I saw a lot of datamined changes for the tier sets and got so excuted. Come to find out that they are just changes for PVP 
Some of these tanks need increased proc rates
reminder that ret tier set 4pc does effectively nothing
still not fixed
Looking at the Fury Warrior bonus since the Winning Streak design is definitely here to stay. The 2pc is fine, maybe needs to be tuned up a bit.
The 4pc is completely ignorable - and I’d like to strongly argue that it buff something besides Bloodthirst and Raging Blow. Especially so for Raging Blow - but there’s not any nuance to these spells and therefore there’s not really anything interesting in a set bonus revolving around them.
At least the 2pc is now increasing the duration of previous effects rather than overwriting them.
Putting in my 2cents:
the tank tier sets are pretty lackluster with the notable exception of the prot pally tier set.
I’d like to point out that the meta tank of Season1 is about to receive the strongest tier set of all the tanks.
This does not make sense.
Devastation Evoker’s tier set does not fulfill its intent as satisfying and exciting in any current capacity presently.
Why?
2pc (paraphrasing) - Triggering Jackpot! casts a Shattering Star at 50% effectiveness at up to 3 enemies. Dragonrage guarantees a Jackpot!
I believe this tier piece fails not only at presenting a meaningful increase in player power, but also at being a fundamentally enjoying piece of gameplay for the reasons that:
- Shattering Star is currently not viscerally impactful for the player
- The random nature of this proc makes it something nearly impossible to react to, and even if one were to react to it, the gain is miniscule. In practice, it is simply a ~1% damage increase.
- Shattering Star itself does relatively little damage, compared to (and this is cherry picking one of the best 2pcs) say, Destruction Warlock’s Channel Demonfire 2pc proc.
But you may say that now this increases the viability of Focusing Iris, increasing talent diversity. This is not true, however, as Essence economy is drastically reduced in 11.1, because:
- Hoarded Power is gone
- The Season 1 4pc is gone
With their loss, it is simply not feasible to ever select anything but Arcane Vigor, as the essence economy without it is not only a massive loss in casting cadence, but an incredible damage loss, as you are losing many casts of Disintegrate over the course of a fight, thus losing further casts of Empower Spells due to Causality.
4pc(Paraphrasing again) - Casting Shattering Star or hitting a Jackpot! increases the damage of your next 2 Empower spells by 20%, up to 2 times.
This 4pc is not terrible, and actually a fair power increase, but it is so obviously worse than the previous 4pc that it borders on questionable. There is no gameplay change here, as you would not play around this increase in terms of your rotation, as you typically already would cast Shattering Star before Empower spells, especially in the case of Scalecommander due to Iridescence. except for some instances where one needs to prioritize getting out Empower spells as fast as possible.
Now, it would not be a fair critique without presenting some alternate solution. I believe that this tier piece is so poor in all aspects as a symptom of the Devastation tree itself being very poorly designed as of present. I do not think that one could create both a satisfying and balanced tier set for Evoker with the current design, to be honest.
But, here are my recommendations:
2pc - Your spells and abilities have a chance to grant a Jackpot!, casting a Living Flame at up to 3 enemies. These living flames have a 50% increased chance to grant Essence Burst. Casting Dragonrage guarantees a Jackpot!.
Reasoning: Living Flame is a fair amount of our overall DPS, and also presents a chance to proc Essence Burst, helping with our depleted Essence economy. It also has some modifiers to it, which can represent more interesting talent choices, at the very least. Even on single target, this would be a moderate increase and a considerable upgrade over the incredibly underwhelming current 11.1 2pc.
4pc - Casting Living Flame, or hitting a Jackpot!, increases the damage of your next Flame Breath by 20%, stacking up to 3 times, and also causes it to grant Essence Burst.
An alternative is to simply change the modifier to be 25%, and not grant Essence Burst.
Reasoning: Thematically, switching it to focus on the other Empower spell makes more sense than both, as last Tier set was about Eternity Surge. There’s also a lot of fire in this raid…coincidence?
Fire Breath is also rarely satisfying to press in the current Devastation identity. This would help make it more visceral to do a Tip The Scales Fire Breath during your Dragonrage while also decoupling us from being so reliant on our Blue spells for damage, as you would see, especially with the 2pc, a much more balanced damage profile. This also makes other talents, such as Catalyze, much stronger, while also arguably being of similar strength for both Hero Talents. It also just flat out makes Flameshaper more viable, which is healthier for the spec.
The numbers can change, as obviously I am biased towards wanting a powerful tier set. But even this would be a considerable gameplay increase over the current tier set. I hope that at least one developer sees this and considers this, though I know it is unlikely.
It is a shame they are doubling down on these tier set ideas. Feels so bad. At least some are functional but feels failed.
