Affliction suggestions

PVP Arenas
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If you didn’t know, affliction got zero (0), new changes in this massive 10.1 patch. Warlocks in general did. But there was just flat nothing for affliction. I have some ideas that could hopefully get circulated for the next patch because apparently there weren’t many floating around.

There were a lot of things that sucked for affliction warlocks in previous patches that got improved. Things that just had to be changed, that you would know if you played a warlock. For example, not being able to get a gateway down at the beginning of arenas without a monk or a warrior RoP or kicking you.

Instant gateway was just a minor but necessary Improvement.

I have a few suggestions for affliction warlocks that after playing this game for many years I think are necessary quality of life Improvment’s.

In no order:

Corruption should last 24s baseline. It should be talented to be permanent in pve. On that note,

Siphon life. This spell is great in a lot of ways. Bring it back to the meta, make it last long enough to have it rolling on 3 people and have time to cast other spells instead of only maintaining dots. It helps rapture, which is neglected in this meta anyways.

Malefic rapture - maybe this is asking too much, but make it chaos school damage to give us another school of magic at least for one spell and put it on par with the other warlock specs shard spender. And if that happens, make soul rot shadow. Nature damage? Idk about that. It just doesn’t fit.

Unstable affliction PvP talent should be baseline. I should be able to cast it on 30 targets for all I care. PvP talents should be like your sideboard, this however is necessary regardless of who you’re playing. Make it baseline.

This could be asking too much, but soulburn: unstable affliction could be balanced and nice:
Your next unstable affliction cast can not be kicked.

Unstable affliction dispel damage should do about 50% of a healers HP. What other class can a 9s cooldown (dispel) remove your 2 minute burst? Its like when combust was purgeable, it’s not good for the game. Buff UA dispel damage.

Curse of fragility: might see some play if it was a permanent 10-15% health debuff instead of 10s or whatever it is.

We are fighting into a spirit link totem basically all game. Our damage is almost fully split. Here is and idea for that problem

New spell that redirects 25%-40% (or whatever) of all dots damage on all targets to the affected target. Maybe it’s a channeled spell, maybe it’s a casted debuff, maybe it’s an instant curse. Idk but you get the point. It’d be nice to have a single target nuke while still needing to manage dots on 3 targets.

Felhunter devour magic: please allow this to be auto cast toggled.

I’ll edit and add more ideas as I think of them.

On the other hand, many abilities from other classes seem to specifically target and counter Affliction locks too much. I would propose nerfing some mechanics:

Feign death. Hunters are never ever my target. 100% counter.

Revival: seems to specifically counter only aff.

Reverse magic: it’s nice to see people reverse a hoj or a trap or a sheep. Maybe make this reverse only 1 magic effect. Not all of them. But the 1 min cd on it seems to line up exactly with my burst cds. Because it does.

In general, having burst dispelled sucks very much and is second only to getting chain kicked by a warrior ret fistweaver team and never getting a cast off in the first place.

Affliction warlocks usually do the most damage if they are left alone, they probably have the highest potential to take over a game if not controlled. That said, they are also the single easiest class to counter and shut down. There are many games where I am unable to cast a single rapture.

The new survivability mechanics are great. I would prefer a kill or be killed type of rework. I don’t want to get beat up 30% less. I want to end people, that’s why I play a warlock. Precog was an amazing addition to this game. It’s skill based. It still wasn’t enough obviously because blizzard had to nerf every single kick in the game. Some games I crush everyone so hard (the games without 2 melee of any skill level on me) and some games I don’t do anything. And it’s painstaking. It’s not skill based, it’s rock paper scissors, which this game should not be.

Unique mechanics make this game fun original and skillful.

What other class has 1 school and casts like 10 different things?

Boomy: mostly all instant
Ele: mostly all instant
Mage: like 80% ice lance damage, instant
Shadow priest? That seems like a respectable class actually.
Evoker: 3 schools I think. Idk much else.

Instant cast haunt would be a nice shift in the aff talent meta instead of the cookie cutter maldiva tree 99% of people copied.

I’m just saying, this spec has been underpowered for way too long. I think a lot of these things could make the game more fun.

