AFFI is so terrible！Designers,Please take note

PVP Arenas
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1、The two-minute burst skill “Summon Darkglare” and the one-minute burst skill “Soul Rot+Phantom Singularity” can be perfectly countered by a simple dispel, while UA (Unstable Affliction) only inflicts a penalty damage of 15-25%. In previous seasons, UA’s penalty damage was 35-40%.

2、The single-target damage output of most melee classes exceeds 1.5 m/s, with some specific classes even reaching up to 2 m/s（ret、dk and fury）. In contrast, Affliction’s three-target damage averages only around 1.2 m/s. This kind of numerical balance no longer follows a fundamental model.

3、Several PVE buffs for Affliction have not been implemented in PVP, yet in reality, Affliction’s damage output is already extremely low. The majority of its abilities should have their PVP nerfs reverted.

4、When Jinx uses the Curse of Exhaustion, if the target has a slow immunity buff, Affliction’s resources will be consumed without any effect. This is highly unreasonable. While the slow effect of the curse may not be applied, the damage over time (DoT) from Agony and Corruption should still take effect.

5、“Rampant Affliction” has become a PVP talent that is virtually unused; not a single Affliction Warlock among the top 500 players employs it. Affliction has completely lost its unique identity and has been reduced to an extremely mediocre specialization. The removal of the “Soul Rot + Life Siphon” mechanic, which extended DoTs (Damage over Time effects) on multiple targets, has made stacking three Unstable Afflictions (UA) entirely unviable. Moreover, when using this talent, UA’s damage is reduced to a mere 45%. Today, most spellcasting classes (such as Elemental Shaman, Balance Druid, and Mage) rely almost entirely on instant-cast abilities, while Affliction still requires an excessive amount of casting.

6、The issue with Affliction’s Fear breaking due to damage thresholds (even when using Nightmare) is particularly glaring, especially when compared to the far more reliable Fear effect of Warriors. Even if a healer has only Agony and Corruption DoTs (Damage over Time effects) on them, they will often break out of Fear automatically within approximately 3 seconds—let alone when your teammates are also applying additional DoTs to the target. In practice, a Fear effect that should last 5 seconds often breaks after just 2-3 seconds, which is highly unreasonable.

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Crazy how chatgpt knows all this stuff. What a time to be alive! But nonetheless I do agree UA backlash needs buffed big time along with shadow bolt damage to give it more single target pressure since blizzard is against the rot game

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No disagreements, this is a problem affliction faces that should be considered when looking into balance changes/adjustments.

It’s important to note that arena logs records all damage in any arena where someone has the add-on, and on that the data pools are large enough to consider the data valid. Afflictions damage is not in a bad place OVERALL, just emphasizing the issue is single target, it’s lethality is low outside of dampening scenarios, and in this meta those are rare conditions to ask for.

Again, specifically single target/funnel damage. It’s AOE is top tier.

This is in fact silly and should be removed, just apply the dots not read “immune” and give us nothing, that said curse of exhausting is fast becoming a useless button when melee don’t need to use WSAD to close gaps and uptime is so high it’s better in a lot of cases to just use weakness/tongues.

While true, I don’t really think this is an issue that should be fixed on affliction if it’s identity is to remain aoe/rot/spread, and other issues were fixed this would be a counterplay/style choice. Don’t want the healer fear to break don’t dot the healer and send raptures. I’m okay with this because it’s how the game works in general, don’t damage people with CC.

Affy could definitely use some attention but keep in mind 2 things, all target UA with un-dispellable damage is not fun for the enemy team to face and difficult to counter, it’s not a good direction to advocate for affliction. It needs greater lethality and help getting damage out when under pressure of melee, and it needs it’s dispel protection mechanic looked into because at present it is not working.

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If I could explain in my native language, I could 100% make it crystal clear. I hope you can understand what my cheap AI is trying to say. One thing I want to point out is: last season, the number of Rank 1 Affliction Warlocks was ZERO!! (across both EU and NA).

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Oh I know man, warlocks are one of the least represented class’s for r1 and gladiator.

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Only if they can sit in the middle of the map and spam raptures which isnt a thing vs people with hands

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I agree here, that’s why I mentioned

I don’t even have a clue what that looks like, but my dps goes up 30% or more in caster lobbies vs double melee lobbies. At present it relies on teammates to help get the set up windows done.

