Affliction Rework: It is time

Classes Warlock
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Affliction is done. It’s never been good at Mythic+, it does too well or is dog water at raids since they all have basic design now, in arena there are too many options too constantly remove their damage from a DPS perspective. UA dispell tickles healers.

What is a single pro of this spec? They’re ok at Battlegrounds? At least Ret Pallys could global people.

Either revert Affliction back to Legion playstyle or rework it.

My two suggestions… First… UA can be casted on multiple targets. Who thought this was a good idea?!? They should be fired. The second… A PvP change would be to make UA and Corruption into curses or dieses but still keep the dispell protect on UA. Make healers have to actually think about healing.

How else can we fix this BS?

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Simple minor cheap fix, Blizz should DUMP Malefic Rapture and just have unstable affliction be the soul shard spendor. Unhook the talents related to dealing increased damage to those with Unstable Affliction and either make them passive or hooked to corruption instead.

One less button to worry about in rotation. One less dot to really watch since Unstable affliction is now the spendor. And no longer having to have such a massive ramp up and lining up of buffs/debuffs. Honetly the idea where talents and dots compund off each other to deal damage so the only way to deal “good” damage is to have everything lined up perfectly is absurd.

It should be enough that you manage the dots to deal good damage not play the Dot/Buff/ debuff/ stack watching/ proc game to be good. Way to much complexity just to be competitive.

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No thank you. I enjoy mg and having viable ST damage

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can be cast

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I’d be happy rolling back to almost any iteration of aff prior to BfA.

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is castable

I think many of us wouldn’t hate Legion style Aff back, but was it good? No. It was just OP. At least in ST and PVP. Affliction BGs were probably the highlight of class enjoyment for me in Legion.

UA spam wasn’t satisfying. But at least it was DoT centric. MR is neither a DoT nor satisfying to spam.

You know what I’d like to see? Talents that speed up / delay DoT damage.
Imagine a channeled spell that when channeled would root you but all your DoTs would ramp up ticking 50% faster. They could tie that into some soul leeching animation so you’re extracting the energy from your targets.

Or a talent that will pause your DoTs on a target but stack up their damage at an amplified rate, then you can “cash in” on your DoTs like an investment and POP. The target just drops.

So you’d pause your DoTs on a target for 10 seconds but then it would pop and inflict 15 seconds worth of DoT damage, all at once. Why would you do this? Fights that have immunity phases, priority adds where you want to kill X add and not damage Y add, well you can at least prep Y add. Also tons of use for this in PVP.

(Of course for balancing reasons in PVP there would be caps and such).

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Agreed, I think Aff would be better of with another shard spendor.
MR is just not that fun. Fun matters, it’s a video game.

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Fun is subjective. I personally find MR very fun

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You find Arcane to be fun, too. You enjoy burst, you enjoy windows. Many casual players do not enjoy this. Many heroic raiders do not enjoy this. Many normal raiders do not enjoy this. They find it more annoying than fun, they go with it because it’s what blizzard wants and more people do not care to actually try to change it to something they actually want because “why bother?”

Something I’ve noticed is this: the better the player the more they enjoy windows and this is simply because: they feel they would not get into a raid or key if they did not have burst windows in their damage profile. It’s less about actually enjoying it and more about being afraid they’ll either let their group down or more set in fear that they won’t even get an invite in the first place. This is entirely incorrect, but fear is fear. Blizzard used to have DoT specs being about just that, DoTs, and they used to pride themselves on designing fights around having DoT specs, not all fights in a raid but some fights in a single raid were designed more towards DoT niche specs.

Players who prefer the “MR spam” style now also fear blizzard cannot actually properly balance DoT specs, so they’re either too OP and broken or they’re too weak. This has been demonstrated time and time again, so that fear’s quite accurate, but I don’t think we should just “prefer” to have a certain that’s easier balanced because we fear they cannot balance the one we actually would enjoy more or that would make more sense.

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I am a casual player. Many bad players may not find it fun but their opinon isnt worth much.

Or I could actually enjoy setting up my burst and watching it pop off.

You really shouldnt talk about content you dont really know.

Pure dot specs are not viable in todays game. If you cant understand that then you dont have a basic understanding of how t his game works.

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Is this your schtick or something? In between threads griping about SND, ROP, and MR all you do is pop in, says it’s fun, and those who disagree with you are “bad”. It’s either trolling or weapon’s grade bad social skills on display.

Edit: I forget the part where you usually begin by saying your opinion matters more because you are an amazing player. Then, someone points out you aren’t that good, in fact, they are better and they disagree with you. Then you say these opinions are subjective, which begs the question why you began arguing in the first place.

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You mean like yours, too, then? Also aren’t you one who usually does mythic raiding or says he does mythic raiding?

You could, sure, but many people I’ve talked to just really say and point out that it’s less they actually like and prefer it, just more that they don’t want to be a burden to their group. Liking it for actually liking it and liking it because it means you’re not a burden or not wanting to be a burden to your group are entirely different things, as 1 is actually enjoyment while the other is rooted in fear of disappointing.

What are you referring to that I do not know? Because I have done mythic raiding, back in Legion when the spec was actually more thematically correct and fun to play. The only way I do higher end content is when specs I enjoy are actually able to thoroughly be enjoyed, and I don’t mean by doing high damage because that means jack squat to me. I mean simply playing the spec as a DoT spec when it’s a DoT spec, playing it as it should be played, then yeah, I don’t mind going through higher content.

