AffDots is just a tool to help to make decisions when to refresh dots, just like tracking procs or dot durations. No good warlock only look at affdots and its colors and based on them refresh dots.
AffDots is just a tool to help to make decisions when to refresh dots, just like tracking procs or dot durations. No good warlock only look at affdots and its colors and based on them refresh dots.
If anyone has any questions about the warlock class going into the next expansion, my stream is currently up. Link in description.
Armory - http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ronic/advanced
Stream - http://www.twitch.tv/xyronic (Tues-Thurs 7:00 - 11:30 and 12:30 - 3:30 cst)
every expansion my class becomes something new...
beta: overpowered as fuck with some really awesome skills
live: underpowered as usual at the beginning, being ripped to pieces by unicorns and having nothing of the cool stuff
though i will miss the dot snapshotting, i always laughed when some guildy played his twink warlock never to be seen near the top 10 dds in lfr, fun times
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...094?page=8#154
(mages tanking with spell steal)
At levels 91-100 all classes get modifications to their spells, which includes having more utility. If you lobby for increasing pet utility as well, and then lobby for Observer: Clone Magic to be changed, so that master gets the buff; then we might replace the mages in their fights.
After parking my lock in Ulduar, because I hate affliction, I actually came back to it this xpac with the Destro changes. I really enjoy playing the class again, and I am not looking for yet anotheranotheranotheranother lock update/change.
The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly.
Bit late to this as I was busy most of yesterday, but cheers for bringing us this information.
I don't think I quite agree on Affdots being the root of the problem with Affliction being so good right now (or at least players getting more out of it then was intended) I *do* think that the difference between a well played Affliction lock and a bad one is probably too large. Giving a less able player Affdots will not turn him into a good one, but I guess it makes the difference on the highest levels where people are fully able to get a use out of the addon.
In short I think the problem is not so much Affdots but the way better players are able to do more with the spec then the average player (and that's just as much cooldown management, shard management, reacting to procs in time and in the correct way as it is having clear readings on dot strength). Nixing dot snapshotting will remove this problem almost entirely, so I can understand why they'd take this approach. I'm just hoping they give us something in return rotational wise to keep the spec engaging. What we currently have in place will most likely not be enough to most people (even if they don't realise it right now).
A general question (and one allready being discussed in this thread) should probably be what is available in the spec, or could be added to have at least SOME kind of mechanic in place that makes a difference in your DPS. Cause without snapshotting there is not much that influences our DPS apart from some shard management and MG uptime.
Proper management of Haunt uptime will be the thing. I think that was always meant to be the thing, but variously multidotting initially (prior to the last corruption only fix) and latterly set bonuses and Haste have just made it less important by ensuring more and more of it ensuring it would have less of an impact.
Last edited by Jessicka; 2013-11-13 at 04:50 PM.
I don't think this guy comprehends how insanely strong trinket and the meta gem proc have been this expansion. I feel like pandemic coupled with how insanely strong trinkets have been this xpac are more the culprit than taking out the guess work. What's there to guess?
Did your insanely strong trinket / meta gem proc?
Yes?
Did your last snapshot have an insanely strong trinket or meta gem proc attached to it?
No?
You should probably refresh your dots.
Weak / power auras have existed for quite a while and would provide all the information needed to game these procs in a convenient manner, affdots just made it even more conveniently layed out and user friendly. But pandemic made it possible to game procs in ways you were never able to before and then they go and give us a random bloodlust proc coupled with trinkets that give us 5x-10x+ the main stat of a fully upgraded chest slot item.
What did they honestly expect would happen?
Last edited by Baconeggcheese; 2013-11-13 at 05:19 PM.
I don't really understand why they like strong trinkets. There's just no reason why for one second on the opener (and then at completely random moments otherwise) I should have double my usual spellpower from just two items.
Edit: Especially for a DoT class w/o snapshotting - there's almost no gameplay there.
Last edited by Rustjive; 2013-11-13 at 09:33 PM.
http://darkcontent.wordpress.com/ - blog (updated Oct. 8, 2013). Latest post: T16H Affliction Trinket Rankings in Combination, done in SimC 540-4.
That's whats funny about this whole situation, pandemic serves no function without dot snapshots outside of a *put your dots back up on the boss before he phases into a mode where you can't dps him for X or Y reasons*
It's like saying *we're going to allow you access to that awesome exclusive community swimming pool that the warlocks have had all to themselves, but we're removing all the water and have no plans to put any back in! Grats!*
As a destro lock who usually specs for KJC, if I sepc for Charred Remains, why do I get the feeling I will be a fire mage, only more durable and has more controllable burst? Although I'm still not quite sure if they will reduce CB cast time making it a glorified LvB, but I am not quite sure how this will pan out in PvP. 3 second static casting CB in PvP is unreliable as it is, 50% of the time.
Hmmm...
