Affliction Warlock Talents Guide

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Class Talents Discussion

Unfortunately there’s not a lot of options in the Warlock class tree.

From the ST build the only real points we can move is shifting Resolute Barrier into Fel Synergy and then having the point from Swift Artifice as a floater, being able to put it into Amplify Curse, Shadowfury or Fiendish Stride depending on what you need.

If you have to drop even more talents, in case you need for example Teachings of the Satyr or two of the ones previously mentioned at the same time, you would have to drop either Fel Domination or Burning Rush.

Notable Class Talents

Soulburn - is a very unique ability and versatile utility tool that consumes a Soul Shard to empower your next cast of certain spells.

Here’s how it enhances each ability:

Demonic Circle: Teleport - Soulburning before teleporting gives you a small speed boost and makes you immune to snares (slows) and roots for 6 seconds. Important: if you only want to remove a slow, you can teleport AFTER the slow is applied without using Soulburn. However, to remove a root (e.g., on Queen Ansurek) you need to Soulburn and teleport BEFORE the root is applied, pre-immuning the effect.

Demonic Gateway - Soulburn makes the cast instant, allowing you to place a gateway quickly during combat. The Soul Shard cost is often outweighed by the value of avoiding a hard-cast. A quick Soulburn > Gateway > Gateway Control Shard combo is a great tool for just getting around quickly yourself as a Warlock, either if it’s getting to a soak mechanic in time or just moving around the world.

Drain Life - Soulburning before pressing Drain Life gives you a small absorb in addition to the healing. This should only be used if you are in danger and have no other defensive options available.

Healthstone - You should always Soulburn before using a Healthstone. This increases its healing by 30% and boosts your maximum health by 20% for 12 seconds. Combined with Pact of Gluttony, this becomes one of the strongest defensive tools we have as a Warlock. Also note that Dark Pact scales with current health, so using Soulburn + Healthstone before Dark Pact enhances the shield even more.

Mortal Coil - When its crowd control component isn’t needed, Mortal Coil effectively functions as a mini Healthstone, healing you for 20% of your maximum health on a 45 second cooldown. Keep in mind that without picking the talent Improved Mortal Coil it only has a 30 yds range, 10 shorter than your regular spells. This plus the travel time of it makes you want to move in a bit closer to your target when you anticipate you will want to use it soon.

Strength of Will vs. Dark Accord - I generally prefer Dark Accord over Strength of Will, as Warlocks are already naturally tanky, and the extra 15% damage reduction often isn’t necessary to survive something, the reduced cooldown is therefore more valuable. That said, make sure you’re actually using Unending Resolve often - if not, the extra 15% mitigation might be a better pick for that specific encounter.

Swift Artifice - This talent may seem minor, but it’s actually quite impactful. Thanks to Pact of Gluttony, Warlocks can use Healthstone multiple times during an encounter. I highly recommend keybinding Create Healthstone so you can recast it mid-fight, maximizing the amount of times we can use one of the strongest self-heals in the game. Swift Artifice makes this smoother by reducing the cast time. It also benefits Soulstone, which has a surprisingly long cast, letting you combat ress faster and more reliably in raid and mythic+ environments.

Gorefiend’s Avarice + Empowered Drain Life - After being almost useless for two expansions Drain Life has finally received pretty significant buffs through these new talents and is now quite a potent self heal, especially paired with Soulburn. With the removal of Health Funnel we now pick Infernal Beneficiary if we also want to heal and keep our pet alive.

Summon Darkglare no longer increases the duration of your DoTs and instead increases the damage of your Agony, Corruption and Unstable Affliction by 20%. So with Midnight we want to cast our Darkglare before starting to dump our Soul Shards instead of afterwards, like we’ve done in the past when UA was our primary spender.

Nether Plating is a new talent added in Midnight that makes your Summon Darkglare cleave up to 4 additional targets, making it a very strong cooldown in low cleave scenarios.

Shard Instability is a new proc that makes it so Drain Soul and Shadow Bolt has a chance to give you a free, instant cast, Unstable Affliction. The duration of this buff is 30 seconds so feel free to hold it for a bit if you don’t have a good target to throw it on, if you want to save some damage for a later stage or if you’re about to go into your cooldown window. However if you plan on casting several more Drain Souls or Shadow Bolts you should spend your Shard Instability proc beforehand.

Death’s Embrace is an old talent and Legion legendary making a return. It’s a very strong talent and will be picked in most talent builds. The damage increase starts when your target reaches 35% remaining health and then grows stronger and stronger for every point of additional health your target loses. This makes Affliction’s execute very strong on low health enemies.

Several Seed of Corruption related talents have made a return since it has once again become our primary AoE spender. The most interesting one being Patient Zero, which gives us a little bit more priority target damage.

The most rotational impactful talent we’ve gained is Dark Harvest. Dark Harvest is a 3 second channel that deals damage to all targets afflicted by your DoTs. Casting Unstable Affliction or Seed of Corruption reduces the cooldown of Dark Harvest.

Siphon Life vs. Absolute Corruption

As it stands Siphon Life is the preferred choice whenever you can reliably keep Corruption up on your targets without being overflowed with other spells you have to press. But keep in mind that this is not a very significant increase so if there’s ever a situation where you feel a bit stressed, picking up Absolute Corruption instead is a good way to free up some globals and brain power.

Hellcaller

Hellcaller replaces Corruption with Wither, a powerful DoT that accounts for a large portion of Affliction’s overall damage.

As it stands, Hellcaller is the preferred Hero Talent choice in cleave and M+ scenarios.

Remember that you want to activate Malevolence before casting your Unstable Afflictions to properly buff your Withers.

Soul Harvester

Soul Harvester revolves around selecting the spec talent Dark Harvest and setting up burst windows every 1 minute.

Soul Harvester makes it so some of your Soul Shards become “succulent” which when consumed will release a demonic soul for 9 seconds, dealing damage and empowering you.

Dark Harvest will regenerate 3 Soul Shards during its channel so you want to deplete your Shards before casting it.