Originally Posted by
Melian
I'm going along with Brusalk here.
I even have an example to kind of "prove it".
In my raid there are two warlocks. Me and the GM from our partner guild (hello mythic raiding... :/). In almost every single fight the last 2 months I'm doing about 15% more dps than he is doing, while we are at the same gear level (him being slightly above). I checked the logs about a hundred times, why he is doing inferior dps. And the only fact that I continously found, was that I'm shadowburning 100-300% more often than he does and use havoc almost on CD, while he rarely uses it.
Apart from that he's doing quite well. Not capping embers, casting CBs during proccs, shadowburning his target if it's low... and so on.
Imho this shows - at least in this example - a gap of about 15% dps just because of "mastering destruction" versus "playing destruction well". I'm always looking for the next possibility to havoc a SB, to drop an ember on a nonbuffed CB and instantly refilling that ember because of a SB (even without havoc). He doesn't do that. He simply plays down his "rotation".
And that's exaclty whats the question when you talk about "hard to master". As a destro wl, you have to know the fight and know the possiblities that the encounter will offer you in the next ~30sec, to perform realy good. There are many other speccs that don't have this high need to plan ahead - and many just have it for their rotation itself, not for the encounter as a whole.
Now you could say, that a destrolock that doesn't plan ahead hasn't even "learned" the class. But imho that's kind of bargaining for arguments. Of course he's not perfect. But if he plays his rotation well and doesn't make any huge mistakes than I think the player "learned" how to play his class. The rest is aceing it. And a difference of 15-20% between players who know what they do and players who try to cheese out the last bit is well designed imho.
There are speccs where the difference is bigger, yes. But often that's just because of broken game mechanics (affliction's soul swap e.g.) or extreme synergy in a rare situation. But as a whole, 15-20% is quite realistic, I think.