[5.4] Affliction Warlock and Encounter Specific Guides

[xskarma]

How do you get soul shards back if nightfall WILL NOT proc, and you used up all on soul swap and haunt because of you ve to have it always on?

You can't get enough shards to keep Haunt up 100% of the time, so spend your shards wisely. Nightfall is the only viable way to get shards back. You can get shards back by using Drain Soul, but this is a DPS loss to do constantly to keep Haunt up 100%.

Use Soul Swap to put instant dots up at the start, and then at strategic moments, mostly when you can afford the shards to do it. Use your shards on Haunt, preferably when you have INT procs or cooldowns like Dark Soul running. MAke sure you have full dots running for at least 9-10 seconds when using Haunt, and then try and get as much Malefic Grasp channeled in as you can. These are the basics of Affliction.

[Gorthan]

What castbar addon is everyone using to track MG? I'm a fan of gnosis but they have yet to update the addon to show the ticks. I think there is a way to add a spell into gnosis and possibly make it show the ticks. I'd rather not mess it up and end up clipping my MG at the wrong time.

Try Gnosis

[Deleted]

It s not a troll. What do you think why i wrote these? Because i dont know aff, even after reading pages and looking videos. I was ALWAYS destruction, and i never ever played aff.
Whats your problem with the q-s?
I asked if hit cap is better or non capped is better in a destruction gear, with a lot of crits, but very low haste? I managed with reforges and gems only 4k haste with 5,4k mastery. This is when im hit capped.
The other questions were coherent for me, if not than sorry. How do you get soul shards back if nightfall WILL NOT proc, and you used up all on soul swap and haunt because you ve to have it always on?
Thx

Just read the guide on page 1.
Or stay destru if this is the spec you like / your are familiar with. Some poeple pull very, very high dps in destruction.

[Deleted]

Or stay destru if this is the spec you like / your are familiar with. Some poeple pull very, very high dps in destruction.

I'll echo this, a well played destruction lock will probably shift better numbers than a poorly played affliction warlock. I'm not saying don't learn to play affliction, but if you're that uncomfortable / unclear about some points even after watching the video / reading the first page, you might be better off sticking with what you know for a while.

[Hypoxic]

Go to the wowace site and download the most recent alpha version of gnosis. They've added MG to it.

Thanks alot! It works perfectly.

[Tyraen]

Thank you guys! I will keep these in mind!

[Ridcully]

Any tips for Wind Lord Mel'jarak (4th boss)?
I'm pulling about 125-128k dps on our 6%-10% wipes, which is ok judging by WoL logs. But surely there are some tricks that can improve my dps. One mistake I figured out - didn't use an Infernal. Pet instead of GoSac maybe?

[Deleted]

How much should one look at the scale factors shown in SimulationCraft? I have reforged to get Hit Cap > Mastery > Haste > Crit. My last simulation got the scalefactors: Haste = 1,96 and Mastery = 1,63. I currently have around 3200 haste and 4350 mastery ratings. It doesn't feel like I'm close to the haste-breakpoint yet and reforging to get 4200 haste would give me more haste than mastery which isn't recommended according to #1. Am I not using the scale factors correctly?

[Szemere]

How much should one look at the scale factors shown in SimulationCraft? I have reforged to get Hit Cap > Mastery > Haste > Crit. My last simulation got the scalefactors: Haste = 1,96 and Mastery = 1,63. I currently have around 3200 haste and 4350 mastery ratings. It doesn't feel like I'm close to the haste-breakpoint yet and reforging to get 4200 haste would give me more haste than mastery which isn't recommended according to #1. Am I not using the scale factors correctly?

Having a Haste scale factor higher than Mastery, might indicate that there is a very beneficial breakpoint in haste that might be worth getting, and sacrificing some Mastery over. I'd recommend taking a look at this and reforging between Haste and Mastery a few times.

As to how much you should pay attention to Simcraft: Movement and Multidotting basically makes Mastery and Haste when getting full breakpoints, stronger, due to them affecting DoTs more than the channels, compared to Int. Otherwise, they are pretty accurate for single-target fights with minimal movement.

[Deleted]

Firstly let me say thanks very nice guide.

If I may I have a couple of questions (more than a couple?) that I have after playing affliction some more.
I hope you don't mind I guess they fall into the more advanced/tweeking section, perhaps you could add the answers in one of your guides.

1) Does Dark Soul stack with hero, I am guessing not?
2) During hero do we need to refresh our dots just after it is cast to get immediate benifit?
3) During hero do we spend shards on haunt just as if DS was up?
4) If at the start of the 20% phase we are short on shards what has priority haunt or SB-SoulSwap, I am guessing haunt?
5) If there are two targets, which gives more DPS SB-SoulSwap on the second, or manual refresh of dots on both and haunt on primary target
6) During the 20% phase should we refresh the dots (with SB-SS) when the first dot is about to fall off, or wait until the last, I am guessing first unless there is about to be a DS tick?
7) When keeping haunt up I am guessing we should try to cast it before the last one has finished to get 100% uptime?
8) If I start channeling drain soul just before the 20% (e.g. 21%) do I get the benifit when the mob later drops below 20%?
9) If I am channeling drain soul < 20% HP and the mob gains HP do I keep the benifit for the duration of the channel?
10) I'm guessing on use trinkets should be used with DS as much as possible.
11) What gives more benifit a DoomGuard with the hero buff for his full duration or the DoomGuard with the mob < 20% for his full duration?

