Right now, I think affliction is hamstrung by three main issues:
Dark harvest and cull the weak being some of the highest-value talents in the entire game if you can abuse them properly (which is extremely rare), which makes tuning harder.
Soul rot being a permanent pick talent and forcing us into a 1m rotation with rapture cycles.
There are no talent selections that allow us to move away from 1m burst and spec into consistent damage, or high consistent spread cleave with bigger burst every 2 minutes.
In the past affliction had a super high consistent damage profile that both increased during execute and during high-value cooldowns like dark soul or soul harvest. The swap to a dot-based spec having low consistent damage and high burst damage is not only counter to the theme of the spec (draining your target, not obliterating it) but also puts it in direct competition with the other two specs. I think if affliction had a higher cadence of soul shards that allowed us to use raptures once we had dots up consistently, it would feel better than having to hold on to the raptures for our burst cycles, and being tuned around that soul rot window.
I’m not a rapture hater, I’m just not a fan of affliction moving away from high consistent damage to become burst oriented. It’s double taxed in a sense since you have to add dots to then start your burst, which is backwards from most other specs in the game that do their burst and end up putting dots either through their burst or after their burst. IMO, if I succeed as an affliction player in putting up all my dots properly and then hitting rapture, I should be doing more damage than somebody that hits their burst sooner but tapered off later – this isn’t the case now.
Last thing is to point back to feedback about our 11.1 tier set here
Obviously there is some more nuance here, but I wanted to shorten the feedback. For more info look at this thread in the warlock section.
My personal preference would be that rapture would affect our dots rather than our dots affect rapture. For example, hitting rapture would enhance our dots in some respect instead of doing upfront damage (whether it be dot tick rate or dot damage).
An even more unique way to think about this would be to have rapture be a single cast that used all of our shards to then multiply its output instead of having to sit there and cast multiple spenders at once, reducing the burden of movement. I’m curious whether hitting a single rapture that consumed 5 shards but then increased dot tick rate by something like 40% per shard would feel incredible.
Bumping this because quite honestly, affliction needs to be discussed more considering no changes so far have been made on PTR to it…and from all 3 specs its the one in more desperate need of changes.
yeah, it’s pretty dissapointing at the moment that certain specs and classes that have criminally low play rates like affliction, sub, and outlaw just aren’t getting a lot of quality of life.
I think even intentionally shoving aff to be our best performing spec and brute forcing thousands more players to play it might allow more people to share their insight on some of the pitfalls of affliction.
If brute forcing affliction to be our best spec then also shows a decline of overall players playing warlock blizzard would at least have some sort of metric to go by.
Our tier set is also just poorly tuned, and poorly thought out. If this is a test to see if we want unstable affliction to be added to more targets, it should have been discussed at the outset of the ptr instead of letting affliction languish in misery and depression over how bad it will perform (even if it was mega buffed).
I agree that affliction low player court also hurts its ability to gather feedback.
I have opted to step out of directly giving aff feedback as its quite clear my perspective is very outsider/non aff player, but i also still think some suggestions wouldn’t necessarily help the spec.
Unsure about bruteforcing it.
Tierset is very “first idea” of a tierset, i had hopes that by now it would have been reworked.
I would like to see Vile Taint removed and have Seed of Corruption become Seed of Affliction, applying both Agony and Corruption. I would also like to see the radius of the effect increased to 12 yrds. With Seed having both a cast time and Shard cost, I don’t think this is asking too much.
I would like to see a choice node with Volatile Agony called Agonizing Demise, where when a target affected by Agony drops to 25% health, Agony erupts for 50% of its remaining damage. This would give Affliction an option that helps them to actually contribute in settings where enemies die quickly.
I would like to see Soul Rot cause Drain Soul / Shadow Bolt to cleave to all targets affected by Soul Rot in the same way it does with Drain Life.
I think I’d rather just have soul flame back to give us some form of on death effect. I feel like this talent would have certain optimization issues, like timing your agony refresh before they hit 25% hp to give you the most amount of damage.
Considering affliction’s thematic text when you choose the spec mentions drains, it’s actually sad that they don’t have more drains involved with the spec. I would also like to see this added – multi-target drain soul in particular sounds extremely thematic.
I had a similar thought a while back when I was giving aff a poke (demonology for life, but I still give the other specs some love). Mine was a talent that made it so if the targets hit by the seed of corruption explosion already had corruption on them, it would apply another random effect. Agony and Unstable affliction by default, but also adding shadow embrace, vile taint, and haunt if talented into those. Just one effect each time though, so you would just toss out a few seeds into each pack to dot up everyone with less ramp
Lets say that enemies live for 6 seconds. Using the talents you outlined, you would want to refresh all of your agonies before they reach 25% since you’d be losing roughly 2-3 seconds of agony damage on every target (50% of agony remaining damage).
