What's the point of Corruption & Curse of agony?

[Nalam the Venom]

Hey.

My Warlock is only lvl 18 so far, But i'm really wondering, What's the point of Curse of agony and corruption? They do absolutly no damage compared to drain soul & Unstable Affliction.. Do affli locks get some passive that increase their damge later? Or maby they cause some other attack to procc? Atm they just feel worthless and i'm even wondering why i should even use them.

I just did "Cookie" Last boss in Deadmines and Drain soul & Undtable did around 3300 dmg each, While corruption barely reached 600 :/

[JustaWarlock]

It's very different at 110. For leveling, they're probably not very useful unless you multi dot a bunch of mobs.

[Deleted]

Agony is a shard generator, and needs time to ramp up, and Corruption in general is a solid, easy damage ability. You'll see the benefits, when you get to any bosses with mobility requirements.

[Lazuli]

It's only one global so you may as well use it, not every ability is gonna do the same dmg, classes are abominations at low lvl compared to max. It will be very different with talents and artifact.

[wholol]

Hey.

My Warlock is only lvl 18 so far, But i'm really wondering, What's the point of Curse of agony and corruption? They do absolutly no damage compared to drain soul & Unstable Affliction.. Do affli locks get some passive that increase their damge later? Or maby they cause some other attack to procc? Atm they just feel worthless and i'm even wondering why i should even use them.

I just did "Cookie" Last boss in Deadmines and Drain soul & Undtable did around 3300 dmg each, While corruption barely reached 600 :/

warlock spell scaling is huge, at low levels you're terribly undergeared and ur spells hit for nothing.

[Bloodyleech]

First: at low level some abilities are just not as good as with high level
Second: Compare the use of GCD's - one corruption does more dmg than one tick of drain soul.
Thrid: Unstable is your strongest ability and that wont change anytime.

As Lazuli said: Agony has a chance of giving you shards (for Unstable) as well as Drain Soul when an enemy dies. Curruption is simply a "do it every x seconds". DoT's in general are not that great in leveling content, since everything dies rather quick (you can multidot and pull multiple enemies, though). If an enemy lives long enough for a full stack Agony, it will deal greater dmg. Don't forget to refresh it before it falls off.

[Deleted]

First: at low level some abilities are just not as good as with high level
Second: Compare the use of GCD's - one corruption does more dmg than one tick of drain soul.
Thrid: Unstable is your strongest ability and that wont change anytime.

As Lazuli said: Agony has a chance of giving you shards (for Unstable) as well as Drain Soul when an enemy dies. Curruption is simply a "do it every x seconds". DoT's in general are not that great in leveling content, since everything dies rather quick (you can multidot and pull multiple enemies, though). If an enemy lives long enough for a full stack Agony, it will deal greater dmg. Don't forget to refresh it before it falls off.

I may as well explain fully how it works.

Agony says "A chance" but it is not very chance based. Whenever Agony does damage, it also fills a random amount of an invisible soul shard meter. The amount is something like 13-18% of the meter. When the meter is full, you get a soul shard, and the meter empties. The more enemies you have Agony on, the less each agony damage fills the meter, but it is still overall better to have agony on more targets, if those targets are going to live long enough for the agony damage to matter.

For late game, there is a difference in two values.

Damage per Second is overall how much damage you are doing.
Damage per Cast Time is how much damage an individual ability does, relative to how long it takes to cast.

Let's use three completely theoretical spells.

Curse of Super Painful Death does no damage for 1 minute, then explodes for 1,000 damage.

Curse of the Nosebleed does 20 damage, every second, for 20 seconds.

Dark Bolt does 100 damage instantly and nothing else.

All these spells take 1 second to cast.

So if I do nothing but spam Dark Bolt, I am doing 100 DPS.

If I cast Nosebleed and then stand there like a chump until I refresh Nosebleed, I do 20 DPS.

If I cast Nosebleed, then spam Dark Bolt until I refresh Nosebleed, I do just under 120 dps, because I "lose" 1 out of every 20 Dark Bolts re casting Nosebleed. However, then Nosebleed does its damage and costs me very little time.

If an enemy is going to be alive for 1 minute, then I should open with a Curse of Super Painful Death, which is only worth an extra 17 DPS.

But let's then compare how much damage each of these does for the time it takes to cast.

A Dark Bolt is 100 damage for 1 second. 100 Damage per Cast Time.
A Nosebleed is 20 ticks of 20, so 400 damage per Cast Time.
A Super Painful Death is 1000 damage for a single second, so it's 1000 damage per Cast Time.

But if the enemy only lives 10 seconds, then my Nosebleed will only deal half its damage, making it worth only about 200 DPCT, and my Super Painful Death will do ZERO damage. Even at 200 DPCT, that Nosebleed is STILL more powerful for the time I invested than a Dark Bolt.

TL;DR Dots don't hit hard, but they are very efficient; they are worth using as long as the time you invest in them gets you more damage than an equal amount of time spent on your filler spell. See if you can work out by judging on the fly when to use those DoTs and when not to.

[Azem]

Hey.

My Warlock is only lvl 18 so far, But i'm really wondering, What's the point of Curse of agony and corruption? They do absolutly no damage compared to drain soul & Unstable Affliction.. Do affli locks get some passive that increase their damge later? Or maby they cause some other attack to procc? Atm they just feel worthless and i'm even wondering why i should even use them.

