Switched to Demonology

ZOMG, Why?

For an affliction blog, this is a strange turn. But it's happened. Why?

Demonology's Demonic Pact is now a required raiding buff. Period. On average at my current gear level, I'm providing 100% uptime on a 540 spellpower buff to the raid. By my measurement*, that buff never dips below 400 spellpower, and peaks at over 700. Bringing me in as Demonology is like adding four more flasks to every caster—healer or DPS—in the raid. Totem of Wrath is history until Cataclysm, when its buff will be identical to—and exclusive with—Demonic Pact. Maybe I'll get to raid Affliction again then**.

Then, we have 3 warlocks in our roster right now, and there's a lot of similarity between Demonology gear and Affliction gear—they're not quite interchangeable (stat weights vary a bit), but I'm the only real candidate to go Demonology without having to reacquire a ton of gear.

On top of that, many of the heroic ICC encounters are much better suited to Demonology: Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Saurfang, Putricide, Valithria, Sindragosa, Arthas. Nobody cares about the Lolboat Lootship, of course. Rotface, Festergut, the Princes and the Blood Queen would probably favour Affliction, but 3/12 isn't enough to make do with an Elemental Shaman instead of a Demonology warlock. In practice, I was switching to the spec I rolled for making heroics less boring in over half of the encounters in Icecrown Citadel. So I made the change permanent and sucked it up.

Pros

• Demonic Pact—the raid loves you. Woohoo.


• Purple Pajama Suit—"form of: Lollidan" is goofy, but fun.


• Survivability—I have more of it now. That's good, right? It's nice for some of the damage aura fights.


• Soul Fire Spam—big crits are better than big tits (for this 'mo warlock anyway).


• Trash—is my bitch. I tanked the two trap-spawned geist packs in the plague wing in an ICC-10 while doing over 30k DPS to them as Lollidan.

Cons

• Weak personal single-target DPS—going from top 5 to bottom 5 is not fun. It's also pointless from a design perspective. I don't get what Blizzard's doing here.


• Demonic Pact—you've buffed everyone else, so they're relatively even better than your lacklustre purple ass.


• Demonic Pact—you don't really think the other DPS isn't wondering what's up with your crappy personal DPS do you?


• Survivability—you lose some of it outside of the pantsuit of power. On nights of shite (like last night) your healers won't notice. I had to fucking Drain Life on Festergut.


• Soul Fire Spam—shards are a pain again. Drain Soul on a wipe instead of speed-wiping, to avoid running out of shards. This is particularly bad on fights like Saurfang, where you want to use every last Decimation Soul Fire you can on Saurfang, once the beasts are dead.


• Trash—nobody cares.

My biggest beef is with the weak single-target DPS. Perhaps it's because last night was a night of not seeing the Decimation execute phase, when our numbers take off again, perhaps I'm just not very good at the Demonology rotation (to be vain, here, I don't think so), or perhaps my latency and nuke spam don't play well together. I just don't get Blizzard's design decision here, though—or for ToW shamans—they've made the buff required for serious raiding anyway. Why penalize the player who brings it?

* I wrote a little mod to figure this out. Haven't published it yet. Too lazy.
** But see my upcoming post on the Cataclysm preview of much meh.