Affliction Warlock Compendium - 3.3.5 Warlock PVE

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Originally Posted by sirstephen

Hello, I have a question about corruption rolling.
So, so far I've been using the nevermelting ice crystal and the potion of wild magic as prepots, as such i get the buff from the trinket then swap with a better one before the pull. Now, I'd like to know is the corruption under the nmic+wild magic effects stronger than the 4pt t10 10%buff? So should i refresh it when the proc happens or do i keep the nmic one? And again, do i refresh ir under 35% with the 4pt t10 pops or is the nmic still better?

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You simply save the NMIC on-use for when for until you get a 4p t10 proc. Most of the time you shouldn't have to be choosing between one or the other. The potion's bonus on the other hand is fine to forfeit, because it's a much smaller DPS gain than the other 2 factors.

Below 35%, the most ideal possible thing would be to have both Devious Minds and NMIC boosting your Corruption again. If your current Corruption has both these buffs, then re-applying it after 35% with only one of them up probably isn't going to be worth the GCD it takes. It'd probably be useful to simplify the +% crit chance buff on your Corruption into a +% damage buff, for easier comparison against Devious Minds and Death's Embrace. The figure will be a little different for each Warlock depending on their crit chance. IIRC for a high-end geared Warlock it works out to something like ~10-11%, so it's pretty much in the same ballpark that Devious Minds and Death's Embrace are.

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Originally Posted by sirstephen

So, so far I've been using the nevermelting ice crystal and the potion of wild magic as prepots, as such i get the buff from the trinket then swap with a better one before the pull. Now, I'd like to know is the corruption under the nmic+wild magic effects stronger than the 4pt t10 10%buff?

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And I just realized you were speaking of using a trinket other than NMIC in the encounter. But most of what I said about approximating the crit buff as a % damage improvement for comparison against Devious Minds still holds true. NMIC + guaranteed 200 crit from the Wild Magic pot will increase Corruption's damage by something like ~11.5-12.5%. In this case, you wouldn't refresh the crit-buffed Corruption on a Devious Minds proc alone, but you would after 35% if you had DM + Death's Embrace. Using this crit-buffed Corruption isn't that much of a gain to do, but technically a possible gain nonetheless. Although you'd also need to weigh in the chance to get a DM early within the Wild Magic window anyway - which is about 50% of the time - and also the DPS cost associated with delaying the proc of one of your trinkets.

It only really becomes a clear gain when you're also snapshotting a buff like Tricks of the Trade along with the NMIC. That creates a powerful enough snapshotted Corruption that will never be refreshed again until you have ToTT + Devious Minds + Death's Embrace, assuming the boss lives long enough past the 35% HP mark.

Also remember that in your opener you'd want to delay Corruption application for as long as possible, to give time for 3% crit and 5% spell crit debuffs to be applied on the boss, since these debuffs are also snapshotted for crit calculation. This is something that tends to be overlooked a lot.

Ret Pallies apply Heart of the Crusader pretty early on, usually on their 1st or 2nd GCD. Hopefully you have a Demo Lock that's smart enough to do a Shadow Bolt very early to apply Shadow Mastery for the sake of the raid DPS increase. The travel time of your Demo Lock's Shadow Bolt will have to be factored in.

For your opener I'd do something like:
1) Unstable Affliction
2) Curse of Agony
3) Haunt
4) Corruption

The idea is to put as many spells before Corruption as possible that don't eat up NMIC stacks. Haunt is fine to use just before Corruption application because the stack isn't lost until Haunt actually lands.

If you're far enough from the boss you could do:
1) Unstable Affliction
2) Curse of Agony
3) Shadow Bolt
4) Haunt
5) Corruption

This assumes you're far enough that Corruption will go off before your Shadow Bolt lands. If you got TotT right at the start, it should still be on you. Ideally this shouldn't be needed, but this is going to have one other benefit: you actually give enough time for 1 Unstable Affliction tick to occur before Corruption is applied, which means 15% of the time, you'll get lucky and pull off the Devious Minds + NMIC + TotT trifecta snapshot very early on.

Hey there. Nice guide, i have one questions though. I pretty much do more dps as demo than affliction right now.

At what rate of the gear should you swap to Affli? When you have the 2 bis trinkets and 4 set? Or dosent gear actually mather?

What's your gear like? An armory link might help.

And what's your basis of comparison here? One thing about Demo is that it provides more important caster buffs to the raid - and to itself - than Affliction. Mainly what I'm talking about is the Demonic Pact buff of course. In poorly organized 5-mans and 10-mans Demonology will do great for that reason. Having an actual capacity for burst, and especially burst AoE, can also play a significant role in tipping the scales in Demo's favour, depending on the fight. In especially short fights, burst windows can matter tremendously, and Affliction's on-demand burst is comparatively non-existent.

