It appears that they did massive changes to Aff locks for DF. They removed all the burst abilities and increased our dots via MR and calamity this looks great for pve but absolutely guts aff in pvp. From what I have seen in alpha vids when they take away rift along with the bolt talents warlocks will have no way to kill any target with any mitigation or self heals.
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To heck with PvP.
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I don’t get why they remove Deathbolt. One of the more interesting spells you can take to min/max your playstyle and give an interesting burst option in situations you need. 0 understanding why they would remove this spell and it should stay as an option.
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Yah I’m annoyed that they removed rift. Currently waiting for full talents before jumping to conclusions, but I hope everything is still good pvp wise.
It should not be an option in the regular spec or class tree. It’s garbage talent that sucks to use. A lot of Aff players do not want burst options, they want sustained damage options. Even in PvP you would favor sustained damage over burst as Aff plays best in either 3v3s or RBGs, 2v2s it’s bad because it’s not meant to be the star to get the kill, only to help get the kills with the rot style.
It can be in the PvP talents tree, it should not be in the PvE/spec tree, though.
Also for PvP you are not actually gutted, at all. You have things like Creeping Death to help give much better sustained damage pressure since it no longer shortens DoT durations now. You have things like the improved Haunt to get more DoT damage out on all targets which increases your sustained pressure.
Throw in Rapid Contagion, along with Creeping Death and you can, from the looks of it, get up to 40-50% faster tick speeds.
Throw in Grim Reach, if we can reach all of this, along with Grimiore of Sacrifice, and you can watch Darkglare hit all targets with DoTs on them, 1 for 100% damage the others for 50% damage, even probably through walls (maybe).
Throw in GoSac procs proccing all the time from DoT ticks, from DG ticks and you’ve got a good burst plus sustained rot pressure going, especially if you have ID where you’re also building your stacks of 50 Drain Life for that spam.
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Once again - Blizzard please make separate PVP class forums just to avoid feedback confusion
Hmm I didn’t know that Warlock forums were only for PVE feedback I thought it was for class feedback in all aspects of the game
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It is, but I think the lack of clarification often leads to confusion when phrases like “buff affliction” and “nerf affliction” can both be fair feedback but for very different scenarios that aren’t always specified
How do you know they didnt just put deathbolt back in the pvp talent pool? I prefer affliction to be a rot spec, not burst which was never an original theme of the spec.
Is alpha back up? I haven’t seen any word if Deathbolt is gone, rolled baseline, or rolled back into pvp talents.
I don’t take any solely PvE focussed complaints seriously when all it is is playing against arbitrary A.I. and dude-bro’ing over getting the correct parse.
I’ll miss the option to use Rift too, it’s that extra bit of fantasy and flavour, and that aside the functionality of it is highly desirable (even if it did originate from Destruction, it was a refreshing idea to have it in the core tree).
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Don’t care about PvP. I don’t want more rapid dots that are just passive (Creeping Death). I want interesting options which Deathbolt absolutely brought to the table. It has a non spammable cooldown (45 sec) and gives a skilled player the option to give more damage on a high prio target or simply not waste the remaining dot time on a target that is about to die. That is something affliction desperately needs cause the spec is boring as hell since they removed snapshotting.
Its similar to genesis from Resto Druids back in the day. Raid healing was more interesting with this ability. Now we get it back as a single target ability and it makes druid a lot more interesting in certain scenarios.
Id be fine if they instead brought back some kind of snapshotting form of Affliction similar to feral but im sure they won’t do that. And affliction is boring ever since.
See, again with the burst profile. No, it doesn’t need burst, it needs to get away from this burst profile type. This doesn’t lend to the “over time” nature that DoTs are naturally, and it doesn’t lend to the fantasy, it doesn’t lend to the theme, it doesn’t fit anything other than the fact the modern game emphasizes a “need” to do damage on a high priority mob.
They’re not interesting, not at all. If you find it interesting then that’s fine, but many of us do not. The DoT aspect does not. A lot of players want the rot style that is passive because it’s more fitting, it’s what attracted players playing in the older versions of the game to the spec, to the play style. It doesn’t need to change, the game needs to account for this and so does blizzard, or they just need to remove “Damage over Time” entirely from the game itself completely. It’s not a middle ground, this profile just doesn’t lend well as we seen in BFA, in SLands, with many people coming to the niche.
The niche of “damage over time” is not a “priority” killer, it’s a boss killer. It’s a big adds lasting forever killer. It’s not a target swapper much, it’s not a burst option. It’s rot damage.
Affliction has had iterations these last few expansions with trying to be burst, that’s not Affliction. That’s not DoTs. That’s not what attracted people into the niche of DoTs from the past expansions who have stuck with playing through the spec for expansions while blizzard has tried to figure out things to do with the spec.
Soul Swap was a good counter for this to help Aff with target swapping, but in a raid, in a dungeon you have other people to help you kill said targets. That’s why you have multiple niches, this game used to be built upon and around multiple niches. The only ones that keep trying to be changed are DoT specs into burst specs and it needs to stop. It’s a bunch of nonsense.
Instead of changing specs to suit 6 second burst windows and keep designing 6 second burst windows they need to design 15 or 20 second burst windows where you have 20 seconds to kill a priority add and not 6. They need to build the game around cooldowns being less powerful and everyone being more powerful regularly, outside of CDs.
This is especially the case for DoT specs, not just Affliction but Spriest, Balance, Feral, Assassination.
It’s boring to who? Like I said the only ones who ever have an issue and claim it to be boring are Mythic and high end players who want something interesting with the mechanic, but I will tell you what: it used to be if you wanted interesting or burst specs you played Demo or Destro, they fit that niche and profile more than Aff and Aff had a boring profile of DoT timer juggling and simple game play. That was it. There’s a reason DoT specs were one of the rarest niche in this game and part of it was that very simple / easy playstyle that very very few really enjoy.
Sorry for the rant, we just had 2 expansions of “priority” play more with Affliction iterations, this expansion and BFA gave rise to higher burst than Legion, WoD, MoP and Wrath yet all of those expansions the spec felt so much better to play than the last 2 expansions.
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