Can a lazy aff lock go far?

[jimmy valmer]

I think its just keeping all dots rolling, haunt on cd, demon soul on cd, doomguard on bosses and sbolt filler? Im not really a hardcore player but this seems simple enough.

[gakpad]

At its core affliction really is one of the easiest specs to play :/

[tj119]

How can you get any lazier than sitting at a computer pressing buttons?

[Deleted]

How can you get any lazier than sitting at a computer pressing buttons?

like you did to reply to this thread?

[Pocketzest]

like you did to reply to this thread?

pwnedipdujfggaijsfgafg

[rijn dael]

not being lazy enough - affi doomguard is weak, you can skip that too.

[tj119]

like you did to reply to this thread?

Lol, glad you can read, yes, sitting at a computer is lazy. Someone give this guy a gold star!

[shapow]

not being lazy enough - affi doomguard is weak, you can skip that too.

200k for pushing a button isn't too bad.

[Inactivity]

I think its just keeping all dots rolling, haunt on cd, demon soul on cd, doomguard on bosses and sbolt filler? Im not really a hardcore player but this seems simple enough.

You can't really be "amazing" and lazy in any spec (not even arcane) but I would say that affliction is one of the easiest lock specs in terms of rotation and definitely one of the more forgiving ones, to an extent.

[Deleted]

Basically with affliction, you just have to stay alive, maintain dots/SE/haunt on everything that's living, and be doing good, you can even move a lot, as affliction is very resilient to movement. Same goes for destruction, but which is less tolerant to movement. The big "skillcheck" to demonology is "getting to know the encounter & timings, and adapt to it" to be able to pull the most out of your meta.

To sum it up :
- affli/destro = you can do your stuff without caring for encounter rythm and combat length
- demono = you have to force yourself into timing your gameplay to adapt to the encounter

[Muschi]

Depends on how far you wish to go. If you want to do decent DPS without monitoring debuffs and buffs and not suffer too much from not moving at maximum efficiency. Then yes, you can do quite well as affliction. If you however want to max your DPS, you can't be lazy. No spec can push absolute top numbers without proper movement and tracking of buffs / debuffs. For example, successfully multidoting as Aff, seeing your numbers race past the other people's numbers is very pleasing. Keeping SE stacked on multiple targets and getting perfect DoT uptimes etc.

[Lillah]

In terms of dps output, you'll do okay if you're lazy. It's an easy spec... However if you're not bothering to take advantage of multidotting on targets with high hp and tracking those dots, you won't be anywhere near topping. Or the opposite, if you're dotting up targets with a low amount of hp instead of just continuing to nuke (there are downsides to this though, it all depends on your raid) you can potentially lose out on several GCDs of lost dps.

[Deleted]

i'm affliction so i'm too lazy to type why, but go mage

[rijn dael]

To sum it up :
- affli/destro = you can do your stuff without caring for encounter rythm and combat length
- demono = you have to force yourself into timing your gameplay to adapt to the encounter

I would say demo is more based around horrible mechanics, it isn't particularly more complex. You mash whatever is current filler, and you can easily setup a powa to tell you. I see it more as affliction and destruction (more in 4.3) have particularly nice 'flow', while demonology keeps having that flow broken (by class mechanics for ideal dps in a given fight), and 'highly compelling pet related gameplay'. Urgh!

[Sartre]

That is affliction on paper. But where affli's complexity is managing procs and maximizing procced dot uptimes. You can play with a straight rotation, keep dots up haunt on cd and so on. This will work well, but this won't be the maximum affli can perform. If you do the proc management, that is where things get tricky. That won't be a very big deal if you can catch a BoD or immo with many procs up in destro spec. But it will be a real big deal if you can do that with Affli, where DoT DPETs are a lot higher. (UA instead of immo ofc)

[gakpad]

Recasting your dots with procs up is almost never worth it...

[Sartre]

Almost. With BoD I don't agree with you. Speaking of a short duration dot like UA yes you're right but there are some exceptions, for me at least. The moment where demon soul is about to end and at least 2-3 big procs are on (which werent when you casted your last UA) for example. On all of these cases you should remember if the last one you've casted had procs , how many of them or not, and decide your action. Or have an addon telling you, if any exists i don't know. With BoD, last 15secs free to recast anyway and I think it is worth a recast last 30 seconds if all of your procs are on (and last BoD you've casted did not have them), in some extreme cases like demon soul, zeth, lightweave, power torrent, and apocalypse. I should point out that I haven't made an exact math about it though.

