Honestly, it's kinda hilarious to read complaining about "feedback listening" in the Affliction thread. Like, Reap Souls is a giant, glowing example of the devs listening to feedback.
Honestly, it's kinda hilarious to read complaining about "feedback listening" in the Affliction thread. Like, Reap Souls is a giant, glowing example of the devs listening to feedback.
If only they'd fixed the Gold traits to accomodate the changes to Reap Soul, liek they promised but haven't and are obviously not going to. It would be a hefty rework there's no time for now.
Two Gold traits are clearly designed to synergise with the old Reap Soul, particularly in fights where there are few to no adds to trigger Soul Flame and Wrath - except Uthalesh itsef no longer produces killable "adds", so in a Zakuun style fight they will be absolutely no use whatever.
It's going to create balance issues, since two Gold traits are very strong in mass-add fights, and useless in others. The old RS evened that out: now it doesn't.
Not having experience with another classes, but I can say aff lock is awesome in outdoor environment: tanking and dpsing 4 elites is Fang'rila with permanent infernal is easy; doing 6 needs some help with dps (nearly constant health funnel needed). Not counting self-healing tanks, who else can do this ?
I miss some tools-of-the-old (soulswap and water walking especially) but I am happy with my aff lock now.
Edit: iLvl 700.
Last edited by bithalver; 2016-08-22 at 04:06 PM.
There's the argument that soul generation on single target was not enough to sustain these talents to begin with, therefore they were made specifically to prop Affliction up on AoE, especially burst AoE (where Aff has been worthless since... late Wrath?) since day one. On o Zakuun-style fight (which is btw a very rare scenario) Aff will be meh to begin with, but is balanced accordingly for that.
The old incarnation of spirits (that you had to target and kill) was absolute cancer btw, worse even than the Effigy that makes you actually run to melee then run back on opener.
Affliction's the one spec I'm moderately optimistic about - the devs are steering it back in a dot-focused direction and seemingly letting them do work as opposed ot being tied to filler and our talent selections are pretty nice bar Soul Effigy. Sorely tempted to play affliction over destruction despite which one I think will end up being optimal because of that.
Yeah, maybe I should have left that at two. I guess it's pretty bullshit to claim they haven't listened considering some of the changes we've seen, even if I still think the class is riddled with some age-old problems.
I bet you the Devs classify some of those as "traditional weaknesses" instead of age-old problems, and they've said they want to emphasize both the strengths and weaknesses of the various specs in Legion. If you look around, everyone's complaining about something they feel they're lacking. Which is a kind of balance too. Instead of giving everyone a full toolbox, they gave everyone an incomplete toolbox with different people missing different tools so groups have to work together and take turns solving problems.
It's a nice idea, in theory. Instead of a bland homogeneous mush you've got a clearer distinction between the different options. Where it falls down is if they fail to make the problems varied enough to match the different toolboxes. Like when there's a raid tier that leans too heavily on the same gimmick, the people with the right tool for that gimmick ride high and the people missing that tool feel like shit.
Problem: Mages and Hunters are more well-rounded with fewer obvious weaknesses
http://www.icy-veins.com/wow/class-guides
Maybe this will change at 110 but I dont see how exactly
Maybe Fire is, but Arcane and Frost, as far as most people are concerned, are trash tier right now :P. Just look at any Mage forum.
The thing is the "traditional weaknesses" seem to be patched if anything, whereas one specs problems seem to have bled over into another spec. I'm fine with affliction having ramp time, I've been moaning for years about how affliction turned from a ramp spec with one of the best mechanically executed, er, execute phases in the game to a burst spec that started gagging on roulette shards.
It's things like destruction inheriting affliction's AOE problems, the return of odd maintenance buffs galore, mobility which has been a gripe ever since Fel Flame was removed being made even worse by the removal of portal. Affliction seems to be struggling a little on ST right now but have surprisingly good AOE despite that being a trademark flaw, purely a numbers thing but I'm curious as to if it's ST can be buffed up numerically without them making it too good elsewhere, but weak ST certainly isn't a traditional weakness of aff.
I'm fine with the class being a relatively immobile class with a tanky feel, but I really don't agree with them having absolutely zero mobility CD's baseline. Portal was already restrictive enough, requiring prep time and not really allowing you to gain any mobility on the fly, it wasn't going to let you speed across the ground in a dungeon or in pvp unless you'd set it up. I'm glad KJC is gone, I'm not glad that they seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
I see hardly any unholy DK's, MM hunters or fire mages complaining, because they are extremely well-rounded with virtually no glaring weaknesses.
Blizzard dev Q&A mentioned that they want to go back to the old model of "a good hunter would be really useful here" style stuff, and have strengths and weaknesses which forces raid comps to pick roles and comps...
...which is a complete reversal of their "bring the player not the class" policy, which was brought in years ago because they found that raid teams were class stacking and class dumping for different encounters and/or raids
And the problem is compounded by the fact that they seem to have dumped most of the weaknesses on one or two classes and most of the strengths on one or two others.
I really can't think of any situation where you'd say "yes we really need a warlock for this"
Warlock seems to have weaknesses in spades but few strengths, and nothing that others can;t do better, or which can do as well but which aren't tied to weaknesses
Given equal player skill, there's really nothing a warlock of any spec brings that a hunter or mage doesn't, but said hunters and mages are better all-rounders on top.
They mentioned that IN the interview.
There's plenty of space between "bring the player not the class" and "we can bring 20 of anything and it makes no difference", "bring the player not the class" was explicitly mentioned in that interview to be moving away from raid comp minmaxing being to the extent that you had a melee group that was all co-support and any melee outside of the group was massively gimped.
Class being desired and having utility is fantastic, it baffles me that people would ever argue against this now that 10man raiding has been killed. It helps prop up weak classes and allows raid mechanics to be more intricate.
It pushes people into classes they don't want to play if you don't happen to have one on your team. It can really suck if you don;t have one at all or that player can't make it for that night...or that week...
Excuse me have you seen the sims?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen.../real_sims.png
..and so he left, with terrible power in shaking hands.
Love the portals
There's a difference between "a good hunter would be really useful here" and "We can't kill this boss because we have zero hunters". Most guilds try to have as wide a range of classes as possible anyway, it helps protect against buffs / nerfs, protects against gearing bottlenecks / tier distribution problems and generally helps with mechanics.
Likewise, you could argue when there's no reason to bring a wide range of classes it "forces" people to re-roll to whatever outputs the best damage, because why bother playing a ret paladin that brings zero utility when you can bring a mage that dominates the meters.
I think it's far more interesting to make encounters where you might get gains from having a warlock in the raid, because a warlock can enslave some demon add during the fight and gain you extra damage as a result, but if you don't have one then it's simply trapped by a hunter or sheeped or whatever. Encounters doable either way, but in one scenario a class gets to feel like they're doing something useful only they can do and getting to experience their Class Fantasy.
Getting more than a little off topic though, so I'll leave it at that.
So I leveled up my affliction lock to 100 and geared him to ~700 ilvl via invasions. However, I get absolutely smoked trying to solo even the "mini bosses" at the invasion structures - the weaker named demons that are 101-102. Is this normal and what I should expect, or am I doing it wrong?
Depends on the quest.
Quests intended to be done solo? Easily. Elites that are a stiff challenge for one person or a good match for two? Afflic shouldn't have much trouble with those. Elites that are meant to be a challenge for three people, with at least one healer or tank in their number? That gets dicier, but if you're slow and cautious I can see doing it, as long as there aren't any boss mechanics that absolutely require an interrupt or something. World quests for what are basically open world 5-man bosses? Not until you majorly out gear it.