack' that way in that you gain anything from it, just that you don't lose out from clipping. You can stack it up if you have the procs for more damage, but it's unlikely you'll have the Shards, and even if you do, then there are Talents like Contagion and traits like Fatal Echoes are built to discourage you from stacking it.

[Deleted]

Why wouldn't Warlock do well on boss fights? Especially if you can keep 100%UA on the boss. It has a ramp up time, but doesn't the damage stack each time you cast UA on the target? Over a 6 minute fight, assuming you have 100% UA uptime.. You're going to have a MASSIVE dot ticking away on the boss. Just take the talent where you have 20% chance to refund your shards on UA cast.. You can quickly stack it that way.

Or am I wrong on how UA works?

You are wrong about how it works. It stacks in the sense that casting it twice, one after the other, deals the damage of 2 UAs. Casting agony twice or corruption twice won't have that effect. Basically, it is a nuke (Pyroblast for example) that deals damage over time. Casting it twice doesn't mean that your first UA is refreshed and the resulting UA deals 2x damage, and that casting another will refresh them all again and deal 3x damage (That would be horribly broken).

1 UA = 1 UA damage, 2 x UA = 2 UA damage, and so on. Nothing complex about it, it functions like a nuke.

[KeystoneTRN]

Why wouldn't Warlock do well on boss fights? Especially if you can keep 100%UA on the boss. It has a ramp up time, but doesn't the damage stack each time you cast UA on the target?

UA doesn't work like that anymore, every cast deals it's damage independent of every other cast. If I cast 6 UAs back to back to back and then 5 seconds later throw a 7th on the stack, the remaining damage on the first 6 casts is rolled into the final cast, not refreshed. You also don't really keep UA up 100% of the time.

Aff just doesn't scale well, at all, beyond niche AoE situations currently. They want DoTs to be the majority of our damage, but don't want to give them the punch to do so.

[FrostyButt]

UA doesn't work like that anymore, every cast deals it's damage independent of every other cast. If I cast 6 UAs back to back to back and then 5 seconds later throw a 7th on the stack, the remaining damage on the first 6 casts is rolled into the final cast, not refreshed. You also don't really keep UA up 100% of the time.

Aff just doesn't scale well, at all, beyond niche AoE situations currently. They want DoTs to be the majority of our damage, but don't want to give them the punch to do so.

I find it weird Affliction doesn't scale well. They're main stats are Mastery/Haste, right? Mastery is a good scaling stat, no? I honestly was puzzled though by the artifact and a lot of the traits are based off things dying.. I find that very weird especially for raids.

[cface]

The class tweaking better give some hope for affliction and the expansion. They say they will do just that, but lets see if they actually deliver.
Almost every class has this shitty feeling. I mean, I want to play sub rogue, but now it's go outlaw or go home. Same with many other classes.

Wtf was the beta even for?

[Deleted]

The class tweaking better give some hope for affliction and the expansion. They say they will do just that, but lets see if they actually deliver.
Almost every class has this shitty feeling. I mean, I want to play sub rogue, but now it's go outlaw or go home. Same with many other classes.

Wtf was the beta even for?

Building hype and fixing bugs.

Things I personally made posts about + submitted ingame:

Murloc PvP area too good to grind to get honor without doing any PvP - Check.
Brulfist Idol + Kite + Emerald Winds interact very well together - Check.
Engineering too expensive + ridicoulus initial quest (Feast) - Check.
General warlock complaints - Check.
World Quests being overly generous - Check.

(I can't remember more at the moment).

They did fix some things though, like making ancient mana more easily available, not spawning mobs inside withered training until you actually picked up withered (Arguably a bug fix), and they made Lord of Flames proc through infernal instead of Rain of Fire (The most lol retarded initial design ever. 10 min CD linked to basic AoE spell, what could go wrong?).

[Locki]

I honestly think a lot could be fixed by tweaking the artifact for affliction though. Not in the way of actually making us top DPS, but closer to competitive levels in terms of DPS. If two gold traits could be at least more RNG in terms of proccing on dots instead of being an on-kill trait, I would be so much happier. Especially with Wrath of Consumption. It would have good synergy with the whole "aff-gotta-ramp" idea. Would obviously be a great plus if the souls wasn't mainly kill-based as well. Would give us a better burst on demand.

I really like affliction as a whole, but the whole on-kill thing bothers me a lot. It really makes me feel out of place both in dungeons and raids.

