“We’d rather you didn’t play Demonology.” - Ion Hazzikostas
What I would give to hear him utter those words again. I’m sorry for throwing you under the bus my demon loving brethren. I just can’t take another expansion of nothing , but demonology being viable for meaningful content. You can face roll your keyboard and do 30% more damage playing sight unseen demo than playing affliction to the best of its ability.
There’s too much ramp time combined with dot modifiers to play around to try to amplify the damage on an already low damage profile. Affliction needs more than some flat damage aura buffs to fix its current design flaws. MR either needs to go, or you need to actually change the way it interacts with our toolkit. Doing ST as well as AoE is clearly not working from a balance standpoint and it’s punishing the spec as a whole.
Agony ramp should get a look from the devs as well. I don’t know what all can be done with current affliction design. It feels like it’s being handled with child gloves, because with the design of it currently, the devs hands are tied. It feels like they don’t know what to do, and are afraid of changing things because the current design could become oppressive quickly with some adjustments.
I hope every spec of warlock gets to have fun this expansion so I’m not meaning to post this in a manner of tearing down my brethren. I just want to play affliction without feeling like a burden.
I hope the devs do something soon, because we’re drowning out here. Please throw us a floatation device before we get swept under by the tide of community opinion.
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I think it would be a lot stronger if you didn’t have to spec so linearly into aoe/ST. With a more flexible damage profile it would have more value. I also think they have no idea how to balance it to be competitive without going completely over the top in spread cleave/mass aoe, sadly. On the bright side it seems likely to receive some kind of tuning soon.
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affliction just feels awful to play right now, many times packs die and I get out dps by tanks and sometimes healers too, this is embarrassing.
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The PTR patch changes are a step in the right direction, but I hope there’s more iteration on our talents coming before it releases.
Siphon life/Corruption choice node is just as bad as it’s always been, and feels like a filler choice for the sake of filling talent tree point requirements. Increase corruptions duration baseline, and bake the instant corruption talent into afflictions kit. There’s no reason for that to be a talent outside of just needing filler talents to hit a point requirement philosophy. Unfortunately a lot of the aff tree feels this way. Replace these talent nodes with other ideas, maybe bring back Wracking Brilliance from Azerite.
I would like to see some adjustments made to Agony as well, baseline duration increase to 24 secs, and either a talent that increases stack ramping speed. or a decrease to the stack count so you get to it’s max damage by the end of your first application. Why it doesn’t even reach 10 stacks before reapplication doesn’t sit right with me.
Our dot maintenance felt great with these QoL conduits, and things in Shadowlands.
We only received one iteration to our talent tree in beta, and it shows.
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I feel this. Aff is a fun spec. haven’t played it in a while but I gave it an honest go and the above post is correct. With the amount of Windwalkers, Wars, and Outlaw rogues running around most packs die before out DoTs get their desperately needed ramp up. Spec is just feeling weak as a whole.
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Tis the price of being an affliction lock.
edit: It is my lock spec of choice btw.
This is the main problem. Granted, dots in general take time to ramp and maximize your potential, but also the talent tree is extremely punishing on your choice.
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The entire class needs major help
It’s like Blizzard sometimes tells certain classes/specs, “Changes and buffs? But we made your class fun to play!”.
It’s sort of an either-or thing with them. I have two mains this xpac, an Affliction lock and an Enhancement shaman. My Aff is a blast. I love how it plays, but I can finish a dungeon run, save my logs, then go back and run that same dungeon with my Enh and the difference in damage is so huge that I cannot justify bringing the Aff over it unless we’re doing a fun run.
The other issue, specific to those two specs, is that I have access to 2-3 unique builds as Enh that allow me to tailor my playstyle, but my viability isn’t affected much when I switch from a ST to an AoE environment or vice versa. For Aff, it’s like I have to pick ahead of time – am I going to be good on the trash, or contribute to boss damage? My choices don’t pertain to playstyle, but rather to base viability.
