BFA Affliction

[Deleted]

Agony is useless for trash pulls except as a shard generator. There's a huge tradeoff between single target for the bosses and everything else that AC is a much more viable option than Writhe or SL. You can snipe shards with UA but that's much harder than using DS because it's just easy to switch targets that are about to tie and tap them with DS.

Sow the Seeds is absolute shit and not even worth bothering with in any circumstance. Seed of Corruption itself is very weak AOE, the only reason aff did strong AOE in Legion was Soul Flame chains. I have no idea why they think that afflocks need to be chained to a cast time and damage to detonate requirement when SoC is so weak to start with. PS has such a long cooldown it's no use in dungeons and could even end up being like it was in Legion, more useful as a single target booster since aff's single target was so mediocre (to keep down it;s multidot damage). Vile Taint is the go-to, or will be until they nerf it several times more - probably lowering the base damage and removing the synergy with the Darkglare. I can absolutely see this happening.

Pretty obvious they just want AOE to be aff's weakness. Shame it;s so critical in M+

[thrill]

Remember when SoC was the best AoE in the game? lol

The removal of healing and decent AoE (ala soul flame) is the nail in the coffin for me I think. I don't see the point of playing a spec with poor mobility and so much ramp when there are no upsides to counteract it.

[UnSigNed547]

Agony is useless for trash pulls except as a shard generator. There's a huge tradeoff between single target for the bosses and everything else that AC is a much more viable option than Writhe or SL. You can snipe shards with UA but that's much harder than using DS because it's just easy to switch targets that are about to tie and tap them with DS.

Personally I found it more engaging to use Agony on trashpulls rather than mindlessly casting SBs or channeling DS. Not to mention you somewhat reliably actually generate shards rather than just starving yourself.

With the DS, AC, VT, SE and CD build I opened trashpulls with Seed of Corruption, followed by Agony on the same target, and then VT under all enemies the tank pulled. Then I cycled through all the enemies applying Agony, before cycling again to spread UAs, and then channeling DS into priority/dying targets.

[Deleted]

Hence why I said it's only use is as a shard generator. The ramping effect means Agony doesn't deal much damage because trash dies too fast, an effect that will get worse as gear levels go up.

O think the default dungeon build will be something like Drain Soul (for shards), Absolute Corruption, Vile Taint (for the AOE and the snare), Dark Fury (stun), either Shsdow Embrace or Sacrifice and Creeping Death or Soul Conduit

Absolute Corruption synergises with Creeping Death, whilst Absolute and Vile Taint both synergise with the Darkglare even though it has a long cooldown

Personally IMHo the Darkglare cooldown should reset on a boss pull.

[Reek]

Did they seriously name a spell "Vile Taint"?

[Orwell7]

Just tested on beta - I've got the 4 stack agony trait on Azerite.
With Vile Taint and Endless Corruption, 45-50% of my damage was Agony.

[Deleted]

Just tested on beta - I've got the 4 stack agony trait on Azerite.
With Vile Taint and Endless Corruption, 45-50% of my damage was Agony.

Because the agony azerite trait is bugged right now and does much more dmg than intended.

[sugarfree]

I have seen a lock video doing a dungeon that actually got Shard starved before switching to Drain Soul. Well, if they really want to shove SB in our faces, then they’d better remedy that quickly.

Also, at this rate, Deathbolt should just be baseline. I can see how much fun and dynamics revolve around it, that just one neef to that talent would revert the whole spec to being dull. It’s the talent that keeps the spec afloat.

[Understarmor]

Did they seriously name a spell "Vile Taint"?

LMFAO that's hilarious!

Shots fired...below the belt!

[Deleted]

Just tested on beta - I've got the 4 stack agony trait on Azerite.
With Vile Taint and Endless Corruption, 45-50% of my damage was Agony.

...because it's apparently adding the damage to each tick, not to the entire duration. There's no way they're going to let that go live.

And even if they did it's just a variant crutch, it creates big gaps between haves and have-nots. We already had this in the form of underperformanc euntil you managed to grind enough AP to get a critical artifact trait.

[Deleted]

For me Deathbolt would be the best candidate to making baseline... There is so much anti synergy with that talent compared to other talents, that most of the time we probably won't bother with it (and be bored to death).

SL is an extra dot, but also an extra GCD being used that could've been a UA maybe?
WiA forces an extra GCD compared to AC, but Agony should deal 50% more dmg.
AC reduces GCDs, ease of play and GCD's but is capped to 16sec.
CD reduces all durations by 15% thus reducing DB damage.
Haunt would be a 10% dmg buff, but is another GCD not being spend on DoTs.

In the end, without some heavy math going on a starting player has no idea which rotation/talents to use with DB talent. And for all that work/preptime I only got like 4k crits or so on my 110 starter toon... Granted I probably played it wrong, but that is really low dmg per effort spent thinking/executing it.

[Orwell7]

In the end, without some heavy math going on a starting player has no idea which rotation/talents to use with DB talent. And for all that work/preptime I only got like 4k crits or so on my 110 starter toon... Granted I probably played it wrong, but that is really low dmg per effort spent thinking/executing it.

And let's not forget Blizzard's "no addon" policy, they don't want you to look at addons when to use an ability optimally.
But hey, it's Blizz afterall, anything can change. To the worse or to the better.

[Tradu]

I also like the multi dot aspect of affliction, I feel it's the niche for which it was based on.

Sadly ever since legion changed the mechanics of shards and UA ( for the Nth time ), the damage was shifted out of the filler dots and more into the UA/drain cycle ( which is supposedly gone in bfa), my 2 main concerns is that even though affli is strong on council fights on live, I would prefer more damage baked into the non-shard spending dots, the 2nd issue I have is with dot duration on UA ( all dots to be fair) when using thing like creeping death on multi target fights, the dots ( let's say UA ) is too short of a duration outside using extending with darkglare.

I would've hoped the duration was increased to how it's like with endless affliction ( the pvp talent) baseline, in order to sustain the multi dot playstyle.

It is especially frustrating when a lot of the talents seem to be in direct conflict with certain playstyles, take for example creeping death which is probably the best dps increase in that tier for any situation but it's counter productive when dealing with multi target especially when picking siphon life for example, which also happens to be the biggest dps increase in it's respective tier for both ST/multi target, yet they're in directly conflict with each other because , you will be gcd locked trying to keep 3 dots+ UA running on all 3 targets so no time to fill much less cast drain soul / SB, especially since siphon life is on the same row as absolute corruption, which is almost mandatory when picking SL, not only that but dots are shorter than previous expansions due to creeping death, and a lot of the new talents are non optional/viable ( like the new dark soul for affli, no one is gonna take that 2 min cd over creeping death).

That's what I mean by clunky, if i had the power to change this spec based on my wishes I would do the following:

-Changes all non shard consuming dots to be 18 secs duration baseline ( including siphon life).
-Increase UA's duration to 15 secs baseline.
-Change UA back to 1 limit per target ( how it used to be ), but keeping the shard cost on UA the same.
-Remove dark glare and add dark soul misery baseline.
-Add dark glare's dot extension to dark soul misery.
-Add Soul burn back.
-Soul burn : consumes 1-4 shards to empower your next UA's damage by 100% per shard or health restored by healthstone by 10% hp per shard consumed or increases seeds generates by seed of corruption by 1 per shard consumed.15 secs cd.( this adds flavor and makes it so u can choose to spend shards on ST or spread UA/ also removes the shitty seed talent without having to pick garbage talents to do it).
-Demon skin for affliction passively recharges at a rate of 1% max hp instead of 0.5%, this is to substitute for the loss of drain soul heals/traits lost due to affliction needing more sustain ( could be buffed to 1.5% if 1% isn't sustaining enough).

The above is just the minimum they can do to make aff more enjoyable than it currently is on beta.

Absolute Corruption is a disgrace of a talent and shouldn't even exist. Picking SL should add a DoT to manage, having another talent remove a DoT is beyond stupid(which is what you're doing on live when running AC+SL). In council scenarios, juggling all your DoTs should be what you spend basically all your time on, and having different durations means you don't just go SL -> Agony -> Corruption, switch target and repeat forever, but instead have to actually manage each DoT individually.

[Duckz0rs]

In the end, without some heavy math going on a starting player has no idea which rotation/talents to use with DB talent. And for all that work/preptime I only got like 4k crits or so on my 110 starter toon... Granted I probably played it wrong, but that is really low dmg per effort spent thinking/executing it.

That is pretty low to be honest. On my 111 toon I've hit, on average, Deathbolts of 12-28k on longer lived mobs. No addons for it either, just adding them per duration: Dark Soul > Agony > Corruption > SL > UA > UA > UA > UA > (Darkglare if it's up) > DB > refresh one of the first 3 while DB is mid-air (think it was usually Agony or SL). Cooldowns, especially Darkglare, add a ton of damage to it, but even without CDs 4k seems excessively low, especially for crits.

[wholol]

Absolute Corruption is a disgrace of a talent and shouldn't even exist. Picking SL should add a DoT to manage, having another talent remove a DoT is beyond stupid(which is what you're doing on live when running AC+SL). In council scenarios, juggling all your DoTs should be what you spend basically all your time on, and having different durations means you don't just go SL -> Agony -> Corruption, switch target and repeat forever, but instead have to actually manage each DoT individually.

