How to Improve Affliction

This post is meant to discuss the weaknesses in the affliction warlock toolkit that have resulted in very low participation in raids and mythic plus dungeons. In addition, I will provide suggestions, talent by talent, how I think we could improve the spec to fit within the framework of a malefic rapture based affliction spec.

GENERAL OVERVIEW

SINGLE TARGET PLAY AND WEAKNESSES - In pure single target, affliction is not a difficult spec to play. Yes, it has many debuffs and dots to maintain but with appropriate shard management, maximizing tormented crescendo procs for both damage and movement and optimizing movement gcds the spec can perform fine given competitive tuning. In my opinion, affliction is undertuned for single target damage in phase 10.2.5. I think there are a few reasons for this.

FIRST - affliction has a few talents that can significantly increase single target output when adds are present, aka funnel damage, particularly wrath of consumption and dark harvest. Funnel damage should be taken into consideration, and likely is, when class tuning is done. This capacity for affliction made it a powerful spec on several encounters in Aberrus, namely the third phase of Echo of Neltharion and the end boss Scalecommander Sarkareth. The point allocation in the tree for season 2 made it an extremely minor dps loss to move points into the ability Wrath of Consumption which gave a significant boost of single target damage when adds were part of the fight.

However, this funnel damage is limited in season 3 because our tier set bonus revolves around soul rot. The 2 piece set bonus increases the duration of soul rot by 4s and increases its damage by 15% while the 4 piece gives 3 charges of a buff that increases the damage of either seed of corruption or malefic rapture and malefic rapture casts also extend all dots by 2s when these charges are spent. This is quite a strong bonus and encourages pairing the 30s cooldown Vile Taint with 2 points in soul eater’s gluttony to make the cooldown of soul rot 30s resulting in a 30s burst damage profile. Because of the point economy in the tree, the result is that in order to take these funnel talents requires dropping strong single target abilities like tormented crescendo, summon darkglare or haunt. In some circumstances, people play phantom singularity with 1 point in soul eater’s gluttony and wrath of consumption. However, given the tier set bonus, the damage gain from wrath of consumption is minor.

SECOND - affliction is a very immobile spec. While affliction conceptually has a lot of instant casts that would enable movement, reapplication of dots on the move is often a very low value cast. Our filler is an immobile drain, our primary spenders VT and rapture are immobile casts and, with exception of our two minute cooldown summon darkglare, our best cast during mobility is using tormented crescendo procs for rapture. Given that this is a proc that is dependent on an immobile drain soul cast, it is not entirely consistent that these movement gcds are available or impactful in a fight. As a result, our simmed dps rarely represents what is possible in an encounter with mechanics.

TWO TARGET WEAKNESSES - In stacked two targets, it is still reasonable to maintain all dots and debuffs on the targets, although more challenging than single target. That being said, the time it takes to set up all of these debuffs is dissatisfying given the tuning of our abilities. Even if we gain full value of these debuffs, many other specs are capable of doing far more damage than affliction warlock and if health amounts are too low, by the time this set up is completed, other specs may have used cooldowns to already kill the two targets.

In spread cleave, affliction has a bit better toolkit with soul swap. That being said, soul swap as a talent is incredibly expensive costing two global cooldowns (GCDs) and a shard. In the absence of dot extension afforded from the 4 set bonus and darkglare, using this ability is not even worth the cost. So, in a situation where we should be strong, we are in fact fairly mediocre compared to other ranged specs.

SPREAD COUNCIL SETTING - In spread three targets, affliction should be very strong. Except, if you add any fight mechanics, it is incredibly difficult to maintain all dots and debuffs on the targets, particularly if playing siphon life. A more common approach that has been taken this phase for the council fight in Amirdrassil is to use absolute corruption and haunted soul instead of dread touch and siphon life. This is easier to do because we have to maintain 2 fewer dots and one fewer debuff. And yet, we are worse at this fight than destruction warlocks which are primarily using 2 target cleave and by far worse than balance druids.

