Welcome to Skill Capped’s Affliction Warlock PvP Guide for Dragonflight 10.2.6
To make it easier to navigate, we’ve divided the guide into the corresponding sections, covering everything from race and talents to gear and macros. These will give you a good idea about what to expect from Affliction Warlock in PvP in Dragonflight, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to get your character ready to conquer the arena.
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Table of Contents
In this section, we will cover the biggest changes to the design of Affliction Warlock in Dragonflight and some of their playstyle implications. Obviously, the main driving force for all adjustments this expansion comes from talents, and we will dive deeper into them a bit later. For now, let’s focus on the bigger picture.
What’s New for Affliction Warlock in Dragonflight?
Overall, Affliction has access to a very similar toolkit as the one it had in Shadowlands. Most of its core gameplay remains the same. The main differences going into Dragonflight are in the form of some welcome new additions coupled with the flexibility in the new talent system. It now opens up the opportunity to take the best parts of a lot of previous builds and mix and match them.
A great new addition is Soulburn. This new capstone talent in the Warlock tree allows you to use shards for utility purposes, which includes improving your Demonic Circle by attaching a freedom effect and movement speed increase; improving your Demonic Gateway to make it instant, which solves the issue of ever getting stopped on your summon at the start of arena; and you can even use it with Healthstone to increase the healing and increase your maximum health.
Affliction Warlock Playstyle in Dragonflight
Affliction Lock has retained much of its identity as the premiere AoE dotting ranged spec. With the addition of Soul Swap and Precognition, getting damage out is slightly easier, despite the growing abundance of disruptive melee abilities. Much of the spec is still built around gradually ramping damage and then dumping burst, which has become the standard of class design in recent expansions.
There are a lot of options when it comes to damage. And if what you enjoyed from Affliction was annoying your opponents, you can still expect a heavy emphasis on CC and disruption. That is due to familiar curses like Curse of Tongues, Curse of Weakness and Curse of Exhaustion being available through talents alongside the option to pick up Amplify Curse on top of it.