Affliction 101 For Patch 3.1 Gear & Spec For Raiding

Warlock’s motto: “We’ve been to Hell and back. While we were there, we stole their cookies.”

Warlocks are a pure Damage per Second class. We can’t heal anybody but ourselves, and we only do that by hurting others. Makes me chuckle every time I think about it. In fact, as an Affliction Lock I’m sometimes near the top of the charts on over-healing, and its all healing I do to myself by killing mobs. (I run with good healers…and its always good to give props to the guys watching your back.)

Some folks don’t like Affliction, often citing it as having a more complex rotation than other specs. To that let me say, “pffft”! An affliction Lock does have different tools at his disposal than Destruction Warlocks, Mages, and Hunters, for example. While these DPS classes generally rely on big hitting spells for burst damage, Affliction Warlocks kill mobs in a more insidious manner, by putting up a series of Damage Over Time spells (DOTs). However, this is far from death-by-inches. A well-geared Affliction Lock can often lead the DPS ratings in boss fights and buff the entire raid in several ways at the same time.

Think Affliction if complicated? Well here’s all the highlights in two columns written with the assumption you’ve never played a Warlock before. Hopefully, there’s plenty in here for the nooby and maybe a nugget or two for experienced Locks who haven’t tried Affliction yet. This is meant as a primer…there’s always more to learn. In the remainder of this one, we’ll take a look at a common Affliction talent assignment (“spec”), picking gear, and what glyphs to use. In the next column, I’ll make fun of people that think Affliction is complicated some more and discuss the rotation.

Talents and Pets – PvE Affliction Spec

After hitting level 80, here is a fairly standard looking Affliction spec as of the 3.1 patch. There is some amount of play in the talent tree now for Affliction that allows you to put points where you like without seriously nerfing your DPS.

Before I go through the tree, here are the abilities we’ll be buffing and a brief description. Virtually all of the Affliction Lock abilities do Shadow damage now (since in patch 3.1 they took immolate away. Another nerf…sigh). Cast times are with no Haste figured in, but I’ll show you how to calculate them with the Haste included a little later. In parentheses are abbreviations I’ll use occasionally below.

• Corruption (Corr)- This spell should always be up on the bad guys. It is instant cast and ticks every 3 seconds.

• Curse of Agony (CoA) – Important DOT that is instant cast and ticks every 2 seconds.

• Unstable Affliction (UA) – Another DOT that has a 1.5 sec cast time and ticks every 3 seconds.

• Haunt (H) – This one has a base 1.5 sec cast time and does some damage when it hits the target. Then, more importantly, it buffs your DOTs 20% or more (the more coming with Glyph of Haunt) for 12 sec. As a result, you always want this one up as well.

• Life Tap (LT) – This is instant cast and trades Health for Mana. On the surface, that may sound like a bad trade. However, if you go Out-of-Mana (OOM) while fighting mobs you’re probably good as dead anyway. In addition, you have a lot of ways of healing yourself as I mentioned above.

• Shadow Bolt (SB) – This is basically a big nuke with a relatively long cast time of 3 sec. It is also shadow damage, but you buff it in the Destruction tree.

• Drain Soul (DS) – This a major damage spell when the mob goes below 25% with a 3 sec tick time. Soul Shards get generated as a by-product.

Here are where the points are assigned and why in the spec above.

Affliction Tree

• Improved Curse of Agony (2/2)– Increases damage by this DOT by 10%.

• Suppression (3/3 or less depending on gear and raid make-up) – Increases hit chance on spells by 3%.

• Improved Corruption (5/5) – 10% more damage by one of your most important DOTs. This also buffs Seed of Corr, which we’ll talk about a little in the next article.

• Improved Life Tap (2/2) – Makes regenerating mana easier. Depending on your play you could pull 1 or even 2 points out of this one. It just depends on how likely you are to go OOM with your play on long boss fights.

• Soul Siphon (2/2) – Buffs an import spell for regenerating health (Drain Life) and knocking down mobs (DS). Its based on number of DOTs on the mob.

• Amplify Curse (1/1) – Lowers the global cooldown on curses. This ones debatable, but I think its worth its point.

• Nightfall (1/1) – Corr and Drain Life occasionally give you an instant cast SB. Not a huge boost in DPS, but it’s a boost.