They are viable, 100%. You just don’t want to believe in blizzard to get it correct. You’re technically fine for doing so, that doesn’t matter, but they are 100% actually able to be viable.

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That’s an absolutly valid point, but there are players like me too that just think that MR isn’t fun. Is not an issue of performance.

Like, I do not consider myself a great player like some green/blue parsers over here…
But I’m capable of getting AOTC with purple parses and raid until like half of Mythic (if I want to do Mythic in the season) with whatever the fk I want…

Even weak specs, sure that makes it harder and I’m gonna need more research and help, but I absolutly can do it as I do every time I come back to this game.

So, I’m saying this cause I can play decently with the current “broken” specs like Aff if I want, but is so annoying to me…

Hardcore, casual, noob… For some people, It’s just a matter of not find it fun those kinda broken and not so objective specs, plain and simple xD

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That’s fair and I’m one of those, too. It just doesn’t fit into a “DoT” spec, but that was just referring to those who prefer MR spam, not those who did not.

I don’t enjoy MR at all. If they made it basically reworked into forcing all DoTs out to tick, it would be really cool and fun then. If they brought Rapid Contagion in as a shard spender, cool then. If they just didn’t have a shard spender at all, cool then.

To many of us it’s quite annoying, it also goes against what a DoT spec should actually be and how it should be developed, too.

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That boat must be very lonely

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He’s a well known warlock forum troll. Just put him on ignore, makes the whole place much better. You wont get anything other than him passing off his opinion as facts, and discounting anyone with a different opinion as bad or not worthy of having one.

I think Blizzards current design philosophy of burst or die makes it very hard to make a dot spec work well. They are afraid of dots doing any sort of meaningful damage.

You only have to look at how they are perfectly fine with lots of melee being able to do massive damage with an instant cast that deals the damage instantly, but make sure that an instant cast single target dot like UA does a fraction of that same damage over time. (Not to mention it can be dispelled with no real punishment with an instant. You can’t dispel the giant axe in your face though).

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Is it me or are those that do like MR seem to like it because they like/want the burst or argue it lets them deal “good” single target damage they control? What i’m trying to get at is it seems like they want to play “affliction” but want it to be like other classes/specs with Cd’s and burst in it and pull away from the dots and then argue if MR were taken away that ruins the current form affliction is in for them.

Back in the day there was a time where it was purely dot management and you had drain life/shadowboly/drain Soul as just the filler. The priority was managing the dots and none of this compounding hoops problem we have now.

Hoop: Get each individual dot up

Hoop: Get the stacking debuff from Shadow Embrace up

Hoop: Get Haunt up

Hoop: Get Malefic Affliction to 3 stacks by casting Malefic Rapture 3 times require 3 soul shards. This ties into Unstable affliction because without it that is a loss of 39% damage from Unstable Affliction

Hoop, Malefic Rapture deals damage based on number of Dots so “When” you cast it is now important but you have to cast it to set up the buffs to then cast later

Hoop: Utilizing Dread touch talent, time your other CD based dots to line up with that for 30% increased damage like Soul Rot or Phantom Singularity.

Hoop: and once again where back to casting Malefic Rapture once all that is said and done to MAXIMIZE damage because EVERYTHING has to be lined and active up to play well.

so each one of those COMPOUNDS off the other so it’s not just you miss one hoop/thing and you miss the damage from that single piece: you miss out on the collective total of how it build off itself. The complexity is just nuts for what was once simplicity.

But lets take a step back here: Affliction, at one time or another, was not always seen as bursty and often was thought of as the Dot class. Could you build a nuke option Wayyyy back in the day cross-talent picking with the other two trees for shadowbolt buffs, sure, but you could ALSO build a pure dot spec where it was more consistent, slow ramp maybe, but solid across what it could do and unique in it’s style.

So, coming back into this subject: Why then for those of us trying to carve out an older dot spec feel like we are get racked on the coals by those who want it to be like other specs when we could simply say, Go play other specs if you want the bursty power, CD’s based, or have layer after layer of compounding skills to increase damage and just leave affliction as it once was at one time long ago: a Dot based spec.

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Less hard cast more dots.
I want a single action bar of soely insta cast dots.

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I keep saying DoT specs should be simple. See, I think higher skilled players literally ruined this because many of them kept saying dumb things like “I want more complexity.” This is very complex, but it makes most of the players playing the spec hate it because it’s too complex now.

DoT specs should very well be simple: DoT management, maybe a debuff managment, filler. That’s it. Outside of that you do mechanics for the fight, you watch other things you need to watch for but you track timers, you use fillers. Many skilled players found it too boring and kept saying “entertain me more” and blizzard thought of this stupid nonsense we have now as a way to keep them entertained.

Now even a fair amount of high end players complain it’s too much, too complex, too much GCD bloat but it’s because they kept asking for it to be more complex.

DoT specs are DoT specs, they’re not brain surgery or rocket science. If you want flashy go play a different spec. If you want more entertainment go play a different spec. DoT specs are the accountants of the world and accounting is a very very boring and tedious job. Most people looking over those numbers all day would be driven mad insane from boredom. That’s how DoT specs should be, how they should operate and be designed. That’s why they’re a very niche group for a very niche individual. They aren’t flashy, nor are they meant to be.

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Have a look at WOTLK affliction. It’s design was 100x better than current affliction. For that matter, all 3 trees were better designed and more fun to play.

Just needed a bit of tuning.

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