Patrick Von Peabody is No Friend of Mine

Before I even begin approaching the preamble to the prologue which will lead-up to this post, I want to make something absolutely and painfully clear: I am not qualified to speak on this topic. I've always tried, with this blog, to avoid speaking with absolute authority on anything, because there's always some elitist jerk who knows more than I do and will be quick to point it out. But I've also kept my writings rooted rather firmly in what I know: Affliction PvE DPS.

Playing a Warlock, or any class, in PVP never held even enough appeal for me to bother buying the Insignia of the Alliance / Horde. To be frank, I'm not very good at it. I've never been particularly skilled at playing games against other players, though I usually enjoy a few matches, even if I lose them. But by the time I started playing WoW, resilience and twinks essentially meant that the only way to participate in PVP at all was to spend a bunch of time getting the gear to make your character capable of doing so. I'm not willing to spend a bunch of time on something that only holds a small amount of appeal for me. I try my best to avoid owning any gear with resilience on it.

That said, every now and again, I do queue up for a battleground.


Stupid geezer! There are two pallies!

Battlegrounds are my favorite kind of PVP. Arenas are a pain in the ass to get into. You need to find a team and pay for a charter, then you get to wait 30 minutes for a 30 second match to start. And not only can you not participate in them on a whim, but you've entered into an implied contract with your teammates that you'll be around to help them get their ten games a week or whatever it is. World PVP would be my favorite if it actually worked. But on non-PVP servers nobody has the balls to flag, and on PVP servers I can count the number of times I've been attacked by somebody who wasn't 10 levels higher than me on one hand. Those few times are good memories though. Some of the most memorable moments I've had playing the game, actually. That leaves Battlegrounds, most of which I really can't stand. In fact, to be honest, the only PVP I really do is Arathi Basin. It's my favorite basin in the game.

For most of the time that I've played WoW, I've been content to pop in there for a few games now and again, utterly fail at it then get bored and not PVP for a few months. However, for reasons I might discuss in a later post, I'm something of an achievement fiend. And a few months back, when I was working on getting the Merrymaker meta-achievement, one of the tasks required was to get something in the ballpark of 50 honorable kills while wearing the gnome costume. A costume which disappears when you die.

I seriously considered skipping this achievement, but I decided instead to power through and get those HKs. It was rough going at first. I was lucky if I survived long enough to get 2 HKs before slowly waiting for the AB to end so I could go re-costume. Frequently I died before getting my first kill. Since continuing on like that would have meant DAYS of work to get the requisite HKs, I eventually had to develop a system.

First, I set up an alternate action bar I could switch to when I PVP. Nothing fancy, just a different arrangement for the first row. I designed it around speed, rather than optimal DPS.

It starts out with Siphon Life, since that's an instant cast and it helps keep me alive, at least a little bit. Then comes Corruption, for the massive DPS output, and Curse of Agony, because the more DoTs I can get on a target while running away the better. Unstable Affliction and Immolate are the next ones up, though as of the next patch I'll have to choose between one or the other. Once a target is covered in DoTs, if I'm still alive for some reason, I start spamming Searing Pain as fast as I can. If I was actually going to put together a set of gear for PVP, it would be all about haste.


Thank. Fucking. God.

I find that I don't use Fear or Howl of Terror as much as I probably should. It seems like every time I try to cast it, I either get stun-locked while casting, or my target has some trinket / racial to get out of it. I could of course simply cast it a second time, or a third time, or as many times as it takes for them to run out of ways to cancel it. But fear doesn't last very long, and I find players often turn their ire on opponents who CC them. The last thing I need when I'm trying desperately to survive a battleground is some bastard with 500 resilience deciding to make me their special project.

I use the imp as my pet most of the time, to take advantage of the superior health. Nether knows I need it, since my PvE gear is based on stacking useful stats, rather than stamina.

And that's pretty much the strategy. It's clunky, inelegant, and serves only to barely keep me alive more than my previous strategy of flailing my arms wildly did. But at least it's a strategy.

Be quiet you damn kids! I was trying to sleep!

Well, that was a lovely, restful, and entirely unannounced vacation. Actually, the only one of those adjectives which applies is 'unannounced.' But whatever happened yesterday is in the past, and now it's time to get back to waving my cane and casting my dots. As something of a rejoinder, I guess I'll talk about stuff that has changed in my personal game-life lately. This post won't be long or terribly interesting, but is intended as a quick stretch before I start posting more regularly again.

I've been running Naxx10 and fully clearing it weekly for over a month now, and our group has managed to get our time down to about 4 hours, give or take 15 minutes. I'm exceedingly happy with our progress. Deaths are uncommon due to our fantastic healers -- though Heigan still drops a few people each time around. We've had a bit of difficulty maintaining a regular set of tanks, but I'm relatively assured at this point that the two MT ready tanks, the the one OT ready tank we have will be reliably available for most of our runs. The only thing really left to improve at this point is the overall output of the DPS, which is getting higher and higher every week. An unfortunate number of them have even started to out DPS me on most fights!

The group has also made an attempt at Malygos, which was long overdue. It took us a little while to get the Death Gripping down, but once we did our Death Knights were able to do it almost without fail. Those times when Malygos managed to chomp on a spark probably fell more on the shoulders of the tank than the Death Knights. We only got to phase 2 once, but I think we'll be able to do better if we get more members of our regular group in there. That attempt was almost half friends-of-friends.


Phase 2 kinda threw us for a loop...

I'm also trying to get used to casting Drain Soul instead of Shadow Bolt once a boss is below 25% health. I'm having an atrocious time remembering to do it, though. Near the end of a boss fight I'm usually so deep into the rhythm of my casting rotation that changing it around just slips my mind. Still, below 25% Drain Soul ticks for roughly the size of a small Shadow Bolt crit (5-6k) so it's certainly worth using, even if the damage takes an extra .5 seconds or so of casting time.

I've also taken a stab at using the Doomguard in fights where it is appropriate. The extra ~500 DPS is certainly welcome, but a little frivolous in my opinion. At this point I've little doubt that my group could lose 2 of our DPS, and still kill Patchwerk before he enraged. So I don't see why everybody seems so gung-ho about the Doomguard. I certainly liked breaking my personal best DPS record (without situational buffs, such as on Loatheb or Malygos) but the Doomguard feels like a fun little gimmick that can be pulled out now and again for extra DPS, rather than a useful class mechanic. Maybe in Ulduar, if there is a boss similar to Patchwerk with more HP and a shorter enrage timer, it'll feel more useful.


Never broke 4k on my own merits before. Very cool.

The only other news that comes to mind is the I finally replaced my last blue. Sentaigrehsk is now in full epics, which feels like such a hallow achievement in light of how easy some of those epics were to get, but meh. Interesting thing is that my newest epic is the Tier 7 shoulders, which, when combined with my Tier 7 chest piece, gives me the 2-piece set bonus. Now, it's not the first set bonus I've had by a long shot -- but it's the first one I've had that actually feels as though it will have a positive impact on my DPS. Every tick of Corruption or Immolate (both of which I'm casting now, though, after 3.1 I'll only be casting Corruption) has a chance to increase my critical strike rating with my next Shadow Bolt by 10%. Additionally, each Shadow Bolt crit in turn increases my shadow damage via the Improved Shadow Bolt talent. I haven't had a chance to do any good tests since I got the set bonus, but it seems like the proc is going off nigh-constantly when I'm casting corruption, so I have little doubt that this set bonus is going to cause at least a moderate jump in my DPS.


Not a huge fan of the Tier 3/7 look, but it's good to see Sentai looking epic again.

