What spec will you play in 7.2?

[Baconeggcheese]

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 only played it for a very short time, but cata affliction seemed like a well enough designed spec.

Demo and destro on the other hand absolutely needed to be cleaned up. Even then, I think destro was the only spec out of the 3 that was really well designed. Affliction was fun because it was overpowered and dumb simple to play. Demonology was the epitome of hard to learn easy to master and was extremely convoluted to the point where I have a hard time calling it a well designed spec.

Frankly anything will be well received if it performs as well as locks did all of mop.

[Deleted]

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.

Demo and destruction, sure. Affliction was nigh perfect.

Affliction was fantastic, pretty sure Ghostcrawler or some other bluepost labeled it as one of the most "finished" feeling specs during Cataclysm. Affliction was enjoyable enough that it kept me subbed and enjoying myself throughout Dragonsoul, despite considering it such a dreadful raid tier that I wasn't sure I'd continue subbing unless MOP upped the raid design, which thankfully it did. The only time the spec might have been more entertaining was 5dot naxx, but the WOTLK / Cata design was incredibly close to each other and the pinnacle of affliction design. I'll stand by that until my deathbed if the current class design trend is anything to go by.

After the revamp we've had
- Destruction which has felt pretty solid, maybe 1-2 buttons short of a rotation but things like CDF help. Certainly an improvement.
- Affliction, which was worse from the get go, a vapid spec that relied entirely on dot snapshotting to have any degree of engagement, then dot snapshotting was pruned, leaving the spec feeling conspicuously empty and struggling to feel right ever since.
- Demo, which I didn't exactly enjoy after the revamp, but at least appreciated it's resource model, and has since needed to be redesigned AGAIN.

I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be happy with this redesign.

[Deleted]

I scratch my head every time I read this, because if you experienced it you'd never think that.

They spawned every I want to say 30 or 45 seconds on a consistent timer. It was absolutely never intended to justify the on death mechanics of the weapon.

On death mechanics like tormented souls are obvously designed to work with Ulthalesh spawning killable adds. It meant that no fight wouldd have been add-free; you would have had a source of adds to keep up Wrath, to generate shards for UA and tormented souls to empower Reap. It is no different to Soul Effigy being a way to allow affliction to play it's original concept as a spec that relied on dots and which permitted dots to be relatively weak single target because Soul Effigy meant that no fight was ever single target.

What other possible reason would there be for Ulthalesh spawning killable adds? To give players something to do? No, it was simply a way of ensuring that an affliction warlock who relied on on-death mechanics - shards, tormented souls as resources and Wrath as a maintenance buff. - would always have "adds" to provide them, even when an encounter (such as Ursoc) did not.

I understand why they got rid of it, because in practise it was horrid to use, lead to flakey stuff like trying to get the "add" into boss range to proc Soul Flame, and would probably have lead to an overabundance in fights that did have adds, you would have had the balanc eissue of trying to get the inherent "adds" to spawn fast enough to be decent but not so many as to cause afflocks to drown in resources in fights that do have adds.

It is just obvous that the first iteration of the aflfiction artifact, the Gold traits and Reap were designed to synergise with the "escaping souls you can kill" function.

Otherwise what was the point of it?

Undoubtedly the timer would have been modified had the mechanic been kept, but it wasn't. What you describe was a tuning issue, not a base mechanic one.

If the killable adds weren;t there to provide shards/souls/Wrath, what were they for?

It's exactly why the artifact spawns randon tormented souls now, because with out that, in an addless or near addless fight, you wouldn't get any and you wouldn't be able to use Reap.

[Baconeggcheese]

If the killable adds weren;t there to provide shards/souls/Wrath, what were they for?

Because reap souls didn't exist, and the only way you got the weapon proc was to kill something.

You couldn't maintain wrath because the duration was shorter than the spawn rate of ghosts which was consistent. You literally got 1 stack of wrath and 1 soul flame proc every 45 seconds. These were absolutely not designed around the ghosts.

Again, if you played it at all we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

[Dismembered]

I only played it for a very short time, but cata affliction seemed like a well enough designed spec.

Demo and destro on the other hand absolutely needed to be cleaned up. Even then, I think destro was the only spec out of the 3 that was really well designed. Affliction was fun because it was overpowered and dumb simple to play. Demonology was the epitome of hard to learn easy to master and was extremely convoluted to the point where I have a hard time calling it a well designed spec.

Frankly anything will be well received if it performs as well as locks did all of mop.

