Is affliction really overpowered?

[chronia]

Shh, switching to moderately high health adds is the single most important mechanic in the world that dwarfs every other situation in the game. Nothing else matters!

Also depends where you look in the progress cycle. During progress fingertip burst is definately very important in alot of cases, when its farm like now for alot of guilds its a lot less important because overall dps due to extra gear / traits makes priority adds a lot easier (sometimes even almost irrelevant) to deal with.

Thats why on fights where locks were brought during progress they generally if not always they were specced destro (i havent seen any of the top guilds run affli locks consistantly during the progress race, but could have been mistaken). And while already having a good to very good dmg potential locks weren't really prefered during the progress part of this content cycle at all. And thats not because topguilds didnt have access to good (affli) locks, but because they preferred other classes.

Looking at parses now is nice, but it won't give a clear picture of how classes actually perform when it matters during the progress phase of the content cycle. as alot of the parses now contain cheesing / padding / tunneling. ToS progress will be the next point to evaluate classes properly on their strengths and weaknesses for actually progressing trough content.

[Deleted]

Nerfing resource generation is a bad way to tackle things. It will really, really hurt in any fight where there aren't adds to tag for souls 'n' shards. It willalso hurt a LOT of M+ dungeons except the highest keystones.

How much of a nerf is this? As far as I can see if you run Conduit you'll be getting 40% fewer shards and thus UA's.

Also note that our shard generation will be much lower in 7.2.5 anyway. We willlose the T19-4 which is very powerful. And get that T20 rubbish instead.

As I said, I have a feeling that at least half of this nerf is due to the fact that without the T19-4, Conduit's soul generation would be vastly superior to Effigy's - even now with the four set Effigy is not a big leap ahead and it;s only use is as a shard generator by slapping Agony on it. Anything else is not worth using unless you take AC as Effigy works horribly paired up with Grasp.

It feels to me that some of this is simply keeping shard generation between Effigy and Conduit roughly in line when we lose the T19 armour. It's a terrible change for dungeons though.

Effigy is an awful thing to use in dungeons, and the Conduit nerf will hit everything we do. Dungeon bosses are such short fights and they hardly ever had taggable adds worth speaking of - once we burn our first three shards we'll be lucky to get any more of them before the boss dies, except on the highest keys or with Tyrannical.

It;s why nearly everyone runs with Conduit even though Effigy is hypothetically better. Effigy is just a massive pain in the ass to use and unlike Conduit you do not get "lucky runs" of shards for what laughably passes as affy's "burst"

[Vynny]

You know you could just have checked the other percentiles and seen that it doesn't get much different so my argument is still pretty much the same, your supposedly horrible fight you're still above average across all specs and one of the best if only looking at ranged.

As for gul'dan, I can't really speak for heroic but on mythic the eyes are pretty much dealt with by the melee dps, you really don't need anyone to kill them outside of empowered, and those should be up for long enough.

I did, and there's a big difference between being 5th out of 24, what aff locks are on the 90th percentile list and 9th out of 24, what aff locks are on the 75th percentile list. Secondly, you keep saying "supposedly horrible fight" and you're more right then you know when you say that because while mobility isn't optimal for Aff locks, we can just go WiA/SE and become an extremely mobile spec in exchange for lower overall damage potential. The point is that in Nighthold, we can work around even the fights that are bad for us, but that's not necessarily going to be true in ToS and beyond, so nerfing aff based on farm nighthold performance alone is absolutely ridiculous. Again I have to ask, did you complain about arcane mage dps on farm HFC because their parses were absolutely ridiculous when you could zerg down boss fights in a minute or so?

Also, what's average to you? There's 24 dps specs in the game right now and you're the second person to say that aff locks aren't at least average on their bad fights, so what spot is average? 12? 11? 13? I mean it seems like 9 which is midtier (3 tiers of 8) isn't average to you unless you didn't take your own advice and actually look at the 75th percentile parses, so at what point do you consider a spec's performance on a fight to be average and by what criteria?

[Deleted]

Also depends where you look in the progress cycle. During progress fingertip burst is definately very important in alot of cases, when its farm like now for alot of guilds its a lot less important because overall dps due to extra gear / traits makes priority adds a lot easier (sometimes even almost irrelevant) to deal with.