[Papyscrap]

I honestly think a lot could be fixed by tweaking the artifact for affliction though. Not in the way of actually making us top DPS, but closer to competitive levels in terms of DPS. If two gold traits could be at least more RNG in terms of proccing on dots instead of being an on-kill trait, I would be so much happier. Especially with Wrath of Consumption. It would have good synergy with the whole "aff-gotta-ramp" idea. Would obviously be a great plus if the souls wasn't mainly kill-based as well. Would give us a better burst on demand.

I really like affliction as a whole, but the whole on-kill thing bothers me a lot. It really makes me feel out of place both in dungeons and raids.

Yes, this x10! I'm sure we are not suppose to have 100% uptime on Reap Souls but it seems i rarely get to use it on boss fights even with many adds, seems too random. and again Wrath of consumption, I get that it fits the Class lore but its basically worthless other than trash and even then its not that great unless you chain the whole instance together. packs of trash get cleaved down, you get the buff when everything is dead then it falls off before the next pull. to put it as a % to proc on dots would be nice. Also i saw someone mention to cut the agony ramp up to 5, and then 10 with writhing agony or w.e the talent is would be nice as well

[Deleted]

Glad to hear that man thanks .. a glimmer of hope because I love affliction and do not enjoy any other spec .. I have no idea how I can reach 50% haste m8 but thanks I'll keep that in mind ..

Was talking about opti not value in stats yeah, sorry Btw if you want a heads up i was actually surprised to do pretty good on most bosses of the new raid, even managed to be top 3 on the 2 last boss in NM and I was arround the middle of recount on the first boss and the eye thing in HM, nothing amazing but still decent enough ^^

[Haruk]

You can play it but you'll get better numbers with destro or demo, the main issue with affliction is the artifact, that relies on constantly killing adds to be effective.
Also the soul effigy talent is very annoying, if you are masochist and enjoy that kind of gameplay feel free to play it.
If affliction gets buffed and it's 20% above destro or demo we will play it, otherwise, I will avoid that spec like death. Long gone are times with soulburn:soul swap when you could dot the entire room in 5 seconds.

Just wanted to join in on the soul effigy hate. Things like that (and before that prismatic shard) are retarded. I don't want a "target dummy" to attack during a fight instead of real target. They should threaten to fire anyone in class design that suggests any such feature.

Also, affliction is bad right now, but it's the spec I like. What happened to the "play the spec you enjoy, they will all be competitive" mantra from blizz? For locks, it's always destro, destro, and more destro. If I had wanted a mage, I would have rolled one.

[evertonbelmontt]

My advice is that you ACTUALLY try the spec before dismissing it.

Everyone keeps saying demon is the best, but it depends. Problem with that is investiment. AP, gear (stats) have a lot to do with my grips right now.

I LOVE Afflic, and I WILL stick with it because I'm nowhere near hardcore, but I'm seeing demon do way more damage on logs.
So I went to try demon on Nythendra. I can't make it work, no matter what. I can't surpass my Affliction damage on it (that's supposed to be shit), because I don't have the ammount of haste to have room to breath. It's true, I tried both on a dummy later on to be sure and demon gets WAY WAY WAY easier the more haste you have, with 33% being much better to perform than 22%.

While as Afflic, mastery have better results for me overall and I already chose to invest AP on it because I like dots much more than demons, so there's that disadvantage.

This is my log from Nythendra: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...mmary&source=7

No food, no deadly grace, no neck enchant (well, WoD mastery +75 if that counts /heh) and giving some calls as raid leader.
I can't get more than 180k as demon in that fight and I'm seeing logs having 280k (50k + than the top Afflic).

Affliction also is the best self healing spec from all three, and could make a difference on a learning curve, where dps doesn't matter as much if there's no priority adds.

Demon can get you better results, obviously. But the ammount of work you'll need into that is very obnoxious. To min/max it you'll need a lot of auras/addons (zpets, DE tracks for every pet, pet counting, etc), a lot of practice and know the fight beforehand to avoid movement as much as possible.

TL;DR: Demon is the best spec for the top players, is it better for you? I'm no Elite, so it's not for me.

[Deleted]

My last Mythic + was with a pug hunter - I of course, had to pidgeonhole myself into AOE and turn my already garbage single target into really garbage, Sow the Seeds being utterly useless. He of course could take Barrage

At the end I got a whisper "why you play affliction, why you play lock at all lolol"

I came away feeling that I;d been carried and that at least the hunter was kind enough to not post recount, I uninstalled that as it;s just too embarassing to look at

My guild are all great guys but even they commented that they hear lots of jokes about locks and how bad they are