From my other post it’s not illogical or affliction would literally be unplayable. The assumption is that you are getting on average 5.5 shards per minute at 0 haste and roughly every 6 agony ticks right.
Before you call me a white knight, since that seems to be your favourite way to just say I’m wrong, I 100% believe that this should be reflected on the UI and that my solution above sounds better in general. 0.2 shard bits on the first agony, and 0.1 per agony sounds reasonable and could use the destruction shard UX
No, the problem is that with agony agard gen is that its random and you dont know when your getting a shard. Two, you have zero agency over getting shards. 3, if your agony drops bc of mechanics, your f*****, no matter how much you try to prepare for it. Not to mention that a normal person is not going to understand anything you linked, and like you said, blizz provides zero ui clarity on it. Plus, lets be honest, if you have to dig all the way back to legion to figure out how aff gets its shards, lol, isnt it time to address it… id say so.
Also, i dont call you a white knighter bc i think your wrong, i do it when you defend blizz and prevent positive progression away from these antiquated systems towards more logical and understandable systems.
Firstly, I’m doing it so that people can make informed decisions because you can’t complain about shard rng without understanding how shards are actually generated. This seems like a good solution, yes? I don’t defend them I literally defend how they are trying to design the class so that we can talk about why it’s bad or unintuitive. Not saying that you saying “this sucks XYZ” is bad feedback at all btw, since that’s relevant.
This is good feedback especially about the “random” element to how people figure out when they’ll get shards, I think dropping agony isn’t actually important to the shard discussion since you can drop it and reapply it the next gcd (which is your best gcd btw) and will only lose 1 tick of accumulation which is fine. Obviously damage is another issue.
AGAIN BEFORE YOU CRUCIFY ME – Blizzard will see it this way btw: players don’t need actual deterministic shard generation because affliction pools resources anyway, you’re not slinging shards like destruction and demo to avoid overcapping.
A normal person doesn’t need to understand the formula, just intuitively understand our 1m shard dump windows (which we’ve had forever btw). AGAIN BEFORE YOU BLAME ME FOR ANYTHING, THIS IS LITERALLY HOW THEY DO THE CLASS DESIGN, NOT ME. You are right about UI clarity, and since I brought it up first (before you white knight me a third time) they should do much better on this front.
I think a broader issue is that multiple spells in our kit work this way with no explanation as to how it works (look at summoning doomguards from doom for instance, which is a complicated equation). This was something I also shared behind the scenes as well.
The disconnect between blizz and the community is just exactly how you explained it, yet blizz refuses to accept the significance of the issue. Usually with mechanics its not 1 or 2 dropped tics, which is what they count on. As other specs and classes are gaining resources, aff is dead in the water as soon as agony drops. Thats a much more significant issue than blizz gives it credit for. A prime example is m+. When VT is on cd (obhorrent spell design btw), and the group is moving onto the next group, aff is significantly handicapped.
We havent even gotten into the role of double and triple taxed spells on the economy of such limited incoming shard resources.
Honestly, with everyone ive talked to, aff players would not be against slinging shards like the other two specs. They just request mr be passive and a different spender be implented. They feel as if it provides the spec more on demand dps and burst, especially in m+ and in raid situations.
I agree the problems are 1. There is ZERO clarity as to how aff works, and 2. Spell explanation.
As for doomguard, as ive announced before, it just needs to find itself as a cornerstone talent on the class tree as a class wife 3min dps cd. Working in tandem with all 3 specs of course and with nodes to modify its playstyle to fit different needs. This would be great for doomguard, for warlocks of all 3 specs, for the class tree, for especially pvp players, and for class theme.
Lastly, id like to add i still stand firm on if blizz is refusing to move forward with shard fragment idea, that they need to 1. Make seed spread agony as well as corruption. 2. Make vt not have a cd. 3. Make corruption generate soul shards. This would go a long ways towards patching up the dead areas of shard regen and make the spec flow better.
Yeah, ngl as somebody that isn’t sold on having more shards through agony, I’m actually curious why people want more shards to spend. Is it that drain soul and shadowbolt really suck to cast? MR being a passive is a curious one, I would assume (like what another poster mentioned) that it would just entail your dots proccing a partial MR explosion on the target. I guess it could be the accumulator buff I mentioned previously, where you could have a stacking buff and when you reach X number your dots explode.
This is pretty much exactly what blizzard posted in the alpha. Doom atm is temporary (or at least some part of demo is temporary to find a better nether portal. My personal opinion is that all 3m cds should be purged from the game completely as they don’t foster good minute-minute gameplay and are extremely hard to balance properly. This expansion has already caused a huge issue with CD parity between classses (which is why short cd specs are dominating m+ and pvp metrics).
Unironically, the thought behind this is that you’re meant to always have agony up, and dropping it is a skill issue (seriously btw, and this isn’t a poke at you but how it’s actually designed). The second part to this is that agony being a shard generation with no cast time is actually better than most classes as they actually need to cast a filler to gain a resource (which can be kicked or you are forced to move). Thirdly, melee classes have to melee to regain resources, and being out of range is like dropping agony.
The problem is that all classes have some ways to actually have a better way to generate the resource (melee have an insane amount of gap closers now, other ranged specs can move while casting to move out of things, the skill of dropping a dot or a “spinning plate” as blizzard calls it is much harder than a filler cast). I think the best path forward is trying to reduce the spinning plates affliction has – going back to MR increasing dot duration is also a good solution here, so that dropping dots isn’t as bad. Not having siphon life has already reduced the skill gap significantly.
