Dear lock community and developers,
Affliction lock was probably in one of its better states in The War Within with malefic rapture as its spender. Season 2 was a particular highlight with good profile for the raid and a really fun tier set for m+. That being said, the spec still has significant issues that can and should be addressed in Midnight.
Below is my list of things to address specifically for aff. I am not trying to be overly prescriptive how to achieve these changes but to more communicate what I and others find unenjoyable or limiting about the spec.
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Improve dot maintenance in AOE, part 1 The removal of sow the seeds made the radius of seed explosion quite limiting on application of corruption when groups were not well stacked. To get mobs stacked, this also takes significant time for pulls to develop. This provides a limitation for the spec because our spender requires enemies to have dots to do any damage. I think there should be iteration done to improve seed of corruption application that would aid the spec in dealing with chaining groups of enemies. That could be in reducing cast time, eliminating shard cost, increasing explosion radius, create a new variant that can pulse corruption application when shards are spent, just to name a few ideas. We just need something to aid the spec for dot spread for fast spawning add waves, chaining mob packs in dungeons and hastening set up so that we don’t need to wait for groups to be well stacked for corruption to apply.
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Part 2: Please redesign vile taint. As for agony, vile taint is a point of contention within the affliction community. I personally think that maintaining agonies in aoe between CDs is not that onerous but I can understand that many affliction locks hate that we refresh agonies only to have vile taint CD available again. I personally hate other aspects of vile taint more. First, it is a CD dot that boosts rapture damage and if there are more than 8 targets, you can’t guarantee it hits the priority target and, thus, lose priority damage because your CD dot missed your target. This has happened in multiple instances in the last two expansions, particularly if you have a boss with add spawns. If agony is on your prio target and those adds number equal to 8 or above, vile taint will never hit the priority target because it prefers targets without agony. This design is very frustrating. Second, it replaces existing curses. If there are casters in the group, spending gcds as affliction to apply tongues ends up being a waste of time because as we ramp up to spend during our burst window, we just replace tongues with curse of exhaustion. Both of these aspects could be changed to improve affliction play and utility. I urge developers to take a look at vile taint and try to find an accommodation that would address these long running concerns.
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Reduce funnel talent contribution. Funnel, or increasing priority (and overall) damage when additional enemies are present, in principle is great, but if you can’t tune affliction to be a competitive spec because of it and the combination of spread cleave and burst, tune down the funnel. It could be the combination of burst, funnel and spread cleave all at once. This in theory is a great combination! And yet, destruction warlock performed better in council fights for at least 2 full expansions because of how affliction is being tuned and because destro also can do priority damage to a second target while affliction is much more priority target locked. Not to mention destro does similar or more total damage in similar encounters such as soul hunters in Manaforge Omega, council of dreams in Amirdrassil or the bug court in Nerubar Palace. This a recurring problem for the spec that destruction and affliction fill similar damage profiles while destruction also has the ability to priority a second target. While affliction is numerically more bursty, the effectiveness of this burst damage often becomes dependent on timings of add waves (funnel) and as a result, destruction also does more boss damage. Thus, you see dramatically lower participation of affliction than destruction, it simply is worse in nearly all encounters currently.
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Address damage profile so more applicable in more situations. Aff is plagued by a long ramp time and a significant portion of our damage profile contained within a tail of our long duration, stacking damage over time abilities. The set-up for this in an aoe situation requires multiple shards and multiple stacking dot CDs as well as prio target application of multiple debuffs. This makes affliction a much worse choice for lower difficulty content or any situations where adds with low health pools need to die quickly. I urge you to reduce ramp time, dramatically shorten dot timers or provide mechanism to recoup damage from dying mobs. For example, our hellcaller tier set in season 3 enabled us to dramatically stack wither. On a longer encounter, this was pretty good. It had both aoe and ST implications. But in practice for dungeons or waves of enemies, our stacked wither bonus damage died when the mobs did. In other words, it doubled down on the weakness of affliction and made the spec less viable for different encounters.
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Give aff more capability to swap targets effectively. This can be cooldown driven or not, the spec just desperately needs something. One talent that many in the lock community thought might have been a good target swap option was oblivion. But that talent effectively went unused the entire expansion. It was undertuned, competed for resources for our main spender of rapture and was on a long 45s CD. Having to swap dots around with multiple gcds before even being able to use our spenders effectively just takes entirely too long for affliction to be effective at target swap at all. We need something to address these situations or affliction just will not be used on encounters that require it.
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Improve spec tree talent design. Many talents in the tree have gone virtually unused in pve content the entire expansion. Dark virtuosity, perpetual unstability, relinquished are all virtually useless talents in PVE. I mentioned oblivion above. Except for dark virtuosity, these are all talents at the bottom of the tree and have had no impact. Not to mention that improved malefic rapture never reduced the GCD, just the cast time of rapture and malefic touch functionally is just a 3 or so percent buff to rapture damage. Almost all of the right and left bottom parts of the tree were either boring or useless. The exception was focused malignancy which was used as a tuning knob throughout the expansion, which is a good use of that talent. That being said, it was tuned so high in season 3 that it functionally became a must take talent.
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Improve visuals. For many warlocks, we set up our dots and we wave our hands around and do damage and have almost no feedback besides scrolling combat text (if we use it) to see what we are doing. The rapture animation is almost imperceptible. Most dot animations are difficult to see. There were three cool introductions in The War Within: Cunning Cruelty has a shadow bolt volley animation, demonic soul, or backpack demon as we like to call it and the pseudo metamorphosis look from malevolence in hellcaller. All three great animations but demonic soul and malevolence are locked behind hero trees and aren’t unique to affliction. So, some more shadow bolts isn’t what I call exciting for the affliction warlock visual kit.
I am very excited to see what is in store for affliction in Midnight and I hope some of these concerns are addressed throughout the alpha and beta cycles so that aff players can have a great experience playing this new expansion.
Your friendly affliction one-trick,
Rpgonlyforme
UPDATE: From what I gather, the first pass rework for affliction in midnight released today addresses virtually all of these concerns.
Swap is still a question but with a much stronger haunt with associated apex talents, it is possible that becomes the solution and with CD resets it makes it easy to swap back to prio after the fact. UA damage as the spender will be a question. 8s duration is pretty short so that is very good as well. Set up might still be a bit long on swap targets but it is shorter than what it was. Excited for this to be tested out more.