Warlock: July 20th Hotfixes

[Dastey]

Simulationcraft results are in. Roughly 10.000 DPS increase to affliction at BiS. Putting the specc as the 2nd highest on Patchwerk fights.

[Jessicka]

I didn't say anything about it being hard to address the toolkit for Aff. I said the goal with these buffs wasn't to prop it up on the fights where it's "unplayable", but to make it more palatable to play it in general. Just like you said - why learn multiple specs ... but now there's a reason to: on the fights where it was alright/good before, now it's good / really good. Like I said, you still won't be seeing Aff locks dominate on Assault or Iskar, but you will see more folks who were on the fence about learning/using it ... learning/using it.

I guarantee the ratio of fights killed in the various specs shifts not just away from Demo and towards Destro, but towards both Desto and Aff, after tonight. By your reasoning they will just shift away from Demo and toward Destro. I guess we'll see over the next week or two if some of those Demo players shift towards Aff or just all towards Destro.

As a trend, I mean. I know I'm dropping Demo for Aff.

I think that's basically exactly what will happen, the buffs to Aff will just mitigate those who are already using Aff from following suit.

[Nerfarien]

I am happy and sad at the same time.
I hate current affliction. Especially once you get 4p and Archibald trinkets it gets toxic and very annoying. The spec is even more stale than Destro which say something yet at the same time in its previous incarnation it was only semi rewarding. Demo scaled way better and even despite the nerfs it was outperforming affli on later fights.
Now back to affli. This disgusting, boring tunnel spec gets so much damage increase that it is lunacy not to play it.
Still, it does not change the fact that it is obnoxiously boring.

[Zaroch]

Here we go boys, 720 ilvl T18HC Patchwerk sim

[Deleted]

That is a fair hike in the rankings, now the question is are most fights still dominated with destro, or will affliction dominate most?

[striderZA]

I'll take those sims with a very large grain of salt, and wait to see how it plays out in practice.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know what's more of a downer, the lack of any attention to demonology or the fact that I'm so surprised and uplifted by such miniscule buffs.

They probably saw a lot of warlocks still playing Demo on progression and thought that the community needs more motivation to stop playing Demo.

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wouldn't the buff make haste stronger? I'm curious about it if we were to use gosac and on single target

That might be true for purely single target, although I'm not entirely sure.

[kneeo]

Destruction is clearly the darling spec for most players including me, I just can't stand affliction because it lacks the "oompf" factor of having spells that crater their targets, such as Chaos Bolt.

The current buffs, in my opinion, still do not make enough case for Affliction over Destruction in just about any encounter except for Fel Lord and maybe padding Council if you don't care about killing priority targets.

Not to mention the different stat priorities makes it a lot harder to spec destro/afflic if you give a shit about optimization. It's a fair bit easier to have destro/demo in the same gear.

Or I'm super wrong and have no place in this conversation since I haven't raided hardcore since DS, who knows!

[Luthadal]

Not to mention the different stat priorities makes it a lot harder to spec destro/afflic if you give a shit about optimization. It's a fair bit easier to have destro/demo in the same gear.

Or I'm super wrong and have no place in this conversation since I haven't raided hardcore since DS, who knows!

Mastery & haste are (at least pre-hotfix) close enough that gemming/enchanting mastery works for afflic as well as destro.

[kneeo]

Mastery & haste are (at least pre-hotfix) close enough that gemming/enchanting mastery works for afflic as well as destro.

Well then, the more you know.

[Count Zero]

I think that's basically exactly what will happen, the buffs to Aff will just mitigate those who are already using Aff from following suit.

The good thing is we'll be able to tell.

Current standings (based on Warcraft Logs statistics):

Total normal mode HFC parses over the past two weeks:

Affliction - 38,031 (24.58%)
Demonology - 13,063 (8.44%)
Destruction - 103,646 (66.98%)

Heroic:

Affliction - 30,043 (23.46%)
Demonology - 9,166 (7.16%)
Destruction - 88,874 (69.39%)

Mythic (perhaps outlier-ish since so few guilds have killed the bosses towards the end, which might skew things heavily, but):

Affliction - 1,030 (19.02%)
Demonology - 469 (8.66%)
Destruction - 3,915 (72.31%)

The normal/heroic numbers are pretty much right on top of each other (relatively speaking, of course). Mythic numbers are actually skewing closer than I thought they would to matching normal/heroic ratios.