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it becomes evident when a talent tree is a labor of love such as the shaman tree. Granted i’ve only played it a little bit over on shaman (thus im not an expert) but from the sheer amounts of choices that you get it’s fantastic…
and agreed on the division of affliction… I’ll add too that most of our talents in general (save demo from what i’ve been testing out) are just base toolkit from before that have now become choices (granted that has been the case for many classes, but for some it’s been ridiculous)
i.e.: Would you like to AOE ?! here’s this new talent seed of corruption or rain of fire…
what’s that .spinning crane kick ? pffft here, have that baseline.
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I recently started playing with Affliction and I have to say its been fun… However I been struggling trying to branch out to create other built away from the Meta.
And even thought I still don’t have enough experience to know for sure but Affliction is a lot of fun but it does feel like we still missing something… what that is you guys probably know more than m, from what I read.
Details on the silly built I been working on you can skip the read if not interested lol
So for you who are interested in what I have been playing and tinkering, its a built to work to “acceptable levels” without Pets. Yes I know I’m crippling my built, but my friends challenge me to try and create a full Vampire theme for some RPG inside fun we got going while playing WoW… (side story for fun, we make as we move to new expansion this character becoming undead in the whole SL story to DF)
However I as much as I try and have fun with the silly built, I still struggle as it seems Tomb of Sacrifice Buff doesn’t seem enough, I really wish we could make more profane (as in making pacts with more powerful beings than the average Demon but it takes away our ability to summon them just like the old talent) Pacts of Sacrifice like that would give us more effective buff, maybe like the Torghast or Chaos Storm Buff (Obviously related to our Class) or maybe a pacts that would give us Curses as annoying as Curse of Blood or Curse of Decay…etc.
The point is be able to have flexibility when playing without pets… I manage to make it work with Destro spec… at one point, can’t say if it would work now…with so much change.
Anyway yeah that what I was working on and it has been super fun… but yeah I think Affliction needs a little bit of more love. (IMO) I’m still getting the hang of this Talent freedom, I do hope they keep expanding and working on it, as its been so much fun!
that sounds awesome, damn I can imagine half of that as glyphs tailored into making warlock even more sinister…
sadly pet-less builds were a thing of the past; I do adore them, at some point we had a grimoire of sacrifice that increased the base damage of some of our key spells instea dof the proc you see today (that’s ofc taking aside classic wow and demonic sac and TBC)
But yeah, affliction feels like it has several things stitched together with Malefic Rapture ( which is currently hated on for a reason ) i feel what it needs is a clear single target spender for it’s shards and bringing back the Malefic grasp feature ineherent in drain soul back in legion ( drain soul would amplify your dots on the target as you channel) - rather than a spender that can’t decide if it’s st, aoe, or multi target
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Do you think the changes in the next maintenance will help with Aff in M+? I have tired myself out with demo and while I’m enjoying Arcane, feel a tad weak, and I’m tempted to go back to the spec as it was one of my very first so I may be feeling sentimental. 
my build isn’t meta, and that only makes me feel worse when I play. It’s fun for me (if I can get all my abilites out) but I do 0 damage outside of bosses and that doesn’t feel good.
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Changes are primarily ST buffs so not really, though once the talent changes from 10.0.5 come live yes but demo is still noticeably ahead in m+.
thats’s affliction main problem in M+ (and in general), ST.
If you go the full AoE build with grim reach it is. I stopped running that awhile ago because the amount of AoE you gain for the massive amount of ST you lose is not worth it. This will still be true on tuesday.
Affliction has also always been in a weird spot for m+ that it’s usually really bad for lower keys, and then gets better and better for higher keys as trash starts to live longer.
I think a better question is how DoT classes like aff and shadow fit for m+ and really modern WoW as a whole? If we get a AMA or similar in the future, this is a question I’m going to submit, as they’ve really struggled w/ the design and balance of both specs for years now. IMO it’s become a fundamental issue bigger than either spec or their recent balance
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this happens with a lot of specs in the game, not an affliction specific issue. We will just have to see how well this ages on tuesday i suppose.