As long as overpowered Soul Flame exists; Affliction.
Definetly demo with a Destro OS!
1- Destro is too niche, below average ST dps, which will be my choice for fights like Elisande or other 2 spread target cleave situations or fights with strong adds that need bursting down (kinda like Helya). Also new tier bonuses look cool.
2- For any other situation its demo since affli and demo share niche but affli is sooo boring.
New demo traits increase already strong single target dps by a huge margin( 20% Felguard dmg, 20% Imp damage, Thal'kiel's freaking Ascendance which gives DE 300% Spellpower dmg on average, also has a great tier set bonus which synergizes with it and surely make the spec less clunky.
Well the point was that atm affliction is an rng clusterfuck, if extremely powerful trinkets was an issue with all or at least many specs then I would say its a trinket/mechanic (snapshotting) issue rather than an affliction issue.
I mean, if you want an extreme example of afflictions design issues, look at Soul Flame. In the right fight (Skorpyron) it can account for like 4 million dps or more on itself, only do do 0 dps on Krosus. Yeah, Skorpyron is extreme, but even then I think it really shows how little effort were put in to actually fixing affliction after the initial idea with shit spawning didnt work out.
I have two Aff Legendarys(Hood and Ring). I got those two when i did my first mythic as demo but my loot spec was in aff. I hate playing aff it's so boring. So i'm playing Demo.
Whatever the brain-canary on blizzards shoulders decides the wheel lands on basicaly.... Right now Destro is looking like the go to Progression spec at least. Aff got some significant traits but it's set bonus is ... meh. Demo doubled down on single target but let's be 100% honest with ourselves, blizzard will never permit Demo's ST to be relevant compared to Destro Cleave (and in 7.2 AoE) and Afflictions AoE (and in 7.2 ST).
On the "bright" side i have only those awsome utility legendaries (Nerganons, KJ's, Fails Pants and Sin'dorei) blizzards crams down our necks so unless i god forbid get a bis anytime soon i can play whatever....
Not sure what you mean by RNG clusterfuck? It has 2 sources of RNG and shards are really consistent, if anything the only issue is getting enough souls for the amount of shards you get which should easily be mitigated by the rend soul trait.
If you wanna talk RNG clusterfuck, lets talk about destro. Its literally a spec that's theme is layered RNG.
..and so he left, with terrible power in shaking hands.
Too much time put into Destro now to think about playing anything else. 9 legendaries in and I finally have the Shoulders and Belt. At last, it finally feels somewhat consistent and comfortable to play.
Except legendaries though, relics are the major burden for spec switching for me. Having to get 3x 900+ relics in my offspecs when there's so much competition for them really puts a cap on offspec gearing.
Personally, I actually think Legion aff has the deepest skill cap so far, though I did skip cata. Sure there are a lot of RNG elements that you can't outplay, but there is so much going on that does matter. Soul usage isn't nearly as straightforward as the patchwork simcraft profile would suggest, and the movement skillcap it at an all-time high. Maybe i'm just bad though.
I can't get myself to really play aff outside of pvp. It's so bloody dull and bland in it's current version. I'll stick to destro/demo.
Affliction's shards are consistent if the fight is right. On something like Krosus or Star Augus they're random.
But shards are not so bad, because with the tier bonus Agony procs them so quickly you don;t notice the RNG, even when you use Soul Conduit, which is itself an RNG proc. And at least you start with three.