AOE TENSION, SEED VS RAPTURE -

Punitive Nature of the choice node Dread Touch/Doom Blossom - Beyond three targets, there is a tension for affliction between using malefic rapture and seed of corruption. This is particularly true because one of our capstone talents is a choice node between Dread Touch and Doom Blossom. Dread touch provides a 30% increase to dot damage as an 8s debuff on targets with UA that are hit with malefic rapture. Doom Blossom does damage to all enemies around the UA target hit with a seed of corruption explosion. When playing sow the seeds, this triggers the effect 3x. Taking doom blossom is up to a 10% increase in aoe damage but a loss over more than 10% single target damage with the loss of dread touch. This choice node is extremely punitive to either single target damage or aoe damage.

Lack of Reward for Debuff Juggling in AoE Setting - For those that want to maximize damage using malefic rapture while maintaining good priority damage on a boss or dangerous enemy, the current game play does not feel rewarding. It is possible to maximize damage by using siphon life on up to 5 targets before soul rot and using dot extension from both the 4p set bonus with malefic rapture casts or summon darkglare. This type of gameplay is significantly more challenging given mechanics and target swapping to individually apply siphon life, significantly more punitive if the set-up is not properly performed and the dps gain is not entirely worth the effort, particularly if the enemies do not last for a significant duration of time.

STATE OF PLAY IN AOE - While we have this debuff/dot interactive ability in malefic rapture, the lack of reward combined with the difficulty of juggling debuffs just pushes play to seed spam. Combined with dark harvest every 30s, seed damage is substantial but I would argue isn’t satisfying game play. We apply a few debuffs and spam an ability. We have a much more interactive ability with malefic rapture, which has good priority target damage but does relatively poor damage to targets with lower dot count. This tension makes affliction either quite boring to play in aoe with marginal effectiveness (or with doom blossom to good effect at the cost of substantial single target damage) or quite difficult to play with… marginal effectiveness. In either case, the difficulty of a rapture based aoe gameplay isn’t rewarded with appropriately tuned damage and besides at exceedingly high target count, seed of corruption damage is only adequate damage that requires substantial single target loss to be particularly effective.

Ineffectual Target Swapping - One of the primary issues that hindered affliction warlocks from excelling at high level game play, particularly in a mythic plus setting, is poor damage to priority targets that spawn during an encounter. Specifically in season 2, the totem from the last boss in Brackenhide Hallow and the vortex spawn for the last boss in Vortex Pinnacle. As I described above, soul swap is very expensive. It doesn’t transfer either dread touch or shadow’s embrace so the player cant even fully set up cool downs onto a target in anticipation for the spawn for soul swap without doing additional set up on the new spawn. If soul swap is on cooldown, the baseline dot damage is also extremely low so we cannot contribute meaningfully in the group to frequent spawns of priority targets… This is a major weakness of the spec.

Summary of Weaknesses - It is my opinion that poor tuning, reliance on funnel talent abilities, mediocre aoe damage with this tension between rapture and seed gameplay as well as one of the worst classes in the game at swapping to a new target that needs to quickly die has limited the effectiveness of affliction warlock in dragonflight. I do not think that these weaknesses are unrelated to the fact that the spec as a whole has demonstrably lower rates of play in both raids and mythic plus compared to other dps specs. Admittedly, there have been some strong raid bosses that affliction has excelled at. However, it often takes months of testing for players to understand how the affliction toolkit would apply to a given fight, particularly this tier with the Tindral Sageswift encounter. In my view, this demonstrates that the strengths of affliction are not as easily recognized a priori which is a design flaw in the spec. The weaknesses should not be so apparent that affliction isn’t approachable for progression based content, even among the best players in the best guild in the world. Significant changes should be made to make affliction’s toolkit more applicable to all content and provide more approachability and reward for the debuff juggling that it requires.

TALENT BREAKDOWN

Below I will review the talents individually and describe both successes, failures and alternatives that could improve how affliction plays moving forward.

FIRST TIER TALENTS
Malefic Rapture – I am not a critic of this spell. The primary issue I have is that it scales with dot number and not the quality of the dot. This basically forces play of Siphon Life because that extra dot provides another multiplier to the damage of rapture. Possible changes to rapture include to cap the number of dot effects that apply to rapture or just go based on the quality of the dot where UA, soul rot and vile taint/phantom singularity increase the multiplier more than corruption agony or siphon life.

