Blizzard is either oblivious or doesn't care (Affliction)

[HorrorCosmic]

I thought that with the focus on class and spec differences that we can play what we want and still be viable. I understand the reason behind having a certain spec outperform others in certain contents, but there's a difference between viability and optimal. And as it's looking Affliction is losing its viability in most categories.

I Love affliction, i love the idea of dotting up a target and watching them slowly die. I've been affliction since BC, and to put all of my artifact power, and focus on mastery / haste gear to get the boot.... now i have to switch to demo or destro to not even be competitive but rather decent.

And yes i know its a great possibility that affliction will be near top dps later in the expac, but we're talking about right now.

Sorry, i've stuck with warlocks since classic, through all of the nerfs and changes i always played destro / affliction / demo whatever was needed of me, but this time....i think i'll focus on my warrior tank. Atleast i'll get alittle bit of satisfaction from filling a role.

[Jonny727272]

I haven't been PvPing this xpac but I had heard aff locks are damn near unkillable in a 1v1 situation. If that is still true, then I'd call that a pretty good niche!

[Cainium]

I haven't been PvPing this xpac but I had heard aff locks are damn near unkillable in a 1v1 situation. If that is still true, then I'd call that a pretty good niche!

Against sustained damage, probably. But against the high burst? No. If you spec full def and dmg reduction in the pvp tree any meele will still break through all your defensives like you would play naked. Maybe you can survive that and in theory you could heal you back to full life, but that's "theory".

If your statement would be true aff locks would be gods in 2vs2 paired with a decent healer. But they aren't.

[Deleted]

I haven't been PvPing this xpac but I had heard aff locks are damn near unkillable in a 1v1 situation. If that is still true, then I'd call that a pretty good niche!

We were very tanky and hard to kill... in the prepatch. This is because we had enough damage resists (via strong innate shield + pact and our 40% cd) to withstand the standard mongo dps "5s stun, pop cds, nuke!" thing and then come back. What happened then was an actual pvp duel in the good ol' meaning of the word, where your ability to do damage while landing cc and the melee's ability to hit you back while using their own tools (cc, kick, damage resists/immunities) determined the winner. And we had a very good chance of winning just because we had our self heal and the ability to buy time with Fear. A good lock was thus often able to hold his own even against 2 melees with reasonable skill.

This is absolutely not the case in Legion at 110 - our damage reduction is in fact far outscaled by damage, so most melees can and will shred through an Aff lock in that initial stun, and even if you trinket the stun and manage to successfully juke the kick to your Fear and land a Fear, you'll usually end up low-ish with your defensives spent - and while you can try to heal yourself back, most melees worth their salt will drop Fear, re-engage and still kill you rather easily. There's no such thing as kiting as a warlock and you will not have the time to bring yourself back against a melee that doesn't completely suck. So you're dead.

Which ofc sucks, because in the prepatch melee had to actually *think* before they decided to open on you in a random BG or something, while now we're back to the same old shit of locks being free kills for them; melees will again chase you across the map like a piece of raw meat thrown to the dogs. I guess all the mongo melees whining about not being able to tunnel down a warlock in one stun in the prepatch got a response to their feedback.

[Deleted]

I haven't been PvPing this xpac but I had heard aff locks are damn near unkillable in a 1v1 situation. If that is still true, then I'd call that a pretty good niche!

yes. but the pvp is not 1v1. and in 2v1 u have 15sec to survie becuase u have a single long cast time time cc: fear.

[Applenazi]

It is very easy to see that Blizzard has no interest in fixing Affliction.

...also this wasnt specific to affliction. This is as destro. Was only replying to the guy talking out of his ass about warlocks.

Wow, you're... you're really dumb.

[Deleted]

I haven't been PvPing this xpac but I had heard aff locks are damn near unkillable in a 1v1 situation. If that is still true, then I'd call that a pretty good niche!

Affliction's felt weaker than ever to me - it's rot is less relevant and it's optimal talents funneled it into a less rot, more focused playstyle - though that's just been nerfed repeatedly.

