We’re currently working on the following adjustment to Affliction Warlock’s set bonuses, which we intend to make live with scheduled weekly maintenance on Tuesday, March 8 in this region.
(2) Set Bonus: Malefic Rapture’s damage is now increased by 25% (was 15%).
(4) Set Bonus: Shadow Bolt now has a 30% chance and Drain Soul now has a 20% chance to make your next Malefic Rapture cost no Soul Shards and cast instantly (was 20% and 10% respectively).
Affliction’s set bonus wasn’t providing enough of an impactful reward for executing its mechanic. These increases should increase the throughput of Affliction’s tier set and we hope that these changes will bring its output in line with other set bonuses.
Is there anyway we can get some interaction with the Sow the Seeds talent given it’s such a go to talent for m+? If it’s been excluded for a specific purpose maybe a reason why ?
Hoping to see an interaction with seed of corruption added with the tier set so that it has an Aoe interaction.
also this buff does not fix aff alone please let there be class tuning aswell.
Glad to be taking a look at aff, and while the tuning to raise the impact is welcome, I think there’s still more to be desired mechanically with the 4 piece. There’s minimal interaction with sow the seeds which is pretty common in M+. Plus there are few chances to actually proc when most of our casts are agony, haunt, UA maintenance, and pumping out seeds. I’m not much of a PVPer but i wonder how much shadowbolt or DS gets used there to provide that value.
The rapture buff is nice, but it continues to make affliction good in the niche it’s already good in (council cleave), without using other levers that exist in the kit to throttle its single target damage where we’re really hurting. I really like the kit that affliction has with rapture, but it seems like there are alot of options and aspects of it that aren’t really being presented as useful options.
so basically the tier bonus for affliction is just an unnerfed bonus, we no longer will be swamp butt tier, only swamp tier, meanwhile other classes got real damage bonus on their tiers. Not to mention that changes happen on the last moment so if we complain you can argue that its too late to make changes now, that will need to wait to next expansion for a change, gg.
A grand total of 0 of that has any value to PvP at all whatsoever. The tier set is non existent to Aff in PvP, because you don’t have time to cast any of that. The only thing I can see is Aff swapping to Nightfall Talent and taking a chance only when NF procs for instant SBs, otherwise nope, never gonna happen.
Really wish they just made it buff DoT damage by like 30% and tick 30% faster for 2pc and 4pc would be something like UA ticks have X% chance to make your next SoC or MR cast instant and cost no shards, stacking 2 times.
Hey Linxy, thanks for the heads up. There is unfortunately a detriment with the current Affliction tier set bonus and Arena PvP. The current tier set [may] have some play in Battlegrounds, but it leaves Arena PvP extremely lacking. It’s extremely rare that we use Shadowbolt or Drain Soul in PvP content. Would you mind discussing this with the team to see if you guys can provide some relief for Affliction Arena PvPers?
The rapture buff is welcome and gives affliction a bit more incentive to try to cast rapture in PVP. The deathbolt nerf went overboard, you just needed to reduce the percentage of dot dmg it took - it will sink back to oblivion now for the sake of class fantasy despite being one of the hardest setups in the game to pull off.
So after the deathbolt nerf, rapture dmg needs to be relevant to have affliction keep pace. So the 2pc is a good buff.
However, as mentioned above, the 4pc is actually one of the most tone def bonuses when looking at pvp. It’s these types of implementations that make people ask “does blizzard even play the game?” Because as far as I can see it’s maybe the worst 4pc bonus for PvP. Add DRAIN LIFE to the list and it will resolve the issue.
Yeah that sounds like a mess. Thought that was the case but I didnt’ know, and thought surely they wouldn’t leave a tier set that’s built around something PvP literally rarely uses.
Totally agree that going off of UA ticks makes sense. Seems like there should be a way they can throttle the proc chance for the 3 UA PvP talent if they can throttle the proc chance for sb vs ds
Except that you literally cannot cast it in PvP. Why? Because melee do so much damage and are training you down hard and mad, so again, it’s something that won’t happen because you have to spend GCDs putting stuff up, then also you have to keep running around. DB was able to be used because it is less than 1 second cast time, literally, and nothing more. If MR had a PvP talent to make it that fast then maybe it would be 1.5 second cast time is actually easily interruptable by good players.
No, just have Drain Soul baseline, replaced with Shadow Bolt if you choose Nightfall talent, otherwise it stays DS.
Exactly, glad they chose a hybrid dps as top over a pure caster dps. Makes a lot of sense. It’s not like they can change and perform the best in other types of roles