[BETA] Affliction Warlock Discussion

[Deleted]

All three mage specs get a 50% boost to one of their secondary stats and a 50% reduction to another on their PvP profiles. That second bit is important, because the baseline for secondaries is equal which means they're at no advantage compared to warlocks.

Two mage specs do get a 30% boost to intellect, but that's pretty obviously to feed the part where mages are glass cannons and warlocks (particularly Affliction!) are not.

haste is SUPER important in PvP and I would sacrifice any stat for 50% more haste.

It is the single best thing for casters in PvP

[ThePhantombox]

haste is SUPER important in PvP and I would sacrifice any stat for 50% more haste.

It is the single best thing for casters in PvP

It's a lot more situational than that.

[wholol]

Aff feels way too strong right now in pvp, especially for the low effort that is required to spread the dots, due to 3 of them being instant cast. With circle youre immune to interrupts, which is a really big problem for any other caster. Now you only need to be aware of classes with a stun, but if youre rolling orc with the passive trinket cc reduction youre not stunned for that long anyways and dr kicks in very quickly, which is way better than interrupt chains which can disable you for much longer.

And of course, if you take dual succubus through grimoire of service you have two quick options to lower the incoming damage to yourself. Seduce has 30s cd now but it also removes all your dots so its actually a viable pet now, because you can use it even as a dot spec. And the knockback is yet an additional tool that you can use to good effect, either to interrupt enemy spellcasts or shoot ppl off cliffs. Add the felguard stun every 3 minutes and you got a ton of cc that most other casters do not have, while not even being half as tanky.

I feel that one of the main imbalances with it right now is the strength of drain life and the fact that you can sustain yourself WHILE your damage is still ticking.

Yes affliction is very strong on beta but please let me fix a few things in your post.

First, immunity circle isn't really needed for affliction since most of your spells are instant and we've made due without said circle for as long as I can remember, one of the perks of affliction is having the freedom to move around while your dots are ticking, circle is mostly aimed for turret specs such as demo specifically as well as non SB-spec destro.

Besides the other 2 options in that tier are very strong if used properly.

Second, please never mention succubus in anything outside demo with the pvp talent "pleasure through pain", the only pet you should be using is felhunter/doomguard, felhunter does more damage for every single dot you have on the target so it is advisable that you use it if you're specced into service ( as well as grimoire: felhunter in that case ).

Third, felguard stun ?? no idea what you're on about, that pet is demo exclusive.

Affliction is back to the Sl/SL days which is quite the nostalgic trip, though I must say I am worried about them nerfing our sustain.

One last thing to say, on beta aff is a beast, it's the only caster spec that 2x melee cannot burst through with 1 window of full cd usage, which means we're a bad target for melee cleaves, so proceed to collect points if they focus you and if you manage to climb a bit higher rating wise you'll start seeing some smarter cleaves who do not focus you, in which case the point of circle is redundant.

[Molag]

I'd rather them left circle a baseline talent and put gateway in its place warlocks have no mobility now you have to just stand and fight through melee bashing on you.

[CuchuCachu]

I had a weird bug. Soul Leech wasnt working at all.

Also I feel really weak when doing old content (I assume that's largely from Blizzard nerfing burst), and maybe a 6 button mouse is too few but I am having a hard time juggling these abilities.

Anyone have a good keybinding setup I could steal?

[ThePhantombox]

I had a weird bug. Soul Leech wasnt working at all.

I'm having the same bug here, relogging seems to fix it.

[Deleted]

For what I'm reading must be me , but I feel affli really under performance in the pre-patch (pvp).

The damage is reaaaally low , even with Soul effigy , yes you can heal a lot with drain life but demonology in the other hand , have bigger shields with dark pact , better dps , cc and also they can't avoid all of your dmg unlike affliction(cleanse)

I've been playing this 3 days ago , have no beta , but in more than 120 arena games I have x2 or x3 times more dps as demon.

