Affliction warlocks after the first few seconds use a priority system rather than a set rotation. The only time during an encounter that an aff lock needs to revert back to a rotation, is if their dots and debuffs have fallen off of their target.
If a solitary lock is in a raid without a Dk (with ebon plaguebringer) or a Boomkin (with Earth and Moon), then Curse of the Elements should be used in place of Curse of Agony.
STARTING ROTATION
Life Tap
Curse of the Elements (if on CoE duty)
Haunt
Shadow Bolt
Shadow Bolt
Unstable Affliction
Corruption
Curse of Agony (if not on CoE duty)
After this rotation is done, this sequence of casts become a priority system.
The priority should be in the following order, i have not included CoE in the following list:
Haunt (if glyphed applies a debuff which increases damge by 23% done by shadow DoTs)
Shadow Embrace (increases all your shadow periodic damage by 5%, stacks 3 times, max 15%)
Corruption (you should rarely need to recast this as both haunt and shadow bolt refresh corruption)
Unstable Affliction
Curse of Agony
Life tap
Do's and Dont's
DONT apply a DoT until that same dot has expired on your target (aka clipping)
DO cast haunt as soon as it is off of cooldown, you only get 4 seconds to re-apply this to the target including the 1.5 sec cast
DONT interrupt a cast to cast another spell (Exception to this is drainsoul, see below)
DONT allow Glyph of Life Tap to expire, life tap at least once every 40 seconds
DONT allow your mana to become so low that you life tap mulitple times
DO cast any other instant spell available whilst moving, ie deathcoil
DRAIN SOUL
Drain soul, unhasted, is a 15 second cast, dealing damage every 3 seconds. This spell really comes into its own when the target is at or below 25%. At this point it does 4 times as much damage. However if you cast drain soul at 26%, the spell does not recheck the target, so your drain soul continues to do only 1x damage even if the target falls below 25%, until drain soul is recasted.
Out of all the spells a warlock can cast, this is the only spell that should be interrupted. However there is a wrong way and right way to go about this.
There are a couple of wrong ways:
The worst way is to run drain soul right to the end of the channel. In the mean time many of your debuffs would have fallen off the target and you would have to start your rotation again.
Another way is to re-apply dots just before drain soul ticks.
The Right Way
Unfortunatley to do this correctly, this does require the use of an addon such as Drain Soul Timer.
In order to maximise the damage that drain soul does, it is imperative that you keep all your debuffs and DoTs up on the target, whilst casting drain soul.
In order to be able to do this, drain soul has to be clipped. DoTs and debuffs should be reapplied as soon as possible, however drain soul should not be clipped before a damage tick. This may delay the debuffs being applied to the target, but clipping drain soul early is a dps loss.
The addon Drain Soul Timer, shows a warning every time drain soul does damage. This makes it alot easier knowing when to clip drain soul and when not to.