The real bastard RNG for affliction is tormented souls, and it's a bastard because the artifact traits were designed around the original killable souls which would have allowed us to consistently generate tormented souls even in ST fights as well as keeping up Wrath
Instead tormented souls just randomly appear if there aren;t any adds to suck the things out of and even if there are adds then you have to look up a guide to see whether than happens or not. Because some adds produce a shard, or a soul, or proc wrath, or some combination of those things. The blobs in Tichondreous for example, iirc they do proc the Wrath buff but do not generates tormented souls
I can;t think of any other class/spec that is less consisten than affliction because affliction is constantly held hostage to it;s on-death procs, and we swing between an overabundance in fast dungeon runs to praying a soul will proc on Krosus
The souls thing is why affliction sucks on pull, we are of necessity underpowered without the Reap buff, affliction is bad enough on a hero-pull with Reap because of the ramping, without it you are guaranteed to be liek the fat kid yelling "wait for me"
At least they acknowledged that zero souls before encounters basically makes affliction suck at the start of every pull and that "maybe" they will buff us to compensate.
Bizarre they gave us three shards saying "yeah starting with zero resources sucks when it takes a spec a long time to build them" and then do this
Th eon-death mechanics are very class fantasy and sound great on paper, but they can really, really suck and tend to impose performance pendulum swings
I'd also guess they make affliction really hard to balance, because Reap uptimes can vary so much. So much so that they have to turn soul procs on and off for individual encounters.
Do any other lcasses/specs have base dps abilities that get turne don and off like that?
The inherent tormented soul proc off Ulthalesh just sucks. You can go for ages without getting one and then get thre eor four one after the other, and it always seems like you are starved when you need them and glutted when you don't so much.
Last edited by mmoc7a6bdbfc72; 2017-03-22 at 10:31 AM.
On Krosus, AFF shard generation is rather obnoxiously RNG. I've been starved/drowning in them from Krosus fight to Krosus fight. But it's one fight; the other fights don't seem too bad with RNG. Even Star Augur the RNG disappears entirely pretty much in the last (most important) phase.
Trilliax is just as bad as Krosus and Gul'dan ain't much better
On death mechanics sound super cool but as a practical mechanic they tend to suck, imagine how warriors would feel if rage generation was like tormented souls
It's all because the affliction artifact was built around the original echanic of proccing killable souls. It was meant to mean that every fight would have "adds" for th eon-death traits to key off, just like Soul Effigy turned every fight into a multidot
But they ripped out the original mechanic (admittedly for sound reasons) and never lived up to the promise of amending the other traits accordingly. Can't think of any other spec with two Gold traits that swing from potentially OP to useless.
Shards aren;t really an issue, with the T19-4 bonus Agony procs them a LOT even on a Krosus fight
The problem is tormented souls, unless there are adds there is nothing at allyou can do other than hope the RNG favours you.
..and so he left, with terrible power in shaking hands.
Just swopped from Demo to Affliction. I dislike Demo and I just feel Affliction lets me get better numbers easier.
So after the AP and legendary grind, the fuck am I switching back or to Destro.
They need to just let AP go across all three specs, it's so retarded locking you into one spec. Ridiculous
I might if the design wasn't so detestable. Mained affliction whenever it was viable, but it just seems to continually be getting worse ever since the completely unnecessary MOP revamp. Had some hopes that things would take a step back in the right direction this expansion with MG being cut and a promise of dots being more important, but MG is already back and one dot has been moved to a resource spender, another a talent and a third can be talented into permenance. Was bad enough to have me disliking it, but the PTR changes make it look even worse.
Sticking with destro which I'm enjoying a shocking amount considering how much I loathed the 7.1.5 changes on paper, it's really hard to remember when I last enjoyed my warlock this much and regretting investing in affliction over demo on live, which I never thought I'd say considering how little love I have for the current demo design.
Last edited by mmoc1571eb5575; 2017-03-24 at 06:00 PM.
I think you and I must have played very different games, as I recall Cataclysm being the absolute low point of Warlock gameplay. IIRC, the MoP Warlock revamp was extremely well received and was absolutely necessary to fix a broken unpopular class. Masochist as I am I played it in Cata regardless.
“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” -- Voltaire
"He who awaits much can expect little" -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I have the demo belt, shoulders, and wrist along with 54 into my weapon so I will be sticking to it. My other Legendaries are the KJ's burning wish trinket and the haste on interrupt/dispell ring.