I should also perhaps note that at the moment, Curse of Senility is in something of a limbo in my mind. While I greatly enjoy writing for this blog, I find it somewhat difficult to write two separate warlock blogs at once. Not only do I need to worry about overlapping content, but my WoW Insider blog, Blood Pact, and Curse of Senility require significantly different frames of mind, which I'm obviously having a bit of a difficult time switching between.

What I'm considering at this point, and it's still only a possibility in my mind, is sticking with Blood Pact for most of my writing. Meanwhile, I'll start a new blog with a new subject matter, and I'll focus on writing there regularly. When I'm struck with the desire to write about World of Warcraft, those posts will still be put here, but I wouldn't hold myself to any sort of schedule. I wouldn't be entirely happy with this arrangement, but Curse of Senility was never meant to be a permanent thing. I will of course make note of it in future posts if I decide for or against this idea.

Thoughts on 3.1 Affliction

Aside from briefly popping online to prepare for a work related project, which I obviously can't write about here, I haven't logged in since the Naxx run detailed in my previous post. Well, actually, while running a standup comedy night on ventrillo I did spend time grinding water elementals between Arathi Basin matches on Arnoux -- who ding'd 38 by the way. But her recent adventures have hardly been worth writing home about. Or worth writing the internet about, as the case may be.


Doesn't stop me from arbitrarily selecting this screenshot to break up the wall of text though!

After the comedy-a-thon was over though, I spent maybe twenty or thirty minutes talking about my thoughts on the future of affliction warlocks to my buddy Kolrawn, who has been too busy tanking for me on his prot pally to really keep up with all the warlock rigmarole. After working through all my thoughts on the matter, I realized it might be something you, my imaginary groupies, might be interested in hearing about.

As a disclaimer, I should note that I haven't been on the PTR, so I haven't actually been able to get any testing done. Any opinions I hold at this point are largely speculative, and based on the latest warlock changes that I'm aware of.

Blizzard's aforementioned intention to simplify the affliction rotation has, unfortunately, come to pass. Not only is Siphon Life being removed as a damaging spell, but now Immolate and Unstable Affliction occupy the same 'slot' on a target, meaning only one of them can be active per warlock at any given time. These changes effectively remove two spells from my active rotation.

What's left is Shadow Bolt > Haunt > Corruption > Curse of Agony > Unstable Affliction > Shadowbolt Spam. Corruption is obviously removed from the rotation after the first cast, meaning that affliction will become roughly a 4 button spec. This is starting to feel a lot like the 3-button days of Burning Crusade.

Particularly annoying is the sudden lack of timer synergy between dots. Right now Siphon Life and Curse of Agony are cast together, because they have similar timers. Same thing with Unstable Affliction and Immolate. The way this caused the rotation to work out was something like two shadow bolts, then haunt, then two dots, then two shadow bolts, then haunt, then two dots, and so on. Very comfortable and easy to work with. Now that the timers of each dot are so astoundingly disparate, it seems likely that switching between shadow bolts, haunt, and dot refreshment may become a bit hectic. But it's far too early to actually say.

Supposedly the upside of this simplification is that it will allow affliction warlocks to do better damage on bosses that require a lot of moving. The oft-heard complaint about affliction is that it is the 'Patchwerk-spec,' and that it doesn't really excel in any other fight. Speaking from my own experience however, I've found this to be absolutely untrue. I certainly do my best damage on Patchwerk -- find me a class that doesn't -- but I frequently top the meters on a variety of other bosses. Sometimes I don't, but that's just the way the game works. Different classes and specs excel in different situations. It would be terrible game design if one class was able to top DPS 100% of the time.


I actually ended up in second place overall for this fight, but the fact that I was able to lead by a significant margin after such a large percentage of one of the most rotation-jarring fights in the game is a clear indication of affliction's versatility.

Frankly, since this change will cause a larger percentage of our overall damage output to rely on Shadow Bolt, I think we're going to see a DROP in DPS for fights which require a lot of moving. At least dots kept on ticking away when we were too busy to cast. But again, such speculation is perhaps getting a little ahead of myself; particularly considering some of the other buffs the tree is getting.

I might say that I look forward to figuring out the best rhythm for the new affliction once patch 3.1 hits the live realms, but that would be a lie. The longer I get to play with my belovedly complex affliction spec, the happier I'll be. I mean, I'm a crotchety old man; you expect me to welcome change?

Curse of Reform

So as the hardcore fans I pretend that I have probably noticed, the rotation being used in the screenshot I posted recently is different from the one I advocated in my post on casting rotations. And for the non-imaginary among you, you'll note that I'm using Curse of Agony instead of Curse of Elements. In forum threads entitled "LS has sold out!!!11eleven" the more astute of my imaginary idolaters no doubt pointed out repeatedly that there is clearly a boomkin in that party, rendering Curse of Elements pointless, and freeing me up to use Curse of Agony instead. And while this is very true, it's not actually the reason for the change in my preferred curse. The truth of the matter is, I have reformed.


As part of my reformation, I've decided to use only level 70 gear from now on.

Before the imaginary flame wars continue, let me explain myself. The catalyst for my decision was the recently announced changes to affliction. Most notably among them, the fact that Corruption and Siphon life are going to be combined into a single casting time. This change comes in response to the fact that Blizzard believes the current affliction rotation to be 'too complicated.' And in truth, affliction warlocks have possibly the most complicated rotation in the game right now.

I love that complexity though. I realize the removal of one global cooldown from the active rotation won't completely kill that complexity, but it will simplify it somewhat. It will make affliction more accessible to all the people who stopped playing their warlock because it became 'too hard.' And before that happens, I wanted to get in a few hours of play with the most difficult rotation I'll ever be likely to have. And I wanted to kick ass with it.

So does this mean that once the rotation is simplified, I'll go back to using Curse of Elements like a good warlock? Nope. While I will, of course, still use it if I feel the situation calls for it, I've noticed that, as of late, I seem to be the only one benefiting from it much. My group/guild is positively notorious for never once having a max level mage that wasn't 'too good' to run things with us, and most of the DPS we DO have is of the physical variety. Hunters, Death Knights, Rogues, and so on. Curse of Elements certainly helps them a little (arcane shot comes to mind) but given the rather significant increase in personal DPS that I've seen since talenting and glyphing properly for Curse of Agony, I think it's time for me to officially replace CoE with CoA*. Not to mention the fact that the boomkin I ran with in that screenshot seems to be playing much more actively again, so this might not be the last time I run with her!


Note the prominent percentage of damage CoA did

So, for those imaginary fans of mine who strive to emulate my play style to the best of their ability, here's my new casting rotation. It's been modified for my newfound lack of trinkets with use function, as well as my new curse preference:

1) Cast one Shadow Bolt, causing the Shadow Embrace effect.

2) Cast Haunt, causing both that debuff, and a second stack of the Shadow Embrace effect.

3) Cast Corruption (I now have this bound to Ctrl+3, since if haunt is re-applied properly, it only needs to be cast once in any given fight. Moving it here allows me to keep my subsequent rotations rooted in keys 1-7. 8 is a little hard for me to reach.)

4) Siphon Life

5) Curse of Agony

6) Unstable Affliction

7) Immolate

8) Re-apply dots as necessary, avoiding clipping (re-casting a dot before it has 100% completed.) Cast haunt whenever it's up--don't worry about clipping it. If not otherwise occupied, be casting Shadow Bolt. Life tap / Dark Pact when you've got a moment of free time too short to cast a shadow bolt in.


*I honestly never thought I would say that.

slash roll 100 >.>

Gee willickers, midterms can sure have a way of showing you when you've bitten off more than you can chew. Turns out updating a blog 3ish times a week through thick and then, while also attending university full time isn't a walk in the park. This round of midterms is done with now, however, and I'd like to get back in the swing of things by adding to my ever-so-slowly-growing collection of posts that might actually be helpful to somebody. So, in the spirit of being helpful, lets talk about gear.

