Is affliction really overpowered?

[Count Zero]

Affliction situational golden traits are making it impossible to balance.

I don't know how many times I've had to say this everywhere ... just make those accrue/proc at a certain minimum rate when things aren't dying, and a certain maximum rate when they are. Done. They're still better with adds but not worthless on Patchwerk. Done.

[burek]

Its a little insane you want affliction balanced against a specific type of encounter. Blizz choose to give us 2 useless gold traits for st raid bosses that give us a massive boost in some boss fights. We cant target switch at all, we are THE TUNNEL spec right now with no mobility at all. We deserve to be a top st spec when our 90% of time useless gold traits can actually get used. And warlocks are the most powerfull casters on azeroth, its class fantasy that we are the strongest dps class when we can use the souls of our enemies against them and leech on their power .

Nighthold just happens to have some good bosses for us. Didnt look at Tomb bosses yet but I doubt that its full of small adds like nighthold.

You don't deserve to be a top ST spec, and especially not to do as much damage as you do now. Ask for better target switching or something, but a massive nerf at this point is more than needed

[lonely zergling]

You don't deserve to be a top ST spec, and especially not to do as much damage as you do now. Ask for better target switching or something, but a massive nerf at this point is more than needed

If Affliction needs a nerf so do Assasination Rogues / Frost Mages / Demonology Warlocks.

Cant nerf one good class and let the classes who are even stronger at this "ST bossdmg niche" be like they are.

With the direction the T20 set goes we are intended to be the ST tunnel specc it seems, get used to us being a good st spec for 7.2. Shadows stole our multi dot niche and I honestly dont miss it .

[Count Zero]

Cant nerf one good class and let the classes who are even stronger ... be like they are.

You must be new to Warlocks

[Fleckens]

Slow ramp up.
Tied to a build. Can't excel at other areas with one build (like some other classes, DH, rogue, DK can). Has to switch to SoW or WiA or AC for certain bosses.
Bad at target switching.
Bad at nuking down adds that have to die within 5 seconds. Casting UA + first tick takes too long
Limited mobility.
No immunity cooldowns or cheat deaths.
Does rely on others to kill adds
Selfish specc that leeches on adds rather than nuking them down.
Single target is not that strong. only gets strong when you can benefit from adds with WoC/Reap. Look at trilliax logs.


Affliction looks extremely strong on logs and damage meters, but don't forget that we also have some real hardcore players like Sjeletyven that do 10 runs a weak to get a good parse and so basically "delete" all their previous runs and only make that one with the best RNG count on logs. Lots of people like him out there, especially for Affliction warlocks. Haven't seen that with other classes as much to be brutally honest.

I think affliction should be a top specc, simply because we don't have all tools available in the game like other classes do. If affliction had bad single target damage it would be a dead specc simply because of the ramp up time. Why would anyone take a specc that needs time to build up damage if they can have instead burst damage instead?

We also scale extremely well with gear, especially secondaries, legendaries and tier set combined.

Affliction is strong yes, but it NH bosses do heavily favor affliction and the whole situation is more complicated than a simple number fix. Let's see what 7.2.5 is going to have in store. Maybe some shift on damage distribution would be nice

You know, most of those things could also be said for shadowpriests and yet we are one of the worst single target specs in the game. We are better at spread out long living targets than you are but on the other hand your aoe is miles ahead of our non existant one.

Warlocks seem to be in a similar position to shadow balance wise where certain situations will make them op. Only difference is that warlocks seem to be balanced around around not being in these situations and so they are way too strong when they happen. Shadowpriests on the other hand seem to be balanced around fights with long living adds and high twist of fate uptime, meaning we are really bad when we aren't in those situations.

[Deleted]

Soul Conduit nerf?

Fantastic. Let's remember that:

Soul Effigy is a shit talent to use in dungeons.
Soul Effigy is a shit talent to use generally because it's a massive pain in the arse.
Our T19 bonus gives us a lot of shards.
Out T20 bonuses are both complete rubbish that will do nothing at all when we aren;t channeling drain soul.

GG Blizz. Everyone will feel forced to run Effigy for raids, even though you know 99% of players hate it and you designed Malefic Grasp to synergise with Conduit and to work really badly with Effigy.

