Affliction concerns for 7.2

[Deleted]

I'm worried when I read the changes coming for Affliction in 7.2 and it looks kinda grim. If we exclude the general damage decrease we'll experience from having less Souls at the start of encounters and the loss of our T19 set bonus being replaced with something that'll barely affect us, my main concern is the design we're being moved towards. The major contributors to why everything's turning for the worse is the new traits, the new set bonuses and bad balancing in our talent tree. Being forced to play a Malefic Grasp build with 15%(25% if head ain't BiS) less shard regen will feel absolutely horrible.

Some things Blizzard could do to adress our problems.
- Make Siphon Life Baseline. No clue why this hasn't happened yet. Replace it with something to help our mobility. Something like,
Kiljaeden's Cunning: Unstable Affliction can now be cast while moving. That way we have the option between more mobility, more AoE or more single target damage.
- Make Soul Harvest also gain the effect of Reap Souls during it's duration. This would help us with openers immensely, especially considering they're removing our option for gathering souls prepull.

- Buff Agony and Corruption damage by ~10%.
- Buff Soul Effigy to 40% up from 35%.
These changes are to make Writhe in Agony a more competetive build, especially in multitarget fights where Malefic Grasp is still superior. Due to the mean damage going down now that we can't prepull with 12 souls Affliction damage in raids, especially farm content will be reduced drastically compared to all others. Affliction is currently dependant on 12 souls and even 5/5 Wrath of Consumption stacks on pull to even do comparable damage to other classes. This will most probably warrant a slight single target buff across the board. While the changes sounds substantial these aren't for Malefic Grasp. A minor buff to the filler dots and getting Siphon Life baseline with the option of Soul Harvest should both make Affliction useable for raid progression and more engaging while playing without making Affliction broken for Farm content, something that never was an issue to begin with.

Regarding the new traits we're getting, they should see a rework too.
- Sinister Seeds: Seed of Corruption has a 20% chanse to spread another Seed of Corruption to a neraby target when it detonates. The current itteration is an embarassiament of a talent. Make it do something useful instead. Another Idea could be to have Seed of Corruption spread one agony to a nearby target.
- Rend Soul: Move this procc to unstable Affliction instead and reduce the procc chance to 5%. Being balanced around 100% uptime on Reap Souls is retarded to start things off. Secondly, locking Affliction to Malefic Grasp is not what we want. Make the trait useable across all speccs.

And lastly we have the horrible set bonuses that basically grants us nothing. The 2 part will probably net us a 0,5-1% dps increase whilethe 4 part will make us reapply our dots 10% faster after we've finished a drain cycle. Absolutely insignificant. Just look at the Demo and Destro set bonuses, absolutely amazing. Give us something like that instead. Something like:

-2/4: Each Agony present increases your haste by 3%
-4/4: Unstable Affliction has a 15% chanse to replicate itself onto it's target when cast.

Just give us something fun that'll help us and make our damage rotation more engaging. As it stand right now the T19 set bonuses are so superior we'll probably lose out on switching from them to T20. Think about what we're losing, 10% UA dmg and 15% higher Soul Shard generation. And what do we get as a replacement? Higher Ilvl. Don't make farming Mythic Nighthold for Titanforge the primary source for gear upgrades.

[Deleted]

Okay my dad works in Blizzard so I will let him know.
Bla bla bla, didnt even read. Blizz wont do any gameplay change untill new expansion.

[slickwilly]

Okay my dad works in Blizzard so I will let him know.
Bla bla bla, didnt even read. Blizz wont do any gameplay change untill new expansion.

Thank you for the amazing insight and brilliance.

[Werst]

The problem with affliction is that blizzard loves vanilla era mechanics in a 2017 paced game. Dots, as a spec mechanic, are inherently weaker than front loaded - especially instant - damage. There is zero reason whatsoever to have agony "stack" anymore. When you look at other "filler" dots from other classes there is no reason agony can't just be full power from application. That's an old mechanic that keeps any sort of balance tuning 20 seconds behind schedule.

Siphon Life could probably just be baked into corruption with any application of corruption. DR its heal or just have it be a healing component only. Its GCD's that don't do enough damage when we look at their DPET vs UA+MG drain. SoC is already shard throttled, its cast time to start doing damage still feels archaic, whatever its damage.

