MoP - Affliction Warlock Guide & Talent Build

[Jesung]

Talents
As with many of the talents in MoP, many of them are dependent on the fights throughout the expansion.

Tier 1 - Self healing

Dark Regeneration restores some of your life and increases healing received for 12 seconds. It also restores some of your pet's life. It has a 2-minute cooldown.

Soul Leech is a passive ability that grants self-healing capabilities to your important offensive abilities, which will heal you for 10% of the damage that they do.

Harvest Life is an improvement over  Drain Life, which it replaces. It deals AoE damage and regenerates between 3% and 4.5% maximum health per second for each enemy it hits. The  effect is limited to 20 enemies.

These first three talents are entirely dependent on the fight in question, Dark regeneration is great for soaking up those big damage moments and allowing healers to focus on someone more important that yourself, Soul Leech is good for a constant source of self healing, and Harvest life can only be used if there are enough targets to make it worth while.

Tier 2 - Crowd Control

Howl of Terror causes 5 enemies within 10 yards to run in fear for 20 seconds. Damage done on an afflicted target cancels the damage. It has a 40-second cooldown.

Mortal Coil is both a crowd control and a survival ability. It causes the target to run in fear for 3 seconds and restores 15% of your maximum health. It has a 45-second cooldown.
 
Shadowfury stuns all enemies within 8 yards for 3 seconds.
 
Mortal Coil will be the default choice as it also grants a bit of healing. If you need AoE crowd control, then you will go for  Howl of Terror or  Shadowfury depending on what the raid requires.

Tier 3 - Damage Reduction

Soul Link causes the damage (and healing) you and your demon take (receive) to be shared. However, your demon's health is reduced by 50%. Soul Link has no cooldown or duration, you can enable/disable it at will. Fall damage is not shared with your demon.

Sacrificial Pact causes your demon to sacrifice half of its current health to give you a 10-second shield that absorbs up to 200% of the sacrificed health. If you do not have a demon out, 50% of your health is sacrificed instead. Sacrificial Pact is on a 1-minute cooldown.

Dark Bargain prevents all damage (except fall damage) for 8 seconds. After the 8 seconds are up, 50% of the damage prevented is dealt over 8 seconds. It has a 3-minute cooldown.

With this tier, it seems that Dark Bargain will be the most useful of the bunch as it allows the Warlock to bypass raid mechanics, (such as Hour of Twilight on Ultraxion) it will also useful on fights with high damage spikes allowing healers to focus on others during the 8 second duration. Soul Link will also be useful allowing to us to take larger hits and Sacrificial Pact will smooth regular damage spikes.

Tier 4 - crowd control and utility abilities that cost health to use

Blood Fear is an improvement over  Fear, which it replaces. It still causes the target to run in fear for 20 seconds and damage dealt to the target will cancel the effect. However, it costs 10% of your maximum health (instead of costing mana), is instant-cast, but has a 10-second cooldown.

Burning Rush is an ability that you can toggle on and off without restriction. While it is active, your movement speed is increased by 50% but you lose 4% of your maximum health every second.

Unbound Will removes all magic and movement-impairing effects, as well as effects that cause loss of control of your character. It has a 1-minute cooldown and costs 20% of your maximum health.

It is clear that Unbound will, will be the talent of choice from this tier as it is the most helpful in a raid environment, both Burning Rush and Blood Fear seem more PvP orientated, although Burning Rush may have an occasional use in the PvE sphere.

Tier 5 - Demon Modification

Grimoire of Supremacy replaces your minions by more powerful demons that deal 20% more damage. See the Demons section of our rotation page for more information.

Grimoire of Service grants you new abilities that share a 2-minute cooldown and allow you to instantly summon a second demon for 20 seconds. The abilities are  Grimoire: Felguard (Demonology-only), Grimoire: Felhunter,  Grimoire: Imp,  Grimoire: Succubus, and  Grimoire: Voidwalker. The temporary demon cannot be controlled and will attack your current target. It is possible that the temporary demon you summon be the same as your currently summoned demon. In this case, you will temporarily have two instances of the same demon fighting for you.

Grimoire of Sacrifice sacrifices your demon to increase spell damage by 50% of several abilities (Malefic Grasp, Haunt, Drain Soul, Fel Flame) and to regenerate 2% of maximum health every 5 seconds. Resummoning a demon cancels the effect. Finally, you gain one of your demon's abilities (Imp: Singe Magic, Fel Hunter: Spell Lock, Felguard: Pursuit, Succubus: Seduction, Voidwalker: Sahdow Bulwark)

From what I have read at time of writing this, Grimoire of Sacrifice will be the default choice of talent on this tier as it gives the larger DPS increase out of the three, so at the beginning of MoP at least Affliction Locks will be without pets during encounters.

Tier 6 - Situational DPS increases

Archimonde's Vengeance causes your target to suffer 25% of all the damage you take for 8 seconds. It has a 2-minute cooldown. When the ability is off cooldown, enemies who attack you suffer 5% of all the damage they deal to you.

Kil'jaeden's Cunning enables you to cast and channel while moving for 6 seconds. It has a 1-minute cooldown. This talent also grants you a passive effect, which allows you to cast and channel while moving but the cast/channel time of your spells is increased by 50% and each cast reduces your movement speed by 10% for 6 seconds (stacking up to 2 times). This passive effect is disabled when Kiljaeden's Cunning is on cooldown.

Mannoroth's Fury increases the area of your AoE spells by 500%. The wording of the tooltip is rather poor. What this talent really does is increase the radius of your AoE spells by roughly 125% (so the radius is multiplied by 2.25), which causes the area affected by your AoE spells to become 5 times bigger.

