The Afflock Conundrum

Yesterday, Blizzard released the long-awaited 2.4 patch. With it comes a new raid zone, the Sunwell, and newer, better gear for raiders. I am always glad to see new content, both from a "my character gets fun stuff" perspective and for the chance to experience new fights. However, my enthusiasm is tempered somewhat by a growing problem among raiding warlocks.

This problem is familiar to all of us, of course: Affliction spec and its place in raiding. What may not be obvious is the complexity of the issue.


The Basic Issue

I'd like to start this discussion with some data, specifically some DPS figures from WoW Web Stats. The raids in question:

EJ Gruul 25 May 2007
EJ Black Temple 20 June 2007
EJ Black Temple 25 July 2007 - the week before our first Illidan kill
EJ Black Temple 27 September 2007
EJ Black Temple 19 December 2007
EJ Black Temple 18 March 2008

I pulled out the raw DPS figure for one 0/21/40-specced warlock (Demonic Sacrifice/Shadow and Flame, the highest-DPS warlock build) and for myself (I have always specced some flavor of Unstable Affliction) for each raid. Here is a graph I derived from the data:



A few interesting things can be seen in this graph.

1. 0/21/40, in mixed Tier 4/5 gear, does not perform quite as well as Affliction.
2. Both Affliction and 0/21/40 specs have trended upward in DPS as raiding progresses (and, presumably, gear improves).
3. The rate of DPS increase for 0/21/40 is significantly higher than that of Affliction.

In fact, on March 18th of this year, the 0/21/40 warlock out-DPSed me by about 35%. For sheer damage dealing, Affliction has been entirely eclipsed.


Why This Matters

"But Uncle Gilliam," you say cleverly, "why does this matter at all? Every class has ideal raid specs and suboptimal raid specs, so who cares about Affliction DPS and whether it's competitive with an optimized build?" That is a very good question, and of course it has much to do with talents.

A fair amount about Blizzard's class design philosophy can be derived from the layout of talent trees. Deep Affliction contains two talents aimed specifically at raiders, both of which have fairly minimal impact on soloing and small-group work. The first is Shadow Embrace. As a single-point ability, it interacts nicely with Soul Siphon to slightly boost self-healing when soloing. However, the damage dished out by solo and instance mobs is no real threat to a proper tank. 5/5 Shadow Embrace sees use among raiders who want a bit of extra insurance against hard-hitting bosses.

By the same token, Malediction is a suboptimal talent for the soloing or small-group loving warlock. The benefit will help at most two people in a standard group (warlock and shadow priest), making Curse of Agony or Curse of Doom better use of one's curse slot. Larger groups containing four or more individuals who stand to benefit from a Curse of Shadows or Elements are obviously the main beneficiaries of this talent.

It should therefore be obvious that Burning Crusade warlock class design was aimed at making Affliction specs desirable in raids. Malediction and Shadow Embrace are unique abilities that no other class or spec offers. Unfortunately, the realities of gearing and scaling make it increasingly difficult to justify the considerable DPS disadvantage that speccing Affliction entails.

Malediction is in essence a 3% DPS buff to relevant classes. Going by the March 18th WWS, the difference between my DPS and the DPS of a 0/21/40 warlock was 412. In order for my presence as Affliction spec to be worthwhile from a pure DPS perspective, the combined DPS increase of all classes benefiting from my Curse of Shadows needs to be greater than 412, or a combined (spriest + warlock) DPS of 13733. Actual combined DPS of affected classes was 4673. In other words, Affliction spec results in a substantial net loss of Raid DPS - and that's before accounting for a higher Improved Shadow Bolt uptime if I were casting nothing but Shadow Bolts.

There is some benefit in exchange for this DPS loss, of course. 5% lower tank damage is significant for new raid zones (but essentially wasted for farm content). The ability to have out an imp without sacrificing DPS can be helpful in fights with a great deal of raid damage going around. However, given the increasing gap between Affliction and Destruction DPS, these benefits come at an increasing cost. It becomes harder and harder to justify taking along an Affliction warlock. Making use of Blizzard's apparent intended class mechanics becomes a raid penalty, rather than a raid benefit.


