Lots of people throw the "S" word around a lot, but no Warlock build has truly spammed anything since Sunwell was hard. I find it humorous that so many people are angry and negative about the "challenge" of Affliction being gone, and how they detest "spamming" builds when for 25-30% of every fight you just lean on the Drain Soul button and refreshed some DoTs as needed. How was that not spamming a "filler" spell? Because Drain Soul wasn't Shadow Bolt or Incinerate it attained some higher level of skill or challenge to use?

The only challenge to Affliction was the server lag come raid time. It was a gimmick tree that relied on two main tricks for the majority of its DPS:

First, the aforementioned Drain Soul cheese. Second, the Affliction tree was (and still is) the one that saw the highest DPS gain from high end specialty pets (Infernal and Doomguard), essentially using them with no tradeoff at all. Say what you will about how each tree should be catagorized, but last time I checked we had a tree that was all about using our demons to the highest effect, and it wasn't Affliction. If you remove those two gimmicks from the equation, then Affliction isn't the top raid DPS spec any longer by a long shot. Even with them, I never peronally saw Affliction consistently top meters on every encounter. Great on some fights and awful on others, while good old FG/Ember kept me in the top 5 range consistently on every fight.

Personally I can't see how anyone can complain that the new Affliction will be boring to play. You may actually get to look at the fight instead of DoT timers and a specialty mod that tracks DS ticks. I'm sure a lot of the core play style elements of the tree will remain, but the way it was before obviously needed some tweaks. On the bright side, spreading your heavy hitting (and critting) DoTs should be easier than before, which means on the 99% of boss fights that aren't Patchwerk you should have the freedom to DoT up secondary and tertiary targets without fear of having your rigid single target rotation drop. To me, that encompasses what Affliction is about more than anything.

For deep Demo, MC makes sense. If you look at the Decimation talent alone you can see they are obviously pushing for a synergy between shadow and fire damage they way they seemed to want to push Destro previously. The way it looks now, Affliction is primarily shadow with the change to Shadow Embrace, Destro is primarily fire and Demo finds a balance in the middle. I think it is a given that FG/Emberstorm goes away if only because the ISB change makes Demonic Pact and Meta all the more interesting and useful (as well as just higher DPS mosy likely). Affliction can still swap to DS instead of Shadow Bolt post-25% while Demo keeps ISB rolling for the raid.

Destruction gains Replenishment on top of more survivability for the chain-gunning Imp, and the changes to talents that affect Immolate just make that DoT even more of a beast. Plus, the change to Pyroclasm almost make up the difference of MC being moved while still keeping everything fire-centric (except it can still boost Shadowfury/Shadowburn if you spec into them too - though most PvE builds won't). People may undervalue Replenishment sources now, but when/if Ulduar provides a challenge and Blizzard tightens the reins on healer mana, this could be a very welcome tool in our arsenal.

Plus, the other piece to the puzzle I haven't seen any data on is set bonuses for T8 which potentially could have a huge impact on how each tree is viewed or even played.

I guess taking all of that into consideration, combined with the fact that this is just round one of the PTR build, makes it hard for me to look at any of this as anything but positive.

Update:
Included the change to pandemic crits from 150% to 200%

Pandemic on the Public Test Realm: - 200% crit modifier.

In a 300s fight (5 minutes) assuming 100% up time on Unstable Affliction and Corruption:

Corruption
Assuming 28% crit chance (15% from gear, 5% moonkin, 3% totem/pally debuff and 5% from ISB/Scorch/Winter's chill):

In raid settings the 'normal' corruption tick for a well-geared warlock is around 2200 (more with trinket procs, less without), which leaves us with 2200 dot crits.

Corruption ticks every 3 seconds so out of those 100 ticks, 28 would crit:
2200x28 = 61600 dmg

If we divide that by the length of the fight (300 secs) the dps gain from corruption alone is ~205 dps.

Unstable Affliction
If we do the same with Unstable Affliction (avg tick ~1700, crits for 1700 extra), the dps gain from Unstable Affliction is ~159 dps.

Those 2 put together is a net gain of ~364 dps from 1 talent point, which is quite nice.


Pandemic on Live servers: - 200% crit modifier.

Assuming 20% crit total (15% from gear, 5% from a moonkin):

Corruption: ~146 dps
UA: ~113 dps

Net dps gain: ~259 dps for 3 points.


EDITED to reflect the following posts.
Edit #2: Consolidated this post with the subsequent one.

Elemental Oath is 5% and does not stack with Boomkin aura.

Totem of Wrath is 3% crit and is a debuff on the target, hence it does not apply to Pandemic's proc chance on live. Same with 3% crit from Judgement.

I find it hard to believe that 150 % crits with 40 % crit adds more dps than 200 % crits with 23 % crit.
For live pandemic I get:
2200x23 = 50600 dmg or 168,67 dps. Am I missing something here ?

Oh ye, that's a slight oversight on my behalf. I forgot to increase the pandemic crit modifier from the live servers to 100%.

I'll fix it.

EDIT:
Fixed and edited my first posts.

Where do you get these 40% from, if one post later you assume 20% for the "old" pandemic (which only doesn't include debuffs on the mob if i remember right). The difference should be 13% on live (10% Scorch, 3% Totem of Wrath) or 8% with the nerfed Scorch-debuff (assuming it is changed)
Am i forgetting anything?

Is it just me, or did the change to Fel Synergy just destroy the Voidwalker's potential health pool ? Granted it was only a gimmick "tanking spec" only usable in a few niche situations (yay Sartharion/3 Drakes !), but it was fun and quite harmless...

You're right, the numbers i used were a rough estimate (hence me using the term 'napkin math'), however you're 100% right.

I'll edit the post to reflect that as well.

I agree, but that's a matter of itemization and another discussion imo

edit: typo

All our dots should be able to crit and Eradication should increase crit % on dots. That would feel a bit more "afflictioney"

Another hypothesis is that Conflagrate does the damage of the Incinerate dot normalized for being an instant (i.e. only gets 42.86% of it, just like instants only get 42.86% of your spellpower). It would get the full base damage of Immolate, which is
1493 = 785 * 1.15 * 1.2 * 1.3 * 1.06

plus the extra damage on the immolate dot multiplied by 0.4286, and benefiting one more time from Emberstorm (since it deals fire damage):
in this example, (1493 + (1091 * 5 - 1493) * 0.4286) * 1,15 = 3670, which is pretty close to the observed 3672.

where 1493 is the base damage of Immolate and 1091 * 5 - 1493 is the amount of damage on the immolate dot coming from spell power.

If this hypothesis is correct, Conflagrate is working as intended *sigh*.