I know Destro is stupidly good right now with no fixes in sight. But I love Affi. Well at least I loved it in Legion.
Will I be making my life hard 100000x because I’m not destro?
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Pretty much
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I don’t think Aff would be terrible if all their damage/burst didn’t lay in stacking UAs which are almost instantly dispelled by any healer. After their pressure is gone, they’re destroyed. I would like to see Aff be viavble, but it needs that fix 100%
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Im gearing my aff ill share what i find 
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Yes my Aff lock does top damage every game. The trick is to stack haste for quicker GCDs in order to counter dispels (also makes DoT’s hit a lot harder too). Make sure to run a lot of versatility too because you’re much squishier than destro. Currently running 2x T3 racing pulse for 2500 haste proc with 1x gushing wound. Also my talents are Writhe in Agony, Grimoire of Sac, Creeping death.
Running 3x Sudden Onset and 3x Wracking Brilliance traits as well. Mainly a rot build which feels nice even at 457 ilvl equipped, doing 30k DPS per arena.
Well with corruptions and the new essences, I don’t see it being a complete waste of a spec. One of the biggest reasons why the spec just can’t be on the same page as destro (or even demo in this case) is the lack of significant damage outside of UA stacks or even major cds. In Legion, aff was extremely viable due to agony full stack, corruption, and siphon life dealing meaningful damage which actually melted opponents even without casting a single UA if you were good with keeping dot uptime on everyone.
A few other reasons in addition to this are UA dispel penalty not being substantial, not having a single tool to hamper melee cleaves besides a castable shadowfury (where destro has a conflag root which is almost readily available and demo has some neat pet stuns), and talent rows being horribly organized.
Some examples are:
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Having Writhe in Agony, Absolute Corruption, and Siphon Life in the same talent row probably killed off our potential to be a rot caster this expansion.
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If you are going to bring back Shadowbolt into the spec’s core rotation, the talent nightfall should have been a baseline passive from the start while deathbolt should be more of a rot enhancement ability.
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Our last talent row is probably the second to worst after the 30 row. Creeping death should have been a talent that replaced haunt so we have the ability to pick DS and Creeping while haunt is given as a baseline (preferably without a cd
and one soul shard cost).
Imo aff was pretty much a dead spec to me once I saw how these talents were placed coming into BFA. Probably would have been a LOT better if some of the changes were targeted towards our talents as mentioned.
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i think aff with the right gear can sustain 30k+ dps tho rn
For 2’s Aff falls apart when you fight a decent healer who knows how to send in their melee, park them on you, and hug a pillar while dispelling them. Eventually you just fall behind in damage and flop.
You go haste you’re super squishy. You go versa your globals constantly reapplying dots feels horrendous. It’s a lose lose situation imo. Feels like a b-list spriest with worse defensives that takes 3x the globals to toss out the same dot pressure.
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Can’t wait to see it Trapqueen.
Yeah but you know its a sad life for an aff lock when a spriest can rot MUCH better than you.
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Aff is hosed for 2 reasons
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UA stacking is a flawed concept in PVP. I get it for pve but it’s terrible in pvp when the healer presses dispel and all your burst is gone. They need to go back to spread pressure UA play
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MW is meta which are the best rot healers. Counteract magic, healing spheres and vision major is just too good
play with a rogue, mage, or destro and you should be fine, need HARD peels or else they are just gonna throttle you
I think you’d be better off pretending Chaos Bolts are big dots that tick once.
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Affliction doesn’t do enough damage to make up for the fact it’s a walking punching bag: 0 instant cc, 0 slows, 1 school of magic, easily dispellable dmg
30k dps isn’t even good now, especially on multiple targets. Lots of dps specs can nearly outheal this passively, and healers like mistweaver don’t even need to spend mana
Destruction freecasting can do more while having meaningful burst, multiple forms of CC and being tankier
I think if affliction was going to be good/viable in the current state of the game, without any balance or design changes, it would need to pull 40-50k dps sustained somehow
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I don’t know about all this; and what dps passively heals 30k?
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30k dps in PvP is a lot.
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Warriors could if they had a passive self heal. 
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30k on a ff isnt a lot though. because if the aff is against any melee hes taking 40k cause has no armor and is getting trained the ground.
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I’d love to do 30k
It’s not 30k single target, it’s 30k / 3-4 targets usually. Almost every dps class with the exception of arms warrior has a good amount of self healing, which leaves the healer to deal with the tickle damage
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