Don't get me wrong I love this spec , know how to play it, reached 2,4k in 3vs3 but I can't make as more as demon.

Am I doing something wrong?

Have 90% of the time the soul effigy up with the 20 stacks of aggony, corruption , siphon of life + Ua (with the talent of increase %) also the same with the enemy players. As soon as you dot things up with agony , you get tons of souls shard that you can only use for UA . I don't know what to do with the soul shard I'm almost with 3 or 2 all the whole time and everything is dotted and even with that I can't do that dmg before the pre-patch the pressure of dotting everything is not the same anymore.

Btw they should take a bit of dmg if they dispell Soul effigy or a fear of 1s and sorry for my grammar.

[futei]

Which Artifact weapon way should i go for PvE?

[wholol]

For what I'm reading must be me , but I feel affli really under performance in the pre-patch (pvp).

The damage is reaaaally low , even with Soul effigy , yes you can heal a lot with drain life but demonology in the other hand , have bigger shields with dark pact , better dps , cc and also they can't avoid all of your dmg unlike affliction(cleanse)

I've been playing this 3 days ago , have no beta , but in more than 120 arena games I have x2 or x3 times more dps as demon.

Don't get me wrong I love this spec , know how to play it, reached 2,4k in 3vs3 but I can't make as more as demon.

Am I doing something wrong?

Have 90% of the time the soul effigy up with the 20 stacks of aggony, corruption , siphon of life + Ua (with the talent of increase %) also the same with the enemy players. As soon as you dot things up with agony , you get tons of souls shard that you can only use for UA . I don't know what to do with the soul shard I'm almost with 3 or 2 all the whole time and everything is dotted and even with that I can't do that dmg before the pre-patch the pressure of dotting everything is not the same anymore.

Btw they should take a bit of dmg if they dispell Soul effigy or a fear of 1s and sorry for my grammar.

Don't use effigy in 3s, it's dispellable ( which is silly tbh ) just go conduit or phantom singularity if you don't wanna spec into conduit.

As for damage it seems totally fine tbh, as long as you're dotting pretty much everything and dumping UA into kill target, demo might have superior ST but it has almost no spread pressure not to mention you need to chain cast spells constantly to keep that pressure up and any sort of CC or interrupt will just fuck up your pressure severely , unlike affliction.

You might be biased coz you're only seeing prepatch changes, but trust me affliction scales much better at 110 with full artifact, I've tried all 3 specs in arenas and demo doesn't feel as strong as it does at 100 for arenas.

[heinz0r]

Yes affliction is very strong on beta but please let me fix a few things in your post.

First, immunity circle isn't really needed for affliction since most of your spells are instant and we've made due without said circle for as long as I can remember, one of the perks of affliction is having the freedom to move around while your dots are ticking, circle is mostly aimed for turret specs such as demo specifically as well as non SB-spec destro.

Besides the other 2 options in that tier are very strong if used properly.

Second, please never mention succubus in anything outside demo with the pvp talent "pleasure through pain", the only pet you should be using is felhunter/doomguard, felhunter does more damage for every single dot you have on the target so it is advisable that you use it if you're specced into service ( as well as grimoire: felhunter in that case ).

Third, felguard stun ?? no idea what you're on about, that pet is demo exclusive.

Affliction is back to the Sl/SL days which is quite the nostalgic trip, though I must say I am worried about them nerfing our sustain.

One last thing to say, on beta aff is a beast, it's the only caster spec that 2x melee cannot burst through with 1 window of full cd usage, which means we're a bad target for melee cleaves, so proceed to collect points if they focus you and if you manage to climb a bit higher rating wise you'll start seeing some smarter cleaves who do not focus you, in which case the point of circle is redundant.

