I wouldn’t define any of the current warlock specs as “smooth” or “fluid” by any stretch of the imagination. There are talents that DO make the rotation feel more consistent and clunk-less, but they are all considerable DPS losses.
I remember being quite annoyed when I leveled my shadow priest that their rotation and skills just functioned so much more fluidly as a rot spec than affliction. Affliction, in it’s optimized talent pathing, feels especially odd in single target due to malefic rapture which, in my mind, feels like it’s more of an AOE skill. It feels like a gussied up version of shadow bolt that costs shards and does spread-cleave damage rather than its own unique thing. Contrast that with shadow priest where every talent and spell feels unique and affliction just feels, I dunno, inefficient? Bland?
DOT application is less efficient (no way to put up multiple DOTs in a single hard cast), DOT damage requires buffs and setup to do respectable damage (haunt, shadow embrace), we don’t spec for increased DOT damage because buffing malefic rapture yields higher gains, hardest hitting DOT can only be active on 1 target, highest yield spec is based on procs of shadow bolt/drain soul and malefic rapture instead of rewarding proper refreshes on DOT affects.
In other words, affliction doesn’t feel like a rot spec. To me, it feels like playing a fire mage with less hutzpah.
Destro would feel good if rotational damage was shifted away from Shadowburn and into chaos bolts and conflagration and it was turned back into a proper execute/kill shot effect again. Shadowburn being the highest priority spell (and yielding more damage per shard than chaos bolts) just feels weird to me since it started its life as an execute-style spell. I don’t know why this changed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good for mobility, but not good for overall identity. And what the hell do the rifts have to do with destruction identity? You’re summoning rifts…in a spec whose identity is otherwise based on channeling fel fire magics. I feel like the rifts should be a demonology talent more than one for Destro.
Demo, on the other hand, nails its overall theme but not the identity of particular mastery in summoning. It’s a bit strange that a “Master of Demon Summoning” can only summon them for a short time and the primary pet is just a rank and file Felguard instead of some flavor of enslaved demon lord. Again, don’t get me wrong, having an army of demons up around the player is frickin’ cool, but I feel like that’s intermediate skill at best - quantity over quality. Wouldn’t someone who has mastered summoning and subjugation pride themselves on enslaving the biggest, baddest demon they could manage? We see that theme in the Argent Tournament raid in Wrath and again throughout warlock class quests (with terrible results for gnomes lol).
The tl;dr of it all is this: warlocks are functional and useful for utility, but they really lack strongly-resonating identity for each of their specs. They all feel like watered-down versions of something incredible…at least to me.
The consolation prize is that we have a TON of excellent transmog options and customization for our demons.
