Please Blizzard affliction needs a rework!!! Give the specc some love (isnt about damage just give the specc more fun to play)
Please Blizzard affliction needs a rework!!! Give the specc some love (isnt about damage just give the specc more fun to play)
remove rupture, make dots do damage. idk make haunt our baseline st spender. anything but fucking rupture plz
They have too much ego to acknowledge that rapture version is worse than Legion/Bfa aff version. At least with current tierbonus incorporated in talents it won't be that horrendous to play on multitarget.
Legion/BfA Aff was the worst iteration of Aff ever. BfA especially, since it was so dependant on Darkglare. Legion at least had sow the seeds for AoE, which was nerfed to the ground in BfA.
But essentially Legion and BfA turned Aff into a burst spec, Rapture still is somewhat bursty, but not as bad as UA stacking Darkglare.
Well that stinks, I was really hoping aff warlock would make a comeback in dragonflight
The changes they are making here this week will put the tree into a pretty good place. Damage numbers-wise, we will see, but Affliction looks built pretty well going into DF (though things can change)
Single target we will have a Haunt rotation that will prioritize damage over time, MR that can be used to pump up UA damage (remains to be seen where it will be in the tree) and Creeping Death that provides DOT damage without the added hassle of more maintenance. That combined with Soul Swap for adds, Soul Tap for shard generation during movement..... that sounds pretty good.
AOE, I'm really looking forward to the improved Vile Taint..... AOE Agony and Exhaustion? Sounds awesome. Wish it wasn't on a cooldown, but its still quite good. The Soul Rot CD reduction talent being tied to UA.... ehhhh not the best, but if you focus on a big health mob it may allow the AOE rotation to feel alot more fluid while still being dot heavy. Sow the Seeds, AOE Agony and CoEx, Soul Rot up every pack or so? Sounds pretty decent.
The problem is that this is their cheap solution to the inherent balance issues with DoTs. If your DoTs actually deal damage, then you're either unusably shit in single-target but good on 2+ targets, or you're good at single target and completely overpowered on 2+ targets. They've struggled hard to balance this with tuning over the decades, and effectively just gave up. So now Shadow Priest, Moonkin, and Affliction Warlock (the three big DoT culprits) have absolutely forgettable DoT damage, and all their actual damage was shifted towards big nukes instead.
Malefic Rapture is their "compromise" - a skill that's still just a big nuke, but because it's contingent on DoTs it's supposed to be a "DoTs still matter you guys!" situation. The actual result is... less than satisfactory. Everyone hates Rapture. It feels clunky and inauthentic, and it's a hoop you jump through for no reason other than Blizzard's lack of creativity when it comes to balancing DoT damage.
Now, I don't have a perfect solution either. I've proposed some over the years; one idea was to have have DoTs diminish in damage based on the number of targets so you could have a priority target where they tick hard (and you use non-DoTs to finish off other things) or you could have multiple targets fully DoTed but wouldn't just get your single-target damage on all of them and ramp out of control; this could even be tied in with Mastery, which could be changed to affect this diminishing returns so a full Mastery build would excel at multi-target fights while something based on e.g. Haste would be more single-target focused.
Another idea was to have Haunt baseline, and serve as your "priority target marker" - your DoTs still don't hit very hard, but Haunt increases their damage by crazy amounts (like idk, 300% or whatever, and with a fairly long duration) on one target of your choice. That would allow you to target swap by recasting Haunt, would not allow multi-target to get out of control, and would still have most damage come from actual DoTs; potentially there could even be a talent option to reduce the Haunt bonus but make it affect 2 or 3 targets, for more dedicated builds.
But I'm not a developer, and I don't get paid to come up with good solutions. THEY ARE.
Instead they just made the class "nuke, but with extra steps" which few people are genuinely happy about. And they seem to only be doubling down on this in DF. It also has the uncomfortable side effect of making Affliction one of THE most action-intensive specs in the game, as you have to track an entire array of DoTs that range from permanent to a few seconds in duration, secondary effects that build your nuke window plus the cooldowns that feed into it, a maintenance buff in Haunt, and a resource mechanic on top of that. Track 20 things and press 20 buttons is not exactly the most user-friendly design, particularly once you go beyond a single target.
