New Affliction

[Deleted]

Lorewise its fine but mechanically it sucks balls. Lifetap is an incredibly outdated mechanic that should have disappeared a long time ago.

Nothing feels worse than having to waste a GCD just to get mana back and do nothing else.

You'd rather press nothing while moving?

Lifetap is fine. Unstable affliction using a shard is what gripes me. Affliction should always have corruption, COA and UA rolling, or at least aim for that. Having UA cost a shard and the optimal use seemingly to stack it ontop of itself in a chain of casts, bleh.

Affliction is a prime case of what I was worried about with the bare-bones Legion class design where there's so little in the base kit and you have to build some semblance of a class out of talents. Classes that I have less interest in I feel like I have three legitimate options (optimal choices aside), with some of the warlock specs it feels like the choice is made for me because it's an ex-core ability that feels like it should be there.

Haunt and SL I'd love to have been baseline, SL I've sorely missed since it was axed and I really enjoyed haunt in Cata / WOTLK where it was a CD based hardcast with minor lifetap / boss synergy. I always loved the flow of WOTLK / Cata affliction where there'd be a nice mix of hardcast SB and haunt, dot refreshes and channeling in the execute range. MOP and WOD felt far too channel heavy, Legion feels like it's shaping up to be very DOT refresh heavy.

So our job now is to make sure Agony and Corruption is up 100% of the time while applying Unstable Affliction? Drain Soul is just there as a mana drainer?

When wasn't this the case?

[Fenzha]

So our job now is to make sure Agony and Corruption is up 100% of the time while applying Unstable Affliction? Drain Soul is just there as a mana drainer?

Yeh, basically what i took from it. just keep dots up all the time and depending on the lvl 30 talent/situation either maintain UA on the target or fire them all out at once. Drain soul seems to only really be there for sniping shards and having something to push in the 1 second gap between dot refreshing if you dont have to life tap.

Lifetap is fine. Unstable affliction using a shard is what gripes me. Affliction should always have corruption, COA and UA rolling, or at least aim for that. Having UA cost a shard and the optimal use seemingly to stack it ontop of itself in a chain of casts, bleh.

New UA is the reason i wont play Aff anymore, id much rather have it back how it was before. Only change aff really needed imo was to balance dots around not needing haunt/drain for their damage.

[munky0408]

I for one love the new affliction. It can be tailored to the unique situation you are facing, whether it be a pure single target fight, a perma 2 or 3 target cleave fight or even a fight with heavy heavy aoe. If you are looking for a talent build that fits all situation and will not be lackluster in another situation then please do not get legion. The talents were designed to offer compelling decision based on what type of fight is coming up.

Affliction always lack a good aoe tool. Now with Sow the Seeds people that enjoyed seed spamming in WOTLK day, seeing all those explosions of damage going arround can do exactly that again. Further then that if these adds will be living for a little while you will get corruption rolling on all of them. Pair that with an infinite corruption and you are golden.

If your facing a pure single target fight then go for effigy and make that single target fight become a 2 target fight making every single target fight you will ever encounter an affliction's lock dream. Make it even stronger get contagion and roll these UA for more damage. Contagion is not meant for a multi target fight go for the better corruption in that case.

Now UA offers compelling game-play. The boss will have a period of taking increased damage, pool your shards so you can unleash a very very strong UA for that time. Every 45 second you need to burst something, pool shards again and release that ultra strong UA on that mob when he comes out. UA offers you flexibility now. Use it during periods of procs like trinkets.

The one big reason why I think people hate affliction is it needs to be micro managed, and spatial awareness is greatly needed for that spec. If you hate maintaining 10 or so dots with different timers because your keeping those dots on 3 targets then DO NOT ROLL AFFLICTION.

The other thing people often overlook when trying a spec is their UI. If something about the spec feels painful maybe there's an addon out there that can help you. Prime example all my dots are Mouseover macros. It facilitates multi doting without needing a single target swap. Also get something like Kui_Nameplates and make sure to show those dots on the enemies nameplates. Make your UI comfortable for you, stop crying about how soul effigy is awkward and figure out how you can tweak that UI to suit your needs.

Number wise currently I am pulling same if not 10k more with the current affliction versus before the patch.

Bottom line, tailor the spec to the situation faced, tweak that UI to show all the required information you need to pull off the spec and AFFLICTION will shine.

[jackofwind]

Number wise currently I am pulling same if not 10k more with the current affliction versus before the patch.

No way in hell are you doing this unless you were already pulling mediocre DPS.

I was pulling 90k single target with 170k burst before the patch. I assure you those numbers are not happening anymore.

stop crying about how soul effigy is awkward

But is is awkward. It drops at your feet, you automatically target switch to it, the nameplate doesn't show up as a targetable enemy, and it's stationary. It's clunky, and Blizz should have done a better job with it.

