Affliction Damage Dissected

I was curious to see how much less important Shadowbolt would become with UA having to be recast every 15 seconds, CoA working into our rotation, and Haunt having to be cast every 10-12 seconds. That being said I did two different tests on a dummy in Stormwind. Each were around 6-7 minutes in duration, the results of both came out very close to one another so I'll simply post one.

To be fair I'm just pounding on a dummy, I'm not in endgame gear, and I don't have any mana support (thus causing me to have to Lifetap a lot more which cuts into Shadowbolting thus lowering its % of overall DPS) so my Shadowbolt numbers should be lower because of those factors.

On the other hand Pandemic doesn't work on dummies, and there was zero movement required so I think everything comes out pretty neutral.

Anyway, here ya go. I think 20% looks pretty reasonable, we might see it being 25% of our total DPS in better gear, but comparing that to 40-50% like we see now it really diminishes the value of Destructive Reach, Ruin, etc. I'd love to be able to test it in a raid but I've been pretty busy lately with school so haven't had much time.




Anyway, after looking at the data and running a real sustained test I've come to a few conclusions.

1) Ruin and Destructive Reach are very overrated by the general beta Warlock community. Yes, my tests were done without Ruin, but even I had Ruin and had, say, 20% crit it would only boost the overall damage of Shadowbolt from 20% to 24%, although even then the extra crit would proc ISB and buff the DoTs more as well... Not so huge a deal for 5 talent points. Compare that to some of your alternatives in Affliction that might give you more bang for your buck.

2) Haunt needs to refresh Corruption in the Everlasting Afflictions tooltip. A few times Corruption fell off due to a string of needing to recast all the DoTs in one timeframe as well as haunt, and dark pact/lifetap. Haunt being added would smooth things out a good bit.

3) Dark Pact really needs to go back to 200%, 150% at an absolute minimum...blech.

4) The Affliction rotation is most certainly is fine. I've seen people gripe on the forums about it being too complex, but even just fighting a dummy I've found Affliction to be even more fun than before.