[6.1] Affliction Warlock Guide

[Noxate]

I love the idea of SB:Haunt but we need more than baseline 4 shards or a way to get back shards in bunches.

Id rather have DS have a chance to regenerate shards and get rid of its DoT throttle. Would solve 2 problems at once as single target Aff wouldnt be so boring because we'd have more shards to play with and multitarget it would only give us slightly more shard generation.

At this point I think SB:SS should just get cut and put SS on a CD that costs no shards.

[Santoisms]

Id rather have DS have a chance to regenerate shards and get rid of its DoT throttle. Would solve 2 problems at once as single target Aff wouldnt be so boring because we'd have more shards to play with and multitarget it would only give us slightly more shard generation.

At this point I think SB:SS should just get cut and put SS on a CD that costs no shards.

Aff needs more baseline shards like WW Monks / Shadow got this expansion.

[Deleted]

Aff needs more baseline shards like WW Monks / Shadow got this expansion.

I disagree, what it needs is increased generation. Make nightfall much more common. Allow multiple corruptions to proc it. Increase amount gained by drain soul sniping or bring back sub 20 regen.

Priests, much like Paladins, needed the increase because their consumers cost all their resources, and they build them much quicker. It afforded them greater strategy in how to spend their resource.

It's not the same with soul shards.

[Noxate]

I disagree, what it needs is increased generation. Make nightfall much more common. Allow multiple corruptions to proc it. Increase amount gained by drain soul sniping or bring back sub 20 regen.

Priests, much like Paladins, needed the increase because their consumers cost all their resources, and they build them much quicker. It afforded them greater strategy in how to spend their resource.

It's not the same with soul shards.

The problem with soul shards is they are too unreliable to generate. You can be swimming in shards with high haste at times and then be barely getting enough shards to keep SB Haunt rolling. They just need to put something in to make it more consistent for these low gear levels.

[theostrichsays]

Potentially stupid question here.
This will be my first time ever main'ing a Lock. I love Affliction and detest Destruction, so I'm holding strong to makign ti work.
Using SimCraft, I'm looking at my gear, and manually added all my haste then added the 5%, checked it against my character screen to make sure I didn't forget highschool math. But on SimCraft page, it shows my Gear haste but I don't see anywhere it shows the 5% spec buff.
So is that something that it automatically takes into consideration under the hood, like in the spec information that I assume we just can't see?
Like I said probably really bloody stupid question, but I was wanting to make sure.
IF that is right, I would gladly sacrifice anybody on MMO-C's first born child for them to swap it to mastery.

[Zevoa]

I disagree, what it needs is increased generation. Make nightfall much more common. Allow multiple corruptions to proc it. Increase amount gained by drain soul sniping or bring back sub 20 regen.

Completely agree. Increase Nightfall proc chance by a marginal percent and reintroduce proc'ing off of multiple targets. If chance to proc above one target could have diminishing returns after x # of active corruptions, this would be a good medium.

The actually single target burst is pretty great for bosses in dungeons/potentially cm's if you're main specing an aoe variant of demonology and have it as your off spec.

[Deleted]

Some broad questions I've been wondering about, but had no time to sim with all the new stuff + life/work:

- how is the perma-DG talent looking atm, compared to SB: Haunt? is it better than sbh on single target high movement?
- how does aff with sbh fare against destro in 2-3 target cleave nowadays? I keep getting very, very mediocre results, am I being rusty or is the spec not so good? [my dot uptime is ok, they just don't seem to tick too hard + I sometimes struggle w/ shards, not getting 2 in 30s happens surprisingly often in my crap 627 gear]
- any recommended values of haste to aim for for reasonable shard gen? I don't mean bpoints, I mean a value of haste to go for first before favoring mastery, to at least have a nightfall proc every 10-12s on average

[Brusalk]

Completely agree. Increase Nightfall proc chance by a marginal percent and reintroduce proc'ing off of multiple targets. If chance to proc above one target could have diminishing returns after x # of active corruptions, this would be a good medium.

The actually single target burst is pretty great for bosses in dungeons/potentially cm's if you're main specing an aoe variant of demonology and have it as your off spec.

I can confirm. (As one who was getting beat in those Auch runs yesterday once you switched.. :P) Aff blows Destro out of the water for single target burst on boss fights in dungeons. Single target aff/aoe demo for CMs will probably be extremely powerful.