A Bit of Perspective

How do the various warlock specs compare to other DPS classes in raids? I added the in-raid DPS for two of our high-attendance rogues. Their specs vary from week to week, but both min-max to ridiculous degrees, so they can be guaranteed to have as close to maximum possible DPS as is humanly possible. Here's the result:



Rogue DPS starts about in line with warlock DPS. They also scale nicely with gear, increasing as raid equipment improves. However, Destruction warlock DPS becomes much higher than rogue DPS at high levels of gearing. Given that even Destruction warlocks have more raid utility (banish, unimproved curses) than rogues, this seems out of whack. If any adjustments to Affliction DPS are made, it's clear they should avoid improving Destruction further.


The Source(s) of the Problem

The main issue, for both Destruction and Affliction, is of course gear. Destruction DPS benefits substantially from spell hit, spell crit, +damage, and spell haste. By contrast, Affliction gains the most from spell hit and +damage, with much lower returns from spell haste and crit.

All warlocks are dependent on higher amounts of spell hit than other classes. Destruction is the only DPS talent tree without some form of spell hit, which means to hit the resist cap against bosses we need to obtain 202 spell hit from gear only. As a class design mechanic it strikes me as odd, but it penalizes all specs equally.

Spell damage scales well for both Affliction and Destruction, especially with talents like Empowered Corruption and Shadow and Flame.

Spell crit has traditionally been the biggest difference between Affliction and Destruction. This is in part due to Ruin - for a Destruction warlock, 1% spell crit gives the same benefit to net DPS as 1% spell hit. Crit is much less helpful to Affliction warlocks due to both the lack of Ruin - making crit only a .5% DPS increase to shadow bolts - and the fact that Damage over Time spells do not crit. Depending on cycle, that can mean that as much as 50% of a warlock's damage gains no benefit from spell crit.

With the advent of the 2.4 patch, spell haste lowers the GCD on spell casting. This is obviously a buff to warlock DPS; Destruction specs will spend less time casting Life Tap, and Affliction warlocks will renew Unstable Affliction, Corruption, etc. without taking a full 1.5 seconds per spell off from casting Shadow Bolts. Unfortunately, the buff for Destruction is considerably greater than for Affliction.

If I gain 33% spell haste, I can cast Unstable Affliction and Corruption in 2.0 seconds. That's one full second saved. However, the actual benefit gained is minimal (one more second of SB spam, or enough time to Life Tap when I otherwise could not) because my DoTs will still last a full 18-second duration. While I may be able to cast more shadow bolts, a significant portion of my DPS (around 40% based on our last BT run) gains no benefit from spell haste.

So, of the four casters' DPS stats, Affliction gains benefits roughly equal to Destruction from only two: spell hit (which is limited in usefulness to 202 hit rating; above that it is wasted) and spell damage. With crit and haste, Destruction gains greater benefit.

This becomes a problem thanks to Blizzard's itemization formula. As the system is currently set up, points in any statistic cost more as that stat increases. For instance, more points of an item's budget are spent going from 100 +damage to 105 +damage than from 50 to 60 +damage. This means that stacking two damage stats - such as spell hit and +damage - is less efficient itemization than a mix of three or four. The vast majority of caster gear follows this logic, mixing hit, crit, damage, and more recently spell haste to varying amounts. Those few items that concentrate on only one or two stats are considered subpar, because they do not contribute as much to overall DPS as a more balanced item. As item level, and therefore individual stats, increase, this problem intensifies.

In other words, as gear improves, the problem gets worse. We can expect the same issue to arise at level 80 unless changes are made to game mechanics or itemization practices, only more markedly due to all gear being of substantially higher ilevel.


