[5.4] Affliction Warlock and Encounter Specific Guides

[goombatommy]

Hey everyone -

I've been raiding as Affliction for all the LFR's I've been doing. However, my DPS is pretty abysmal. It ranges anywhere from 35K - 55K and I've seen similar locks with gear like mine easily hitting 75K+.

I've read up on a few guides; but some guides say once hit capped, go haste, others say once hit capped go mastery. I did that AskMrRobot site, and for some reason it wasn't working for me (could be PC related). I tried mostly haste, not really so much of a difference, and now I've started taking a blend of the two. Still not good.

My current rotation is (assuming start of boss fight):

-Soul Burn + Soul Swap
-Haunt (to keep debuff up)
-Filler is Maelfic Grasp

I manually refresh DoT's and try my hardest to keep Haunt up as much as possible, as well as CoE.

My armory link is : http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...anger/advanced

If someone could please assist or give me a few pointers I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much!

[Xandy]

There was some talk about using DS to maintain 100% uptime, don't know how the math worked out though.

Huge DPS loss, never do it. The damage from channeling MG far outweighs the extra shards you'd get from DS.

EDIT: Correction, there are some situations where you want to channel DS >20% but only because of fight mechanics; i.e. in order to maintain channelling during Epicenter on Feng when your tanks suck, etc

Hey everyone
-snip-
Thank you so much!

Since you're gearing up, I'd say Gem for Intellect when you can and keep your Haste and Mastery relatively even. Once you reach 500 ilvl you can start to Gem pure Haste/Mastery and worry about Haste breakpoints.

Learning how/when to refresh DoTs and when to use Haunt is the bread and butter of Affliction. I can't give much advice on your 'rotation,' but based on what you said, I can tell you that you don't want to keep Haunt up as much as possible; only maintain Haunt when your DoTs are empowered by major buffs or when under a major Haste buff like Bloodlust or Dark Soul.

Oh, and download the addon "affdots" it will make you a better player

[goombatommy]

Huge DPS loss, never do it. The damage from channeling MG far outweighs the extra shards you'd get from DS.

EDIT: Correction, there are some situations where you want to channel DS >20% but only because of fight mechanics; i.e. in order to maintain channelling during Epicenter on Feng when your tanks suck, etc



Since you're gearing up, I'd say Gem for Intellect when you can and keep your Haste and Mastery relatively even. Once you reach 500 ilvl you can start to Gem pure Haste/Mastery and worry about Haste breakpoints.

Learning how/when to refresh DoTs and when to use Haunt is the bread and butter of Affliction. I can't give much advice on your 'rotation,' but based on what you said, I can tell you that you don't want to keep Haunt up as much as possible; only maintain Haunt when your DoTs are empowered by major buffs or when under a major Haste buff like Bloodlust or Dark Soul.

Oh, and download the addon "affdots" it will make you a better player

Oh wow, thank you very much for the quick response! I will definitely check that addon out.

I read in a guide a while back that keeping Haunt up on the target is a big must. So hold off using Haunt in my rotation unless heroism, Dark Soul, etc. is active?

[Bonkura]

Huge DPS loss, never do it. The damage from channeling MG far outweighs the extra shards you'd get from DS.

I saw some math here recently backing it up possibly being a DPS gain in some situations to channel DS, which he's probably referring to. maybe someone who remembers when it was posted can dig throug the thread to see the posts related to it.

Since you're gearing up, I'd say Gem for Intellect when you can and keep your Haste and Mastery relatively even. Once you reach 500 ilvl you can start to Gem pure Haste/Mastery and worry about Haste breakpoints.

we've been gemming pure secondary stats since the release of MoP. I haven't used a single intellect gem since I entered MSV normal with full blue gear (except from when I didn't know about orange gems with exp and haste/mastery). I don't know if running GoSup brings Int closer at lower gear levels, but 500 ilvl seems a bit high to recommend it.

edit: what should be recommended is gemming quite aggressively with haste to reach extra ticks at 6637 and 9778 haste rating. If you cant reach 9778 haste and have no rppm trinkets (any trinket from ToT) you should dump rest into mastery. if you have any rppm trinkets you can probably just go haste all the way, even if you can't get it to 9778.

