[5.4] Affliction Warlock and Encounter Specific Guides

[Deleted]

Hello wlocks!

I am having the biggest headache ever, since I am playing this class.


I am so puzzled at stat weights ... like I never was before.

Should I go for hit cap? Is haste > mastery for me, is it not?

I was thinking to go for 10% haste and hard mastery after this, also trying to achieve hit cap.

What is your opinion? How I can find the most accurate stat weights for my character?

[Deleted]

by simcrafting your character.

[Deleted]

by simcrafting your character.

Thank you for being less useful/helpful than a wall. I know it is called simcrafting. I just want to know what tool are the different players using...

I am using Mr.Robot... is it worthy and could it be trusted?

[Huevos]

Thank you for being less useful/helpful than a wall. I know it is called simcrafting. I just want to know what tool are the different players using...

I am using Mr.Robot... is it worthy and could it be trusted?

When people say SimCraft, that's what they mean, so he wasn't being unhelpful. SimCraft is the tool. It's actually "SimulationCraft", but that's the only thing SimCraft means.

And for what it's worth I don't trust Mr. Robot on it's own, it's only useful when used with tools like SimCraft, because you need to be able to put in your own stat weights.

[EvreliaGaming]

Get 4198 Haste and "close" to your hit cap, then stack Mastery. Simples.

[xskarma]

http://simulationcraft.org/

Go here, look around the site, take in all the information it gives and try to get a handle on it. Once you feel comfortable that you know what they are talking about and understand what kind of information the sims give you then download the Simcraft program, and start looking around in that. When you've had a look at all the options and bells and whistles use it to upload you character with the options you want, then run a sim for it. Then take some time to dig through the information you get from it. Once you know a bit how to translate what you got from the BiS heroic sims to your own sims, it's time to get your own stat weights. Go to Options -> Scaling and tick the boxes for crit, mastery, hit and haste, at least, and do a sim with that of at least 10k iterations. Voila, your very first stat weights. These stat weights will not tell you everything you need to know, but it's a start. Once you have your statweights you can plug them into MrRobot, and reforge/gem your gear as appropriate. Then import your char again, and run the Sim again. You'll get different weights and different DPS numbers. Look at if the result was higher then before, reforge with the new stat weights, then Sim again. After doing this several times you should be able to get a good idea on what does what for your char. If you want to skip all the extra reforging use the Reforge Plot option of SimC and wait a long time till it's done, then look at what the graph tells you, and try to manually find your own statweights. And every time you reforge and get a new setup, you start the process over again.

Did this sound like it costs a lot of gold in reforging and a lot of time? then you got the right message. Doing this is not for people that want a quick and easy way to do more DPS. Those people use the default statweights on MrRobot and get 90% of the result for 1% of the effort. Using SimC is a complex tool that takes time and effort and takes a certain amount of understanding to get the results you want.

Still I can recommend trying it out and looking at the results you get, cause if you are smart enough you'll learn a bit about how WoW and gearing and reforging works and you'll come away a better player.

[Jenerena]

Get 4198 Haste and "close" to your hit cap, then stack Mastery. Simples.

Well I don't know about your gear level, but according to wowreforge it isn't even possible for me to get over 3.8k haste. So I've dropped it to 3045 haste and I'm going full mastery from there.

[Deleted]

Get 4198 Haste and "close" to your hit cap, then stack Mastery. Simples.

Well I don't know about your gear level, but according to wowreforge it isn't even possible for me to get over 3.8k haste. So I've dropped it to 3045 haste and I'm going full mastery from there.

I've managed to get 4.4k haste, 4k mastery and 4.3k (12.5%) hit.

Alas, last time I shoved that into simcraft the stat weights I got back had mastery at 1.5x the value of haste. I've not had time to mess around with forging small portions into mastery and hoping the gap narrows (I'm aware high mastery makes haste valuable and vice versa), but the disparity seemed a tad large for my liking. I was under the assumption that keeping the two within around 400pt of each other was the way to go, I'm starting to doubt that.

