Buff our DoTs or get rid of them

Between SWP and VT that do a pathetic 6% of our overall damage in a 5 minute sim, they serve almost no purpose outside being conduits for other spells. Mastery buffs. SL triggers. Not to mention the bloated talents surrounding such paltry abilities.

The largest chunk of my damage is literally channeled abilities of me sitting doing nothing.
Roughly 1.5 minutes out of 5 (30%) is idle channeling. Good luck not having to move lmao.
Tack on casting time of mind blast as our other top ability and you’re at 58% idle time. All just to be bargain bin damage.

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Not positive but some of this might just be balancing for raids+mythic+.

DoTs are really hard to balance because obviously if mobs die before you get your full damage out of them they’re pretty terrible. But if you just inflate their damage a ton they’re suddenly overpowered for raid bosses. I think the ‘solution’ blizzard has found is to make DoTs more interactive elements for other abilities.

Affliction Warlock’s history has had a lot of this too.

It’s kind of a shame because I love DoTs and Bleeds and all, but I get how it’s a thin line to balance.

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It’s a design I dislike and that also seems dysfunctional. We are now at a point where specs are not allowed to have damage profiles which deviate too far from the average in any content, but express their niche through utility. It’s a big problem for priests in particular as our utility is so lacklustre. One of the class’s niches of spread council cleave via strong dots has been designed away for “balance”, but nothing has been given in utility as replacement.

The game feels a lot better when different classes have different damage profiles which are beneficial in different situations. M+ homogenization is at fault for this and hopefully they move away from having M+ performance be the centrepiece of class design.

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I recall many expansions where I can just dot up a target and tab target and dot the next and so on and I could then fire up my trinkets and the dots could most of the time kill the target outright before they ran out or I could cast a single spell like Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death or Devouring Plague to finish the targets.

Later during MoP and WoD I would use Cascade or Halo in conjunction with my fear once I triggered Twist of Faith damage bonus from low health to finish all of them off.

I wouldn’t mind a similar style of gameplay again even though it’s most likely never going to happen. But I think dots being powerful enough to get the target to 35-50% health at least (normal world mobs) with just the dot rot damage would be ideal and lower once you out gear the content.

This is what happens when you just pile more garbage onto classes and you end up with a million damage entries in details log.

From a pvp prospective, I prefer weak dots now. In the race against death via melee specs and other classes we just lose the race. While I’m setting up my dots and waiting an hour for insanity to build up, then having to hard cast voidform against 2 melee, the fury war has already taken half my heath or nearly killed me multiple times.

Significantly buff:
Mindblast
Devouring plague (instant damage portion)
Voidbolt (no reason to hit less than nightfall proc)
Voidblast
SWD and its proc. Talent is lame.
Void torrent should be immune to micro-cc and pushback

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Our entire kit is dealing damage that is far too low. Its so bad that despite enjoying everything they’ve done to the world in tww, I still would rather be playing MoP simply because the class design was so much better.

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Ya, absolutely. Even voidform isn’t fun or engaging. In legion it was fun in a raid environment when you ramped up the haste stacks and you could feel getting more powerful. That was before they gutted the entire voidform mechanic.

Now don’t get me wrong, that specific mechanic sucked everywhere else outside of raids, but it was fun button to press. Now the only cool part of voidform is when the missiles spawn and hit everyone, that looks cool. Then nothing

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