Next week's balance changes

[Deleted]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah man, whatever... artifact broken yada yada... that is not the real issue with affliction, but ok, whatever floats your boat.

I know it's not, do you really think the artifact is a good design? Isn;t it obvous that Soul Flame and Wrath are designed to work with the way Reap Soul oriiginally did?

We have two Gold traits that vary between overpowered to completely useless. With the original Reap Soul, you'd have had the supply of "adds" to keep up the Wrath buff, althoughj Flame would have been more fiddly (and probably one of the reasons they dumped it, because we'd have had locks staying in melee range to try to get the explosion onto the boss)

They pulled Reap at virtually the last minute, promised to adjust the Gold traits to allow for that, and didn't. The affliction artifact is just plan bad, because it is designed to work with a mechanic that they ripped out. Those Reap adds would have allowed reliable empowering, allowed Wrath to work better

As it is, if you have a fight with plenty of adds Flame can be silly, you can kepe up Wrath and you can almost constantly keep up the artifact empowerment buff. But in a fight with no adds, Flae and Wrath are literally rendered totally useless, and you are starved of souls to empower your main cooldown/maint buff.

It's just badly designed, and one of the contributing factors to affliction tending to be a poor performer. It also does not help that Soul Flame provides a boost where affliction doesn't need it, aoe, and doesn;t help at all where affliction needs it which is single target.

As affliction I feel bottled into a niche aoe role, and I feel punished by talents that force me into a niche role. Other classes have way better designed artifacts, where traits in the artifact cancel out weaknesses inherent in the class or their talents. And plenty of classes have good all-rounder talent builds, you don;t feel bottled into a niche role as an mm hunte ror fire mage for example.

Okay, now I;ve had my "yada yada" as youlike to call it, let's hear your analysis as to why the affliction artifact is a piece of brilliant design. Or would you rather just tell everyone to play destruction for the six thousandth time?

- - - Updated - - -

Well I think it's easy to solve just by making filler much more powerful. It is explicitly single target, so won't affect multidotting. Or maybe reward stacking UA more.

They could buff Dralin Life/Soul by 100% which would give aff som emuch needed single target and a small "burst" facility and it would have no effect at all in the "multi-dotting can get too strong" dilemma. Drain is inherently single target

Othe rpossibilities are buffing Shadow Bite, though I really don;t like too much being tied to a pet. They die, and the Felhunter has no speed boost which make sit a PITA generally. Or as you say, they could instruce a modied to say "each Unstable Affliction applied to the tagret increases UA damage on that target by 10%" or something.

I quiote like the ide aof "stacking" UA.

[Gaidax]

To answer that, I don't care about artifact... Soul Flame and Wrath of Consumption are so low on affliction issues pole that I genuinely wonder why you are even so laser focused on them and keep repeating this Wrath/Flame mantra all over and over and over again.

The REAL issues for affliction are

1. Ramp
2. Single Target

Then maybe effigy being bothersome shit for many.

Your complaint is insignificant, I could not care less if Flame/Wrath exists or not and in which form, as long as the above REAL issues are addressed.

I simply think you lack vision of grand scale of things, really.


P.S. Another thing, plenty of people including me actually really like Soul Flame, simply, because it is something awesome in the otherwise pretty boring affliction. It is a big help in a lot of cases, so I am not even sure why you even designate it is an issue, cases where it is good to awesome far outweight those where it is so-so or even useless.

[dakalro]

It is astounding you cannot understand how this game works in terms of the grouping aspect. Warlocks aren't being denied spots because "Well, you cannot hit this single arbitrary line" and this 10% buff gets us over that. It is that we are doing 30% less damage than a bunch of other classes. Why would anyone take a class that is doing 70% of the damage as someone else they could take? And then you are idiotic enough to state "well, complaining that since everyone got buffed that we suck is stupid because we got buffed" proves your lack of understanding of math. If we were doing 30% less than the top 3 specs, and both get buffed by 10%, we are actually further behind those top 3 than we were previously. And since, based on your post it is clear you won't understand that as truth, let me explain with examples with made up numbers. For the sake of simplicity, lets say that the top 3 specs were averaging 100k DPS and Locks were averaging 70k dps (which is the same disparity we've had). If both are buffed by 10%, that means that the top 3 go to 110k while Locks go to 77k. That means instead of being 30k DPS behind, we are now 33k DPS behind. Because a 10% buff to someone doing a lot more damage is worth more than a 10% buff to a class doing a lot less damage.

