As it stands right on beta, DoTs are hitting like wet paper. Time and again we are dependant on augment spells and abilities to make DoTs effective and it’s not even close. MR is topping damage while DoTs like agony and corruption are doing maybe 8% of our damage? In PvP, DoTs are once again being passively healed through while SPriests are destroying your health with ONE DoT.
We do not enjoy this style of gameplay and I garauntee that destro is once again going to end up being the default for most players…again.
Now we’ve been hit with a 66% hit on DB, which we all knew needed tuning but 66%!?
So rogues get an OP ability and to make it less dominating, you BUFF their other abilities but nerf ours into the ground?
SL is looking less and less appealing to me right now and that sucks. But you do this every expansion. Leave the same usual suspects OP while constantly nerfing others. I’m getting tired of this roller coaster ride with this game.
I dont have to work 1/2 this hard to maintain my damage abilities on my DK or my Hunter, nor or some abilities that much more impactful than others like this.
We are sick of weak DoTs. Sick of it. You keep throwing argument spell after augment spell at us and it just makes for unnecessarily tedious game play that isnt fun.
I feel like affliction has been pretty lame ever since Blizz decided the spec needed a “spender” and gave us soul shards.
Legion only worked because we had 10 things magnifying our dots to deal real damage
Now that those are gone, we see what the core of the spec is. Pitiful dot damage that Blizzard makes up for with a nuke “spender” that just deals damage
I’d like affliction to move away from this idea that we need a spender nuke spell, we don’t. A rot spec is a rot spec, not a half rot spec with nukes to make up for pitiful rot damage
Shadow I think works well because their “spender” is just more rot damage, and they also have ways to quickly apply dots to many targets, and maintain them through voidbolt.
Their design is a true rot spec. In a big pull of mobs, their job is to just maintain dots, and fill with flay/sear or mindblast procs
Afflictions job is to maintain pitiful dots, but also find time to nuke with rapture to make up for low dot damage, and it makes it feel like a generic nuke caster such as mage. You could replace rapture with flamestrike and it’d be the same…
I really wish we had enough momentum on this to make it into a megathread where they can’t ignore it. the problem is that no one even plays affliction anymore enough to care because there is no “affliction” in affliction. It’s been a burst spec for over two years and with Malefic Rapture, that’s not going to change. Maybe if they nerfed rapture in half and then gave all of that damage back into dots it would at least feel more balanced.
@Zyrras, I was looking at the spellpower % of each of the caster classes’ dots and affliction dots were about the same power as shadows. mostly hovering at around 70%ish spellpower. Balance dots were up to 104% plus 14-20% spellpower initial damage plus easier to apply to an entire group of mobs (baseline sunfire and talented moonfire double dot). Its sad that currently in the PTR the strongest and easiest to maintain dots belong to Balance druids.
One thing that struck me as odd is that technically Unstable Affliction has a higher spellpower % than Devouring Plague. What makes DP feel impactful is the fact that all of that damage is applied over 6 seconds as opposed to UA over I think 21 seconds. That makes UA literally less than a third of DP’s damage per second even though priests can generate enough sanity to maintain it 90%+ on single target or at least apply it fairly well on two targets. UA is always limit 1.
This isn’t the spec I signed up for over 10 years ago. Ever since BFA this spec has turned into a pile of trash. I don’t care if warlocks do good damage wise. Affliction was never supposed to be a spec reliant on CDs or bursty shard spamming nonsense. Affliction is supposed to do high sustain rot damage via drains and dots.
Don’t even get me started on how boring and simplified destro is. On the shadowlands beta, chaos bolt feels absolutely pathetic. A spell that used to be slowly built up, but chunked now feels less impactful than malefic rapture. Your main sources of damage are RNG infernal spam. So much of your damage is tied to a boring CD. Destro ever since Legion has disgusted me.
Dot classes cant work in this day and age of dungeons. If you want strong dots then you have to suffer in keystones. It sucks but I don’t think its possible to have a middle ground.
Unless Blizz just made it so dots contribute overall more in pvp and rapture takes the backseat and then in pve Blizz just swaps them around. Which could work but I feel like Blizz wouldnt do that because more work for them.
Warlock has always been pretty poor in the beginning of expansions. I’d say give it time, because the class has some insane scaling around the second and third tier.
That’s false. In legion the m+ problem was solved by soul flame and sow the seeds actually doing damage. In raids we still had dots doing actual damage and we had stuff like the malefic grasp talent.
It was like that in wrath and no one complained from my memory.
On full resilience, a single roll of shadow priests dots would take 50% of your life over however long it was. An affliction warlock took around 60%. This was also during a time when dispel didn’t have any cd so healers could keep their teams clean but the point remains. Dots used to be scary as hell
Let’s be honest, it’s been burst spec for 4 years, ever since they made that ridiculous legion change to Unstable Affliction that’s FINALLY getting reversed.
I agree. Affliction should do the majority of its damage from dots. Sure, there’s a tuning issue there, and they need to manage it carefully so that as soon as there’s more than a few targets we don’t just outclass everyone. But right now, it’s just silly seeing only 20-30% of afflictions damage coming from dots.
Yup, there’s a middle ground somewhere though. In vanilla a warlocks dots could basically take your entire health if you didn’t get any heals or dispels. So they’re probably afraid of that.
Just going to throw in my vote to shift more damage back into our DoT’s. I understand the arguments around balancing the damage on larger pulls or it’s impacts on PvP, but to me in a PvE setting the longer setup to get our DoT’s rolling wouldn’t hurt quite so much if they actually did more damage. Sure that would scale higher with more mobs that stayed alive longer but with the target capping coming into play for SL (affecting most classes/specs) how big a pulls are actually going to happen in M+ keys that a bump in DoT damage will actually approach game breaking?
I won’t pretend to comment on the PvP ramifications or solutions as I don’t PvP and have no real interest in it but I accept that there may be balance concerns there.
With Deathbolt finally gone, I think Blizz might finally start looking at buffing DoT damage, since that spell was broken.
And I’m not saying it was horribly OP, but it couldn’t be properly balanced and caused everything surrounding it to have to be nerfed as well.
Now with it gone, they don’t have to be concerned about people building DoTs up for this huge death bolt hit. I’m sure UA will get some attention, too, now that it can’t stack.
It’s the first of two intelligent things I’ve seen blizz do with the spec (the other was reverting UA back to pre-legion).