I think Affdots is a much bigger issue than a lot of people are giving it credit for. If you think of player skill on like a 1-10 scale, I would bet money that Affdots takes whatever number a player was on before and adds at least +2 to that number for most players. I have raided on (I think) 6 different classes in every role, and I don't think I have ever used a mod that I felt impacted performance as much or as easily.
For less skilled players, it gives them a number to blindly follow that allows for MUCH more DPS than they were doing before tracking anything.
For decent to good players who were tracking procs already, it gave you an easy solution to look at that let you focus on other parts of raid awareness while probably doing more damage then just tracking procs by a decent margin.
For really elite players, I actually think its less of a big deal, as they were already tracking things better and probably have much higher natural raid awareness.
What it did was often skewed the average performance of warlocks in guilds filled with players of about the same gear level and talent into a higher bracket. They would still get beat by elite players of other classes, but suddenly a decent warlock who was squeezing 65% of his potential damage output from his toon was getting 80% of potential output, and crushing his/her friends.
Affliction will be the hands-down least interesting spec of all time without dot snapshotting though. Fine by me, I hate that spec anyway
Except that's counter intuitive, because haunt is not on a cooldown anymore it's on a secondary resource that can be delayed as need be in order to maximize up time without any loss.
At least to me the *whole point of pandemic* was to allow us to take advantage of these exaggerated short duration trinket procs (10~ish seconds) we've had all xpac where in the past we would have had to ignore them entirely as they would time out before it would be a dps increase to refresh our dots if they were recently cast. If you coupled that with the addition of malefic grasp we would basically have received 0 benefit from procs RNG withstanding or an extremely decreased amount of benefit to the point where we wouldn't have been competitive and RNG would have been a much bigger factor than the "mini game" we play now.
The quality of life was to allow us to game these powerful procs in ways we would not have been able to without it.
Its the last tier with a legendary meta, some percentage based racials, and some trinkets that have had to leapfrog each other to continue use. So there is a pretty big convergence right now that just makes balance impossible. 30% legendary meta, 2x 14K+ int trinket procs (or a 14K+26K), 2K int from eng gloves, 20% haste from troll racial, lightweave or herbalism, warp, etc being extended for 1.5x'ish even the dot's normal duration then swapped around to everything w' a HP bar is impossible to balance. Too many very powerful things with an application that is instant, spreading that is instant, pandemic extension, and how haste is calculated makes it too powerful at the top end. Either the baseline is complete floppy rooster mode and we balance on the notion of those procs or you take out snapshotting and rebalance the spec.
Demo is far less reliant on snapshotting now (doom still is for damage, not an entire playstyle) but more is based on spending your DF properly. If we can move aff to a model where shard use, like DF use, defines good play we can have a non boring spec with a high skillcap. Clearly the spec will need some other changes to make it less boring but with the snapshotting mechanic has painted locks and devs into a corner. Since its been around forever logic suggests its a mix of factors (end tier ilvls, last tier before squish, trinkets/metagem/etc) but these issues will come up again.
Also keep in mind the level of the average player has scaled up too. I recall when the hours spent on muru were considered shockingly excessive. Now most progression guilds raid that much or far more for most every heroic boss when its progression. I recall when a DBM was considered "using addons" where now you have a near fully customized UI, somewhere between half a dozen to a dozen mods in combat, and are far more theorycrafted than ever before. So as the average has increased the hardcore/progression raider has scaled up too. People used to put on gear, maybe gem or enchant, and go. Now its gemmed, enchanted, reforged, xmogged, upgraded, and other gear adjusted to account for the ripple effect of the first piece.
Some of those other things are going away along with snapshotting so accept there is a macroscopic shift towards taking the complexity of the game down a notch. Thus skill will be defined more by execution, secondary resource use, and "non dps" factors like damage taken, interrupts hit, etc. In some ways that will make people better raiders the same way WoL "ranking" makes perfectly good players do dopy stuff to "rank". TLDR if you can't find a way to be a better raider and dps to your raid without snapshotting I suggest doing a bit of self analysis.
How is it counterintuitive? Without Pandemic, you're pretty much casting your DoTs right before the last tick unless you have a lot of buffs up, that means, given that all our DoTs have different durations, you can end up with two DoTs with 12s left and one with 6, casting Haunt at this point isn't great, but with Pandemic, you can extend the 6s one and follow it up with Haunt covering the full remaining duration of all three DoTs. It makes perfect sense to me, because that's how I figured it out in Beta long before we knew we'd end up on this path of super-powered trinkets or anyone had written the AffDots addon.
It is what it is to you, because that's what the community made it and how it's come to be explained since then.
Was a quarter way through a post that was gonna end up needlessly large and I decided this isn't worth THAT much debate.
It is what it is to me because that's how I immediately interpreted it upon seeing the passive, it is what it is to you because that's how you interpreted it upon seeing the passive. It became what it did to the community as a whole because of obvious reasons.
If they wanted to make a QoL change for dot classes it wouldn't have been given to warlocks specifically after an overhaul that would have made affliction worthless without it due to a completely reworked filler spell that's damage entirely depends on the current snapshot of your dots.