Warlocks aren't that bad at the moment. At least not bad in the way that they shouldn't be brought to groups. It's at most a preconception increased by all the lock whine.
I got myself a keystone boost (2-5) and I kept up with the boosters even if they'd done the place countless times versus me being the first time in there and not knowing what to expect (what gets pulled, what they skip etc.)

And arguing that "Well, Locks should just change specs for literally every fight" is a bullshit reasoning when basically no other class needs to change specs that much. And even when we do change that much, we still aren't topping meters.

Changing talents/specialization for every fight is actually a fun thing, if it didn't cost an arm and a leg. It's not even a hindrance if you want to perform to the best of your ability, it's simply a given.

[n0n3]

It's not ok for warlocks to be middle of the pack, since we are pure dps class, we can only DPS, we need to be on the same level of DPS as the other pure dps classes like mages, rogues or hunters, otherwise, we will get benched in favor of another pure dps class.

[panzerfar]

A boost to AFF dmg is nice, but it doesnt solve the problems.... It still feels a bit boring on ST, with at too long ramp up time.
If Agony would ramp up twice as fast and soul shards generation was upped with 30%, I would be happy.

[Deleted]

Personaly i think that with the incoming buffs lock specs will excel more in their niches. And i dont think its bad that different specs excel in different things..Number tuning is a good start, but when/if more in deph changes come i would rather see the "all star" specs like fire or MM getting the "excel in a certain area, lack in others" treatment. Making all specs excel in everything , will have the result (if history has taught us anything) to make only one spec viable and all others "useless"..like mages are now.

Either way there can be only two outcomes for pure dps classes:
1) All specs will be played, depending on encounter, cause they excel in a certain thing
2) Only one spec will be played cause it can do everything better than the other specs

[Jessicka]

Warlocks aren't that bad at the moment. At least not bad in the way that they shouldn't be brought to groups. It's at most a preconception increased by all the lock whine.
I got myself a keystone boost (2-5) and I kept up with the boosters even if they'd done the place countless times versus me being the first time in there and not knowing what to expect (what gets pulled, what they skip etc.)

What I'm actually seeing Mythic groups is 'only bring one ranged so they can get hit by shit'. And when I give people the choice of Mage or Warlock, they tell me Mage. It is what it is; there just isn't a lot of space for ranged in general when you give people the choice. Monk healers seem popular too because, they count as melee and won't get hit by shit when you have that one ranged to get hit instead.

Changing talents/specialization for every fight is actually a fun thing, if it didn't cost an arm and a leg. It's not even a hindrance if you want to perform to the best of your ability, it's simply a given.

Fun is subjective. I found it one of those things that's fun at the start, especially when you can really see the benefits from it and you're given time to do it; but it quickly becomes tedious, especially when your group just wants to plough on through and the benefits become more marginal as 'aoe stuff' just dies faster and faster to the 'free' incidental damage a lot of other specs put out.

[Gaidax]

Honestly, I think this is the work of all the "amaghad homogenization" shit crowd.

In my opinion all specs should be equally capable to contribute in a wide variety of encounters with some small extra bonus perks here and there.

I mean when people create their character they see "a warrior of light and defender of justice", not "this guy can do decent single target and shit AoE" in description.

If a class has a specific role, he should be able to perform that role successfully in as much aspects of the game as possible and not encounter underwater rocks in the end that unexpectedly sink his ship, like "you are completely outclassed in AoE, because it's not your intended strength", for example.

[Deleted]

Warlocks aren't that bad at the moment. At least not bad in the way that they shouldn't be brought to groups. It's at most a preconception increased by all the lock whine.
I got myself a keystone boost (2-5) and I kept up with the boosters even if they'd done the place countless times versus me being the first time in there and not knowing what to expect (what gets pulled, what they skip etc.)


