Affliction Warlock Midnight Talents Guide

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Unfortunately, a lot of our class talents as Warlocks provide flat damage increases or increases to our stats, making them mandatory in almost all situations.

However, we do have some powerful tools that we can spec into at the bottom of the tree.

Frequent Traveler - This allows us to use our gateway 2 times before it goes on cooldown. As a relatively immobile class, this may prove to be very useful situationally.

Pact Of Gluttony - This is an incredibly powerful talent, allowing us to use Healthstones multiple times a fight, alongside Swift Artifice. For longer fights, we can use healthstone every minute if we need to. Using healthstones with Soulburn is vital for staying alive on certain bosses as a Warlock.

Soulburn - This is a very important utility spell that affects different spells differently:

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. This is only used in specific situations, so consider if it is worth spending the soul shard to empower it with Soulburn beforehand.

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, whether it’s getting to a soak mechanic in time or just moving around the world. Alongside the Frequent Traveler mentioned above, this is a very powerful mobility tool.

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.

In all situations, it is worth having a macro to use Soulburn before Healthstone.

/cast Soulburn
/use Demonic Healthstone

Single target

The choice node of Absolute Corruption and Siphon Life creates an interesting choice where you choose between the quality of life of a permanent Corruption, or your corruption doing more damage.

The choice node of Drain Soul and Improved Shadow Bolt, the general idea is that Drain Soul is better when fighting 1 target, and Shadow Bolt is better against multiple.

Nether Plating is a new addition for midnight which makes your Summon Darkglare do significant damage in multi target situations.

Malefic Grasp turns your Shadow Bolt or Drain Soul into a powerful channel spell for the duration of your Summon Darkglare, causing each tick of damage to instantly deal 30% of their normal damage, making Summon Darkglare with Eye Contract very strong in single target.

Fatal Echoes causes your Unstable Affliction to have a chance to reapply upon expiration, as a large portion of our damage on single target is looking to be a very strong talent.

Cascading Calamity causes us to gain 5% haste for 15 seconds when casting Unstable. We can have almost permanent uptime of this buff, essentially making it a talent that just gives us 5% haste.

Multi Target

Nocturnal Yield causes your Nightfall to be able to be cast on Seed Of Corruption which is incredibly potent on multiple stacked targets.

Patient Zero causes your Seed Of Corruption to do extra damage to the main target, which is a very powerful funnel tool where there is a primary target.

Sow The Seeds enables affliction to do damage on AoE by making each seed cast send out 3 seeds instead of the usual 1.

Dark Harvest alongside Cull The Weak gives us a very strong burst tool on around a 40 second cooldown that can be lined up with important adds, this is very strong especially when using the Soul Harvester hero tree.

Currently, it is worth using all 4 points in the Apex Talents for affliction.

The Apex Talents focus on making Haunt more powerful, and very important to cast on cooldown rather than just maintaining it:

• The first point makes it deal additional damage to the target, as well as nearby talents.
• The second and third points increase the damage Haunt deals, as well as increasing the damage amplification attached to it by 4%.
• The 4th point causes Haunt damage to have a chance to call down meteors that deal both single target and AoE damage.

Hellcaller is primarily used for multi target situations. This tree gives us Malevolence, which is a very powerful 1 minute cooldown. It also significantly increases the potency of your Corruption debuff by turning it into Wither.

It is important when playing Hellcaller to always save up your shards and dump them after casting Malevolence to gain as many stacks as possible.

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. It also makes Dark Harvest regenerate 3 Soul Shards during its channel, so you want to deplete your Shards before casting it.

While the design seems to suggest that Hellcaller should be better in spread cleave scenarios and in dungeons, the current tuning is such that it’s almost never worth playing Hellcaller, and having the on-demand burst damage from Soul Harvest and Dark Harvest seems to just be doing more damage everywhere.