Destro vs. Affliction in 7.2.5/ToS

[Walrock]

I would not give to much on this "insight".
All Mythic testing was done before the recent nerf.
Besides that, Destro's talent setup changed, you may need to play different on many encounters.

There is absolutely no ground where you could say that Aff will be the best spec, none.

Wait until tuning is done and then have a look at the logs.

Destro may get 10% across the board, Aff maybe will get another 5% nerf, Demo may get a slight buff.

We don't know, stop spreading "set in stone" forecasts.

100 and 10% my ass (no offense)

If you want to be prepared, have 52 points in every weapon and get your gear ready, because any 5-10% can throw the specs ahead/behind.

And as always, how useful is pure boss damage anyways?

[Fabinas]

And as always, how useful is pure boss damage anyways?

Very. Kinda a prerequisite to win an encounter :-P

[Deleted]

What we know :
Demo needs to have the biggest ST damage or it's gonna be useless compare to Affli / Destru (BUT you can't have too many tunnel spec in the raid).
Affli vs Destru will depends of witch one ends with the highest ST / AoE Damage (with an advantage to Destru since it doesn't have ramp up).

Fight :
Goroth : ST fight
Demonic Inquisition : 2 targets Council fight (+ affli ability to pad with doting the mob inside the cage)
Harjatan : AoE (from logs 65% dmg to boss / other to adds)
Mistress Sassz'ine : AoE (not so many logs :/ )
Fallen Avatar : ST
The Desolate Host : Cleave fight (2 / 3 targets but not many logs)
Maiden of Vigilance : ST
Sisters of the Moon : ST
Kil'jaeden : ST + cleave (85 / 90% to boss ?)

The raid is mainly ST fight with soft (Harjatan) or hard enrage (Maiden of Vigilance / Fallen Avatar).


Gonna also say that things were a lot better before 7.2 : https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/11/#region=1
So having an overwhelming spec like the current Affliction has low chances to happen (but will certainly happens when farming the content).

Choose the spec you play the better / like the better or what your raid needs (having 3 demo lock isn't gonna get the adds killed).

[Deleted]

Did every single mythic PTR test so far, affliction will 100 and 10% be better for progression on every single boss we've seen so far. All of you people that are thinking destro is the better of the specs need a reality check. The other warlock in my guild and myself we're topping every single boss fight as aff. Aff trumps destro single target, and it specifically trumps destro in high health multi target encounters.
Goroth- aff
Inquisition - aff by a mile(multi target)
Harjatan- aff by a mile
Sisters- aff but destro might have potential (I haven't seen past phase one so I can't tell if destro has potential)
Lady- aff by a mile (multi target)

If there's any warlock spec that has potential it's demo, the st demo sims with RR are off the charts so it might be used on maiden, fallen avatar and goroth if you want.

99% sure you had some bad players in the raid, so please stop spreading information that's not 100% accurate. I'm pretty sure destro will get another 7-10% buff after first heroic id cause that's where the real tuning happens.

[Deleted]

Very. Kinda a prerequisite to win an encounter :-P

Not true. Whilst naturally, you need boss damage sufficient to kill before enrage, generally speaking, the ability to defeat mechanics is at a minimum as important, and probably moreso.

So long as a burst spec/class is not hopelessly underpowered for boss damage, it will on the whole win out, because it is much better at most other things. Which is why destruction has quite consistently been the progression spec for this expac.

Afflcition needs so have very good sustained damage, because it comparatively sucks at most other things (except freaky instances of soul flame lols).

Affliction;s ramp means it pays a big penalty for target switching of any sort, whether thats a boss going through phases, or becoming unattackable for long enough/mechanics forcing you off him long enough for you to have to build up your Agony stacks again, affliction is really, really bad at priority add killing (even now when you can doa snap Reap/UA/UA/MG dump and pray for crits, which will not happen in 7.2.5)

For most encounters pure boss damage will not lead to a kill no matter how high it is. Because raid bosses woul dbe boring as fuck Patchwerks. One of th emainstays of encounter design is "get through this fast" or "kill that thing before it kills you"...and on demand burst classes excel.

As someone so aptly put it, affliction is very good at things that tend not to feature in the game, and very bad at things that feature in it a lot.

They could help by getting rid of that dumbass, archaic Agony mechanic, which is a hangover from a much slower paced game.

Wow of 2017 is so much faster paced and so much more favourable to burst that afflictin;s inherent ramp is enough of a penalty without the Agony thing.

[severan]

....snip....

There's plenty of "mechanics" that don't require burst. There's adds that live longer than 10 sec which aff will be fine. Some mechanics require dps while moving which aff will be very good at.