• Empowered Corruption (3/3) – Another buff to Corr. This one’s based on your Bonus Spell Damage (Spell Power) directly.

• Shadow Embrace (5/5) – Add a debuff to the target increasing damage and decrease its ability to be healed. Automatically placed on target with SB and H…this ones a no-brainer even at 5 talent points.

• Siphon Life (1/1) – Another increase for Corr and also for UA. Also heals the caster a little. Definitely worth its 1 point.

• Shadow Mastery (5/5) – Another 15% on all shadow damage…oh yeah.

• Eradication (3/3) – Corruption has a chance to increase your cast speed.

• Contagion (5/5) – Increases damage by CoA and Corruption again.

• Malediction (3/3) – Increases your spell damage slightly and increases the crit chance of Corr and UA.

• Death’s Embrace (3/3) – Increases your Siphon Life effectiveness when you need it most and increases your damage to the target when their low on life. Like I said, insidious.

• Unstable Affliction (1/1) – Gives you this DOT.

• Pandemic (1/1) – Lets Corr and UA crit for 100% more damage…sweet

• Everlasting Affliction (5/5) – Increases Corr and UA scaling with your Spell Damage. It also resets Corr automatically when you cast H simplifying the rotation. Even at 5 talent points it a bargain in my opinion.

• Haunt (1/1) – The must have spell for an Affliction lock. It does it all. It does a little damage directly, heals you, and it makes your DOTs tick a lot harder.

Destruction Tree

• Improved Shadow Bolt (5/5) – Increases damage by Shadow Bolt and also increases Spell critical strike chance on the target. It also adds a debuff to the target increasing the crit chance of every caster in the raid. Mages will /love you for it.

• Bane (5/5) – Decreases the cast time of Shadow Bolt by 0.5 to 2.5 seconds base cast time.

• Ruin (5/5) – Doubles your critical strike bonus damage on Shadow bolt.

In this spec there are 3 points left. Personally, I would put 2 of them in Demonic Power and run with the Succubus as a pet (tier 3 of Destruction tree). Succubus does slightly more damage than the Felhunter. I also find her annoying, but my game sound is usually pretty low anyway.

The last point could go in Fel Synergy to increase your pet’s survivability, Demonic Embrace or Improved Healthstone to increase your survivability (your raid-mates get better cookies too), Fel Concentration to reduce cast times when your being hit, Grim Reach to increase the range of your Affliction spells, or other places really depending on your preference. None of these will increase your DPS directly but may improve your game play depending on your play style and the situation.

Glyphs

Glyphs for the Affliction Lock are pretty obvious. To maximize DPS there are at most four realistic choices for major Glyphs. In order of importance they are Glyph of Life Tap, Glyph of Haunt, Glyph of Curse of Agony, and Glyph of Corruption. In fact Glyph of Life Tap and Glyph of Haunt are so obvious for the Affliction Lock you should wonder about the sanity of any Aff Lock using anything else. Glyph of Curse of Agony increases the duration of this DOT. If you usually use CoA, this is the glyph you should have. If you are usually the one putting up Curse of Elements (discussed in Part 2) on your runs, Glyph of Corruption is the best choice for you, which gives the extra occasional instant cast SB.

Picking Gear

There are great websites, forums, articles, etc. for this. My favorite at the moment, which is also a great general Affliction Warlock thread, is at elitistjerks.com by Namnalia. The short version is:

Hit Rating > Spell Power > Haste Rating > Crit Rating ~ Spirit > Intellect

The numbers below are approximate, especially in ‘real’ raid fights, but they give you a point of reference for choosing gear. These are the numbers from Namnalia, and they are pretty consistent with what I’ve seen since the last major patch. They may come out a bit high for you due to his assumptions (perfect execution and zero lag). In a 25 man raid, in other words with the buffs assumed in the calculation, my DPS is pretty much the calculated ±5%, okay mostly minus, in a tank-and-spank fight involving few interruptions and moves, e.g., Patchwerk. Neither my lag nor probably my execution is ever “perfect”, so being somewhat lower is to be expected. Again, the main point is you can use these to decide which gear and enchants are for you.