Take frost dk for example, even b4 the nerf with this week’s update, you still have 0 reason to ever talent into frost scythe.
2 Likes
Pretty much exactly what i wanted to say, but seeing as how havoc’s hasn’t even changed yet (emphasis on YET Blizzard, the havoc set is horrible and should not go live) i didn’t have much else to add other than “i still hate everything about winning streak please dont go through with it.”
Now that the SPriest tier actually works, I can actually give some feedback about it!
The Good:
- It’s VERY strong currently, just from a tuning PoV.
- The PI uptime from the 4pc is reasonably high on average, and the Haste you get from it feels incredibly satisfying since SPriest generally feels great with high Haste.
- The Insanity generation from these random Void Bolts can feel nice even in moments of high downtime (~20 seconds before Void Eruption especially).
The Bad?:
- The tier’s strong enough that I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if it got toned down a bit. Stuff like Aug’s and Dev’s tier, and now BM’s too, are also similarly strong.
- Any possible nerfs to this tier would genuinely make it feel less satisfying. Keeping the hRPPM and nerfing the Void Bolt’s effectiveness would probably be the best; the proc rate is barely high enough that it doesn’t feel like you’re always getting droughts.
- As is always the case with RNG set bonuses, this one has some serious feast-or-famine gameplay. When this tier procs, it’s very strong, and it can proc into itself and give you some pretty meaty Void Bolts and some extremely good personal PI uptime.
- This seems to favor Archon (and especially VF+Archon) extremely heavily; I don’t see how Voidweaver would ever be considered when this set bonus only really seems to benefit Archon (stronger PI, higher Voidform uptime).
- Casting PI overwrites PI procs, instead of adding to those procs’ duration.
Just went and tested on the PTR out of hope of a fix before coming here. Was sad to see you’re right, it still is not spreading Unstable Affliction. 3 weeks of PTR being unable to test my main spec has got me feeling down.
I will say though, it IS increasing Unstable Affliction’s damage by 50% for 12 seconds, along with the Haste bonus. It’s just not written into the buff we’re getting. But if you check the DoT icon on the enemy you have it on, you can see it is increased when Jackpot triggers.
I will ALSO say though 50% buff is definitely not enough. Even if it applies in AoE to the 3 spread UAs, it is going to be well below our other spells. And even if Malefic Rapture gains the bonus damage to these enemies with UA, its increase is still miniscule.
We REALLY need a look at this, and soon.
1 Like
warcraftlogs .com/reports/ycm4tMbCgYTk7KVh?fight=2&type=damage-done&source=4
It’s was not increasing a few hours ago.
i.imgur .com/fCLUMeP.png
The issue is that this flag for the tier is actually set as Direct Damage and not Periodic Damage.
If you see a similar effect, i.imgur .com/N0b4L8r.png this is the affliction aura, it have both for direct damage (for damage on cast values) and periodic (like ticks of dots).
Its possible they hotfixed it.
And yes, they fixed it now, it increases the damage while jackpot is active.
1 Like
Now that we have a working set bonus in the PTR, I wanted to follow up on my original post regarding the affliction tier set for pve content.
The set has some quirks/bugs that wouldn’t necessarily be intuitive gameplay.
- The jackpot UAs do not interact with all talents. Specifically, there is no damage bonus for focused malignancy and tormented crescendo does not proc from enemies with a jackpot UA, corruption and agony.
- The language of the set-bonus is somewhat misleading. The UAs don’t really spread as in there doesn’t need to be a target with UA on it for the jackpot proc to apply UAs to other targets. I am fine with this gameplay, but it might be confusing for players.
- There is an interaction with the set bonus that enables 2 copies of UA to exist on the same target but the ordering matters to achieve this. Specifically, if a target has a jackpot UA applied to it when that target did NOT have a hard cast UA on it, you can hard cast UA onto that target and they both will exist on the same target at the same time. They both do dot damage and they both contribute to rapture damage. However, if there is a hard cast UA already on the target, proc-ing jackpot does NOT apply a second UA onto the target.
There are a few gameplay concerns regarding these aspects of how the set bonus is working. First, the fact that jackpot UAs present the same debuff on nameplates but don’t interact with all talents, particularly tormented crescendo, provides more opportunity to make mistakes in gameplay. Only hardcast UAs are refreshable so it makes it more difficult to track which enemy in an aoe situation needs to have UA refreshed. The hardcast UA is the only UA that procs TC so maintaining a focus target becomes more important for gameplay. This added complexity isn’t desirable in my opinion.
