[Legion] Terryn's guide to Affliction Warlock

[Jellospally]

They've literally nerfed every single one of our lvl 15 choices. Nice job blizzard. Really sticking it to us.

Also love that they said they wanted Aff to be a multi-dot spec, and then nerf haunt lol....

Because haunt TOTALLY buffs our 2nd+ targets... oh wait no it doesn't.

[Deleted]

Yep, as usual, th emoment they swing back to "it's all in the dots" and start buffing them, we become terrible at pure single target without a really powerful single target multiplier.

Death's Embrace and Siphon Life are both spreadable - DE applies to every target, Siphon Life can be put on everything - so we're going to be balanced around multi-target damage, and right back to the start of Emerald Nightmare where affliction felt like a third wheel on a boss like Nythendra or Ursoc, you'd knew you'd be dead last.

Because with damage in the dots, if we were balacned on Nythendra we'd stomp everyone flat on a boss like the Dragons.

It's exactly the problem Grasp was brought in to fix. Only now they've burnt it to the ground in pursuit of "affliction is about multidotting".

The net result of these changes is going to be a big loss to pure single target damage and also the loss of what little "burst" we had, i.e. by doing two UA's, Reap+Grasp and hoping for crits.

[Deleted]

Yep, as usual, th emoment they swing back to "it's all in the dots" and start buffing them, we become terrible at pure single target without a really powerful single target multiplier.

Death's Embrace and Siphon Life are both spreadable - DE applies to every target, Siphon Life can be put on everything - so we're going to be balanced around multi-target damage, and right back to the start of Emerald Nightmare where affliction felt like a third wheel on a boss like Nythendra or Ursoc, you'd knew you'd be dead last.

Because with damage in the dots, if we were balacned on Nythendra we'd stomp everyone flat on a boss like the Dragons.

It's exactly the problem Grasp was brought in to fix. Only now they've burnt it to the ground in pursuit of "affliction is about multidotting".

The net result of these changes is going to be a big loss to pure single target damage and also the loss of what little "burst" we had, i.e. by doing two UA's, Reap+Grasp and hoping for crits.

Haunt is nearly a free UA every 25s without adds and gives us 20% to all damage (not pets I think) for 15s. MG gives 25% but only to DoTs and I have no idea if DS is included or not. You obviously also can't move with MG :P. WiA has only been nerfed, probably to remain on par with the other two talents.

No Idea if I'll ever take SL when it's a lvl 100 talent with DE/SC next to it. Unlike Spriest with Twist of Fate, it looks like every target of our dots needs to be sub 35% to benefit from DE. Getting a big dmg buff at the end of a fight where allot of times the DPS really counts is nice though.

[Jellospally]

Haunt is nearly a free UA every 25s without adds and gives us 20% to all damage (not pets I think) for 15s. MG gives 25% but only to DoTs and I have no idea if DS is included or not. You obviously also can't move with MG :P. WiA has only been nerfed, probably to remain on par with the other two talents.

No Idea if I'll ever take SL when it's a lvl 100 talent with DE/SC next to it. Unlike Spriest with Twist of Fate, it looks like every target of our dots needs to be sub 35% to benefit from DE. Getting a big dmg buff at the end of a fight where allot of times the DPS really counts is nice though.

DE is 0% dmg at 35% and 50% at mob practically dead. Its a weak execute. SL before it went down to 75% was a clear winner by a mile. SC was/is pretty low. SC is also garbage without MG since with haunt you only want to UA during haunt pretty much and 4-5 shards is all you need every haunt CD.

SL was pushing 13-14% of your dmg or more on PTR it was hitting so much harder than anything except UA.

[slickwilly]

Yep, as usual, th emoment they swing back to "it's all in the dots" and start buffing them, we become terrible at pure single target without a really powerful single target multiplier.

Death's Embrace and Siphon Life are both spreadable - DE applies to every target, Siphon Life can be put on everything - so we're going to be balanced around multi-target damage, and right back to the start of Emerald Nightmare where affliction felt like a third wheel on a boss like Nythendra or Ursoc, you'd knew you'd be dead last.

