Warlock dps in WOTLK

[Modez]

Agreed, but I think its a broken buggy mechanic that I don't like doing. There is no difficulty to it, just a pain in the ass.

I'll agree with you on the grounds of calling it 'annoying'. Destro has an annoyance as well in the immo/conflag lag - which actually gives us a permanent DPS loss though we are balanced around 1-2 more conflags in a fight than we get. I would classify neither as 'difficult' though.

[Bakis]

Afflicion warlocks are balanced atm if they:
A: critroll toth etc
B: got 277/264 gear

ICC heavily favor melee on many fights cos of splash and desease etc but among casters warlocks are fine for the time being.
The nerfbat should hit the above and most of all hunters if anything. Hunter dps rape every caster by miles which is wrong since it has none of the melee splash etc stuff.

Think demo cant compete the same and definetly not destro. Demo do quite well tho on some fights but that are due to the mechanics that allow them to decimateroll.

[xionkarl]

If Blizzard would disallow recount we would never have these arguments.

Who cares who is doing the most dps, as long as the boss goes down it's all good.

[Maeno]

If Blizzard would disallow recount we would never have these arguments.

Who cares who is doing the most dps, as long as the boss goes down it's all good.

Because carrying slackers is always fun and helps progression.

[xionkarl]

Because carrying slackers is always fun and helps progression.

you have slackers in your progression group?

[Deleted]

you have slackers in your progression group?

Would you know w/e recount?

[xionkarl]

Would you know w/e recount?

Considering that the majority of ICC boss encounters are first and foremost focused on raid coordination, and then enrage timers....yes.

If someone isn't doing their job by being where they need to be, i.e. stacking together for the green slime on putricide, or running a gas spore out to the ranged if two pop up in melee on Festergut, then it's pretty easy to pick out.

If you can do the mechanics fine, but aren't beating the enrage timer, then you have a DPS problem if everyone is alive, and a mechanics problem if everyone isn't.

Sure Recount makes it easy, but it isn't the only way. How did you find slackers before Recount was created?

[Goatonlb]

You didn't. That's why you could have 10 people /afk in a 40 man raid but there were so many people it didn't make a difference, at least through AQ40. Naxx took 40 people paying attention, but then again, not a lot of guilds made it very far in Naxx.

You have 1 DPS die early/slack on Festergut, you might not make the enrage timer. How could you possibly know that the Timmy lock in the corner is pulling 4k DPS when the rest of your raid is pulling the necessary 7-7.5k if you didn't have recount? It's a tool that allows you to see what people are doing.

Do I look through the 8-9 DPS all pulling about the same numbers in a progression fight? No. But I most certainly look at the 1-3 low people and try to figure out what they're doing wrong, especially if it's enrage timers we're running into.

[Maeno]

You didn't. That's why you could have 10 people /afk in a 40 man raid but there were so many people it didn't make a difference, at least through AQ40. Naxx took 40 people paying attention, but then again, not a lot of guilds made it very far in Naxx.

You have 1 DPS die early/slack on Festergut, you might not make the enrage timer. How could you possibly know that the Timmy lock in the corner is pulling 4k DPS when the rest of your raid is pulling the necessary 7-7.5k if you didn't have recount? It's a tool that allows you to see what people are doing.

Do I look through the 8-9 DPS all pulling about the same numbers in a progression fight? No. But I most certainly look at the 1-3 low people and try to figure out what they're doing wrong, especially if it's enrage timers we're running into.

Very well said friend ;D

[Jenerena]

Mate,that was a sarcasm.

So it's okay when the same *PURE DEEPS* class, with equal gear, and roughly equivalent skill does 10-15% more dps than you?

You will NEVER get equally skilled players. The only equal skill you will ever see is the 'elite' option on simcraft, that is, a simulator. Warlocks shouldn't be 10-15% lower than the top. Everyone should be doing similar. If you're not doing similar (not necessarily top), then either accept that person at the top is playing better than you, their gear is itemised better for them then yours is for you, or the fight mechanics favour their class. You cannot come on a forum QQing 'omg my class is rubbish doing 15% less dps than person at top', it just makes you look like an idiot, because 99% of the time it is NOT THE CLASS, it is one of many many many reasons why you aren't doing the same damage as that person. Maybe they spam their buttons faster?!

This is why it infuriates me when people take that meter so seriously. Everyone is always capable of more, some people just excel at excelling better than others. For example, I have a tendency to stare at timers and not plan ahead enough, that is my weakness. That is probably what puts me 3rd on the meter rather than 1st. It is so easy to blame the class :.

[Strah]

You will NEVER get equally skilled players. The only equal skill you will ever see is the 'elite' option on simcraft, that is, a simulator. Warlocks shouldn't be 10-15% lower than the top. Everyone should be doing similar. If you're not doing similar (not necessarily top), then either accept that person at the top is playing better than you, their gear is itemised better for them then yours is for you, or the fight mechanics favour their class. You cannot come on a forum QQing 'omg my class is rubbish doing 15% less dps than person at top', it just makes you look like an idiot, because 99% of the time it is NOT THE CLASS, it is one of many many many reasons why you aren't doing the same damage as that person. Maybe they spam their buttons faster?!