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Melee don’t have the positional, ranged, durability (except ret) or the spamable cc potential (except ret)

Also just play with an assa rogue and all those problems go away

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idk design like this just creates degenerate gameplay

like okay put everything into stopping the lock from ending the game in a series of short rapture casts and he does nothing

but now the void weaver disc is doing 1.8m dps, the 4pc pres is doing 1.5m dps, or the paladin is quad repping 5 people at once with nothing better to do

does anyone win with this design?
it’s eeriely similar to bfa gpy on 5x speed idk

wish they’d stop making specs like aff destro exist to sponge 110% of every possible crumb of disruption or you instantly lose

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Aff is prob one of if not THE worst spec in pvp right now, and ppl don’t care, the devs don’t care, people just hate warlocks in general.

u know this spec is useless when you dot all 3 ppl the entire game and ret still outdmgs you sitting on one target, you have the most useless cc, your fear breaks off your dots, and you get this 3 min CD unending resolve defensive which BM/ret/dh/fury just kill you through, save your self some time and stop playing this sad spec, blizz is okay living off selling tokens from these FOTM RET rerollers.

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It’s impossible to do that with how nerfed all the Afly talents are in general.

They even ignore the healer, All the silent CCs are for the Afly because no healer can maintain the Afly

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hell no

10lemons

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  1. Shadow Bolt and Haunt are also nerfed.
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I think deep down you know it does. A 3-4.5m hit on a major spell thats suppose to make you think about dispelling is a joke. It needs to be hitting for 10m minimum for it to be useful again.

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Can’t dispel phantom singularity, and this is why you want to cc the healer OR soul swap the dots to protect against dispel.

And it was nerfed because it was too strong.

As a general rule that I don’t see a lot of affs take advantage of, make sure to pressure and dot the healer. If you don’t, they WILL be able to dispel with impunity which will put you extremely far behind.

That being said, inaccuracies about the class aside, aff is one of the relatively weaker specs atm, but I’m not sure how much of that would change if it wasnt for all the melee being nuts RN.

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Basically affy needs to run with a good assa rogue to be scary due to how much the rogue is able to lock targets down with stuns and silences

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I’m a pretty mediocre player, and playing with a primarily pve player, and a legend dps that is trying healing for the first time, and we hit 1900 mmr last weekend doing about 30 games a week together as shadowplay.

I think it’s a great deal more viable atm than the meta would suggest. If our silly group of friends with no aspirations of being glad can play somewhat early in the season at 1900 with very little synergy/experience I think good players could easily play at a 2200 level atm. We tried it with me on destro, and I’m a solid -26/10 destro and we played at 1500 for 2 weekends before switching to affy and climbing 400 mmr almost instantly. I’m trying desperately to convert this pve guild into arena players.

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After reading your reply, I believe you do not play the affi class, so I would like to explain this to you while also informing others and the designers:

Due to reason 5 mentioned above, among the top 500 best Affliction players in the world, exactly ZERO use the UAx3 build (simply put, all affi players use the UAx1 build).
Therefore, it is also impossible to use the Soul Swap build (as this build has now become a PvP talent).
Even Chanimal cannot effectively pressure healers who know how to dispel DoTs, because the healer only has two DoTs on them—Agony and Corruption—while the Affliction player’s only UA is on a DPS target and has just been dispelled. The Affliction player must recast UA on the healer, which is extremely difficult to achieve in matches of equal skill level.
Additionally, the current dispel punishment damage for UA is only 15–20% (or even lower), meaning all healers can freely dispel without worrying about UA.

So, the idea of applying pressure to the healer is unfeasible and simply cannot be achieved. I hope you can understand my TEMU AI.

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Then you would be wrong, as I have multiple gladiators on warlock; most of them as affliction!

And out of the top 300 moonkin in solo shuffle last season, I was the only person playing elune’s chosen and I was rank 1st and 4th overall. Most moonkin players also never played disarm or tireless pursuit, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad talents either.

0 moonkins took celestial guardian as a pvp talent because it was worse than other options as well; which is currently what multi UA would fall under.

You’re just stating numbers with no practical application. It’s all meaningless.
0 warriors in the top 1000 played dragon charge. Warrior was still fine.

Sure, so chanimal’s teammate pressures the healer which either forces the enemy teammate to get off the lock; allowing him to freecast, or let their healer suffer and race the warlock.

It can, though.

Are we pretending like assa+aff wasn’t the highest repped comp s1 above 2400 relative to spec population???

Aff isn’t going to 1shot or burst anything down; you’re committed to playing a game of attrition when you Queue up as that spec.

What you’re describing are intentional class design themes of aff, and require your team to play differently with an aff lock.

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A unfortunate reality is that compared to affi, assrog are far more willing to play with countless other classes such as ele, undk, boomy, mage, dest and so on.
A well-known “Affi-only” R1 player who Langernnur, failed to achieve Rank 1 last season (their composition was assrog+affi) and even fell short by 200-300 rating points（If I remember correctly）.