Gear selection is a contentious issue for many warlocks. Hell, if you've ever debased yourself by visiting the official forums you should know that for many people, gear selection is tantamount to one's worth as a person. Rubes of the official forums aside, though, there is more than one school of thought about how to select gear. Some of them are absolutely terrible (we call these "Stamina Stackers") while some of them have a legitimate case to make. Since my goal with this blog has absolutely nothing to do with objectivity, what follows is an approximation of how I select my own gear. It seems to have worked pretty well so far.


*Cough* >.>

As a forward to my discussion on gear selection, I want to reiterate--for those who have never read my blog before, or those with a poor memory--that I'm talking about PvE affliction gear here. Usually I go ahead and leave that unstated, since it's implicit in the way I talk about things. However, when discussing gear that distinction is nowhere near as clear--and far more important. PVP warlocks, PvE demonology warlocks, and PvE destruction warlocks have different priorities for each of their stats--even if we all use the same ones.

I'd also like to say, before I start, that I could have simply written about specific pieces of gear I think a person should get, but that wouldn't really be helpful in the long run. You might say that rather than giving you a gear-fish, I'd like to teach you how to catch a gear-fish. Gear-fishing, however, is no simple matter; there's MATHZ involved. And while a good WoW player should never be too lazy to play with the numbers, I think there's a threshold where it becomes acceptable to approximate and move on. I call that threshold the "damn, where the fuck is my old calculus textbook" line.

Having said all of that, lets start to break this down. Selecting gear is, essentially, a choice between various stats. There are seven stats a warlock should care about, and every other stat is absolutely and utterly pointless for a PvE affliction warlock, and should be completely ignored. Each of those seven stats serves a specific purpose, and should be weighted according to the importance of that purpose.

Spell Hit is of paramount importance--at least until you get 446 of it. This is a pretty standard requisite for all the DPS classes but frequently I hear some young warlock proclaim something akin to "I never miss anyway, so I don't need spell hit." To which I must respond that anybody who thinks they never miss isn't watching their combat log closely enough (May I recomend Scrolling Combat Text Damage?)

Consider this: haunt is the groundwork for any affliction rotation, and it has a nice big 8 second cooldown on it. If haunt were to miss, then that's at least 8 full seconds of unbuffed dot ticks--a massive blow to any warlock's standing on the DPS meter.

Stacking hit isn't very fun, though. In fact, it's pretty boring to stack compared to things like crit. Fortunately, there is relief if you spec correctly. While it is true that without talents, you must get 446 hit rating to be hit-capped, if you put even 1 point each into Suppression and Cataclysm (in the affliction and destruction trees respectively) that will bring your requisite hit rating down to 420 to be hit capped for all of your spells. If you put TWO points in each, the hit-cap is lowered still further to 394! And if you're able to put a total of six points aside for putting 3 in each of the two talents, then the hit cap goes all the way down to 368. Obviously those talent points might be better spent elsewhere, but they are a nice cushion that can allow you to play a bit above your gear level.

Spell Power is a warlock's bread and butter. There really isn't too much more that can be said about it. Gearing up is largely the quest to make this number higher and higher without getting un-hit capped.

Spirit was, until very recently, utterly useless. However, in patch 3.0.2, things changed! Not only does Life Tap scale with this stat, but (far more importantly) 30% of our spirit is turned into Spell Power by our Fel Armor! This isn't horribly significant, but it is worth keeping in mind if you're ever faced with a tough decision. Lets say, for example, that you're trying to choose between two pieces of gear. One has 30 spell power, and the other has 100 spirit and 10 crit rating. Now, spell power is always preferable to crit rating for an affliction warlock, but, that 100 spirit will be turned into 30 spell power by fel armor, meaning that the second piece of gear effectively has 30 spell power and 10 crit--a clear winner when compared against the first piece, which has only 30 spell power.

Crit Rating is everybody's favorite stat, and thanks to Pandemic, now affliction warlocks can play with it too! That doesn't mean we're allowed go go wild, however. But thankfully, most pieces of endgame gear have at least two green stats (Spell Power, Hit Rating, Haste Rating, or Crit Rating) and once one has gathered enough hit rating, it's a perfectly legitimate strategy to use mostly Spell Power / Crit Rating gear. In fact, that's precisely what I do.

Intellect is to crit rating what spirit is to spell power...sort of. Intellect has two primary uses. First, more intellect means deeper mana pools, which means less life tapping and more pew-pewing. More relevant to the aforementioned relationship however is that intellect raises crit rating. To be precise about it, 167 intellect translates into 46 crit rating at level 80. 46 crit rating being the requisite amount for a full 1% crit chance. So, much like the example I used with spirit above, enough intellect can make up for losing some crit rating on a new piece of gear--and in fact, it's preferable to get your crit chance off of intellect, since intellect also increases your mana pool.

Haste, I will be honest, is a bit of an enigma to me. Rather than try to sound like I know what I'm talking about when I don't, I'll say this: it makes your spells go faster, this is awesome. However, in most cases it seems like you must choose between gear with spellpower/haste, or spellpower/crit. Which either means accepting a very low crit chance, or balancing out the two stats and having them both be mediocre. Personally, I stack crit rating. This may well not be the best choice, as I have seen spreadsheets that imply haste to be the superior stat. I am slowly building up my haste, and hope to get a better idea of just how much it helps my DPS in the future.

Stamina happens. That's really all there is to say. Yes, stamina is an important stat for warlocks, it keeps us alive and it allows us to do mad life-tapz...but it doesn't need to be considered. Sentai's unbuffed HP has fluctuated from 14,000 to 18,000 and back again, and it doesn't matter. All gear has loads of stamina on it these days, and a piece of gear would have to be an absolutely titanic loss of stamina in order to warrant even a passing consideration in the decision making process. In honesty, the only reason I even included it in this list is because there are PVE affliction warlocks out there, the bad ones who showed up to Kara in Gladiator gear, who think stamina is the absolute most important stat for warlocks. It is not. At all.

And that's the four-one-one on warlock gear selection. The most important thing, of course, is balance. 446 hit rating is worthless if you've got 100 spell power, and by the time you've got 1800 spell power you should probably have at least 15% crit, or a nice bit of haste if you decided to go that rout. I'd like to thank my warlock-buddy Kolrawn for helping me work out the best way to break this all down, and I hope that it ended up being helpful.

A closing note on spell penetration: It's essentially useless. Here's what WoW Wiki says on the matter:

PvE, targets of a higher level than the caster have a base resistance (2% of mitigation per level difference) which cannot be overcome by spell penetration nor by any other stat. Otherwise, very few mobs and raid-level bosses have a substantial amount of resistance to overcome.

Time To Talk Talents (Totally Titanic Tirade!)

I don't think I can rightly have a blog about a class in World of Warcraft without taking a moment, at some point, to talk about my spec. To talk about why I think it's the best spec for me, why I made some of the controversial decisions that I did, and some alternative ways to spend points that I'm looking at using in the future. So rather than wait for later, how about I go over it now!

This is a broad topic, so I'm going to try to narrow it down as much as I can. I've talked about why I spec the way I do in a more general sense, so I'll not do that again here. I've also dedicated two posts already to the tactics that I use with this spec, so I'll not waste my reader's valuable time with recitations of that either. What I am going to do is list every single talent in the affliction tree, and why I did or why I did not put points into it. I'll also briefly mention at the end of this post why I decided to put my extra points into destruction rather than demonology, and why I decided to place them in the places that I put them. Hopefully by the end, I'll have a comprehensive guide for locks looking to spec affliction for the first time--even if they don't make the same choices I made.