Thats why on fights where locks were brought during progress they generally if not always they were specced destro (i havent seen any of the top guilds run affli locks consistantly during the progress race, but could have been mistaken). And while already having a good to very good dmg potential locks weren't really prefered during the progress part of this content cycle at all. And thats not because topguilds didnt have access to good (affli) locks, but because they preferred other classes.

Looking at parses now is nice, but it won't give a clear picture of how classes actually perform when it matters during the progress phase of the content cycle. as alot of the parses now contain cheesing / padding / tunneling. ToS progress will be the next point to evaluate classes properly on their strengths and weaknesses for actually progressing trough content.

Precisely. It is why destruction was and will be the preferred progression spec. On demand burst matters a lot more than sustained damage, so long as destruction is not totally incompetent at it, the ability to switch with very little cost and produce strong burst on demand will more than compensate.

On farm bosses affliction's very high sustained damage is fine, you just want to kill the boss as fast as possible, the incidental mechanics become trivialised by the raid outgearing them.

In TOS you might take one afflock and have him tunnel the boss to try to beat dps checks. He will have no other role.

Thanks to the talents and the T20 armour which centres everything around uninterrupted Drain Soul channeling, affliction is strictly a single target tunneling boss. Tunneling will be our niche and we'd better be damn good at it.

[Vynny]

Shh, switching to moderately high health adds is the single most important mechanic in the world that dwarfs every other situation in the game. Nothing else matters!

You don't kill the adds on Chronomatic Anomaly fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Trilliax fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Spellblade fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Krosus fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Tichondrius fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on star augur fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on botanist fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Elisande fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Gul'dan fast enough you wipe. See a bit of a pattern there? Being able to efficiently cleave or target switch is a big thing in nighthold mechanics and is something Aff locks can't do very well. Now if you don't know the fights then please continue on making an arse of yourself, but the fact is that almost every single nighthold fight has add dps checks that will wipe you if failed, so yes in nighthold it is most important.

But yeah, it's kinda laughable that someone who hasn't even set foot into mythic nighthold (according to the character name and server on your profile) is gonna try to talk shit about which mechanics are important.

[Reith]

You don't kill the adds on Chronomatic Anomaly fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Trilliax fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Spellblade fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Krosus fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Tichondrius fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on star augur fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on botanist fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Elisande fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Gul'dan fast enough you wipe. See a bit of a pattern there? Being able to efficiently cleave or target switch is a big thing in nighthold mechanics and is something Aff locks can't do very well. Now if you don't know the fights then please continue on making an arse of yourself, but the fact is that almost every single nighthold fight has add dps checks that will wipe you if failed, so yes in nighthold it is most important.

But yeah, it's kinda laughable that someone who hasn't even set foot into mythic nighthold (according to the character name and server on your profile) is gonna try to talk shit about which mechanics are important.

It's laughable that you guys focus on your single weakness so much and conveniently ignore all your strengths, tbh. Just because other specs do one thing better does not mean affliction is not at an imbalance currently. Affliction does many things extremely well right now, which I would say no spec should be able to be that versatile with as much damage as they can do. It's fine if you tunnel a boss that you're slightly higher, no one's arguing that, but there's other things going on. Also, my choice of not doing mythic raiding has nothing to do with this?

[Deleted]

It's laughable that you guys focus on your single weakness so much and conveniently ignore all your strengths, tbh. Just because other specs do one thing better does not mean affliction is not at an imbalance currently. Affliction does many things extremely well right now, which I would say no spec should be able to be that versatile with as much damage as they can do. It's fine if you tunnel a boss that you're slightly higher, no one's arguing that, but there's other things going on. Also, my choice of not doing mythic raiding has nothing to do with this?

And which are those many things, so many that we are gods?

And yes, you're choice of not doing mythic raiding has a lot to do with this, since NH HC is easy as fuck. All of those "Switching target issues, etc" that were mentioned, can be almost ignored on HC. But not in mythic progress.

[Pickynerd]

Aff is OP AF when it comes to self healing, or raping a shit ton of mobs, but feels on par with other classes single target.

