Just curious as to why affliction is being taken away from dot damage.
One of the worst parts of BFA affliction was deathbolt which they move to a pvp talent.
Yet malefic rapture is sort of a re packaged deathbolt?
Affliction is supposed to be a dot to spec with multidotting and dots hitting for a reasonable or most of our damage.
We have nuke specs but we need aff to stay a rot spec.
People didnt want UA stacking but malefic rupture more or less plays the same without interacting with darkglare the way it does now. The irony of course is people do not realize its the same gameplay under a different look.
Malefic rapture feels incredible to play with on the beta and rewards dot maintenance greatly, rather than spitting out several UA’s for a burst of damage every thirty seconds with death bolt.
I would prefer more of Aff’s damage to be weighted into their dots, but the system as it stands on the beta is much much better than UA stacking.
darkglaire doesnt feel good without UA stacking, i would prefer that they remove it and add something else.
I don’t think anyone really asked for Rapture either though.
I was sort of hoping to just going back to Haunt as a spender, if anything.
But from a PVP perspective it does feel nice to not have UA stacking. UA performed too many roles in BfA that it felt removed from what it was originally in PVP - dispel protection. In terms of PVP UA is just much better as a maintenance ability.
As for Affliction being a rot spec though yeah this definitely isn’t it, and is more or less a design repackaging that does favor the PVP side of things but doesn’t really give Affliction its identity back.
New spriest on the other hand is actually back to being a rot spec, while simultaneously having significantly faster dot application/less ramp up time.
Maelfic Rapture is cool, and feels fun…but yes I agree it’s silly that it does so much more damage overall compared to the DoT’s themselves. I’d rather see the damage of MR get reduced but include a buff that increases the remaining DoT’s damage by 3% stacking up to 5 times or something else that interacts with / rewards good DoT application and moves back some of the damage toward the actual spec identity.
They are definitely trying to bring it back to a rot spec but it’s difficult for 1 reason.
That reason is M+.
Tuning a rot spec to be effective in M+ while remaining under control for raiding is a major challenge. I really hope their malefic rapture design will make us competitive in both but have not had the opportunity to check it out yet.
I think one of the best things they could do to support the rot class fantasy would be to get rid of darkglare. What a garbage cooldown that is. If there is a warlock spec that REALLY doesn’t give a crap about pets it’s affliction.
The way it’s looking, spriest dots are gonna hit harder than our dots.
putting dots so they do absolutely nothing but boost my rapture damage, such an amazing playstyle
Our dots do no damage in SL, if this keeps up I will probably be a shadow priest, things will obviously change before launch, hope they make the right choice.
they took our meta, gave it to dhs, now they took our dots and gave them to spriests, what is left is 3 garbage specs that play like trash on beta
The virtue of being a DoT class and other abilities reward that. You do not let your DoTs fall off live for that reason. Gameplay wise you are doing the exact same thing in ST aside from darkglare you are spamming that ability to dump shards. Its reskinned UA stacking. As far as AoE goes it creates its own set of problems such as creating more ramp and overshadowing other talents and abilities.
What made Haunt work as a spender was that A. there was more than 1 spender and B. Snapshotting existed. Because B. is now gone the existence of A became a lot more useless and Haunt as a spender just makes it feel like UA stacking anyways(you would just be dumping shards for minimal gain).
Rather people would like to admit it or not UA stacking was the best spender mechanic for Affliction post Snapshotting. Malefic raptures essentially gives you the same gameplay but now some talent choices are dead and now you have a baseline spender that is both used for ST AND AoE.
In my honest opinion in ST its probably less interesting because you went from:
Maintain DoTs and use shards smartly to Maintain UA(as in always make sure you have at least 1 shard to keep UA uptime)
To:
Maintain DoTs and just spam spender with no real consequence.
Except Malefic Rapture is perfectly versatile for Single Target, Cleave, and AoE, the latter of which was something they were entirely incapable of doing like in M+.
Giving us another maintenance dot back in our baseline kit is excellent as well. The only alternative they could or should consider aside from putting more damage into the dots instead of MR, is bringing back SB:Haunt somehow. Miss that something awful.
Thats the problem with it, i am well aware that its more versatile but that not always a good thing. Sometimes versatility can break things and dull gameplay and thats what malefic rupture did.
If they could take damage away from malefic rapture and make the AoE talent row of Sow the Seeds/Phantom Singularity/Vile Taint more powerful, I’d be okay with it.
Seed of Corruption feels useless as is, a ghost of it’s former self from Legion when using Sow the Seeds.
Lets say they did that. How would that make it a more interesting spell than UA being the spender because like i mentioned earlier on live at least you have to think about shard usage. It would still be, have shards? use them.
Edit: Now if a majority of Afflocks are okay with that then its fine but just realize what it does to your spec may help you improve it. Me personally Warlock will be an alt going forward so its of no consequence to me anymore lol.
Not really.
It was a terrible mechanic when introduced, and was only propped up by Malefic Grasp/Death’s Embrace in Legion (post Nighthold rework of the spec) and Deathbolt/Darkglare in BfA. And even in Legion it was almost never worth putting up more than 2 UAs at a time, except in PVP. This fact alone about Legion just screams how the spec was only strong because of other mechanics it had.
Mechanically-speaking, it is terrible and it was holding the spec back.
It’s gone, and it’s a good thing that it’s gone.
Notice how i never said it was good or bad but simply best? Why is Malefic Rupture better when it makes you think about Shards even less?
Edit:
The thing is you guys are at least insinuating that Malefic Rupture is better or different without explaining why. The best i got is “makes DoTs matter” but DoTs matter with or without it.