This change to Conduit is a much bigger nerf than it looks, Not only fewer shards, but having to piss aorund with Effigy with all it's limitations (get ready to hear "I can;t reach that!" a lot and the joys of the fucker despawning on any phasing boss) and unlike Conduit, Effigy will suck up GCD's and pull down Drain times.

Which the T20 bonuses require us to maximise. An Effigy+Grasp+T20 build is horrible. And that's what we're getting. Shard generation will be way down.

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LOL. Look at Warcraftlogs. The Charts are full of warlocks pulling insane dps. 5 to 10% ahead of the secondbest and over 20% ahead of the midtier/lower dps.

Affli is completely insane right now and needs a massive nerf. It is easily 10% Top strong in the hands of top players.

Well we will see. Warlocks have been very often overpowered in the last 5 years so i expect them to stay best dps. Nur at least that much ahead of the Second best dps.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/11#boss=1863

Currently Affli is the FOTM spec. They are as op as shadows in EN and TOV.

A typical situation where those op guys keep telling us that they arent op and we should accept that they are sooooooooooo far ahead. Of course we are jealous when we are stuck at 900k dps and affli can pull 1.2m on single target.

Now look at Trilliax and see where aflocks will be on any fight where there aren;t killable adds to cheese the numbers with. And on Trilliax also note how massivey powerful Rogues are, and they don;t have to rely on on-death procs

Affliction drops like a rock to middle of thepack without those killable adds. We aren;t "FOTM" even on Alluriel

Now imagine where aflocks are going to be on a Trilliax style fight once the nerfbat is finished whacking us into the ground.

Those on-death procs are like an albatross around our necks, they either end up with us being overpowered on addfights or underpowered on addless ones.

If they make us perform decently when we dont; have loads of shards/souls/Wrath then we will be overpowered with them. If we are balanced around add fights, we'll be shite on a Nythendra style boss.

Which is exactly why they tuned each fight so that adds sometimes did not proc our one death stuff. Then they abandoned that.

It's an unsolvable problem that was inevitable because of the basic design of Ulthelesh.

[ComputerNerd]

Are there specs which are arguably excessively good at some things ?
Yes.
Are those some specs ideal for absolutely everything ?
No.

So affliction is not "overpowered" in such a vague term, nor is any other spec.

[Tradu]

I think that there are 2 main things that are inflating aff's numbers right now

1. the number of add fights in NH; Skorp, Chronomatic Anomaly, Tichondrius, Star Augur, Krosus, High Botanist, Gul'dan. All fights where Aff in topping the parses and all fights where adds supply a decent amount of wrath of consumption stacks, and they now supply more reap soul uptime. Will these conditions which are favorable to aff continue in ToS? I dunno because I haven't looked at the fights much, but nerfing aff because the current tier is really good for aff and inflating it's numbers would be stupid imo because without these conditions (on Trilliax or Elisande for example) aff drops down to bottom of the top tier or top of the middle tier, so nerfing aff would leave them in the lower middle to bottom tier of dps without these add fights to inflate their numbers.

2. many of the bosses have temporary damage windows that aff is very well poised to take advantage of now. Very few classes have the kind of small burst windows that can be held back like aff does. Mages can't hold onto their burst phases too long because they're cd based, so they have to ensure a certain number of uses per fight, the same goes for warriors, pallies, etc. Aff can hold 4 to 5 soul shards, save reap stacks, and coordinate when to let loose based not only on when they have wrath of consumption stacks, but when Chronomatic Anomaly has his 30% increased damage taken debuff or for Essence of Night on Tichondrius. Now this is going to be powerful with Concordance in the near future, but unless boss fights have these high damage phases in ToS then it's something that Aff can indulge in for this tier, but will no longer have to inflate their numbers in the next tier.

The point is that I hope the devs themselves realize how they designed this spec and at least wait until the initial balancing patch of ToS to see how aff interacts with concordance and these new fights before nerfing it so as to avoid taking what is in reality a spec that is top tier, but not top overall and making it into a middle or even bottom tier spec when the fights are what's making aff op, not the spec itself.