It's not the the doom and gloom you make it out to be.

[Walrock]

There's plenty of "mechanics" that don't require burst. There's adds that live longer than 10 sec which aff will be fine. Some mechanics require dps while moving which aff will be very good at.

It's not the the doom and gloom you make it out to be.

Yes, there are plenty of "mechanics" that don't require burst, but there still are some.

It's pretty much the "condom logic":
It's better to have one and don't need it than not having one and needing it.

Destro just has the better raid progression kit, where pure mechanics matter, like bursting something down, surviving a big hit or cc'ing something (AOE stun).
Movement wise you can just use your artifact (not really if using shoulders), conflag or life tap.
History showed that after the big demo nerf in 6.2, Destro is the go to spec for progression.

90% of the time, on progression, you wipe because you didn't play a mechanic well enough, not because your overall damage was low.

[severan]

Yes, there are plenty of "mechanics" that don't require burst, but there still are some.

It's pretty much the "condom logic":
It's better to have one and don't need it than not having one and needing it.

Destro just has the better raid progression kit, where pure mechanics matter, like bursting something down, surviving a big hit or cc'ing something (AOE stun).
Movement wise you can just use your artifact (not really if using shoulders), conflag or life tap.
History showed that after the big demo nerf in 6.2, Destro is the go to spec for progression.

90% of the time, on progression, you wipe because you didn't play a mechanic well enough, not because your overall damage was low.

Of course if u need burst you will want burst but alot of fights in ToS donot seem to require it. There's more movement heavy, ST, some AOE and adds with decent health points which all favor affliction over destruction

It will be the same story as always. 99% play what you want and it will be fine. The other 1% play whats best on a per fight basis. It's the "condom logic".

[Deleted]

There's plenty of "mechanics" that don't require burst. There's adds that live longer than 10 sec which aff will be fine. Some mechanics require dps while moving which aff will be very good at.

It's not the the doom and gloom you make it out to be.

Point it this: in the situations you describe, burst damage is as good as ramping sustained.

On the other hand, there are very few situations where the reverse is true.

Everyone is focussing on raids, but outside of raids, burst damage is better about 90% of the time, because they have built the game so that dps classes with high burst potential do not have considerably lower overall damage.

In short, the mages, huntards, demon hunters etc not only have high on demand burst, they are at worst only slightly behind (if at all) on overall damage.

Also, adds will need to liv elonger than 10 seconds - we already have plenty of classes that can reserve mini-cooldowns and chuck out 3m+ dps. GUess who will be better on adds, when affliction has Agony's mechanics and will no longer be able to do a snap UA+UA+Reap+MG+Pray to RNjesus for big crits, and they nerfed Haunt to the floor by lowering it's upfront damage and the duration, meaning you cannot do a full UA dump in the 10 second window.The way Death's Embrace works the shorter lived the add the less benefit you get from it.

Raid won;t be so bad, but dungeons will. There are hardly any bosses that have long-lived adds, there are plenty where you have adds you want to kill quickly, off the top of my head Harbaron in MOS, curator in Kar, Domatrax in COEN and again asaik there are no council type bosses in dungeons

[Gaidax]

Affliction is well geared for ToS, whatever it lost there, it gained with stupendous mobility and execute. It also got amazing cheese for Demonic Inquistion too.

Not sure where all this sky is falling coming from.

[Baconeggcheese]

@Gaidax I imagine people just like ST tunnel specs, and would prefer our class had 2 flavors of the exact same formula.

[Soluna]

I am fine with affli being nerfed. That way I won't get spammed to reroll my destro specc or kick due to me HATING on affli. I mean, if they can't buff destro to be as good as affli is in live now, they might as well nerf affli, I don't care. I just want to be accepted as a destro again in high mythic raiding.

[Deleted]

I am fine with affli being nerfed. That way I won't get spammed to reroll my destro specc or kick due to me HATING on affli. I mean, if they can't buff destro to be as good as affli is in live now, they might as well nerf affli, I don't care. I just want to be accepted as a destro again in high mythic raiding.

This is stupid on multiple level. First, you should never ask for nervs, especially not for your own class. It's almost allways better to ask for buffs.
Second, for 'high mythic raiding' you should play all of your DPS specs. If that is not the case, than this kind of raiding is not for you.

[Baconeggcheese]

Second, for 'high mythic raiding' you should play all of your DPS specs. If that is not the case, than this kind of raiding is not for you.