Unstable affliction – staple of affliction warlock game play. If anything, I don’t think this talent needs to be in the tree but should just be learned when using affliction specialization.

Seed of corruption – Another staple of the affliction warlock.

MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - I think that it should be changed to be a cooldown ability that is primarily used for spreading corruption, not for its impact damage. Its impact damage can be increased to adapt to this cooldown function.

Nightfall – This talent has been a staple of warlock since vanilla. It provides very good synergy with other talents in the affliction warlock tree, specifically drain soul, withering bolt and tormented crescendo.

MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - One aspect of nightfall that I’d like improved for PVE content that that when under effects of nightfall, drain soul should be castable while moving. This could even be another talent node in the tree associated with drain soul.

Writhe in Agony – Agony is our shard generator and is a stacking dot. When fully stacked, it does substantial damage. This talent increases the starting and final stack count. I would argue that this is a relic of older class design.

MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - Agony should no longer be a stacking dot. This talent either should convert agony to its max stack count on application or should just be removed if agony is just converted to a single stack dot.

Sow the Seeds – Given my view that seed of corruption should be more of an ability that applies corruption to all mobs on a cooldown rather than a repeatable damage based ability, this ability could just be a 3x damage amp to that cooldown, which could provide significant burst damage if the initial damage of seed is considerably increased. I am not opposed to this talent staying, particularly if the talent agonizing corruption (as discussed below) is reworked.

Shadow’s Embrace – This talent provides primarily single target utility; however, ideal play currently also encourages its use in multitarget scenarios when using filler to increase the damage of dots and shard spenders.

MINOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - While this increases the skill cap of the spec, I don’t believe this talent is necessary for the spec and provides more bloat than is necessary.

Dark virtuosity – this is an uninspired talent that increases filler damage. Functionally, these points are the easiest points in the tree to move to aoe talents with minimal effect. If that’s the purpose, it serves that purpose but nothing exciting here.

Kindled Malice – uninspired buffs to aoe abilities. These points are taken in all PVE contexts.

Agonizing Corruption – This talent might be good in theory for low difficulty content. Increasing the stack count allows the primary shard generator to do more damage faster because it stacks faster. However, this talent receives virtually zero play.

MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - In my view, this talent should be reworked in conjunction with a seed of corruption rework. With seed of corruption as a cooldown that applies corruption on a 10s cooldown and sow the seeds providing an additional 2 seeds for a good burst damage cooldown, agonizing corruption should increase the duration of agonies on targets hit by seed of corruption by 1s per point in this talent. The result would be that if you use your seed of corruption abilities on cooldown, you can extend your agonies by 12s each agony cast (assumed 18s agony base duration, not including dot extension abilities like summon darkglare or the current 4 set). This would synergize with vile taint, which I will discuss shortly.

MIDDLE TIER TALENTS

Drain soul – This is a staple of affliction warlock game play. It is a strong ability, synergizes well with applying shadow’s embrace, nightfall damage and tormented crescendo casts. Also does increased damage to lower health targets. It also provides an avenue in aoe to generate shards when draining dying mobs. This is a good ability. In fact, I believe this ability shouldn’t be a talent for affliction. It should just be automatically learned when you spec into affliction. This might be an issue for pvp play. Nightfall procs provide very strong movement with shadow bolt where maintaining dots and movement is more important than stationary draining. But to answer that as mentioned above, I think there should be a talent for affliction that allows movement during drain soul. In the past, there was an ability called kiljaeden’s cunning. It was an instant that allowed you to cast while moving for 8s. So historically, we’ve had movement abilities while casting. A simpler and less overpower solution would just make a version for this for drain soul where nightfall drains can be cast while moving.

Choice node: Absolute Corruption/Siphon Life

Absolute corruption: this talent is rarely used in pve content because of how rapture scales with dot number. Even in heavy aoe scenarios, seed applies corruption and the increased damage from the talent isn’t significant enough to cripple any prio target or single target damage that you’d want in a dungeon or raid encounter.

MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - Unless rapture is redesigned, I think this talent should be removed and replaced. I’ll discuss its replacement towards the end.