Well, having spell lockout protection for the moment you need to leech, it is actually a very powerful tool, because in most cases you only get to that moment when ppl disabled you from selfhealing for a while, which often came in the form of them using stuns or an interrupt on you while dealing alot of damage. Most classes but rogue do not really have long stuns, or only that one stun, so you will not have all that much to fear while sitting in your circle channeling, that goes for casters too who might wanna interrupt you. On destro I usually take spell reflect but to me, on affliction, the immunity circle is a great tool for survival against all classes.

Name mixup, I meant the infernal not felguard, sorry. Playing on non english client. Its the 3 minute cooldown, 2 second ae stun.

As for the pet. I do not care much about the minimal extra damage that the felhunter might give. It is not that much more, because the special ability has a base damage of around 2500 and goes up to around 6500 with all your dots on target. Shadowbite only benefits from agonie, unstable affliction and corruption, but not from
siphon life. The succubus special attack deals 6100 damage every time with her autoattack being around 1950. The two are not that different in damage while the succubus can deal with any enemy type using seduce, and knockback. The felhunter can only lockout casters and has nothing else.

The only thing where the felhunter has the advantage is to lockout a healer and thats about it. For preventing damage, the succubus wins by a large margin.

And yep, I fully agree. There is barely a class that can touch affliction right now. I had several situations where melees in bgs simply stopped playing because they couldnt even dent me. And thats why I say the class is way too strong right now. There is no other caster that has to put up such little effort in order to frustrate pretty much any other class in the game right now. Shadow priests can do something similar, when chain casting 5-6 VTs on different ppl, but its prone to get interrupted, makes them immobile for those casts and thats less effective compared to affliction. And of course, they cannot drain life, only heal and be oom after 4-5 of those.
@Ji-tae
I am on beta and know how the spec plays out with pvp talents and artifacts and it will even get less vulnerable with them because you get even more healing through traits, in the form of corruption having heal chance, healthstones that your teammates use heal you for the same amount, and drain life getting stronger by 30%, which you can increase to 60% using the 3 slots for it. Talent wise ppl will probably go rot and decay to keep refreshing dots instead of having to reapply them one by one on each target, and longer unstable affliction for some really big damage on the kill target. It will be even stronger than it is on live. And it is actually pretty mobile due to having 3 instant dots, which allows them to run around as they please and wait until you have 5 shards and then unload on your kill target with UA spam and drain life.

[Deleted]

@Ji-tae
I am on beta and know how the spec plays out with pvp talents and artifacts and it will even get less vulnerable with them because you get even more healing through traits, in the form of corruption having heal chance, healthstones that your teammates use heal you for the same amount, and drain life getting stronger by 30%, which you can increase to 60% using the 3 slots for it. Talent wise ppl will probably go rot and decay to keep refreshing dots instead of having to reapply them one by one on each target, and longer unstable affliction for some really big damage on the kill target. It will be even stronger than it is on live. And it is actually pretty mobile due to having 3 instant dots, which allows them to run around as they please and wait until you have 5 shards and then unload on your kill target with UA spam and drain life.

Interesting. Thank you for sharing. I have heard some people say that Healthstones someone don't work currently.

Let's hope Affliction is good in PvE too so I can focus all my power on a single artifact weapon for both PvE and PvP

[Kirroth]

I had a weird bug. Soul Leech wasnt working at all.

Also I feel really weak when doing old content (I assume that's largely from Blizzard nerfing burst), and maybe a 6 button mouse is too few but I am having a hard time juggling these abilities.

I had that bug too. A relog fixed it.

Regarding old content, there was an unannounced changed with the patch. You know how it's long been the case that if your pet kills a mob without your active participation, you don't get kill credit or loot? That's no longer true. So for old content you can grab GoSup for the Infernal and just let its constant passive AoE kills all the annoying trash with no effort on your part.

Well, that's pre-Mists old content. For Mists content, everyone feels weaker doing it. Trust me, I've run enough alts through Terrace along side enough other people. It's why the initial HFC nerf of -30% boss damage and -40% boss health only made it about as hard as it was pre-patch, and they had to do a second round of nerfs to actually make it easier.