To answer the question more directly, no you needn't wait on high gear to go Affliction. The choice to go Affliction should be determined more by a) whether your raid has some other means of the spell-power buff such that your not being Demo wouldn't hurt the raid, and b) whether the fight is something that plays to Affliction's strengths - mainly multi-dotting, and often also the high execute phase damage. If condition (a) is fulfilled then your gear doesn't really matter too much, although it's worth acknowledging that Affliction certainly does get a pretty sizeable bump in DPS from the 4-set compared to the other specs. If (b) applies as well, then being Affliction is a no-brainer.

Hello, regarding the section in which you indicate when respecting the gems, I think it is a little bit confusing when you say that you have to respect blue socket if the bonus is +7 SP or more. With the exception of helmets, +7 SP or +9 SP bonus is only given in pieces where there are 2 or 3 gems, respectively. Therefore, if we have a piece with 2 blue gems with a bonus of +7 SP, one can think from your post that you want to respect the bonus with 2 Purified Dreadstone (12sp 10spirit). This traduces to 31 SP + 20 spirit = 31*2.4466 + 20*1.3514 = 102.8726 dps. However, using 2 Runed Cardinal Ruby (23sp), you obtain 46 SP = 46*2.4466 = 112.5436 dps. Therefore, you dont want to respect the bonus. The same applies for 3 blue gems.
All combinations are:
You always respect red, yellow, and combinations of these two.
You never respect blue, unless it is combined with 1 or 2 reds or it is in the helmet.
You respect a red+yellow+blue

You're right about the double-blue gems example.

The table on gemming guidelines has a caveat to it just below that demonstrates how the ideal gemming method might change when you have more than one gem socket that isn't red. For instance in your example with 2 blue gems and a +7 spellpower bonus, that would have to be regarded as only a 3.5 spellpower gain, per red gem given up. This change in opportunity cost has to be reflected in the gemming strategy.

The same principle can be extended to any socket colour permutation in the game.

If we are not using pots what will be the optimal rotation? 2xSB(2x Shadow Embrace)>Haunt(1x Shadow Embrace)>UA>Corr>CoA?
If we get Devious Mind proc shouldnt we reapply all the dots not only corruption? What about any SP or Haste Proc - do we reapply all the dots (except corr because it wil auto refresh through SB or SD)?
Do all dots scale with haste or only corruption?
What about potion of speed vs potion of wild magic? which is better?
Thank you.

Hey there, I thought this would be a good place to come with my issue.

So, for a long time I've been putting up with the elvui nameplate issue on my warlock(mainly affliction), had enough of it this morning and decided to use tidyplates for nameplates but alas, the problem did not fix itself.

What happens is, the debuffs shown on nameplates do not update until I manually target the target with debuff. I'm not a big fan of flushing through available targets to dot/track the dots so I'm using mouseover macros to apply said dots. Not sure if it's an issue with the client itself but i'm hoping it's something I can easily fix. Any suggestions?

thanks.

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Originally Posted by Adrarenad

If we are not using pots what will be the optimal rotation? 2xSB(2x Shadow Embrace)>Haunt(1x Shadow Embrace)>UA>Corr>CoA?
If we get Devious Mind proc shouldnt we reapply all the dots not only corruption? What about any SP or Haste Proc - do we reapply all the dots (except corr because it wil auto refresh through SB or SD)?
Do all dots scale with haste or only corruption?
What about potion of speed vs potion of wild magic? which is better?
Thank you.

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It's only Corruption that scales with Haste. UA and Curse of Agony also don't comprise a very large portion of your DPS. You won't find yourself reapplying these under spellpower procs very often, unless it happens naturally because the DoT was about to fall off.

The 500 Haste pot provides better stat-for-stat value than 200 Spellpower 200 Haste. Not to mention being much cheaper. Wild Magic becomes the pot of choice mainly just when you're trying to roll a more powerful Corruption.

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Originally Posted by Baleful

What happens is, the debuffs shown on nameplates do not update until I manually target the target with debuff. I'm not a big fan of flushing through available targets to dot/track the dots so I'm using mouseover macros to apply said dots. Not sure if it's an issue with the client itself but i'm hoping it's something I can easily fix. Any suggestions?

thanks.

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I've put up with this precise problem for a really long time too, and would be thrilled if someone could come forward with a fix. In the meantime, I can only suggest trying out Plate Buffs instead and seeing whether the issue is a little better using that.

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Originally Posted by DarkenedHue

I've put up with this precise problem for a really long time too, and would be thrilled if someone could come forward with a fix. In the meantime, I can only suggest trying out Plate Buffs instead and seeing whether the issue is a little better using that.

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Hey, I have since come upon information regarding that issue and I'm afraid it's a limitation of the interface system. In order to precisely track debuffs on a nameplate, the target below the nameplate has to have a valid unitID (ie. has to be someone's target, focus, focustarget, boss frame).

Addons can only get debuff information from frames listed above and nameplates are sadly not in a list of "frames". Hope this helps.

