Is Destro REALLY 'The' Raiding Spec?

[Deleted]

i always loved affliction because of its complexity.
in burning crusade it was nice to out-dps those bt-geared 1buttonlocks in t5 gear ...
but nowadays, affliction is comparably easy to play and does not do sufficient damage anymore.
its only advantage is multitargetdamage, but in most pve situations you dont need this because adds have to die FAST.

from personal testing i can confirm that even when both specs are played to their best with optimal timing and stuff, destro deals around 10% more damage (selfbuffed) compared to affliction.

if you want to play a powerful and complicated dotclass, take a shadowpriest, thats the "new" afflictionlock somehow xD
and also one of the classes with the highest noobrates ...^^

[Meredi]

granted my lock is just an alt, i would agree that destro is the better spec, due to most encounters requiring some kind of burst on adds and so forth.

basically even if all the specs do equal dps, you are still handicapping yourself by not being destro for the burst abilities. also 5% dps difference may not seem like much, but even if it was 1% difference, destro is still the better spec based on numbers.

stop assuming everyone who uses elitist jerks hasn't tested the specs for themselves.

also i skipped like 6 pages of this topic so idk if it was mentioned, but just cuz you are equally geared to this other lock and are out dpsing him cuz you know what you are doing, doesn't mean he does. if he sucks at destro and doesn't know how to time his cds and keep his needed dots up then yeah you are likely gonna out dps him, but get a destro lock that knows his rotation well and you will see much higher numbers.

[Modez]

As the person right before me said, there are many times in ToC hards that you will need the burst which isn't offered by affliction.

ToC Hard mode uses:
Snobolds
Portals/Volcanoes
Faction Champs in general
Shields

I haven't done Anub hard mode yet, but I'm sure there's a use there too. Put 8 aff locks on snobold duty vs. 8 destro locks. Who's going to get them down faster? There's lots of things like this in hard modes.

[rieuxor]

To the OP, yes destruction is the raiding spec as of now. This is coming back an old vanilla wow warlock that always like playing affliction. When WOTLK first came out I really enjoyed playing aff and the dps was great. I didn't think it was difficult as some claim it to be (really not trying to be elitist here), but after the changes to destruction it pretty much blew it away sadly.

I figure that you just haven't had a good destruction warlock in your raid to see how powerful destruction really is. You should give it a try to see for yourself. It personally took me a while to switch specs even though I was reading a lot information that was saying destruction was the best dps spec. I finally decided to change it when I notice that I just wasn't top dps where I use to be raiding Naxx/Maly/OS, when I did there was no looking back.

Also the only fight I can think of where aff is good is for yogg with 1 or 0 watchers, but even that's debatable.