Apologies if these have been answers in the posts, I had a look and couldn't see the answers.

[hellhamster]

1) Does Dark Soul stack with hero, I am guessing not?
2) During hero do we need to refresh our dots just after it is cast to get immediate benifit?
3) During hero do we spend shards on haunt just as if DS was up?
4) If at the start of the 20% phase we are short on shards what has priority haunt or SB-SoulSwap, I am guessing haunt?
5) If there are two targets, which gives more DPS SB-SoulSwap on the second, or manual refresh of dots on both and haunt on primary target
6) During the 20% phase should we refresh the dots (with SB-SS) when the first dot is about to fall off, or wait until the last, I am guessing first unless there is about to be a DS tick?
7) When keeping haunt up I am guessing we should try to cast it before the last one has finished to get 100% uptime?
8) If I start channeling drain soul just before the 20% (e.g. 21%) do I get the benifit when the mob later drops below 20%?
9) If I am channeling drain soul < 20% HP and the mob gains HP do I keep the benifit for the duration of the channel?
10) I'm guessing on use trinkets should be used with DS as much as possible.
11) What gives more benifit a DoomGuard with the hero buff for his full duration or the DoomGuard with the mob < 20% for his full duration?

Apologies if these have been answers in the posts, I had a look and couldn't see the answers.

Maybe some are wrong, better warlocks than me need to look into them, but some are obvious.

1) No
2) You should, at least with Pandemic
3) Yes
4) Dots always have prio over haunt, use SB:SS if no dots are up
5) I found Glyph of Soulswap CD way too high for my tastes so I rarely use it (for example Stone Guards it's a good idea to unglyph it), I just keep my dots up on both as much as possible, use Haunt on primary target.
6) Use SB:SS when the first one is about to go off. You can wait one second or so if Drain Soul will award you a shard.
7) You can clip Haunts up to 10 seconds so you don't need to cast them back to back, so basically it's safe for Haunt to hit with 2 seconds or less of the previous Haunt, anything higher than that is probably a dps loss, unless you are sitting on shards.
8) If you cast Drain Soul at >20% and the first tick is at <20%, you gain the execute benefit.
9) Like 8, all that matters is when exactly of the boss' hp Drain Soul ticks. If it's <20%, it's all good.
10) Yes, but don't sit on them too much.
11) This one is the trickiest, I'm guessing both are about the same, but the first one is alot easier to pull off, the second one you will probably kill the boss without the full benefit of the Doomguard. In my opinion best Doomguard usage you can get is at the start, exactly when hero is popped and the rest of the cds are about to or are up already.

[Hypoxic]

Any tips for Wind Lord Mel'jarak (4th boss)?
I'm pulling about 125-128k dps on our 6%-10% wipes, which is ok judging by WoL logs. But surely there are some tricks that can improve my dps. One mistake I figured out - didn't use an Infernal. Pet instead of GoSac maybe?

After looking at logs I saw that meta was ahead of affliction by a bit; depending on the strat your group is running. My group CCed two trappers, one battle mender, and one of the melee mobs (can't think of their name at the moment)(i also might have the # of trappers and melee adds backwards.) We then had the two tanks group up the Boss and the other five adds and we cleaved them down and killed them all at the same time. Meta was the best choice imo for this fight with our strat. I put corruption on every mob at the start, hit grimore service: felguard, hit felstorm, hit impswarm, Infernal, 2HoG to stack Shadowflame, and hellfired until I had enough DR to refresh corruption to the max with voidray and put doom on all six mobs. I then spammed void ray until I dropped out of meta. From there its just 2HoG when you have them and helfire until corruption is at about 8 seconds (i liked to play it safe) to pop meta again and hit immo aura and then void ray spam to refresh all the corruptions. You do crazy aoe if you can do everything properly. I was pushing about 200K+ aoe dps on certain pulls. This isn't the easiest thing to do and i surely f'ed up at times but i found it very effective. Oh and use all your CD's whenever they are up obviously felstorm, impswarm, DS, and whatever else im forgetting. It's alot of stuff to juggle.

Unfortunately on the kill I out ranged a healer (while not moving) and got gibbed by the aoe without realizing it so my WoL sucks for that attempt. Recovering from a death with about 30+ molten core procs almost full DR and all my cooldowns poped is almost enough to make a grown man cry.

Hellfire(3 DR per mob it hits) is worse at DF regen than HL(10 +3 per other mobs it hits), it ticks faster .85 seconds compared to 1 though and it hits harder, i didn't try HL filling DF which i assume would equal more metas. I will next week. HL 28 DR per second vs. 18 per hellfire. There might be some way to Simcraft this but I'm still not the best at using it.