Must say I loved this guide. Been playing aff warlock ever since I started out in wotlk a few years ago and it seems I still have a lot to learn. Still the most fun class to play but takes a lot of time and practice.

I have a question about haste. Other guides I've seen say the haste cap is around 1400, at that point Haunt and UA cast faster than the 1sec GCD. With spellstone, at bis, and with DFO it's easy to go much over that 1400 rating (a friend of mine reached 1600 with DFO, somehow). Is it true that going over that cap lowers your dps? Wouldn't BL and other haste buffs lower your dps if so? And, at bis, is spellstone still better than firestone?

Also, I'm still a bit lost on DFO and PoNL. To summarize, DFO's haste is better than PNL's crit, but PNL's proc is better on shorter fights, meaning if I'm going against Marrowgar, I'd use PNL, but against LK I'd go with DFO. Is that (roughly) correct?

Thank you!

Thank you so much for this mate, pretty much covers up everything you wanna know about affli locks! appreciate the effort!

Thanks for the guide, I have 2 questions about the coefficients that you calculated to see how much dps increase provides each stat.

1. Do you take into consideration in the intellect and spirit stat, that our spirit and intellect are going to increase with KINGS by 10% and chest enchant by another 10%? For example, an item with 50 crit will provide 50*1.4944 = 74.72 dps. An item with 50 spirit will provide 50*1.3514 = 67.57 dps. However, those 50 spirit that appear in the item description, will transform into 60 spirit with KINGS and chest enchant and the dps increase will be 60*1.3514 = 81.08, which is better than 50 crit. I would appreciate if you can explain me how to properly use coefficients.

2. Does this coefficients work to built a Herald of the Titans BiS items? Or do you think the increment in dps will vary because the levels are lower?

Thank you in advance

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Originally Posted by arikari

Must say I loved this guide. Been playing aff warlock ever since I started out in wotlk a few years ago and it seems I still have a lot to learn. Still the most fun class to play but takes a lot of time and practice.

I have a question about haste. Other guides I've seen say the haste cap is around 1400, at that point Haunt and UA cast faster than the 1sec GCD. With spellstone, at bis, and with DFO it's easy to go much over that 1400 rating (a friend of mine reached 1600 with DFO, somehow). Is it true that going over that cap lowers your dps? Wouldn't BL and other haste buffs lower your dps if so? And, at bis, is spellstone still better than firestone?

Also, I'm still a bit lost on DFO and PoNL. To summarize, DFO's haste is better than PNL's crit, but PNL's proc is better on shorter fights, meaning if I'm going against Marrowgar, I'd use PNL, but against LK I'd go with DFO. Is that (roughly) correct?

Thank you!

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Hey, thanks for the kind words!

The haste cap most people are concerned with is ~1269, where your instant casts and baseline 1.5 cast time spells (like UA, Haunt, etc), take only 1 second, and don't go down any further. Thing is, haste does in fact continue to benefit you a great deal even past this point. It never lowers your DPS. Spellstone should be marginally better than Firestone at any point.

Re: DFO and PNL

Yup, that's mostly right. The nature of PNL's proc makes it outstanding for most of ICC's short-ish fights. DFO provides better stat-for-stat value, but it takes a longer fight for this to be realized.

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Originally Posted by DeagleZzZz

Thank you so much for this mate, pretty much covers up everything you wanna know about affli locks! appreciate the effort!

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Hey, thanks! :)

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Originally Posted by frantennis

Thanks for the guide, I have 2 questions about the coefficients that you calculated to see how much dps increase provides each stat.

1. Do you take into consideration in the intellect and spirit stat, that our spirit and intellect are going to increase with KINGS by 10% and chest enchant by another 10%? For example, an item with 50 crit will provide 50*1.4944 = 74.72 dps. An item with 50 spirit will provide 50*1.3514 = 67.57 dps. However, those 50 spirit that appear in the item description, will transform into 60 spirit with KINGS and chest enchant and the dps increase will be 60*1.3514 = 81.08, which is better than 50 crit. I would appreciate if you can explain me how to properly use coefficients.

2. Does this coefficients work to built a Herald of the Titans BiS items? Or do you think the increment in dps will vary because the levels are lower?

Thank you in advance

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Yep, the stat weights factor in increases from things like Kings and Life Tap glyph. All raid buffs are considered, since that's how the numbers were generated. What the pic basically says is "in a raid setting, 1 more point of this stat increases your DPS by this amount". The only multiplier not considered is the Human Racial (the one that increases your spirit by 3%), since the simming was done with an Orc Warlock.

The chest enchant doesn't increase your spirit by 10%, it's just flat +10 spirit.

Re: Herald
You're definitely right that the precise DPS increase from each stat will be somewhat different at Herald levels of gear! While you won't go wrong sticking to the Hit Cap > Spellpower > Haste rule, it's probably going to be best to consult a tool like simcraft if you're after precision.