Feedback: Class Sets in The War Within Season 2

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
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Upon request of a fellow warlock from EU, i post his thoughts about Affliction tierset here.

His passion for the Affliction spec and experience as a warlock are among the greatest i know as such this comes from the heart and mind of someone who deeply cares for the spec.

Class: Warlock

Spec: Affliction

(2) Set Bonus:
Your damaging spells have a chance to hit a Jackpot! that increases your haste by 12% for 12 seconds. Casting Summon Darkglare always hits a Jackpot!

(4) Set Bonus:
Hitting a Jackpot! also increases the damage of Unstable Affliction by 50% and causes Unstable Affliction to spread to up to 3 targets within 40 yds for 12 seconds.

Hello, I’m Zhazz, i am user of the warlock discord, moderator for it and Affliction lover.

The two set, while numerically strong, leaves a bittersweet taste in the mouth in all honesty. It is a clone of a 2 piece we had as recently as Dragonflight season 1.

A small change to the proccing mechanism but a 12% haste buff all the same. This is the only stat based 2 set of all classes.

The combination of these two factors really puts me off the two-set despite its output potency and as much as I don’t want to say it; this simply seems lazy.

Now the real meat of the conversation is the four set and while I loathe to be too negative I truthfully have nothing good to say about this set and would say it is arguably the worst tierset I’ve ever seen for Affliction.

For starters the set itself does not work on the PTR in any way, so these thoughts are based upon the functionality and current Affliction gameplay opposed to testing.

The “Good”

  • The “strength” of this tier set is in 3-4 target cleave, a situation Affliction does not struggle with in its current form. This is down to the gain of both an extra dot for Malefic rapture as well as the dot being Unstable Affliction which in turn benefits from the talent Focussed Malignancy (25% increased damage to targets with Unstable Affliction applied). Unstable Affliction itself does little damage.

The Bad

  • The nature of this set’s bonus predominantly coming via MR is just another nail in the coffin for the Hellcaller hero tree due to Soul Harvester’s MR enhancing talents. Hellcaller has struggled to find a place for the majority of the first season in both M+ and Raiding.
  • The larger the pull size e.g. in mythic plus the less impactful this four set is as a contributor.
  • Potential shard overflow / useless shard gain that you’d have gotten via shard sniping anyway.

The Downright awful

  • Affliction has drastically struggled with tuning in the first tier of the expansion, most notably in single target encounters. I suspect this is down to the existence of funnel talents such as Dark Harvest and Cull the Weak. This tierset however is painfully poor for single target, currently looking to be a 2-3% gain. The 50% boost for single target to Unstable affliction is just painfully undercooked.
  • I am genuinely confused as to the logic behind this set given the current playstyle of Affliction. Your shard expenditure is significantly tied to 1 minute cycles because of the strength in Soul Rot windows. This leaves the “rng” version of the Jackpot! procs to be frustratingly disenfranchised from the kit; if it procs outside your soul rot window the value is simply laughably low as you’re in a position of either holding shards for your window or simply not having any available.

All being said, Affliction since 9.1 has become an incredibly poorly tuned and unpopular spec (consistently the least used in both heroic and mythic raiding.

The least representation in M+ and looking to only have a single player get the 0.1% title this season after 0 for the entirety of Dragonflight). To now have A) a copy+paste 2 set and B) A simply terrible 4 set in both tuning and design is very disappointing.

I fear this, alongside the strength of demonology and destruction tier-sets, will simply push Affliction into obscurity for another tier at the bottom end of tuning and popularity.

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351

FDK set is absolutely awful, for all the reasons already mentioned here.
I’ll just say that IF (big if) the datamined BoS changes/replacements go through it might have a chance to not completely suck. Its pretty much unplayable in its current state with our current kit though.

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352

RNG based set bonus is not good. RNG based set bonus that does nothing but provide +x% damage is terrible.

Sets with stacking damage with a chance to reset damage stacks are the biggest issue. These are lazy and uninspired

Class/Role bonus can be fine, but when all we get is a damage bonus, which will be balanced around anyway, then why does it even exist.

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353

Yeah it doesn’t feel good to get an RanG defensive that last 4 seconds.

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To make a feedback post here, please provide:

  • The class and specialization being discussed

-Brewmaster Monk

  • The game content type being referred-to (raiding, M+ dungeons, PvP)

-Raiding & M+.

