to dot or not to dot? thats the question (affl or destro?)Follow

hello

so i have a 66 human warlock and im currently specced affliction becuz i have a shadow priest friend. first of all, am i correct believing that shadow priests get to nuke more then affl warlock? another feeling i got is that shadow priests crit higher then affl warlocks when we dont specc in ruin, true?
my sbs hit for 1 k and crits for 1,6 (booooooorinnnngg damage and worthless)cuz if affliction is all about dotting then im outa of here.

the reason why i think affl would match better with shadow priest is becaus or dots and drain life/mindflay wont mess up fear.

but then again;maybe its better to use succubus to charm and then just nuke (me: sb+shadowfury+shadowburn) (he:mindblast+manaburn+ SW:D)

so what is the best/most fun? (consider both arena and pvp if you bother answering)

sorry for noob question and thank for taking time!

Thanks for the reply. your a affliction warlock, how much do you crit?

I have 40 in demonology and 21 in destruction. Crit Chance of 20% with crits of ~3800 SB and ~5200 SoulFire...of course if Soul Fire doesn't crit, it's kind of a waste.

Destruction is by far the weakest of the possible specs a warlock can choose for 2v2 Arena. Id go Felguard Demon, UA Affliction, or Siphon Life/Soul Link.

Depends on arena - I'm assuming that for the 2v2, he's referring to an "survival-spec" build. *shrugs* just a guess.

1: Destruction talents will, overall, increase your "UBER CRITZ LOL" damage by 33% (Ruin). That's 3K turning into 4K, and in this age of Resilience, crits are nowhere near as reliable as they once were.

2: This "lame DoT damage" you speak of will be a fair portion of your damage. Even a Destrolock still DoTs, for the main reason that it'll increase your damage by about 1/3 and make it so you can do something while moving more often. If you're on the run for 10 seconds, you can cast Shadowburn and maybe stop to pop Shadowfury.

That's 8 seconds of instants you're missing out on: Siphon Life, your curse of choice and Corruption (unless you're even more silly than your post implies and missed out Improved Corruption), plus another 3.5 seconds to reapply your Unending Breath and Detect Invisibility or something else, like the Nightfall instant nukes that should be proccing from your Affliction talent (that someone who hates lame DoTs won't have taken). If you forsake these, you're missing out on a FREE 3K damage and 1.2K healing over a minute!

I'm not trying to discourage you from speccing Destruction, merely from making a bad example of our class (happy-go-'locky?) by being a Destrolock who fails to acknowledge that there's one thing that separates us from a gimped Mage: the Affliction tree!



I've got an inexplicable aversion to big crits, to be honest, ever since I realized that Mages always out-critted me anyway: I have something in the region of 2/3 items with spell crit on them! However, as Affliction, my Bolts hit for ~1.5K and crit for ~2.5K (10% of the time!).

Edited, Nov 20th 2007 11:41am by ecirphsoj

Affliction is good for survivability, though Demonology is designed for that. The general Affliction playstyle is to keep your DoTs on all enemies possible (in PvP) while Draining one. Affliction is a very hectic playstyle, but very fun and madly destructive if you play it right.

Not on WoW at the moment, will check that later, but it's not an insignificant amount.

You're another one of those ISB leech locks I hate so much. One of the locks in my guild tops DPS because he runs w/ 1400 shadow power and 10% crit and knows the other 4 of us in the raids can keep ISB up around 90% of the time. Pain in my ***, he is.

Thanks all, i have decided! i will specc deep affl, but later on maybe ill respecc to destro because ive heard the seduce/soulfire teqnuiqe works really good with a disc/holy priest critting 5 k with holy fire, not sure about that.