DF doesn't feel like it solves any of that; if anything, the current state of things makes the problems worse and creates more of them.
How many council fights (as in spread cleave) were there in the entire Shadowlands expansion? By my count: Zero. Council of Blood is a single target fight, because the bosses heal themselves back to full health when one dies. Pantheon is a stacked cleave fight.
They are afraid of Aff being op in a situation that doesn't exist. Or barely exists.
Their entire reasoning is nonsensical. Let Affliction be monstrously overpowered in council fights, because they don't exist anyway. If they absolutely can't help themselves and grace us with one or two in Dragonflight, then make them the 3rd or 4th boss that is going to be a pushover anyway.
Their "solution" is one in search of a problem. They ruined dot specs. Curse them.
Last edited by enigma77; 2022-09-02 at 03:41 PM.
This.
I had plenty of fun with affli in Legion.
The upside to the new talent systems is that i'll easily be able to play in a way i want, even if it's unlikely to be anything close to competitive.
But i did dig the endless curses via corruption in SL, so that's gonna be fun to play with in random bgs either way.
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I do agree on the dots and am no fan of rupture, but haunt? Really?
Imo they should just let us stick to pure dots, not involve darkglares, ruptures or even haunt. I mean sure they can be there, just not in such a central role.
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Furthermore, I consider that Carthage Slam must be destroyed.
Dunno about that, but I preferred BfA Afflock to SL. While they improved AoE greatly, ST burst is super awkward. You set it up, immediately burn through your shards and then just stand there fishing for more with Drain. Darkglare is also a crappy ST cd. Spec also has literally too many DoTs. Fortunately, they fix a lot of issues in DF, with Vile Taint spreading Agony and Darkglare having AoE talent.
Last edited by Makabreska; 2022-09-02 at 04:20 PM.
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Ion has stated in more than one interview, that affliction is the most challenging spec in the game to balance properly. So many little things cause it to go off the charts positively or negatively. With that said, it's no wonder it's always mediocre or broken.
Having played the alpha quite a bit, the new talent trees at the moment, look so strong for affliction, that if they're left this way, I could easily see it being one of the top DPS specs in the game. We're getting back LEgion 7.1 AoE skill, when mobs die with dots they explode for massive AoE dmg. Seed of corruption throws out more seeds, and adds 2 seconds to agony, you're able to have 2-3 options for soul shard regen inside of the same build. Like, it's looking brokenly strong. Rapture still feels out of place though, and Drain life/soul need to be the same skill again.
But as of now, it will be a great spec if left unchanged.
While I didn't mind Legion's Aff (especially later down the expansion with some tweaks), off the top of my head I'd still rank WotLK (especially the 3.0 and 3.3 iterations), Cata (especially the short lived Drain Life build filler at the beginning), MoP and BfA versions over it. Not sure how I'd rank SL compared to it, maybe about the same.
Come on now...
You completely forgot so many fucking bosses
Huntsman altimor literally has him and dogs the entire fight
sun kings salvation is a massive add fight, so lots of mobs to dot up
while council of blood does require you to just focus one boss down, the fact you can dot the others to stack procs and shards is not nothing...
Sire denathrius entire second phase is multidot, with the ads, and dpsing both him and remoria
the stone legion, entire third phase multi dot
The nine is literally a multi boss fight almost the entire time
kelthuzad again TONS of stuff to dot up CONSTANTLY
Vigilant guardian yet again
artificer kind of, issue is they are so few and far between.
Lihium again massive multi dot fight
Lords of dread? did you fucking forget they exist? again 2 boss fight, easy to dot up, can do the same to the adds once they reach near full hp, pop agony on them so by the time its ticking full they are ready to be killed
Pantheon is both, cleave fights are also multi dotting fights, and while first phase and second phase it is 2 target cleave, which is better for destro, the final phase and add phase of part 1 are better for aff, being able to quickly multi dot all the necromancers, means you have 6 mobs worth of dots running
the fact you say 0 council fights is hilarious.