It would end up being pretty complex to figure out when you should refresh agony on every target (with the assumption you could seed to refresh), when to rapture which would overtake refreshing said agonies through seed, or when to hit shadowbolt / drain soul. Would you know, without a weakaura, whether 3-4 seconds of agony damage on 5 enemies would yield more or less damage than a rapture hitting all those targets? This would happen every pack in an m+. Obviously this would be constrained to people who would want to min/max damage, but the implication would be that guide writers would have to include this in some capacity.
Honestly, making this flat damage would just avoid every issue and would just end up with us going back to soul flame (which seems to be a less tricky design).
Same as what photon just mentioned, and the implications I laid out above. With rapture as our spender, adding another spender that added dots would add to the complexity of whether seed would be a better button to press over rapture.
DPET would have to be calculated on a per pack basis, and it would cause a mess for guide writers and players to figure out how to accurately assess when they should hit seed vs rapture based on their overall output and whether you can rapture afterward effectively in a dump cycle.
Make rapture single target, turn seed of corruption into your aoe spender and adjust numbers as needed. Easy!
Mostly kidding, of course, but I do honestly think half of Affliction’s headaches comes from the fact that rapture is balanced around being used in both aoe and single target.
My only issue with the effect occurring on death is that you gain no benefit whatsoever on a typical boss fight. I’m not a fan of the idea of a talent point being 100% useless in single target fights.
Your points on the complexity that would arise from the amount of damage being based on the remaining duration of Agony are definitely worth considering though.
I think, if anything, soul flame being a single point talent node in non-competitive area of the tree would just straight up be better than what we had last expansion for instance. I also do not like on death effects, but I’m not sure what else could make dots “bursty”.
Rapture being a universal spender is new this expansion anyway, even when seed was a better aoe button they still didn’t want to buff rapture. I don’t see this doing anything different than what we currently have .
If they made it purely single target like you were saying, then it literally just becomes legion affliction, but it retains a terrible fantasy of dots exploding and not amping our dots up at all (aside from them contributing to linear rapture scaling).
I just really want fantasy for the spec to come back as a drain and dot spec and not a burst spec, idk.
Replace SoC talent with a choice node. Take Jinx off of the PvP talents and make it a choice node with SoC. I will always keep coming back to trying to solve this problem of stonewalling our talent tree behind a strictly AoE, costly ability that is niche in its use. I could see the value of having a talent like Jinx for PvE situations.
The issues of Malefic Rapture are well documented and I kind of like the idea to make it Single Target, but Single Target as a baseline. I would like to change Sacrolash’s Dark Strike. Currently it increases Corruption damage by 15% and mildly extends curses. My idea would be:
Corruption Damage increased by 15%. Now causes your Malefic Rapture to hit all targets affected by your Corruption.
If the curse timer extension is important, then add it to a talent like Malediction, or Creeping Death?
I still think we should go back for UA as an spender for single/cleave and Seeds for AOE(or rapture now).
Haunt and UA should be merged and maybe kill Vile Taint/Phantom Singularity and replace them with an skill that spread all dots on one target to all enemies nearby.
Affliction needs more talents too, I think we have few options. Oblivion needs some purpose in our rotation. We should get some mechanic to extent dots instead of Darkglare and make the rotation about it. Make fun ways to apply dots, spread them and keep them up.
And we need better animations too, at least an update for Haunt and Drain Soul
At this point affliction is a hot mess. It plays outdated as hell. And I need someone…anyone, to tell me why the damage is awful and abysmal. Like after playing it for about a hour and half on world content, a dungeon and other stuff, I was very very disapoointed.
Blizzard should really be ashamed of themselves. The spec with all it’s complexity plays just flat horrible. I mean can we show that we are neglecting the spec without really showing that we are neglecting the spec. It is just shameful that a spec plays this bad at this point.
I always forget about how much the radius bugs me until I am casting seed, and inevitably watch it apply to one or two mobs after which I receive a rage buff in real life.
The problem with affliction is mainly the time you spend spreading the dots. It is abusive when every one else is going ham from the first tick of the fight. So I’d say having a spell mechanic for spreading agony is key. Then at the start of the pull you wind up that long seed cast and go right into the agony spread mechanic spell.
This means VT can be removed or changed into the spell to achieve that. And the spec would then have a consistent throughput for pulls with focus on managing shards.
Haunt needs to apply dots. It has a cooldown, so it isn’t something that can be abused. Virtually every other spec has a way to start their rotation in a GCD or two - we have to suffer through five (UA, Haunt, Agony, Corruption, Shadow Bolt). And that’s BEFORE cooldowns. It’s egregious and literally doesn’t fit into the fast-paced, bursty pve setting.
We have seed and VT to apply dots en masse, though both need quality of life upgrades in their own right.
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