I just did "Cookie" Last boss in Deadmines and Drain soul & Undtable did around 3300 dmg each, While corruption barely reached 600 :/

Yeah man, at low levels it's meh. The reality is, even at 110 the baseline dmg is still meh... However, with artifact traits and +sp your dots tick so strong it's unreal.

[Thelxi]

Perma corruption is awesome for leveling no one should have to explain that. Also if mobs have a lot of health you can pull them with agony and then cast a seed for some nice aoe.

[Atraxxa]

Things always end up working differently towards end-game in most games, as a general rule you should prob avoid passing judgment on something in the first hour of gameplay

[Caprix]

Well actually corruption damage been only 20% or UA damage is not very different from what you will get at end game with some ST talents
Still cool for an instant cast every 15s

[Deleted]

Hey.

My Warlock is only lvl 18 so far, But i'm really wondering, What's the point of Curse of agony and corruption? They do absolutly no damage compared to drain soul & Unstable Affliction.. Do affli locks get some passive that increase their damge later? Or maby they cause some other attack to procc? Atm they just feel worthless and i'm even wondering why i should even use them.

I just did "Cookie" Last boss in Deadmines and Drain soul & Undtable did around 3300 dmg each, While corruption barely reached 600 :/

They are instant cast and don't require anything to cast.
Drain Soul and UA maybe did 3300dmg each but you also have to take into account how many UA's you casted and how many seconds did you spend Draining Soul.
On longer fights and on fights where you have to move is where you see their point. On targets that die fast and where you generate shards, yea they are more or less pointless.

[cafecito820]

Any spec that relies heavily on damage-over-time (dot) spells is going to perform poorly as low levels. Just by their nature, they do fantastic damage -over- -time-. But, they do almost nothing against enemies that barely last more than a second or two. Low level dungeons are a very poor indicator of a spell's value.

If you want to do more damage in dungeons, try Destruction or Demonology. Destruction will have a lot more hard-casted spells (like a mage), but the damage is all at once instead of over time. Demonology will have a beefy demon that will be in melee range with the tank, and will get lots of hits in while you're back casting.

Otherwise, just enjoy the carry until later levels when things start living longer and Affliction can start to shine a bit more.

[Deleted]

Perma corruption is awesome for leveling no one should have to explain that. Also if mobs have a lot of health you can pull them with agony and then cast a seed for some nice aoe.

Yup, best talent for lvling, all you need to do is click and they die.

[Kirroth]

TL;DR Dots don't hit hard, but they are very efficient; they are worth using as long as the time you invest in them gets you more damage than an equal amount of time spent on your filler spell. See if you can work out by judging on the fly when to use those DoTs and when not to.

To expand on this, your DoTs are at maximum efficiency when the target lives long enough for them to deal all or most of their damage. Which is fine for dungeon or raid bosses, but can really suffer when you're trying to kill open world quest mobs quickly. So what's the solution? Spreading your damage to more targets at the same time.

Sure, it might take three times as long to let your Corruption and Agony alone kill a target rather than focusing Drain and UA on them. But if you can throw those DoTs on five targets at once and have them all dying at the same time, suddenly you come out way ahead on the time efficiency scale.

How viable is that playstyle at your low level? I honestly have no idea. It was almost 10 years ago that I first leveled my Warlock, and it's an entirely different game now. However, between your Voidwalker tanking some of them and a little Drain Soul to heal yourself once your DoTs are up, I suspect you'll be able to pull rather more than one mob at a time. You should give it a try and see how many you can pull at once before you're at risk of dying.

[Biomega]

One of the big factors involved is Mastery, which you only get at level 78 and which increases your DoT damage substantially - raid-geared max level characters will regularly have 120% Mastery or more, which means +120% damage on DoTs you don't have at low levels.

Affliction leveling used to be all about spamming Haunt - a spell you literally never use at max level, but which used to oneshot just about any mob well into the level 80s if you had full heirloom gear. Now that the leveling experience has received its overhaul, I have no idea what the best way is.

In any case, the whole paradigm of "learn your class while leveling" is mostly a myth. Many classes have substantially different endgame (raid) rotations than they do leveling up. You'll have to relearn a lot of things once you hit 110.

[ydraw]

FWIW I've been leveling a new warlock on horde to test out the new leveling system. It's actually pretty nice to be able to cast a few spells at a monster instead of just 1 shotting everything. I'm about level 40 now.

At the beginning, haunt would do 60-70% of the mobs health. Cast a haunt then drain soul while it's flying and it would be dead by the 2nd tick of drain soul.

Now I'm around level 40 I'm going with Unstable Affliction - Haunt - Drain for regular quest mobs.

It is nice though that when fighting against dungeon bosses now it is actually worth casting Agony for the shards, since most dungeon bosses at this level are taking about 8-9 UAs before they die. Against regular dungeon elites I'm putting up a corruption (talented for absolute corruption) on each then haunt/drain the lowest health. Doing this I'm keeping up with every other class.

[Deleted]

During WQ's I just burning rush around putting Agony and sometimes corruption on my target, then go to the next. They never survive the duration .

[Utha]

I run around dotting up with corruption and then choose the mob with the most health left and continue into my rotation. Soul Flame gets to them and boom, nice little chain reaction. If the mobs are stronger then I usually dot up agony, corruption and siphon life before moving onto the next mob. Afflic locks can do some insane DPS at end game.

[ydraw]

Before you get Mastery they are largely useless. OP was leveling a low level Warlock.