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I think most of afflictions issues stem from the game itself, which seems to favor set up comps historically. We’ll see how CC changes effect things, but I think micro CC’s going away almost entirely and fewer, yet relevant CC’s would have been better for affliction, and PvP in general than the current CC changes. The issue of not being able to play the game is usually coming from chained, small CC’s interrupting anything you try to do. It’s less about what you can do for affliction as a spec, and more about what you need to do for the game as a whole, to make rot comp consistently viable (along with aggro and set up archetypes). This is also largely why destro is often the PvP spec, it’s just better for set up style gameplay.

That being said…

Would like to see damage modified to be a better option for PvP than Phantom Singularity.

I’ve long been a proponent for a nature school of magic (Soul Rot) with poison style magic DoT, and perhaps mortal coil can go on it as well.

Between wall, fake outs, precog and now shorter kick durations, this is asking too much.

No* (see below)

Fine, if* (see below)

This is not affliction, and this suggestion makes me sad =(

Mismatches to a degree is good for the game. Otherwise you end up with homogenized gameplay. Most of what was stated here has somewhat recently been largely improved to be at least tolerable.

This is the see below:

Idk, I think having burst at all is a bad idea for affliction. I’d say get rid of it and significantly raise the standard rot damage, similar to the way it played in TBC content. At that point, we look at proposed changes a little differently. But increasing rot damage is hard to do when you have to account for burst modifiers. This is prob why our DoTs feel weak when we’re dishing, but rough when we’re taking. Fact is affliction should be hard to kill because it should win late game. Trying to add things like deathbolt and burst to create set-up style win conditions just make affliction a bad choice to play when so many others do it better, and usually just further hinder the ability to rot.

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this is asking too much

i’d rather see haunt / malefic grasp make your single target damage meaningful at the expense of overwhelming rot

aff has been impossible to balance for the longest time imo

it’s either more ape than melee just tab 123 dotting expecting to win with overwhelming raw dps for no reason, or it’s single target UA stacking for actual meaningful damage and every aff lock crying

not really sure how to make it work for the aff players that think they deserve to win a game for doing pve scoreboard dps from 40yards all game with mostly instant casts while being realistically healthy/good for the game

atm logically i think that UA stacking is the only right answer for affliction
trying to maintain this weird archaic rot spec class fantasy just won’t work
it’ll either be WAAAAY too strong passively unhealable, or all pad completely irrelevant

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This.

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All I know is aff used to be a super fun super viable spec at the same time destro and demo we’re both viable in some form. Now all I can say is it doesn’t feel good , but I’ve never been a lock main so I’m only speaking from limited personal experience

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Nah. UA stacking felt unbelievably awful and opened you up to way too much counterplay. It was too easy for a healer to just never dispel you until you’ve stacked up all your UA’s and then boom there goes all of your damage.

It can work to some degree but they need to pull back the general rot damage and put it into some shorter cds like haunt or making rapid contagion the spender but casted. That way if teams properly shut down the shorter cds the damage is damped a reasonable amount and it feels like you can actually outplay the pve but at the same time they’re just short cds so it’s not like you’re afking for 2 minutes until cds come back up.

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The issue with affliction is fundamentally the spec just doesnt work.

Malefic rapture shouldnt cost soul shards and should be our “filler” spell when able to be cast, there shouldn’t be so much play around it in our talents.

UA pvp talent should be removed, and UA should cost soul shards to spread. BUT it can be stacked on as many targets as you want, as many times as you want. This brings back spreading UA to multiple people, but also being able to do single target damage by putting it on the same person multiple times (if you have the soul shards).

Rapid contagen should require 1 soul shard and be on a 1 min CD.

There is A LOT to move around in the talent tree. but writhe in agony should be baseline. absolute Corruption should be baseline and siphon life should be the talent there along with siphon life’s duration increased to 20 seconds instead of 15.

Summon darkglare should be a 1 minute cooldown and have its damage reduced by 5% (since it stacks). OR we should have some other way to extend the length of ALL our dots other than rot and decays pvp talent.

The issue is our damage is all dots, there are so many ways to clear dots, if we ramp them up, its hard to keep them there since there are so many ways to counter them. As well as getting trained, you cant cast your damage without getting locked out a lot. But when you freecast, you can do way too much damage. But thats because of how we are built around spreading damage and spamming raptures to do our chunky damage. if you remove that and bake more damage into our dots themselves or haunt maybe. it would be better.

