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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Affliction in Cataclysm PTR Patch 4.0:
Talents, Glyphs, and Playstyle


Talents
I had a nice amount of time today to work out the kinks on my patch 4.0 spec for affliction. For the purposes of the dummy DPS test, I had to spec out of Soulburn: Seed of Corruption, for the simple fact that it is used for AoE and not for single target DPS, plus I needed every free talent point I could get, so many great talents. Had I had just 4 more talent points I would have finished off Bane specced it 3/3 and spec Dark Arts for Tier 1 Demonology Tree 3/3 which would increase 5% Damage on my Felhunter's Shadow Bite. Below is the spec that I used for my DPS test.






























Glyphs
Like I noted in my Demonology thread, Glyphs are impossible to find. Luckily, I many of the glyphs I had copied over just fine. Here's what I used:

Glyph of Corruption, basically gives you an instant shadow bolt every once in a while. Don't really need to manage it since Shadow Bolt is your main nuke anyways.

Glyph of Haunt, just increases 3% from the 20% it already provides, basically a DoT damage booster. Again, nothing to maintain or worry about, it just takes care of itself.
































Playstyle
Basically, Affliction as we know it has stayed the same, except there are a few added things, such as cooldowns, which I will get to in a moment, and there is now room for error without risking any DPS loss. In my opinion, this spec has become just a bit "faceroll" in that, there is no need to worry about clipping DoTs or maintaining proper durations, etc...
However, like I said there are a few chnages. First off, as every spec has the new SoulBurn ours isn't an instant cast and it isn't an ability that we use in PvE very often. Our Soulburn is Drain Life, it channels twice as fast for half the duration. This allows it become a pretty powerful cooldown when things are getting tight. It is a good idea to have these two buttons right next to each other on your affliction bar, or either binded to two keys that are very close to each other, this will allow for you to use it as touch and go.
The Opener: Shadow Bolt, Haunt, DoT load (unstable affliction, bane of agony, corruption, and curse of elements [if not already up].
Rotation
Maintain 100% Uptime on: Corruption, Unstable Affliction, Bane of Agony, and Haunt.
Use Haunt every CD, and shadow bolt as a filler, Summon Doomguard when extra dps is needed, as Well as Soulburn >> Drain Life.
That's basically all it is for affliction. I did a 9 minute DPS test, and these are my results.

Shadow Bolt Damage, 40% effective crit avg hits ranging from 6k - 8k and crits hitting for 12k-18k. The main source of damage for Affliction Warlocks, makes up of 40% of total damage. No doubt 1 more point into Bane would make this a more powerful spell.


















Corruption, our strongest DoT, 20% of our overall damage. Also procs Eradication, and shadow trance. Also has its duration reset to full every time the target is hit by haunt drain life or drain soul. 

















Unstable Affliction, 2nd most poweful DoT has a 1.5 sec cast time, 1.3 if glyphed, 50% crit.
















Bane of Agony, used to be Curse of Agony, but now crits, 15% of overall damage, not high damage, but hits often.




















Haunt, basically only in the rotation because it boosts the damage of our DoTs. Used every 8 seconds when it falls off CD.





















Drain Life, used exclusively with Soulburn. Can now crit and does a ton of damage when combined with Soulburn. Don't use unless you press Soulburn first.






















Character Stats



























Pet Stats (FelHunter)






























Fun spec to play as always, few nice changes. Gets more of a benefit from spell crit versus spell haste, as was in patch 3.3.5.

-Happy Draining,

BeerandChips

14 comments:

  1. I myself am a hunter but man am I looking forward to Cata

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  2. Looks like cata's gonna be good for the locks :)

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  3. I sort of want to get back into WoW now. Nice post!

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  4. I cant wait till cat! its gonna be so sweet! I love my warlock :)

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  5. More posts like this! I'm also a warlock!

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  6. I may go back to my warlock after this!

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  7. Holy christ, how much time did you spend on that?
    Makes for a good blog though, good details and plenty o' screenshots.
    (Unabomber? Nice touch.)

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  8. This is for a private server? Or are you just testing out your own builds on a private server? o.o it seems like a lot of damage!

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  9. cool little heads up, p.s theres big random gaps in your post. Made it confusing =p

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