As with the first tier of talents the one that is best will be dependent on the fight at hand. Kil'Jaeden's Cunning will be vital on movement Heavy fights. Mannoroth's Fury will be essential on heavy AoE encounters with adds loosely grouped. If neither of the conditions are true of the fight then Archimonde's Vengeance will be the default talent of choice.

Rotation/Spell Priority

Single Target Rotation/Priority

• Apply Agony and keep it up.
  
• Apply Corruption and keep it up.
  
• Apply Unstable Affliction and keep it up.
  
• Cast Haunt when you have a Soul Shard or when you are in  Shadow Trance.
  
• Each time you deal damage, you have a small chance to enter Shadow Trance, removing the Soul Shard cost of your abilities for 5 seconds.
• Cast Malefic Grasp as a filler.
  

When the boss is below 20% health,  Drain Soul replaces Malefic Grasp in the rotation. Doing so will grant you more Soul Shards than you can possibly spend. This means that you should always refresh your DoTs by using  Soulburn and Soul Swap (this causes Soul Swap to apply all your DoTs on the target).

Multi Target Rotation/Priority

Against 2 or 3 enemies, use Soulburn and Soul Swap to add your DoTs to all the targets. Then, use a combination of Malefic Grasp and Haunt to deal damage, and Drain Soul to regenerate Soul Shards. Maintain your DoTs with Soulburn and Soul Swap.

Against 4 or more enemies, you will need to start using Soulburn with Seed of Corruption. While Seed of Corruption is ticking, you can choose to maintain your DoTs on as many targets as possible using Soulburn and Soul Swap (and Drain Soul to regenerate Soul Shards), or to spam Rain of Fire, depending on the number of enemies (the more enemies, the better Rain of Fire becomes).

Cooldowns

Dark Soul: Misery is the main CD of the bunch and should be used on cooldown throughout the fight, the only time it should not be used is during Heroism/Timewarp as we will hit the GCD on nearly every spell, essentially wasting it.

Summon Doomguard/Infernal Although I have included the Infernal here, it is virtually never used, even on heavy AoE fights Doomguard out DPS's the Infernal. Unfortunately, when we replace our T13 set pieces with MoP gear the cooldown will once again go back up to a 10 min CD, only allowing us to use it once per fight.

Stat Priorities

During Cata, the Stat priority was essentially Int > Hit to cap (17%)> Haste > Crit > Mastery, by the time patch 5.0.4 arrives the stat priorities for Warlocks will have completely changed, and the new stat prio is as follows;

1. Intellect;
2. Hit Rating (until 15%);
3. Mastery Rating;
4. Haste Rating;
5. Critical Strike Rating

As you can see Haste is taking a step back and becoming only our 3rd most important stat (excluding Hit) and mastery is taking its spot as the next best thing to intellect. Also as you can see the hit rating will be the lower value of 15% (previously 17%), this is true for all casters as of patch 5.0.4.


Additional Reading

Mana Management: Life Tap will be used much more frequently that in Cata (every 30-40 seconds) to maintain the amount of mana needed.

DoT Refreshing: As you would imagine keeping the three main DoT's (Agony, Corruption, Unstable Affliction) is vital and keeping 100% up time on them is key to good DPS. DoT's benefit frm your stats at the time of casting and will not modify mid duration from Procs or other abilities, even if you get a slew of procs it is generally more worth while to allow the DoT's to continue than the refresh them to benefit from the extra stats (especially true for Agony as it needs to build up to 10 stacks before doing it's maximum damage). It also goes without saying that you should only refresh DoT's just as they are about to expire.

Pandemic is your level 90 ability. It causes the remaining duration of your DoTs to be added to the new duration when you refresh them, up to 50% of the base duration. It means that it is not detrimental to refresh a DoT when it has less than half of its maximum original duration (for example, 18 seconds for a 36-second DoT). This allows for earlier refreshes on DoT's to accommodate for procs of Power Torrent or other procs.

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Well, that about does it for the Affliction guide, sorry for the enormity of this post, but us Warlocks have had by far the most changes out of any classes and thus requires the most explanation of the new rotations and abilities in my opinion. I will try and get guides done for both Destruction and Demonology, but as Affliction seems to be ahead in the meters it seemed easier to do the Affliction one first as most people will playing it.

If there is any questions, or if you have suggestions to add to the guide feel free to say so in either PM or in this thread.

[Sneakytiger]

what do u think about them removing shadow bolt?

[Jesung]

what do u think about them removing shadow bolt?

I think it fine to be honest, it feels a little weird having a channeled spell as a filler, but once you get used to it, it is like it was always there

[Slush]

Hey Jes. Macro for ya!

#showtooltip Ritual of Summoning
/y F*** Y** Blizzard for lowering my in-game quality of life!
/s You have 10 seconds to click.
/raid If you have to walk your lazy ass here, blame the people who sat here and couldn't be bothered to click.
/cast Ritual of Summoning

[Switchback]

Great write up jes


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk and technology

[Jesung]

Hey Jes. Macro for ya!

#showtooltip Ritual of Summoning
/y F*** Y** Blizzard for lowering my in-game quality of life!
/s You have 10 seconds to click.
/raid If you have to walk your lazy ass here, blame the people who sat here and couldn't be bothered to click.
/cast Ritual of Summoning

I might have to use this one from now on

[TeaLeaf]

it feels a little weird having a channeled spell as a filler, but once you get used to it, it is like it was always there

Welcome to my Mind Flay world.... :thumbsup: