Our warlock friend content creator Kalamazi created a state of affliction video on Youtube with some great criticisms of what he’d like to see changed with the affliction spec. After watching and how he constantly suggested how good demo and destro are for quality if life and less buttons. I got to thinking about what changes Aff could have to make it appealing for modern players, and also be competitive as a top spec in the game. Here are some changes I would make to aff. Feel free to suggest your own below…
These changes are my own thoughts…
When UA is applied to a mob/boss, it also auto applies agony and corruption. If other mobs present within 20 yards, Corruption and Agony are applied to other mobs/bosses as well. UA will refresh other dot timers effectively in aoe as well as Single Target. This puts maybe value and Perpetual Unstability and makes it to where we aren’t having to cycle so many mobs in mplus especially since other classes don’t have to do this either.
Replace volatile agony with cascading calamity (no longer needed unless you want to have agony do massive dmg when we refresh our UA every time). Giving us need/want to talent both Perpetual and Cascading.
Remove vile taint and seed and replace with other talents like improving dot dmg or rapture dmg. Also gives value to drain soul/shadow bolt as we’d be casting those more. Giving value to the drain soul/sb talent in the 2nd row.
Make PS and Soul rot 30 second cds like we had in Shadowlands for 30 sec windows.
Make Shadow Embrace stack on corruption/wither ticks, 3 stacks for full buff. This is a thing in Cata classic right now and SE used to stack on dot ticks instead of Drain/SB.
This style of aff will then be in line with destro and demo styles of auto cleave and not having to click so many buttons on each mob. No more LONG seed casts, no more shard waste on seed/vile taint, no more worrying about agony timers in aoe (might also make siphon life useful). Embrace stacking will remove the need for vile agony and can replace with something useful.
Also remove all the 2 point talent nodes and make single points. The amount of 2 point nodes and not being able to take simple talents like shard gen or extra DS dmg is atrocious and would not make the spec overpowered as we are dead last in most content.
Priority adds will only then require a haunt and UA added then go to town on drain or rapture spam. Heck, shadow priests have one of their dots apply the others also, why not aff lock? Mobs that spawn near the boss will get dots/SE applied so really only drain soul and continued raptures needed to burn the adds down giving us good prio target dmg, good crescendo procs in ST and AOE, and target switching easier.
Super Wish List Item
If these changes were to go through, I would like us to have malefic grasp back and have it do increased dmg in execute range like DS would. Keep shadow bolt as option for things like where it might be better in pvp instead of a long channel, can make SB baseline like it used to be honestly. So no down time from rapture which rapture would still be stronger in aoe and st but not really lose much when out of shards since other classes can just go to town non stop with their abilities. The down time right now feels awful having to refresh dots, haunt and praying for TC procs, wasted 10 seconds and sometimes up to 2 full mintues in a boss fight, feels bad. Can even make a talent where Grasp makes dots within 20 yards do additional dmg instead of just being a single target channel, would be good in mplus but might take other talent options for raid/bosses but Improved MG would be nice to have in aoe instead of VT and can just replace the infirmity talent as nobody takes this in mplus anyway. Having 30 second windows would negate the need for a 10 second buff every minute.
Feel free to add or take away any suggestions, but more importantly, come up with any changes of your own…
Was checking out the MoP talents and abilities to refresh my memory a bit for the upcoming classic mop release, and i was honestly a bit surprised.
It’s simply exactly what everyone is asking for on retail. How can the retail version of aff be a gimped version of the mop tree? All the qol is there, none of the gimmicky/clunky cds either (like soul rot/darkglare). 2 charges of dark soul on a 2mins cd , dot snapshotting and insta dot application with soulburn soul swap, no cd either! It’s kinda crazy how the retail design is so backwards. Most of the things that have cast times on retail are instant cast on mop.
It’s almost like they’ve deliberately ruined the class.
The dev working on our class is hell bent on keeping us as hard casting as much as possible for literally no reason since the pve mechanics in both raiding/mythic plus have gotten to the point that hard casting is a detractor.
Technically screwed until someone new comes along.
They moved away from mop affliction because it was grossly overtuned and impossible to balance old soul swap. As somebody that played high end heroic raiding (mythic now), when the discovery for swap weaving was discovered in late 2013, affliction devolved into only hitting soul swap – literally. EDIT: MoP classic is going to be an absolute fiesta of affliction warlock swap nonsense, and vengeance bug abusing. People will find out quickly why swap was tuned like a yo-yo back in mop (in ToT for instance it had a shard cost and was only useable through soulburn).
If you want proof, here’s a log of how many casts I hit in a fight back in mop during the swap weaving days: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/AkpzwxTB6tLFraGn?fight=4&type=casts&source=31
If you don’t want to copy the link, the breakdown is 65% hitting soul swap (a single keybind) in any setting where there were was more than a single target (which is nearly every raid boss and all of m+). Outside of that it was relatively as dull as it is now. There should be a happy medium here, of course, but I’m not convinced that this model was successful (it wasn’t).
ON THE OTHER HAND
I do agree, obviously, that affliction is poorly designed at the moment (look at my post history). I don’t think going back to how it was in mop or legion is the right design choice; blizzard just needs to listen to the feedback from us warlocks about what we don’t like about current affliction and figure out ways to actually work with us instead of against us.
Common complaints:
Ramp up time vs the rampant burst of other classes. This is caused by agony stacking, dot application, having to hit a spender 5-6 times in a row vs a ret or enh shaman hitting a button and dumping their entire resource bar.
Visual clarity blows. Rapture has a terrible animation, dots have none.
1 minute resource dump cycles. Other classes have ways to shift their cooldown cycles, we do not. If I have to hit like a wet noodle outside of my cooldowns, my cooldowns better be omega huge (spoiler, they’re not).
Relying solely on funnel to be relevant in single target settings. Dark harvest and Cull the weak are abominations of talents and can never be tuned correctly. See pyschic link for shadow priests.
The only thing I would add is making Shadow Bolt generate a soul shard just like Demo. Destro can generate shards from multiple spells and passive regeneration. Demo is over flowing with shards half the time, meanwhile Affy has Agony as its one and only generator and it’s a chance to even generate one.
Half the time I feel soul shard starved in pvp with the Jinx talent. Hell, I use Soul Rot with the Soul Harvester tree to generate shards if I’m desperate enough in Areas. Imagine that, a major DPS cooldown being used to generate your resource to use your spells….like what?
Shadow Bolt generating a shard just like Demo would be a great improvement to the class design which has so many flaws. It would be a step in the right direction.