[PVP] Affliction in Shadowlands

[enigma77]

Let's brainstorm a bit!

As you know Affliction in BFA (except for the very short time when the meme drain was a thing) has been a complete trainwreck of a spec in just about any form of pvp, but most importantly 3v3 of course.

Why? Primarily because of melee cleaves being able to utterly shut Affliction down and deal frankly unhealable damage to it.
The spec soaks up damage like a sponge but doesn't deal any in return.

With one spell school only, no baseline Demonic Circle, no way to peel for ourselves and no other mobility to speak of, other than a lenghty cooldown, gateway, we are in a terrible spot. In addition to that in BFA Affliction was heavily designed to be more of a single target spec, making our spread pressure, especially when not being able to burn cooldowns and cast UA, due to weak dots, well lacking.


What changes with Shadowlands? Demonic Circle is baseline once again, allowing us to take either Coil or the new Talent 'Tongue Tied' which works as a heal absorb. Instead of stacking UA we'll have a new soul shard spender 'Malefic Rapture' which makes all our other dots deal damage. Former pvp only Curses (Tongues/Weakness) are now baseline again, which leaves space for several new pvp talents and this is where I'd like to voice a few ideas of mine and I'm eager to hear yours.

In my opinion, Affliction badly needs some way to get melee off itself and this is why I believe Shadowflame should return, in a sligthly reworked fashion. Namely it should root instead of slow. This would create much needed breathing space to actually get off those Malefic Raptures and other casts.

The next new talent that should be added is one that formerly existed aswell, altough the name currently eludes me. Basically Fear has become a worthless spell to use on any target that is already dotted up, as it breaks almost immediately. This is counterintuitive to the gameplay of the Warlock and ideally wouldn't be a problem. Assuming fear breaks just as easily in Shadowlands as it does in BFA we need a talent that causes Fear to momentarily stop the dots from dealing damage, but preserve them and once the Fear has worn off, they continue dealing their damage.

Finally I'm hoping for either a new baseline ability (Covenants aside) that we can use when being locked out of Shadow. It feels absolutely terrible when you get interrupted as an Affliction Warlock as there is literally nothing that you can do. For the love of god, we need back either Searing Pain or Immolate, or both. Affliction used to be THE Warlock pvp spec and I know many of us still love it dearly and wish to merrily spread the rot again in Arenas and bgs. We need some BIG love.


P.S Demon Armor should be baseline

[Vankhorne]

Considering what we have on Alpha right now, I don't think Affliction will be much better to be honest. In my opinion, Affliction needs 3 things to be good in Arenas: Tankyness, DoT damage and Dispel Protection.

Tankyness: Warlock was very squishy in BfA, and Blizzard gave us Demon Armor as a PvP`talent, then nerfed the hell out of the spell. The problem? That might be ok for Destro and Demo, as they have baseline spec damage reductions in the form of Destro's Mastery and Demos's Soul Link, but Affliction has nothing baseline going for it. Solution: give a form of damage mitigation that is exclusive to the spec.

DoT damage: This one is complicated. DoT damage is in a rough spot right now, hitting for around 1% HP/per tick. There are some absurd design/tuning choices here, like a 10 stack Agony hitting for the same as Corruption. Hello? Wtf is the ramp up for? What is the point of being slow if it at the end it's going to do crap damage? To compound the problem, there are too many dispels/ways to remove DoTs and too many forms of sustainability. Solution: remove said ways of sustainability from other classes (impossible), or buff DoT damage, at least in PvP.

Dispel Protection: it's crap since they changed UA to individual stacks in Legion. Now it seems to be even worse, given the 1 target limit for UA, how are we going to deal spread damage only with Agony and Corruption and UA only on 1 target with trash dispel damage? Solution: Allow UA to be cast on any number of targets and increase its dispel protection. Should be baseline, but could be done with a PvP talent to not mess with PvE, and would help a bit with our weak DoT damage.

[xblubbx]

Dispel Protection: it's crap since they changed UA to individual stacks in Legion. Now it seems to be even worse, given the 1 target limit for UA, how are we going to deal spread damage only with Agony and Corruption and UA only on 1 target with trash dispel damage? Solution: Allow UA to be cast on any number of targets and increase its dispel protection.

I remember that clip from Maldiva where he was SO excited about hearing from his source long before dev notes that Aff gets limited to 1 UA. So it must be good. No?

[Craaazyyy]

the fact that you can't cast UA on multiple targets is stupid. I also want to see other stuff back, like some slows.. shadowflame with slow like back in the days would be neat

there are more things ofc, but i'm trying to be realistic, cuz i know they wont just bring back everything that i want

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I remember that clip from Maldiva where he was SO excited about hearing from his source long before dev notes that Aff gets limited to 1 UA. So it must be good. No?

yeah, it's good, but you can only cast one UA.. not per target, just one

[Vankhorne]

I remember that clip from Maldiva where he was SO excited about hearing from his source long before dev notes that Aff gets limited to 1 UA. So it must be good. No?

Since it was before the Dev notes, "UA limited to 1 target" probably mislead Maldiva to believe it would be 1 UA PER target, not ONLY ONE UA, at all. Would indeed, be much better than the current iteration, specially for PvP.

[Icathian]

Affliction is fine. Actually all DoT specs in the game are fine, the problem is the game itself and the way it's played.
This game became World of Burstcraft. PvP or PvE, doesn't matter, if you can't do big burst DPS, you're at a disadvantage. Aff PvP is terrible because it just makes the problem extremely obvious: You'll either be dead or about to die by the time you're at your 3rd GCD and your dots are still ramping up.
In M+, same thing: by the time you're done setting up your dots, the DH and Rogue already cleaved every mob to death.

What's blizzard's solution to all this? Make DoT specs more bursty, kinda like spriest and now aff lock in Shadowlands.

It really pisses me off, makes me feel that soon all specs will have the same 2 buttons to press, one burst ST spell and one burst aoe.

[Amariw]

You'll need more then this. In mop till legion affliction had instant shard spenders to use intelligently when melee was training you with interrupts.

We also had ways to renew pet after they died. Now pets are just as easy to kill, but summoning them takes 5.5 secs (!?) and the cd to instant sum them is friggin 3 mins. Even for m+, this is horrid, for arena you may as well be petless.

In legion, you also had short 30 sec cd casting circle to actually try to bait interrupts or hard cast. It was counterable but you could often force enemy into making tough choices, or god forbid get some casts off.

New howl of terror isn't even instant, practically useless in m+, pvp and prolly even torghast.

Affliction seems dead on arrival again.

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Affliction is fine. Actually all DoT specs in the game are fine, the problem is the game itself and the way it's played.
This game became World of Burstcraft. PvP or PvE, doesn't matter, if you can't do big burst DPS, you're at a disadvantage. Aff PvP is terrible because it just makes the problem extremely obvious: You'll either be dead or about to die by the time you're at your 3rd GCD and your dots are still ramping up.
In M+, same thing: by the time you're done setting up your dots, the DH and Rogue already cleaved every mob to death.

What's blizzard's solution to all this? Make DoT specs more bursty, kinda like spriest and now aff lock in Shadowlands.

It really pisses me off, makes me feel that soon all specs will have the same 2 buttons to press, one burst ST spell and one burst aoe.

This isn't true, back in legion, just one expansion ago, affliction had insane cleave dmg in arenas and the power to survive melee (with difficulty) through versatility templates, circle and gateway. It wasn't easy, but you were a real dot class with the power to make it worth it. They took away so much of what allowed that in bfa I'm hard pressed to believe they play locks.