Affliction Warlock DPS Guide — The War Within (11.0.5)

Affliction Warlocks excel at sustaining single-target and multiple-target damage. Most of your damage comes from applying harmful damage over time effects (DoTs). This allows them to effectively cleave on targets spread around an area, something many specializations struggle with or cannot do. Like the other Warlock specializations, Affliction Warlocks bring the Demonic Gateway ability to the raid, which can be an invaluable mobility cooldown.

Strengths

• Good single-target damage
• Very high AoE damage
• Spread cleave
• Very good funnel and priority damage

Weaknesses

• Ramp-up time for some of its damage
• Low Burst damage (outside of Hellcaller) which requires a setup period
• Damage profile centered around sustained output with relatively weak cooldowns

We have a dedicated leveling guide to help you get your Affliction Warlock to the max level, complete with many tips and suggestions.

While playing with the default UI for the leveling is entirely possible, transitioning to a max level rotation with a substantially different UI layout can feel overwhelming and ultimately disorient or frustrate the player. We recommend implementing Layout changes gradually to allow you to acclimate to a more effective and personal UI. The Addon page below offers some recommended options.

Affliction Warlock is a spec centered around Damage over Time effects, cooldown periods that require a setup to get the most out of them, and a relative amount of pet management. At its core, the gameplay is about generating and spending the Warlock's iconic resource: Soul Shards.

The fundamentals are simple: maintain Corruption and Agony on the target(s), spend your Soul Shards on Malefic Raptures or Seed of Corruption and cast Shadow Bolt in the downtime.

If you are a newcomer to the spec but would like to learn the basics, start browsing the Spell Summary and head over to the page linked below

For those more familiar with Warlocks, we invite you to check out the Talents and Rotation pages for more detailed and in-depth information.

Due to the increased number of variables and different systems, picking gear has become a much less intuitive and immediate process. Nevertheless, you can find guidelines on the best way to equip your Affliction Warlock on our dedicated gearing page, including the current Best in Slot equipment for the current tier.

Equipping gear is not enough. You must also choose suitable consumables and gear augments to maximize your character potential. Below is listed a page that can guide you through those choices as well as a page to better understand the implications each stat has on your Warlock.

Being geared and well equipped is only half of the journey, as the end game activities require a different approach to the spec. To find more information on tackling these challenges, check the pages below.

Understanding your errors and refining your performance is a constant exercise, which can sometimes be frustrating or confounding. Below are some pages that offer tools and can point to and help correct those mistakes.

At the time of writing, Warlock is in an interesting position, offering comparable single target output to Demonology, but gaining massive dps increase from additional targets being present on a fight while also performing very well in AoE.

The addition of Hero Talents offers a meaningful increase across the board in output but do not skew the performance dramatically in different contexts, so while technically Hellcaller offers better AoE, Soul Harvester is not that far behind and compensates with better single target and low target count cleave.

However, in the bigger picture Warlock specialisation as a whole do not have very strong single target compared to other DPS classes/spec.