Came back to 9.1 and have been gearing a few classes, decided to try out affliction on my lock that was destro in S1 and… yikes…
Really just need to add a simple mechanic that makes your DoTs do less damage the more people they are on, so that DoTs can actually do anything and not just be sad little tickle spells in 1v1 and 2v2 while not being completely broken in larger scale stuff like BGs.
It is incredibly underwhelming putting 4-6 dots on someone and blowing a bunch of DoT-boosting CDs just to watch their health go down slower than if a full green geared rogue or DH were just auto-attacking them.
The only reason the DoTs are this pitiful and lackluster is because if they were any stronger it would make them broken in AoE when spamming them. So just make them scale to the number of active targets?? lol???
I have many 60s and affliction at the best of times feels 10x worse than any of my melee classes feel at the worst of times. All of my DoTs combined literally does not equate to half of 1 DH just auto-attacking, and I actually have to cast some of them. disGOSting.
Really can’t stress on the underwhelming enough here.
Didn’t think it could get worse after UA spam but surpriseeee.
Haunt should be baseline liek it used to be, in the version where it brought health on return. Boosting primary damage so our dots can feel powerful on single target damage/players. Even a talent that allows unstable affliction to apply agony and corruption could do a lot for this class. By allowing us extra time to do other things than trying to cast our dots and keep them up. Shadow Priests got it yet they have less DoTs than we do.
And affliction is dying for a new filler outside of shadowbolt.
Demonology is where it’s at for now. Not that it’s better than destro or anything, but Demonology is basically a DoT class in it’s own right, just the source is different. It’s been a blast so far, and I’ll be maining it till affliction is fixed for sure.
Yeah, M+ is good. Sow the seeds does crazy dps and the +10 buff Necrotic Wound helps their single target a lot.
But seriously, sow the seeds build is one button. Actually, legitimately, one button. Unless you have a single target you hit one button the whole fight. It really isn’t fun at all, and doesn’t do great dps unless your tank is double pulling (which they should be with an aff warlock, but still not every pug tank can/will do this). And it takes necrotic wounding to kinda sorta fix single target otherwise you’ll never time a Tyrannical key. What happens next season when we lose it?
Warlock is a tragedy. The current warlock iteration (all specs) is hands down the worst class i ever played in the game. I can’t fathom how anyone can look at the logs and rankings and think warlocks are fine outside of mythic+. Definitely gonna switch class next patch. **** the cookies. **** the SS. **** the portals it’s not worth it i’d rather run back 30 minutes after every wipes than play warlock right now. There’s a glaring design problem within the game when a spec tuned toward cleave like destruction can’t even dominate cleave fights.
For one DPS sucks if you don’t get PI. Look at the logs. Locks doing well gets 2+ PI and they are not even doing that well with the 2+ PI. I would not mind it too much if it was fun and/or simple to play. Like dunno BM. I’d press my 2-3 buttons and would focus on calling the mechanics for other people. But no it’s actually relatively “hard” to play for absolutely no payoff unless you get 2+ PI. Only spec fun to play right now is affliction in mythic+ with Dreamwaver and the NF legendary cause you don’t need PI since SR+Legendary is a PI in itself.
Hm. I am unsure of my own performance but I do pump as a NL Demo Lock. Compared to other warlocks that are majority of them are Night Fae, I may be a bit behind.
But hey, Implosion is fun! Leading an army of imps along with slimes is also fun too and are affected by Mastery and Tyrant (Both conduit and aura).
There is one BM hunter friend I am struggling to keep up and he’s usually the guy I run with for KSM. I mostly beat every other BM Hunters however, and this is without PI.
I also make money from summoning people who piss off our RL! Having ONE Warlock that can parse enough to keep the group going is worth keeping.
I think Warlocks are a lot more worth playing than you think they are. Dammies are important, sure. But I don’t think they’re end all, be all factor of the game. Besides, you’re a lot more durable than hunters even though you don’t have a turtle to immune it.
Demonology is probably the only spec that I’d say is improving but it really is only because it’s been lacking for years so it finally being average/above average is a sight to see.
