That’s what the description for Affliction is, but I’m really not that, I’m not that at all. I’m the master of an ability that scales with relatively weak damage over time spells that I really only use once every minute or so in an 8 second window, which can be widened slightly by a demon…for some reason. Anyway, can we please take a second look at Affliction? It’s really depressing sitting at 216 item level and watching my DOTs tickle targets until I spam a single ability. Really not sure if this is playing out the way you guys planned it, but it’s kind of lame. I’ve had a chance to play around with several classes and specs, and I have to say, Affliction is by far the least rewarding.
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oh they gave up on that as an identity long ago. the basic issue is shadow priest and aff lock step on each others toes way to much. trying to keep them both distinct while staying true to the concept just doesn’t work. so one of the two is in a garbage state at all times
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Yes I find Shadow priests more like an Affliction lock is supposed to be with Vampiric touch and Devouring Plague actually being the better versions of Siphon Life lol.
However I do spam Drain Life a lot and I feel like a lot of locks ain’t using it enough in PvP?
I rarely wait for it to hit 50 stacks.
See if this is the dev’s point of view, honestly, I don’t get it. Shadow Priests are touched / with the void Affliction Warlocks are not “touched” by anything, we use shadow magic (different field than Void) and use void (voidwalker) but beyond that the two classes can be 100% different but play similar if they wanted to, they just don’t. This is why almost every destruction locks fondly remembers MoP destro because it was so unique in it’s playstyle. I’ve never played a class like that the way the resource generation met use and power in such a unique meshing + starting to be engulfed in flames!!! It was so cool and 100% embodied the “destruction warlock” fantasy. Oh? And Aff? SOUL SWAP! They had the ability to cast a bunch of DoTs (that actually did damage) and then cast an ability that would mirror those curses and spells on another target - spreading those maladies around - THAT is aff lock.
And, an F in the chat for my demonology MoP warlock which you and your evil class STOLE - Metamorphosis and turning into a Demo lock tank was by far some of the most fun.
The point of all this is that they don’t need to worry about the toe stepping because they already have created the separation, they just refuse to fine tune and go try to make the classes work for themselves since they pruned the class design teams. If they wanted to, they could, they either just don’t have the time or they don’t care - I suspect it’s the latter.
Class descriptions like this are often not valid beyond the expansion in which they are written. The original blurb included a passage about warlocks being highly resistant to magic.
I’m sure this has been beaten to death, but dots are weak because they are impossible to balance. They are either good enough to use on 1 target and insane when you have multiple enemies or weak vs 1 target and annoying to use because they feel bad.
While I miss the days of being able to 3 dot targets and watch them get chunked, modern wow has moved away from large single bosses for all fights in raids, and that seems to be mostly what they balance around.
Good point, but why are assassin rogue and feral Druid allowed to have lots of dot damage? Is it the energy constraints that allow it to not scale out of control.
Also, shadow priest dots are at least noticeable.
see that’s the thing aff lock is supposedly “THE DOT SPEC” and well no it Fing ain’t at current. you cast a couple spells that are essentially “this spell makes MF hit harder” then MF and repeat
It’s kind of always been like that. Shadow word pain has commonly done as much or more damage as curse of agony and corruption combined. Dotting and draining is historically a shadow priest thing. I didnt play MoP or WoD really, but the first time I ever used a drain as my main filler as a warlock was in Legion.
I think other classes having a reliance on dots are the results of a trend of homogenization. Most specs now have some kind of main damage ability with layered dots to fill the gaps. It’s probably done for tuning purposes since it would be much easier to slightly tweak each layer of damage rather than ruining your only damage spell.
Look at old casters for example. Shadow bolt in classic is like 100% of the damage you do in a raid. So its much harder to tune something like that properly because you can easily get swings of no crits or all crits and end up in a weird position. In retail they want to smooth that out so your potential dps is less of a guessing game. They decided to accomplish that by adding many smaller layers.
I personally prefer having stronger dots and feel that its mostly only a good thing to have more options and avenues of attack on a dps class. I understand the sentiment, but with so many other classes and specs being so similar its hard for me to say that affliction locks are “the dot spec”
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I do think it could be done very easily, just not by the current blizzard devs. They already have a distinction in that lock has a pet. really all they need to do is add more demon abilities so that we could use more than one demon all the time …
My main issue with their solution has been visual clutter, there are often so many dots and effects ticking down at once that its really mentally taxing trying to parse which things are important at a glance.
Its just sloppy design
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I really agree with this. The UI can sort of handle representing dots on your target, but its really at the state where I would say an addon is required to play the spec, which is probably the worst possible outcome from a design perspective.
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The day drain soul stopped making dots hit harder it was the day affliction died.