Siphon life: this talent is widely disliked because it has limited interaction with any abilities in the toolkit and does low damage. Yet, everyone plays it because of how malefic rapture works. It also contributes to summon darkglare damage. Personally, I do not hate this ability. In aoe, it can provide some movement gcds because siphon isn’t necessarily required for our aoe damage. There should be some additional talents that provides an easier way to apply this dot in multi target scenarios if it is kept as a talent however. Otherwise, the talent could be jettisoned.

Choice node: Phantom Singularity/Vile Taint

Phantom Singularity – This ability has a longer CD than vile taint, doesn’t cost a soul shard, is instant cast and is applied to the target is uncapped aoe on targets on close targets and heals. Theoretically, this ability is quite strong for single target. In execution, there are notable problems. First, presumably because of the healing aspect, haste decreases the duration of this dot rather than increasing the number of dot tics per time. Considering the fixed cooldown, haste doesn’t impact single target damage except when paired with dot extensions. This talent was only played in heavy movement fights, with specific fight timings or aoe scenarios where the profile of this ability fit better than vile taint. The affliction warlock community felt like this ability was undertuned the entire expansion and was disappointed that it wasn’t buffed.

Vile taint – This ability is 30s CD, cost a should shard, has a 1.5s cast time is an area of effect ability that hits up to 8 targets and in addition to the vile taint dot, it also applies agony and exhaustion to those targets. This ability has been the go to ability for most PVE encounters. However, that does not mean it is well liked, and for many reasons.

DESIGN FAILURES OF VILE TAINT
First, the duration of vile taint and the application of agony has been a sticking point for aff locks all expansion. The design idea is that the player should reapply agony before it drops to maintain agony stack count and keep high damage rolling. In practice, this means that during agony pandemic windows after you’d extended dots with darkglare, you refresh 4-5 agonies and then vile taint is available to cast again in just a few seconds. This feels exceptionally bad to play and a waste of gcds, even though it is a dps increase. Often there are comparisons to shadow crash with shadow priests or the combination of cataclysm and raging demonfire for destruction warlock. The cooldown and duration of shadow crash matches vampiric touch duration for shadow priest while the combination of cataclysm and channel demonfire allows for continuous dot uptime without having to individually cast these dots.
Second, the application of exhaustion as a curse to targets is actually antisynergistic to the utility that warlock provides in many dungeon scenarios. Some of the greatest danger in a dungeon derives from casts. Dangerous casts can be drastically mitigated by curse of tongues, particularly using amplify curse in the class tree. However, on all mobs that are not immune to exhaustion, vile taint replaces curse of tongues with curse of exhaustion. During the set up window, ideally you want to use every gcd possible after VT for dots if playing malefic rapture as spender or you want to immediately get into soul rot and darkharvest window. So more ideal gameplay is to identify the casting mobs and apply curse of tongues to them. Then, go into the damage generation window. Vile taint basically makes this impossible because it replaces that curse.

MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - The curse of exhaustion element should either be removed or made so that it will not replace an existing curse on a target. Or, it should apply curses in a smart manner where any target that has a kickable cast that is hit with vile taint also should get tongues while mobs without a kickable cast get exhaustion.

Third, vile taint appears to PREFER targets without agony on them. So if the player identifies a target that they want to prio damage abilities onto and the number of targets is larger than 8, the lock needs to put agony on the other targets and not the prio target to ensure that the main target gets both agony and vile taint from the vile taint cast. When there are instances like the risen dragons in Galakrond’s fall with many small oozes around the risen dragons, it is quite difficult to actually get agony and vile taint on these dragons, particularly if you pull two of them at a time. This behavior is incredibly frustrating. And considering we cannot apply vile taint as an individual cast, these types of pulls end up as a weakness to affliction’s toolkit. Normally, rapture damage is quite strong on prio targets but that requires having full dots on that target. Not getting vile taint onto the primary target drastically reduces the damage capacity we can do to our priority target. MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - A possible fix to this is to make vile taint uncapped but only applies agony and a curse to 8 targets. In shadow lands, vile taint was uncapped so this isn’t that far out of our history for the spec.

Pandemic invocation – I like this talent. It isn’t particularly strong, particularly with regards to shard gen. But, i like the concept and it is a reward for proper dot upkeep.

