more tuning for Aff and Destro on the 20th (damage of all abilities reduced by 5%)

[Sunlighthell]

And as I said. Completely retarded nerf for affliction single target (cause on multi target those 5% nerfs are nothing in pve) and this is also pvp nerf, while sub rogues/warriors are left op as is. They could buff UA for example to make ST a bit stronger in return, but no, lets listen to melee mongoloids who scream at every corner that affliction is op.

[Count Zero]

I do think a tiny buff to MG or pets or UA to make up for some of the ST loss is warranted.

[evertonbelmontt]

I do think a tiny buff to MG or pets or UA to make up for some of the ST loss is warranted.

They want destro and demonology warlocks to think they matter too, kappa

[Uzkin]

Almost as clueless a nerf as the one to Soul Flame earlier. Before this nerf, affliction was properly balanced against destruction which means that now it will be, comparatively speaking, (slightly) underpowered and locks will mostly play destro during progress. Again.

[Lulbalance]

Almost as clueless a nerf as the one to Soul Flame earlier. Before this nerf, affliction was properly balanced against destruction which means that now it will be, comparatively speaking, (slightly) underpowered and locks will mostly play destro during progress. Again.

Hey what do you know.. aff got nerfed.

[Deleted]

More affliction nerfs, hype!

[Harsesis]

Almost as clueless a nerf as the one to Soul Flame earlier. Before this nerf, affliction was properly balanced against destruction which means that now it will be, comparatively speaking, (slightly) underpowered and locks will mostly play destro during progress. Again.

The soul flame nerf was to balance out the flat buff aff got, so Soul Flame wasn't hitting 20% harder.

[Walrock]

Let's wait for everyone to get their T20 and then we can say who's over-underperforming.

Just nerfing/buffing around based on 1 week HC with overgeared people not playing mechanics properly, still wearing last content's tier sets...

Do you want Blizzard to tune the classes every week for 6-8 weeks for every climb in gear they get during the transition to a new raid tier?

A shot of objective realism would be healthy for some people here...

[Shandalar]

Nice demon buffs.


Oh wait.

[Liarparadox]

Nice demon buffs.


Oh wait.

It's too bad really that there was much of any focus on AFF when, if anything, demo was what needed a good looking at. I mean they can certainly do two things at once, I hope. But still, while I dislike demo's playstyle, it would have been nice to see it get some love so that those who do love it don't feel useless in terms of relevant dps on some fights.

[Baconeggcheese]

Exactly. The problem is that if you do blanket nerfs to aff, it will still overperform on multidot and you risk it underperforming on single target. I noted that baking damage into dots makes it almost impossible to achieve a proper balance between single target and any siutation where you can multidot

That's not quite where I was going with what I was saying. They have knobs for ST between drain / UA / MG. They always give themselves a dot modifier that serves as that knob. Where they balance ST vs MT is a matter of will, not something impossible to do.

Really when I get down to it its because of 2 things, 1 is its a pure dot spec which has obvious pitfalls. If it doesn't sustain higher than a direct damage spec then it doesn't bring anything of value since it can't do priority / burst dmg. The other thing is that there's so much power wrapped into on death mechanics. If they balance it to be good without add deaths, then it becomes a god with them, if they balance it around add deaths, then it'll be awful without them.

I'd say the ideal thing to do is to remove more power from the on death mechanics and put it back into the base spec a lot like what they just did for destro with havoc.

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Not thrilled about the agony / corruption nerf though, I want the spec to be good at multi-dotting and this does nothing to help that in a patch where most of the changes were supposed to push it back towards being good at multidotting.

Not surprised they nerfed the spec, but I was expecting / hoping that dmg would have been taken out of elsewhere.

[Beazzles]

It's a nerf that won;t chnage the "problem" though. You will still see aff toppping everyone where it tops everyone now, and it will get pushed down a notch on fights where it;s already single target.

It'd be better to do a bigger nerf to the dots and increase the single target stuff, you could easily push up Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul a touch, or even the Doomguard's damage, all of which are exclusively single target.

