Forever Affliction Warlock Stat Priority

This page covers the stat priority for Affliction Warlock at Level 60, explaining how each stat works and which talents affect your gearing choices. These recommendations may change as Forever is updated.

A missed DoT costs mana and delays its damage until you can cast it again, making Hit Chance your first priority until you reach the raid boss target. From there, Spell Power and Critical Strike increase the damage of your DoTs, drains, and direct spells.

Stat	Bonus
Hit Chance	Reduces the chance that your spells miss. Raid boss gearing target: 17% total Hit Chance against Level 63 bosses, including talents.
Spell Power	Increases the damage of your spells.
Critical Strike	Increases the chance that your spells critically strike, including your DoTs and drains.
Haste	Shortens spell cast times, drain channels, and the spell global cooldown.
Intellect	Increases your maximum mana and spell Critical Strike Chance.
Spell Piercing	Reduces the resistance your spells have to overcome and can increase your magic damage.
Spirit	Increases normal mana regeneration and the mana restored by Life Tap.
Stamina	Increases your maximum health.

Raid bosses count as Level 63 enemies, so aim for 17% total Hit Chance against them from talents, gear, and other bonuses. Five points in Suppression provide 5% Hit Chance for all your spells, including Shadow Bolt, leaving another 12% to get from gear and other sources.

Spell Power increases the damage of spells such as Corruption, Bane of Agony, Wrack, and Shadow Bolt without increasing their mana cost.

Because Affliction primarily deals Shadow damage, a bonus to Shadow damage can compete directly with general Spell Power: 1 point of either provides the same benefit to your Shadow spells. General Spell Power also improves your Fire spells.

Your DoTs and drains can crit on each tick, just as Shadow Bolt can crit on each hit. Pandemic increases the critical damage of your Shadow DoTs and drains, while Malevolence adds up to 5% Shadow spell Critical Strike Chance.

Critical Strike and Pandemic

Your DoTs can already crit without Pandemic, but taking all three points doubles the extra damage from crits on the DoTs and drains listed in the talent. A Corruption tick that normally deals 100 damage therefore crits for 150 without the talent or 200 with it, before other modifiers.

Haste reduces the cast time of spells such as Shadow Bolt and shortens the spell global cooldown to as little as 1 second, letting you apply DoTs and use Life Tap with less time between casts.

Haste also shortens the channel time of drains such as Wrack, giving you the same number of ticks in less time. DoTs such as Corruption and Bane of Agony keep their normal tick speed and don't gain extra ticks.

At Level 60, each additional point of Intellect gives 15 mana before modifiers, and about 60 Intellect gives 1% spell Critical Strike Chance. The larger mana pool lets you cast longer before using Life Tap, though it doesn't change the mana restored by each tap.

Spell Piercing reduces the resistance your spells have to overcome, with testing in Forever showing that it can push resistance below zero and increase damage even against enemies with no resistance. Its effect is separate from Hit Chance, which reduces the likelihood of your spells missing.

Spirit increases the mana restored by Life Tap, allowing you to recover mana with fewer casts, though each tap also costs more health. Spell Power doesn't improve Life Tap in Forever.

Spirit and Life Tap Scaling

Before talents, each additional point of Spirit adds 1 mana to Life Tap and 1 health to its cost. Two points in Improved Life Tap increase the mana gained by 20%, bringing the bonus from 100 additional Spirit to 120 mana per tap.

Spirit also improves normal mana regeneration, although that regeneration normally pauses for 5 seconds after you spend mana on a spell and provides less value while casting continuously.

Stamina provides 10 health per additional point before buffs, helping you survive incoming damage and giving you more health to spend on Life Tap. The extra health doesn't increase how much mana each tap restores.

These coefficients show how much of your Spell Power is added to each hit or tick before talents, crits, resistance, and other damage modifiers. For DoTs and channels, the total assumes that every tick deals damage.

Spell	Coefficient per Hit or Tick	Total Spell Coefficient
Corruption	20% per tick	120% over 6 ticks
Bane of Agony	13.3% recorded periodic coefficient	159.6% calculated over 12 ticks
Bane of Doom	400%
Siphon Life	5% per tick	50% over 10 ticks
Wrack	14.3% per tick	85.8% over 6 ticks
Shadow Bolt	85.7% per hit
Drain Life	10% per tick	50% over 5 ticks
Drain Soul	10% per tick	50% over 5 ticks
Immolate, if used	20% initial hit 13% per tick	85% from the initial hit and 5 ticks
Shadowburn, if talented	42.9% per hit
Hellfire	2.2% per tick, per enemy	33% over 15 ticks, per enemy

An additional 100 Spell Power, for example, adds 20 damage to each Corruption tick for 120 damage across all six ticks. The table uses the recorded coefficients for the spell ranks used at Level 60, as lower ranks can have different coefficients or fewer ticks.

Bane of Agony deals increasing damage over its duration, and the total shown here is calculated from its periodic coefficient and 12 total ticks rather than measured independently for each individual ramping tick.

More WoW Forever Warlock Guides

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