Inevitable demise – This talent is one of the coolest talents that affliction locks have, in my opinion. Particularly when you pair it with soul rot. It provides the opportunity for a strong defensive, when paired with vile taint, provides the potential for funnel damage to use drain life at 50 stacks more frequently. With soul rot, it provides the ability to cleave onto all targets with soul rot so that’s up to 6 targets (target of drain life doesn’t have soul rot will cleave to the 5 targets that do). In the class tree, affliction can play grim feast and increase the haste of drain life by 30% which makes this a high dps ability with 6 target cleave. However, this ability is significantly undertuned for single target. It is currently a dps loss to press the button at 50 stacks. In aoe, we have a passive ability in soul flame that provides good funnel damage to prio mobs and does decent damage in the dungeon. Functionally, ID has been relegated to a defensive ability when it could be so much more. Furthermore, it is another immobile ability and it is antisynergistc with generating tormented crescendo procs which makes it feel even worse to play even where it would gain value.

MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - This is where I want to propose a change for absolute corruption. As I said, I think absolute corruption is outdated and should be removed. I think a good alternative is to take an idea from Season of Discovery. The master channeler rune converts drain life into a 15s dot with a cooldown equal to its duration. This ability would be the go to talent in aoe when you can combine it with inevitable demise and soul rot. Furthermore, it would still provide another dot for single target rapture damage. It is likely that the damage would need to be tuned such that siphon life would provide better single target utility and reduce the healing from drain life with master channeler so that the self-sustain for affliction wouldn’t be overpowered. However, this would provide an avenue for easier application of malefic rapture in aoe scenarios, a strong synergy of cooldowns and a damage boost for affliction that it desperately needs.

Soul swap – This ability is a fun and strong ability, if implemented correctly. In its current state, it is too costly to use except in very specific scenarios. It costs two gcds and a shard. It transfers UA which may or may not be preferred given the situation. It doesn’t transfer debuffs like shadow’s embrace or dread touch. So even if you set up completely on one target and swap to the next as it spawns for prio target damage, it still needs further set up to do max damage.
MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGES - First, Soul swap shouldn’t cost a shard if it is going to copy dots (it should also copy debuffs too). The 30s cooldown is appropriate in my opinion.
Second, there should be an option to use soulburn with soul swap so that when using a shard, the player can instantly apply all baseline dots to the target in one gcd.
Third, there should be an associated talent with soul swap that we have called swap bolt. This would be similar to the deathbolt ability in that when the player copies the dots from one target and applies to the next target, this new target takes an upfront hit of damage that is a percentage of the dot damage transferred. This would only apply to targets that the player is copying dots to so is not meant to be used a single target cool down. One of the biggest weakness of affliction the entire expansion was the inability to swap to a target that needs to die in a short duration and do significant damage to that target. This swap bolt cooldown would significantly improve that weakness.

Soul flame – I don’t like this talent. I dislike talents that are passive damage when the target dies on a large scale. There is very little interaction with targets necessary to provide this damage bonus, often the damage occurs towards the end of the pack and provides little meaningful damage because the targets were dying anyway. MINOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - I would much rather this be a proc chance based on using rapture.

Grimoire of Sacrifice – This talent is fine. I personally don’t mind having an option to sacrifice pets for the command ability and gaining a small amount of single target dps.

Focused Malignancy – I like the concept of this talent. It should provide the tuning knob for single target rapture. The problem is that it is almost never used as such. Rapture damage beyond single target is actually quite poor. MINOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - I would much rather rapture be increased in its base damage and focused malignancy reduced in effect so that rapture would have a better aoe profile but that type of tuning did not occur at all once this talent was reintroduced in around 10.0.7.

Withering bolt – this is talent is fine. It is interactive with the toolkit. It isn’t particularly exciting but nothing that I would complain about really.

Sacrolash’s Dark Strike – This is basically a dead talent in PVE content. The damage gain is low, the curse extension is basically meaningless, it is too costly at 2 points to path towards lower talents. It needs a rework for it to be functional in pve content.

FINAL TIER TALENTS

Creeping Death – This is a strong, if not uninspiring talent. It is much improved in dragonflight such that it doesn’t reduce the duration of dots and just increases tic rate. I’m going to hold off on discussing the associated talents because they aren’t as directly connected to this ability whereas the subsequent talent rows have connecting talents that are directly related.