Unused talents:
*Haunt: has never been a thing this expac, maybe instant with all dots applied on a 15 sec CD giving it a soulswap/outbreak with a bit of damage that can at least not utterly embarrass itself single target vs MG. MG is our damage barometer, haunt needs to do more.
*Phantom Singularity: looks like fun except it is inferior to both other options in every facet of the game so far. Why the biggest aoe radius in the game? Just to troll pull in 5 mans? Cut its cooldown and radius in half, back off the healing, increase damage slightly. It needs to be good enough its an at least situational choice so it has room to grow. The fact we have had most of the expac and not a single fight or niche in pvp or pve says its not tuned well.
*Effigy: can it please just follow the lock around? WiA builds aren't competitive and this holds back tuning based on mechanics yet again. That or I'm fine with it being some kind of thing we embed into our target but its too weak in practice so I could see it going up to 40%+

Putting all our eggs in the channeling basket is just unfun. Waiting as a dot class take some innate patience but not when it takes 2x cycles of a dot to even reach its full power....a "power" that is meager for a dot nowadays. Its just a shard engine instead of anything important and is still 1x GCD per application so you are throttled in multitarget already.

Devs have a very strong "class fantasy" with affliction. Unfortunately for people who may want to play that "fantasy" its not such a great fantasy....its kinda a pain in the arse mechanically compared to our peers. Whatever your view on numbers tuning its almost as if the devs feel a pathological need to really cornhole affliction's functionality in modern wow relative to other classes.

I'd rather see much stronger baseline dots with shorter durations so you really can't multidot beyond 3 targets, Corr/Agony, no agony ramp up (WiA is just stronger by same % as 10 vs 20x agony), and far less reliance on drain channeling would be better directions. A highly mobile ranged with good sustained and spread damage should be the spec. Demo is already a turret and so is destro...one more mobile spec isn't out of line since the new AP line kind of forces you to either "main" 3x specs or be a gimp (plus leggo RNG). To keep corruption relevant I'd like to see souls generate from corruption and shards from agony...that makes more sense if we are going to have to nurse a wonky artifact mechanic weapon.

No major gameplay changes beyond the above are probably too far reaching for this expac. I'm simply saying that MUCH could be done within existing mechanics with just some minor tweaks that could really help QoL, balance tuning, and "fun". For all its fotm, aff really isn't excelling in any area of the game and T20 doesn't look like its going to be more advantageous. But as the man says "we'll be fine", which is true, but is it fun?

[Deleted]

The only complaint I have with warlocks in general is extremely limited mobility and burning rush is nice, but extremely underpowered compared to other classes baseline mobility.

For affliction my main complaint is that with MG you have an extremely hard time to switch to high priority adds. You basically always want to continue draining your main target, because switching to a target and putting up dots then ua then draining is a straight big dps loss.

There are a lot of solutions, but this isn't the right place and I don't think Blizzard is going to make big changes with warlocks in LEGION.

[Werst]

I would agree Conflux...the mobility issue is a constant frustration. All our specs seem to be pushed into turret gameplay. As you pointed out aff/demo can't target swap. Even if we do stop everything and dump into a new target we lose most of our main target damage and just enter the 10-15 second ramp up where you do squat all damage. So even if you try to play "for the team" you are encouraged to tunnel or leave mechanics to classes better able to handle it.

Are we "fine"? Sure...good players make due but most of the gripes I have (and seems others) are largely mechanically based. It feels like something needs to give. Either more mobility or cut down the demo/aff ramp up. BR is stupidly overpriced for its effect. You can't leave it on long in any content and you will need healer supervision in anything but affliction's self heals. Locks being "tanky" is a misnomer, its enough to ignore lesser mechanics when you outgear content...its NOT the same as not getting hit when its a 1 shot anyhow. So I guess if you play normal with 885 gear its cool but it sort of falls apart at content's edge (for your gear). BR should give at least a 15% baseline movement speed boost and you could probably cut its cost in half OR more intelligently make its cost stack up to present levels over time. Can only the things that help us have ramp up?

While there is a ton of room for QoL fixes blizz just seems more wrapped up in micro holidays and such.

[Tikishock]

The only complaint I have with warlocks in general is extremely limited mobility and burning rush is nice, but extremely underpowered compared to other classes baseline mobility.

For affliction my main complaint is that with MG you have an extremely hard time to switch to high priority adds. You basically always want to continue draining your main target, because switching to a target and putting up dots then ua then draining is a straight big dps loss.

There are a lot of solutions, but this isn't the right place and I don't think Blizzard is going to make big changes with warlocks in LEGION.

I agree and is probably my biggest complaint because it puts pressure on the other members of my raid team to drop priority adds so I can tunnel the boss because it just isn't work it to stop boss dps. A fix to this would be if they brought back soul swap in which we could copy our boss Dots over to priority adds at the cost of a shard or something. I would love for that to come back.

I also agree the ramp up time for Agony is a relic of a game gone past. Let it do full damage and actually compete with UA for top percentage of our dmg to enemies. Currently it's usually behind Corruption in total damage which is just pathetic.

[sd2400533]

Everything you said warlock community have been saying since 7.03, all i can say is keep dreaming....

[Gohzerlock]

Everything you said warlock community have been saying since 7.03, all i can say is keep dreaming....

"Everything you said warlock community have been saying since 7.03, all i can say is keep draining...."

There, fixed.