[CuchuCachu]

I had that bug too. A relog fixed it.

Regarding old content, there was an unannounced changed with the patch. You know how it's long been the case that if your pet kills a mob without your active participation, you don't get kill credit or loot? That's no longer true. So for old content you can grab GoSup for the Infernal and just let its constant passive AoE kills all the annoying trash with no effort on your part.

Well, that's pre-Mists old content. For Mists content, everyone feels weaker doing it. Trust me, I've run enough alts through Terrace along side enough other people. It's why the initial HFC nerf of -30% boss damage and -40% boss health only made it about as hard as it was pre-patch, and they had to do a second round of nerfs to actually make it easier.

Ah, so it isnt just me. That's good to know, thank you for the advice

My sustained damage on a target dummy is just fine even with my timers and stuff not working properly so I assume it is a lack of burst.

Also no Soul Swap

[wholol]

Well, having spell lockout protection for the moment you need to leech, it is actually a very powerful tool, because in most cases you only get to that moment when ppl disabled you from selfhealing for a while, which often came in the form of them using stuns or an interrupt on you while dealing alot of damage. Most classes but rogue do not really have long stuns, or only that one stun, so you will not have all that much to fear while sitting in your circle channeling, that goes for casters too who might wanna interrupt you. On destro I usually take spell reflect but to me, on affliction, the immunity circle is a great tool for survival against all classes.

Name mixup, I meant the infernal not felguard, sorry. Playing on non english client. Its the 3 minute cooldown, 2 second ae stun.

As for the pet. I do not care much about the minimal extra damage that the felhunter might give. It is not that much more, because the special ability has a base damage of around 2500 and goes up to around 6500 with all your dots on target. Shadowbite only benefits from agonie, unstable affliction and corruption, but not from
siphon life. The succubus special attack deals 6100 damage every time with her autoattack being around 1950. The two are not that different in damage while the succubus can deal with any enemy type using seduce, and knockback. The felhunter can only lockout casters and has nothing else.

The only thing where the felhunter has the advantage is to lockout a healer and thats about it. For preventing damage, the succubus wins by a large margin.

And yep, I fully agree. There is barely a class that can touch affliction right now. I had several situations where melees in bgs simply stopped playing because they couldnt even dent me. And thats why I say the class is way too strong right now. There is no other caster that has to put up such little effort in order to frustrate pretty much any other class in the game right now. Shadow priests can do something similar, when chain casting 5-6 VTs on different ppl, but its prone to get interrupted, makes them immobile for those casts and thats less effective compared to affliction. And of course, they cannot drain life, only heal and be oom after 4-5 of those.
@Ji-tae
I am on beta and know how the spec plays out with pvp talents and artifacts and it will even get less vulnerable with them because you get even more healing through traits, in the form of corruption having heal chance, healthstones that your teammates use heal you for the same amount, and drain life getting stronger by 30%, which you can increase to 60% using the 3 slots for it. Talent wise ppl will probably go rot and decay to keep refreshing dots instead of having to reapply them one by one on each target, and longer unstable affliction for some really big damage on the kill target. It will be even stronger than it is on live. And it is actually pretty mobile due to having 3 instant dots, which allows them to run around as they please and wait until you have 5 shards and then unload on your kill target with UA spam and drain life.

If you insist on playing with circle why would you bother with the succubus ? you can hard cast fear for the same result, it shares the same DR, does not remove your dots plus the fear is a better form of CC forcing targets to run away which is granting you distance.

Another better option for dps pet is simply using supremacy doomguard which not only grants you a stronger pet it also frees more shards for UA spam , the doomguard also happens to have a potent slow which is a much needed tool for the spec.

And lastly, if we are ever talking about arenas you cannot say things such as " the advantage is to lockout a healer and thats about it", yes that advantage alone is worth more damage than you can imagine.