Unfortunately building well-rounded specs takes a backseat to fantasy. The FOTM for blizz at the moment is "multidotting" (that's Fixation Of The Month)

I comfortably predict come Argus, they'll take the damage back out of the dots and buff up the ST stuff again

The same old game we've had since Ulduar at least....

What you are asking for is literally 75% of what they changed for the patch. So just revert to where aff was pre-patch? lol


Sadly, 99% of people do not realize it is our poorly designed Golden traits that will prevent affliction from ever being balanced in its current build. As long as the spec requires small adds to die, it will always severely over perform or under perform

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That's not quite where I was going with what I was saying. They have knobs for ST between drain / UA / MG. They always give themselves a dot modifier that serves as that knob. Where they balance ST vs MT is a matter of will, not something impossible to do.

Really when I get down to it its because of 2 things, 1 is its a pure dot spec which has obvious pitfalls. If it doesn't sustain higher than a direct damage spec then it doesn't bring anything of value since it can't do priority / burst dmg. The other thing is that there's so much power wrapped into on death mechanics. If they balance it to be good without add deaths, then it becomes a god with them, if they balance it around add deaths, then it'll be awful without them.

I'd say the ideal thing to do is to remove more power from the on death mechanics and put it back into the base spec a lot like what they just did for destro with havoc.

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Not thrilled about the agony / corruption nerf though, I want the spec to be good at multi-dotting and this does nothing to help that in a patch where most of the changes were supposed to push it back towards being good at multidotting.

Not surprised they nerfed the spec, but I was expecting / hoping that dmg would have been taken out of elsewhere.

I have to agree with you. I have really been enjoying playing a different spec almost every fight. If they were to turn us into 1 target drain tunnelers with MG again on every fight, I might consider rerolling even despite the awesome damage.

That spec is really not fun, and severely punishes you for hitting anything besides your 1 main target

[corebit]

Affliction will still be fine, but I hope Blizzard nerfed it taking fully geared ToS characters into account and not just prematurely nerfing it because of incomplete logs.

[severan]

Its 1-2% loss on single target and 3-4% on multitarget. Not too big a deal. You
can math it out looking at current parses.

[Demonidze]

this nerf wont change anything. we will still be super strong on council/cleave and somewhere average on ST. but what ever.. hope the cry babies who wanted affli nerfed will shut up finally.

[Reith]

Dawww QQ?

Calm your tits, this is a small nerf, aff will be fine.

It's amusing you are all so salty, it was meant to happen really.

Just like I said. Affliction is in a much better place than Shadow Priests, tbh, even after the nerf. All the people crying about "logs don't matter" are just making excuses and never actually use their brains for introspection.

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Nice demon buffs.


Oh wait.

Switch specs. You're AK40. Concordance isn't hard to get.

[Lucrece]

The "buffs" to demo locks will be to nerf aff/destro to be as crap as them lol. just as Blizzard usually does with talents.

[Gohzerlock]

Wow, am I ever glad I took a break.

[Deleted]

The soul flame nerf was to balance out the flat buff aff got, so Soul Flame wasn't hitting 20% harder.

Only Soul Flame got nerfed by 50%

It might be fun but that talent is toxic as shit. Affliction;s AOE is pretty crap and leans a lot on Soul Flame as a crutch. I'd rather they got rid of it and at the same time got rid of Seed of Corruption's stupid cast times and detonation requirements.

Soul Flame is like so much else in affliction, it varies from being "meh" when you got a few adds to retarded when you have a lot. Soul Flame is unique in that it's power rises exponentially the more adds there are, because the adds themselves are damage sources. I think every other AOE in the game is a flat damage, obviously, you do more the more there is to hit, but it doesn;t multiply up.

Yeah those massive Soul Flame cascades like the Arcway are kinda fun, but it creates yet more situations where aff breaks the averages all to fuck. It's also a right pain in the arse for Bolstering.