I still miss destro from mop.

[noaim]

How much of a nerf is this? As far as I can see if you run Conduit you'll be getting 40% fewer shards and thus UA's.

40% fewer shard returns, but hardly 40% fewer shards. If you spend 100 shards with 20% SC, you get 20% more UA's on average. Now you get 12% more on average, so an 8% nerf, plus a little more in a real life scenario where time is a factor, not only X amount of casts, since you will get fewer shards over time, you also have fewer casts to possibly get a refund of.

[Deleted]

Its a spec designed to kill vast amounts of enemies, and most of the pve content involves killing "trash" hence our large dps

[Count Zero]

40% fewer shard returns, but hardly 40% fewer shards. If you spend 100 shards with 20% SC, you get 20% more UA's on average. Now you get 12% more on average, so an 8% nerf, plus a little more in a real life scenario where time is a factor, not only X amount of casts, since you will get fewer shards over time, you also have fewer casts to possibly get a refund of.

To be honest this almost feels like a preventive measure against scaling out of control w/ Tomb and (eventually) Argus gear.

[Fleckens]

I did, and there's a big difference between being 5th out of 24, what aff locks are on the 90th percentile list and 9th out of 24, what aff locks are on the 75th percentile list. Secondly, you keep saying "supposedly horrible fight" and you're more right then you know when you say that because while mobility isn't optimal for Aff locks, we can just go WiA/SE and become an extremely mobile spec in exchange for lower overall damage potential. The point is that in Nighthold, we can work around even the fights that are bad for us, but that's not necessarily going to be true in ToS and beyond, so nerfing aff based on farm nighthold performance alone is absolutely ridiculous. Again I have to ask, did you complain about arcane mage dps on farm HFC because their parses were absolutely ridiculous when you could zerg down boss fights in a minute or so?

Also, what's average to you? There's 24 dps specs in the game right now and you're the second person to say that aff locks aren't at least average on their bad fights, so what spot is average? 12? 11? 13? I mean it seems like 9 which is midtier (3 tiers of 8) isn't average to you unless you didn't take your own advice and actually look at the 75th percentile parses, so at what point do you consider a spec's performance on a fight to be average and by what criteria?

I tend to prefer looking at class rather than spec, while it's true legion did make you more locked into a spec than before, it has gotten a lot less important at the moment and so being 6th out of 12th is average, although again if you look at just ranged, you are far above average even on that fight. And so for a fight where you can not use any of the mechanics that make you so strong, to still be able to rank this high shows that your spec is definitely overperforming compared to most other ranged dps. Again, take a lot at classes that also suck at this fight like most other dot classes and you can see them at the bottom of the rankings.

Also you can not compare affliction locks in nighthold to arcane mages in hfc, fights have not changed nearly as much, most fights lost at most 10-15% of their killspeed compared to those hfc rankings where even average killspeeds were cut in half and the top ones were reduced to nearly nothing. As for tomb, even if every boss was as bad for you as trilliax you would still be in a better spot than most other ranged dps. Now of course the issue is just whether warlocks should be nerfed or the other ranged classes just should be buffed, it depends if they wish to keep this dps gap between melee and ranged or not. That said, I do think something does need to be done about your damage in the cases where you have adds to kill as in those situations your damage is clearly too good.

You don't kill the adds on Chronomatic Anomaly fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Trilliax fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Spellblade fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Krosus fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Tichondrius fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on star augur fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on botanist fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Elisande fast enough you wipe, you don't kill the adds on Gul'dan fast enough you wipe. See a bit of a pattern there? Being able to efficiently cleave or target switch is a big thing in nighthold mechanics and is something Aff locks can't do very well. Now if you don't know the fights then please continue on making an arse of yourself, but the fact is that almost every single nighthold fight has add dps checks that will wipe you if failed, so yes in nighthold it is most important.

But yeah, it's kinda laughable that someone who hasn't even set foot into mythic nighthold (according to the character name and server on your profile) is gonna try to talk shit about which mechanics are important.

As for this argument, lets just quickly go over them.