My biggest gripe with affliction is how there is no option like other specs have to have any sort of AoE/single target build. others than like 1 or two minor talents. I can sit there spamming my damage freecasting on an rdruid, he just dispells, eats the UA damage and all my dot damage while he keeps his HoTs up and his health never drops below 60%. There is no way for us to give up any spread pressure in order to achieve big single target dps (which could be fixed by UA stacking, but for instance, for each UA that is on the target, if dispelled, the damage is increased by 10% for each additional UA past 1. This gets around the 4 UA insta dispel poof goes the damage issue).

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The biggest issue with affliction is that our damage either does not get put out because we get trained, because we don’t actually get most of our damage from instant casts like other classes. It comes from casts.

The second biggest issue is dot removal is too easy and rewarding.

Everyone mentioning UA stacking, it was so weird when that was a thing. It was a pretty bad idea imo. I think it is a MUCH better idea the way they currently have it, where UA builds damage off rapture casts. 39%.

Having a one button rotation is noob imo.

However the post just above has the right idea

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I think this is an idea worth confronting when observing modern day aff design. It’s very basic and PvE-centralized which inevitably transitions over to PvP similarly.

Balancing attrition gameplay (single-target focused) and CC-based gameplay is the key imo. When aff does nothing but tab target DoT, its evident that there are intrinsic flaws in its design. Make fears/CCs, pet management/utility, Dot management and DoT enhancing mechanics more involved. The lack of depth in aff rotation and pressure is the number one reason why the spec feels existentially toxic right now and has been since Legion.

UA stacking was shunned upon in Legion particularly because of a clunky playstyle it promoted, but other than that the spec was doing really well in PvP for the most part because of generating pressure through easy tab target dotting paired with gcd conveniences.

Agree.

Disagree with this because attaching a resource cost to UA never felt rewarding for the spec in any environment.

Or… just remove darkglare from the game. Honestly one of the worst CD based abilities introduced to Aff locks. Ruins rotational aspects of the spec in PvP. I’m sure PvEers also agree with this to some extent. To compensate for this, make soul swap and haunt more interactive (implement valuable soul burn mechanics for these 2 abilities so there’s a derived skill cap between using them recklessly vs using them punctually/properly) and costly (from a shard perspective). Oh, and also remove rapture from the game while we’re at it and replace it with haunt.

I think rapid is sort of fine the way it is right now. Attaching more lengthy CD based abilities to aff will force it to behave improperly in a PvP atmosphere, which is likely going to promote more unhealthy appearances for the spec.

Somewhat convenient dotting paired with good single target pressure should make the spec more tolerable to play and fight.

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Just delete the spec it sucks to play and play against

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delete aff, give us MoP demo in place of it.

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Rapture is actually not a filler, it is massive burst.

I play now almost exclusively with a disc priest. When my dots are fully spread and my raptures are stacked, I call for Dark arch and PI. My raptures are hitting over 100K and my damage spikes IN ARENA to over 100k dps with my spec. I have never seen a spec do over 55k and that was when ret was broken and MW hit those numbers as well.

I like to feel dangerous, but I don’t like getting zero casts off vs a DK DH team. It’s bipolar.

I just want to feel like I have gotten my damage rotation off most games instead of some games never casting a rapture

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i think affli needs more time on the dots when you apply on players… you need to reapply the dots far too often during the match

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I think the only issue with aff playstyle is how heavy it is on the GCD, you put dots up and it can be dispelled then you have to reapply.

If they brought back the talent that reduced the gcd for aff that would make it a lot better

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That has never been the role for aff and people play aff so they can rot teams.

You should lose the game if the aff uses his control to stop you from killing him, while doing pve damage. The whole premise of affs since its inception was a spec that does great pressure from dot damage while controlling the game.

If they removed Darkglare, Rapid Contagion and nerfed malefic to be a thing that just buffs dots, then buffed our dots by 25-30% then you would be a place were you would have to have 5 minute games of control to win the game.

Kiting properly and controlling properly double melee should always lose to casters in the long run, aff should never have super single target damage outside of maybe haunt.

