Affliction
Drain their life with your DoTs, delicious pain!
Here is a good example of a lvl 85 build for an affliction lock. This spec is built to max out DPS, so it may not be the best for leveling.
32/3/6 - Prime Glyphs included, For Major Glyphs you definitely want Glyph of Life Tap and Glyph of Soul Swap, after that its whatever you prefer. I suggest Shadowbolt or Shadowflame.
Stat Priority
For Affliction Locks Haste Rules all as it makes our DoTs tick faster and even adds more ticks with enough haste!
- Haste
- Mastery - buff those DoTs up!
- Crit
Once you are hit-capped try reforging gear into haste or mastery. Anything to get rid of excess spirit or hit on your gear.
Time to cast!
There is no specific rotation but more of a priority system. Make sure you keep Demon Soul on cooldown and have your one Bane and Curse on your target.
- Curse of Elements (This trumps all other with the addition of the resistances debuff and with Jinx talented all enemies in range are affected as well)
- Haunt
- Shadowbolt
- Demon Soul
- Bane of Agony/Doom
- Corruption
- Unstable Affliction
- Drain Soul (once boss health is under 25%)
- Fel Flame - mainly used when changing positioning or running out of the fire.
Shadowbolt
and Drain Life is your filler spell, use this when there is nothing else to cast.
Drain Life was given a 25% damage reduction, effectively killing this as our filler spell Also many guides suggest opening with Shadowbolt & Haunt because you get more DPS out of your DoTs with applying your debuff(with Haunt/Shadowbolt) and then casting the DoTs. Haunt will refresh your Corruption, also use Drain Life if Corruption is about to fall off and you do not have enough time to recast Haunt.
For Boss Fights you can add Summon Doomguard, Death Coil, and Shadowflame for a little Extra DPS.
You want to keep all your DoT's up and refresh them just before the last tick. DoTs no longer clip the final tick when you refresh them, which is a major plus! Haunt and Drain Life will refresh the Corruption DoT, so you will only need to cast that once, unless you let Corruption fall off. Shadow bolt will be your filler spell until the target hits 25% at which point you will want to switch to Drain Soul.
As of Patch 4.1 the Felhunter is back to being the top DPS pet. Also, for ultimate DPS in the execute phase, save your Demon Soul DC and cast Demon Soul to add to 20% buff to all your DoTs. With Drain Soul refreshing Unstable Affliction and Corruption this will be a huge DPS boost in the last stages of the fight.