Welcome to Skill Capped’s Affliction Warlock PvP Guide for The War Within 11.0

All sections for Affliction Warlock PvP have been divided into corresponding sections for the most optimal hero talents, class talents, spec talents, race, stats, gear, enchants, gems, and macros. This will help you have a good understanding of Affliction Warlocks in PvP for The War Within, the strengths and weaknesses associated with this specialization, and help you conquer the arena. This section provides a brief overview of Affliction Warlocks in The War Within.

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What’s New

What’s New for Affliction Warlocks in The War Within?

As we begin our journey into The War Within, Affliction Warlocks experience a bountiful amount of change, predominantly in how they deliver massive damage. This specialization continues to prioritize spread pressure with our dots, but instead of the dots themselves dealing most of our damage, we now treat it as a buffer to deliver massive burst from our Malefic Rapture and our Nightfall procs.

Directing our attention to our new Warlock and Affliction trees, we now lose out on Inevitable Demise, reducing a bit of our survivability with Drain Life, but talents that buffed our Drain Life can now be allocated into Sargerei Technique for more single target damage coming out of our Shadow Bolt. Additionally, our Soul Swap talent is now a potential PvP talent we can grab instead of defaulting as it in our Affliction tree. As for our last major change, we have suffered a massive blow to our cleave damage, as Rampant Afflictions has been reduced by 60% instead of 40% to our Unstable Affliction when we apply this on multiple targets.

Now, in order to compensate for these nerfs, we have been introduced to two new Hero talents that improve our damage throughput and survivability. For Affliction Warlocks, this is Soul Harvester and Hellcaller. Soul Harvester is currently your default pick, although you can choose Hellcaller if you enjoy the rotting aspect a bit more.

Soul Harvester supplements our toolkit with so many buffs to our single target and cleave, primarily for Shadow Bolt, Nightfall, and Malefic Rapture. For our centerpiece node in this Hero build, we receive Demonic Soul, occasionally empowering your Soul Shard to have a Succulent Soul engrained in it. To consume this soul, this requires you to cast Malefic Rapture, increasing its damage by 20%, and upon use our Demonic Soul directly attacks all targets affected for some solid cleave damage.

Hellcaller, and as said before, emphasizes a more dot oriented playstyle, which focuses on obtaining Wither, replacing Corruption. When applied, this becomes a stackable dot, and in order to stack it you must consume Soul Shards with Malefic Rapture. Once it stacks, it’ll occasionally be consumed on the affected target for some direct damage, increasing our padding potential.

Ultimately, our most preferred default in the current meta tends to be Soul Harvester, amplifying our direct burst, which by itself allows us to close games in cases where we wouldn’t normally be able to. As it currently stands, Hellcaller isn’t as recommended due to Wither being a magic dot, meaning if the healer is aware of this they can easily disrupt your ramp with a single dispel. This also requires you to cast more frequently, and with us always being a common kill target, we almost never have that kind of luxury.