[Legion] Terryn's guide to Affliction Warlock

[Xorn]

I've talked about it again and again and again here. There are easy fixes they could make to the on-death traits. Just make them accrue/proc at a minimum rate when things aren't dying, and a maximum rate when they are. Done.

Exactly. Like they did (sort of) with the souls for Reap. That way things don't get out of hand when everything is dying, but also so you still feel them working when nothing is dying

[zugus]

Confuse about stat weight. Is there have soft cap of haste or I just go mas>cri for NH

[Darkheart]

Hey guys. I have been facing two issues that I would like to discuss.

1. A problem that I am noticing right now with MG build, specially if you have legendary belt, that you can easily get shard capped, as it's always only 2 UAs then Reap/Drain. And in Nighthold when we get set bonus that increases shard regeneration, it will likely be even worse. So as a workaround, whenever I find myself at 5 shards, I always use 3 UAs instead of 2 before Reap/Drain, but even then I can still get shard capped!

2. Also with MG build, many times I find myself with only 1 soul after casting 2 UAs, so I have to decide whether to reap anyway with 1 soul, or just drain without reap. Several top players are still not decisive on this issue. Some say never reap unless you have 2+ souls because you want to make sure you use reap in a way that maximizes your odds at a fatal echoes proc. Others say always reap even if you have 1 soul.

And sometimes, I will face the above two issues at the same time, which makes me crazy!

[Deleted]

Exactly. Like they did (sort of) with the souls for Reap. That way things don't get out of hand when everything is dying, but also so you still feel them working when nothing is dying

Tbh this feels like bad class/talent design. Nothing in the tooltip says "useless for raids". When an add dies it should 100% work. if 100% work is feast or famine, redesign it.

I get why the 2 golden talents are useless on fights like Nyth. And they are used to buff AoE. But if they effectively never work in Raids... WHY DO WE HAVE THEM?????

[SirreASDF]

Tbh this feels like bad class/talent design. Nothing in the tooltip says "useless for raids". When an add dies it should 100% work. if 100% work is feast or famine, redesign it.

I get why the 2 golden talents are useless on fights like Nyth. And they are used to buff AoE. But if they effectively never work in Raids... WHY DO WE HAVE THEM?????

Because Blizzards new philosophy is not entierly clear.. It's no longer "we only balance around raids", but rather, we balance around all the content, but we don't really balance the whole picture.

[Deleted]

Because they were designed to work with an artifact that would have procced killable adds, therefore Wrath at least would have been consistently up. Now, the reasons for removing that mechanic were sound: it was a pain in the arse to use and would have lead to freaky stuff like trying to get the things to die near the boss to spread Soul Flame damage but the problem is they removed it so late in the development process they had no time to redesign the two Gold traits that are very obviously designed to synergise with it.

Undoubtedly affliction is balanced around not having the Wrath buff up significantly because for most raid bosses it just isn;t, meaning that on a boss like Skorpyron where Wrath would probably be up at full five stacks all the time. Same is true of tormented souls for reap, affliction is balanced around the pretty low self-proc rate and they do not want afflocks with Reap up for whole encounters, which leads to the sort of numbers inflation we are seeing now on farm mythic dungeons although it has to be said they seem quite content to see other classes pulling even more inflated numbers

Soul Flame is in raid bosses an incredibly niche talent, so quite why it has to be turned off as overpowered on the very rare boss where it would excel I do not know, when you consider we don;t get any compensation at all for Soul Flame doing sod all in a boss like Nythendra or Ursoc. It comes across as it;s OK if a trait is next to useless but bad if it's really outstanding

Afflocks were getting very excited by Skorpyron. Now we know they won;t be anything special there. Without SoulFlame there are plenty of classes who will do more AOE. Outside of Mythic we can expect the good old game of watching the cast bar on Seed of Corruption crawl across the screen and end with a "I need to target something!"

[dalsand]

Has anyone sim'ed trinket lists for Affliction in 7.1.5?