I'm not a fan of AC, I just don't enjoy being gcd locked on 3+ targets, I would prefer to have SL baseline and have a talent that reduces the gcd of dots by 0.5 ( the talent we had in ages past ).

As for actual dot duration, let's be honest here, you usually fully refresh dots before going into a drain cycle anyways, this single dot management bullshit is an illusion, only rarely do u ever have to single manage a dot and it's probably agony to keep it at max stacks, besides that it's not really much singular management.

@Duckz0rs

Blizzard said recently that deathbolt's damage is calculated upon cast not upon reaching the target, they said it was so that players wouldn't sit point blank range during fights to increase dps, so there is no need to refresh dot to increase it's damage once u cast it.

[Deleted]

That is pretty low to be honest. On my 111 toon I've hit, on average, Deathbolts of 12-28k on longer lived mobs. No addons for it either, just adding them per duration: Dark Soul > Agony > Corruption > SL > UA > UA > UA > UA > (Darkglare if it's up) > DB > refresh one of the first 3 while DB is mid-air (think it was usually Agony or SL). Cooldowns, especially Darkglare, add a ton of damage to it, but even without CDs 4k seems excessively low, especially for crits.

Well Darkglare did not exist back then, neither did Dark Soul. So it was Agony/Cor/SL/Some UA's. And the gear was 185 ilvl + I probably sucked .

[Duckz0rs]

Blizzard said recently that deathbolt's damage is calculated upon cast not upon reaching the target, they said it was so that players wouldn't sit point blank range during fights to increase dps, so there is no need to refresh dot to increase it's damage once u cast it.

You're right, seems I misread Seph's post about Affliction. I thought it was calculated at cast and at launch, taking the higher of the two. Seems it's something they're only considering but haven't implemented.

[thrill]

Picking SL should add a DoT to manage, having another talent remove a DoT is beyond stupid(which is what you're doing on live when running AC+SL). In council scenarios, juggling all your DoTs should be what you spend basically all your time on, and having different durations means you don't just go SL -> Agony -> Corruption, switch target and repeat forever, but instead have to actually manage each DoT individually.

That would be reasonable if the DoT durations were longer (like they used to be), but taking SL will GCD lock you on 3 targets, and you won't even be able to keep 4 dotted. If you take creeping death at the same time it's even worse.

[Deleted]

Absolute Corruption is a disgrace of a talent and shouldn't even exist. Picking SL should add a DoT to manage, having another talent remove a DoT is beyond stupid(which is what you're doing on live when running AC+SL). In council scenarios, juggling all your DoTs should be what you spend basically all your time on, and having different durations means you don't just go SL -> Agony -> Corruption, switch target and repeat forever, but instead have to actually manage each DoT individually.

Two problems with this: first, if it's all about the dots then you won;t have much to do on single target and your damage will be low. Second, thanks to the short duration of current dots, the skill requirement grows exponentially per target, moreover, three would be the maximum not only because four would be inhumanly hard to pull off but more because the GCD hard locks you anyway, you simply can't refresh that many dots effectively. It also means that an addon is absolutely mandatory, and whilst we know that almost everyone uses them, it's still the design philosphy that you shouldn't have to have them.

The differring dot durations, the deeply punishing nature of getting Agony wrong and the requirement to maintain other dot-multipliers is sufficient. Look at Shadow Priest; they only have two long duration dots and can take a talent where one ability extends the duration of all their dots on all their targets (unless they are widely dispersed)

I would also add that a pure dot using spec is all but dead in WoW. The much faster pace of the current game favours burst damage far too much.

[Deleted]

Two problems with this: first, if it's all about the dots then you won;t have much to do on single target and your damage will be low. Second, thanks to the short duration of current dots, the skill requirement grows exponentially per target, moreover, three would be the maximum not only because four would be inhumanly hard to pull off but more because the GCD hard locks you anyway, you simply can't refresh that many dots effectively. It also means that an addon is absolutely mandatory, and whilst we know that almost everyone uses them, it's still the design philosphy that you shouldn't have to have them.

The differring dot durations, the deeply punishing nature of getting Agony wrong and the requirement to maintain other dot-multipliers is sufficient. Look at Shadow Priest; they only have two long duration dots and can take a talent where one ability extends the duration of all their dots on all their targets (unless they are widely dispersed)

I would also add that a pure dot using spec is all but dead in WoW. The much faster pace of the current game favours burst damage far too much.

For a pure DoT spec, Aff sure has low interaction with DoTs. We can't copy/extend/spread em besides crappy seed. All we can do is apply a dmg debuff to our target to increase DoT damage.