Point 1 is basically saying that Aff should be OP on the bosses that suit it/where it gets fed souls) but still strong on the ones that don't. That's... not how balance works. Specs are meant to be strong on the fights that suit them and average/below average on the ones that don't(which is not the case for Aff currently, as you said yourself). Now, it probably doesn't need much of a nerf(if any), unless they keep designing fights that favor it(and keep giving it strong traits to double up on with all the souls from those fights)

[Trollhammer]

I have a affliction lock alt.. Didn't the artifact used to spawn mobs that you had to kill what happened to this? Seems like the artifact was designed around killing these mobs..

[Fleckens]

Now look at Trilliax and see where aflocks will be on any fight where there aren;t killable adds to cheese the numbers with. And on Trilliax also note how massivey powerful Rogues are, and they don;t have to rely on on-death procs

Affliction drops like a rock to middle of thepack without those killable adds. We aren;t "FOTM" even on Alluriel

Now imagine where aflocks are going to be on a Trilliax style fight once the nerfbat is finished whacking us into the ground.

Those on-death procs are like an albatross around our necks, they either end up with us being overpowered on addfights or underpowered on addless ones.

If they make us perform decently when we dont; have loads of shards/souls/Wrath then we will be overpowered with them. If we are balanced around add fights, we'll be shite on a Nythendra style boss.

Which is exactly why they tuned each fight so that adds sometimes did not proc our one death stuff. Then they abandoned that.

It's an unsolvable problem that was inevitable because of the basic design of Ulthelesh.

Did you actually take a look at trilliax before making this post? https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...867&dataset=90

If that is your worst fight and you're still 2nd best ranged and 5th best overall then I think it's pretty safe to say that you're in a pretty amazing spot. Take a look at other ranged classes where it's also their worst fight like boomkin, shadowpriest and ele shaman, all completely last on dps and even in the case of boomkin and ele which could go change to another role and go melee they would still at most be middle of the pack of all specs(which is closer to bottom if you look at classes rather than specs).

rest of your points I do agree with though, it does seem like affliction warlocks have issues that make them pretty hard to balance.

[Tradu]

Slow ramp up.
Tied to a build. Can't excel at other areas with one build (like some other classes, DH, rogue, DK can). Has to switch to SoW or WiA or AC for certain bosses.
Bad at target switching.
Bad at nuking down adds that have to die within 5 seconds. Casting UA + first tick takes too long
Limited mobility.
No immunity cooldowns or cheat deaths.
Does rely on others to kill adds
Selfish specc that leeches on adds rather than nuking them down.
Single target is not that strong. only gets strong when you can benefit from adds with WoC/Reap. Look at trilliax logs.


Affliction looks extremely strong on logs and damage meters, but don't forget that we also have some real hardcore players like Sjeletyven that do 10 runs a weak to get a good parse and so basically "delete" all their previous runs and only make that one with the best RNG count on logs. Lots of people like him out there, especially for Affliction warlocks. Haven't seen that with other classes as much to be brutally honest.

I think affliction should be a top specc, simply because we don't have all tools available in the game like other classes do. If affliction had bad single target damage it would be a dead specc simply because of the ramp up time. Why would anyone take a specc that needs time to build up damage if they can have instead burst damage instead?

We also scale extremely well with gear, especially secondaries, legendaries and tier set combined.

Affliction is strong yes, but it NH bosses do heavily favor affliction and the whole situation is more complicated than a simple number fix. Let's see what 7.2.5 is going to have in store. Maybe some shift on damage distribution would be nice

Rogue can do multiple things with 1 build? That's news to me. Last time I checked rogues were able to do exactly 1 thing: tunnel a boss really hard. Switching targets? Nice joke. AoE? If RNG feels like it. Rogues can't even spec into it, unlike Aff.

[Reith]

Did you actually take a look at trilliax before making this post? https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...867&dataset=90

If that is your worst fight and you're still 2nd best ranged and 5th best overall then I think it's pretty safe to say that you're in a pretty amazing spot. Take a look at other ranged classes where it's also their worst fight like boomkin, shadowpriest and ele shaman, all completely last on dps and even in the case of boomkin and ele which could go change to another role and go melee they would still at most be middle of the pack of all specs(which is closer to bottom if you look at classes rather than specs).

rest of your points I do agree with though, it does seem like affliction warlocks have issues that make them pretty hard to balance.