I'll warn you right now that this post is going to be rather long, though I'll do my best to keep it from becoming dry. So, without further arbitrary addition to the already sizable length of this post, here's my spec:

54 / 0 / 17
I call it 'Affliction Mach 3' (seriously, it's my third major variation on affliction since 3.0

Affliction Tree

Tier 1

Improved Curse of Agony (0/2): Right off the bat is perhaps my most controversial decision. Almost all affliction warlocks these days--and even many demonology and destruction warlocks as well--put two points in here for the improved damage. I, too, would join them, save for the unfortunate fact that I don't have any boomkin or deathknights to run with reliably. This means I'm still casting Curse of Elements frequently enough that it doesn't seem worth it to spend two points on something I would only get to use very occasionally.
Suppression(3/3): Three points here makes getting myself up to the all-important hit cap much easier. However, if I ever reach the point where my gear easily gets me all the way up to the spell hit cap of 446 (which it almost has by now) then these three points will very likely start going elsewhere, since the mana-cost reduction to my affliction spells is insignificant. Two of them will probably go into Imp'd CoA, if I haven't already moved points into there by then.
Improved Corruption(5/5): This is an absolute, and obvious, must for all affliction warlocks. Corruption one of the most important spells to any affliction rotation--and in fact as of late I've noticed that it has become my single highest damaging spell, beating out shadow bolt by 1% of my damage dealing pie. As such, improving it whenever possible is crucial. Any affliction lock who doesn't r lyke ttly skrub. Also ghey, lawl.

Tier 2

Frailty(0/2): Despite being improved since Burning Crusade, this talent is still absolutely terrible, and should never be taken. Evers. Double ever.
Improved Drain Soul(0/2): This talent is something of a tossup. It's a soloing/PVP talent, so in a raid or instancing environment it helps only a very little bit. However, the rather lackluster talents of tier 2 make this an acceptable choice, if only to give you enough total points in the tree to make your way to the next tier. It's certainly a fine alternative to putting any points in Frailty.
Improved Life Tap(2/2): Life tap is fundamental to a warlock's ability to do damage. Our spells are mana inefficient, we can't regen mana the way priests or magi do, and the only way we're going to be able to keep casting is if we're able to life tap or dark pact to keep our mana up. I would go so far as to say that this is a must-have talent (though more due to the poor choices on this tier than to how awesome an extra 20% mana is I think.)
Soul Siphon(2/2): Much to my embarrassment, I only recently noticed that this talent was changed in the Echoes of Doom patch. You can tell I'm smart because it only takes me three months to notice a fundamental change in a talent that I've put points into after several respecs. Having now noticed it, I am tempted to move these points either to Improved Curse of Agony, or to Improved Drain Soul. However, Drain Life is very helpful when soloing Onyxia--which is fun even though they recently halved the gold you get from doing it. So I may keep it here. Regardless, I don't view it as important enough an error to deal with immediately. After all, it's not like I put the points in frailty. (Which you should never do. Ever.)

Tier 3

Improved Fear (0/2): I imagine that this is a kickass PVP talent. It's probably also sexcellent for soloing. However, I do not PVP, nor do I use fear much when I'm soloing things. I'm weird that way. As such, I've never put points here, and doubt I ever will. Cool talent though.
Fel Concentration (3/3): Another great soloing talent that ends up being completely useless in a raiding or instancing scenario; provided the healer is doing his or her job. However, since there really isn't much else to put points into at this tier, I think it's a good choice, since without this talent, drain-tanking is effectively impossible.
Amplify Curse (0/1): I'm bouncing back and forth on this talent. It was initially very appealing to me, so I took it to try it out. After leveling up with it, and using it in my first raid or so, I concluded that it was a bad talent for me. My conclusion was based on the fact that I always used Curse of Elements, and my typical tactic for using that spell was to cast it while the tank was gaining aggro. As such, a faster cooldown didn't mean I got to start DPSing faster, because I was waiting for the tank to build aggro anyway. I even went so far as to sugguest on the warlock forums that this talent be changed so that it reduced the global cooldown of lifetap and dark pact--spells that often need to be cast in the heat of casting rotations, which has a tendency to throw off a person's sense of timing. However, due to how much easier threat generation has become, and due to the increased use of Curse of Agony in modern raids, I am beginning to reconsider whether or not this talent would be useful. My personal jury is still out on this decision.

Tier 4

Grim Reach (0/2): The equation with this talent seems very simple in my mind. Any affliction casting rotation I've ever seen contains shadow bolt. Most good ones also contain Immolate. Immolate and Shadow Bolt are destruction spells, and will not get the increased range from this talent. So, unless you're willing--and able--to put points into the destruction talent which also increases range, Grim Reach is silly, because you'll still have to stand just as close as you would have without it in order to cast your destro spells. Furthermore, I've noticed a distinct lack of fights in Wrath of the Lich King which really require you to stay as far away from the boss as you can. In fact, there are a surprising number of fights where you actually have to stand on top of the boss in order to be successful. Perhaps things will change in Ulduar. If so, I shall reconsider.
Nightfall (2/2): I'm a bit dubious about the amount that this talent actually helps, but again, poor alternatives leave me with only a few equally dubious alternatives. I've heard that the benefits of this talent are much better now than they were in BC, which is good, because I have points here. It should be noted that Glyph of Corruption DOES stack with this talent, so it's probably a decently good idea to get both--given the lackluster quality of warlock glyphs. (A subject I should probably write on sometime soon as well.)
Empowered Corruption (3/3): Woot, another chance to improve my corruption. If I didn't take this, I'd be a moron!

Tier 5

Shadow Embrace (5/5): This talent is an absolute requirement for any affliction spec. In general, things that make ALL your dots do extra damage are a very, very good thing. This is also the reason why, in my boss rotation, I open up with a shadow bolt before I cast haunt, followed by all my dots. That way, this effect is stacked to the maximum of height of two before my first dot ticks.
Siphon Life (1/1): Siphon Life, even after being Glyphed, will probably end up being your lowest damage-dealing DoT. However, without it your overall damage would still be significantly lower. What's more, the healing effect (combined with your Fel Armor's heal, combined with the healing effect of Haunt, combined with a Death Coil now and again) help you keep yourself healed through all that life-tapping you'll be doing during boss fights. The healing effects mentioned are enough, in fact, that it allows affliction warlocks to solo some rather tough elites with ease. Not only is this talent useful enough that you should get it for instances and raids, but it's also an utterly fantastic talent for both soloing and PVP.
Curse of Exhaustion (0/1): A dubiously useful talent, that requires you to take another dubiously useful talent. Curse of Exhaustion is great for PVP, and a very useful tool when soloing, but for a spec geared toward group-content, you really can't allow yourself to waste the point most of the time. (Not to self: find a thesaurus that has terms such as 'PVP' and 'soloing.')

That's a lot of text...Random screenshot time!

Tier 6

Improved Fel Hunter (0/2): This is a decision I may have to seriously reconsider. The primary benefit of this talent is that it allows your fel hunter's main attack to return mana to it--which in turn allows you to dark-pact mana from your pet more frequently. (it also improves the Fel Intellect buff, but I did the math on it once, the improvement is utterly negligible. Not even worth considering the the decision making process.) Now previously, I rejected this talent because on 98% of bosses in the game, if I sent my fel hunter in to attack them they would one-shot him with some kind of AoE or whatever. However, due to the recent change (which raised my fel hunter's health from 7k to something like 17k unbuffed) the fel hunter may be significantly more capable of surviving, making this talent much more viable. I will do testing on this over the next few weeks--though my initial concern is that the fel hunter will only last slightly longer than he did before with this new HP buff, since I refuse to waste valuable casting time using a channeled heal on my pet. We will see, however.
Shadow Mastery (5/5): RAWR, Shadow Damage! Even if Siphon Life were the most useless spell in the game, it would be worth getting it just to get your hands on this talent. The only spell in my rotation that this talent doesn't improve by 15% is Immolate.