Unfortunately inerte is right though, every one of the three specs has been pushed to a “all my damage is in my dark soul(tyrant) window, and I do basically tickle damage at other times”. Power Infusion as a result, is the highest dps gain on a warlock in their burst window. Our priest is shadow so I never get it and we aren’t a mythic guild, but when I pug and get a power infusion I am actually flabberghasted at how much my dps goes up, it is night and day.
Aside from that, all the things you mentioned like summons are important and will stay one of my favorite parts of the class. But yeah the dps aspect of it, if you played warlock prior to this expansion, is probably the worst it has ever been.
Just look at your damage when hero is popped at the beginning of the fight. When we pop hero at the beginning of the fight i am top 3 dps. Then i fall and fall and fall and fall and finish in the bottom. No doubt with 2+ PI i would remain close to the top. All 3 specs are highly dependent on haste and without corruption we simply can’t get enough of it to feel good outside of mythic+ with the “corruption like” NF legendary. I get to over 100% haste when i use SR in mythic+ as affliction and my dps skyrocket. But that’s going to be nerfed in 9.2 absolutely no doubt so affliction will revert to being useless in all content.
I understand they are afraid warlock will become too good with scaling as the expansion goes on if they buff them too much now but that’s a terrible design. You can’t design a class so it will **** for 2/3 of an expansion cause it scale too well with haste. That’s even beyond terrible design it’s a failure of epic proportion from a developer who really is not even a shadow of what it used to be couple of years ago. There’s locks in logs with 6 PI in a single fight and they can’t even get in the top 10 … that’s something.
The pvp talent that hits for like 9-12k which is less than 1 ability from a Hunter/Pally, but takes 5 DoTs of setup and multiple cast times? It’s nothing special. I’ve seen bigger hits with it, but its mostly stacking buff and zerker in BGs and such. I’ve consistently been hit by moonkin starsurges for 12k+
With night fae soulrot, and then darkglare to extend all your dots (Deathbolt doing damage based of total time remaining), then pop it and one could hit for hmm, 18k-20k ish, which could crit if you’re very lucky because affliction warlocks have like, 5% crit usually.
But more often than not, I activate darkglare and the healer dispels them, taking the 13k dispel damage, removing all my dots and damage entirely, and having the deathbolt that’s midair hit for a grand total of 0. Sadge.
Thing is, as I’ve been told when I advocated for a playstyle similar to Legion’s for Affliction, is that it’s too difficult to balance that playstyle without either making it overpowered or underpowered.
I just wanted Legion style Affliction back, like not the ridiculousness of the weapon which is entirely what made it overpowered during Legion, but Legion style without the weapon would be fine, imo, but others do not think that would be the case.
Nonetheless, though, yeah Aff is pretty terrible right now because it’s middle between the two playstyles, which is terrible and counter productive.
In mythic+ it’s very good, it’s back to Legion style SoC spam play which was a lot of fun since hardly any globals needed to do damage.
UA has 184% spellpower scaling
Starsurge has 207% spellpower scaling
UA does its damage over SIXTEEN SECONDS and has a cast time.
Starsurge is instant cast and instant damage.
UA can only be on 1 target unless I dedicate a PvP talent to it.
And then on top of it all, Balance druids have more effective DoTs by way of shooting stars and an instant cast DoT that can hit multiple people.
Warlock has multiple 1 minute cooldown covenant DoTs that literally do less damage and have worse scaling than the basic abilities of multiple classes - and then the DoT can be dispelled. Less damage, over more time, even though it already innately has more counter-play. High grade logic, blizz. Its perfectly OK for a Ret pally to hit people for 27k in 0.7 seconds for an entire expansion — but be careful — if that Warlock DoT that can only go on a single target did any meaningful damage over 16 seconds, well that would just be too much. lmfao??
The more I play the spec the more amazed I am at just how bad the design is compared to literally anything else - I just happened to choose balance/ret to compare to here.
Having ONE Warlock that can parse enough to keep the group going is worth keeping.