Cata Demo lock was pretty awesome, good ol' Ragnaros days.

[Coffeexbean]

/cast Demonic Empowerment
/cast Demonic Empowerment
/cast Demonic Empowerment
/cast Demonic Empowerment
/cast Demonic Empowerment
/cast Demonic Empowerment
/cast Demonic Empowerment


yeah right^^

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no reason to switch away from destruction?

did your guild bench you at Star Augur? and it's not like Destruction is any good on the other bosses except for Guldan and elisande

I kinda like it I just wish it was instant cast lol

[Shibito]

Havent played my warlock properly since tbc so its nice reading on this forum and what spec to stick with ,destro in vanilla and tbc so idk what to play these days

[Baconeggcheese]

Havent played my warlock properly since tbc so its nice reading on this forum and what spec to stick with ,destro in vanilla and tbc so idk what to play these days

They're doing a balance pass in 7.2.5. so play whatever you enjoy cause they all work and we have no idea what will happen in said patch.

[Saiona]

My alt has sindorei bracers trying to get destroyed belt so I can use 2pc t19 and 4pc t20 them chaos bolts thooo

[Scummer]

Been Demo from the start of the expansion and dont plan on changing that any time soon.

[nocturnus]

A friend has been bugging me to come play wow again. My Aff lock is 107. How long do you figure it will take me to get it geared up decently after I hit 110? I also have a 110 rogue which I quit playing after clearing ToV Mythic.

[Deleted]

Cata Demo lock was pretty awesome, good ol' Ragnaros days.

I liked Cata demo WITHOUT MWC, with MWC it was asinine. Had some interesting things going on though.

[Scathbais]

I only played it for a very short time, but cata affliction seemed like a well enough designed spec.

Demo and destro on the other hand absolutely needed to be cleaned up. Even then, I think destro was the only spec out of the 3 that was really well designed. Affliction was fun because it was overpowered and dumb simple to play. Demonology was the epitome of hard to learn easy to master and was extremely convoluted to the point where I have a hard time calling it a well designed spec.

Frankly anything will be well received if it performs as well as locks did all of mop.

@bacon, there were some awful things done to Warlocks in Cata. The worst was that all three specs (or two of three) had access to every dot in the spell book. Top locks, of course, figured out the optimal rotation that used everything including the kitchen sink. The result of this messy rotation was a solid dps/complexity. Ghost Crawler, in his infinite wisdom, decided that if we were using every spell, he would nerf them so that using the complex rotation now only gave you damage equal to other, lesser classes.

The result:

1) using a simpler rotation gave you sub par performance.
2) no single spell was very powerful. Therefore Warlocks could not do enough damage to peel Rageface on the Shannox encounter, nor could we quickly break Fiery Grip on Spine of Deathwing. Blizzard's solution to Rageface was to make every spell hit on Rageface a guaranteed crit. Demonology was the only spec that could do enough damage on Burning Tendons during progression and only with a complicated pet twisting cast sequence macro. Demo also brought the 10% raid SP buff, making it the only reason to bring a lock at all on that fight.
3) Lastly, as mentioned above, Demonology had pet twisting. Meaning at the start of a fight, we would summon felguard, sacrifice it for the buff, then hard-summon felhunter because it did more damage. Then after x minutes, summon felguard again, sac it, and then resummon felhunter. This did awesome damage, but was pretty involved.

Any way, there were some great articles written about the fall of Warlocks during Cataclysm. Cynwise wrote a wonderful, detailed analysis here . Defi

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[QUOTE=Nagassh;45112616]Demo and destruction, sure. Affliction was nigh perfect.

Affliction was fantastic, pretty sure Ghostcrawler or some other bluepost labeled it as one of the most "finished" feeling specs during Cataclysm. Affliction was enjoyable enough that it kept me subbed and enjoying myself throughout Dragonsoul, despite considering it such a dreadful raid tier that I wasn't sure I'd continue subbing unless MOP upped the raid design, which thankfully it did. The only time the spec might have been more entertaining was 5dot naxx, but the WOTLK / Cata design was incredibly close to each other and the pinnacle of affliction design. I'll stand by that until my deathbed if the current class design trend is anything to go by.

As I pointed out in my response to Bacon, as affliction, you couldn't peel Rageface nor could you do enough damage on the burning tendons on Heroic Spine. That was because Blizzard designed our specs to rely on a lot of weak hitting spells with no real burst in any spec.

The spec may have felt great to play, but it lacked tools to handle certain mythic (heroic back then) mechanics.