Because with damage in the dots, if we were balacned on Nythendra we'd stomp everyone flat on a boss like the Dragons.

It's exactly the problem Grasp was brought in to fix. Only now they've burnt it to the ground in pursuit of "affliction is about multidotting".

The net result of these changes is going to be a big loss to pure single target damage and also the loss of what little "burst" we had, i.e. by doing two UA's, Reap+Grasp and hoping for crits.

According to our math simcraft guru ghaddo the changes are a small loss in a single target and a huge boost to mobility. I'm gonna put my apples in his basket over some feelycraft.

[Inshabel]

According to our math simcraft guru ghaddo the changes are a small loss in a single target and a huge boost to mobility. I'm gonna put my apples in his basket over some feelycraft.

People don't want to look at math, they to scream about falling skies.

[Deleted]

DE is 0% dmg at 35% and 50% at mob practically dead. Its a weak execute. SL before it went down to 75% was a clear winner by a mile. SC was/is pretty low. SC is also garbage without MG since with haunt you only want to UA during haunt pretty much and 4-5 shards is all you need every haunt CD.

SL was pushing 13-14% of your dmg or more on PTR it was hitting so much harder than anything except UA.

But are we getting these 4-5 shards every 25s? Besides UA gets more benefit from reap then Haunt anyway. 20% damage increase is not that mandatory to have compared to current 70% MG.

[Jellospally]

But are we getting these 4-5 shards every 25s? Besides UA gets more benefit from reap then Haunt anyway. 20% damage increase is not that mandatory to have compared to current 70% MG.

On PTR I was getting it pretty often along with enough reap for the whole haunt. Never less than 3 for every burn though.

[Sunlighthell]

So I tested new trinkets on ptr. And it seems I will just coin gul'dan, anomaly and fish for arcano crystal harder in 7.2.5 till they finally decide to nerf the hell out of these trinkets. Because new trinkets are just beyond bad. Only haste one may be good, but whispers still better.

[Deleted]

According to our math simcraft guru ghaddo the changes are a small loss in a single target and a huge boost to mobility. I'm gonna put my apples in his basket over some feelycraft.

You can bet some more single target nerfs are on their way though, because both Death's Embrace and Siphon Life become exponentially more powerful the more targets there are.

If affliction is good at single target with them, it will become more and more overpowered the more targets there are. Particularly as Death's Embrace is a passive talent, you do not have to do anything at all for it to do it's thing.

If you keep multi-target damage under control, you lose out single target.

They've been trying to "have their cake and eat it" right back since Wrath and they have never done it. The only real way would be to have a really strong DOT you can only have on one target at any one time. They're never done that which hints they can't.

- - - Updated - - -

So I tested new trinkets on ptr. And it seems I will just coin gul'dan, anomaly and fish for arcano crystal harder in 7.2.5 till they finally decide to nerf the hell out of these trinkets. Because new trinkets are just beyond bad. Only haste one may be good, but whispers still better.

The new trinkets struck me as being uniformly awful. Affliction does best from stat-sticks unless the trinket effect is really powerful, like the Whispers one is. All of the new trinkets lost me massive slices of stats one way or the other - the Mastery one doesn;t have Intellect, for example. And some of the on-use effects seems pretty flakey.

As to melee....I can;t see them wanting to give up their Nighthold trinkets. The Warrior one is just crazy good.

[Deleted]

You can bet some more single target nerfs are on their way though, because both Death's Embrace and Siphon Life become exponentially more powerful the more targets there are.

DE benefits AoE and ST equally. With DE every target effectively has about 10% less HP because our DPS increases below 35%.

[Demonidze]

So I tested new trinkets on ptr. And it seems I will just coin gul'dan, anomaly and fish for arcano crystal harder in 7.2.5 till they finally decide to nerf the hell out of these trinkets. Because new trinkets are just beyond bad. Only haste one may be good, but whispers still better.

this is sad.. gonna have to farm hard for a titanforged whispers. as it looks to be BiS for ToS.

