Flame Shock and Moonfire are both instant cast and now have dispell protection while still doing more damage than Corruption with Sacrolash. We literally have a Legendary that amplifes the damage but still does less. Shadow Priest DoTs are on a complete different level.
They also do more damage than UA. Meanwhile Affliction has no single target that is in anyway scary. We can’t even kill a Psyfiend in less than 20 seconds.
You would think that the “DoT” class would be able to have the best DoTs in the game.
Both Corruption and Agony have higher spell power %'s than Vampiric Touch or Shadow Word:Pain
Devouring Plague will deal more damage than UA but Devouring is SPriest spender, while UA is just a maitenance dot.
Now, i do agree that affliction single target is rather low when compared to S.priest, but it’s 3~4 spread cleave is stronger.
Welcome to the world people so much wanted when they asked for MR-nerf and more “Multi Dot” based, you are now balanced across long periods of multi-target dot maintenance.
Yes, blizz isn’t even working on wow anymore, but the thing with aff locks is that blizz is too stupid to fix them while the community screams at them from an air tight forums.
Yes we wanted more dot dmg bc before they ticked for garbage. What idiot blizz did was nerf Mr but barely add any dmg to dots. I mean, if it wasn’t for soc doing ACTUAL viable dps meow, aff would be garbage in m+ too.
Look, blizz obviously had an agenda against aff and even fire mages. You can’t tell me that they don’t know how to balance a spec to the point where a spec doesn’t drop from 1st to last in fps rankings…
Very constructive. Lets compare a filler spell to those that are part of our constant rotation.
OP made valid claims. Even with a dot buff legendary it still doesnt compare to the nit and grit of spriest and balance dot damage. In pvp, do you know how annoying it is to deal with a player who uses the regeneration seed talent? So much ramp up and not enough single target damage.
UA, a very required skill in terms of dot protection, has to be talented in PvP. Otherwise you’ll have one target with dots on it while the healer removes the dots off of everyone else. Even then more and more healers are dispelling ua because they have ways to deal with the downtime.
There is a valid claim in there in that affliction looks like it’s not doing enough damage but comparing two spells in a vacuum like that is counterproductive. The problem here is that the devs want the soul shard spenders to be a warlock’s big damage spells (and with good reason) but either you have to put it on a DoT (I think we all agree that the old UA model was clunky as hell) or on something else, namely Malefic Rapture. This means affliction’s damage comes not from its DoTs, but from keeping DoTs on their target and using MR as much as possible.
So what’s the solution? Well, changing soul shards to empower your DoTs would be nice, but that’s kind of what MR is already doing by doing damage based on the number of DoTs on there. One thing I would like is for them to change MR entirely. Make it instant and instead of doing damage, it prolongs all your DoTs. Like, adds 6 seconds per cast. Buff the DoTs to do more damage. Or remove it and make Haunt baseline again and make it cost a soul shard, like it used to.
Perhaps this is a good time that soulburn returns, to offer shard spenders and ways to boost the damage of our moves. We have no shard spenders as affliction outside of MR and Seed of Corruption. Soul Shards used to be a huge part of the warlocks identity.
More or less. Go back to the original design and soul shards were items which you had to farm and though you had Soul Fire which was a soul shard consumer, no one in their right mind would have used it. Soul Shards were there to summon a demon or to conjure healthstones and soulstones. Soul shards being a resource which warlocks generated with some spells and spent on more powerful spells is a design which came much later in MoP. And yeah, back then, it was all about Haunt. I miss that design.
It’s the fault of people not being aware of what they want, 9.0 Affliction was an amazing powerfull spec, but people hated it to the point of it being semi-reworked for 9.1
A system that have dots being very strong in single target leads them to being absolutely insane in spread cleave, Malefic Rapture handled this in an amazing way at 9.0 because you could never keep all dots of MR in all targets so it was allowed to be extremely powerfull in single while also powerfull in AOE and Spread Cleave.
The moment they nerfed MR and implemented more damage on corruption and agony your damage became slower, more dependent on dots fully ticking for their worth as GCDS and this reflect poorly in affliction single target damage.
Thankfully, with this you now have space for each Warlock Spec, Demo on pure single, Destro on 2-target cleave and affliction is still very insane on fights like KT with Wrath of Consumption.
I think Affliction could have a damage increase on single target, but it will not be coming from a increase in Corruption or Agony, MAYBE from Unstable Affliction.
As for your Shadow Priest Argument, Affliction destroys Shadow Priests in Spread Cleave and AOE, just take a look at KT heroic parses https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/28#boss=2422&difficulty=4 , this is because outside of Devouring Plague Spriest dots hit even lower than Affliction but in compensate Devouring Plague is stronger than UA while still being more of a single target due to constraints on the resource spending, making Spriest more single target inclined (it’s pretty similar to how BFA affliction was more of a single target machine with UA stacking)
Because it plays like trash. Not because it was weak. The damage PROFILE makes dots practically non existent. People spec affliction because they want to see dots be the primary focus. We dont need this weird garbage of transparent purple piss spam.
This isnt some new issue. Blizzard has solved this time and time, expansion after expansion, not only with affliction itself but other specs. Affliction isnt the only dot class. They are just unironically incompetent at their job.
And no one is debating this. This is why you create single target throttles. This is why MR exist now. We’ve had this before where drain soul sped up your dots on the target. Other classes like balance druids have their dots proc instant free starsurges to funnel ST damage.
Current MR doesnt do this. It just exist as this all encompassing spell that uses dots as buffers instead of the other way around. So in order to keep this balanced. dots have to be trash. (which btw, we havent even mentioned how awful MR feels in pvp).
its quite obvious you didnt read what I said
As in, the way it deals damage. not the actual numbers which can be tuned at any given moment in a hotfix by one guy and his pet turtle.
Not really. You could make UA buff dots damage (less effective when you take the pvp talent) and it would be fine both in single target and aoe. You could make it so UA buff dots by a random amount between x and y (kinda like destruction mastery) and it would at the same time play into the name of unstable affliction.
There’s many ways to solve the issue and imo making the spec a clave/aoe only spec is not one of the solutions. The same can be said about destruction. Both spec have bottom of the barrel single target dps. If you look at Guardian of the first ones both spec rank bottom 5 (all percentiles (and 95% percentiles) in heroic cause both have only 1 parse in mythic).
Not to mention the impact on survivability caused by loading our damage into a spell not effected by soul leech while also weakening siphon life and drain life.
I mainly PvP and Mythic+, this talent shouldn’t even exists. Even in PvE scenarios putting UA on 4+ targets you’d still trash damage.
The only way Affliction can see viability this expansion without Maelfic Rapture is by buffing DoT damage by close to 30% but still would he mid tier in raids.
I don’t think you understood what i meant. I meant that UA would buff the others dots damage by x% on the target it is on. Basically Corruption and Agony would do more damage on the target having UA. The x% would be lower in pvp with the UA pvp talent selected.