This is why it infuriates me when people take that meter so seriously. Everyone is always capable of more, some people just excel at excelling better than others. For example, I have a tendency to stare at timers and not plan ahead enough, that is my weakness. That is probably what puts me 3rd on the meter rather than 1st. It is so easy to blame the class :.

so lets say, of people in TOP guilds like ensidia and paragon are all not equally skilled?
afaik, they all PERFECT their rotations, and put their class to it's maximum potential, and only the class matters.
but that is just an example.
hell,even simcraft in bis gear, hunter is maximized at like 15+k, while warlock is at what, 13.8, was it?

[ZzXK]

We usually pull the lowest DPS out of pure DPS classes. But some fights I'm top 3-5. Its more on a fight by fight basis.

[Bigjay]

Warlocks have been a bit low since Ulduar, but not OMG terrible. Because of the nature of many of the fights having a longer rev up time, affliction does is not ideal. You also have to remember what % of maximum damage you do while revving up, affliction is very low. While other classes that say they take 10-15 seconds to reach maximum start instantly at 80-90% and then rev, affliction starts in the gutter and then climbs up for 20 seconds.

Also if you are working on hardmodes and wiping (or wiping on normals) both affliction and demo will look worse compared to many specs, both have powerful, even compared to other classes, execture ranges and without the full fights we look worse.

Personally what I'd LOVE is to remove the gimmick for corruption, or at least part of it and then rebalance our class based under that assumption.

Currently, and yes blue posts confirmed, they balanced us assuming we receive a ToT towards the start of the fight while our 4 piece bonus is active and while we either have NMIC or the good enough trinkets to negate it. That means if you do not have ToT and 4 piece and etc on corruption at the start then you are not who blizzard is balancing the class around.

With fights with breaks like lich king and sindragosa, and fights with rng breaks like bone spike, and conflag, and even add heavy fights were you get to either focus on adds on split damage adds and boss, to etc. Keeping corruption up covers the gambit of impossible to automatic. But our maximum damage assumes we can keep it up with all it's starting bonuses. I'd prefer this goes away.

Blizzard said we're balanaced with these assumptions because if they did not, top guilds would use them and locks would be OP. Personally I'd like to see these things roll on and off like they did to haste and rebalance us to adjust for it. I know many will hate this cause keeping corruption up was part of the fun with affliction. You can still keep that goal because you don't want to waste GCDs throwing it up. But if we're balanced without this assumption many ICC fights will look better for us, and those who don't get tots, focus majic, or have pulls to fast to prepot arn't going to be at a disadvantage compared to all other classes.

SUMMARY: Yes we're still weak compared to other classes, no blizzard is not ignoring our class, yes ICC does not favor our top damage spec of affliction, and please remove the gimmic from corruption and rebalance us.

[cronix]

The fact is there is no point doing any major changes with cata about 6-9months away. they will continue to 'test' changes they are looking at introducing in cata but they will be minor and insignificant in the grand scheme of things (*cough* immo crit and dark pact wtf).

When they start off with a talent build and gear/stat design at the beginning of the expansion you either win or luck out with the gear scaling from the subsequent patches. We won in bc with the isb talent haste/hit stat but lucked out in woltk with the inital 'complexity' afflic design and then the faceroll design they halfassed. Demo and destro were just victims to blizzard wavering buffing and nerfing...On another note my shammy is now 80 =D. So my lock can just chill for a bit.

[shippior]

I believe locks owned pretty much evertything from SSC to halfway Ulduar. Maybe time to lower our dmg a bit so we can own in cata again and laugh at all the other ugly tier sets while ours is awesome.

OT: Can't really speak as I and the other lock I raid with are higher skilled than most of the others in my guild and thus we mostly top the dps ( He as afflic, I as destro/demo)

[Deleted]

There's some truth to these issues, but I don't think it's fair to say that blizz don't consider them.

lag - balancing around hardware deficiencies is not really practical, especially as not all players have hardware problems. Also casters can queue spells, mitigating loss due to lag. The real casualties of lag are classes whose rotations are made up primarily of instants, since you can't queue them, but have to wait for the GCD.

Burst Damage vs Sustained Damage - I think classes are balanced around this, and it's a swings and roundabouts situation. As an Aff lock I'm regularly whooped on burst by our Arc mage. However, I'll still beat him on add fights due to my ability to multi-dot. Saurfang and Dreamwalker are good examples of this. I own on these fights.

Difficulty of play - A good point, though blizz's attitude to Feral druids and the hybrid tax is a bit of an exception.

Ramp up times - See Burst vs Sustained

Movement - While it's true that melee can do more or less full damage on the move, it's also true that range brings the advantage of not having to move. Casters don't have to break stride to switch between targets on different sides of a room, for example.

On balance I don't think melee has a natural advantage. In a particular fight this may not be true.