Chronomatic the only adds you could argue are those you just send a small melee group to, so doesn't really matter that you can't deal with the adds as the other pack that rest of your raid goes to just blows up.
Trilliax the only is a long living high health add, no issues for you there.
Spellblade you should really have enough dps from other classes to deal with the adds unless half your raid is dead, in which case you have a different issue than lack of aoe.
Krosus comes down to soaking more than killing adds, if you have so many adds up they are a problem you fucked up soaking them. And since warlocks are pretty tanky you can easily soak several pools.
Tichondrius and botanist are the only ones that I can somewhat agree with, although your ranged has nothing but affliction warlocks you still shouldn't have any issues as you really dont need the entire raid to deal with them.
Star augur again is a high health add.
Elisande adds are fairly high health and elisande is more a case of kill adds at the right time, not as fast as possible.
Gul'dan has 4 sets of small eyes, after that it's only empowered eyes as well as the 2 big adds. Last phase you got nightorb and the add, both live for a decent amount of time. That said, Gul'dan is the one fight where destruction might be better as it's really good in last phase and at the moment having too much dps can actually screw up your timings more than it helps in the first 2 phases.

You just don't seem to understand that not everyone needs to be super high dps on adds, there's a reason why rogues are brought so often and if warlocks had been in the state they are now at the start of 7.1.5 there's no doubt they would also have been used for more progress.

[chronia]

It's laughable that you guys focus on your single weakness so much and conveniently ignore all your strengths, tbh. Just because other specs do one thing better does not mean affliction is not at an imbalance currently. Affliction does many things extremely well right now, which I would say no spec should be able to be that versatile with as much damage as they can do. It's fine if you tunnel a boss that you're slightly higher, no one's arguing that, but there's other things going on. Also, my choice of not doing mythic raiding has nothing to do with this?

The point is that this single weakness is one of the main criteria for Mythic progress setup selection, while it doesn't bother me as i'm in a pretty casual guild that dabbles with Mythic, but doesnt go hardcore in it, it is a problem for affliction locks that actually want to play affli at the cutting edge.

No one is going to argue that affliction is not strong right now, but its also a moot point since most guilds and esp the top parsers are in the farm stage of a progress cycle. Nearly all of the top logs now are fights being done with traits that the content was never designed for and alot of cheesing and padding, the only conclusion you can draw there is that affliction locks are very strong in Nighthold when farming. Which is certainly is the case. But especially in cutting edge NH progression 3 months ago i didn't see any affliction warlocks being ran alot by the top guilds, heck some didn't even any locks.

If affliction locks are still doing this well in ToS during progress and some guilds are actually going to stack affli locks on nearly every encounter (like SP's were stacked early legion) then yes, there is a problem. However if due to ToS mechanics and encounter design locks are suddenly all running destro again for prog then there is no real problem with affliction. Ppl should not really judge class performance based on farm logs with cheesing and padding but on actual progression performance and viability.

And yes, choosing to raid Mythic or choosing to not raid mythic but sticking to heroic / normal is quite a factor, as afflictions weaknesses and strenghts play out different at these difficulties esp when Nighthold Progress was going on for the top guilds.

[dabanks07]

I've dabbled with warlock off and on for years before finally making a full re-roll to my lock a few months ago. Regardless of what people are trying to say, yes, Affliction locks are indeed OP right now. If you go and look at the top logs on Ursoc right now you will only see 3 specs in the top 50 parses: Frost Mage, Havoc DH, and Affliction. This is a fight with absolutely zero ability to abuse the souls mechanic and these logs came after the change to reset souls on raid encounter. When you add in the "on-death" mechanics this gets exacerbated. I know these fights are short but I think that is even more telling as in their current set-up Affliction has no big cooldowns to abuse in these shorter fights.

However just because they are OP in their current state and in this tier does not mean they aren't broken in a negative way. Yes they have top tier single target. They have very good general AoE and excellent stacked AoE. They have good mobility. But they are also in a position where the stars have aligned for them and they only appear flawless on the charts. They will have top level Single Target even going into the next tier with their new tier bonuses boosting that even more. It is all of those other things that are being dropped without Blizzard even raising a hand to the tuning on their spells. One can assume fights won't have near the same number of disposable adds or if nothing else there will be less than there are currently. Their burst rotation (UA>UA>DS) will be indirectly nerfed as they lose their t19 two piece which buffs UA by 10%. Their AoE will be indirectly nerfed as they lose their 4pc t19 which increases soul shard generation for Sow the Seeds spam. And their mobility is being nerfed as the t20 bonus calls for much more Drain Soul channeling.