Second, the option of having a second UA on a target I believe will cause problems in gameplay, particularly under the conditions described above. In single target, it is easy enough to play around these conditions for applying 2 copies of UA during the dgl cooldown. In the opener, you just wouldn’t hardcast UA until there was a jackpot proc or a forced jackpot proc from darkglare applied a jackpot UA first. Then, before the next darkglare, you’d let UA fall off before casting darkglare and again hard cast UA afterwards for 2xUA on the target during CDs. But, any procs outside of darkglare have very low ST value because all that it does is increase UA damage, a lower portion of our damage profile. In aoe scenarios, it is again possible to game the system where if there is a group of enemies and one of them is the priority to kill, you can attempt to funnel the jackpot UAs onto the prio target by placing a hardcast UA onto an offtarget. Then, as soon as the jackpot UA goes onto the priority target, you can just transfer the hardcast UA onto the priority target. This convoluted dot switching is not a good development for affliction in my opinion. It could be this is a bug in either direction, meaning that the intention is either to never have 2x UAs on a target or that 2xUAs are intended but the ordering part is a bug. But as is, target switching UAs like this would not be enjoyable gameplay.
To reiterate my previous post, my primary concern with this set bonus, which the existence of this mechanic to achieve 2xUAs likely exacerbates, is that affliction is becoming increasingly dependent on funnel damage to be competitive in single target. In the current iteration, playing with this set bonus has not eased my concerns.
In principle, if the 2x UAs is intentional the coding was supposed to prefer that targets without a hardcast UA get the jackpot UAs first, I can see how the design intent was good in that this would dilute the effect of our funnel in aoe situations. But the ability to game this interaction by just hardcasting a UA onto the priority target after jackpot spread allows a degenerate type of gameplay that isn’t good for the spec. I would far prefer that the damage bonus provided for the set be increased for single target and then diluted as more targets have UA. This provides a buffer for the funnel damage design issue that affliction currently has.
Thanks for your time and attention,
your friendly affliction one-trick
7 Likes
Coming again after making a post in non class sets. Monk tier imo needs some stat adjustment, right now its 4/5 haste pieces vs 3/5 on retail, very unfriendly to brewmaster and I know you guys sometimes forget we exist but would be nice if we didn’t have a bunch of required haste we cant utilize again
2 Likes
to piggyback on this there’s only 1 other non haste item in the entire 8 piece set so you can’t even make it up from catalyst atm. (boots are crit vers, the rest are haste)
1 Like
I don’t think i’ve seen a 2 piece as universally hated as the tank ones. Please change it so it works like
"Luck of the draw procs giving you 15% damage for 8 seconds and a charge of (survival instincts) > can now stack to 5, starts with 2) OR just (Next charge of survival instincts is free).
Same with Every other tank… Random damage reductions is useless and non-interactive.
OR change the 2 piece to give Incarn/Avatar/etc. It shoehorns us all into playing a build but is at leas tmore fun.
3 Likes
I like the brewmaster 2pc because it can stack duration and has a higher ppm. It makes brewmaster feel much tankier in M+
1 Like
Bump for this post in regard to affliction tier set. Thank you rpg 
I will also add that this is yet another affliction tier set that has extreme bugs or is misleading that can be added to an ever-growing pile of poorly thought-out tier sets in the past couple of years for affliction. I’m curious whether the issue is an issue with the spec fundementally, or another issue entirely.
TLDR:
- The Jackpot mechanic is forcing poor gameplay interaction that intentionally disrupts our standard rotation and does not enhance it, especially when thinking about cool-down timings. You can game having an extra dot on your target in single target by intentionally not playing correctly and dropping your unstable affliction. This is a dps gain.
- The extra unstable affliction dots are not hard-coded to be affected by certain talents, which is misleading.
- Players are also being misled by the wording of “up to three targets” as the impression it gives is that it would also spread to the current target. There is no clause that states that these spread UA’s will not affect your current target.
Solution from a theorycrafting standpoint:
Like rpg was saying, the implication is that you will choose to drop your unstable affliction before your cooldown timings in order to benefit from having an extra unstable affliction through a jackpot proc on your current target, increasing rapture damage linearly. Since our UA is already a smaller portion of our damage and doesn’t suffer ramp up cost, this is a net gain in general for the duration of jackpot.
A solution would be to always allow an extra UA proc to apply to our current target, and then apply it to 3 other targets. This would be a net buff, but would solve the issue of intentionally dropping our UA. If I were to be bias, I would rather have every jackpot UA apply to our current target (as in 3 extra if there were no other targets) but would settle for a proper flowing rotation at the moment.
3 Likes
Can blood DK get the tier set updated?
Looking at some of the other tank updates, blood tier feels meh.
The 4 piece is cool for mythic plus, but has little to no value in pure single target.
burst specs like frost dk and sub rogue must have jackpot set.
like
free glacial advance 2 sets 5 seconds pof and %10 damage buff for oblit 4 set
free sech tech 2 sets 5 seconds shadow blades and %10 damage buff to evis and black powder 4 set