Will delve further into it tommorow, curious as to if I'm taking this in the "right" direction and the high value of mastery is simply indicating that that's what I should be stacking now (which was my intention) and how other 'locks are handling their stat weights.

[Brusalk]

Hello wlocks!

I am having the biggest headache ever, since I am playing this class.


I am so puzzled at stat weights ... like I never was before.

Should I go for hit cap? Is haste > mastery for me, is it not?

I was thinking to go for 10% haste and hard mastery after this, also trying to achieve hit cap.

What is your opinion? How I can find the most accurate stat weights for my character?

Haste and Mastery scale synergistically.

What you should do is get your haste and mastery within 300-400 rating and with more mastery than haste.

[Rustjive]

Well I don't know about your gear level, but according to wowreforge it isn't even possible for me to get over 3.8k haste. So I've dropped it to 3045 haste and I'm going full mastery from there.

That's because WoWReforge is broken and wrong. You can get to almost 6k Haste in your gear (not that you would want to). You would need to gem secondaries over Intellect, but that might even be a gain for you depending on your current stat weights.

[Jenerena]

That's because WoWReforge is broken and wrong. You can get to almost 6k Haste in your gear (not that you would want to). You would need to gem secondaries over Intellect, but that might even be a gain for you depending on your current stat weights.

Well yes, but that's because wowreforge doesn't even take into account gems or enchants. It's just so frustrating at the moment - reforgelite doesn't seem to be giving me the answers I'm looking for, wowreforge doesn't seem right, and simcraft won't do plots. I just get a little question mark on the results instead of the graph. So right now I have no idea what I should be doing.

I just need Simcraft to show me a reforge plot 2000 each way. That will tell me everything...

I did actually win the Elegon trinket last night, which has a nice chunk of haste. I imagine I can get to at least 4.4k haste now, and then go mastery. It 'seems' to be a good option for now (I stress 'seems' though).

I might have to check Mr Robot out.

[Justusy]

I keep seeing it recommended to go 4198 haste, but I found it easy to get to 4717 haste with pre-raid gear (and maybe a pvp piece or two). This is another corruption tick, and in my current gear the simulation thinks getting to this point is another 300 dps over going to 4198 haste then all mastery.


The sim also found 4717 haste to be significantly (500dps) better than going 3043 haste and then all mastery for the 380ish gear I'm using atm.

[Deleted]

Question.

With the upcoming changes to Kil'jaeden's Cunning (increases cast and channel time by 50% 30%), reckon it'll become more useful than Archimonde's Vengeance?

[xskarma]

Question.

With the upcoming changes to Kil'jaeden's Cunning (increases cast and channel time by 50% 30%), reckon it'll become more useful than Archimonde's Vengeance?

Me personally, probably not. I still don't like the self snare, and I can usually get by with just instants, Life Tap and Fel Flame.

[Tresdallah]

Question.

With the upcoming changes to Kil'jaeden's Cunning (increases cast and channel time by 50% 30%), reckon it'll become more useful than Archimonde's Vengeance?

Even with the snare I personally like it for Heroic Stone Guard. I'm the amethyst side "runner" which is what we call the almost full-time panel lighter upper lol. Off the start the druid with me does his roar thing which basically nullifies the self snare and I can run and channel MG as opposed to just Fel Flaming This is great because it allows me to have all CDs and a pot popped and I can retain a relatively decent opening burn on the boss. Obviously I don't constantly use KJC in this fight because outside of Amethyst/Jasper Petrification I need to pop a CD and get the debuff off me as fast as possible, but I find that it's much more useful than AV in this particular fight. As long as I don't herpderp, I don't really take much damage from the dogs (only unavoidables being Overload and Jade Crystals) so AV is really useless in my opinion.