Tormented Crescendo – This is one of my favorite abilities in the tree. The ability to proc instant raptures and use those for movement gcds and extra damage during full dot windows is one of the most fun aspects of the spec. Excellent ability.

Haunt – This is an iconic talent. It is sad that given the playstyle and tuning of affliction, haunt is often not played in mythic plus because it has so little value in aoe and compared with other options in the lower third of the three provides the least value. It is prudent to discuss haunt with the next to rows to which it connects. First, seized vitality. This talent is purely a point tax. It is one of the most ineffectual talents in the entire tree. I’ll accept that for what it is. Personally, I would prefer some type of useful non-damage tax here than something disguised as both a damage and self sustain ability when it provides virtually no value for either. The final point is haunted soul. This ability is actually quite strong, particularly in spread cleave fights. 20% increased dot damage to all targets is very good. I personally think that the tax to take this talent is too high but some changes could change that.

Summon Darkglare – I personally like this ability. I don’t mind that the eyebeam damage isn’t that much damage. The way this ability changes how we approach the game with amplifying as many dot abilities as possible is really interesting. Players however do not like this ability because the eye beam damage is low and the dot extension isn’t perceived as that impactful. That being said, the associated talents are amplifying what is uninteresting about the ability. Malevolent visionary is one of the worst conceptions of an ability you could imagine to me. Summon darkglare for max value takes a significant amount of gcds to set up properly. Then, the eyebeam lasts 20s after set up. This talent providing an additional 10s of eye beam time is often useless in any dungeon content because the eyeball is just floating next to the player as the group is moving to the next set of mobs doing nothing. The increased eyebeam damage itself is fine. However, extending the eyebeam duration is functionally worthless. Grim reach is one of the better abilities associated with summon darkglare. Again, the point tax associated with malevolent visionary is the issue. MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGES - In my opinion, grim reach should just be consolidated with the baseline version of darkglare. Darkglare eyebeam should be reduced in duration to 10s. And there should be an associated talent that increases the tic rate of dots on targets by 10% per point (2 point talent) for the duration of darkglare. This would make the people very happy to press this cooldown. Grand warlock’s design is almost never taken by affliction. It would see more play if summon darkglare was a strong ability relative to other capstone abilities.

Wrath of Consumption – I like this ability a lot but the dot buff is too weak. 15% dot buff when only around 50% of our damage is dots is a pretty underwhelming talent, particularly considering that the uptime in most encounters is not going to be particularly high. Having something that at best is 7.5% bonus damage at the expense of another talent in funnel situations isn’t strong. MINOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - In my opinion, this needs to be increased to 4% or 5% per stack for 20-25% increased dot damage.

Soul rot – I think this is an excellent addition to affliction warlock gameplay. The entire row to the capstone should be discussed together. First, the ability to cleave to 5 targets now is very strong. With a strong interaction with inevitable demise and drain life, it provides an opportunity to combine funnel damage, aoe and a defensive in a single channel. Unfortunately, inevitable demise has been exceptionally undertuned all expansion. Soul eater’s gluttony was changed in 10.2 to be a flat reduction instead of based on UA dot tics. This was an excellent quality of life change and it is a worthy point tax to get to the final capstone. Dark harvest at 4% haste and crit per target soul rot hits is exceptionally strong in aoe. MINOR SUGGESTED CHANGE -The only criticism I have is that it is capped at 8s and doesn’t track with the duration of soul rot. Attaching the buff to soul rot would increase the synergy with dot extension abilities like darkglare and the current tier 4p bonus.

Xavius’ Gambit – This is a fine, but boring talent. It is functionally another talent tax to get to the capstones.

Choice node: Dread Touch/Doom Blossom

Dread Touch – I think this is a great talent. It provides another debuff to maintain which is afflictions bread and butter while providing a really strong dot boost. MINOR SUGGESTED CHANGE It might even be too strong and some of that power might better be served by distributing more damage to baseline dots.

Doom Blossom – This is also a good talent. Functionally, it is a buff to seed. It provides nearly a 10% boost to aoe damage. However, it contributes nothing to single target.