The reason why UA stacking worked in legion was because dots did a heap of damage baseline and our filler spell actually ticked our dots for 70% of the damage (140% during execute). In BFA it was actually the worse thing for aff and made it just deal 0 damage.

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Was nothing wrong with wod aff playstyle . Now its like everyone and their dogs clear dots, especially hunters who were bad against sots, they dont even take ua damage

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i don’t know how you can realistically design that to be competitive in a healthy way
which is probably why aff hasn’t had a place in any meta in the last almost decade

disagree entirely

i really dislike the idea that affliction is the expected victor in any game that it does damage and doesn’t die in for those reasons alone

affliction players in general always have this weird idea that if they 123 123 123 for 4 minutes and use their 30 SECOND PORT well enough that they don’t die that they should just win for it which is beyond stupid

i don’t care why it worked or didn’t work
i’m saying that the design of funneling UAs into a single target to mount pressure makes sense and is healthy

there’s no world where anyone is having fun if affliction is just tabinstantdotting people and that alone is it’s primary wincondition

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Double melee d’s pretty well on aff “tabinsta dotting” you can do heaps of damage as aff and still lose. Ua stacking was yuck. Dont say its good if you’ve never had all your burst just stopped from 1 dispel

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Aff in 9.1.5 was pretty healthy and maldiva was still winning games at 3100 because the people he was vsing just kept choosing to try train him and not his friend. If the lock uses his cds perfectly he should not be the kill target vs basically any comp and if this is a problem for you then it isn’t a game problem but a player problem.

People don’t play aff because it has a large skillcap and usually especially now demo and destro are just way easier to play at every level.

Then why should melee win by just running at people stopping damage? It is the same concept the only thing you could say is that every game should be 1 melee 1 caster and that would probably be the only way to do this.

Also atm melee have so much mobility that to actually get space I need to coil port fear and use priest life grip to not just instantly die, which is far more synergy with team mates then turbo running at me full pelt trying to stop me as much as they can.

The difference is if I my team does the job better I will always win and turbo has to hope the lock stuffs up to win, which is exactly how it should be.

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that’s the point, if it were up to every affliction player they would passively do unhealable damage on 3 players the entire game for no reason winning by not dying and doing literally nothing else

“rot specs” in general are just a really stupid concept that promote ultra lowskillfloor gameplay that nobody enjoys playing against

i understand that appeals to some people but i don’t think that justifies it’s existence

UA stacking forces you to create meaningful damage on a target of your choice in a window of your choosing
the team that does more meaningful damage in better windows that they’ve created to make that damage meaningful should be rewarded

doing randomly meaningful damage to 3 people non stop for no reason is stupid

who cares what maldiva was doing, you and every other affliction player have been 1600 and the spec hasn’t been meaningfully involved in the meta since like wod or maybe a portion of legion

neither me nor you have any idea what you’re saying here

this is blatantly false but go off

when destro isn’t a battle tank like it was in bfa, or an instant cast 40 yard melee bot like it is right now it’s easily the highest skillcap warlock spec

you think any iteration of 123tab123tab moron holds a candle to drexia in a season where casting matters and destro isn’t a tank?
not a chance

the only reason anyone in the game thought affliction was more involved 10 years ago was because default UI makes managing DoTs 50x harder than it has to be and addons weren’t normalized
there’s nothing fundamentally hard about aff outside of it’s damage with a poor ui since it doesn’t ever even play to cc and it almost never has to get casts off in a tight window to win

they shouldn’t and they don’t
if this is a problem for you then it isn’t a game problem but a player problem

the space to what? bad wizard players have this weird idea that they need spacing the entire game

warlocks in general are VERY durable and in the windows when damage is too high for ANYONE (not just warlocks) to tank they have incredible tools to create space

if you’re sitting there port/gate/gripping air because you’re uncomfortable with 2 players on you when it doesn’t matter that they’re on you then it’s just you playing badly

that’s wrong though

it should be more involved than that

you rotating 30 second mobility cds while doing battleground dps shouldn’t be a win condition
if you aren’t getting meaningful cc and you don’t have a meaningful way to funnel damage in those windows that you’re getting cc you should literally NEVER kill anything
which is thankfully how the games treated affliction the last few expansions

1 Like