[goombatommy]

I saw some math here recently backing it up possibly being a DPS gain in some situations to channel DS, which he's probably referring to. maybe someone who remembers when it was posted can dig throug the thread to see the posts related to it.


we've been gemming pure secondary stats since the release of MoP. I haven't used a single intellect gem since I entered MSV normal with full blue gear (except from when I didn't know about orange gems with exp and haste/mastery). I don't know if running GoSup brings Int closer at lower gear levels, but 500 ilvl seems a bit high to recommend it.

edit: what should be recommended is gemming quite aggressively with haste to reach extra ticks at 6637 and 9778 haste rating. If you cant reach 9778 haste and have no rppm trinkets (any trinket from ToT) you should dump rest into mastery. if you have any rppm trinkets you can probably just go haste all the way, even if you can't get it to 9778.

Thanks! Okay, I'll look into regemming solely on Haste. What about reforging? Should I reforge Haste>Mastery? And I don't have any trinkets from ToT yet.

[Bonkura]

gems:

blue socket -> lightning wild jade
red socket -> wicked vermilion onyx
yellow socket -> quick sun's radiance

get 170 haste enchant on your gloves and put a brilliant serpent's eye in your legs (since you're for some reason only using one serpent's eye and 320 int > 480 haste/mastery/hit). make sure to grab all socket bonuses.

reforging:

5100 hit > 9778 haste > mastery/haste (probably doesn't matter what you go for, but I'd pick mastery) > crit
if you can't reach 9778 haste then check if you can get 9211 haste, if not go for the following
5100 hit > 6637 haste > mastery/haste > crit

remember expertise gives spell hit as well. I recommend reforgelite since it sorts that out for you.

[goombatommy]

gems:

blue socket -> lightning wild jade
red socket -> wicked wild jade
yellow socket -> quick sun's radiance

get 170 haste enchant on your gloves and put a brilliant serpent's eye in your legs (since you're for some reason only using one serpent's eye and 320 int > 480 haste/mastery/hit). make sure to grab all socket bonuses.

reforging:

5100 hit > 9778 haste > mastery/haste (probably doesn't matter what you go for, but I'd pick mastery) > crit
if you can't reach 9778 haste then check if you can get 9211 haste, if not go for the following
5100 hit > 6637 haste > mastery/haste > crit

remember expertise gives spell hit as well. I recommend reforgelite since it sorts that out for you.

Thank you so very much! Greatly appreciated. I will try this out tonight!

[Bonkura]

np. I put a typo there in the quoted post btw. it's wicked vermilion onyx, not wild jade. ^^;

also noticed now that you are running with grimoire of sacrifice. grimoire of supremacy is better with your gear. while I'm at it you should remove harvest life since it's not a dps gain in any situation, go for soul leech or dark regeneration. you also wanna remove the dark soul glyph and grab the healthstone and siphon life glyphs. third major glyphs doesn't matter (I usually always have exhaustion in that slot, since it's extremely useful on some fights while all other options are rarely used at all.

[goombatommy]

np. I put a typo there in the quoted post btw. it's wicked vermilion onyx, not wild jade. ^^;

also noticed now that you are running with grimoire of sacrifice. grimoire of supremacy is better with your gear. while I'm at it you should remove harvest life since it's not a dps gain in any situation, go for soul leech or dark regeneration. you also wanna remove the dark soul glyph and grab the healthstone and siphon life glyphs. third major glyphs doesn't matter (I usually always have exhaustion in that slot, since it's extremely useful on some fights while all other options are rarely used at all.

Haha it's okay, no biggie! I'm definitely going to try this out tonight, many thanks!

[dahri]

Dont worry about GoSac or GoSup. But according to me pets stink on ice on most ToT encounters. What you need to learn is to refresh DoTs when you have lots of procs. And thats when to use haunt.
Go get Affdots addon and understand when you have strong dots. Set up good tellmewhen/needtoknow or weakauras so yuo can se when you have procs.Refresh dots with SB:SS 1 sec before you lose your strong procs.

