Been hearing lots of Aff love lately.... why?

[Astynax 24]

So, I've not come here in a while, been on break, and between raid teams lately. But recently I've been talking to some warlocks on my server, as well as reading over Sparkuggz's latest posts, and noticing a TON of love for affliction among the higher tiers. Is this an ilvl thing? Most of them seem to have my 561 ilvl by 14+. Is this just us getting more used to the fights, and understanding mechanics better? What exactly is going on here? And should I swap over? I've noticed myself pulling 240k or so on thok, running my KTT and PBI, and not set up to really run aff to the best of my ability (reforged to the 10131 destro BP), which is only about 15-20k below what I'm used to pulling, and IK is just my own screwups in the rotation.

 

Just curious what the consensus here on IV was, and how it was playing out.

[Kazistrasz 216]

No, it's not an ilvl thing. Sparkuggz is a very old-school lock who is more comfortable playing affliction than destruction - he's been doing it all tier including during the progression race. Many warlocks are old and stuck in their ways; they didn't get on the destro boat with the rest of us. Now, I will say that one of its strengths as a spec is on short fights. I was looking at logs earlier, and Method's H Jug kill this week was 4:00 exactly. When your fight is that short, your opener counts for a lot more. Affliction has a very big, very long opener compared to Destruction. You see this when your raid as a whole has high DPS.

 

Then again, there's the fact that we're 5-and-a-half months into SoO, and many of us are just tired of playing the same spec for that long.

[Astynax 24]

No, it's not an ilvl thing. Sparkuggz is a very old-school lock who is more comfortable playing affliction than destruction - he's been doing it all tier including during the progression race. Many warlocks are old and stuck in their ways; they didn't get on the destro boat with the rest of us. Now, I will say that one of its strengths as a spec is on short fights. I was looking at logs earlier, and Method's H Jug kill this week was 4:00 exactly. When your fight is that short, your opener counts for a lot more. Affliction has a very big, very long opener compared to Destruction. You see this when your raid as a whole has high DPS.

 

Then again, there's the fact that we're 5-and-a-half months into SoO, and many of us are just tired of playing the same spec for that long.

 

Ah, I didn't know Spark stuck THAT old-school with things.

 

IK the 1M+ DPS burst opener aff has, even at like my ilvl, is a DPS "buff" on really short fights, (in a way, artificially so) but I wasn't sure if we were just seeing a by-product of better overall raid ilvl, increased dps, and thus an artificial inflation of the DPS in this way, or if we'd found some type of holy grail of affliction DPS that we missed at the outset.

 

So, what I'm hear from you, kazi, is "Your ilvl is now high enough that the DPS difference in moderate fights in minuscule, and you can play what you want, but the realistic, progression DPS levels are the same as we've always said they were."?

Edited February 24, 2014 by Astynax

[Zagam 1,982]

Method and high end guilds who are killing bosses as fast as ever are shifting to Affliction because the shorter fights are, the more powerful Affliction is.  Shorter fights = less dependence on RNG to push high parses.  Archimode's Darkness also has a much more powerful effect on Affliction than it does for any other spec, so when you can increase the uptime of your primary cooldown by a significant margin in a short window of time, you're going to look fantastic.

[Liquidsteel 279]

Like the guys have said, Affliction looks better on farm with inflated gear levels and short fights, but Destruction is hands down the best progression spec this tier. High dps and ridiculously high survivability.

Where I think it beats Affliction is that it's burst does not require any RNG. You can choose to focus your damage onto high priority adds whereas Affliction can only compete if you get a good trinket proc in this window.

This issue is exacerbated in 10 man where there is more (I feel) personal responsibility to ensure you are focussing the correct target.

[Astynax 24]

Where I think it beats Affliction is that it's burst does not require any RNG. You can choose to focus your damage onto high priority adds whereas Affliction can only compete if you get a good trinket proc in this window.

This issue is exacerbated in 10 man where there is more (I feel) personal responsibility to ensure you are focussing the correct target.

 

Yeah, I'll definitely not be switching it to my main spec until I can get my hands on a better PBI and a BBoY, but even then it's a very proc-dependent spec, and I felt a huge difference in the last time I played it (20 odd ilvls ago) after upgrading my trinkets.

 

And I can definitely see this in 10m. IK my guild is ranged-short, and during shams, I get to look awesome, and pull like 320k DPS, cause we have a hunter who's lacking in AOE for them, and an ele shammy who is just bad. lol. So My dps gets artificially inflated, and running aff in fights like this wouldn't even be an option, because I couldn't insta-kill the adds I needed to.

[Zagam 1,982]

In 25 mans, you can get away with playing any spec you want while depending on people to cover your stuff.  In 25 Siegecrafter, I played Demo and enjoyed it.  I couldn't do that in 10 man because I'm relied on to kill bombs and Empowered Missiles.