Affliction Warlocks and You! Part 3

And after two weeks it’s all finally almost over! The long awaited part 3 of my guide to affliction warlocks! In case anyone missed the previous two parts, you should read part one and part two and hopefully you'll enjoy this last part.

6. Farming like it’s going out of style

So after dinging 80 I was faced with the fun challenge of trying to decide what gear I needed to replace first and once that was figured out, what instances I was going to hit up first. With introduction of the Icecrown Citadel instances, farming for gear has become seriously easy. You can get armor, weapon/offhand, and even trinkets from these instances alone. Running them in regular mode also still rewards emblems of triumph so I would seriously recommend doing so.

When I dinged 80 I needed badges badly, so many badge rewards that were giant upgrades from my instance blues. Since this is just a quick guide I am only going to list some upgrades for weapons and trinkets since to me they are the hardest pieces to upgrade. I would say that priority should be upgrading your weapon since chances are you're either going to be wielding the boa one or one with under 300 spell power. Your options are going to be the following:
Non Heroic
1. Flameheart Spell Scalpel Revered with Kirin Tor - Highly recommend this weapon.
2. Jeweled Coronation Sword - King Ymiron Utgarde Pinnacle
3. Sempiternal Staff - Chrono Lord Epoch Culling of Stratholme

Heroic:
1. Seethe - Devourer of Souls Heroic Forge Of Souls - Best Weapon Pre-raid
2. Surgeon's Needle - Forgemaster Garfrost - Heroic Pit of Saron
3. Spectral Kris - The Black Knight Heroic Trial of the Champion



Ok so let’s say that you got lucky and got a new shiny epic weapon on your first run and you are now hated by your friends who spent countless runs farming for the very same weapon. Well clearly you need a trinket or two to really shine! These are a little harder to find but chances are that you'll have them longer then you will your weapon, especially if you raid a lot. At least that’s how it seems to me. Stupid raids not giving me all the trinkets I want! :(

Non-Heroic:
1. Abyssal Rune - Eadric/Paletress Trial of the Champion - Personal Choice
2. Cannoneer's Fuselighter - The last line of defense quest chain
3. Tome of Arcane Phenomena - Ley- Guardian Eregos Occulus

Heroic:
1. Nevermelting Ice Crystal - Scourgelord Tyrannus Pit of Saron - Personal Choice
2. Forge Ember - Sjonnir the Ironshaper Halls of Stone
3. Mark of the War Prisoner - Cyanigosa Violet Hold

Good luck farming those instances for the weapons/trinkets I've listed. There are plenty of other trinkets available at 80 from both pvp, crafting professions and badges but I figured that since you're going to be running instances for badges/gear that you might as well farm these specific ones first.

7. A good rotation makes the world go round.

This one is pretty easy because unlike other classes that have a priority based rotation where you have to keep track of all sorts of procs, timers, and debuffs, affliction warlocks have it pretty easy. You just have to make sure that your dots are up on the boss and that they are always on the boss...at all times. From all that I have read the best rotation is:
1. Shadowbolt
2. Haunt
3. Corruption
4. Unstable Affliction
5. Curse of Agony
6. Shadowbolt until a dot falls off
7. Reapply said dot
Note: You can replace Shadowbolt with Drain Soul if the target is under 25% as it does more damage. Feel free to interrupt Drain Soul to reapply dots though.

After that initial rotation you have to just focus on keeping Agony, UA, and Haunt up. Like I mentioned earlier, getting a dot timer is the key to maximizing your dps. Be sure to not clip any of your dots and what I mean by this is that if agony has 3 seconds left on the target and let’s say that it ticks every 3 seconds, if you reapply agony at 3 seconds left, it will take 6 seconds before it will tick again because it takes 3 seconds for it to tick and you've just refreshed the tick timer on it. This leads to bigger dps drop then if you had just let the dot fall off.

If you're not casting something then you are losing dps. What I mean by this is that if your agony has 1-2 seconds left before it falls off, you should be shadowbolting, life tapping, draining souls, etc. You should always be doing something! Standing around and watching for your dots to tick off is bad for your dps and should not happen!

Well I think that about wraps it up for me and my guide to affliction warlocks. I hope that you've enjoyed what you've read and if anyone has any questions please feel free to post them. I don’t claim to be the bestest affliction warlock in all the land but I love my lock and I've been playing him since vanilla wow and that is good enough for me.

- Jed