Changing talents/specialization for every fight is actually a fun thing, if it didn't cost an arm and a leg. It's not even a hindrance if you want to perform to the best of your ability, it's simply a given.

I definitely wouldn't mind swapping around talents if the item to do so wasn't retarded by design. 1 item to change all your talents is much worse than 1 item to swap 1 talent, because the item is balanced around being able to swap all of them. But sometimes you just want to swap 1 or 2, and so you end up "paying" more for that.

If they made the cost of that item 1/7 of the current price (In mats), it wouldn't be nearly as bad in my opinion to swap talents around.

Edit: Also, did Mythic+ last night, had a hunter and mage in the group. I felt decent for doing around 200-250k damage by the end of most boss fights, no BL, but the mage and hunter were hovering around 100-150k higher than that. They were definitely good players and had great gear, but it is kinda insane to already be that far behind in my opinion. Especially when 250k single target DPS isn't currently bad at all for destruction warlock. It was BRH, and yes, we steamrolled through it (Only a 2 keystone). If it was +8 I would have felt bad if we didn't make it through.

[dakalro]

I definitely wouldn't mind swapping around talents if the item to do so wasn't retarded by design. 1 item to change all your talents is much worse than 1 item to swap 1 talent, because the item is balanced around being able to swap all of them. But sometimes you just want to swap 1 or 2, and so you end up "paying" more for that.

If they made the cost of that item 1/7 of the current price (In mats), it wouldn't be nearly as bad in my opinion to swap talents around.

Edit: Also, did Mythic+ last night, had a hunter and mage in the group. I felt decent for doing around 200-250k damage by the end of most boss fights, no BL, but the mage and hunter were hovering around 100-150k higher than that. They were definitely good players and had great gear, but it is kinda insane to already be that far behind in my opinion. Especially when 250k single target DPS isn't currently bad at all for destruction warlock. It was BRH, and yes, we steamrolled through it (Only a 2 keystone). If it was +8 I would have felt bad if we didn't make it through.

Yeah, this talent change mode sucks. It's mostly the cost as I re-started WoW with 20k gold )
I think with the extra health/healing affixes locks may be quite good even now. Too bad this reset it seems to be teeming at +4 )

[Deleted]

To answer that, I don't care about artifact... Soul Flame and Wrath of Consumption are so low on affliction issues pole that I genuinely wonder why you are even so laser focused on them and keep repeating this Wrath/Flame mantra all over and over and over again.

The REAL issues for affliction are

1. Ramp
2. Single Target

Then maybe effigy being bothersome shit for many.

Your complaint is insignificant, I could not care less if Flame/Wrath exists or not and in which form, as long as the above REAL issues are addressed.

I simply think you lack vision of grand scale of things, really.


P.S. Another thing, plenty of people including me actually really like Soul Flame, simply, because it is something awesome in the otherwise pretty boring affliction. It is a big help in a lot of cases, so I am not even sure why you even designate it is an issue, cases where it is good to awesome far outweight those where it is so-so or even useless.

I agree with what you say on affliction. It doesn't seem like a good all-around spec with the flaws you have listed. And yes Soul Effigy is definitively a very interesting talent, but it is too "complicated" and bothersome for playing modern WoW

[Deleted]

Its to difficult (if possible at all) to do that for all the specs. Many specs are capable to contribute in certain aspects of a fight..the thing is their contribution might get lost in false analysis of logs. Most people just go and see dps done and dont bother with anything else. An example that comes to mind is Mythic Beastlord, where you had some dps assigned to the adds and some people speced for boss dmg. Now the people that had the add job where having bigger dps numbers. That doesnt diminish though the role the other dps had, cause it was equally important for beating the encounter.

Also sadly most people when they create a character they see "good single target, trash aoe" etc. The min/maxing perfomance mentality has gone to far in this game, so much that there are people spending more time analysing logs, than being in the actual game. And for most people it becomes a one way road if they want to do endgame content.