Also aff dps will increase a lot with gear and weapon and trinkets are ofc most important.

[Deleted]

Did the hotfixed the SoulSwap trick where you could SS back and forth and keep the power of the dots? I treid it last night at meagera and wasnt working.

[Deleted]

Did the hotfixed the SoulSwap trick where you could SS back and forth and keep the power of the dots? I treid it last night at meagera and wasnt working.

I dont have Lei Shen trinket, so my gain of DPS isnt that imba, but they didn't do anything about it. It's working.

[kaamila]

Did the hotfixed the SoulSwap trick where you could SS back and forth and keep the power of the dots? I treid it last night at meagera and wasnt working.

worked for me as of last night

[Deleted]

Did the hotfixed the SoulSwap trick where you could SS back and forth and keep the power of the dots? I treid it last night at meagera and wasnt working.

worked for me as of last night

Was still working for me also.

[Deleted]

I've been asked to play Aff/cheat on Ra-den, I noticed my dots do lose power over the course of the fight, even though they keep on critting 100%. They start at like 100k, then 84k, then 67k.

[Deleted]

im still fairly sure that keeping the buffs when you soul swap is intented, the keeping the buffs rolling continously with the dots is not however, wouldnt make much sense if it wasnt like this tbh, if it wasnt then there wouldnt be much point in using soulswap.

I've been asked to play Aff/cheat on Ra-den, I noticed my dots do lose power over the course of the fight, even though they keep on critting 100%. They start at like 100k, then 84k, then 67k.

read some blue poster saying that they had added some crit protection to the trinket, so that after a while it wouldnt work or work to a much smaller degree for some classes, particularly spriests they have prolly added something similar to locks now, or atleast soul swap. this was a while back tho.

[Count Zero]

All I can add is that when I tried the SS thing on Megs my dps was lower than when I just did it without the SS thing (no Lei Shen trink at the time, but I had a 10-stack of the Wushoolay buff + Dark Soul + Timelust), last week. Yet on dummy tests (haven't tried it this week -- but since I got UVLS [lfr version] I could give it a go) it was a definite gain.

Would help if the folks without such info in their sigs noted what region they play in -- possible a hotfix got applied for one of Euro/NA but not the other, or happened a day after or something ... ? I'll hit the dummies here in a bit and report back.

edit/update:

... except I forgot I just ditched Afflic for Demo until I can socket my legendary gem and/or get a 2nd 522 rppm trink ... haha ... closing in on 24 hours without sleep, sorry. hah.

[Deleted]

Yea, being able to roll the dots infinitely definitely not intended. That said i think its not a bad thing overall. I just think they need to make it so that you can never soul swap back to a target that those specific dots have been on. There may be a few fights you could abuse that on but for the most part that would cause the dots to fall off at some point. You could get some absurd numbers at the start of council, but with say three rounds of dots going unless your really planning out where they're going chances of you messing up and losing a couple are pretty large.

Only exception i can think of is maybe dark animus, but as soon as you start dps on animus you'd stick your dots on animus, and as soon as it was going to fall off you could swap to massive and then they're gone. Horridon maybe too but depending on hwo good you are at killing adds if you dont have adds to swap betwee doors on you woudlnt get much out of it sicne you could only swap off of horridon once. Would much prefer a fix like that as opposed to something that makes soul swap pointless.

[Deleted]

I think they should fix the SS thing already and its sad that it ruined affliction rankings. It was fun for first few times i did it, but its very frustrating to accidentally override your opener dots with worse dots. I'll be playing demo while farming ToT except jinrohk and jikun, since can't be arsed to do this soul swapping and i like getting wol rankings.

[Deleted]

I just think they need to make it so that you can never soul swap back to a target that those specific dots have been on.

I'd much rather they simply made it so exhaling applied the current procs.

It's both intuitive and fixes any gaming of the system, since I think it's fair to say abusing opener dots for the entire fight duration wasn't intended.