Affliction Warlocks and You! Part 2

Well that was a fun little break but now to get down to business...finishing this guide! I attribute lack of posting to dinging 80 on my warrior and gearing him up from heroic badge farming.

Incase you somehow missed the first part of this guide you can read it here.

On today’s agenda we have glyphs and gear upgrades.



4. Glyphs make the world go round.

Well after reading a few websites, I came up with three strong contenders for my contenders for my major glyphs: Quick Decay, life tap, and haunt. Why these three over all the other major glyphs? Because the Internet said so!

Well let’s look at what each glyph does starting with quick decay. Your haste now reduces the time in between your corruption ticks. What this means is that the more haste you have the faster your corruption will tick and do damage. So you will see your corruption ticking more often especially if you have a shaman in the group dropping wrath of air totem and popping heroism.

Next up is the glyph of life tap. Life tapping or using dark pact will now increase your spell power by 20% for 40 seconds. My warlock currently has 581 spirit so if I life tap or dark pact I'll get a bonus of 116 spell power for 40 seconds! Using life tap or dark pact before a fight begins means all your initial dots will do more damage until they tick off and need to be replaced. I believe that your corruption should benefit from this increased spell power through out the fight since you don’t have to reapply it thanks to your haunt refreshing it.

Lastly is the glyph of haunt. This glyph increases the damage bonus your haunt gains from your spell power by 3%. Your haunt spell already increases the damage your dots do while haunt is up by 20% so with this glyph your shadow dots will do 23% damage. Since your haunt should always be up on a target, you will always be doing increased damage thanks to this glyph.

5. My gear is better then your gear.
So you're a fresh 80 and you want to raid and down bosses...unfortunately the odds are high that your gear is a combination of quest greens and pre-80 instance blues. So how can you improve your gear and help your guild clear ICC? Well with patch 3.3 the new LFG Tool was introduced. You queue as a dps and it will random you into a heroic based on your average gear level. What this means is that you wont random into one of the new harder ICC 5man heroics with your weak gear. I know this sounds unfair but with lousy gear you cant really contribute to a run and would pretty much be getting carried by the group, which is unfair to them. Now you can always get a guild run going for the ICC heroics and have your guild carry you through. The LFG tool also gives 2 extra badges for each time you use it, frost the first time you use it in a day and triumphs after that. It is really easy to get badges to buy gear now.

So you've run heroics and picked up a few blues and a ton of badges and are not sure what to spend it on. Well what I did was look at all the possible upgrades for me and compare the stats on each piece. The one that looked like it was the biggest upgrade across the board was the piece that I bought. Comparing stats is a good way to see if a badge item is an upgrade or not over whatever you are wearing. Most people look at the badge gear and assume that just because an item is purple and has a high item level, that it is the best piece of gear in the world. They are dumb and should be shunned. When looking at gear you should remember the stat priority I mentioned previously: Hit> SP > Haste > Spirit > Crit > Int.

If you are hit capped then you can look at pieces of gear that don’t have hit and have more haste or spirit instead. If you're lacking hit then obviously you should aim for pieces with hit on them. The Heroic ICC 5 man gear may be a bigger upgrade for you then a badge piece or it may be a downgrade for you, ultimately its up to you to be smart and compare the pieces.

As a new 80 I would recommend that you farm both regular ToC and all 3 regular ICC 5 mans. The gear in there will more then likely be better then anything that you will get from any heroic and since they are regular you can keep running them over and over again until you get the piece of gear that you want.

If you are completely clueless about what is an upgrade for you then perhaps you should download ratingbuster and use it to help you look at the stat increases a piece of gear will give you over the item you have currently equipped. Once you've got a good grip on what your stats are and what you want to increase you can downloadRawr and enter in your gear/stats and look at the results it gives you when you put in a new piece. Both are useful and I am sure that there are more out there that do the same thing.

Well that’s it for now, I'll see if I can finish out this guide this week and start on something new but until then enjoy this entry and let me know if you like what you see.