Welcome Warlocks – today I’m continuing my recent series into casting rotations for mid level Warlocks specced in Affliction.
While your choice of pet will have an effect on how these rotations play out exactly, you’ll find if you level with your Voidwalker, and run instances with your Imp or Fel Hunter, this mid level affliction rotation should hold up just fine.
If you’re after a hard-core dungeon runner spec, or a PvP roation – this isn’t it.
This rotation is for casual PvE/leveling, and pick up dungeons, not a casting rotation that needs epic items or full sets of blues to trigger certain effects.
For Level 50+ Affliction Locks:
Firstly, ensure you have the lifetap glyph, the extra spell power is a boon to any Warlock.
Here’s the rotation:
Life tap -> Shadow bolt -> Unstable Affliction -> Corruption -> Curse of Agony -> Shadow Bolt Repeatedly to keep shadow embrace multiplier in effect.
We start this rotation with life tap for obvious reasons — it increases your spell power and hence damage caused over the whole rotation.
Shadow Bolt comes next, which sets up Shadow’s Embrace (if you’ve specced affliction right), giving us a Shadow damage bonus for the next three DoT’s.
UA, Corruption and CoA should be cast in that order as UA has a cast time and a short life span (try and get the most out of Shadow’s Embrace), Corruption equally has a short duration, and Curse of Agony has a LONG life span which will then benefit from the series of Shadow Bolts which follow it and multiply Shadows embrace.
This rotation will work just fine for normal mobs as you level, and can be kept running through a hard to kill boss – just keep an eye out for threat as always.
If you’re going for efficiency and leveling speed apply my favorite two laws:
1. Try and get quests which have you killing mobs 2 levels below you, and
2. Don’t go for the “fast kill”, go for the efficient kill. That means using wands and close combat attacks to preserve mana over a long time period to prevent down time through having to eat and drink.
If you’re always burning through your mana by using every high mana spell in your book you’ll find that you will kill mobs fast, but you’ll equally need to spend plenty of “ass-time” sitting around eating. Let your pets do the work for you as much as possible and work out the most efficient rotation of spells you can to keep going longer!
A good casting rotation will do big things for your leveling speed, but if you’d like even more help, check out my Horde Leveling Guide front page for some comparisons of the top commercial WoW guides.
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