Refreshing DoTs, no matter how strong, is not the most compelling gameplay. WoD was channel heavy and that sucked, for sure, but even bringing back Nightfall procs would make Aff feel better - give us something to get excited about in between our methodical refreshing of C / CoA / SL / and new UA stacking. We don't have a single hardcast non-DoT ability with frontloaded damage other than Haunt, which is talented and trash-tier.

[Fenzha]

But is is awkward. It drops at your feet, you automatically target switch to it, the nameplate doesn't show up as a targetable enemy, and it's stationary. It's clunky, and Blizz should have done a better job with it.

I don't know if it could ever work but maybe linking yourself to the enemy and casting the dots on yourself would work better, have it so they didnt deal damage to your health but ticked and transferred the damage. Prety easy to target self and you will never be out of range. They could go with the whole warlocks damage themselves to do stuff system they liked so much and have the dots take like 1% of your health away per tick to the effigy target.

I'm awful at coming up with ideas but there have to be better ones out there.

[skitzin]

Affliction DPS wise at 110 is doing quite fine, particularly on single target. We do require ramp up time though which can either: let our DPS shine or, if the mob/boss dies quickly, look like a potato.

Once you get sufficient haste you will be at 4/5 shards in most fights quite easily hence you'll be able to spam UA consistently for the most part. Life tap is a non-issue really. Once you get into the habit of tapping every now and again like we used "back in the day" you won't really notice it.

The biggest let down is that we have to choose whether we go for AoE or ST damage. This combined with our artifact traits requiring death to activate put us in an awkward position end game. Our AoE DPS is okay, but spikes really high once mobs start to die off which can give a false perception of our AoE abbilities.

I agree that the UI design for soul effigy is also awkward and clunky. It is an example of poor design that needs to be corrected for anything serious. I suspect we will have an addon author will make a subsitute to fill in, but that rather proves the point though doesn't it.

[jackofwind]

Affliction DPS wise at 110 is doing quite fine, particularly on single target. We do require ramp up time though which can either: let our DPS shine or, if the mob/boss dies quickly, look like a potato.

Once you get sufficient haste you will be at 4/5 shards in most fights quite easily hence you'll be able to spam UA consistently for the most part. Life tap is a non-issue really. Once you get into the habit of tapping every now and again like we used "back in the day" you won't really notice it.

The biggest let down is that we have to choose whether we go for AoE or ST damage. This combined with our artifact traits requiring death to activate put us in an awkward position end game. Our AoE DPS is okay, but spikes really high once mobs start to die off which can give a false perception of our AoE abbilities.

I agree that the UI design for soul effigy is also awkward and clunky. It is an example of poor design that needs to be corrected for anything serious. I suspect we will have an addon author will make a subsitute to fill in, but that rather proves the point though doesn't it.

At 110 is Soul Effigy still the be-all-and-end-all, or does Soul conduit stack up in any way?

To my mind Soul Conduit at this point is a huge QoL improvement over managing the clunkiness of Effigy.

[Rogalicus]

What I despise the most is the changes in SoC. Not only it casts longer and doesn't detonate on it's own anymore, they also made it not to explode on mob's death. In TW it's a wasted cast most of the time, since adds die before you are able to detonate it (I don't even talk about applied Corruption, since it does a couple of ticks even if you are lucky). It might have a niche on fights like Iskar and Socrethar, but I don't see the spell being of any use anywhere else.

[skitzin]

At 110 is Soul Effigy still the be-all-and-end-all, or does Soul conduit stack up in any way?

To my mind Soul Conduit at this point is a huge QoL improvement over managing the clunkiness of Effigy.

Soul effigy seems to dominate in the ST damage department. Soul Conduit only really overtakes that when you are fight 3 or more targets. Which makes it more suited to an AoE or cleave fight to me.

- - - Updated - - -

What I despise the most is the changes in SoC. Not only it casts longer and doesn't detonate on it's own anymore, they also made it not to explode on mob's death. In TW it's a wasted cast most of the time, since adds die before you are able to detonate it (I don't even talk about applied Corruption, since it does a couple of ticks even if you are lucky). It might have a niche on fights like Iskar and Socrethar, but I don't see the spell being of any use anywhere else.

If you were looking to use SoC in any serious fashion you'd really need the "Sow the Seeds" talent. But our AoE suffers from a continued theme which is that most of our AoE damage triggers on or near death which defeats the whole point.

[Cheze]

as someone who hasn't really played aff since 3.1 dropped, I really like the changes. It feels more like oldschool affliction than the boringcakes cata/MoP/WoD implementation.

the only thing I don't really like about it is how short the duration on UA is compared with the duration of the drain life/soul channel, but that's not the end of the world

a lot of the affliction artifact traits also seem kinda lackluster, but the on-use does seem fun

[muto]

new UA ruins it for me.