That's hella difficult to pull off this xpac even if you don't have a job / responsibilities. If you do have a job / responsibilities its been neigh impossible. The 7.2 changes are pretty much the only hope for actually attempting to play multiple specs and even then you gotta deal with legendary RNG.

This way of thinking was true in previous xpacs, not so much in the current one.

That said his issue sounds more like it has to do with who he surrounds himself with and not the game itself.

[Turturin the Warlock]

Most of the world's warlocks in top 50 guilds in NH were destro on almost all fights. Pretty clear if you weren't accepted as destro than by definition you weren't in "high mythic raiding"

[BannedForViews]

If it plays out like that, I feel sorry for aff players, it will be a even bigger hit by the nerfhammer, no way blizzard are gonna let aff be as dominant in ToS as with NH.

Dominant after 7.2, when all the content got a massive indirect nerf and mostly became trivial? The story of afflictions life huh. Just wait for it to become farm content then watch everyone cry because youre at the top of the meters.

If blizzard did their fucking jobs properly, specs would be similar enough that you wouldnt be abpe to complain without fingers pointing at you telling you youre playing it wrong, or your strat isnt good for cheesing, or your kill time is too slow cause you play with shitters, or...oh wait, all those things are true right now.

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That's hella difficult to pull off this xpac even if you don't have a job / responsibilities. If you do have a job / responsibilities its been neigh impossible. The 7.2 changes are pretty much the only hope for actually attempting to play multiple specs and even then you gotta deal with legendary RNG.

This way of thinking was true in previous xpacs, not so much in the current one.

That said his issue sounds more like it has to do with who he surrounds himself with and not the game itself.

Not to mention, point me any (?) high performing warlocks that are not just sticking to their main spec through an entire tiers progression so far? It is very easy to so say "oh yea swap specs based on fights" while ignoring your points about gear, but a quick look at logs shows that even if gesr werent a li iting factor, which for some it is not, there is actually no need. All specs perform well on all fights. Yes, destro is lower in overall dps, but it is still desired and does well enough because it brings on demand burst to the table, which people are very found of pointing out every chance they get.

Honestly, all the crying from destro people is just meter envy. You always have a place in raids, this hasnt been in question. You just want to also constantly challenge for the top of the meter, and while i dont blame you, you clearly do have a lot more utility than demo or aff, so really, why should you do as much overall damage?

And yet there are still destro locks doing more than 99% of aff locks on all boss fights right now.

[Deleted]

I will definitively switch to Demo or Destro with 7.2.5.

Most people don't understand why Affliction is extremely strong right now. Funnily a lot of people think affliction has some sort of amazing Single Target Damage they can do whenever they want, but in reality Affliction just hugely benefits from all those add fights in Nighthold.

I often like to look at Trilliax as some sort of metric for relativ class strength in terms of single target balance. Yes I know its not perfect, but Trilliax is the only fight in the game without any adds that affliction can selfishly tag and benefit more from than anybody else. So it is the closest, especially on heroic, that we have to resemble some sort of single target fight.

Can't link warcraftlogs, but it isn't hard to look up statistics for trilliax heroic/mythic on warcraftlogs.

And now we have to take a look at the direction that Blizzard is going :

- Nerf to Wrath of Consumption
- Nerf to Malefic Grasp
- Nerf to our T19 set and introduction a "worse" T20 set
- Soul shard generation is down, because of talent swaps

What we are going to get with 7.2.5 is a flat damage buff to our spells by 20% (which was 25% on a previous build, but was being nerfed). Also Soul Flame and Seed of Corruption was nerfed. Which is somewhat understandable since they have the 20% aura in place now to balance it out.

What is going to happen in 7.2.5 and ToS?

- Affliction will still be viable and by viable I mean that basically everyone but the top10 guilds of the world don't need to worry
- Affliction will be more well-rounded
- Affliction will be less reliant on Malefic Grasp
- Affliction has more options with WiA and Haunt now. Talent diversity is better
- Affliction will be extremely strong on sustained multi target fights. Better than boomkins and shadow priest right now. Much better
- Affliction single target will take a strong hit. More than some people actually think.

So basically the time of selfishly tagging adds and nuking boss with Soul Harvest, lots of Soul Shards -> Unstable Affliction and caring about nothing but tunneling the boss are over and we move to wanting to have adds that live a bit longer so we can multi dot them.

Overall the 7.2.5 patch is extremely great for making Affliction a more well rounded specc and pushing the players more towards doing adds instead of tunneling boss. Sadly this change is happening with Tomb of Sargeras, a raid that very well might be mostly single target and since Affliction Single Target, which already is actually worse than some crybabies think, is tuned down even more it is likely that on single target encounters affliction will be lower than people are anticipating right now.
Also factoring in that other classes get buffs too shifting the relative balance aswell.

