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Affliction vs. Destro
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Post by
skribs
I'm starting to gear up my warlock (more greens than epics atm, several blues) after hitting 80, and I've tried both affliction and destruction and found I do more DPS as destruction. If I've understood what I've seen on other sites correctly, Affliction is top DPS, so I'm trying to figure out why I did more as destro. I know it's not gear choices as both require roughly the same gear, so here's my experience:
I levelled from mid-30s as destro, and I've done a half dozen heroics as destro and 2 heroics as affliction. I know them both very well (read stickies here and posts on EJ) but I don't have as much practice with the affliction rotation. I was between 2k-2.5k in both specs, but it was in the higher end of that range on destro
On a training dummy, I was able to do 2.4k as affliction and 2.6k as destro. However, I can attribute this to a number of factors: practice (as in last bullet), lack of movement (on movement heavy fights I believe affl is penalized less than destro), lack of buffs/gear (not sure how they scale), haste (I was getting perfect timing on refreshing immolate like 0.1s after last tick without any pause in cast time, and hitting points like that in haste help DPS a lot - this I learned by playing a BM Hunter in TBC), and the fact I never used DS on the test dummy
So here's my question: at lower gear levels, is affliction generally lower? Or am I doing something wrong?
Open Combo: Haunt - Corr - UA - CoA - SB, Priority Haunt - UA - CoA - SB
Open Combo: Immo - CoE - Conflag - CB - Inc, Priority Immo - Conflag - CB - Inc
Post by
291094
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Post by
244066
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Post by
skribs
Yeah this is what I was thinking, I just wanted to make sure I was thinking right. When I look up the top 20 warlocks on each boss fight and see the majority of them affliction, and then I do less DPS as affliction than destro on a target dummy, it raised a yellow flag (not quite a red one) and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.
Also, the dummy test wasn't bad in terms of ramp-up-time, I gave it a few times through my rotation to make sure I got a good test.
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291094
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Post by
Micaiah
When you tested on dummies, you used CoA for aff and CoE for destro.
To get (more) relevant numbers, use CoE for both, or Coa for aff and CoD for destro.
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244066
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166705
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501997
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Post by
MegaVolt
As far as I know affliction, even with high end gear, is quite a lot weaker than destro or even demo for most of the fight. The main strength of affliction is the absolutely insane execute phase in which your damage should increase significantly. You will do less in the non-execute range but shoot far, far ahead of the other specs as soon as the boss gets on low health.
This extremely strong execute is awesome on bosses that only become really dangerous when they get on low health (good examples would be Sindragosa or Anub which are quite easy until p3) but it also means that on the dummy (no execute at all) and heroics (barely enough time to get any DS ticks in during execute because the boss dies so fast) your damage will be seriously gimped.
By the way: For fights with lots of adds (including heroics) I'd recommend going demo because of the way the demo execute works: If you hit a low hp mob you gain your execute and you can start spamming SF for 10 seconds. Our guild Warlock is abusing this mechanic e.g. on Saurfang: Kill one of the adds, proc your 10 seconds of execute with it and use those 10 seconds to spam SF on the boss, basically giving you free execute time while the boss is on high health.
Post by
asakawa
you're overestimating the importance of the execute phase for aff.
yes it represents a bump in output but it's not that large.
Post by
amythe
you're overestimating the importance of the execute phase for aff.
yes it represents a bump in output but it's not that large.
It's quite large, actually. You get 12% increased shadow damage when targets are below 30%, which affects all of your dots. Of course, then there is Drain Soul, which hits (at least for me, with mostly ICC 10 gear and some 25 including 4pc 10) for 17k every 1.7 seconds.
That's pretty nuts.
Post by
asakawa
i'm not all that concerned with specifics like that, the proof is in the pudding. go and look at a DPS graph for a fight as aff and, sure it goes higher toward the end of the fight but we're not talking about a huge difference. megavolt was saying that aff is weak for the majority of the fight but it is made up for by a strong execute. this is true but only in a VERY minor way. i'm just raising small flag of disagreement on a relatively minor point. that's all.
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