Tier 7

Eradication (1/3): Eradication is an interesting little talent. I, like many other affliction warlocks, once had it topped out at 3/3, until I saw the math. See, the way the internal cooldown for this proc works (it's unusually long) means that if you increase the probability of it happening, as you would by putting two or three talents into it instead of just one, all you really do is cause the ability to proc during the cooldown--meaning essentially that one point in here has almost exactly the same benefit as having three! Do yourself a favor and put those two points somewhere more useful. (I put them in Cataclysm, which made me hit-capped.)
Contagion (5/5): 5% isn't all that impressive for a 5-point talent, and the dispelling effect is really just for PVP, so it's not really a viable reason for taking this talent in a PVE spec. However, a buff to corruption is a buff to corruption. I've never seen a good affliction warlock without this talent, and I doubt I ever will.
Dark Pact (1/1): Dark Pact has gotten a lot of heat lately. Many warlocks feel that it scales poorly compared to lifetap, and has been rendered useless. Now, one or two people complaining about that and I would disregard it as poppycock spouted by morons who can't play their class. However, it is a complaint that is gaining a great deal of purchase in the warlock community, so I decided to do some tests myself. I won't bore you with all my numbers, but what it comes down to is that Life Tap returns roughly 2800 mana, and Dark Pact returns about 2800 mana. There are variances as my stats change, but all in all they usually return within 200 mana of one another. Pet mana and personal health regen are such that I'll likely only be able to get 2 Dark Pacts off before the pet is empty, but if I'm wise enough to dark pact early on in my rotation, rather than when I'm out of mana, I should be able to get away with going 50/50 between life tap and dark pact, which will be a great help to the healers. Now, it should be noted that these numbers may be vastly different for different people, because Dark Pact scales depending on a warlock's spell power, and Life Tap scales--as of 3.0--depending on how much spirit a warlock has. However, I don't see any reason why my spirit / spellpower ratio wouldn't be at least roughly representative of most level 80 warlocks. Perhaps I am wrong in thinking this, I don't know. That said, pets COULD use a larger mana pool. This is something I'd really like to see from blizz in the near future. (They do seem to be reconsidering the dark pact mechanics, given the various PTR changelogs I've seen over the last 6 months.)

Here you can see my Spell Power, Spirit, and an example of both a Life Tap and a Dark Pact, with the mana returns scrolling to the right of my character. Don't ask why Life Tap has such a random icon.

Tier 8

Improved Howl of Terror (0/2): I wish this talent was viable for PvE ;_; It's just so bloody awesome. An instant cast fear? Holy crap is that cool! Unfortunately, a warlock should only rarely use fear in an instance, and this deep into the tree you have to start being very frugal with your points, because almost everything is necessary to take.
Malediction (3/3): While the 3% bonus to spell damage that they added makes these three points worth it all by itself; I largely took this talent for the improvement to Curse of Elements. By this point in reading this post / my blog you should be more than familiar with why.

Tier 9

Death's Embrace (3/3): While the bonus to draining is a boon for soloing and PVP, the improved crit chance is really what makes this talent worth taking. Warlocks have a notable lack of 'cooldowns' to 'bust out' when the raid leader starts shouting "ALRIGHT, SHE ENRAGED, BUST ALL YOUR COOLDOWNS!" So this talent is really very helpful in giving affliction damage a little extra 'umf' in the home stretch. (I actually covered exactly what that umf amounts to very recently.)
Unstable Affliction (1/1): Must have. Period. Second best warlock DoT there is.
Pandemic (3/3): This is an astoundingly interesting and innovative mechanic, and it's one of the biggest reasons that affliction is able to remain competitive in Wrath of the Lich King. See, in Burning Crusade, warlock raiding went like this: first, you spec affliction. You get to about SSC / TK level, you get the magical stats (202 hit, 20% crit, 1200 spell damage if I recall correctly) and then you respec 0/21/40. Why? Because affliction didn't get much of a benefit from all that crit, and since your gear ended up having crit rating on it anyway, destruction was indisputably more powerful than affliction at this level of gear, by several orders of magnitude. The size of a destruction warlock's crits in BT gear are seriously something I didn't start to see on Sentai until he was Naxx-geared at level 80. So anyway, in response to this, blizz created Pandemic, which (essentially) allows dots to crit, allowing affliction to scale with gear in a way that it was unable to do previously. It's really quite ingenious. That said, I'd like to see the effect altered somewhat to include all periodic effects, rather than just corruption and unstable affliction, because based on what I've seen on my damage meter's pie charts, pandemic isn't doing quite enough damage to really keep affliction competitive with destruction in T9. However, we will see as time goes on! (I should also note that blizz recently said that they had managed to re-code the way dots work in such a way that they could--if they wanted to--allow dots to crit on their own. They also said that they have no plans to do that at this time; but it could be an interesting mechanic in the future.)

Tier 10

Everlasting Affliction (5/5): As if the additional spell damage wasn't enough to make this talent worth taking, the fact that it allows Haunt to re-apply corruption is a beautiful thing. You see, with Haunt re-applying corruption, a whole spell--and its 1.5 second global cooldown--are removed from the extremely complicated affliction rotation. As much as I love the depth of affliction DPSing, I welcome this bit of simplification with open arms. I would like to see the talent modified in the future, however, so that Drain Life does NOT renew corruption. Drain life has a rather short duration--particularly if the warlock is getting hit. And most of the time when you're casting Drain Life, you're casting it over and over again--meaning that your corruption spell often doesn't even last long enough to get a single tick off before drain life re-applies it. [EDIT: I stand corrected on this! Apparently the re-application of corruption caused by this talent does not break the flow of damage ticks. My bad!]

Tier 11

Haunt (1/1): Haunt is living proof that blizz is full of smart people. This is exactly the kind of innovative mechanic that I love to see. All at once, it both plays to the already established strengths of this spec, while also bringing something completely new and unfamiliar to the table. Bravo, warlock dev team. Bravo.



Poor Sentugrehsk is so hungry! But what does he have to do with affliction specs?

Destruction Tree

With 54 points spent in affliction, that leaves me with 17 points. There are a multitude of interesting things that could be done with those points. For example, 13 points in the demonology tree to grab Demonic Aegis would not only increase the amount of healing Fel Armor does by 30%, as well as turning the 180 base spell power from that spell into 234, but it would also convert 40% of my spirit into spell power, instead of the default 30%! However, as you can see I haven't done that in this spec, as tempting as it is. Instead I've put those 17 points into the destruction tree, due to the fact that the low-tier talents in that tree are more useful for straight DPS than the low tier talents in demonology. At least, that is, on average. As stated above, I'll only go over the talents I actually took in the destruction tree, for brevity's sake.


Improved Shadow Bolt (5/5) This is an astoundingly good talent, particularly for affliction warlocks, and particularly since the recent change made to it in 3.0. With five points here, every single time your shadow bolt crits against a target ALL OF YOUR DOTS (except immolate) do 15% more damage for the next 12 seconds. And let me tell you, even as an affliction warlock, I crit quite frequently. What's more, as of 3.0 the effect is now a buff for the warlock, rather than a debuff for the target--meaning the bonus damage will hurt all of your targets, rather than just the one which you crit against. I can't imagine going without this talent.