Also, Spirit may be overestimated in importance a bit. You get additional Spell Power from LT based on Spirit with Glyph of LT. This buff lasts for 20 seconds currently. However, unless you need the mana, it isn’t an overall DPS boost to LT every 20 seconds. As a result, I just LT when I’m replacing nothing but part of a SB and need the mana boost, and the Glyph buff is not always up. Spirit is devalued somewhat as a consequence, I suspect because the usually assumption in the calculations is that the Glyph buff is always up. (However, the rumor is that in the next patch the Glyph buff will increase to 40 seconds, which will likely make Spirit scale as below and probably as intended.)

• 1 Hit rating point = 1.6 DPS

• 1 Spell Power = 1.4 DPS

• 1 Haste rating point = 0.9 DPS

• 1 Crit Rating point = 0.7 DPS

• 1 Spirit = 0.7 DPS

• 1 Intellect = 0.2 DPS

Hit rating is the most important stat on gear up until your character is “hit capped”. No matter how much you may want to or how much your gym teacher tells you to give 110%, you can’t hit something 110% of the time, so don’t go over 100% anymore than you have to. In Burning Crusade days, you could only get to 99%, but the great and powerful Blizz changed that so that you can make sure you hit with every cast. If at all possible you should.

On bosses, which are considered to be 3 levels higher than you are, you need 17% hit to reach the cap. A Gear Hit Rating of 26.23 is equal to 1% additional chance to hit a target. So, for bosses you need a hit rating of 445.91 from somewhere.

You get 3% from the talent tree listed through the tier 1 Affliction talent Suppression. So, you need 14% more, a rating of 367.22, not counting any of the various buffs/debuffs that may or may not be flying around in a particular raid that affect spell hit.

The most common Hit buff, if you’re alliance, is a 1% additional hit from having a Draenai within 30 yards, Heroic Presence. Consequently, as alliance you’ll only ever really need 13%, a rating of 340.99, with 3/3 in Suppression…there are plenty of Draenei around.

If you have choices in gear on the spot with respect to hit, you can ask your raid what hit related debuffs they are casting. If you have a Battle Chicken (Balance Druid) in the group, they will likely be putting up Improved Faerie Fire, which will give an additional 3% Hit on the target. As a result, you could swap out +hit gear for more Spell Power, Spirit, etc. gear if you have it. Just keep the priorities above in mind. After you get to the “hit cap”, whatever you decide that is for your situation, gear for as much Spell Power, then Haste, then Crit, etc. as possible.

Haste increases the speed that your spells cast. A Haste Rating of 32.78 decreases your cast time by 1%, and it makes your DOTs tick faster by the same 1%. To calculate your cast times with added Haste Rating, the formula is below.

In other words, if your Haste Rating = 500 from your gear, then a Haunt cast (base cast time = 1.5 sec) will take the time as shown below.

A Critical Strike (Crit) dramatically increases the damage done by a spell. With the spec above, many of your spells have a chance to Crit, including SB, Corr, UA, and Haunt. These DOTs have a chance to Crit on every tick. A Critical Chance Rating of 45.91 is equal to an additional 1% chance to Crit. Intellect also increases your Crit Chance slightly.

When choosing between Haste Rating and Crit Rating, Haste is slightly better, but Crit Rating is definitely a good thing for an Affliction Lock as well.

The easiest time, from personal experience, to identify yourself as a noob is during the loot handout. If it doesn’t say “Cloth” at the top right and has stats in white other than Stamina, Intellect, and Spirit its not for you. The secondary stats like spell power, hit rating, haste, etc. are generally near the bottom on the item.

One secondary stat that really doesn’t help Warlocks much is Mana Per 5 Seconds (MP5). There is no best-in-slot gear for Warlocks with MP5 on it, and since Ulduar was released there may not be many top 20 items for Locks with MP5. Personally if a Lock with a green or blue item in that slot wants to roll on the epic with a bunch more Spell Power but also some MP5, I have no problem with it. The item would be a big upgrade for them. If you already have an iLevel 200 or more item in that slot, let the healers fight over it. Naturally, that’s up to the leaders for your raid.

Follow the above and you’ll be dressed and specced for Dominating success as an Affliction Lock. Next time we’ll talk about killing stuff.