[nightfalls]

AV is actually almost completely, 100% useless... take a look at the (post-nerf) damage done from the ability when not abusing it (in other words, taking unavoidable damage - which is almost NEVER worth it post-nerf), and you see it does relatively little whether activated or not. There's only a handful of situations where I would say it is worth it.

Kiljaeden's Cunning as you pointed out is good for Heroic Stone Guard. Mannoroth's Fury has its uses too.

(Assume you are taking constant 20k damage ticks for a 10 minute fight. Archimonde's Vengeance will only do 600k damage over the entire 10 minutes. This is an extreme amount of damage intake (1.2 million damage per minute), I don't even believe will of the emperor on heroic mode has this much damage taken over time. Of course you can usually time AV's activated ability for some extreme gains, but considering the "passive disabled on cooldown" you will usually only lower damage from it, and will rarely gain any useful amount of DPS to the boss from the ability. Proper use of Kiljaeden's Cunning as an activated ability will often be a much bigger DPS increase).

The only recent fight (in a low level raid) where I can think AV is the clear choice would be Heroic Ultraxion. And even then, the total DPS done (assuming optimal usage over 6 minutes) is a 900 DPS increase, which isn't bad (about a 2% dps increase)... but this is where it literally tops off - by a lot (Ultraxion's raid damage taken, by any standards of a boss, is ridiculously high). I won't say "never use AV" - but it's often far from a good choice.

[Purpleisbetter]

there's something not really clear when reading around.
For example, in some guides you may read that refreshing your dots when u got trinket procs is, usually at least, a dps loss.

In raid i, once my opener is done, normally SB:SS few seconds later as soon as both the new darmoon and alchemy trinket proc all together (is like 8k intellect worth proc).

to be more accurate:

(got a second lock in raid, not optimal but the guy is willing to keep up CoE, good for me :X )
-synapse spring + pre pot
- SS:SB
- Haunt
- MG.
[i save DG for lust fase wich we always plan before to make it fair for everyone]
A few instants later, on regular basis, both my trinket proc up, so i immediatly SB:SS again.

Is this correct?

And while midfight, should i always go for dots refreshing when i got strong +int procs? (and mostrly due to shard starvation, refreshing them manually)

[EvreliaGaming]

there's something not really clear when reading around.
For example, in some guides you may read that refreshing your dots when u got trinket procs is, usually at least, a dps loss.

In raid i, once my opener is done, normally SB:SS few seconds later as soon as both the new darmoon and alchemy trinket proc all together (is like 8k intellect worth proc).

to be more accurate:

(got a second lock in raid, not optimal but the guy is willing to keep up CoE, good for me :X )
-synapse spring + pre pot
- SS:SB
- Haunt
- MG.
[i save DG for lust fase wich we always plan before to make it fair for everyone]
A few instants later, on regular basis, both my trinket proc up, so i immediatly SB:SS again.

Is this correct?

And while midfight, should i always go for dots refreshing when i got strong +int procs? (and mostrly due to shard starvation, refreshing them manually)

Honestly, I don't know. My strategy at the moment is to refresh with a second SB:SS before my first major proc expires (which usually means all of my procs are up at the moment that I SB:SS - Trinket x2, Lightweave, Windsong, Dark Soul). However, there's a period of around 10-15 seconds in between those two SB:SS casts where my DoTs are not benefitting at all from my proc effects. I'm not convinced I've gotten it down perfectly yet, but it's close. I managed 90k dps on Feng today, and I can pretty reliably reach 150k on the pull.

[Rustjive]

For procs that happen after SB:SS but during the opener, a Fel Flame after the first or second Haunt will cover you just fine. You need one anyways to maximize your MG time. It doesn't get Agony but it's stacking up for a while anyways.

[Deleted]

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Thanks for sharing your opinions. I'm aiming to be level 90 this weekend (I'm either really lazy or there's too many good games to play, haven't decided which yet), and haven't yet decided which talent to go for. Sounds like it'll be KFC- sorry, KJC.

KJC is only a one minute cooldown, correct?