Bane (5/5) Back in Burning Crusade, when I was hanging out on the warlock forums trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing, I heard a warlock say 'there's no such thing as a raiding spec without bane.' And as far as I can determine, this has only become more true for affliction warlocks since Immolate is part of our rotation now.

Cataclysm (2/3) This is a recent addition to the Mach 3 version of my affliction spec, and wasn't here in Mach 2. Much like suppression, I have this talent to shore-up my hit rating numbers. With the combination of those 5 talent points spread throughout the 2 trees, I am far above the hit cap for all my offensive spells. When my gear eventually reaches the point where I'm easily maintaining the 446 hit, I may decide to move these talents into something more useful, since the mana-cost reduction is (as mentioned) negligible.

Ruin (5/5) Sexy, sexy ruin. There isn't a warlock in the world who doesn't want to have the five talent points to spare so they can put them here, thanks to the way Blizzard rearranged the destruction tree in 3.0, I now do. This makes my shadow bolt crits very big. They're like..."BOOM!" and seeing numbers like "9538" on my screen causes some of the bloodflow in my body to be diverted elsewhere, if you know what I mean. *wink wink*

So there you have it, the grand spec post. Kind of daunting, now that I look back on it. I hope I didn't get anything massively wrong, since this post is likely to be one that a lot of people find my blog from. But hey, couldn't put it off forever right?

Anyway, despite the fact that I can't quite think of a way to end this post, anybody who read this far is doubtless hoping that this post is going to end soon, so I'll grant their wish without any further delay.

Server First! (?) Heroic Training Dummy...

So, I was running around Stormwind on a lowbie earlier, looking for a stockades group. And I happened upon something peculiar: the Heroic Training Dummy, usually at about 11 million hit points, was down to a paltry 2.5 million. This was a job for a hit-capped level 80 affliction warlock, who had never quite been able to get a decent reading on how much the 3 points he put in Death's Embrace (Improved crit chance when the mob is below 35%) really helped him.



Quite a bit as it turns out. That's an increase of about 250 damage per second over my normal peak of 2.5. I usually only hit 2.2 on the training dummy, so this improvement seems to indicate why I tend to do better on real bosses.

It was a long battle. Recount clocked it at about 20 minutes I think.I don't know for sure though, for I was far too intent on the zen of casting rotations to take a look at the clock, or even screencap during most of the fight (screenshot lag causes lack of rhythm which causes slight drops in DPS!) However, I can tell you that after long minutes of furious battlecasting...


I emerged victorious.

Curses! Cursed again!

The mainstay WoW's 'debuffer class,' which curse to use is often the source of some contention among warlocks (since only one can be used at a time.) While not all curses are created anywhere near equal I thought it might be fun to run them down, and give my thoughts on them.

Curse of Weakness easily makes my list of the top five most useless warlock spells, (I actually made that list once.) The pittance of attack power (478 at level 80) that this spell removes from the target is so insignificant that it's not even really viable as a PVP talent. And while it can be improved by talents, it can't be improved nearly enough to avoid much more useful talent points, such as the improvements to drain soul, life tap, and drain life. In complete honesty, the only time I can think of that I might use this spell, is in-between levels six and eight, when it's the only curse that I have. (Or, I suppose, if you're in a raid with an inordinate amount of warlocks--but even then Curse of Agony or Doom is probably a better choice.)

Curse of Recklessness is one of the most under-rated curses in the game. Not so much for the armor reduction, which is really just incidental, but rather for the fact that it causes mobs not to flee. This can be extremely handy in instances filled with humanoids, where a mob with low health is often likely to run off and pull a second group of enemies, causing the wholesale slaughter of a warlock and his or her compatriots. Back in the days, before all these whippersnappers started playing the game, some warlocks used to practice a tactic called 'yo-yoing,' where they would fear a mob, CoR it, then throw another curse on it and fear it again--effectively causing the mob to run away from, and towards them over and over again. Unfortunately as of patch 3.0.2 CoR no longer causes creatures to ignore fear effects, but it still prevents them from fleeing.

Curse of Tongues I like this curse. I actually like it a whole lot. I just don't know what to do with it. I imagine it'd be rather handy in PVP, but I don't really PVP all that much. Never was able to get into it. As such it spends a lot of time next to curse of weakness on my action bar, gathering dust. However, it DOES make the stuff you say sound funny. And that's just cool.

And now, a random screenshot to break up the wall of text!

Curse of Exhaustion Much like Curse of Tongues, I love this curse, yet I never get to use it. Though, much unlike its counterpart, the reason I never get to use it is because I never get to *have* it. Curse of Exhaustion is great for kiting, which is something warlocks could certainly use help with. If I was to create some kind of soloing spec, or a PVP spec even, Curse of Exhaustion would be a must. However, in the instancing/raiding specs that I use to optimize my performance in what I consider the best part of the game, the two talent points required to get this little gem are much better spent elsewhere.

Curse of Elements is my curse of choice. Not only does it give a huge buff to all of my damage, but it gives buffs to the damage of my buddies who play magi as well! What's more, now that 3.0.8 has gone live and endgame BM hunters start using arcane shot, it'll help them too! By far this is the best curse to use for warlocks in an instance, unless there is some other warlock there casting it (since the effect does not stack,) or some other class casting a debuff that CoE doesn't stack with. (Boomkin and Death Knights do this.)

Curse of Agony is, according to every single source (reliable and unreliable) the curse you should be using in Wrath of the Lich King. You can distinguish (roughly) between the reliable and unreliable sources, because the reliable ones will add "unless nobody is already casting Curse of Elements or something that supersedes it" under their breath. Honestly, I'm still having a bit of a hard time with this. I believe I may have mentioned in the past that when I was being raised, a warlock could get quite a talking to for using Curse of Agony in a raid. I remember one raid leader once saying "Could all the warlocks putting Curse of Agony on the boss try doing something USEFUL instead?" As such, I've been conditioned against using it, A Clockwork Orange style. That said, I've begrudgingly accepted that it's useful these days, and as soon as I find a boomkin to hang out with, I'll start using it.

Curse of Doom was once called "Curse of Takes-forever-to-proc" by my guild's main tank. Back in Burning Crusade (damn, I say that alot,) this was the spell you were supposed to use if somebody else had Curse of Elements up. And at level 80, if you don't have points in Improved Curse of Agony, the 11k damage of this spell still ends up being slightly superior to CoA according to my damage tests. Though whether there's actually time for it to proc depends on whether or the mob will stay alive forever I suppose. That said, if you're using damaging curses rather than CoE, you should probably have points in Improved Curse of Agony.

Really, the layout of curses right now is pretty dismal. You'd think that a core class mechanic would be less cast aside than curses have been. Healers get more and better ways of healing, DPS gets more and better ways of DPSing. Why doesn't the debuffing class get more and better ways of debuffing? This is something I plan to address in more detail in a future post.

Affliction DPS on Trash Mobs

NOTE: A lot of people are getting to this post after searching 'affliction dps 80' or something of that sort. And while I think this post is helpful, it's probable that you're looking for something a little more like this.

"Woe to you, affliction warlock! For your dualistic lot in life is one both of glory and of shame; for while you may top the meters on Patchwerk, never will your name be seen above rank the tenth when there is trash to clear. And so will you remain in obscurity, your true skill remaining hidden due to the lies told by 'overall damage' reports."

~Anonymous Raid Leader

I'm not one to complain about the weaknesses of my class, or the strengths of other classes. I may have suggestions for improving things, but I really do hate to bitch. That said, affliction warlocks have it bad right now as far as trash DPS goes, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing. Trash mobs are just what their name proclaims them to be--trash. If a group can't manage to tear through trash mobs with relative ease, then they really have no business attempting the bosses that come after said trash.

