there are multiple reasons for it:
MR requires…what 8 debuffs, a conduit, and a soulbind do that the kind of damage you are talking about. the spec basically goes all in on MR.
aff dots are pretty weak.
On the bright side, at least there will be less desparity between the top and bottom specs. That said, destro needs damage buffs AND some new tools.
No, you can’t tell me that my own opinion is wrong. And I’m aware a lot of other specs got buffs—that was the basis of my comment. I think more specs being viable is good for the game. Again, if the difference between the top spec and bottom spec is minimal, I really don’t care where destruction is in that spectrum.
Clarification: your stance is wrong, not your opinion. Yes, you can have ur opinion, but to say ‘i dont care its just a minimal difference’ is completely illogical and irrational.
The difference between aff and destro in a raid setting is massive, and more often than not, the deciding factor during progression fights.
If I was raid leading on a progression fight and it came down to dps, knowing your opinion on your class, you would be the first one I drop. Being in a raid means having the respect for your fellow raiders to bring the best dmg/healing/tanking that you can, even if it means changing specs.
Requiring others to do more dmg when you leave so much dmg on the table bc you refuse to play a spec is just selfish.
I never wrote that. You need to read what I actually wrote more carefully; it seems like you don’t fully understand how the word “if” works, because I wrote very little about the actual state of the game right now—only that today’s buffs should help narrow the gap between under-performing specs and the top performers.
The difference in specs right now is far larger than I would like it to be. Giving a buff to under-performing specs will help narrow that gap. When the gap is narrow, player skill has a bigger role in comparative performance than spec strength, and that’s what I’d like to see.
Schematics.
Of course you would, so would most people. However, thats not the way blizz has it. So spec AND player talent play a role.
Do you mean “semantics”??
You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. I’m aware that balance is in a very poor state right now. All I’m saying is that the closer the gap becomes between the top spec and the bottom spec, the better. That should not be especially controversial.
Sure.
Its not, but the issue is when you have such a dps difference between aff and destro but still have players play destro bc “they enjoy it” but still demand to do the same damage as the meta builds.
In a perfect balanced world, all dps specs do dmg within 1% of each other and everyone could play what they want. But thats unrealistic, it’s not rational or logical. So players have a choice: play meta and get inv but don’t enjoy it or play c spec that they enjoy but getting invited is much harder.
i agree and tbh i dont think buffing destro really makes a difference when SURVIVAL is the issue. i know with more haste destro is gonna be even better but honestly right now hitting 10-15k chaos bolts in arena and not even really geared, and that would be cool if we had some defensives to mitigate that huge incoming damage everyone has on an instant cast spell
Bro, you’re like 5/10H… sit down.
I’d take a good Destro player over an average Aff player and never think twice about it. If the difference between a singular Destro player’s damage vs theoretical output if he played Aff is why you’re failing to down heroic bosses (this late in the tier especially) you’re completely missing the real causes.
6/10, and I’m a casual player who raids 1 night a week, only with my guild because I have kids, married, and in my phd program. RL > wow.
You have no idea about my raiding situation. You come to the defense of “play what you like” bc you think it makes you look good. I clearly set the context of progression dps check. I set the situation in that the good destro player was underperforming bc of spec, not bc of talent. I made it clear that it wasn’t fair to the rest of the raid if that lock refused to switch to aff to do more dmg to help meet the dps check to ask them to do more dps hense the reason for them being booted first.
This is about choice, not about talent.
I stand by what I said, and it isn’t about ‘looking good’. If your first thought after failing a progression dps check in a non-HoF guild is to boot the guy playing Destro over Aff rather than looking at what the entire group as a unit can do to improve, you’re going about it completely wrong.
I stand by what I said, and the unit analysis was assumed. But to ask the unit to find ways to do more dps to carry that one person who is struggling to meet dps requirements bc they play a subpar spec and refuse to try the better spec is wrong. If that play parses high but the dmg is low, I am confident that player would transition to the better spec and have better dps.
If your running an alt raid, thats one thing, but if your guild is trying to progress, thats another. I was discussing the latter.
I think what he’s getting at though is that the 500-1000 dps disparity between Destro and Aff can usually be made up by, for example, 1 less person dying early in a fight. If we’re assuming nobody dies early and everyone is playing as well as the Destro lock, there’s zero reason you wouldn’t be able to overcome a dps check, even with multiple “unviable” specs in your raid. They just don’t exist unless several of your raid members are underperforming skill-wise or are undergeared. If you’re doing Hall of Fame progress raiding, racing other guilds, and killing mythic bosses with the raid undergeared as Manni said, then yeah, you need every scrap of damage you can get. Destro doesn’t “struggle” to meet dps requirements. It’s not going to beat Aff but it’s perfectly capable of beating enrage timers, which is all that matters unless you’re carrying others or competing for early tier completion.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I feel like whats terrible about destro is being locked behind soul shards. Anyone else feel this way?