Can't imagine why anyone would play affliction over demo atm.

[Jonny727272]

It appears I was very wrong, as pointed out by several of you. All the knowledge of aff pvp I had must've been from pre patch or purely anecdotal. I'll just stick with destro and pve, that is very fun and rewarding of played well.

[Iknus]

well based on another big PTR change and more buffs for other class and NOTHING for Affliction locks or blue posts about the plans and state of Affliction .... Blizzard just doesn't know what to do and does not give a shit !!!

[Deleted]

Where is Gaidax saying "it's only alpha".

Or is it beta?

[Jessicka]

Where is Gaidax saying "it's only alpha".

Or is it beta?

Gaidax is just happy Destruction is best spec at the moment, he only complains when he has to play Aff or Demo, especially Demo.

[Caolela]

I put the blame on all the homogenization whine squad that was plaguing forums for years.

Sure, blame the players not the company that makes the product - as if Blizz listens to any "whine squad". Blizz does whatever the fuck it wants as long as they get your money. They only change something if it results in enough sub losses and what they've done to classes is Blizzard's own doing, not players.

[Coldfire989]

So we are now 5 weeks in to Legion and after a few rounds of hot fixes and balancing, as well as current state of PTR ... It is very easy to see that Blizzard has no interest in fixing Affliction. They say sims are not worth anything so lets go over raiding logs of how things are playing on with regards to damage done.

Currently as you see We are not strong at anything in raiding at this point and parses from EN over last week (7 days and 14 is worse) of Heroic raiding show it load and clear.

add worldoflogs(.)com to beginning of url
So Single Target Fight - (Emerald Nightmare) - Nythendra -> /statistics/10#dataset=100&difficulty=4&sample=7&boss=1853
AOE / Burst Target - (Emerald Nightmare) - Il'gynoth -> /statistics/10#dataset=100&difficulty=4&sample=7&boss=1873
Multi DOT - (Emerald Nightmare) -Dragons of Nightmare -> /statistics/10#dataset=100&difficulty=4&sample=7&boss=1854

Is someone at Blizzard going to take there head out of there ass or kick the person that is assigned to this mess to give us at least some plan they are working on or hope of or a real changes to come ... currently PTR shows no signs of it.

Note: I am providing data and insight and hope the person being PAID to care about our class / spec starts to soon!

Option might to be to reset all the Artifact power of Affliction players and let us add it to a other spec / class as 7.1 will be here soon enough!

I am thinking they are keeping quite on any new changes till Friday and the 7.1 QA (no idea why) at least that is what I am hoping they are doing as there are a few classes that really need a good looking at and or buff.

[sd2400533]

They know there is a problem with Affliction, but they can't simply fix it.
You make it very strong, some people will complain that they waste their AP on Demo or Destro.
Most of the people won't care because their Affliction artifact is like Lv 9.
People who choose Affliction as their main spec will be happy but their number is so few(as you can see on WCL) it just doesn't matter (Its wrong, but that's just how Blizzard do things).

My guess is that they are gonna fix Affliction after 7.1 or at the end of 7.1 when everyone is maxed out on their main artifact and want to try something new, that's when they gonna buff Affliction very hard to make it appealing for people looking for a secondary spec.

[Deleted]

There are major number issues, the amount of energy we have to put in to get decent (and even competitive) dps in some fights such as the dragons is off the chart, it's not normal. For the constant switching and watching over 3+ targets all kinds of dots, we should be more rewarded. Don't get me wrong, I've always enjoyed managing dots on multiple targets, but we used to have tools to help us manage them better + you could really see the difference on recount.
The same goes for ST, we have to manage 7 dots, and we are so way behind everyone else, it's really terrible, I've played affliction since BC with a small switch to demo at the beginning of WoD, and the spec is really in poor shape on a lot of fights, and unfortunately gear won't solve everything
We lost so much things, our execute phase, the ability to dot quickly other targets with soul swap, some automatic refresh of dots with our drains.
We still have the artifact bugging with some 3 ranks trait still not working when we activate our weapon, tooltip bugs everywhere, it's scandalous.
We need a 15% increase in our dps numbers, and some mechanical changes. They need to do something about ST fight, bringing back mechanics like haunt or an execute phase would be easy and would solve a lot of problems.
I remember when affliction was about weakening slowly your target then drain his soul and doing MASSIVE damages, an affliction warlock would be behind everyone else in a fight, but in the last 25% you would just crush everyone else on the meters on some fights. It was so rewarding as a gameplay, you worked hard through the whole encounter, and then at 25% you just had to enjoy and sit back, draining the soul of your ennemy and just watch it crumble.
I'd love to see drainsoul back as baseline with its old execute phase that would reset a dot, like agony for example.