The problem with affliction's low trash-mob-damage comes not from any actual problems with the in-game situation, but rather, from the damage meter, and the perception it creates in peoples minds. Now don't get me wrong--damage meters are wonderful, amazing tools. If not for damage meters, I never would have found out that I was consistently one of the worst damage dealers in any group, which means I never would have sought help and never would have become the symbol of mediocrity that I have become today. Furthermore, without damage meters I would have no way to test my new rotations and specs. And hell, without damage meters, I wouldn't be able to playfully compete with my fellow DPSers for the top DPS spot.

The problem with the damage meter is that most people don't know how to use it properly. Almost everyone keeps the thing stuck on 'overall damage,' which in my experience both as a DPSer and a raid leader, doesn't do anybody any good. Far too often this method of looking at the numbers allows a small group of people to climb to the top of the meter doing trivial things such as slaughtering the trash mobs or spamming AoE on nonelites, while their actual contribution in difficult situations is frighteningly lackluster.

Furthermore, as a motivating factor, damage meters become meaningless when only overall data is used. Invariably, in any instance, a small group of people quickly establish themselves as the 'top' DPS, while other players are left in the dust. Given a boss or two, the damage meters will settle into a rather stable arrangement, that won't be changed even if the people at the top stop trying, and the people at the bottom use every trick they've got in an attempt to pull ahead.


Damn hunters! >.>

Personally, I find the most accurate way to view the data is to set your damage meter to only show the numbers for the current fight. This way, everybody has a clean state at the start of every single pull. When I've been doing well throughout the instance thus far, this forces me to 'keep it up,' in order to maintain my lead. Similarly, when I've been doing poorly, I am less likely to get discouraged, and more likely to try harder to improve my standing on the next pull.

All of that aside, I am most firmly of the opinion that even though affliction warlocks can't be expected to do good DPS on trash, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. To that end, I've begun to play with a variety of alternate tactics for trash mobs, and while I've yet to achieve any truly great level of success, I have managed to put forth a decidedly respectable showing on individual trash pulls now and again. Once or twice even managing to get the top spot! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Before you really begin to think about how to do good damage on trash mobs, you must try to understand why it is that affliction has so much trouble with them in the first place. Affliction Warlocks are sometimes called "DOT locks," after their primary form of attack. DOT, as everyone knows, is the acronym for Damage Over Time. And that, there, is the root of the problem. Time. Affliction warlocks require some measure of time before they can really begin to do damage.

I've done extensive testing of affliction damage using things like real time graphs, as well as friends who agreed to serve as a control group of sorts. What I've noticed is that even several seconds into my rotation, my damage output is altogether pitiful when I'm using my full casting sequence. Then, about 25-35 seconds into combat, my numbers suddenly shoot up at an astronomical speed, as all my dot ticks start going off in force. Before this, however, my numbers would shame a level 65 elemental shaman.

At this point, the issue should be clear. When fighting trash mobs, each target is only going to be alive for a scant few seconds, meaning that the 'shooting up' part of my damage never happens. Ergo, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the only way to really do damage against such mobs is to either significantly alter my rotation, or respec--something I'm not willing to do when my damage output in more important situations is phenomenal.

Altering the rotation, however, is a tricky business, because it either requires memorizing every trash mob in every instance, or it requires tactical senses good enough to analyse a target mob's life expectancy after a glance at it's HP, and formulate a viable tactic based on that. Given the near impossibility of the former, I fear I am stuck with attempting the latter, even given my lackluster tactical skills.

To make things simpler, I've devised a hand full of rotations for different situations. And, whenever I find myself faced with trash pulls, I try and approximate which one of these rotations might work best for that particular pull.

Boom Theory: Seed of Corruption, Rain of Fire, and a Shadowflame now and again for good measure. If you've got a good tank, then this is by far the easiest way to go about things in larger pulls. Not just pally tanks anymore either! I've used this tactic to great success with both warrior and death knight tanks*. Be careful though, if you pull aggro you're very likely to end up dead, and if you piss the tank off, you're very likely to end up looking at a window that says "You are not in the instance group, you will be ported to [Insert Hearth Location here] in X amount of seconds."

(*No offense is intended to my feral druid buddies--I just haven't run with one since Karazhan, so I can't speak from experience.)

The Resilient Trash Mob: Some trash pulls are almost like mini-bosses in terms of how much HP they have, but that still doesn't mean you're going to be able to get your full rotation off. So I abbreviate it: Curse of Elements, Haunt, Corruption, Followed by Shadow Bolt spam, and a re-cast of Haunt whenever it's up. After the first 7 seconds of combat or so, all your casting time will be spent on direct damage casting, so you won't be losing any global cooldowns on dots that won't finish. I sometimes modify this to include Unstable Affliction as well, if the mobs are particularly hearty.

Humanoids Got No HP Humanoid trash mobs last only barely longer than nonelites do in most instances. For these, the AoE approach is by far the preferable one, but if there's only one humanoid left, or if your tank isn't comfortable with the threat created by your AoE, then your best bet is to just sit there spamming the Shadow Bolt button. These mobs will likely go down so fast that even Curse of Elements will be a waste of valuable shadow bolting time. I've considered trying to use Searing Pain on these mobs, given its shorter cast time, but the significantly lower amount of damage it does, and the significantly higher amount of threat that it pulls, makes me dubious that it will be more successful than straight up SB spam.


An example of the 'Resilient Trash Mob' tactic

I've found that, in a general sense anyway, one of these three approaches will almost always serve well enough to get the job done, and keeping available tactics down to three also helps avoid confusion. I think it was Bruce Lee who said that a person shouldn't try and learn too many ways to react to a single situation, because if they do, then when they're in that situation they'll find themselves paralyzed with indecision about which way to react. Something to that affect anyway.

So that's how I deal with trash DPS as a level 80 affliction warlock. It's not great, it's not even 'very good' if I'm trying to out DPS a hunter, rogue, or kitty druid. However, the results I've got from it are certainly respectable enough that I can rest assured my performance on the boss will be noticed, and my actual skill--good, bad, or mediocre--can be judged at least somewhat accurately by the rest of the group.

How One Relates to Three

Affliction, Demonology, Destruction. Warlocks would seem uniquly suited to me, given that ADD diagnosis I was handed as a kid. Puns aside, I thought it might be intersting to write a post about why it is that I chose affliction as my tree, rather than one of the two Ds. It doesn't have much to do with my playstyle preference, or with how easy it is to play. Honestly, I don't like to think of myself so much as 'an affliction warlock.' Rather, I view myself simply as a warlock. All the skills in all the trees are part of me--even if they're not active at the moment.

When I first started my warlock, (who, by the way, was also my very first character,) shadow bolt seemed to be the thing. It was solid burst damage that took people out pretty fast. It was also the attack with the least confusing application. As such, when I recieved my first precious talent point at level ten, the choice seemed obvious. Why improve my hit chance with affliction spells, or lower the casting time of corruption? Why improve my imp, or my healthstone, or my stamina, when I could shorten the casting time of my shadow bolt? It is, after all, the mainstay of how I play!


Alls I need is my Shadow Bolts, my wand, and my hunter!

As levels went on, destruction continued to draw my points. Double crit damage? heck yeah. An instant cast direct damage spell that gives me a soul shard? who could say no! It was right around the time that I was greatly enjoying the benefits of 'Backlash' in Un'Goro crater, shortly after I started , that I started to get annoyed with how much I was dying. Looking back on it, it probably was far more due to my skill, and my tactics than it was due to my spec. These were back in the days before I'd ever done an instance with a group of my peers, and still had no frame of reference from which I could determine just how terrible I was.

