Affliction mechanics

[Prophet001 598]

Hi All.

First, thank you for putting up these guides. They have been really helpful to me and even enjoyable to read. I learned a lot from Zagam's Affliction guide but I have a few other questions.

My lock is pretty young so I'm not really concerned with his stats and build. I'm more concerned with some of the mechanics of Affliction. Primarily, do the Affliction DOTs get modified by Haunt if they are already up when Haunt is cast? I've seen a few places where the rotation was DOTs > Haunt and it seems to me that Haunt should already be up to give the increased damage to your DOTs when they are applied. Just wondering if this mattered or not.

My other question had to do with DOT ticks. It's not exceptionally important since Blizz easy modes us with Pandemic but when is the last tick of a DOT? Does the DOT tick right before it falls off? If you didn't have Pandemic would you wait for Corruption and Unstable Affliction to fall off before you reapplied them so that you could get the last tick out of them?

Thank you for your help and posts! They are appreciated.

P.S.

Zagam,

I'm not sure if you ever played Rift or not but there was a spec in Rift Vanilla called "Defilemancer." It was an absolute dream and really took the concept of DOTs and stat snapshots to the next level. If you like Affliction, you would have loved it.

Edited February 4, 2013 by Prophet001

[Zagam 1,982]

Hi All.

First, thank you for putting up these guides. They have been really helpful to me and even enjoyable to read. I learned a lot from Zagam's Affliction guide but I have a few other questions.

My lock is pretty young so I'm not really concerned with his stats and build. I'm more concerned with some of the mechanics of Affliction. Primarily, do the Affliction DOTs get modified by Haunt if they are already up when Haunt is cast? I've seen a few places where the rotation was DOTs > Haunt and it seems to me that Haunt should already be up to give the increased damage to your DOTs when they are applied. Just wondering if this mattered or not.

My other question had to do with DOT ticks. It's not exceptionally important since Blizz easy modes us with Pandemic but when is the last tick of a DOT? Does the DOT tick right before it falls off? If you didn't have Pandemic would you wait for Corruption and Unstable Affliction to fall off before you reapplied them so that you could get the last tick out of them?

Thank you for your help and posts! They are appreciated.

P.S.

Zagam,

I'm not sure if you ever played Rift or not but there was a spec in Rift Vanilla called "Defilemancer." It was an absolute dream and really took the concept of DOTs and stat snapshots to the next level. If you like Affliction, you would have loved it.

I'll answer your questions in order.

1) Haunt is a debuff. Debuffs update damage modifiers dynamically. Anything you do to that boss is IMMEDIATELY increased 25% for the duration of Haunt. Important to remember during execute phase because if you get Haunt to land a fraction of a second before it falls off, that Haunt will hit for 25% more.

2) Dots tick with a certain speed, so their last tick is haste dependent. Without getting into gorey numbers, lets just assume you have a DoT that lasts for 5 seconds and ticks every 1 second. Your tick time would look like this:

t=1, t=2, t=3, t=4, t=5

If you were to have, say 10% haste so that the ticks took 0.9 seconds, now you have ticks like this:

t=0.9, t=1.8, t=2.7, t=3.6, t=4.5

In this case, you'd still get 5 ticks, but for 0.5 seconds, you'd have this DoT up but not get any more damage out of it. This is how haste thresholds are calculated. If you were to have, say 20% haste, it would look like this...

t=0.8, t=1.6, t=2.4, t=3.2, t=4.0, t=4.8

Now you get an additional tick in the same amount of time as the original DoT, but here you are still 'wasting' 0.2 seconds if you were to let the DoT run its course. Haste thresholds, such as the 4717 threshold, find the exact haste rating that gives you enough haste to add an additional tick of damage while not 'wasting' any by going over.

3) played Rift for 30 minutes and decided it was too fun to play. The game was awesome, but the community was not. I play MMO's for the community. Tis a shame, really.

[Prophet001 598]

That makes sense.

Thank you for the reply. Really enjoying Affliction and considering giving demo a shot too.

Thanks again.

[Stonesie 5]

Hey Zagam, just wanted to let you know that I REALLY enjoy your affliction advice. I was pretty cranky about going back to affliction (hadn't been since lvl 70) and your help has actually brought me to enjoy it again.

tytytytytyty!

[Zagam 1,982]

Hey Zagam, just wanted to let you know that I REALLY enjoy your affliction advice. I was pretty cranky about going back to affliction (hadn't been since lvl 70) and your help has actually brought me to enjoy it again.

tytytytytyty!

Glad I could help!