This week, I'd like to sum up the Warlock specs I tested, and how they play. I won't bother saying much about their exact DPS output, because not only did my
gear change between each test, but a few days of trials is hardly enough to get an absolutely comprehensive understanding of a play style. Instead, I'll be focusing on what it's like to play each of them, since they're all at least viable DPS specs. I'd also like to throw in my analysis of what will happen with them once patch 3.1 rolls around. Though, on the note of analysis, I should point out that computer issues continue to keep me off of the test realms, so my analysis is purely speculative.AfflictionSince Zach did a write up of Affliction shortly before I started writing Blood Pact, I decided to pass over it as part of Project Respec. And anyway, it's my primary spec, so it wouldn't exactly be a 'respec' were I to write about it. Gotta stay true to the name of the project, yo.Playing Affliction right now is a little bit like healing. Except instead of playing whack-a-mole with health bars, you do it with DoT timers. And there are a lot of DoTs to keep track of! An Aff-'lock needs to keep track of Corruption, Siphon Life, Curse of Agony, Unstable Affliction, and Immolate; not to mention keeping Haunt, and two stacks of Shadow Embrace active. Most players find this
balancing act unreasonably difficult, and nobody can deny that it's only really effective during single-target encounters. (Well, that's not true, I'm sure somebody somewhere insists that they managed to pull 10k DPS on Gothik using Seed of Corruption) But at the same time, Affliction is pretty much the spec with the highest damage output for most boss fights right now.