Shh stop actually looking at stuff and just take his word for it. He knows everything about anything, clearly.

On a serious note, I don't know how I would fix affliction, but it's clearly imbalanced. Cherry-picking fights that your spec is not #1 on is not much of an argument against that...

[BannedForViews]

You don't deserve to be a top ST spec, and especially not to do as much damage as you do now. Ask for better target switching or something, but a massive nerf at this point is more than needed

lol@ don't deserve.

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Rogue can do multiple things with 1 build? That's news to me. Last time I checked rogues were able to do exactly 1 thing: tunnel a boss really hard. Switching targets? Nice joke. AoE? If RNG feels like it. Rogues can't even spec into it, unlike Aff.

Maybe you're just not a good rogue.

[Irian]

I wouldn't say affliction is overpowered, personally. It's got enough weaknesses and drawbacks to be fairly balanced even if it has strong ST. But this is world of meleecraft and anyone at the top who isn't a melee is going to get nerf-cried.

That being said I can get why people don't particularly like Affliction being top. It has a lot of toys and can keep up even when not the top ST spec, easily. It also kinda has the problem of gear progression being hurtful to gradual ramp-up classes. I'd personally like affliction a lot more if it traded some of its ramp-up for more upfront damage by killing agony stacks and simply having it be a flat DoT.

[Deleted]

I have a suspicion that Soul Conduit is being nerfed down to roughly the same soul generation that we will get from Effigy in our T20 armour.

The T19 additional soul generation is a very powerful bonus effect and IMHO is probably the only real reason you'd chose to take Effigy and maintain Agony on it; it's not for the damage, it's a shard generator (which in itself feels plain wrong)

Even so Effigy only edges Conduit, you get more shards but it sucks time from Drain Soul.

So i think it's less an overall nerf (though that will certainly be the effect) and more a talent equalisation thing. If the intent was a damage nerf and Soul Effigy was as powerful as it is now, they'd have nerfed that as well. Without T19 armour Agony will proc a LOT fewer shards and I suspect that Effigy would simply never be worth taking even if it;s other issues were fixed.

It's going to be really painful in dungeons. Effigy is absolute garbage for dungeons. Entirely useless between bosses and pretty bad on bosses too until you get the 10+ keystones or tyrannical. The things are half dead by the time you've got effigy out etc.

[Deleted]

Rogue can do multiple things with 1 build? That's news to me. Last time I checked rogues were able to do exactly 1 thing: tunnel a boss really hard. Switching targets? Nice joke. AoE? If RNG feels like it. Rogues can't even spec into it, unlike Aff.

you are right. I am wrong about rogues. no idea why I wrote that. Was a mistake on my side. apologies.

[Vynny]

Did you actually take a look at trilliax before making this post? https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...867&dataset=90

If that is your worst fight and you're still 2nd best ranged and 5th best overall then I think it's pretty safe to say that you're in a pretty amazing spot. Take a look at other ranged classes where it's also their worst fight like boomkin, shadowpriest and ele shaman, all completely last on dps and even in the case of boomkin and ele which could go change to another role and go melee they would still at most be middle of the pack of all specs(which is closer to bottom if you look at classes rather than specs).

rest of your points I do agree with though, it does seem like affliction warlocks have issues that make them pretty hard to balance.

Why are you looking at 90th percentile parses? In what world does it make sense for Blizz to balance around the top 10% of players who are literally abusing everything they possibly can and cheesing bosses? I mean seriously, did you complain and say that arcane mages needed to be nerfed back in HFC because their numbers were ridiculous when you were able to zerg down the fight in a minute or less? No? Then maybe the top 10% percent isn't the representative group you should be looking at for your data.