Possible Solutions

What to do about this little conundrum? The issue here is doubly problematic because we must take into account both PvE and PvP balance, assuming that Blizzard will continue to use the same ruleset for both as they have so far. Additionally, it must benefit Affliction specs enough to bring them somewhat closer to Destruction, without further enhancing Destruction's already substantial DPS. The goal here should not be to give Affliction higher DPS than Destruction; Affliction has greater raid utility and therefore should do lower overall damage to compensate. However, the system should in some way lessen the difference in scalability between the two specs, so that the DPS loss from taking an Affliction warlock is more constant rather than more heavily penalizing top-end raiders.

1. Apply spell crit to DoT spells.
Damage over Time spells are obviously a good target for improvement, because Destruction specs make no use of them whatsoever. Allowing full durations or individual ticks of DoT spells to crit would improve Affliction DPS somewhat. However, without Ruin these crits would be only 50% higher damage. This would allow crit to scale slightly better than it does now for Affliction warlocks. The PvP ramifications of this change are fairly massive, however, and I doubt it could be properly balanced even with the extreme levels of Resilience found among top PvPers.

2. Apply spell haste to DoT spells.
As I mentioned before, spell haste does very little to help DoT DPS. In full Tier 6 level gear, that means spell haste is a wasted stat for about 40% of an Affliction warlock's damage. Haste can also impact a warlock's DPS cycle negatively, leading to DoT downtime and, possibly, lower net DPS. Allowing spell haste to reduce the duration of DoT spells would fix all of these issues. The DPS cycle would become uniformly faster, as it does with Destruction warlocks. Additionally, spell haste is not a common stat to find on PvP gear, so this solution would likely have a lesser effect on PvP than altering crit function. It would not change the DPS patterns of the 0/21/40 crowd (they never use DoTs anyhow) and would keep Destruction specs on the high end of damage, but it would allow Affliction warlocks to seek out three optimal DPS stats - +damage, spell hit, and haste - rather than the current two. That would in turn allow for more efficient item design.

3. Change ISB functionality.
Altering Improved Shadow Bolt to only apply its damage bonus to periodic effects would significantly lower the contribution of Shadow Bolt to warlock DPS. Destruction warlocks would be impacted heavily, losing perhaps 15-20% of total DPS. Affliction would not necessarily gain any advantage from this change, and in fact it might lead to Destruction specs switching to Cataclysm for their tier 1 talent. I would categorize this solution as A Bad Idea.

4. Rework the item budget system.
Clearly this fix is more long-term, aimed at addressing the issue for Wrath of the Lich King itemization. I neither expect nor encourage wholesale reworking of existing items; that would be a waste of developer time. However, just as The Burning Crusade saw a revaluing of Stamina to increase its presence on level 61+ gear, the new expansion would be an excellent time to address an issue that has caused problems at both level 60 and 70. As item level increases, the continued stacking of single stats becomes increasingly expensive, and gear with three or more relevant statistics becomes the only efficient itemization strategy. Removing, or at least greatly reducing, the increased cost of stacking fewer stats would allow for more Affliction-friendly gear.

5. Create items with interesting, Affliction-spell-related functions.
[Timbal's Focusing Crystal] is an interesting little trinket. It, and items like it, could be another way to address Affliction problems without reworking entire itemization systems or altering existing spell mechanics. The problem comes with balancing multiple items with "on periodic damage" procs, limiting powerful procs to unique item slots and avoiding overuse of the mechanic. It might be an interesting balancing act to attempt.

Let me reinforce one more time that I am not looking to make Affliction DPS equal to or greater than Destruction. Afflocks have a fair bit of raid utility that Destruction lacks, and much of that utility is indispensable in high-end raids. I simply want to curtail the current trend that leads to Affliction warlock presence amounting to an increasingly harsh penalty to raid DPS because of poor scaling relative to other classes, and especially relative to other warlocks. We don't need absolute parity, just something a bit less...insufficient.