It makes me wonder if ignorance is bliss sometimes (talking about the ingorance the community had at the early years of the game)

[sugarfree]

I see you have worked for blizzard and know their design process.... Or were you just assuming and making up shit in your head because the fantastical "details" sound really good to you and it fits the narrative you like to push?

Typically when I don't know how the baker makes cannoli I don't go around telling people how I think they make it with dog shit.

Yes I know their design process - have an expensive spell with a long cast time and hit it for far less than an instant cast with the same cost but without all the risks. Have I made it clearer now?

[Deleted]

Jesus christ, can you people actually read what I said instead of attempting to turn every conversation into a dick-comparing competition. Having an actual discussion on MMO-C is impossible because of how knee-jerk some of you guys are to open the gates with insults.

A big issue I have with the class design, as I addressed in my first post, is that in order to have "pretty good" AoE we have to sacrifice our ST DPS entirely. Yeah our AoE is pretty respectable when we take grimoire of sacrifice, FnB and/or Cataclysm, or if we take all of them it's pretty damn good, but tell me what other class has to throw away their single target DPS to even have a decent AoE spell.

If you take any of those except Grimoire of Sacrifice, prepare to watch your ST drop hard. You have no method of doing both whereas hunters and mages both do so effortlessly. Do you think that's good balance? That's exactly what I mean when I say that we would have to be buffed to the state of being OP in order to be anywhere close to our competitors who are oddly enough not receiving nerfs, which gives the implication that that is where ranged DPS should be.

Not entirely.
I switch talents based on my group and the dungeon.
Lots of quickly dying adds FnB.
Lots of cleave, Eradication and Wreak Havoc.
Lots of single target, Backdraft, Eradication, CDF.

I'm kinda ok with this because it means talent choices are meaningful and, yeah, you can fuck up. You learn, you improve. I enjoy seeing myself improving through understanding my class instead of managing to find that one spot where I have to move as least as possible while running a cookie cutter spec.

[Deleted]

To answer that, I don't care about artifact... Soul Flame and Wrath of Consumption are so low on affliction issues pole that I genuinely wonder why you are even so laser focused on them and keep repeating this Wrath/Flame mantra all over and over and over again.

Because it's so indicative of the design issues the class/spec have, and notleast because it's all because they changed reap souls so late they never got around to fixing the rest of the artifact which is designed to key off one of it;s primary mechanics

The REAL issues for affliction are

1. Ramp
2. Single Target

Then maybe effigy being bothersome shit for many.

I'm aware of that. Affliction has always had ramp. It's single target is terrible, and part of the reason for that is the artifact, which not only has two broken Gold traits, they tend to boost affliction where it's already strong but help little to nothing where it's weak. Soul Flame buffs AOE and almost nothing else unless you faff around ensuring that adds die in a certain place but also Wrath cannot be maintained without lot sof adds. And even Ulthalesh itself cannot be empowered without a steady stream of souls to collect; the "self proc" rate is way too low to be of any help. So, it all ties together, not only does aff have inherently low single target, it's artifact tends not to help with that, particularly in a fight like Ursoc which is exactly the place aff is weakest.

The two are not entirely coincidental, is this really hard to understand?


Your complaint is insignificant, I could not care less if Flame/Wrath exists or not and in which form, as long as the above REAL issues are addressed.

I simply think you lack vision of grand scale of things, really.


P.S. Another thing, plenty of people including me actually really like Soul Flame, simply, because it is something awesome in the otherwise pretty boring affliction. It is a big help in a lot of cases, so I am not even sure why you even designate it is an issue, cases where it is good to awesome far outweight those where it is so-so or even useless.

Either that or I know affliction better than you, given you post endlessly about how you play destruction given it's plain better for raiding.

I can only repeat, I am using the state the artifact is in right now highlights a badly designed spec, in part due to late revisions without changes to ameliorate the side-effects of those revisions.

I don;t find Soul Flame particularly "awesome" and I can only repeat, it's double bad design when the artifact simply boosts affliction where it's strong and does nothing whatever to help where it's weak.

