A guide-like article with statistics on the 9.2 Tier set bonuses for Affliction Warlock in Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft universe massively multiplayer online role-playing game and a brief analysis of what makes this class great at its job.
Xyronic, the author of our Affliction Warlock guide, has expanded on the Affliction Warlock Set bonus adjustment.
The warlock tier sets were all tweaked somewhat in the last PTR release, either in terms of implementation or scaling. There were buffs almost everywhere, with the majority of them focusing on increasing the potency of the set benefits. As shown above, Affliction benefited from some very excellent increases in both quality of life and proc rate.
As a reminder, Deliberate Malice, the second component, increases the uptime of your primary three DoTs by 2 seconds on each target they’re active on every time you strike Malefic Rapture. Previously, this was a bit strange in permanent multidotting cases since you’d be better off picking Absolute Corruption and therefore losing out on a third of the set extra gain. Instead, you’ll get one free tick of Corruption damage, which is a good compromise.
In addition, the 4set’s procrate on Drain Soul has been increased by… 150 percent. If you performed any playtesting with this set bonus on the PTR, you know that you could easily channel Drain Soul for a minute without getting this set bonus proc, thus this is extremely welcome. The synergy that I highlighted in the first essay is intensifying. It all feeds into itself: more Malefic Rapture casts, more DoT uptime, more time spent casting Drain Soul rather than renewing DoTs. It should be a lot of fun to mess around with.
I’m still not convinced that these adjustments will elevate affliction to the status of a top-tier spec – none of the warlock specs currently seem to be in that position, regrettably. However, due to the power of Sow the Seeds, it should remain one of the finest consistent AoE specs in the game, and will undoubtedly be a formidable multitarget spec with this set bonus.
