Future for Affliction. 2 rotations?

[Robula]

Good morning evil ones. Today I stumbled accross the Warlock T11 Simulationcraft and noticed there were two Affliction parses; Affliction Drain and Affliction Shadow Bolt.

If I am reading this correctly, does this mean that Warlocks will have the choice in which spell (Drain Life or Shadowbolt) they use as a main filler? Of course consuming Nightfall/Shadow Trance procs with SB. Also, what would each Affliction (drain or sb) use their Soul shards for?

I currently play a Shadow Priest but I would be really interested in the Affliction Drain if it is really that viable. Affliction is so similar to Shadow now it's unreal, but this Drain spec really breaks the boundaries with having a Channeled filler like the Priest.

Thoughts? Thanks

[Weazle83]

Guess both rotations use their shards on Soul Fire for the haste buff.

[Deleted]

If I'm not totally lost in the woods here I belive that warlocks will continue to use sb as filler. The drain life specc isn't possible to execute as perfect as the simulationcraft "does" due to ms etc. Blizzard dont want us to use drain life and become shadow priests so Im pretty sure changes will be made, if they dont already have, to make sure sb stay on top.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Robula]

Wow, Affliction Drainer is more similar to Shadow than I originally thought in terms of abilities and mechanics.

Drain Life - Filler. Channeled. Treated as DoT. Refreshes Corruption.
Mind Flay - Filler. Channeled. Treated as a DoT. Refreshes Shadow Word: Pain.

Haunt - Burst Damage, (Debuff) Increases Shadow Damage taken.
Mind Blast - Burst Damage, (Buff) Consumes orbs to increase Shadow Damage done.

Unstable Affliction - Hardest Hitting 15sec DoT.
Vampiric Touch - Hardest Hitting 15sec DoT.

Corruption - Utility DoT, procs Nightfall and Eradiction. Refreshed by filler. 18sec DoT.
Shadow Word: Pain - Utility DoT, increases damage of Mind Flay and Mind Blast on target. Refreshed by filler. 18sec DoT.

Bane of Agony - 24sec DoT with fun mechanic. Gets stronger over time.
Devouring Plague - 24sec DoT with fun mechanic. Returns HP to Priest ever tick.


I'm not saying the two specs are the same but there's some really strong simularities. Lazy Blizzard.

[Robula]

That's probably another reason for DL being nerfed, too similar to shadow priests

Well the Priests execute is very different from DL. But yeah, I never reaslised till now that both specs abilities are almost the same.
But I guess that's where Blizzard are heading. All healers can fill all healing roles now for example. Now when I heal as a Paladin I feel less special now because I know 5 other healers in the raid could do it just as well as I can. lolz.

At one point Elemental and Destruction were very similar but Elemental changed a bit now.

[gherkin]

I'm going to lock this thread because I don't want to spread misinformation and more "omg we're priests lololol" bullshit.

SimulationCraft uses both Drain Life and Shadow Bolt as filler because they are both viable, if a computer is playing the game. You cannot play Drain Life affliction as well as required to exceed Shadow Bolt as a filler until you have something in the way of 30+ Mastery.

What you should read from this is that casting Drain Life instead of Shadow Bolt to keep yourself alive is not a DPS loss, but rather an equal DPS trade for short periods of time.