When you play affliction, you’ll definitely need a dot tracking addon for agony, corruption, siphon life, and UA. Weak auras 2 is easy to set up these basic Colored horizontal bars for each dot. This will drastically improve your performance. For Destro, make one for Immolate. Here is an example I posted for a BM hunter use the same procedure. The dots are in the debuff section of WA.
In regards to playing your spec optimally, memorize the rotation in the icy veins bm guide and use their talents. I would highly recommend using the weak auras 2 addon. It’s very easy to set up a few weak auras that will improve your performance.
For BM, I have three colored horizontal bars under my character’s feet for barbed shot (debuff section), multi-shot (buff section), and focus (resource section). I can see them draining down in my peripheral vision, which is needed for timing with other skills as you will see in the icy rotations.
“Google “weak auras 2 curseforge”. Download the addon, and Copy the weak aura 2 folders to your WoW/retail/interface/addon folder.
Relaunch the game. Type /WA in game to bring up the menu.
Click new aura, from template, horizontal bar, debuffs, Barbed shot.
Click bar color to change to preference, I set width to 225, height to 15.
Drag the bar below your characters feet.