I’m a player who returned to WoW a week ago after several years of inactivity, and today I was following Team Liquid’s World First race (congratulations to them for achieving it!).
One of the things that caught my attention was the inclusion of an Affliction Warlock in their team. This stood out to me because, in many tier lists and sources I found online, the general consensus seemed to be that Affliction Warlock was the weakest Warlock spec.
With that in mind, I’d like to ask the following questions:
What utility does the Warlock bring to TL’s composition that made them choose it over other classes?
Why did they decide to run Affliction instead of Destruction, which is generally considered the strongest spec?
Do you think this achievement will improve Affliction’s reputation or raise its ranking in tier lists?
Most raid teams want at least 1 warlock. Healthstones and Gateway are very good utility to have
It depends on the fight, but in situations where there are long lived adds, affliction having access to permanent Wither can be very strong. Even having that 1 dot on a target over the course of a fight can deal significant damage. It’s especially powerful if the additional targets will be out of your range for periods of the fight. You’ll still be able to have some cleave on them even when you can’t reach them thanks to the permanent dot.
Overall I would say no. Affliction only shines in very niche situations, whereas destruction (and even demonology) can take advantage of their own designs much more easily and often.
The race to world first is also a raid setting, much different than mythic plus, where affliction is also behind and also struggles. I would say Liquid probably played to afflictions strengths in the instances where it was warranted, but overall if you’re trying to do the most types of content, you’re better off as destruction or demonology because they don’t require such niche situations to shine.
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THD is a lock god so I wouldn’t say it’s particularly representative of what the overall mood of locks will be.
Affliction with tier has a niche use in being useful for the wrenchmonger adds since you can drop UA on both of them + a bomb add. Otherwise, its a pretty bad fight for all three of our specs.
They ran Aff on specific bosses where the sustained 3 or 4 target spread cleave was valuable, and Destro doesn’t really do that.
Ideally, you run Aff on One-Armed Bandit and Crucible of Carnage, and if you need more Add damage on Gallywix (else destro).
On the other fights, the added movement potential for Destro with shadowburn is just too good.
A good starting point is to look at logs of the content you plan on doing, look at what the best warlocks are doing for those fights and look at the cast timelines, it will give you a good idea