[BETA] Affliction Warlock Discussion

[dholland662]

Objective for Beta:

1) make Reap Soul more interesting (the idea is fine as a mini cd, but not so as a maintenance buff imo)

And/or

2) better gold rings. If we only get one of the two improved (soulflame, wrath of consumption) that would be great.

Soulflame could easily work as a procced spell which does splash damage, not too Afflicy but it would be nice to get some bolt action back.

These are just my ideas, didnt get an invite so I just want to suggest them here

[Deleted]

everybody gets cool new animations and affliction locks are still stuck with the barely visible 2004 dot effects

[nerdzrool]

Objective for Beta:

1) make Reap Soul more interesting (the idea is fine as a mini cd, but not so as a maintenance buff imo)

Souls really don't have a high enough spawn rate to maintain 100% uptime on the buff in most scenarios. It's mostly used at 4 shards before UA dumps. I personally don't find it very maintenance-heavy in it's current incarnation.

[Deleted]

everybody gets cool new animations and affliction locks are still stuck with the barely visible 2004 dot effects

Yeah, this. Agony for example, they could replace that with one of those "red slashes" effects they use when a mod is, err, slashing at you. Now Corruption, well, that could always induce repeated vomiting! heh...

Also agree with the above. the artefact gold talents are awful, two of them anyway, they only buff you when stuff dies. Now that's OK if they adjust afflocks so they perform okay without them, but it kinda renders the whole thing pointless.

It also implies a balance problem, because if we perform ok without them, we'll be op when they are actually useful.

[dholland662]

Souls really don't have a high enough spawn rate to maintain 100% uptime on the buff in most scenarios. It's mostly used at 4 shards before UA dumps. I personally don't find it very maintenance-heavy in it's current incarnation.

works for me

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Yeah, this. Agony for example, they could replace that with one of those "red slashes" effects they use when a mod is, err, slashing at you. Now Corruption, well, that could always induce repeated vomiting! heh...

Also agree with the above. the artefact gold talents are awful, two of them anyway, they only buff you when stuff dies. Now that's OK if they adjust afflocks so they perform okay without them, but it kinda renders the whole thing pointless.

It also implies a balance problem, because if we perform ok without them, we'll be op when they are actually useful.

Give us abilities like Carrion Swarm, or a spell where we literally spread felblight. We're the warlock plague spreaders so let's spread some death

Blizzard, iirc, in Wrath said Affliction had to be about shadow damage and damage over time. They've taken it way too far

[Canitank]

Souls really don't have a high enough spawn rate to maintain 100% uptime on the buff in most scenarios. It's mostly used at 4 shards before UA dumps. I personally don't find it very maintenance-heavy in it's current incarnation.

I could be playing it completely wrong here, but I find Reap Souls far more useful at lower stacks with more frequent use to increase the proc chance on Compound Interest from 10% to 20% than waiting for higher stacks and doing some sort of UA 'dump'. I don't really find myself 'dumping' UA into anything unless something really needs to die quickly and I have excess shards. I'd rather take 1 UA at 75% increased damage over stacking UA. With that play style I find UA as my 2nd highest damage source behind Agony even when I take Absolute Corruption because I'm lazy. I might stack 2 or 3 UAs if I hit 5 shards without having gained a 5 stack of Compound Interest as to not waste shard procs.

Quick edit to mention that in it's current iteration it does not feel like something you can keep up as a maintenance buff and moreso need to pick and choose the right time to use it.

[Baconeggcheese]

It also implies a balance problem, because if we perform ok without them, we'll be op when they are actually useful.

Depends, quickly dying adds tends to be the place that aff shits the bed. So these traits that trigger on death could just prevent aff from totally shitting the bed instead of making aff op in those situations.

If its a single add dying here or there it likely won't matter much, if its a bunch of adds dying then its a matter of what you can cleave soul flame onto that actually matters. Like the scorpion boss you can cleave onto him as the packs of adds die and that could be some hefty dmg to make up for whats likely going to be aff not really getting to do much aoe to those adds otherwise as they'll likely be burst down.