[chronia]

I've dabbled with warlock off and on for years before finally making a full re-roll to my lock a few months ago. Regardless of what people are trying to say, yes, Affliction locks are indeed OP right now. If you go and look at the top logs on Ursoc right now you will only see 3 specs in the top 50 parses: Frost Mage, Havoc DH, and Affliction. This is a fight with absolutely zero ability to abuse the souls mechanic and these logs came after the change to reset souls on raid encounter. When you add in the "on-death" mechanics this gets exacerbated. I know these fights are short but I think that is even more telling as in their current set-up Affliction has no big cooldowns to abuse in these shorter fights.

Its also a total irrelevant encounter currently, and i don't know if its the best encounter to mention, as this as always been a fight dominated by a single or few classes, for example the 7.0 - 7.1 rankings when it was still a somewhat relevant encounter the top 50 on ursoc was 50 SP's not a single other class, now its 38 frostmages, 6 DH and 6 locks, if any conclusion could be made then its that for a fight type like ursoc Frostmage is by far the most OP class at this moment . Also you can still use some of the soul mechanics on the adds i believe (its a while since i did ursoc mythic).

Not to say that affli locks arent strong to possibly OP on farm content at this moment, but farm content doesn't say alot if anything at all, but before any real conclusions can be made about the OPness of affli warlocks we first need another progress cycle.

[Fleckens]

Its also a total irrelevant encounter currently, and i don't know if its the best encounter to mention, as this as always been a fight dominated by a single or few classes, for example the 7.0 - 7.1 rankings when it was still a somewhat relevant encounter the top 50 on ursoc was 50 SP's not a single other class, now its 38 frostmages, 6 DH and 6 locks, if any conclusion could be made then its that for a fight type like ursoc Frostmage is by far the most OP class at this moment . Also you can still use some of the soul mechanics on the adds i believe (its a while since i did ursoc mythic).

Not to say that affli locks arent strong to possibly OP on farm content at this moment, but farm content doesn't say alot if anything at all, but before any real conclusions can be made about the OPness of affli warlocks we first need another progress cycle.

That argument didn't really stop priests from getting nerfed, affliction warlocks now are probably at the level priests were in 7.1.5 before they got nerfed. And now with the buffs to other class as well as haste mechanic changes in nighthold we dropped down to on average the worst class in nighthold. Honestly I'd rather see buffs to most casters rather than a nerf to locks(or at least not a nerf that would affect their single target damage when they can't make use of adds) as there's quite a gap between the couple of good casters and the melee and then the rest of casters.

[Vynny]

I tend to prefer looking at class rather than spec, while it's true legion did make you more locked into a spec than before, it has gotten a lot less important at the moment and so being 6th out of 12th is average, although again if you look at just ranged, you are far above average even on that fight. And so for a fight where you can not use any of the mechanics that make you so strong, to still be able to rank this high shows that your spec is definitely overperforming compared to most other ranged dps. Again, take a lot at classes that also suck at this fight like most other dot classes and you can see them at the bottom of the rankings.

Also you can not compare affliction locks in nighthold to arcane mages in hfc, fights have not changed nearly as much, most fights lost at most 10-15% of their killspeed compared to those hfc rankings where even average killspeeds were cut in half and the top ones were reduced to nearly nothing. As for tomb, even if every boss was as bad for you as trilliax you would still be in a better spot than most other ranged dps. Now of course the issue is just whether warlocks should be nerfed or the other ranged classes just should be buffed, it depends if they wish to keep this dps gap between melee and ranged or not. That said, I do think something does need to be done about your damage in the cases where you have adds to kill as in those situations your damage is clearly too good.



As for this argument, lets just quickly go over them.

