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Hello and welcome to my Mists of Pandaria Affliction Warlock quick look.
In this video I'm going to try to explain the changes and rotation differences between
the current Affliction skillset and the one implemented in the Mists beta.
In the background will be my Warlock going through the rotation described later in the
video. I haven't spent too much time in front of the target dummies, so the rotation is
sloppy and I let a few debuffs fall off here and there.
Up on the screen are the tooltips of your major spells, taken directly from the beta
client. Bog-standard tooltips, nothing fancy.
We'll start with the stuff that hasn't really changed.
Corruption, Unstable Affliction, and Agony are still the main DoT effects, and have minor
changes.
Agony's scaling effect now is a stacking debuff that deals more damage with more stacks, and
is refreshed with however many stacks you had on it before you refreshed.
Fel Flame still is an instant cast, but now increases Corruption's length as well as Unstable
Affliction's.
Curse of the Elements is still a fire and forget magic damage debuff, and Life Tap is
still the same "exchange mana for health" button it's always been.
Soul Burn is basically the same spell as it used to be- pop it, it consumes a soul shard,
and grants an additional effect to a few of your spells.
The only really notable effect is Soulburn: Soulswap, which applies all your shadow DoTs
to a target, saving about two GCDs.
Drain Soul is still a channel execute spell, but has a new effect once you hit execute
phase that I'll detail in a minute.
Finally, Dark Soul is the new Demon Soul, and is losing it's per demon effect to just
give a straight spell haste buff for affliction.
It's not rocket science, and if you've played a warlock for any length of time in the past
expansion, these spells come as no surprise.
The real treat comes from our new spell and the changes to soul shards.
Ok, first thing's first.
Affliction warlocks no longer use Shadow bolt as our filler spell.
We have a completely new spell: Malefic Grasp.
It's a channeled spell that ticks about once a second for a small amount of damage, but
the meat of the spell comes from it's secondary effect.
While you are channeling Malefic Grasp, all of your Damage over Time spells have their
duration increased by 100% and their tick time decreased by 100%.
Basically, while you channel this spell, your DoTs deal damage 100% faster. tick times of
2 seconds become just 1.
The duration increase is to offset the decreased tick times so that your DoTs still have the
same amount of time on them during the channel that they had when you started the channel.
This secondary effect also gets applied to drain soul when your target is in the execute
phase, therefore replacing malefic grasp as your filler once the target hits 20% health.
As for the other major change, Soul Shards have been overhauled again.
Only Aff locks get access to them this time, along with their attendant spell, Soul Burn.
You'll notice in the video a few green orbs around my character's head; those are my soul
shards.
Normally, they are a nice purple and look more like crystals, but they can be modified
by a new glyph to look like Kael'thas's green orbs.
I've applied the glyph in this video so that the orbs are easier to see against the purple
and blue of the Exodar.
Soul shards are regenerated through an out of combat passive effect, in combat through
two ticks of drain soul, or through Nightfall.
Nightfall is a passive effect off of corruption, as it is in Cata, but now has a 10% chance
to regenerate Soul Shards. However, nightfall cannot proc more than 5 times every minute.
Now here's where things get interesting.
Soul shards are spent by casting Haunt, which is now a 40% spell damage increase that lasts
8 seconds.
This means that you have to spend at least 7.5 shards a minute to keep 100% uptime on
Haunt.
Remember that the Nightfal proc, our main way of regenerating soul shards, only regenerates
5 soul shards per minute.
This means, that with perfect play and perfect procs, you have a deficit of about 3 shards
per minute.
If we take into account the time putting debuffs up on the target and letting Agony stack up
and assuming you have the glyph which increases the shard count from 3 to 4, this means that
it takes about 2 minutes before you run out of shards.
ONce this happens, your only way of regenerating shards beyond the 5 per minute is letting
drain soul tick twice.
This introduces an interesting choice- whether to ignore the 40% increased damage and only
cast haunt when you can, or to cast Drain Soul and loose out on the faster DoT tick
time of Malefic Grasp.
Now, on to the rotation that I've stumbled upon.
Start with putting your DoTs and debuffs on a target manually, then channel Malefic Grasp
until Agony is at 10 stacks. Cast Haunt, and then go back to Malefic Grasp.
Refresh Corruption and Unstable Affliction with two Fel Flame casts, as two casts will
refresh both to back to around maximum duration while dealing damage you wouldn't get otherwise.
Refresh Agony when you have to, making sure to only put up haunt if all of your dots have
at least 10s of time left so that you can channel Malefic Grasp for the entire duration
of the Haunt debuff without having to refresh your dots in the middle of it.
Cast Drain Soul during the execution phase or only when you have no dots that need refreshing
and haunt is not up AND you have no Soul Shards. Do not cancel the channel on Odd numbered
ticks.
Now with this rotation, I've found that I haven't had to cast drain soul all that much,
as Nightfall usually proc'ed when I was refreshing my Dots. Combine this with movement and I
can see a few fights where you wouldn't need to cast Drain Soul beyond the execute phase.
However, at higher levels of play, I can see the 5 shards/minute becoming a problem, and
the player will need to have better judgement on when to cast Drain Soul and when to ignore
Haunt.
Overall though, while the Affliction rotation has a few built in kinks to it, playing with
it feels smooth and a lot less like whack-a-mole of previous expansions. Definitely a win for
the class and a load of fun to play.
Please thumbs up if you liked this video, and subscribe to be notified when I release
more content. My name is Vorpal Stick, and this has been my Affliction Warlock Quick
Look.