[Inshabel]

Looking at Yips video of 7.2.5 Affliction I'm pretty excited, I was planning on swapping demo (PT/SC) for variety's sake, but I'm not so sure anymore.

[Deleted]

Link the vid

Στάλθηκε από το SGP621 μου χρησιμοποιώντας Tapatalk

[Inshabel]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHTGEYu14Kw

[Deleted]

this is sad.. gonna have to farm hard for a titanforged whispers. as it looks to be BiS for ToS.

You can bet that they nerf the shit out of at least whispers, if not Arcano and metronome as well, once TOS mythic comes along. They've done it in every expansion so far: As soon as it becomes obvious that old raid trinkets are more powerful than new ones, they nerf the old. Demo trinket from MOP Throne of Thunder anyone?

[baoluvboa]

I'm not sure that is a valid argument considering how different Legion is compared to older expansions. There are clear benefits in doing old raids compared to forcing people to run old contents for trinkets in older expansions.

I have a 925 socket whisper and even then, once the warforged level comes up, it is quite exciting to farm Mythic Guldan for a 940+ whisper.

[Deleted]

DE benefits AoE and ST equally. With DE every target effectively has about 10% less HP because our DPS increases below 35%.

Death's Embrace improves our multi-dotting damage, particularly on shared health council fights.

As I said, you just can't have a spec whose damage is mostly dot based do good single target damage unless you can limit it;s spread damage.

One way of doing that would be to make one or more dot sonly usable on one target at a time.

Historically, Blizzard have tried to solve the problem by trying to balance affliction around multi-target damage and then dealing with the fact that this of necessity means weak dots by bolstering them with a multiplier - Haunt, Malefic Grasp, Soul Effigy that is exclusively single target or at least very difficult to spread.

It has lead to perpetual swings as they have never managed to hit a perfect sweet spot, we've usually turned into either multidot monsters, single target turrets or lacking in one or the other. I would iamgine that it;s pure hell trying to even get near that sweet spot.

As I said, Death's Embrace and particularly siphon Life become more valueable or mor epowerful the more targets you have, and Siphon I think is particularly going to cause issues if the devs have any intention of keeping it a viable pure single target choice.

Note in Yip's video he says that affliction gets around a 100k single target nerf, which I assum eis based on his single target damage.

Moreover, remember also that affliction is putting out very inflated numbers due to Nighthold mechanics plus a very strong T19, neithe rof which will apply in Sargeras. Pre 7.2, affliction was iirc middle of the pack for single target fights

- - - Updated - - -

You can bet that they nerf the shit out of at least whispers, if not Arcano and metronome as well, once TOS mythic comes along. They've done it in every expansion so far: As soon as it becomes obvious that old raid trinkets are more powerful than new ones, they nerf the old. Demo trinket from MOP Throne of Thunder anyone?

Hopefuly the feedback they asked for will mostly say "these trinkets are kinda shit and feel uniformly worse than the Nighthold ones"

I suspect they are trying to back off from having such hugely powerful trinkets - whispers is very powerful, but the melee one is just crazy (and it;s just astonishing that it hasn;t been nerfed already, particularly given what warriors can do with it)

The trouble is that people won;t want to swap to Sargeras ones, not unless they make them much better OR they simply nerf the Nighthold ones.

[severan]

Aff felt pretty good in the LFR on the PTR. Single target was still competitive and I had tons of mobility. I thought it was a decent metric since everyones gear is scaled to 860.

[Sunlighthell]

Well they changed whispers before raid release so there's still hope that new trinkets receive very negative feedback and they change them into something usable.

But there's one thing they will not change for certain: shit relics. ToS filled with trash relics once again. This time there're more usable relics (shadow damage for affliction for example) but relic from last boss is the same garbage as relic from last in NH. They could make relics so each class need different one, but for some reason they continue to put usable traits on same relics for every class who use them (botanist relic: dh/rogue/warlock) creating some idiotic competition between melee and ranged. Also I don't know why they continue to ignore relic power issue.

I have several 905 shadow relics, but traits on them is hot garbage (non dps/drain soul dmg) and they're dps loss compared to my 890 crit dmg relic.