Chronomatic the only adds you could argue are those you just send a small melee group to, so doesn't really matter that you can't deal with the adds as the other pack that rest of your raid goes to just blows up.
Trilliax the only is a long living high health add, no issues for you there.
Spellblade you should really have enough dps from other classes to deal with the adds unless half your raid is dead, in which case you have a different issue than lack of aoe.
Krosus comes down to soaking more than killing adds, if you have so many adds up they are a problem you fucked up soaking them. And since warlocks are pretty tanky you can easily soak several pools.
Tichondrius and botanist are the only ones that I can somewhat agree with, although your ranged has nothing but affliction warlocks you still shouldn't have any issues as you really dont need the entire raid to deal with them.
Star augur again is a high health add.
Elisande adds are fairly high health and elisande is more a case of kill adds at the right time, not as fast as possible.
Gul'dan has 4 sets of small eyes, after that it's only empowered eyes as well as the 2 big adds. Last phase you got nightorb and the add, both live for a decent amount of time. That said, Gul'dan is the one fight where destruction might be better as it's really good in last phase and at the moment having too much dps can actually screw up your timings more than it helps in the first 2 phases.

You just don't seem to understand that not everyone needs to be super high dps on adds, there's a reason why rogues are brought so often and if warlocks had been in the state they are now at the start of 7.1.5 there's no doubt they would also have been used for more progress.

As for the first point, it's really difficult to justify looking at it class by class because it's far more likely that a pure dps class will have at least one spec that is powerful in any given situation; whereas, a shadow priest is more likely to run into issues that can't be mitigated with talents alone. Beyond that, imagine if Shadow priests as a spec could mitigate their weaknesses through talents alone and do everything warlocks could as a class in mitigating their weaknesses, that'd be completely unfair because your kit on a single spec would have all of the strength of 3 kits on one class, so no comparing class to class is a really really unfair comparison to make.

Secondly, you're right, aff is overperforming on farm where you can ignore adds. You don't seem to get this, but every second you're not drain souling a target, you're losing 70% dot damage, so the more seconds you spend having to apply dots to adds the more time the bulk of your damage drops by 70%.

Thirdly, You're saying that even if every fight was as bad for us as Trilliax, we would still have to be nerfed in your opinion? You're seriously saying that the 9th best dps would require a nerf just to satisfy you? Wow, that is some petty bullshit. Also, aff's damage will naturally go down because we won't be keeping our current 4 set which is amazing because it lets us consistently have enough shards to sustain a double UA (or more) drain rotation. The entire point is that aff locks performance is extremely dependent on how things currently are with nighthold, so nerfing us based on that is small-minded and shortsighted. Way back in the first post of mine you responded to, I myself said that if we must be nerfed then they should nerf us during the balancing patch before mythic ToS.

Fourthly, you're looking at this from a farm perspective.

The adds that pop up on Chronomatic Anomaly that intersect with the slow phase are a dps check and you're less likely to get those adds during farm, but most likely get them during prog. And again, every second we're not draining is 70% reduced dot damage.

On Trilliax, you can't afford to ignore the add and again, switching hurts our dps a hell of a lot. Imagine every gcd that we're not draining effectively reducing most of our damage by 70%. Hell, the longer an add lives the more dps we lose because that's more time where we have to reapply more dots which means less draining.

You're not going to soak all the pools on Krosus unless you get lucky. Even with everyone up, you're still going to get like 2 or 3 adds per set of pools and aff locks can't help with those because they need to die faster than our ramp up time allows.

Star Augur, again, it's the existence of the adds that hurts our dps, the same as Trilliax. Every second we're not draining we're losing up to 70% damage. You really really should research how a spec works before saying it's overpowered and needs to be nerfed.

Elisande, again not being able to just tunnel and drain costs us a fuck ton of damage. How long the adds lives only counts for how helpful we can be with a mechanic, but currently having to do more than just putting a single dot on the target for WoC stacks is very bad for us due to the fact that MG gives us such a huge damage bonus.

Gul'dan, I'll defer to you with the caveat that aff is the top performing warlock spec on WCL for that fight.

The point I was making is that if aff locks can't just leech WoC stacks and souls off of adds and actually have to help deal with them, then their damage isn't going to be anywhere near these parses that you're basing your complaints on.

