I’ve mained a warlock since 2004. It’s pretty bad at the moment - it’s a double whammy of Dragonflight being COMPLETELY ranged unfriendly with constant movement and effects to dodge that doesn’t affect melee uptime at all, as well as a clear lack of understanding about how to design the class.
Look at how badly designed our talent tree’s are (which was foreshadowed with the almost complete lack of iteration and communication in alpha). We have worthless capstones, a bunch of underwhelming choices and pretty much no choice in talents. We have to give up all of our ST or AOE in most specs, while melee and others get to do both amazingly without giving up anything.
It’s just so unfun.
The contrast between raiding in dragonflight and raiding ulduar in wotlk classic (as a demo pact lock) is just night and day. Warlock design, all 3 specs, was just so much more fun to play, even discounting Aff being overtuned.
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comparative to other classes, warlocks rarely don’t have a spec performing well or top 5. This patch is really an exception to the rule.
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terros wasn’t too bad if you aren’t on demo
sennarth as affy works if you’re super comfortable on the spec. We killed M Senn last night and I absolutely nuked tf out of the boss
Am I misinterpreting Warcraftlogs or has the consensus not caught up to the buffs to Aff last week? It looks like Aff lock rose quite a bit on the rankings for Heroic. Mythic we’re still very middling but I don’t raid Mythic and it seems most in this thread are talking about Heroic anyway:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#dataset=95&difficulty=4&sample=7
Honest question, not saying I haven’t felt undertuned so far but I’m also relearning Lock after not raiding for two expansion. It seems like maybe Aff is respectable at this point looking at the trend over the last week (two even). My char sims higher in Destro but I think that may be due to having more Haste than Mastery stacked after playing Demo up until last week. This also confuses me as Destro is still very low on the charts yet I can dps better (both sim and dummy) on it.
Will answer your question. Affliction had quite a few bugs this week that made it competitive.
Todays hotfix nerfs it to a worse state it was before the patch because they fixed a bug that has been in the game since DF beta lol.
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Nothing like kicking a spec while it’s down.
It’s funny that it took 4 BUGS to make the spec COMPETITIVE.
Not crazy op…competitive.
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Thank you sir! I was not aware of any of that. Interestingly I only see Aff in the top third or better for ilvl above about 397ish and Shadow Priest is right there with them in pretty much every ilvl bracket after that.
Maybe I should play my SP more… 
Aff is “fine” on the fights its good at. I don’t think lock needs more than some minor tuning and some big bug fixes. It is ok for a spec to be middle of the pack
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It’s also terrible to play. Let’s get that fixed too.
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Ill take it over netherportal
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Hang in there we always pickup as the expansion progresses
Wow…I actually have to think for a minute on which is worse.
You got me. Not sarcasm.
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I was queueing solo shuffle matches, and randomly into one of the games during the session, my inevitable demise stopped working. It stacks up to 50, but has no effect on the damage/healing output of drain life. I tried it out on training dummies multiple times now and it always does the same damage whether I have the stacks or not. I tried unlearning the talent and relearning it, exiting game and relogging, and changing specs and back. But nothing is working.
How do I unbug the talent so that I can play the game? arenas are unplayable without being able to self sustain…
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You don’t you have to wait for them to fix it. Enjoy your weekend because it is not getting fixed until monday at the absolute earliest.
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You played affliction? I don’t mind demo or destro at all – that’s why I’m playing a lock honestly, because I enjoy 2 of the 3 specs. But I don’t really enjoy affliction.
Don’t worry! They’ve detected that one of the melee classes might be not having a 100% fun time dominating, so they are redesigning ret’s talent trees in 10.0.7
I know I breathed a sigh of relief to see that they are on top of poorly designed trees and snapping to action to make sure no melee spec is left behind.
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Leave superficial people to static data and they will almost always come back with false positives/negatives.
Yeah, did you look at the last set of patch notes? That sounds terrifying to be fair.
Resto druids got shafted mostly, as did ferals/boomkins/bears. Boomkins talent tree is just a mess all around, despite performing well.
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Lol aff needed bugs to even be competitive… peak design choices here … peak design
- Malefic affliction: why is this gated behind 4 … 4 damnable raptures anyway?!
- ID evidently needed the damage
- Withering bolt for single target purposes, why not just leave it un-capped… it’s not like we can constantly dig for more dots than those available to us in our tree…
On one end, aff needed a buff and they didn’t know what to do… now bugs came around and instead of taking that as a “Oh, this is what we had to do…” they just hit it with a “Nope”
I’ve start training Aff rotations in the dummy today and god damn, what a disgusting gameplay. If Aff become the only good Warlock spec in the next raid tier, I’m done. I’ll just reroll to melee.
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