  • When and where you feel like your set bonuses will be the most and least useful

-Most useful: No where.
-Least useful: Everywhere.

  • Some sort of feeling about the above (positive, negative, indifferent)
  • Let me not mince words. There is NOTHING positive or “indifferent” about this tier set. It has no business calling itself a “Tier set effect”. Everything I feel about this tier set is negative.

  • The types of feedback posts that are most useful include all of the above, and might also detail:

  • How bonuses may not have their expected value, given how the class is often played

  • First off, I will echo what 1000000s others have said. The proc / rng based effect to get a chance at a 4 second Fortifying Brew is just so unimaginative. Sure, it allows us to stagger up to 15% more (if talented) every so often. However, Brewmaster suffers from neglectful class design, so much so, that typing all that out on here is just a waste of time.
  • How bonuses could have very different value in single target and AOE situations.
  • The bonus could have 100% uptime. That would make Brewmaster Monk maybe A Tier in Raids, and remain C to D tier in M+.
  • How bonuses help or don’t help in specific situations that are relevant to players
  • Again, this bonus could have 100% uptime and BRM monks would have no increase in their rankings.
  • Likely degenerate or unintended impacts on rotations, including:
    *Using single target abilities in AOE or vice versa
  • Brewmaster Monk suffers from significant neglectful class design. I am not wasting my time, as the feed back has been given by those significantly more qualified than me.

Being flooded with resources faster than they can be spent

  • This I will note on. Because losing the Season 1 effect, makes Brewmaster feel AWFUL. I literally will not play Brewmaster if this effect isn’t baked in to our class. Or something similar in value is given.
  • Being encouraged to use core abilities repetitively, or not at all
  • No comment.

I will say it again. Brewmaster needs work to function going into season 2. Understand the BRM monk community is kind of cynical at this point due to lack of changes and significant neglect on your part. Please consider reaching out to our class theroycrafters to address the massive underwhelming feeling that is playing brewmaster monk.

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355

So I feel like the Winning Streak idea isn’t terrible, provided it has a good payoff when it is lost. The Survival Set is pretty bad. Buffing Wildfire Bomb per stack of Winning Streak is fine (every tier set we get seems to buff WFB–but I digress). The issue lies in the fact that the 4 set is absolute dookie. We don’t want Kill Command to be buffed. I would like to see something like this instead:

4 pc: For each stack of Winning Streak you had when it ends, your Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite strike one additional target and deal 20% increased damage, for 2 seconds.
^This set bonus will give you a big burst window after consuming Winning Streak, and will probably result in stacking more towards another streak.

Alternatively,
4 pc: After losing Winning Streak, your Explosive Shot is reset, and your next cast of Explosive shot will fire an additional Explosive Shot every second for 2 seconds.
^This set also gives a big burst of damage immediately following a Winning Streak. This would also supply a great deal of WFB CD reduction.

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FURY WARRIOR

2pc bonus - I have no real issues here, and rampage damage is good. There’s some variance, whatever. A solid universal bonus for both ST and AoE.

4pc Bonus

I think this is “ok”, but it’s also a bonus you’ll largely never care about. You’ll continue to hit your buttons and your combat log will say you got some random buffs while you were going about your business. I also think the last thing this spec needs right now is YET ANOTHER effect tied to Raging Blow. If nothing else I would advocate the Raging Blow bonus be changed to literally anything else.

While the winning streak bonuses feel more lame than the other variants I also think the Fury bonus is perhaps the most unnoticeable of even those more forgettable sets of bonuses. The Ret Paladin bonus for example seems like a pretty cool take on this formula.

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Hihi
A few testing observations from the PTR.

Don’t have many words here. Haste is nice sure. The 4 set is bugged and doesn’t function.
As a few have mentioned, it needs more Single Target component as UA damage is a very small percentage of overall, if there aren’t extra targets you don’t get the bonus.
There are also a lot of open questions on how this interacts with talents and abilities.
Does the empowered UA add duration to existing UA?
Does Dark Glare extend the extra UAs? etc etc
Look forward to testing it more once it is functional on PTR.

This bonus is alot more function on PTR and I have many things to report. :smiley:
Overall love having Greater Dreadstalker (Big Dog) procs, and love having extra burst from the line up of two sets of normal dogs, and proced dogs and Hand of Gul’dan usage.