I don't want to be rude but please try not to educate the minds of the non beta players with such prehistoric ideologies, it simply reeks of very low level arena experience.

[Deleted]

So have people gathered experiences so far with Affliction in 7.0 raiding? How is it going for you guys. Is affliction able to compete with mages/hunters/rogues etc. ?

[heinz0r]

If you insist on playing with circle why would you bother with the succubus ? you can hard cast fear for the same result, it shares the same DR, does not remove your dots plus the fear is a better form of CC forcing targets to run away which is granting you distance.

Another better option for dps pet is simply using supremacy doomguard which not only grants you a stronger pet it also frees more shards for UA spam , the doomguard also happens to have a potent slow which is a much needed tool for the spec.

And lastly, if we are ever talking about arenas you cannot say things such as " the advantage is to lockout a healer and thats about it", yes that advantage alone is worth more damage than you can imagine.

I don't want to be rude but please try not to educate the minds of the non beta players with such prehistoric ideologies, it simply reeks of very low level arena experience.

Passive agressive attitude and being elitist never helps in a discussion. And please stop trying to sell your oppinion as the only viable option, and then a couple sentences later you are telling me that I should not educate ppl. It just makes no sense and you might probably want to take a look into the mirror every now and then

But regarding the issues at hand. I never claimed to be talking exclusively arena, so you must have gotten that impression for the wrong reasons. I usually look at a class for all pvp situations, and that includes battlegrounds, rated bgs, 1onX, duels aswell as arena.

Immunity circle is clearly too strong in a game where almost every class has rather short cooldown interrupts and we will be able to completely ignore that. This can completely cross the game plan of some comps in arena, because they can only stun and mez you now, and is basically an i-win button against pretty much any caster when youre facing off against them outside of arena. And it is one of those "no effort, but massive gain" type of abilities. I can see good use for the other two talents aswell, but none of them is as broken right now, because the reflect has way higher cooldown and needs to be timed properly, and the drain dmg reduction only works against the target youre draining, so you still take full damage from anyone else and will be prone to interrupts, and more often than not, have to sit through it without that selfheal for a couple seconds.

I dont know if I can take you seriously when youre telling me what I should and should not say regarding arena, and then you talk about pets and their damage. Why would you even bring up pet dps in the first place? Who chooses a wl pet for damage? The difference between them is marginal and it does not matter much. WL pets serve the purpose of extra cc, the damage is just a bonus. Even the doomguard is not doing that much more than the others, because it has to cast almost 3s on a doombolt, which makes it prone to drop casts when ppl run around obstacles, and even with 100% succes rate of casts, it still wouldnt be dealing considerably more damage compared to the other pets... so please, stop bringing up damage as a reason for taking a wl pet over the other.

A full duration seduce, when a healer has no trinket left, is worth a ton of damage too, wouldnt you agree? Ever tried getting off a fear when youre stunned? Or when you just got interrupted while trying to fear? The succubus doesnt give a damn if youre stunned or interrupted, or if you have line of sight, because she usually sits right on the target, even when it is strafing away from your line of sight behind an obstacle.

I am not saying that the succubus will be the go-to pet for affliction, far from it, but it can be a viable option, and especially outside of arena, when youre doing battlegrounds, a defensive pet is almost always the best option when youre _not_ just running with a pack and hiding behind other players. Because if you do not have defensive cds, you will die in any 1onx situation pretty quickly. And 2x succubus can even turn around dire situations against any class other than feral+boomkin.

If that is prehistoric, well so be it

[ThePhantombox]

Who chooses a wl pet for damage?

Oh jeez....

WL pets serve the purpose of extra cc

Oh god....

A full duration seduce, when a healer has no trinket left, is worth a ton of damage too

Oh Christ....

if you do not have defensive cds, you will die in any 1onx situation pretty quickly.

I think I'm gonna be sick....