Why? It's really similar to old Haunt. 1.5 second cast that costs 1 Soul Shard.

[Fenzha]

Why? It's really similar to old Haunt. 1.5 second cast that costs 1 Soul Shard.

I never had to cast 5 haunts back to back to get them to decent damage and this has to be cast almost twice as much as old haunt if you wanna keep up the damage amp because of the new UA duration..

[Deleted]

as someone who hasn't really played aff since 3.1 dropped, I really like the changes. It feels more like oldschool affliction than the boringcakes cata/MoP/WoD implementation.

the only thing I don't really like about it is how short the duration on UA is compared with the duration of the drain life/soul channel, but that's not the end of the world

a lot of the affliction artifact traits also seem kinda lackluster, but the on-use does seem fun

Wat? Why is Cata in with the shitty revamp affliction when Cata is the closest spec to WOTLK affliction.

Why? It's really similar to old Haunt. 1.5 second cast that costs 1 Soul Shard.

Are you really calling two spells similar based on cast time and resource cost?

You might as well ask why people wanted fel flame back when they had conflag. They're both instant cast spells that do damage.

[muto]

Wat? Why is Cata in with the shitty revamp affliction when Cata is the closest spec to WOTLK affliction.



Are you really calling two spells similar based on cast time and resource cost?

You might as well ask why people wanted fel flame back when they had conflag. They're both instant cast spells that do damage.

Conflag has a cooldown, but nice try on the comparison. If you're moving your conflag might be on cd.

[wholol]

Might as well renamed this thread to " new affliction thread " because the old affliction thread was getting kinda , you know... old.

Gotta talk about the same stuff we're talking about over on the "old affliction thread" here coz it seems fresh and new.

Pretty much sums it up.

[Deleted]

Conflag has a cooldown, but nice try on the comparison. If you're moving your conflag might be on cd.

It's almost like I was trying to point out that comparing Haunt to UA was pants on head retarded considering nothing bar them using a resource and having a similar cast time are even remotely similar.

[Deleted]

I'm very happy about the new iteration of Affliction warlock. I personally thought the MoP/WoD iteration was an abomination, and fuck everything about malefic grasp. I appreciated the idea of a filler that "enhances" our dots damage, but in truth it basically boiled down to having half assed dots unless you keep your filler up. Made for some awkward as fuck situations on multidotting fights.

I like soul well, but there has been like no UI support for it. It's hard to spot amidst the chaos of a encounter for several reasons, and it seems like Blizzard has accepted it and is letting the addon creators solve the issue. Really disappointing.

Outside of that, as long as I don't have to bother with Mana Tap as a talent, or grimoire of supremacy, I'm good. Supremacy is such a mind boggling shit grimoire. Remove your only baseline cooldown, so you can have a passive as fuck doomguard/infernal instead. Unimaginative and utterly boring talent. A shame it found it's way into Legion.

[muto]

It's almost like I was trying to point out that comparing Haunt to UA was pants on head retarded considering nothing bar them using a resource and having a similar cast time are even remotely similar.

Yeah it is similar with Contagion.

[skitzin]

Outside of that, as long as I don't have to bother with Mana Tap as a talent, or grimoire of supremacy, I'm good. Supremacy is such a mind boggling shit grimoire. Remove your only baseline cooldown, so you can have a passive as fuck doomguard/infernal instead. Unimaginative and utterly boring talent. A shame it found it's way into Legion.

Well you should really be going GoServ for fights that are single target damage. Fel hunter should be your default permanent pet because f how Shadow Bite works. And obviously if you are talented into GofServ you should also use the Felhunter as your grimoire cooldown.

Fights that are either AoE or cleave benefit better from GoSac due to the splash damage that makes it pull ahead slightly in this instance.

GoSup, however, is a good choice for questing and world content since the sustained damage from mob to mob is more valuable than the increased burst every few minutes. But you'd never use this in raids or dungeons.

[Deleted]

Well you should really be going GoServ for fights that are single target damage. Fel hunter should be your default permanent pet because f how Shadow Bite works. And obviously if you are talented into GofServ you should also use the Felhunter as your grimoire cooldown.

Fights that are either AoE or cleave benefit better from GoSac due to the splash damage that makes it pull ahead slightly in this instance.

GoSup, however, is a good choice for questing and world content since the sustained damage from mob to mob is more valuable than the increased burst every few minutes. But you'd never use this in raids or dungeons.

Oh, don't worry I know. I'm just saying that generally speaking, GoSup is a horribly lazy and wasteful talent. It is neither good nor an interesting choice, but for people who don't really want to be all that involved with rotations can pick it and not worry about having that extra cooldown. I'd just prefer they had made a different, less passive talent in it's stead.