However…
There is a lot of inconsistency in which talents and abilities effect the Greater Dreadstalker (Big Dog)
He is affected by:

  • Dreadlash
  • Carnivorous Stalkers
  • Wicked Maw
  • Dread Calling (and he consumes the stacks, robbing them from normal casts of Dreadstalkers :scream:)

But he does not appear to be affected by:

  • The Expendables
  • The Houndmaster’s Gambit
  • Flametouched
  • And most importantly Demonic Tyrant. Neither the duration increase or damage increase.

I fully recognise being affected by Tyrant might be outside the budget of a tier set, but just find it weird how Greater Dreadstalker is affected by some things, and not other newer things.

Current implementation of this is very inconsistent.
The Demonfire Flurry only appears to function on hostile mobs, like tanking target dummys, and does not appear to function on passive mobs like the regular target dummys.
It does appear to be affected by Raging Demonfire, extending Immolate and shooting more bolts, but is doesn’t appear to be affected by Demonfire Mastery which makes sense this to be tuned separately.
Overall I feel more Demonfire bolts are fun set once they proc consistently, however I feel like the 4 set is kinda too passive and unnoticeable, its going to be a damage boost for sure, but I find it really hard to notice any difference in when it procs.

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358

Yeah, he is definitely trolling. He is also smelling his own farts. I checked his facts in Warcraft Logs. As far as feral, he is hillariously wrong as feral isn’t in the top 15 dps. In a few cases, feral druid is dead last against all dps. But hey, let’s not let facts get in the way of a good lie.

grrrrrrr… unable to provide links that prove my points and hits them home… go to …warcraftlogs.com to verify what I am saying. That numbers and spreadsheets do not lie.

359

Tier set RNG = bad. I understand the assumption that RNG free tier sets might be boring. This is just way too much RNG on RNG.

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360

RNG to build it and RNG to lose it… IMO as stated before these tier sets are not fun. Period.

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361

So what is the excuse for this tiers lazy design? first it was" oh we got new talent trees that we want to focus on" then it was “well we got these hero trees that have 0 gameplay to them so we want to go easy” what is the excuse this time? not to mention that the only “fun” ones are the range dps ones. melee dps just get a boring dmg increase with a chance of it removing itself and get 0 pay off(other than ret pala)? I really hope this isnt going to set a precedent, i was somewhat understanding in DF season 1. not at all in TWW season 1, andn ow i am just baffled? so, what is the reason for the lazy design this tier?

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362

My take away from the new set bonuses needs to be this.

You build up stacks of one damage buff and ofc that is a bonus on its own, but when you proc or consume the stacking buff, it needs to give you something even better in return so they loop back into each other.

My best example is with frost DK, build up stacks that buff Frost Strike but Obliterate consumes the buff for something way better. TLDR players should look forward to each interaction happening cuz you gain a benefit one way or another that is impactful. Heck maybe even making consuming the buff at max stacks has a more impactful buff.
Just make it to where each buff/set feeds into each other creating a fun gameplay loop.
Obliterate buffs frost strike for each stack but on consume it gives a stronger killing machine proc. Basically make it worth losing the buff if you are gonna go the route of RNG sets, so no matter what happens you win both ways.

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lazy devs… those will clearly be ignored or impact negtively the gameply… i like marc take on it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjSU2k4niYU

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364

Please ! PLeaseee PLEASE

Change it all! This is just horrible.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE REDESIGN ALL of IT!

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365

The melee DPS set bonus scheme seems unilaterally less fun than what ranged specs get. I don’t know what you’re going to need to do tuning-wise, Blizz, but it has all appearances of being another situation where we hold onto our existing sets until we have all four pieces of the new tier at heroic raid-grade before swapping over to do equivalent damage and enjoy the stam boost.

These are real stinkers. Boo. Down with this sort of thing. Big L.

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366

It would be cool if the tier sets were goblin-themed properly: Giant mechs, improvised explosives, rockets, lock-on target lasers, shields, traps, gambling, extortion.

So for example, a healer set that “collects a fee” by stealing the lowest secondary stats of their peers and summons some goblin thugs to assist their damage, or a giant mech suit that shields you. Hunters shooting rockets, rogues planting explosives on targets, etc. Anything could have been better than these tier sets.

