How To Improve As Affliction Warlock — The War Within (11.0.5)

While this is one of the most basic mistakes, it will cost you a lot of damage if it happens to you. It is highly recommended you obtain an AddOn such as WeakAuras or Gnosis that can display an easy timer or icon for your DoTs. In multi-target situations in particular, keeping track of your Agony stacks is of crucial importance to pulling ahead on damage.

While its single target usage is pretty straight forward, Unstable Affliction application is more dynamic when additional targets enter the battlefield. While it is indeed a damage increase on a specific target, both because of the spell itself and the scaling from Malefic Rapture, the additional effect of refunding a Soul Shard if the target dies during its duration should not be underestimated. Especially on lower target counts, where Soul Shard influx is not as fast as to make difficult spending Soul Shards fast enough, Unstable Affliction should be used to snipe lower health targets (in conjunction with Drain Soul when talented).

When you are playing with Drain Soul, you must go out of your way to "snipe" Soul Shards by draining them as they die. Draining the target is only half of the method, however, as you need to put the Soul Shards to use. Always keep track of your current Soul Shard count in relation to the next available Soul Shards, either by DoT ticks or by Drain Soul. If you are high on Soul Shards with a group of adds low on health, you will end up with too many Soul Shards to spend, or in other words, Shards wasted.

Seed of Corruption is not as strong as we are used to from Legion, and should now only be used as a Soul Shard dump when there are large numbers of targets. Seed should always be used to apply and maintain Corruption, however, if there are 3+ targets stacked together.

Summon Darkglare is not as impactful as it was in previous expansions, however the DoT extension still plays a big role by alleviating the amount of GCD required to maintain those (especially on multiple targets) which in turns allows for a sequence of Malefic Rapture casts for high burst.

One of the biggest mistakes players in general make in a dungeon is to hold their cooldowns for most of the run, fearing they will not be available on bosses.