[demonik187]

Confuse about stat weight. Is there have soft cap of haste or I just go mas>cri for NH

The general consensus is Mastery 100% + crit and haste about the same, with crit being a little higher. So like 110% mastery, 25% crit, 20% haste, for example. Give or take a few percentage points in either direction. Not those exact numbers, mind you, just similar ratios. It's often best to sim yourself so you can adjust your own stats accordingly.

[DarkosQwester]

The general consensus is Mastery 100% + crit and haste about the same, with crit being a little higher. So like 110% mastery, 25% crit, 20% haste, for example. Give or take a few percentage points in either direction. Not those exact numbers, mind you, just similar ratios. It's often best to sim yourself so you can adjust your own stats accordingly.

Hi mate, have a question:

If I have 128% of mastery, 18% of haste and ~11% of crit what am I supposed to do to increase my dps?

1) Down mastery to 100%-110% and charge crit a little bit?
2) Down mastery till my crit and haste wont be ~20-25% both?

Basically, with rotation 311111 I have 500-570k when bursting (raid dummy in the class hall) and 380-415k dps in ST as an average DPS. I suppose, that this is extremely low according to the latest buff.

Is is reasonable to have SL and AC talented both, when I have SE? Probably, we should keep some GCD when using ST rotation?

Thanks in advance.

[SirreASDF]

Hi mate, have a question:

If I have 128% of mastery, 18% of haste and ~11% of crit what am I supposed to do to increase my dps?

1) Down mastery to 100%-110% and charge crit a little bit?
2) Down mastery till my crit and haste wont be ~20-25% both?

Basically, with rotation 311111 I have 500-570k when bursting (raid dummy in the class hall) and 380-415k dps in ST as an average DPS. I suppose, that this is extremely low according to the latest buff.

Is is reasonable to have SL and AC talented both, when I have SE? Probably, we should keep some GCD when using ST rotation?

Thanks in advance.

Generally, the best advice I've heard is this (roughly):
For raids:
1. Get mastery too 120-130% (No lower than 120, this is prio 1)
2. Keep haste and crit roughly equal
2.2 Do you have the affliction legendary hood?
If yes: Favor haste slightly over crit, say 20-25 haste/17-20 crit or so
If no: Favor crit over haste, 20-25 crit/17-20 haste

For mythics, people have mixed opinions, but if you're going to do a lot of seed of corruptions, you may want to devalue mastery (no lower than 100 though) in favor of more haste and crit, since mastery doesn't affect seeds.

[Fearzigdots]

Hi Terryn, love your guide and it really has helped me a lot getting back in the game after a big break.
I have some questions though since i seem to be struggling to get the correct stat-priority.
At the moment, without the legendary Head and with a 885 Bough of Corruption and a 880 Twisting Wind Trinket i have the following stats:
105% Mastery
18% Crit
16% Haste
0% Vers

Now i do also have a 855 Corrupt Starlight (997 Mastery), a 865 Unstable Horrorslime (1036 Crit) and a 860 Deteriorated Construct Core (1421 Int) Trinket. Which trinkets should i use?
Should i Keep the Bough for the Mastery (and it procs nicely since the last Patch) and the Twisting Wind or
Should i swap the TW for the Corrupted Starlight for the Mastery or maybe use the Unstable Horrorslime because of the Crit and favor that above the Twisting Wind?
Or should i keep the Trinkets i have??


Ps: My Talents are currently: MG, AC, DC, SL, BR, GoSUP and PS (i hate SE and still need to try SC)!

Your help is much appreciated!! Obviously, if others have suggestions i am very happy with that too!

[Soulzar]

Oh my fuck, can you guys not let the Gold traits thing go? Seriously....

I'm going to go petition Blizz to change our Gold Traits... WoC swaps place with Shadowy Incantations which has a baseline 3%. SoulFlame swaps place with ... lets say... Inherently unstable at its baseline 6% ...

Boom... you now have two gold traits that always work, and very good single point non gold traits.


and nothing has fucking changed except your retarded perception that a gold trait needs to be useful always but the single point traits you also have to get dont.

[siren]

Oh my fuck, can you guys not let the Gold traits thing go? Seriously....

