Originally Posted by
Taus
So, the amount of finesse, knowledge, and addons required today to perform moderately well as Affliction would equate very substandard performance as Affliction in Wrath. First, to even compete with Destro you needed a certain haste breakpoint that wasn't incredibly easy to achieve. Once you hit that, you had to be very aware of your various haste procs, and whether or not the previous DoT had been placed with those buffs or better ones. If your new state was better than the old state, iirc, you were supposed to let the DoT fall off and then recast. Then once that DoT was cast, you had to never, ever let it fall off - refreshing the DoT would keep the previous state rolling, not snapshot your stats. So every fight was a very careful dance of building up the best, say, Corruption, and then good performance absolutely required that it never fall off through the entire fight. Add to this the fact that there were many more things to cast as well, and it was quite stressful. The numbers result of this were basically two things happened - you executed perfectly, or you did not. If you were perfect (and lucky with RNG), you absolutely blew the meters away. If you didn't - in ANY way, because generally this kind of setup is pretty binary - you were down - way down. There was no middle.
As far as Demo, at the time it was considered a buff spec and they were there mostly for the raid buff they brought. They weren't expected to perform as well, but you could squeeze a good fight out if you did your SF weaving correctly. I don't really remember that so much these days, but I do know it was more forgiving than Affliction but less than Destro. Destro's problem at the time was really one of scaling.
TL;DR - I'm still not sure I previously properly conveyed that the specs are easier now in the present, and were harder then, in the past. The difficulty has decreased over time, not increased.
So again, Affliction might need some tweaks - I'm not playing it much currently, so I can't really speak to it. I do know that as Destro at iLvl 899 right now I tend to beat most locks of other specs unless it's a novel situation like Scorpion or something similar. However, in general the class has three specs that are performing pretty damn well right now, and that makes this expansion the first time that has happened in my memory. An argument can be make that adjustments and tweaks should be done, but my whole point was that I disagree that there's a massive problem and it's majorly OP.