[Amnesia101]

There seems to have been quite a few buffs to affliction from the Alpha to Beta transition. Healing is ridiculous, DL will pretty much heal you to full in 6 seconds and out heals boss damage atm. Shard, soul and CI procs are high, coupled with SE we put out stupid amount of ST damage not to mention 2-4 targets. AoE still suffers, P.S and Seed are pretty mediocre still even with persistent mob HP, but I guess that's a good tradeoff. Remains to be seen how the interaction with Soul flame and Wrath of Consumption works. If they proc from any mob that died that you have dotted we'll be in serious need of a nerf as there is no tradeoff for Aff.

[Deleted]

I guess the tradeoff would be that two of the Gold traits would be completely useless in a fight like Oregorger, Gruul or Kromog.

Affliction was always good on single targets or anything with long lived multiple add fights - although the shortness of the DOTs will make that more difficult (and tedious), but on the other hand, this is balanced by DOTs being stronger and not having to be empowered by multipliers such as Haunt

It seems as though affliction will still be weak on AOE, though not to the point of uselessness as now (even if you take Cataclysm)

I agree about the healing, I was surprised at just how much they have assigned, particularly to affliction, particularly as PVP is now entirely separate

Maybe it's to compensate for a perceived very heavy need to Lifetap. They won't want players kicked from dungeons because they piss off the healers.

[Amnesia101]

I guess the tradeoff would be that two of the Gold traits would be completely useless in a fight like Oregorger, Gruul or Kromog.

Affliction was always good on single targets or anything with long lived multiple add fights - although the shortness of the DOTs will make that more difficult (and tedious), but on the other hand, this is balanced by DOTs being stronger and not having to be empowered by multipliers such as Haunt

It seems as though affliction will still be weak on AOE, though not to the point of uselessness as now (even if you take Cataclysm)

I agree about the healing, I was surprised at just how much they have assigned, particularly to affliction, particularly as PVP is now entirely separate

Maybe it's to compensate for a perceived very heavy need to Lifetap. They won't want players kicked from dungeons because they piss off the healers.

LT on beta now is on par with Live or slightly less, the healing is out of control and will have to nerfed (there's an aditional 30% healing from an artifact it's ridiculous).

S.E will probably see it's damaged reduced too. I don't see them buffing 36 other specs in favor of catching up to Aff as it is wayyyy to strong atm. Fun though.

[nerdzrool]

LT on beta now is on par with Live or slightly less

It's not even close. I usually have to life tap twice on Archi on live, each life tap restores like 70% of my mana since it scales with your health pool. I find myself life tapping at least once or more just on quest mobs in beta, dungeons bosses often require 4+. Gear is only going to make this worse as mana cost increases with haste and life tap hits harder as health pool increases, while restoring the same amount of mana.

[Kyoda]

Sorry to break the on-going topic, but I would like to ask a silly thing for those in Beta, since I'm not in, to ask them to put a better effect or to upgrade the spells animations for Corruption, Agony and Unstable Affliction. Please?

[Terryn]

Objective for Beta:

1) make Reap Soul more interesting (the idea is fine as a mini cd, but not so as a maintenance buff imo)

Honestly reap soul is pretty solid as is imo. On single target its definitely a mini cooldown, but works much more than that, increasing the proc chance of CI allowing you to get more super strong UA off. In multi target its almost permanently up. Only thing i would like to see is its got a nasty effect of if you have a buff for 30 seconds, and you use it on a 1 soul stack, you now have a 5 second buff. Ether make it append time, or make it not useable unless it would increase the duration of the buff.

2) better gold rings. If we only get one of the two improved (soulflame, wrath of consumption) that would be great.

Soulflame could easily work as a procced spell which does splash damage, not too Afflicy but it would be nice to get some bolt action back.

These are just my ideas, didnt get an invite so I just want to suggest them here

At this point i'm confused why CI and Soul flame haven't swapped locations outside of "most classes have an aoe gold trait", and this is probably the only reason for that... CI is probably the strongest trait in the entire tree, giving almost an effective 50% increase in our strongest ability / shard dump.

Wraith just needs to work off of souls, and have a 5 stack cap no matter how many souls are consumed (12 soul consumed gives a 5 stack, 5 souls consumed gives a 5 stack). Lots of wiggle room for "Should I eat the souls now or wait a few more, or is it better to get the longer buff" decision making with that case, and it allows more stuff to work off of the eat soul button.

