You obviously haven’t seen or played warlock in beta, ptr, or even watched raid testing. Warlocks are crushing them with two specs. Here’s a little listing for you ripped from beta logs wowmeta. com go to shadowlands dps rankings right now Shadow priest aren’t that impressive. They feel good yes, but they aren’t as broken as this forum is saying.
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Run out of mana too fast for my liking, and they took life tap away.
please do not use or reference this site. its a meme or a noxxic rip off and both are terrible. its not a reliable source it literally just rips every log in existence from raid testing and puts it into a graph. Your point is accurate, aff specifically is dumpstering everyone, destro is really solid as well (prolly top 5), just please dont use that site as a source lol
Hey I never asked this but what do you think of Simulationcraft? I get the info on the addon then plug it into the simulationcraft program and it gives me projected DPS. I found it real easy to use which is why I use it, plus you can sim quickly between different gear items.
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i use simc addon and raidbots usually. using the full simcraft program is also perfectly fine for slightly more in-depth breakouts, they both use the same APL so its perfectly fine to use either/or.
i just prefer raidbots cuz i can run 3-4-5 tabs on another monitor to check stuff.
also: top gear is a thing, so raidbots takes the edge for me due to that
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I agree and I would never use that site for telling someone how to analyze a class in a live patch version compared to actual logs, raider io, and simcraft. If the warcraft logs stats page was available for castle Nathria I would’ve linked that. The site basically just tries to clone the statistics page of warcraft logs anyway a comparison of the two shows that. I just needed an example of rough data to show that the shadow priest much better than weak aff lock narrative isn’t true.
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I suppose there’s no accounting for fun. Having dots do near no significant dmg and having it all come from Malefic Rapture ain’t intuitive nor fun. I play lock and spriest on live and trust me I hate playing destro so I was happy when I heard that affliction was making a comeback, but i wish they went back to affliction doing dmg with dots. I suppose I’m leaning towards spriest because the spriest changes are kind of huge and it feels completely different and fun now.
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In that we can be in agreement I like the idea of rot, but I just don’t see how it fits into the current game. At least if people actually want affliction to be viable in m+. I feel like half this forum was complaints about fixing warlocks in m+ and I feel like this design is trying to address that.
Where I worry shadow priest will suffer the same problem as bfa outside of raids. I didn’t even play warlock in 8.3 after the first month, because I also hate destro.
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Mmmm, I think they really amped up the aoe potential for spriests though. With the increased amount of apparitions proccing, psychic link being a talent instead of a PvP talent which does dmg to everyone with your dots on them, and searing nightmare basically being the Malefic rapture of spriest, being able to be casted while mind sear is being casted kind of like mw monks vivify being able to be casted during soothing it looks as though they could be okay. Again i haven’t tested enough and we would have to spec into those aoe talents thus making our single target not as good, so I don’t know for sure.
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Affliction’s dot damage is still significant in any fight that lasts long enough to run out of soul shards.
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https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/cVk86yaGrKCNQv4z
UA has a decent amount of damage to it individually. the other ones are still weak individually but overall they add up to an “ok” amount of damage. here are my logs from a normal clear on sunday of Nathria if anyone wants to peruse
Looks like decimating bolt + drain soul execute are a bigger concern than rapture. I wonder how other covenants would size up to something like that.
And taking a look at the shadow priest from those logs, they have a similar issue where their resource spender is the bulk of their damage and their dots are mostly tickling.
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I’m playing Warlock at high level for the first time on the 9.0 PTR so I’m not expert, but here’s some input:
in general it’s smooth, but there’s awkward gameplay between spreading DOTs with SoC spending shards, and Malefic Rupture spending shards being contingent upon having DoTs up, while you don’t have a good way to get Agony going on multi-target fights.
This makes the spec feel really disjointed especially in AoE Dungeon/M+ settings on the PTR which makes me not really excited to play it most of the time.