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Point 1 is basically saying that Aff should be OP on the bosses that suit it/where it gets fed souls) but still strong on the ones that don't. That's... not how balance works. Specs are meant to be strong on the fights that suit them and average/below average on the ones that don't(which is not the case for Aff currently, as you said yourself). Now, it probably doesn't need much of a nerf(if any), unless they keep designing fights that favor it(and keep giving it strong traits to double up on with all the souls from those fights)

It does when you can only achieve these results on farm. The instant you introduce a priority add that everyone needs to burn down on progress, aff's damage drops. The reason that aff is top on fights it works well with and only drops down to bottom of the top tier or top of the middle tier on fights that work poorly with them is because they can afford to ignore the things that hurt their damage on farm fights. All the priority adds that you can barely handle on progress can easily be ignored resulting in no loss of MG uptime. Rather than wasting a bunch of soul shards on UA's or Seeds on adds you can just keep pumping all that into the boss while tunneling and let other people better at dealing with those things do it.

For example, with heroic Gul'dan I can now afford to just use a single Seed cast to just tag the eyes because the dps that are actually good at cleave don't need my help killing them before they can replicate, so I don't even have to target swap off of Gul'dan if I time it right, but if I did that on progression then I'd get my ass reamed out for being a selfish asshole and holding back the group because the eye's were a much tighter dps check. So no, they shouldn't necessarily be average or below average on their bad fights because the things that are bad for them can just outright be ignored on farm thus inflating their numbers above what they would be in a situation that was representative of where balance actually matters.

Basically, you're assuming too much and not considering how farm differs from progress for different classes in different ways.

[Fleckens]

Why are you looking at 90th percentile parses? In what world does it make sense for Blizz to balance around the top 10% of players who are literally abusing everything they possibly can and cheesing bosses? I mean seriously, did you complain and say that arcane mages needed to be nerfed back in HFC because their numbers were ridiculous when you were able to zerg down the fight in a minute or less? No? Then maybe the top 10% percent isn't the representative group you should be looking at for your data.

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It does when you can only achieve these results on farm. The instant you introduce a priority add that everyone needs to burn down on progress, aff's damage drops. The reason that aff is top on fights it works well with and only drops down to bottom of the top tier or top of the middle tier on fights that work poorly with them is because they can afford to ignore the things that hurt their damage on farm fights. All the priority adds that you can barely handle on progress can easily be ignored resulting in no loss of MG uptime. Rather than wasting a bunch of soul shards on UA's or Seeds on adds you can just keep pumping all that into the boss while tunneling and let other people better at dealing with those things do it.

For example, with heroic Gul'dan I can now afford to just use a single Seed cast to just tag the eyes because the dps that are actually good at cleave don't need my help killing them before they can replicate, so I don't even have to target swap off of Gul'dan if I time it right, but if I did that on progression then I'd get my ass reamed out for being a selfish asshole and holding back the group because the eye's were a much tighter dps check. So no, they shouldn't necessarily be average or below average on their bad fights because the things that are bad for them can just outright be ignored on farm thus inflating their numbers above what they would be in a situation that was representative of where balance actually matters.

Basically, you're assuming too much and not considering how farm differs from progress for different classes in different ways.

You know you could just have checked the other percentiles and seen that it doesn't get much different so my argument is still pretty much the same, your supposedly horrible fight you're still above average across all specs and one of the best if only looking at ranged.

As for gul'dan, I can't really speak for heroic but on mythic the eyes are pretty much dealt with by the melee dps, you really don't need anyone to kill them outside of empowered, and those should be up for long enough.

[Reith]

You know you could just have checked the other percentiles and seen that it doesn't get much different so my argument is still pretty much the same, your supposedly horrible fight you're still above average across all specs and one of the best if only looking at ranged.

As for gul'dan, I can't really speak for heroic but on mythic the eyes are pretty much dealt with by the melee dps, you really don't need anyone to kill them outside of empowered, and those should be up for long enough.

Shh, switching to moderately high health adds is the single most important mechanic in the world that dwarfs every other situation in the game. Nothing else matters!

[Deleted]

Killing priority adds has consistently been one of th emost important boss mechanics. There's only so many things you can have in a boss encounter, and they are all basically variants on

Don;t stand in the fire
Kill this before it kills you
Stop the boss doing something

And the final check is do enough damage to kill the boss within his enrage timer.