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367

These set bonuses really lend the impression that you’ve let class design get away from you thanks to the needless complexity of the DF talent system along with big helpings of additional modifiers from the hero specs, so you’ve had to go very general and throw darts.

None of this was necessary for the game to continue being fun to play, and all of it is making it harder to find the fun in different classes and specs because so much of our damage comes from layers and layers of modifiers on abilities when buttons should just feel decisively like what they do on their tooltips. So many specs now have para-resource systems that are not represented well in the UI at all (tip of the spear for survival; maelstrom weapon stacks going to 10 but only visually represented poorly up to 5 for enhancement) or have resource systems so distorted by the layers and layers of talent and hero talent cruft that they’ve lost all elegance (rogue specs with up to seven CP that more often than not fill instantly, a talent that effectively adds two additional invisible CP, assassination having upwards of 300 energy available to manage it all). It’s gross AND was never necessary for specs to be fun to play, and it is way, way less easy to understand or intuit than any previous iteration of the game.

So yeah, I guess it’s unsurprising that you’ve arrived at this sort of tier set bonus plan. It’s telling. It’s bad design. It’s CYA.

You all are really lucky FFxiv screwed up so badly with the latest expansion.

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A few comments about the Frost Mage set bonuses from a PvE perspective (raid, M+).

The set bonuses are very undertuned. I’m not sure what the target for these bonuses is, but the discrepancy is fairly massive. The entire set bonus (4pc) is currently worth about 4-5% DPS while some of the good set bonuses are pushing 20%. Still, that’s something that can be adjusted fairly easily.

Which brings me to the second, bigger issue. The effects are just plain boring. We sometimes have set bonuses that end up being fairly boring but are at least interesting on paper (season 1 4pc turns Ice Lance into an AoE spell – that seems cool even though it doesn’t amount to much in practice), but this one isn’t even that.

The set bonus doesn’t even require any input from the player. You get the same benefit whether you do your rotation properly or are just autoattacking the boss while casting Icy Veins on cooldown. It also doesn’t interact with mastery in any way, making an already bad stat even worse.

I’d love to see some secondary effect tied to the damage, much like Arcane and Fire do.

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369

After testing, this is somehow worse than originally thought. I won’t repeat all of the issues that every melee has already pointed out with winning streak specifically, but will throw in that i also strongly dislike the general idea of cookie cutter role-specific bonuses. The 4 set bonus also fails in both design and execution for havoc.

Demon form itself is a baseline 30% buff to chaos strike and blade dance, which is why eye beam (with demonic) is always used before essence break (which increases chaos strike and blade dance damage by 80%). The 4pc sacrificing your winning streak means you will never have more than maybe one stack of winning streak active for your essence break window, adding almost no damage to our CDs. With how high crit is already stacked and with mastery and haste scaling being taken out behind the shed with the few talent changes that have been made so far, a max of 10% crit at the cost of 30% chaos strike and blade dance damage just isn’t worth it outside of extreme AoE.

Unfortunately making matters even worse, the crit buff from the 4 set can overwrite itself. Importantly for some of havoc’s talents, using an ability that would cause you to enter demon form while you are already in demon form still counts as entering demon form. This means you can have 10 stacks of winning streak, eye beam to convert it to 10% crit, at least blade dance and chaos strike and get a couple stacks of winning streak, then metamorphosis and overwrite your 10% crit buff with a 2% crit buff, and if you’re really unlucky you can even overwrite that with a 1% buff when you eye beam again since meta resets the CD of eyebeam. So in the span of about 5 seconds during your cooldowns, you have turned 30% chaos strike and blade dance damage into 10% 2% 1% crit. Not a good feel.

Also while I am someone who primarily does PvE, even I have to acknowledge that the 4 set might as well be laughing at PvP players. Crit damage is reduced in PvP. One of the most busted talents for havoc in PvE is Know Your Enemy, which gives crit damage equal to 80% (with 2 points) of crit chance and is the main reason havoc is so crit hungry in PvE, yet most PvP builds don’t even take it because of how devalued crit is in PvP. Why would they ever want to give up 30% chaos strike and blade dance damage for 10% of the worst PvP stat? Again i don’t really PvP so i could be missing something important about how it works that actually makes it better, but it at least doesn’t look good.

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