Affliction Warlocks and You! Part One

Today’s blog is going to be about warlocks and how to play them as affliction. So having recently dinged my sexy gnome lock 80, I went about the fun task of both gearing him and fine-tuning his spec for optimal dps. I have been affliction on him since vanilla WoW and throughout BC, I decided to keep him as affliction with some points in destro.

After reading through a few blogs and forum posts about warlock dps I came up with a list of things I needed to do to make my lock the ultimate lock badass. This is the list:

1. Get hit capped
2. Up my spell power
3. Get a good dot timer
4. Check which glyphs are better at 80 then what I currently have for leveling.
5. Replace my mix of crappy quest greens and sub 80 instance gear with the new sexy triumph gear.
6. Prioritize the list of instances I need to farm for non badge gear(weapons, trinkets, etc)
7. Work out a good spell rotation



1. Getting Hit Capped or how I learned to stop missing with my spells.

Getting Hit Capped can up your dps a considerable amount, having a mob resist your spells = no dps for you! After doing a little bit of reading online I found that you need 17% hit, or 445.94 hit rating, to not miss on a boss, now this number is before talents, debuffs on the boss, or consumables. Now being affliction you are going to have at least 3 points into suppression so you'll need 14% hit or 367.25 rating. If you have a draenei in the group, subtract another 1% and if you have either a boomkin with 3/3 improved fairie fire or a shadow priest casting misery on the boss then subtract another 3% leaving you with a need for 10% hit or 262 rating.

I personally don’t know if I will have a spriest or boomkin in my raid so I aimed for 14% hit. Anything over this is wasted so if you're hit capped and get a new piece of gear with more hit on it, feel free to regem/enchant your gear to reduce the unused hit that you'll have.

Cliffs:
1. With no boomkin/spriest or draenei in the group and no points into suppression you need 17% hit, which is 445.94 rating

2. With a boomkin/spriest, no draenei in the group and no points into suppression or no spriest/boomkin, no draenei in the group and 3/3 suppression, you need 14% hit, which is 367.25 rating

3. With a boomkin/spriest, no draenei in the group and 3/3 suppression you need 11% hit which is 288.53

4. With a boomkin/spriest, a draenei in the group and 3/3 suppression you need 10% or 262.23 rating.


2. Crank that Spell Power to Eleven!
So you're hit capped...now what?

Once you're hit capped then you should start stacking as much Spell Power as possible. After getting capped you should look at stats this way SP > Haste > Spirit > Crit > Int.

MP5 does nothing major for warlocks and so should be avoided. The better your gear is the better a stat haste will be for you, so once you're running around with full T10 haste gets close to passing spell power in terms of importance.

3. Timing is everything.
Unless you are a super awesome person with exceptional timing skills...get a timer addon, it will help you sooooooo much! Clipping dots = bad, letting dots fall off for too long before reapplying them = bad. I personally use dotimer for all my timing needs but any addon that keeps track of how long your dots have left on the boss will do. Trying to keep track of your dots manually may lead to you messing up the timing and a lowering of your dps.

I think that will be it for the moment, I'll finish this up at a later time if anyone is actually interested. Enjoy.

- Jed