So, we can all expect Demo's percentage of the whole to drop. We'll see over the next two weeks how many go where.

[Jaman]

That is a fair hike in the rankings, now the question is are most fights still dominated with destro, or will affliction dominate most?

Keep in mind that those rankings are in 4pc t18 and (I assume) with the Archimonde trinkets. And on Patchwerk. Actual results will vary based on people's individual gear and fight mechanics.

However....I think the HFC fight mechanics still by and large favor Destruction (which is in a pretty good place on those rankings as well). There's a lot of fights that require AoE and/or cleaving. The hotfix helps Affliction in single target situations, where you can easily Drain Soul and cast Haunt. It doesn't help on much in multiple targets: especially if you take the Archimonde trinket in mind which makes it even harder to cast DS and Haunt while keeping DoTs up on everything.

I may try Affliction a bit more this week...but I still feel like overall that Destruction will win out overall because it has a larger toolkit and fits the HFC fight mechanics better. But you will probably see Affliction more than previously. Especially because you will see a lot of people who look at the rankings and say "Affliction!" without stopping to consider their own gear or how they'll handle the fight.

[dotstwo]

So servers are back up for me and the tooltip/testing for Drain Soul actually has its damage going DOWN from the pre reset DS...can anyone else confirm this?

Edit: NVM....I'm Just Stupid. DOn't think any changes went in effect

[Akakishin]

They probably saw a lot of warlocks still playing Demo on progression and thought that the community needs more motivation to stop playing Demo.

yeah! but for some ppl (like me) , its not going to work. demo still performs handy in many later bosses, has better tools vs different situations and is doing reasonable damage. For me current aff is just definition of bad design and boring as hell. Not gonna try it even if does twice damage of an arcane mage in ST. And if it's so much about extra pushes I'll just respec to destro even tho i really miss aff.

[Restitution]

Yea this is just to further push us away from Demo because it was actually very viable still and they of course hate that. Time to be forced into Affy -_- With Destro being top dog, i have been going full Crit/Mast on every piece that i can. I suspect the pieces i can't will have to be Haste/Mastery to help Affy out. WHY BLIZZ WHY!!

[Count Zero]

You know, as far as stats on who's playing what, a lot of it depends on when those hotfixes actually go live. I forgot it said on the blog post that they're still in testing. I imagine they'll be up by the time most US guilds are starting their raid week tonight tho.

[evertonbelmontt]

I don't think this is related to ppl using demon, at all.
I think they are fixing their mistake on the 2p because those were the numbers they actually wanted for afflic, but had to wait an elegant solution to change some of that dps from the tier into the spec without messing out PVP.

They said they're addressing these buffs for PVP: https://twitter.com/CM_Lore/status/623306559599218689
We'll know if what I said above is true if these buffs go live tonight with the PVP fix done by then too.

[Deleted]

Heyo warlocks buffs! Who would've thought!
But still no demo ):

[xuros]

Kinda sucks that i pretty much went mostly crit/mastery in gear since i was doing destro/demo mostly. Now i need to try to get some haste for affliction (

[SpikeySquad]

You can use the same gear for all 3 specs Xuros.

[Deleted]

Simulationcraft results are in. Roughly 10.000 DPS increase to affliction at BiS. Putting the specc as the 2nd highest on Patchwerk fights.

But there aren't any. There are tons of fights with AOE packs or adds you need to kill fast, where affliction isn't so good.

It has awful AOE thanks to the changes made to SoC and the long rampup times make it awful for things like killing the blood blobs or killer skeletons

So on paper, it looks great, in reality...not so much.

You can't rely on sims, they are wholly unreliable.

Affliction absolutely depend son being able to channel Drain Soul, now more than ever...and movement kills that.

I guess the thinking is that affliction's high potential dps is in reality restricted by it's own mechanics and almost every encounter in current raid tier.