Not really more shards theough agony, its more like more shards from multiple places like other classes so that we have a more well rounded shard generation. I think in todays heavy mobile scene, drain soul is incredibly out of place and shadow bolts cast time is too long. For aff, as a spec that is getting better with mobility, its still stuck bc of those two spells. Also, im not overly sure why ppl want mr as passive, but im sure its bc of the massive ramp time we have. So soon as we start applying dots we start doing dmg instead of having to wait.
Yea. Blizz destroyed doomguard in demo AND as a standalone demon. I am not a fan of how they implemented doomguard in demo and god i hope they dont do that to him in the class tree. As for the 3 min cd, i mean, i get it, but he could also be a 2 min cd while our spec cds could be 1 min which would make vastly more sense. A big problem with locks is that our dps cds are on too big of cds. Doomguard deserves to be a cd, not some random proc. That would be horrific and absolutely demeaning to such a thematic part of our toolkit.
That is fixed in its entirely by having soul generation through multiple avenues, not theough the singular means of increasing dot times. When u cant cast you cant increase dot time anyways. Its pointless.
Agree on all of RPGonlyforme’s points.
The vile taint replacing curses especially hampers m+ gameplay, I would love to be able to curse during pull gather, and when I switch specs I notice the difference immediately. Of course I would love a way to AOE apply curses, but I will settle for being able to curse on the gather.
Seed of Corruptions small radius I find especially impactful in raid, frequently large raid bosses may have small adds around them. Typically in the past you seed the boss, 2 of your sow seeds go on the adds everything gets corruption. Now on bosses like Rasha’nan if you seed the boss you will not get corruption on any adds at all. It makes affliciton’s ability to function in these kind of funnel situations much more difficult, you have to seed an add, then dmg it to pop the seed (unlike on the boss with all your dmg rolling that will instantly pop) and by now the adds are all dead. I would love to see sow the seeds baked into our seed talent, with dmg reduced (so it doesn’t become the spender), 3 seeds are usually sufficient to provide coverage. But of course any solution to this issue would be a huge win.
IMO, it was way more fun when agony (through nightfall at the time) was providing supplemental shards and we were generating the rest of what we needed through our choice of fillers. As the expansion when on and you gathered more haste, you had to do less shard generating and spent more time using the higher damage filler.
I’ve been complaining about how bad it feels to not have any control over our resources since they changed away from this. It seems they tried to address that feeling this xpac by just tuning up the number of shards we have available. Just a bandaid like how volatile agony makes it numerically worth it to refresh agony in aoe but doesn’t stop it from feeling bad to do.
I don’t understand why Aff, being the premier dot spec, needs to have a soul shard cost associated with seed while Dest’s cataclysm does not! Just seems weird that they’re hell bent on making Aff life as hard as possible with DOT management. Dest can easily maintain 100% uptime on wither with CDF + Cataclysm while Aff cannot. Show Aff some love please Blizzard!
If dot application is sooooooooo intricate to the identity of aff, why does it not have multiple ways of applying dots? Wouldnt you think if it was one of the capstones of aff, that it would be, in sorts, a field of specialization?
Seed needs to be removed or reworked, it’s cast time blows as does the aoe radius, most of the time packs of mobs die before you even have a chance to do any meaningful damage, whereas most other classes just instant cast and start ramping straight away.
Vile taint needs to be back to back castable or we need something else in our toolkit that extends Agony on targets so we aren’t forced to reapply agony to targets one at a time in aoe scenarios.
Fix phantom singularity being reduced by haste.
Oblivion needs to be reworked, it should do its own damage (8 second duration + pandemic + 2soul shards) and increase all damage over time applied by the warlock by 100% or something. It should be able to compete with Rapture in single target and give us a true dot weaving build that forces us to focus on 100% uptime of all our dots w/ drain fillers.
Have rapture spread oblivion to 5 nearby targets to give it aoe potential.
seed of corruption at this point is just a relic of a bigone age that they appropriate into the design. we just need a new spell honestly
(fix)
remove seed of corruption & vile taint
Circle of Death (replaces seed’s current spot on talent tree): 1,5 sec cast, 15 sec cooldown. Applies corruption & agony to the target and all enemies within 15 yards. (edit: no shard cost, for the love of God)
Death’s Caress (replaces vile taint), circle of death now applies it’s own DOT for 10 seconds. (to make up for the loss of a dot from vile taint that boosts Rapture)
this doesn’t fix all other afflock issues but gotta start somewhere
Its basically just what i have been requesting but with new names…
I was told by the apologists that “dot application is too important foe aff identity to make things that easy.” Although that is paradoxal as if dot application is so crucial to identity, then aff should be able to multiple ways of applying dots.
Dont count on anything happening. The 1% thinks “locks are in a good place atm.”
Oh, look, another day, another round of “Why doesn’t Blizzard listen to us?” posts. Here’s the thing, and I’m going to say this slowly so maybe it sinks in this time: Blizzard doesn’t care if you’re enjoying the game, they never have, and spoiler alert, they never will. All they care about is that sweet $15 a month rolling in, and guess what? You keep giving it to them. You think they’re sitting in a boardroom somewhere agonizing over your forum feedback? No, they’re not. They’re laughing all the way to the bank while you write novels about your broken class or that feature they promised but never delivered. You have two choices here. You either quit and find another game to cry about, or you keep paying, keep playing, and keep suffering while doing exactly what they want you to do. That’s it. There is no third option where they suddenly wake up, read your posts, and say, “Oh no, we’ve been so wrong, let’s fix everything right now!” It’s not happening. So keep complaining if it makes you feel better, but let’s not pretend it’s doing anything other than giving the rest of us something to laugh at.
Sounds like a 1%er who doesnt like change/doesnt want change, has profited off of aff not changing, and would prefer things never change.
Must have hit a nerf.