I'm going to go petition Blizz to change our Gold Traits... WoC swaps place with Shadowy Incantations which has a baseline 3%. SoulFlame swaps place with ... lets say... Inherently unstable at its baseline 6% ...

Boom... you now have two gold traits that always work, and very good single point non gold traits.


and nothing has fucking changed except your retarded perception that a gold trait needs to be useful always but the single point traits you also have to get dont.

This, so much this.

The real complaint should be/is so many of the traits bugged and not working proper with reap.

[Count Zero]

Oh my fuck, can you guys not let the Gold traits thing go? Seriously....

I'm going to go petition Blizz to change our Gold Traits... WoC swaps place with Shadowy Incantations which has a baseline 3%. SoulFlame swaps place with ... lets say... Inherently unstable at its baseline 6% ...

Boom... you now have two gold traits that always work, and very good single point non gold traits.


and nothing has fucking changed except your retarded perception that a gold trait needs to be useful always but the single point traits you also have to get dont.

I'm not concerned about whether the traits are gold or not, my point is about reducing the gap between afflic ST and cleave/AOE by making very small changes to the on-death traits. As in, giving a small boost to ST and a moderate reining-in of the aoe. I haven't played in a while so I don't know if aff aoe is still god tier, but I'm still seeing people talking about the difficulty in balancing aff's ST with its cleave, and in most cleave situations adds are going to be dying so this helps there too.

[klogaroth]

Aff aoe isn't quite god tier on a large scale since the sow changes, but we're still excellent at providing even aoe, with soul flame helping to smooth out early deaths even more. This can be pretty useful for things like bolstering or ensuring that helya p2 adds die stacked (comp dependant ofc).

[Fearzigdots]

Hi Terryn, love your guide and it really has helped me a lot getting back in the game after a big break.
I have some questions though since i seem to be struggling to get the correct stat-priority.
At the moment, without the legendary Head and with a 885 Bough of Corruption and a 880 Twisting Wind Trinket i have the following stats:
105% Mastery
18% Crit
16% Haste
0% Vers

Now i do also have a 855 Corrupt Starlight (997 Mastery), a 865 Unstable Horrorslime (1036 Crit) and a 860 Deteriorated Construct Core (1421 Int) Trinket. Which trinkets should i use?
Should i Keep the Bough for the Mastery (and it procs nicely since the last Patch) and the Twisting Wind or
Should i swap the TW for the Corrupted Starlight for the Mastery or maybe use the Unstable Horrorslime because of the Crit and favor that above the Twisting Wind?
Or should i keep the Trinkets i have??


Ps: My Talents are currently: MG, AC, DC, SL, BR, GoSUP and PS (i hate SE and still need to try SC)!

Your help is much appreciated!! Obviously, if others have suggestions i am very happy with that too!

Bumping the post

[Deleted]

Hi, i'm still trying to figure out if running infernal + sephuz is better than doomguard considering the fact that meteor strike can proc on boss. If yes, should i use meteor strike on cooldown or only during reap ?

Thank you !

- - - Updated - - -

Hi, i'm still trying to figure out if running infernal + sephuz is better than doomguard considering the fact that meteor strike can proc on boss. If yes, should i use meteor strike on cooldown or only during reap ?

Thank you !

Ok, simmed it and it seems better to use infernal over doomguard. Simcraft uses meteor strike on cooldown and it's a 3% gain for me (Although I'm pretty sure it would be a gain to delay the first meteor strike to align it with your first reap but i'm not good enough with simcraft to test it).

[Roblinz]

Hey Terryn, when is your website going to be ready??

[Terryn]

Hey Terryn, when is your website going to be ready??

websites on a temporary hold while i re-do hosting, and because i was busy getting the Wowhead guide and a bunch of other things going. I also started a new Grad level security class, and with Nighthold out tomorrow I want to make sure that my other parts of my life are in order before trying to work on this more

[Roblinz]

websites on a temporary hold while i re-do hosting, and because i was busy getting the Wowhead guide and a bunch of other things going. I also started a new Grad level security class, and with Nighthold out tomorrow I want to make sure that my other parts of my life are in order before trying to work on this more

Fair enough. Layout looks really good.