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I liked Cata demo WITHOUT MWC, with MWC it was asinine. Had some interesting things going on though.

Pet twisting and using felhunter instead of felguard just felt wrong to me.

[Baconeggcheese]

there were some awful things done to Warlocks in Cata.

Yeah I experienced the tail end of it, and was about to not play warlock until prepatch landed and I saw how much everything was cleaned up.

[Requimortem]

Cata Demo lock was pretty awesome, good ol' Ragnaros days.

You must have gone through that expansion blitzed because there was nothing redeemable about our class. That whole expansion was cancer and as bad as Legion is, I'd still take it over Cataclysm.

[Deleted]

As I pointed out in my response to Bacon, as affliction, you couldn't peel Rageface nor could you do enough damage on the burning tendons on Heroic Spine. That was because Blizzard designed our specs to rely on a lot of weak hitting spells with no real burst in any spec.

The spec may have felt great to play, but it lacked tools to handle certain mythic (heroic back then) mechanics.

Affliction not being able to handle some mechanics with high burst requirements doesn't really strike me as a good reason to slate the design - we can't handle mobility mechanics for the mostpart either, but that's part of the class fantasy, apparently. Different specs have different niches, affliction was the slow ramp execute spec and was perfectly viable for prettymuch everything bar Spine from what I remember.
There were plenty of other classes that could do burst damage, very few that could provide things like CoEx which affliction still had at the time, surely that's a more justifiable tool to differentiate a class than burst damage? Had to dredge through old screenshots since my memory is like a sieve, but I definitely played affliction on Shannox and don't remember being particularly irked by it.

Not really sure I see a problem with the specs having access to a wide range of cross-spec spells either.

Not sure you can really pin abilities being cross-spec on Cataclysm either. Be damned if I remember how destruction played in either expansion since I don't remember it being particularly popular or useful, though I do remember demolishing people with conflags at some point in WOTLK pvp.
Affliction and Demonology both had access and used all of the spells in WOTLK though, hell, WOTLK had 5 dot naxx with immolate, but had the ability axed halfway through WOTLK and it wasn't brought back.
Demonology had always been a mid-ground between the shadow / fire focus of affliction and destruction, so had always been a mix of the two, even having alternate Shadowbolt / Incinerate filler depending on procs. This wasn't anything added in Cataclysm, it was just how the spec had practically always been, the specs have only really been partitioned off into completely seperate entities with no crossover when the pruning started in MOP / more heavily in WOD / Legion.

Pet twisting, felhunter primary pet and delaying meta to orbit entirely around MWC was asinine, but outside of that Cataclysm demo was pretty enjoyable and affliction was, as I've said plenty of times, one of the best designed specs in the game. I'm not sure Blizzard making obnoxious encounters with absurd burst requirements like Spine is a problem with class design as opposed to raid design, which Cataclysm, especially DS, was hardly the pinnacle of.

The class had more tools than it has today, with real utility both good (like CoEx, CoT, CoW, CoS etc) to the bad (arguably DI) - as well as all the doodads like portals and healthstones. The only thing it lacked was burst, which seems both a suitable thing to lack in the world of class fantasy and 20man raids, nor something we're particularly stellar at today with reap souls, stacking agony and soulshard requirements etc.
If something needs bursting down, affliction probably isn't the class you want to assign to the job today any more than it was back in Cata.

You must have gone through that expansion blitzed because there was nothing redeemable about our class. That whole expansion was cancer and as bad as Legion is, I'd still take it over Cataclysm.

I'd take Cataclysm over just about anything bar WOTLK, at least when it comes to affliction and possibly demo, though when MWC got added to the game demo dropped to one of the least enjoyable specs to play. Destruction is the only spec I think has improved since then.

[ehxy]

Demo in our guild who parses in the 90+ always unless he died says with the new t20 4p he will see a 200k dps increase. They are also parsing significantly well already.

Going demo. RIP affliction

[Khuros]

Demo seems completely unplayable if theres ever a melee near you in PVP.

[Cathbadh]

The new demo set piece that reduces the number of empowerment casts really looks good. But I'll probably stay destro.

[erinthea]

Demo in our guild who parses in the 90+ always unless he died says with the new t20 4p he will see a 200k dps increase. They are also parsing significantly well already.

Going demo. RIP affliction

And affliction on the PTR is parsing about 200k higher as well the rend trait is amazing keeping reap up 100% is what is causing it along with 4/4 traits that all get doubled 100% of the time.