[dholland662]

Is Soul Effigy or Soul Conduit our go to talent? I'd prefer the latter for the obvious reason

As for the people saying we need visual upgrades. You're right but the DoT effects probably wont be enough.

Just for later on in the game consider suggesting to Blizzard that Affliction have more spells than various DoTs and that dreadlord are a good source of inspiration (Carrion Swam seems up our alley).

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At this point i'm confused why CI and Soul flame haven't swapped locations outside of "most classes have an aoe gold trait", and this is probably the only reason for that... CI is probably the strongest trait in the entire tree, giving almost an effective 50% increase in our strongest ability / shard dump.

Wraith just needs to work off of souls, and have a 5 stack cap no matter how many souls are consumed (12 soul consumed gives a 5 stack, 5 souls consumed gives a 5 stack). Lots of wiggle room for "Should I eat the souls now or wait a few more, or is it better to get the longer buff" decision making with that case, and it allows more stuff to work off of the eat soul button.

Okay, that does sound like a great suggestion terryn, if you have Beta access make it. Or someone else make it.

After all, the trait is called Wrath of CONSUMPTION so we should be consuming something.

Although if it is caused by Reap Soul does Reap Spul buff it properly?

[Molag]

Been playing the beta but haven't quite figured out which lvl 90 talent to use. GoSac seems lackluster compared to live and almost not worth using and GoSup you lose out on Infernal/Doomguard cd, and have never enjoyed GoServ. Plus with GoSac and GoSup you lose out on the felhunter shadowbite dmg boost making the "preferred demon for each spec" pointless. Other than that I'm enjoying affliction.

[Scathbais]

Been playing the beta but haven't quite figured out which lvl 90 talent to use. GoSac seems lackluster compared to live and almost not worth using and GoSup you lose out on Infernal/Doomguard cd, and have never enjoyed GoServ. Plus with GoSac and GoSup you lose out on the felhunter shadowbite dmg boost making the "preferred demon for each spec" pointless. Other than that I'm enjoying affliction.

I don't believe GoSac is supposed to be used the way it is in Legion. The Sac pet does the exact same damage as the Sup pet. The difference?

1) Sup gives us a 2 minute cd of an additional 100% dmg buffed pet.
2) Sac gives us the ability to sac our pet for aoe moments and then resummon our pet for non-aoe parts of an encounter. Not sure how the numbers work out but we gain no benefits (extra health, healing or abilities) from running sac 100% of the time unless there are aoe opportunities for a significant amount of time. Not sure how much AOE is required for the Sac dmg proc to exceed the single target pet damage, but I will leave it to our esteemed theorycrafting friends to figure that out.

TL;DR: I *think* the idea of GrimSac is to sac and resummon pets during an encounter and to not stay Sac 100% of the time.

[Deleted]

I don't believe GoSac is supposed to be used the way it is in Legion. The Sac pet does the exact same damage as the Sup pet. The difference?

1) Sup gives us a 2 minute cd of an additional 100% dmg buffed pet.
2) Sac gives us the ability to sac our pet for aoe moments and then resummon our pet for non-aoe parts of an encounter. Not sure how the numbers work out but we gain no benefits (extra health, healing or abilities) from running sac 100% of the time unless there are aoe opportunities for a significant amount of time. Not sure how much AOE is required for the Sac dmg proc to exceed the single target pet damage, but I will leave it to our esteemed theorycrafting friends to figure that out.

TL;DR: I *think* the idea of GrimSac is to sac and resummon pets during an encounter and to not stay Sac 100% of the time.

I like your thought process, but that basically sounds like a version of pet twisting. However i think you are reading to much into it, Grim of Sac has always just been about simply allowing you to play without a pet, as some ppl hate the AI. If you can game encounters to benefit what you are suggesting kudos mate, but i don't really think thats what the talent is intended for.

[Molag]

I think that sort of makes sense because currently it doesn't make sense to run around with the pet sac'd 100% of the time like on live since it doesn't give the other bonuses of damage buffs and health when paired with SL.

[Deleted]

Why affli didn't have a cool video with the new animations spells efects like other classes ?

[Jessicka]

Why affli didn't have a cool video with the new animations spells efects like other classes ?

Because it doesn't have any.