[Jessicka]

I've been playing Aff with Haunt, just to mix up the rotation a bit; and I think that's where the answer to ramp up lies - on shorter fights it definitely feels like it helps a lot since it hits pretty hard (recommending on the basis of fun here, not numbers). The problem is that it's a spell that scales horribly, as it gains nothing from Haste and nothing from Mastery - they need to find a way to fix this; be it by straight up reducing the CD with Haste and adding Mastery to it, or by adding the old Debuff to it so it gains by proxy from the other spells its buffing.

Other than that, just have Wrath of Consumption proc at 25%; makes little difference to much of its current functionality, while giving you something if nothing else is dying.

[Deleted]

Changing talents/specialization for every fight is actually a fun thing, if it didn't cost an arm and a leg. It's not even a hindrance if you want to perform to the best of your ability, it's simply a given.

1) No other class has to do that
2) Not everyone has the time or ability to change from affliction to destruction to demonology every two minutes
3) Not everyoen has the patience or inclination to level three artifacts
4) Teh game should accomodate my play style tastes, not force me into playing some style I don't like just to be competetive with players who chose the "right class" and can stick with what they like
5) Many groups do not have the patience to wait for the lock to dick about with spec and talent swaps every two minutes


This is exactly why we get declines. PUG groups have no idea about player skill, so the easiest first filter to apply is class. PUG groups do the obvoius thing, they take the strongest classes, particularly ones that are good all rounder which are easiest to play.

If you do that then a mage or hunter is an obvious choice preference to a warlock. Give equality of skill, a mage will flat out beat a lock in most things, they don;t have to fart around saying "wait guyz need to swap specs and talents again" and frankly if you luck out and get a mediocre player then a mage will bring more to the table because they are just stronger and more difficult to screw up.

[Orwell7]

Not entirely.
I switch talents based on my group and the dungeon.
Lots of quickly dying adds FnB.
Lots of cleave, Eradication and Wreak Havoc.
Lots of single target, Backdraft, Eradication, CDF.

I'm kinda ok with this because it means talent choices are meaningful and, yeah, you can fuck up. You learn, you improve. I enjoy seeing myself improving through understanding my class instead of managing to find that one spot where I have to move as least as possible while running a cookie cutter spec.

Yesterday I did a 96th percentile log on Elethre Renferal Heroic based on my ilvl (94th overall).
The problem with our DPS is this:
http://imgur.com/a/kdobp

I'm not as good on my mage; only 80th percentile, but still outdps'd my warlock by almost 30k.

[Deleted]

lmao. Found the bullshitter right here.
You said 250-300k sustained when you're saying that you should feasibly be able to burst easily over 400k as a destro lock. If you're in a group bursting around 400-500k, until about Mythic +12 the boss is not going to live long enough for your damage to fall.

This is also bullshit right here, my recent log for ursoc hc bursted almost 700k at lust and that is normal when we run mythic+ atm we are pushing around lvl 6 and 7 and our dps still have time to drop to normal lvl due to the massive hp increase on the bosses so plz get some personal experience before talking out of your ***.

Log for the fight.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...&view=rankings

+ Look at the OP mages they are around the same brackets i am so the little number bump on wednesday and we are fine all it says is that most of the locks are just bad not being able to push out the dmg and i can say i did not play that fight perfectly far from it.

[K4sk]

Still wont make me touch my Warlock.. Affliction is super bad and a couple of % changes wont make it go from bad to good.

1) The buffs are laughable and nowhere near enough to bring them in line with other casters/Hunters.
2) The mechanics are just flat out bad. Why must UA be the nuke? It's a dot. It shouldn't require a soul shard.. Shadowbolt should be brought back to be the single target filler, with Haunt taking up a soul shard.
3) Just like with Shadow Priests, they need a way to instantly spread dots to 5-10 targets, sort of like how DKs insta spread their Diseases. The AoE is awful. Seed of Corruption is an annoying spell that doesn't really fit the dot class fantasy imo.
4) Way less ramp-up time. This applies to PvP as well, a full row of dots only doing like 10% of someone's HP is boring as hell when any melee can instantly get on you and global you in a second.