If that’s your situation, regardless of the reasons for it, then your opinion about what Mythic raiding guilds pushing progression should do about DPS doesn’t hold much weight. The fact that your parses are also pretty mediocre just makes your comments terribly ironic.
It’s a pretty huge investment to change specs in Shadowlands. On top of learning to play the new spec effectively, which not only involves learning new rotations for ST and cleave, but also includes learning the ins-and-outs of how to exploit your spec to its fullest potential on each encounter you face and setting up weakauras and other addons effectively, you also have to spend several weeks farming Torghast for a max-level legendary, and you may have to switch covenants as well. You’re not going to just open the talent screen and switch and suddenly be doing 1000 more DPS.
so like 2 months ago id say this is 100% true in terms of requirements. however; we’ve had time to farm+max out 1 leggo, and should have enough to craft like 2 more all the way (gold permitting). Your conduits can be changed easily enough (conduit energy is stupid tho), essentially its the rotation thats gonna be the kicker in all of this.
in our case as warlocks, if you did not go night fae off the rip and ignored everyone who told you to, then its sort of a reap what you sow situation.
edit - as for my take on this debate because NO ONE asked me: good play will close a performance/damage gap on a boss quicker than any spec swap will. Spec swap will potentially enable people to hit a required personal dps marker “easier” due to what the spec is capable of outputting. 5k on aff is alot easier than 5k on destro etc etc.
I didn’t say it had to be a mythic setting. You misinterpret dps checks only being in mythic.
Two, my parses are 80s-90s, which is perfectly acceptable in the content I raid. Plus, its quite good for the lack of practice time and the fact I have a disabled left hand.
The investment to switch specs, as cheezedot points out, isn’t nearly as heavy as it was before. By now, you should have conduits, legendary, ect. If you went another covenant than night fae, bc you WANTED to or for the transmog, then the dps change will be quite a bit more now that we have access to Niya final talent.
So at this point, you have a raid, say, heroic sludgefist, dps check, all the other dps are parsing 90+, including the destro but the destro is doing 1.5k less dps bc of spec/covenant, NOT bc of talent. The raid wipes 4 times with 5% left on boss. This is a clear dps issue as no one dies early. In this situation there is no other choice then to sit the destro and/or request they switch to aff.
If everyone in your raid is even just blue parsing you aren’t going to hit enrage on heroic Sludgefist, unless you have some weird comp that is like 1 healer per 2 dps or something.
For a little added nuance, people in your raid need to understand that they will probably need to have personals/healthstones/etc available for that last 5% on Sludgefist. Again, if the raid starts to disintegrate before Sludgefist charges the wall, it’s not solely on the Destro lock. I do think you could make the argument that if the Destro was capable of playing Aff at the same level and switched then it would take some personal responsibility off of the rest of the raid, but at that point you are changing spec to carry the rest of your raid, not because you are being carried as a Destro.
No, I’m just aware that any spec is perfectly viable for normal or heroic content right now. As Mannimarcø pointed out: if you’re having issues meeting DPS checks in normal or heroic, the spec people play isn’t the real issue. You’re not being “selfish” (as you accuse) if you play your spec well and do raid mechanics properly on normal or heroic difficulty.
Yes, your parses are just fine for the content you are doing—but the content you are doing does not have hard DPS checks, which means that your comments about what people should and shouldn’t be doing to beat the difficult checks and progress are coming from a place of inexperience.
You know how ridiculous that example is, right? If all of your DPS are parsing 90+, and nobody dies early, you’re not going to wipe at all on Sludgefist. And if people die early on that fight, that’s on them for being positioned poorly (or possibly on healers during the headcrash) and has nothing whatsoever to do with the spec of DPS players.
True, but as I pointed out earlier, it’s not just rotation: it’s knowing how to exploit your spec to its fullest based on the circumstances of individual encounters. I think the value of experience is often underestimated. Sometimes that experience will translate well across specs (because it has to do more with boss mechanics than how the spec interacts with those mechanics, for example), but sometimes it doesn’t.
Many were recommending Kyrian early on for Destruction, as I recall. I’m also thoroughly dissatisfied with covenant balance, but that’s another topic.