I need help with Affliction

[Revea1eD]

I can not get my head round how to improve my affliction DPS, I did Antorus HC ( only two bosses) and the logs say my DPS is low... Please can people help me...

Logs: warcraftlogs.com/rankings/character/27665627/17#metric=dps

[Trillest]

There are alot of reasons why your dps is low. I suggest doing some research from websites or even the Warlock discord sever. Just at first glance here are a few of the most obvious issues...

1.You have no raid tier bonuses as part of your equipped gear. Dungeons and Raid are different, and so are the requirements to do well in them. Prior to this most recent patch, most Affliction Warlocks were forced to wear 2pc T19 and 4pc T20 to do sufficient damage.
2.Your trinkets are not very good for your spec. With item stat forging removed and base level forging being boosted on steroids, trinkets can be the most important piece or pieces depending on your spec/class. This is mostly due to the mass amounts of them in the game, and only a handful being good in raid/dungeon/questing etc.
3.Youre using the wrong legendary combination for ST dps. Blizzard did adjust the numbers for legendary pieces so that the dps wouldnt be so noticeably lower or higher depending on which ones you had. However, for ST or cleave/aoe depending on the fight, it will boost your damage significantly to be wearing the best combination of 2 legendaries for that fight. Right now that is still up for debate, but it is looking as though Power Cord/Netherlord are still best for ST, and PowerCord/Hood may be best for cleave. If you havent learned how to sim your own character yet, I suggest starting there. If it is too much to handle, Pawn and AskMrRobot are decent with stat weights and advice to begin with.

[agentsi]

I will echo everything Trillest said.

Most of your gear just looks to be a combo of highest ilvl stuff, and your ilvl is low for heading into normal Atbt. This is not the thing to do with Warlocks in general, Affliction is the worst of the three specs when it comes to prioritizing proper stats always. You want Mastery on everything if you can, then sprinkle in Crit/Haste and try to ignore vers if and where possible. Make use of Raidbots.com, sim yourself after every piece of gear. Get stat weights after every upgrade or two. Get 75 points into your weapon asap, and sim relics for upgrades. If they have the wrong stats even a 40ilvl upgrade won't be an upgrade over some specific combos. ( Trust me, I know, 980 blood relic wasn't as good as my 940, 5k less dps... /cry) Stat sticks with int are better than most on use effect trinkets. A 910 haste or mastery is better than Terror from below, in anything that isn't a mythic + run.

I think once you make a habit of simming yourself, make gear decisions based on proper stats ( other than four piece ), you will see a good climb in dps. Also, don't look at the overall ranking, try to focus on your ilvl for now until you have the proper gear. Another good thing I do is, look at what other warlocks are using talent wise on boss fights. For example, Absolute Corruption is almost never used other than maybe on Eonar. Using Contagion is almost always a dps increase, unless you're spamming Seeds instead of UA.

[VarianceWoW]

The previous advice about gear is mostly decent, but looking at your actual rotation there are some other more important problems that you can work on. One thing thats been suggested that I don't really agree with is to sim your stat weights. You should definitely be simming to find the biggest DPS upgrades but the stat weights you get from it unless you really know what you are doing with sims are going to be poor gearing advice. Sims will only give you pure single target stat weights and mastery although decent for single target completely obliterates the other stats on multi-target. If you follow your simmed stat weights you are going to end up with gear way too haste and crit heavy and way too mastery poor. The default stat weights from lockonestopshop.com are a much better composite stat weight for the type of fights you will actually encounter in ABT, those weights are Mastery: 2.45 Haste: 2.25 Crit: 1.94 Vers: 1.45 Int: 1.0

Now on to the rotational stuff that you can fix now while you work on improving your gear and getting tier sets. By far the biggest rotational problem I see is reap usage, you are mostly casting reap before you start your UA drain cycles, this is a really bad idea as you want to make sure you have reap up for the entire drain cycle if you can. The ideal way to do this is to cast 2-3 UAs then hit reap and immediately drain soul after reap. Reap is off the GCD so you can start your drain the instant you cast reap and this is what you should aim for. Also your first drain cycle on the opener with soul harvest up you missed hitting reap there, this is one of the most important reaps of the fight and you absolutely have to hit it during your first drain cycle with soul harvest running. Moving deeper into the fight at 51 seconds you cast 4 UAs off of 2 starting shards, there is no reason to dump all these shards here, the only time you want to be dumping more than 3 UAs is to avoid capping shards or during periods with big damage buffs(soul harvest, trinket procs, boss taking increased damage, etc). There a few more times where you over spend shards when you don't need to, the goal is to have at least 2 UAs in every drain cycle, you have a few drain cycles with only 1 UA. Shard spending strategy will change a bit with 4pT21 when keeping up the 4p debuff is another reason to spend shards. You also have one instance at the 2:15 mark where you dump 3 UAs and don't drain them and then you pop SH after these UAs have mostly ticked and follow that with a single UA drain cycle. One last thing is you capped on shards 2 times, not capping shards is a very high priority and should almost never happen especially without T20 4p. If you only absorb one thing from my wall of text it should definitely be to work on your reap usage and make sure to cast it after your UAs but before your drain soul. Your dot uptime is good, you let agony drop once and corruption twice but immediately refreshed both times so keep doing that.

A few adjustments to your rotation as well as some better gear should improve your numbers significantly.

[Count Zero]

I need to find a way to get back to basics ... I have some bad habits baked into muscle memory.

[Staysafe]

Very useful thread. Just hit 110 and 890 ilvl, but noticed my DPS is still insanely low compared to everyone else in LFR. Seems my biggest problem is not having any tier pieces or legendaries.

[Deleted]

I can not get my head round how to improve my affliction DPS, I did Antorus HC ( only two bosses) and the logs say my DPS is low... Please can people help me...

Logs: warcraftlogs.com/rankings/character/27665627/17#metric=dps

Take your log and load it into this website,

It breaks down what you are doing and what you are not doing correctly within your spec, the data can be very useful for identifying faults where you may not think you are doing anything wrong.

https://wowanalyzer.com/