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It's laughable that you guys focus on your single weakness so much and conveniently ignore all your strengths, tbh. Just because other specs do one thing better does not mean affliction is not at an imbalance currently. Affliction does many things extremely well right now, which I would say no spec should be able to be that versatile with as much damage as they can do. It's fine if you tunnel a boss that you're slightly higher, no one's arguing that, but there's other things going on. Also, my choice of not doing mythic raiding has nothing to do with this?

That single weakness is really important for actually progressing and killing a fight before you over gear it. This is why I brought up you not doing mythic, you don't seem to get how tightly tuned it is and how not being able to deal with the mechanics presented by the fight in an efficient manner is likely to get you benched on progress. It's a matter of you not knowing what you're talking about because you haven't experienced mythic at any point in the game from what I can tell. It's like trying to tell someone how to do their job when you have no experience whatsoever to back it up with. It really just makes you look like an asshole because you're talking out of your ass.

P.S.
I would encourage you to try mythic raiding, it's really a lot of fun and I believe with enough work and effort, most players can do it, so please don't take what I'm saying as some insult to your skill. As you said it's not that you can't do it, it's that you don't choose to do it. I'm not trying to come off as an elitist prick.

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That argument didn't really stop priests from getting nerfed, affliction warlocks now are probably at the level priests were in 7.1.5 before they got nerfed. And now with the buffs to other class as well as haste mechanic changes in nighthold we dropped down to on average the worst class in nighthold. Honestly I'd rather see buffs to most casters rather than a nerf to locks(or at least not a nerf that would affect their single target damage when they can't make use of adds) as there's quite a gap between the couple of good casters and the melee and then the rest of casters.

at the level they were in 7.1.5 before they got nerfed? what? Okay good joke. No one stacked aff locks to burn bosses on prog, yet that's exactly what was done with spriests in ToV, but they're totally on the same level . . .

[Lucrece]

Not to mention for mythic guldan people were bringing 2+ shadow priests, assassination rogues, and fury warriors (who are broken as fuck yet nobody is talking about them) alongside 2 DH's.

How many warlocks were there in the 3 top guilds in the race? 1 for Gul'dan, Bangers as destro. The other two brought not a single warlock.

Affliction clearly needs some power shaves but the least they can do alongside those is work on soul effigy as a talent and make playstyles other than MG not total shit.

[Fleckens]

As for the first point, it's really difficult to justify looking at it class by class because it's far more likely that a pure dps class will have at least one spec that is powerful in any given situation; whereas, a shadow priest is more likely to run into issues that can't be mitigated with talents alone. Beyond that, imagine if Shadow priests as a spec could mitigate their weaknesses through talents alone and do everything warlocks could as a class in mitigating their weaknesses, that'd be completely unfair because your kit on a single spec would have all of the strength of 3 kits on one class, so no comparing class to class is a really really unfair comparison to make.

Secondly, you're right, aff is overperforming on farm where you can ignore adds. You don't seem to get this, but every second you're not drain souling a target, you're losing 70% dot damage, so the more seconds you spend having to apply dots to adds the more time the bulk of your damage drops by 70%.

Thirdly, You're saying that even if every fight was as bad for us as Trilliax, we would still have to be nerfed in your opinion? You're seriously saying that the 9th best dps would require a nerf just to satisfy you? Wow, that is some petty bullshit. Also, aff's damage will naturally go down because we won't be keeping our current 4 set which is amazing because it lets us consistently have enough shards to sustain a double UA (or more) drain rotation. The entire point is that aff locks performance is extremely dependent on how things currently are with nighthold, so nerfing us based on that is small-minded and shortsighted. Way back in the first post of mine you responded to, I myself said that if we must be nerfed then they should nerf us during the balancing patch before mythic ToS.

Fourthly, you're looking at this from a farm perspective.

The adds that pop up on Chronomatic Anomaly that intersect with the slow phase are a dps check and you're less likely to get those adds during farm, but most likely get them during prog. And again, every second we're not draining is 70% reduced dot damage.

On Trilliax, you can't afford to ignore the add and again, switching hurts our dps a hell of a lot. Imagine every gcd that we're not draining effectively reducing most of our damage by 70%. Hell, the longer an add lives the more dps we lose because that's more time where we have to reapply more dots which means less draining.