But I don't think there is reason to worry, because overall affliction will be good enough. I think the balance in ToS, atleast between the 3 warlock speccs, will be close enough so that people can freely play what they want.

My personal guess of state of balance in 7.2.5 :

Single target : Demonology >> Destro > Affliction
Everything else : Affliction >> Destro > Demonology

For Destruction it is hard to say how balance looks, but 7.2.5 is definitively a good patch for Destruction and I wouldn't be surprised if Destruction is going to surprise a lot of people in 7.2.5 and ToS.

PS : Tuning isn't done yet. Maybe they will do some more tweaking of those damage auras.

[Soluna]

This is stupid on multiple level. First, you should never ask for nervs, especially not for your own class. It's almost allways better to ask for buffs.
Second, for 'high mythic raiding' you should play all of your DPS specs. If that is not the case, than this kind of raiding is not for you.

Well how about you back off. I've managed to get cutting edge from firelands till blackrock foundry in a timely manner. And yeah, I know Firelands, or any cata raid had cutting edge, but you get my point regarding telling me that this kind of raiding is not for me, I hope.
I raid to get the tier down while its current, I don't try to get world first. Anyone who is less than top 100 is clearly wasting their time farming shit like mofos.

Also, did you read my comment? I said that I am fine with affli being nerfed, I never said 'I would like affli to be nerfed', if anything, I want destro to be buffed, which I mentioned, but I guess you were too busy trying to insult me with the word 'stupid', you didn't think this through.

Finally, fury warrs, frost mages, DHs, MMs, Boomkins, Affli locks, Frost DKs, Ret paladins can all clear the tier on mythic WITHOUT putting any effort in gearing/gathering ap for another specc. So, I would like for you to stop being such a sensitive manikin of a goose.

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Most of the world's warlocks in top 50 guilds in NH were destro on almost all fights. Pretty clear if you weren't accepted as destro than by definition you weren't in "high mythic raiding"

Destro locks are indeed good because of being able to burst priority targets, but let's face it, everyone and their mother are glorifying Affli locks atm, just because they pad the meters on skorpyron. But then again, show me an example of a destro that is superior in any fight other than maybe Elisande. That's what the ppl look at by looking at logs. They don't go deeper to see which specc is actually more potent when it comes down to add bursting, etc. And by high mythic raiding I meant guilds that are 8/10 or 9/10 M. They asked me to go affli or gtfo. This is ToT all over again when destro was potent, but everyone wanted you to play fucking affli (Until you would get lei shen trink that is, then demo.)

[Deleted]

Well how about you back off. I've managed to get cutting edge from firelands till blackrock foundry in a timely manner. And yeah, I know Firelands, or any cata raid had cutting edge, but you get my point, I hope.

Also, did you read my comment? I said that I am fine with affli being nerfed, I never said 'I would like affli to be nerfed', if anything, I want destro to be buffed, which I mentioned, but I guess you were too busy trying to insult me with the word 'stupid', you didn't think this through.

Finally, fury warrs, frost mages, DHs, MMs, Boomkins, Affli locks, Frost DKs, Ret paladins can all clear the tier on mythic WITHOUT putting any effort in gearing/gathering ap for another specc. So, I would like for you to stop being such a sensitive manikin of a goose.

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Destro locks are indeed good because of being able to burst priority targets, but let's face it, everyone and their mother are glorifying Affli locks atm, just because they pad the meters on skorpyron. But then again, show me an example of a destro that is superior in any fight other than maybe Elisande. That's what the ppl look at by looking at logs. They don't go deeper to see which specc is actually more potent when it comes down to add bursting, etc. And by high mythic raiding I meant guilds that are 8/10 or 9/10 M. They asked me to go affli or gtfo. This is ToT all over again when destro was potent, but everyone wanted you to play fucking affli (Until you would get lei shen trink that is, then demo.)

Dealing with priority targets > your dps. If you deal well with prio targets, you'll always be locked in.

Nobody cares about you doing 900k ST dps if you can't even burst down a prio add.

[Soluna]

Dealing with priority targets > your dps. If you deal well with prio targets, you'll always be locked in.

Nobody cares about you doing 900k ST dps if you can't even burst down a prio add.

I know, that's a good point, and I fully agree with you my friend. Now tell that to someone when you are being recruited and they are like 'We only want affli locks cause they can do X dps ST on krosus'.

And by the way, I feel like my ST is fine, even as destro, if I specc fully to single target.