Our resource system is bad as well, really those soul fragments are more a pain in the ass than anything else. You're always starving and it doesn't give you the feeling that you're going to do something great with it, it's just another dot. The old hard system, where you could empower your healthstone, or your demonic circle, or your soul swap, was great in my opinion, you were eager to spend your soulshard.

[transparent]

You know what would fix all three specs? Enabling the PvP talents for all content. Therein lays the problem that of course now you would have people complaining that they need to do PvP in order to PvE, this would be justified.

Solution? Give us back our baseline abilities from the normal talent tree and take the useful talents from the PvP tree to replace them and have the PvP talent tree focus on PvP abilities that aren't useful in most PvE situations, like the Casting Circle. Voila, jobs done.

[Deleted]

They know there is a problem with Affliction, but they can't simply fix it.
You make it very strong, some people will complain that they waste their AP on Demo or Destro.
Most of the people won't care because their Affliction artifact is like Lv 9.
People who choose Affliction as their main spec will be happy but their number is so few(as you can see on WCL) it just doesn't matter (Its wrong, but that's just how Blizzard do things).

My guess is that they are gonna fix Affliction after 7.1 or at the end of 7.1 when everyone is maxed out on their main artifact and want to try something new, that's when they gonna buff Affliction very hard to make it appealing for people looking for a secondary spec.

They could easily buff affliction's damage by 10-15% single target bia drain soul or some other single target spell (but please not the abomination that is soul effigy)

That would bring it up to middle of the pack

No one would switch to it and complain they invested into destructin or fire mage, because affliction would still be awful at stuff like target switching

But I suspect you are right in one way, so few people play affliction Blizzard don;t givea shit and have adopted a "so play destruction. Or better yet fire mage"

[Jessicka]

They could easily buff affliction's damage by 10-15% single target bia drain soul or some other single target spell (but please not the abomination that is soul effigy)

That would bring it up to middle of the pack

No one would switch to it and complain they invested into destructin or fire mage, because affliction would still be awful at stuff like target switching

But I suspect you are right in one way, so few people play affliction Blizzard don;t givea shit and have adopted a "so play destruction. Or better yet fire mage"

Buffing DL/DS by that much might create some degenerate builds that impact the playstyle. They would probably have to go back to MG style 'extra ticks' or something to prevent that; but they made such a big thing of cutting that, that it makes it difficult. They've painted themselves into a bit of a corner with Effigy too, as buffing that would upset the balance on that row; and its just straight up not a "convenient" talent for 99% of the game so likely wouldn't want players feeling obliged to be running around the world and dungeons with it because of its strength.

[Mongosaurus]

I don't get why effigy exists after they already tried it with mages and failed. Did they run out of unique ideas?

[Deleted]

Buffing DL/DS by that much might create some degenerate builds that impact the playstyle. They would probably have to go back to MG style 'extra ticks' or something to prevent that; but they made such a big thing of cutting that, that it makes it difficult. They've painted themselves into a bit of a corner with Effigy too, as buffing that would upset the balance on that row; and its just straight up not a "convenient" talent for 99% of the game so likely wouldn't want players feeling obliged to be running around the world and dungeons with it because of its strength.

nah. fix is easy. they just need to step back to old affli builds when the drainsoul was empovered the dots on target. they can do this with drainlife and problem sloved.

and dont come with will be over powered. now a single rog or monk easy 2-4hit u even u use full deffense.