Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology and destruction warlocks. For those who disdain the watered-down arts that other cling to like a safety blanket ... For those willing to test their wills against the nether and claim the power that is their right ... Blood Pact welcomes you.
As a pure DPS class, warlocks have something of a unique flavor all of their own, which brings along with it several different balancing challenges that hybrid classes generally don't face. On the surface, spec balance is a fairly simple concept. All specs should deal relatively within the same level of damage then you're basically golden. Alas, that's just not how it does.www.scanscafe.com
Raw damage is only a single factor in the equation. There's raid utility to consider, how the spec interacts with encounter design, and how complex a spec is to play. We've spend a large amount of time focusing on raw damage over the years, yet when push comes to shove, it is only a minor fraction of the whole.
In the new age of Cataclysm-styled DPS where damage balance is closer than it's ever been, the secondary factors of balance are becoming more and more important. This week, we'll talk a bit about the future of affliction and how it can fill in what major roles still remain.www.threadwow.com
Utility balance
Utility is perhaps at the forefront of the balancing game right now. When it comes to which specs a raid wants to bring along with then, that added bonuses those specs can bring to the table are often considered first. Damage has been pushed aside. Everyone has damage, but not everyone has the same utility. To many people, utility is just those over-homogenized buffs or debuffs that they bring along with them. While a part of the equation, buffs and debuffs are really only a minor part of utility. Just like damage, they've been given out to everybody and anybody to the point that none of them hold any special weight anymore. Instead, utility can be defined as anything beyond a give role -- tanking, DPS, or healing -- that a player can use to benefit the raid or themselves in some way.
In this instance, the ability to heal yourself for large amounts of damage via talents and Drain Life would be considered utility. Even though Drain Life as a filler spell for affliction has been stomped on by Blizzard, the damage that it can deal isn't so abysmally low that it's never worth using. A player's ability for self-healing can go a long way in helping to down encounters, especially in terms of world firsts. Less reliance on healers generally means that fewer healers need to be taken, the fewer healers that a raid brings along, normally the harder the content they can push. The world-first Rag kill had nothing to do with healing and tanking and everything to do with damage.
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