At the same time, a friend of mine with a level 70 warlock was continuing to insist that I should spec affliction. I don't like to give in to the insistance of friends for no reason, but this particular friend has the uncanny ability to be completely unreasonable, yet still be right about things. And, since I was dying constantly, I decided to take his advice and spec affliction. I wouldn't say that I absolutely loved it, there are many things that I missed--and still miss--about destruction. However, with a whole new set of skills and abilities unlocked for me, I gained a new appreciation for the depth of the class, and the pleasure I could have playing it. Save for a few brief stints respeccing to destruction or demonology just for the fun of it, I've been affliction ever since.

There's still a part of me, though, that really thinks of myself as a destruction warlock. A part of me who holds on to shadow bolt as the core of my damage-dealing ability. And while I have much less of a connection to demonology--I don't actually know my fel guard's name--I do have fond memories of the amazing things I've been able to do back when I had points in Improved Voidwalker. You might say that, in spirit, I'm a 72/73/73 warlock.

However, in body, I'm spec'd 56/0/15, because I'm good at it. I started spec'ing this way because I was told it did the best damage and I wanted to do the best damage. I stayed spec'd this way because I've since become very familiar with the proceses involved in optimizing this spec for good DPS. If, someday, some other tree, either demonology or destruction, is the clear leader in DPS. Then I'll switch. It would have to be a rather large gap, I think, for me to so readily give up the expertise I have with affliction, but I would relish the chance to play with a different aspect of my whole. As you might imagine--I can't wait for dual specs to open still more of the class up to me.

And there it is. I spec affliction because it does good damage, and because I'm good at it. I have no compulsion to cast dots, no passionate love for this particular placement of talent points. Not because I don't love the intricacies of playing affliction--but rather because I love the intricacies to be found in each of the three specs.

P.S. (First person to notice the pun in the post title gets a cookie.)

That's how I raid, whippersnappers!

Today I'd like to take a moment to talk about level 80 affliction instancing; be it in heroics or raids. In particular, I'd like to touch on what my rotation is, how I settled on it, and compare it against some of the stuff I've heard from other people. First though, I'd like to clarify that I am not talking about the way I do DPS on trash pulls here. Affliction warlocks are, very possibly, the worst DPSers when it comes to doing trash pulls. I do have methods I use on trash pulls to attempt to maximize my damage output on them, but that's a post for another day.

In Burning Crusade, affliction instancing wasn't actually very dot heavy. It was pretty funny actually, I was throwing up two dots--Unstable Affliction and Corruption--on any boss, and only had to worry about keeping them refreshed while I spammed the shadow bolt button. It's no surprise really that once you had decent enough gear, the poor scaling of dots made destruction absolutely mandatory.

In WotLK, things have changed significantly for affliction. Not only have the previously lackluster dots had their damage significantly buffed in comparison to Corruption and UA--but a multitude of new buffs in the affliction tree which affect 'all your periodic effects' has made dot-locks far more dot-heavy than they were in the BC days. Not to mention about three hundred times more confusing! What's more, the introduction of Pandemic means that your dots scale not only with your spell damage, but with your crit rating as well, making it far less likely that destruction will prove to be the definitive best spec in higher tier content.

When I was first coming in to LK, I took my knowledge of BC raiding, and modified my rotation to fit my new best friend: Haunt. First, I'd open with Curse of Elements, and probably hit one of my spell damage trinkets. Then I'd begin my rotation with Haunt, follow it with UA, followed by corruption, and finally shadow bolt until either UA or Haunt needed to be refreshed. This actually worked exceedingly well, and I don't believe I actually felt the need to improve it until I had been doing heroics for awhile.

On the suggestion of a friend, I decided to try out some of the dots which I once scorned other warlocks for using. Siphon Life was the first addition to my rotation, after I noticed that I could get upwards of 500 damage per tick on a dot that didn't need to be refreshed very frequently at all. This gave me a nice little chunk of bonus damage. My rotation was modified again only recently, after I read the excellent post by fallenman on the warlock class forum. After reading it, I did some DPS tests on my own, played around with the numbers, tried to guess what I could expect to see in actual instances, and finally added immolate back into my primary rotation--a position it hasn't enjoyed since shortly after I made it through the dark portal I think.

At present, my casting rotation goes something like this:

[IMPORTANT NOTE: This rotation has been updated.]

0) If at any time, either of my two spell damage trinkets are up, I use them. They don't even have a global cooldown, so it shouldn't interrupt the rotation.

1) Get Curse of Elements on the target while you give the tank a moment to build a bit of threat.

2) Cast one Shadow Bolt, causing the Shadow Embrace effect.

3) Cast Haunt, causing both that debuff, and a second stack of the Shadow Embrace effect.

4) Corruption

5) Siphon Life

6) Unstable Affliction

7) Immolate

8) Re-apply dots as necessary, avoiding clipping (re-casting the dot before it has 100% completed.) Cast haunt whenever it's up--don't worry about clipping it (or corruption, the dot which it re-applies.) If not otherwise occupied, be casting Shadow Bolt.


Bad warlock! Lrn2lifetap!

The logic behind my casting order is thus: First, I get the Shadow Embrace and Haunt debuffs on the boss first thing, so that *each and every tick* of my dots gains the benefits of those effects. Corruption comes next because it is by far the most powerful dot in an affliction lock's arsenal, with UA being the closest second. Unstable Affliction and Immolate go together because they have very similar durations (thus allowing them to be re-cast together) and they go at the end of my initial rotation because their durations are very short, giving me the maximum amount of time to shadow bolt before I need to re-apply my dots.

Now in general, this is relatively close to what a lot of endgame raiders who play affliction do--which kinda surprises me, given that only recently did I read anything approaching an authoritative 'how to.' And that only led me to make one major change to the way I was doing things. However, there are some differences between what I do and 'what is best,' that I feel can be reasonably justified. Furthermore, there are a few things I've heard a large number of people insist upon which are frankly just dumb.

Perhaps the biggest divergence from the norm is the fact that I don't use Curse of Agony. It's not even easily accessable on my casting bar. At first I didn't use it because back in BC, using CoA was enough to get you booted from the raid if the leader knew even a little bit about warlocks. Then I started seeing everybody insist that in LK, it should be in your affliction rotation. I was skeptical, so I did tests. Curse of Elements came out on top for pure damage--which is something that all of the better affliction locks seem to agree upon. The reason that none of THEM use CoE is because--apparently--both boomkins and death knights have some kind of debuff that doesn't stack wich Curse of Elements, and is perhaps even better. I say apparently because I haven't grouped with any boomkin that I remember since level 70, and while I do know a DK who I group with often, I've yet to recieve a message saying 'a more powerful spell is already active' or something like that. Perhaps this is something I'll have to look into soon.

Another thing I've heard a great deal of is warlocks demanding that haunt be the LAST spell cast during the first rotation, rather than the first. The logic of this positively baffles me. Supposedly the idea is that you start with corruption, cast all your other dots, then cast haunt, refreshing the corruption that you started with, and giving you some time to shadow bolt before you have to recast haunt. I can't understand, however, how this minor benefit is supposed to make up for the roughly 1-2k damage more that your dots would have done if haunt had been active earlier. Not to mention shadow embrace! No no, I really don't see it.

Well, this old man has rambled long enough I suppose. So there you have it. My method, my results, and my defense of my results. All of this is of course, liable to change, because like anybody I am always trying to learn and improve. Sometimes my stubborn pride has a tendancy to stunt my ability to learn, (like hell will you ever see me cast Curse of Agony on a boss! >.>) but eventually I do.

I should perhaps note that there are a variety of topics which I touched on briefly here that require a bit more justification than I gave them. Said justification was excluded in favor of doing an entire future post on those topics, rather than cluttering up this one any further.