I'm sure the fight is fine for affliction but I just couldn't pass up the aoe fest for my groups strat.
EDT: had to remove the h t t p : / / w w w . so i could make the post because i just started using the forums.
Here's the demo rankings on WoL worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Heart_of_Fear/Wind_Lord_Mel'jarak/10N/Demonology_Warlock/[/url]
here's the affliction rankings on WoL worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Heart_of_Fear/Wind_Lord_Mel'jarak/10N/Affliction_Warlock/[/url] (basically looks like you Corr everything at the start and then use SB seed to keep it up while using SB:SS to put full dots up when you get a NF proc and then seed spam or HL
I dont think destruction is viable being 30 to 40k behind on the top rankings.

Also i'm very tired after raiding for 6 hours tonight so the grammer and spelling is probably terrible so let me know if you need anything clarified!

[Bonkura]

For Wind Lord I just kept Corruption on all targets with SB:SoC, no hardcasting. By doing this I was getting so many soul shards back that I could keep all dots on 3 targets with SB:SS and spend most of the time channeling MG/DS on the main target. It was 2x menders + boss, then 2x trappers + boss and 3x blademasters before full nuke on boss. I wasn't doing any padding, just killing what was supposed to be killed while keeping dots on boss (most of the time). My DPS wasn't particularly high in first phase (around 130k) but as you can see linked above #2 for affli locks on 10-man.

[Ridcully]

For Wind Lord I just kept Corruption on all targets with SB:SoC, no hardcasting. By doing this I was getting so many soul shards back that I could keep all dots on 3 targets with SB:SS and spend most of the time channeling MG/DS on the main target. It was 2x menders + boss, then 2x trappers + boss and 3x blademasters before full nuke on boss. I wasn't doing any padding, just killing what was supposed to be killed while keeping dots on boss (most of the time). My DPS wasn't particularly high in first phase (around 130k) but as you can see linked above #2 for affli locks on 10-man.

We don't have a main target, killing everyone almost simultaneously (healers first). Going to try GoSac, felhunter on healer in first phase when there is almost no draining and saccing void in second phase for additional damage.

[Tresdallah]

Any tips for Wind Lord Mel'jarak (4th boss)?
I'm pulling about 125-128k dps on our 6%-10% wipes, which is ok judging by WoL logs. But surely there are some tricks that can improve my dps. One mistake I figured out - didn't use an Infernal. Pet instead of GoSac maybe?

I didn't read the previous post so I will just let you know what I'm doing and you can judge for yourself what is best for you. My group just AoEs everything down sort of like Freya style. Get them all low and try to kill them within 10s of each other. I found that Demo was DECENT at best for this fight for me, but I'm definitely MUCH better at affliction than Demo since that is what I am rolling with in every other fight. Also, Aff tends to fair much better in p2 which is the most critical point as the room being full of bombs is bad. All and all Aff, imo, is the best to roll with because it's AoE is just as good (if not better) than Demo's for that prolonged amount of time when you can SB:SS at least 2 mobs the entire fight and roll SoCs with SB when necessary. Then clearly Aff is a better choice in p2 as the single target is much better.

So what I do, roll main DoTs on our kill target (which is the amber-trapper as we only have 1 of those active so that group is taking less overall damage from AoE), and roll off-dots on the main boss. Then it's literally just SoC spam for what seems like 10 minutes lol. I went back and forth between Infernal/DG, but the Infernal was only like a 2k overall increase (I would say these are valid numbers because I have about 60 wipes on him right now lol). I truly believe that DG is better especially if your group is using Lust at the end of the fight. The major game-breaker in this fight is killing the boss before enrage, yes, but it also helps to not have the entire room full of "mines".

[Ridcully]

I created an addon to keep track of your dot power.


Since it is my first attempt to write addon, it is beta for now.
http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/affdots

[Lyndonm33]

tremendous attempt to make the addon,
best of luck Ridcully

[xskarma]

I created an addon to keep track of your dot power.


Since it is my first attempt to write addon, it is beta for now.
http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/affdots/

That looks pretty interesting, will try it.

[Deleted]

I created an addon to keep track of your dot power.


Since it is my first attempt to write addon, it is beta for now.
http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/affdots/

Part of me will "miss" doing this manually, but I can't deny that if this works and does what it says on the tin, then it'd be a fantastic addition to most raiders arsenal.

[xskarma]

Allright tried it. No bugs or errors for me, works like it says it will. Very handy. Kudos to you Ridcully.

If you decide to do more work on the addon at some point I'd love a feature that will allow me to have the display either vertical (like it is now) or horizontal (with the dots side by side). I process info better that way for some strange reason and it's easier to fit into my UI. But minor point, for now I've got it stached on the side somewhere where I can see it out of the corner of my eye and that works too. If I have them horizontal though I'd use it instead of my normal dot timers.