[Gilian]

I'm going to disagree. I believe and the general consensus is that afflic is currently the highest personal dps spec, while demo is close behind but provides a much more beneficial raid buff that outweighs the difference in dps from the two specs overall. But in reality it depends on the boss fight, anub is a demo fight while in lady deathwhisper no one come close to beating me as afflic.

Also why do people keep saying locks cant top meters in WOTLK? I have never had a problem staying in the top 5 regardless of how geared/skilled the raid is, even on melee dominant fights like saurfang and festergut. Feel free to check out this world of logs, its pug icc25 i run in each week. http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...yze/dd/source/

Seriously guys if u can run a daily heroic, weekly raid and voa. You will be 4piece t10 by now... which means you can top meters. If your gear isnt the problem then its all on you. Watch some dps maximising vids on youtube they explain the mechanics well and it helps alot. Dont ever think you know it all..

If you have that dps on saurfang (9100) in a guild who cleared ICC you will be last on the dps meter.

It can be that you in a pug top the meters, but when you are in a realm first/second guild on hardmodes where everyone walks around in the best gear possible they can get their hands on you probably won't top dps meters.
Warlocks in my guild sometimes get in the top 5 in affliction spec and rogues are always on top.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=3811&e=4081

Warlock is destruction for stunning the beasts. If he is affliction he would probably be in the top 5.
I am the elemental shaman (Creasie). No demo lock so no fire elemental/searing (2200 dps). So that would mean that in this case i would have been #1 with a demo lock, lol. That never happened before though. And i think our raid dps can be higher then in this log.
The hunters are trapping so they lost some dps there. Zup is undergeared compared to the other dps, i think.

If you would have a log of a real hardcore guild you can see the difference much better. Or look at the top dps on worldoflogs on Saurfang per class. And lag is also a factor.

[Jenerena]

so lets say, of people in TOP guilds like ensidia and paragon are all not equally skilled?
afaik, they all PERFECT their rotations, and put their class to it's maximum potential, and only the class matters.
but that is just an example.
hell,even simcraft in bis gear, hunter is maximized at like 15+k, while warlock is at what, 13.8, was it?

No they are not. Oh and by the way rotations can never be perfect. Are you perfect? The person at the top might have the best skill, but that doesn't mean the person at the bottom has bad skill. Just maybe not as good as the person at the top. Overall in guilds like that even the bottom dps will probably beat the hell out of most other meter topping dps.

They play to a very high standard, but more in the case of boss tactics, not necessarily who is at the top of the meter.

Everyone is going to relate it to their own guild. If you don't top the meters in your guild, you're going to presume warlocks are weak. If you are always top, why should you care? The only people who really care are those near the bottom wishing they were top. In this case, it seems there are alot of those people. But 90% of those are QQing because they are either just not as geared as those at the top, or they are less comfortable on the boss fights and don't play to the best of their ability. I am guilty of it sometimes, I am sure the top end guilds also have their moments.

You do have to think about it logically. Though Blizzard have agreed in some cases that warlocks are a little low. In my opinion, I think warlocks are ok. Not overpowered one bit, but competitive. Blizzard have provided some nice buffs recently, what more do you want? I think some of our scaling is a little off. I'd like to think we could scale slightly better per point of spell power since spirit and crit are now becoming quite insignificant compared to haste and spell power.

http://www.wowmeteronline.com/rank/classrank/dtb/9/0/3

Lets be fair, I don't see warlocks near the bottom, in fact, i see a nice variance between all classes. What does that tell you?

[Syenite]

No they are not. Oh and by the way rotations can never be perfect. Are you perfect? The person at the top might have the best skill, but that doesn't mean the person at the bottom has bad skill. Just maybe not as good as the person at the top. Overall in guilds like that even the bottom dps will probably beat the hell out of most other meter topping dps.

They play to a very high standard, but more in the case of boss tactics, not necessarily who is at the top of the meter.

Everyone is going to relate it to their own guild. If you don't top the meters in your guild, you're going to presume warlocks are weak. If you are always top, why should you care? The only people who really care are those near the bottom wishing they were top. In this case, it seems there are alot of those people. But 90% of those are QQing because they are either just not as geared as those at the top, or they are less comfortable on the boss fights and don't play to the best of their ability. I am guilty of it sometimes, I am sure the top end guilds also have their moments.

You do have to think about it logically. Though Blizzard have agreed in some cases that warlocks are a little low. In my opinion, I think warlocks are ok. Not overpowered one bit, but competitive. Blizzard have provided some nice buffs recently, what more do you want? I think some of our scaling is a little off. I'd like to think we could scale slightly better per point of spell power since spirit and crit are now becoming quite insignificant compared to haste and spell power.

http://www.wowmeteronline.com/rank/classrank/dtb/9/0/3

Lets be fair, I don't see warlocks near the bottom, in fact, i see a nice variance between all classes. What does that tell you?

Come again...

This might give a better idea how classes perform overall. I see hunters, warriors and rogues topping a fuck of a lot

[Jenerena]

Fine, either moan to Blizzard, or roll another class.

Can't be bothered with so many whinging locks, we just got buffed for god sake. And people still moan.