More affliction nerfs... needed?

[Deleted]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...=2069&sample=7
A spec like affliction should be botton on single target. Just like frost mage beats fire mage on pure single target for a reason.

Yeah, that would make affliction really great at the 99% of content that isn;t raids, right?

Affliction is pretty awful in dungeons unless you're doing a high key - it pays a massive penalty for ramp times. Moreover, very few dungeon bosses play to affliction's strengths: most of them are single target fights with don't stand in the fire mechanics. There is no opportunity for affliction to cheese off long lived adds, for example, and it almost never has high uptimes of Reap or Wrath.

Affliction is mediocre at best at raid single target bosses. If you made it bottom on those, you'd make it all but useless for non-raid content, and that would affect many more players because the majority are not raiders

Given that the next expansion places even more emphasis on dungeons for progression (probably because it's getting harder and harder to build up a guild and a raid team)...your idea is just plain bad.

Affliction is very strong in raids, particularly in raids that play to it's strenghts which is true of Antorus and was for Nighthold. But what makes affliction strong in raids tends to turn into a handicap in dungeons unless you're doing a high key.

How many dungeon bosses have tone sof little adds that you can snipe for shards and to proc Wrath and Reap?

The devs really made a rod for their own backs with those: it's extremely difficult to balance affliction becaus eof them. If you 'normalise' affliction around encounters that give you high uptimes of the artifact selfbuffs, you make it rubbish for any time they aren't. If you normalise it around fights where Reap and Wrath have low uptimes, you make affliction 'overpowered' when they are.

They sound cool and very spec fantasy, but in reality they are very flakey mechanics that introduce huge differences in dps from one fight to the next. In EN the fights were individually tuned - that stopped in EN, instead every add procced the artifact traits, which is why aff had such a massive jump in rankings

Undoubtedly, it was taking far too much time and resource to tune raid bosses (or specifically, the adds in them) for just one spec of one class.

AFAIK this is a problem that is pretty unique to affliction. I don;t think any other spec is so dependent on artifact trait selfbuffs.

They had a similar problem with Spriests - any fight where you could cheese surrender to madness produced ridiculous numbers. But very few fights did, nonetheless they reworked so that the spec wasn't so centered around it.

[adamzz]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...=2069&sample=7

Doesnt look that bad.

On pure boss damage, all 3 warlock specs are beating all other ranged specs. It also isnt fair to say that affli is midpack considering that everyone ahead of affliction is melee dps (and they have higher patchwerk dps for a reason ).

If you exclude all melees you will see that affliction is even at pure single target very strong (close to hunters and frost mage, far ahead of shamans, priests and druids).

A spec like affliction should be botton on single target. Just like frost mage beats fire mage on pure single target for a reason.

>Let's ignore 13 other specs because it fits my narrative better

Nice argument there.

Garothi, affli is rank 17
Hounds, rank 1
Command, rank 6
Portal, rank 3
Imonat, rank 12
Kin, rank 7
Vari, rank 2
Coven, rank 1
Aggr, rank 1
Argus, rank 21

Average rank of 7.1 or 6.5 if you count eonar.