Depending on the profession choice, your gear, especially trinkets; proc management's importance changes. For a gearset that only has power torrent+zeth you are completely right. As zeth is on use and power torrent-lightweave alone won't worth a recast. But my past experiences tells me that especially BoD will provide a dps gain if you recast, but only when the moment is exactly right. Of course you should not recast 3 times the same BoD. But personally I do recast if old BoD did at least 2 ticks and then I got some mad procs on, again remembering what old BoD had as procs when casted.

Present play of affli, with zeth always times up with BoD devalues what I say about this of course. I am mostly speaking more of a theorical way. Where we would have a big proc like DMC:V, and others.

I should point out that this is only based on my personal experience.

As for 4.3 shadow embrace affects BoD, and a blue post said last 6 seconds of dots won't get affected negatively by recast. That 6 seconds thing I haven't tested on PTR and not sure if that was for MoP or 4.3 . But I think SE affecting BoD will make recast more worthy, as damage will be multiplied by an additional 15%.

[gakpad]

If you have 2 ticks left on BoD the new BoD would have to be equal to or greater damage than the last two ticks of the BoD you'd be overwriting plus the four ticks you get from recasting it plus the DPET of the spell you'd be using instead of recasting BoD. Since BoD doesn't scale from haste this situation will practically never arise. Same goes for even clipping one tick of BoD - you'd have to have the new ticks dealing nearly 40% extra damage and when its ticking for 30-40k+ a pop non crit that would have to be a hell of a set of procs you have up.

The main thing players often forget is that when you clip a dot before the grace window you get is that by doing so you're not just increasing the DPET of the dot you're casting but also *decreasing* the DPET of the dot you're overwriting because you're effectively wasting part of the time you spent casting the first dot by reapplying it early.

The only buff you should be lining it up with is Zeth simply because zeth cooldown is equal to BoD's duration. The best you can do is keep an eye out on your buffs during the last 15 seconds of BoD and pick the best time to refresh it within that 15 second window. Any lining up with procs will just be incidental.


the 6 second thing is for MoP not 4.3.

[Zinnin]

So on a dummy with no procs and with Haunt and CoE up I get a ~21200 BoD tick, compared to procs (DMC + Power Torrent + RoZ + Demon Soul) a 34500 tick, so just right there if you say the old BoD with 4 ticks left, you refresh it with all procs up, you now have 5! ticks of ~34500, not even counting the 5th tick you gained 53200 damage, way more then a shadow bolt would net you instead of refreshing it with procs. Now you can throw in DI into that so, (21,200 x 1.09 = 23100 ) (34500 x 1.09 = 37600 ) for a net gain of 58000 damage. Bane of Doom's damage scales up and a ridiculous pace.

The DPCT of shadow bolt is incredibly low and its really easy for refreshing BoD with good procs to out scale its damage. On the same test scale (casting shadow bolt with the same procs up) it hits for ~17k. This means in the current scenario we are looking at, where we had a BoD with 4 ticks left on it with 0 procs, everything procs, That BoD was worth (58k \ 1.22 cast time) 47.5k compared to shadow bolt which was worth ( 17k \ 2.04 cast time ) 8k. But even cutting that gain in half with the 2 ticks left senario, you're still gaining 23.7k compared to 8k ONLY looking at the extra damage from ticks and not even the increased duration of BoD or the fact that you'll have 5 really beefed up ticks.

Now obviously you're not going to have a whole lot of times where it is as cut and dry as that, but as you can see it is actually fairly easy to get a dps increase out of recasting BoD early since our filler does next to no damage.

Also, current DoT mechanics means the last next tick of the previous DoT gets tacked on to the new DoT. So lets say you have a BoD counting down at 23 seconds and you refresh it, you're next BoD will be placed on the target with a duration of 1:08 with a total of 5 ticks with the 1st one happening 8 seconds in.

Fair warning, this was tested in my gear \ haste levels. At different gear levels the numbers will vary by quite a bit.

[gakpad]

except that if you are playing properly you'll have demon soul and RoZ up for every doom regardless so I'm not sure how they come into play here.