You're not going to soak all the pools on Krosus unless you get lucky. Even with everyone up, you're still going to get like 2 or 3 adds per set of pools and aff locks can't help with those because they need to die faster than our ramp up time allows.

Star Augur, again, it's the existence of the adds that hurts our dps, the same as Trilliax. Every second we're not draining we're losing up to 70% damage. You really really should research how a spec works before saying it's overpowered and needs to be nerfed.

Elisande, again not being able to just tunnel and drain costs us a fuck ton of damage. How long the adds lives only counts for how helpful we can be with a mechanic, but currently having to do more than just putting a single dot on the target for WoC stacks is very bad for us due to the fact that MG gives us such a huge damage bonus.

Gul'dan, I'll defer to you with the caveat that aff is the top performing warlock spec on WCL for that fight.

The point I was making is that if aff locks can't just leech WoC stacks and souls off of adds and actually have to help deal with them, then their damage isn't going to be anywhere near these parses that you're basing your complaints on.

at the level they were in 7.1.5 before they got nerfed? what? Okay good joke. No one stacked aff locks to burn bosses on prog, yet that's exactly what was done with spriests in ToV, but they're totally on the same level . . .

If we were in any other expansion I'd agree with the way you're comparing stuff a bit more, but currently they clearly seem to want melee to be stronger than ranged on dps, so you should not compare yourself to other ranged, not melee. And in that case you along with some other outliers like frost mages are quite far ahead of other ranged dps. However as I already said which you ignored, I would rather they buff other casters to be on par with warlocks in the trilliax scenario than nerf them there.

On your other point, you really exaggerate how bad switching targets for you are, throwing up dots and switching draining to the trlliax add or star augur add is not that much bigger dps loss for you than for other classes. If you take a look at a lot of star augur logs there are plenty of examples of logs topping damage on both the add and the boss.

Also it seems you need a quick reminder what 7.1.5 was for priests. It was when stm was nerfed but our dots were quite strong, but then we took a 14% nerf to vt, 11% to swp and 4% to everything else. Even if we got those numbers back we most likely still wouldn't be able to compete with current affliction warlocks. You have to remember that when nighthold came out not only had warlocks not been good for a long time, and especially not affliction, so very few people had any ap or legendaries for it compared to all the geared priests that existed due to stm. And of course, you guys got buffed in 7.2 both in the changes to reap soul as well as your artifact scaling incredibly well with getting more traits. So yes, I think it's fair to say that currently warlocks on farm in 7.2 are as good or better than priests were in 7.1.5 on farm(and if you try and claim that many were still progressing Helya there, there are many still progressing nighthold as well right now).

But I'll mention it again in closing once more. I'd much rather they buff other casters and only nerf warlocks ability to get ridiculous uptime on their buffs due to adds, you're not overpowered on trilliax but you are on most other fights.

[yarafx1]

Nonsense. In all previous expacs spec swapping was only limited by stat-weighting and gear, and maybe a specialised trinket (and yeah it was really dumb how powerful some of those were)

In Legion the artifact system and legendaries lock you much more effectively into one spec than ever.

If I wanted to swap to demo or destro out of affliction now, I would have to give up two very powerful best in slot legendaries (which are entirely useless outsid eof affliction). Now I;m lucky enough to have six legendaries, so a couple of them like the legs are equally useful across any spec. But it would be a big step down to quit using the affliction helm and replace it with the portal legs

Moreover, I'm now at 44 on my artifact for affliction but only 33 for demo and 20 for destro (cos I hate destro, with a passion). Not only that, I have three really good artifact affliction relics and obviously some crap ones for demo-destro, so to swap I;d have to start farming those again

Yes yes, artifact knowledge I hear you say. To be honest - the thought of artifact levelling makes my toes curl.

With the amount of time it takes to get the 43'rd trait for one spec (assuming these are the new) traits. You could have had your other weapons at 38. As to before this patch to compete you had to be at the flat 54 traits before you could even be considered for higher level progression raiding. I have my aff spec at 43, Demo and Destro both at 38/39 and i've never cast a spell as Demo. If you also have spec specific legends now its easy to pick up legends for the other specs(unless you have trash utility then rip).