Having no real reliable and consistent way to gain Shards leads to a strange feast-or-famine swing of the pendulum where packs just before boss pulls are spent basically banking all the shards I can, and hope the group pulls before my extra 2 shards expire between pulls.
For AoE/M+ situations the gameplay between spending a shard to spread Corruption with SoC and being down a Shard no matter what you do for Malefic Rupture feels really disjointed and causes a clash in the flow of gameplay.
Usually, in 3+ packs I only Agony one target because by the time I manually put Agony on all the targets, and can really start doing DPS the packs are dead, making Affliction basically dead weight for M+ dungeons. If you can only be counted on to do DPS on the bosses when the bulk of the keystone is contingent upon AoE, why would anyone ever want an Affliction Warlock over Destro who can pump out AoE and Single Target without a second thought?
Bottom line is Affliction needs stronger resource generation so the majority of your time playing isn’t just Shadowbolt/Drain Soul spam while you hope the next tick of Agony gives you a Soul Shard.
In the meantime I’ll just play Destruction since it’s still real strong and still awesome to play raining Infernals down on your foes like you’re Gul’Dan on a bender.
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drain snipe, UA snipe, go into packs with multiple shards. probably the easiest fix for what youre describing. also what M+ were you doing on PTR? what level key?
You arent going to go into a M+ pack with full shards really simply because at a baseline you go in with 3 and once you get everything rolling you are dumping them all with MR(and likely taking Vile Taint as well).
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Drain Snipe/UA Snipe is a band-aid answer indicative of a deeper problem. Your fuel for literally participating shouldn’t all come from the tail-end of the engagement. And for ST fights, if you don’t bank shards just before the boss pull your burst is kneecapped, and your choice is either burst at 3/5ths effectiveness or wait for 2 more shards and delay your ST burst, and each option doesn’t feel that good.
I think skill gaps should exist in the game, but having your core spec gameplay loop be contingent upon player skill to snipe with 2 shard generators is still awkward and disjointed gameplay, which no other spec really relies on.
The only similar effects are execute effects - which is just damage that doesn’t provide your bread and butter resource for any other class - and smaller effects like Soul Rip on the Unholy DK which still serves the primary function of providing Runes during a gap in gameplay and the tertiary buff has a minimal impact on timing the ability to gain the buff.
It puts Affliction in this really awkward place where it’s strongest when targets are consistently dying, but then has no fuel injection to get there.
As I’ve said I’m a rookie Warlock player, but it seems to me that there’s a reason Affliction is not the dominant spec to play right now in Live, and making UA generate a shard when an enemy dies feels like they are just doubling-down on the clunky class design.
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yeah i suppose it depends on how the tank is pulling whether or not the combat timer has a chance to reset your shards entirely. and its a valid issue to bring up
I just see it as nuanced gameplay within the dungeon and pull itself. sniping mid pack, shifting your UA to a low HP target and combining with drain to give 2 back. understand whether or not its worth to throw out MRs on 1-2 super low HP targets when you could drain and go into the next pack with a higher resource count
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Nuance, decision making, and those choices are fine on a smaller scale, but the problem itself still stands as a core flaw in the design of the class.
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this has been a thing since legion or before, it isn’t new. and yes, i overall agree that it is relatively band-aidish as a fix (drain/UA sniping), but its something we’ve just learned to kinda do that has smoothed it. its not played on live because it has no AOE to speak of. MR is aoe, your damage is just partially contingent on mobs living long enough to seed+agony 3ish targets, and then go to town, or add in VT as Lyeza mentioned. i think itll be fine in M+, what the meta will dictate is beyond me, and youre right infernal spam is exceptionally strong so it will likely be the default in normal keys. but i do believe aff has significant potential with its new kit and is miles ahead of where it is on live
I DO agree that SoC should NOT use a shard and SHOULD apply agony + corruption (and maybe be an instant cast with a cooldown). I also think vile taint should NOT use a shard and should MAYBE even be an instant cast. With these two fixes aff locks would be great (balanced) in AoE situation.