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That's not quite where I was going with what I was saying. They have knobs for ST between drain / UA / MG. They always give themselves a dot modifier that serves as that knob. Where they balance ST vs MT is a matter of will, not something impossible to do.

Yeah, if you read back I've pretty much said that, th eproblem is they are trapped by a design philosophy, or at like this month's design phiosophy, which is "it;s all about the dots".

I totally agree, they have the tools, but the question is, do they have the will? I think aff would be better off with a bigger nerf to Agony and Corruption and tweaking up Malefic Grasp, Drain Soul or whatever. That would control multidot damage but prevent single target from sliding down too far. But then again, we've got this other thing going on where "we want classes/specs to be bette ror worse at certain bosses", which is a reversal to the old "bring the player not the class" idea, which itself evolved as a response to the "better or worse" original concept...which generally lead to stuff like class stacking and class kicking depending on a boss, and that was just plain bad.

Theother big problem is this: they;d have to admit they got it wrong. Loads of people pointed out that if you put damage into dots then dot users become one of two things: monsters at multidotting, or bad at single target. We've been here before. It's why they brought Malefic Grasp back, for heaven's sake.

I think the dot buff should have been smaller, with compensation elsewhere...Malefic Grasp, Drain Soul, UA. They could even make Siphon Life a spell you can only have one instance running

Really when I get down to it its because of 2 things, 1 is its a pure dot spec which has obvious pitfalls. If it doesn't sustain higher than a direct damage spec then it doesn't bring anything of value since it can't do priority / burst dmg. The other thing is that there's so much power wrapped into on death mechanics. If they balance it to be good without add deaths, then it becomes a god with them, if they balance it around add deaths, then it'll be awful without them.

This, basically. Can't argue with anything there. A spec that uses dots and has so much ramp has to have high sustain damage or there's just no point in taking it, because a burst spec that can do just a smuch sustained damage is better at almost everything else. It's not so bad now, but as progression goes one, affliction;s value will drop as adds die faster and faster.

And yeah, the on-death procs souns all cool, but they are retardledly difficult to balance, again, the sweet spot is almost impossible to hit, how do you ensure aff is not crap in a fight with no adds, or stop it becoming a god when there are loads?

Shadow Priests as powerful dot users have similar "issues", they are exceptionally powerful in the same fights we are...but no nerfs for them. But at least they don;t have that on-death-proc stuff hanging around their necks.

I also suspect that aff won;t be anywhere near as "overpowered" in Mythic modes. There's a massive amount of cheesing and padding going on, and the main source of that is Absolute Corruption, like dumping it on the caged things in Inquisition.

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Its 1-2% loss on single target and 3-4% on multitarget. Not too big a deal. You
can math it out looking at current parses.

That's why people are describing it as a "political nerf". Let's hope they don;t keep salami slicing like this. The nerf really doesn;t chang emuch at all, the logs will look pretyt much the same. I repeat, Blizz don;t take those seriously, particularly the aggregate All Bosses, but they know players do.

This nerf is as much about player perception as numbers.

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Just like I said. Affliction is in a much better place than Shadow Priests, tbh, even after the nerf. All the people crying about "logs don't matter" are just making excuses and never actually use their brains for introspection.

Shadow Priests are doing perfectly well, in the fights where afflictin is strong SP's are doing extremely well also. SP dots are actually better than ours and easier to maintain on multiple targets, so long as they are reasonably close to each other.

They got a talent that lets them apply both dots with one cast, and voidbolt extends them by 3 seconds on allthe targets they are running on. We have to do that manually, and there's a big penalty for letting Agony drop.

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The "buffs" to demo locks will be to nerf aff/destro to be as crap as them lol. just as Blizzard usually does with talents.

Sad but true. I suspect demo will parse better when players get the encounters down better. Movement really, really hurts demo and I guess with the raid so new, many players are running around alot more than they need to.

On paper demo is exceptionally powerful for single target, if it can stand and turret.

[Lucrece]

Demo is mediocre ST even when it gets to stand still all fight. It's simply undertuned for how much ramp up it has while being garbage at anything outside ST.