Affliction Warlock Midnight Playstyle and Rotation Guide

General Rotation

Maintain your damage over time effects, Agony and Corruption (or Wither), on all targets, use Dark Harvest on cooldown or when important targets are up.

Build up shards to dump when Summon Darkglare is used.

The main gameplay loop of affliction warlock revolves around maintaining your damage over time effects, Corruption and Agony. Agony is your Soul Shard generation, which allows you to cast your spender, Unstable Affliction, on single target, or Seed Of Corruption on stacked multi-target situations. Your filler spell, depending on talent choice, will either be Shadow Bolt, a short cast that deals moderate damage, or Drain Soul, a channeled cast that has an execute aspect to it.

Easy Mode Rotation

• Maintain Haunt by casting it on cooldown on the main target
• Maintain Corruption / Wither
• Maintain Agony
• Spend Shards down to 0 then cast Dark Harvest
• Build shards to spend in burn windows
• Cast drain soul / Shadow bolt

Hellcaller Rotation

When playing Hellcaller, our Corruption spell is replaced by Wither. Functionally, it is very similar; it has a stacking component when spending shards; after reaching 8 stacks, they are consumed over time to deal additional damage due to Seeds Of Their Demise. The longer they are being consumed (kept above 1 stack), the more damage they do.

Malevolence instantly gives your Wither’s an additional 6 stacks, as well as giving you haste for a short period.

The idea when playing Hellcaller is to save up a few shards going into the Malevolence window and spend them after pressing it to keep the burn phase of Wither going.

Soul Harvester Rotation

When playing Soul Harvester, the main focus of this build is that it buffs your Dark Harvest spell by causing you to gain 3 shards over the channel. Dark Harvest does damage to all targets that you have either Corruption or Agony applied to. This means your rotation on 1 or multiple targets is to ensure they have your DoTs on them, spend your shards down to 0 or 1, then cast Dark Harvest so you can keep spending shards.

Openers

Single Target

1. Precast Haunt
2. Apply Agony then Corruption
3. Press Summon Darkglare and all on use trinkets / racial buffs
4. Cast Malevolence if playing Hellcaller
5. Spend all shards on Unstable Affliction
6. Cast Dark Harvest if specced into it
7. Spend all shards on Unstable Affliction
8. Cast Malefic Grasp

Keep refreshing your DoTs and spending any extra Soul Shards you generate on Unstable Affliction for the duration of your Summon Darkglare.

After Darkglare runs out, simply maintain your damage over time abilities and make sure you have shards to dump for your next Darkglare window.

AoE / Mythic+

1. While mobs are being grouped up, apply Agony to as many as possible
2. When they are standing still, press Haunt on a primary target
3. Cast Summon Darkglare
4. Press Seed Of Corruption
5. If playing Hellcaller, cast Malevolence
6. Dump all shards into Seed Of Corruption
7. Cast Dark Harvest when out of shards
8. Continue to spam Seed Of Corruption
9. Reapply 4-6 Agonies to keep enough shards to continue Seed spamming

After your cooldowns run out, simply maintain agonies on 4-6 targets for shard generation and continue casting Seed Of Corruption whenever possible

Cooldowns

Affliction Warlock cooldown usage boils down to applying all your maintenance DoTs (Agony, Corruption, Haunt), then pressing Summon Darkglare, spending as many Soul Shards as you can, and finally casting as much Malefic Grasp as possible while Summon Darkglare is up.

Summon Darkglare no longer extends your existing damage over time effects on the target; it instead scales its damage off of how many damage over time effects are on the target each time it hits, so it is important to refresh short duration DoT’s ahead of using Summon Darkglare.

It can be a good idea to look at how other affliction warlocks are using their cooldowns before going into a fight, by checking Warcraftlogs.com or Lorrgs.

Defensives

Warlock is one of the most tanky classes in the game. We have a large amount of passive mitigation through Soul Leech, Fel Armor, and Soul Link, coupled with increased max health from Demonic Embrace and Demonic Fortitude. Other than those, we have four active spells that will help us survive:

Unending Resolve

Unending Resolve, also known as our “wall”, provides 25% damage reduction and immunity to interrupt, silence and pushback effects for 8 seconds on a 3 minute cooldown. This can be further enhanced to either 40% DR with Strength Of Will or reduced cooldown with Dark Accord.

Dark Pact

Dark Pact sacrifices 20% of our current health to shield for 200% of that amount on a 60 second cooldown. You can further enhance this by either talenting into Ichor Of Devils, which makes Dark Pact only sacrifice 5% of your current health for the same shield value, or by talenting into Frequent Donor, which reduces the cooldown by 15 seconds. Since Dark Pact scales off of current health, it should ideally always be used at high health before you take damage.

Mortal Coil

Heals you for 20% of your maximum health on a 45 second cooldown, and should be viewed as a mini Healthstone. Remember that you might have to move in closer to the target in order to use it since it has a shorter range than the rest of your abilities.

Demonic Healthstone

Even though every class has the ability to use a Healthstone, you, as a Warlock, should view them a bit differently. They heal you personally a lot more thanks to Pact Of Gluttony and Sweet Souls, and with Pact Of Gluttony, they have a 60 second cooldown during combat, which allows you to use several of them during an encounter. A big part of increasing your survivability as a Warlock is learning to use these frequently whenever you are in danger. Whenever you use your last one during an encounter, you should cast Create Healthstone to refill.