Affliction,when is it viable?

[Baconeggcheese]

Congratulations. You've taken one stray case (using simcraft, mind you - what a joke)

Except you could have simmed similar examples all xpac, as I did when people stressed this so much. See the problem is people are stuck in the mindset and never bothered to even give it thought. Myself and traherne back and forthed on stacking haste(and specific breakpoints) vs mastery for the last two tiers and tried everything in between and never once found any tangible difference in dps in raid with us doing drastically different reforges over and over.

While I agree simcraft is freaking terrible I know you know no other logs or anything I could show you are going to be anything more than anecdotal at best considering how insanely different a single pulls dps can be. In any gear stacking mastery > haste ignoring breakpoints always lands you with a healthy amount of haste. Even in my own gear right now which is far from Aff BiS I end up with 12.9k haste proiritizing mastery completely. I see no tangible difference in dps going from 12.9 to the 13.2k breakpoint, Further I see no tangible difference going from the 13.2k breakpoint to the 13.7k breakpoint.

I've simmed and theoried and live tested arbitrary amounts of prioritizing haste over mastery, mastery over haste, and very specific breakpoints to death and never once found any tangible difference between them outside of pure preference as long as your gear wasn't super fucked up with massive amounts of crit.

What *proof* would you consider legitimate proof? You know any logs I provide would be anecdotal and I could throw more crappy simcrafts at you for random various breakpoints and it would end up showing the same thing (as it has been doing the whole expac) and it would still be simcraft. I mean shit dude pet dps has been normalized since the start of the xpac and yet people still INSIST observer is by far the highest dps pet because they never bother to check any better. Just because people get stuck in mindsets for an entire xpac doesn't mean they're right and if what they're doing doesn't have a tangible difference otherwise (for instance switching a pet or not caring about a breakpoint) they'll never bother to thoroughly test it and just keep on being *convinced* of its "truth".

[Bonkura]

Haste breakpoints don't do much other than save us globals from manually refreshing dots (which we rarely do anyway because of SB:SS).

Since the release of the expansion the main focus (should) have been to maintain both Haste/Mastery to not let them slip too far from eachother. Focusing on breakpoints have been mainly for its convenience. There's obviously been some changes here and there to certain spells (and the T15 RPPM days) that have made us favor some builds more than other, but this patch it doesn't really matter much at all. You can see people consistently rank high with 10k haste and others at 18k.

Seriously, go for whatever you're more comfortable with. The theoretical differences there might be don't have a big enough impact to matter.



FWIW, to answer OP (repeating what's already been said by others but whatever): 560+ is when Affli starts to shine on more fights than Protectors.

[Shiekyerbooty]

Haste breakpoints are pretty huge for fights that naturally favor Affliction. Think of a fight like Protectors or Qin-Xi, we're not just talking 1 extra tick per spell per 18 seconds, now we're talking 3 extraticks x 3 or even 4 targets. That can be as much as 12 extra ticks every 18 seconds.

Remember simcraft is on a patchwerk run

If you have herbalism ( lifeblood ), meta-gem, and of course the hero-on the pull fights, you can get away with being " near " the breakpoints if you are good at snapshotting, but on long multi-target fights even this won't compensate for not being at the breakpoints

[Bonkura]

The thing is that the dots tick faster between the extra ticks, so it's not as juicy as it might seem. That's what explains what was shown on previous page. Your example also doesn't compare it with other stats. Haste has really great scaling for Affliction, but so does Mastery. On multitarget fights both are good. Also remember that higher Haste values makes us more sensitive to latency and mistakes in general. So even if Haste would be slightly better on paper, Mastery might be better in practice. That's why this topic is mainly subjective and there's not many rights and wrongs when choosing what you prioritize.