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Introduction
Hello! My name is Omnithic, I’m the raid leader and GM for Dead On My Screen on Area-52 US. I started CE Raiding when the Legion expansion launched and mained Warlock since Battle for Azeroth and haven’t looked back. One of the reasons I play Warlock is specifically for Affliction, and be it in keys or raid, I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed the playstyle from whenever I swapped to this class.
This guide will cover everything you need to know for Affliction in Midnight and should help provide the maximum throughput you need when playing Affliction as well. I hope this guide helps you enjoy the spec as much as I have in all forms of content.
Affliction Warlock Overview
Affliction is a spec that focuses on Damage of Time (DoT) management. They are one of the strongest specs when it comes to maintaining spread cleave in fights, and can easily change their talents to provide on-demand burst in AoE via Seed Of Corruption and Dark Harvest. Affliction is also able to leverage funneling through Curse Of Agony and the Soulshard generation it provides to put the damage into single-target.
Despite their varying builds to fit all forms of content, their core gameplay focuses still on DoT management and knowing what DoTs to put on what target and at what time. Additionally, their single target burst is not the strongest in the game and often leaves the spec wanting more.
What has changed
Patch 12.1 Changes for Affliction Warlock
The new (4) Set bonus of the Affliction Warlock Tier Set in Season 2 causes Seed Of Corruption to apply a stack of Unstable Affliction to the primary target. This has created some repercussions for warlock that has forced a few talents to be changed.
Removed Talents:
New talents:
These talent changes mean that playing Seed Of Corruption talents is purely for an AoE build rather than multi target funnel, and in raid you will almost certainly have to play an Unstable Affliction Talent build.
Patch 12.0.7 Changes for Affliction Warlock
There were no specific Affliction Warlock updates in Patch 12.0.7, however, there were a few things introduced during the Patch that will impact Affliction Locks; notably the new Sporefused, higher item level, gear and Omnium Folio player power upgrades (a weekly unlock system with passive power).
Both of these are covered within the Gearing section of the guide.
May 5th Hotfix Changes for Affliction Warlock
The recent hotfixes to affliction, while not changing the playstyle or talents at all were actually very impactful for the spec, especially in single target.
Hotfix Changes:
- Unstable Affliction damage increased by 20%
- Seed Of Corruption damage increased by 10%
- Corruption damage increased by 20%
- Agony damage increased by 10%
- Fixed an issue where sometimes Wither would not replace Corruption
- Soul Harvester: Fixed an issue where Sataiel's Volition would sometimes stop providing its Corruption modifier
These changes are as big as they look, affliction is now very competitive with other warlock specs in the raid, potentially becoming the best single target warlock spec in the game on fights like Vorasius.
Midnight Expansion Changes for Affliction Warlock
Moving into Midnight, Warlock has received a pretty substantial rework.
With the removal of Malefic Rapture, warlock now spends their shards on Unstable Affliction for single target, and Seed Of Corruption in stacked multi target scenarios.
The spec tree has also been modified to reflect these changes.
New Unstable Affliction based talents:
New Seed Of Corruption based talents:
Your main cooldown as affliction, Summon Darkglare, has also changed, as it now no longer extends your damage over time effects on targets, and instead deals substantial damage even in single target and multi target situations because of its new talents:
Dark Harvest also comes with its own talent, Cull The Weak, allowing you to cast it more often, which, as one of your highest damage spells, is incredibly powerful.