[theostrichsays]

So I was waiting on my guild mates to log on to do some dungeon spamming, and was bored so started to sim myself and noticed that it said Servitude was almost 1k more then Soul Burn.
I checked the Sample Profile, now I maybe could have made a mistake in it somewhere while changing the info, but it showed the same with that also, that Servitude was better single target then Soul Burn. I didn't check none of the raid geared sample profiles.
I know a lot of people who are better at math, and have been Warlocking much longer then me already hashed this out, but any guesses as to why it would be showing it as a higher sim?

[ComaCanadian]

So I was waiting on my guild mates to log on to do some dungeon spamming, and was bored so started to sim myself and noticed that it said Servitude was almost 1k more then Soul Burn.
I checked the Sample Profile, now I maybe could have made a mistake in it somewhere while changing the info, but it showed the same with that also, that Servitude was better single target then Soul Burn. I didn't check none of the raid geared sample profiles.
I know a lot of people who are better at math, and have been Warlocking much longer then me already hashed this out, but any guesses as to why it would be showing it as a higher sim?

probably because of the low amount of stats. where servitude starts off strong, but with better gear sb:haunt will outscale it.

[Santoisms]

So I was waiting on my guild mates to log on to do some dungeon spamming, and was bored so started to sim myself and noticed that it said Servitude was almost 1k more then Soul Burn.
I checked the Sample Profile, now I maybe could have made a mistake in it somewhere while changing the info, but it showed the same with that also, that Servitude was better single target then Soul Burn. I didn't check none of the raid geared sample profiles.
I know a lot of people who are better at math, and have been Warlocking much longer then me already hashed this out, but any guesses as to why it would be showing it as a higher sim?

probably because of the low amount of stats. where servitude starts off strong, but with better gear sb:haunt will outscale it.

This is what I have found as well, when using the 665 APL it's SB:Haunt > Serv.

[Junichi]

At what ilvl do you guys think aff will catch up single target with destro?

[kduv889]

Any thoughts on Affliction since the Hotfix went live today (11/25/14) to buff warlocks across the board?

- - - Updated - - -

I can confirm. (As one who was getting beat in those Auch runs yesterday once you switched.. :P) Aff blows Destro out of the water for single target burst on boss fights in dungeons. Single target aff/aoe demo for CMs will probably be extremely powerful.

This makes me so happy to see! This is exactly what I've been doing. I came into the xpac just trying to play Demo and nothing more. found it underperforming at low ilvl's so made Affliction my main spec and now i use Demo for AoE. As someone doing the daily CM, i'm constantly switching between Affl for some bosses and Demo for trash/other bosses. it's a beautiful thing!

[Zevoa]

At what ilvl do you guys think aff will catch up single target with destro?

4piece and gear that actually has haste.

[Cyberthug32]

Looking at my Tooltips, I don't see the hotfix in yet... But that could just be the Tooltip..

[Deleted]

Affliction is just fundamentally flawed spec, no matter how much they increase our damage. Even if affliction was top1 in patchwerk dps, it would be still awful on everything else than sustained dps where targets live longer than 1min. They overnerfed this spec, most of our shard regen are gone(drain soul ticks and dying mobs), added shard to soulswap. Seriously, only one of those would have been enough with snapshot removal to make this spec balanced. Now we need huge amount of shards to spread our dots, and with this extremely awful dot design that Agony has, it's so terribe to trying to spread dots on adds that die within 30seconds, it's not even worth it.

Affliction was my favorite spec during MoP, but I will never play it again until it can do something else than single target DPS, when even there it's currently carpage.

[Deleted]

Looking at my Tooltips, I don't see the hotfix in yet... But that could just be the Tooltip..

Tooltips don't get updated until an actual patch is released.

[Deleted]

What niches does affli have really? Single target i suppose it could have in the future, but if not. Why even play affli at all?

[Werst]

Right now I have a hard time finding a good reason to be aff. It's mechanically flawed. SS needs to be on the charge system. Take stacking off agony. SoC needs to instantly detonate and be a instant or 1 sec cast. It is just too slow to function in modern raids. Shard regeneration needs a buff, strong bad luck protection (1x per 10 sec baseline plus procs with no less than a 3 target limit. DL needs to get out of shadow or become like cobra/steady in that its unintertuptable with glyph and bake glyph baseline or build it into HL talent aff only.

[theostrichsays]

What niches does affli have really? Single target i suppose it could have in the future, but if not. Why even play affli at all?

For a PvE perspective the most useful thing I've found for Affliction so far, is needing to kill something early on really quick. The Daily CM's with my guild when UBRS was the CM, the 2nd boss we were cleaving then focusing the kill target, didn't work well. Swapped to Affliction and just put everything into that first add, and nuked him to the ground, and made the whole thing drastically easier.
Stuff like that and Everbloom Council have been the most use I've personally gotten from it in PvE.