And 2x succubus can even turn around dire situations against any class other than feral+boomkin.

ERROR... CANNOT_COMPUTE...

[Kirroth]

Seriously, your information is either grossly incorrect or hopelessly outdated, Heinz0r. With Agony's ramp mechanic the last thing you ever want to do is clear your own DoTs. Using Seduce is something Destro does. Or I should say "did" because that's outdated now too. And Afflic's 1v1 or even 1v2 survival is insane right now. Have you even tried Afflic on the Beta or since the patch?

[Deleted]

Aff feels way too strong right now in pvp, especially for the low effort that is required to spread the dots, due to 3 of them being instant cast. With circle youre immune to interrupts, which is a really big problem for any other caster. Now you only need to be aware of classes with a stun, but if youre rolling orc with the passive trinket cc reduction youre not stunned for that long anyways and dr kicks in very quickly, which is way better than interrupt chains which can disable you for much longer.

And of course, if you take dual succubus through grimoire of service you have two quick options to lower the incoming damage to yourself. Seduce has 30s cd now but it also removes all your dots so its actually a viable pet now, because you can use it even as a dot spec. And the knockback is yet an additional tool that you can use to good effect, either to interrupt enemy spellcasts or shoot ppl off cliffs. Add the felguard stun every 3 minutes and you got a ton of cc that most other casters do not have, while not even being half as tanky.

I feel that one of the main imbalances with it right now is the strength of drain life and the fact that you can sustain yourself WHILE your damage is still ticking.

The other side of the story is that afflocks have no burst, they have to be able to survive long enough to actually kill someone. If you're up against a burst class then without that survivability an afflock would lose 100% of the time because they would always die first.

And afflocks have like all DOT classes always done massive amounts of spread damage.

If people are getting killed to afflocks without stuns, lockouts and interrupts being used then they are deservedly losing.

And the last thing you'd do is use a succubus because eof Agony's ludicrously long rampup times. Maybe in a large battleground where you can Seduce someone and have them died to a team-mate. I doubt you'd use it outside of that.

The felguard is unique to demonology of course.

DOT classes have always been strong in battlegrounds particularly, they often do most damage - but with relatively low actual killing blows.

[Deleted]

Aff feels way too strong right now in pvp, especially for the low effort that is required to spread the dots, due to 3 of them being instant cast. With circle youre immune to interrupts, which is a really big problem for any other caster. Now you only need to be aware of classes with a stun, but if youre rolling orc with the passive trinket cc reduction youre not stunned for that long anyways and dr kicks in very quickly, which is way better than interrupt chains which can disable you for much longer.

And of course, if you take dual succubus through grimoire of service you have two quick options to lower the incoming damage to yourself. Seduce has 30s cd now but it also removes all your dots so its actually a viable pet now, because you can use it even as a dot spec. And the knockback is yet an additional tool that you can use to good effect, either to interrupt enemy spellcasts or shoot ppl off cliffs. Add the felguard stun every 3 minutes and you got a ton of cc that most other casters do not have, while not even being half as tanky.

I feel that one of the main imbalances with it right now is the strength of drain life and the fact that you can sustain yourself WHILE your damage is still ticking.

Well instead of attacking the Class that has exceptional self sustain, attack something else lol. Or better yet attack the Affli Lock with more than one person.
Locks have always been known for the massive spread pressure they can do, and with Blizz basically removing ALL mobility spells from Locks in general they need to be compensated somehow, and being tank-like is what they've got.

From what i've seen on beta and the pre-patch Affli is in a good place right now (damage is a little low but that's easy fixed) PVP wise i'm confident Legion will be for all purposes MUCH better for Warlocks than WOD has been.

And your mention of the Felguard when speaking about Affli shows you've came on not really understanding the mechanics of the Warlock and just have clearly been stomped by a few lol.

What you're really trying to say is you can't beat a Warlock 1v1 so you want them nerfed, right?