The issue is that talents that are so strong in their respective situations, ST vs aoe, should not be mutually exclusive. The result is that with the aoe option, the spec underperforms in single target and with the single target option, the spec underperforms in aoe. This results in a spec that is not really good in any dungeon scenario. MAJOR SUGGESTED CHANGE - These talents should be separated and tuned respective to their accessibility in the tree.

8 Likes

Most people have been playing demo because of how strong it’s been. However aff isn’t really as weak as you’re claiming and is showing a lot of strength on the last three bosses especially Tindral.

One of the big reasons is everyone is set up for demo crit/vers when Aff is haste/mastery

Mythic logs show that Aff has solid root damage as demo but much better boss damage.

1 Like

I’m aware of its strength on Tindral. Its single target strength relative to demo is a function of funnel. Which I described in my post. And the rest of the fights besides council, which it isn’t any better than destro, affliction isn’t particularly strong. I don’t think it is strong on smolderon and there are very few players who have killed fyrakk as affliction. It also is curious that we see affliction play months after the raid is released and at far lower numbers than other specs.

I don’t find that being strong on one or two bosses per raid in the past two tiers changes the fact that the spec has exceptionally low play rates. This is especially true for mythic plus which is what I focus on most.

Aff is never going to be strong in mplus because of how the spec is designed.

Also play rates don’t mean anything.

That’s literally the point of this post, to address design failures of the spec.

5 Likes

I didn’t read literally every word but I skimmed through and thought that while you bring up some good points I feel like the biggest problem with affliction is that at it’s core it is a builder spender spec where the builder is completely RNG. I’m not sure if this was mentioned in your post or not. Shard generation RNG is the most frustrating part of playing the spec. So many things compete for shards and often times you’re unable to properly maintain your rotation because you got unlucky and didn’t have a shard to refresh vile taint on time or you had a shard for vile taint and now you soul rot but you don’t have another shard or TC proc so you can’t maintain dread touch. I listen to kalamazi ask for a soul burn component for soul stone and my skin crawls. The cost for pressing soul burn is SO much higher for affliction than the other two specs and it’s because shard generation is RNG.

Personally I’d start improving affliction by redesigning how shard generation works, I was thinking we could tie it to a fully channeled drain soul or something like that because of how TC works and it wouldn’t be a hugely different change to what we have now ‘fishing’ for procs against mobs that aren’t dying.

5 Likes

I mean, did you even look the topic which you’re replying to ? It’s literally called “How to Improve Affliction”.

And play rates do actually mean something.

It’s hard to take the opinion of someone, who by all metrics (A singular, untimed 18 EB for experience with Affliction in M+ this season),seem to not comprehend how the spec works (DB in a Tyrannical week ?) seriously, vs the OP, who is top 10 worldwide on the Spec in M+.

At this point, I’m not even sure that you’re arguing in good faith or if you’re just trolling.

Personally I’d like to see

  1. drain life baked back into drainsoul
  2. remove SL, and buff each dots contribution to MR damage
  3. agonizing corruption either extends or does something more with agony
  4. PS/VT give VT two charges and PS, give it a 30 second cd to match VT
  5. increase shard gen
  6. and have haunt apply shadows embrace again
  7. instead of extending our dots, it would be great if dark glare gave us a dark soul misery esc haste buff
4 Likes

I thought about including this. There is definitely a feast or famine component to shard gen and during a ST target fight, it would be nice to have a guaranteed way to generate shards. I haven’t really conceived of it fully though. You’d want to either have more rng with drain soul having a chance to generate shards or you would want to introduce shard fragments from filler that after so many tics you get enough shard fragments for a full shard.

Regarding the soulburn aspect, a good idea that I have seen is that soulburn should have its own charges separate from our builder spender so that each spec has equal opportunity cost to using the ability. And that it refreshes on a timer.

The way i understand aff shard gen is you get shard fragments 1-32 on agony ticks and when it gets to 100 you get a shard, I’d buff it maybe 80 points to get a shard instead of 100?

I hadn’t thought about a charge system for VT. that could be interesting for agony refresh in aoe.

I presume #7 is referring to darkglare. Yeah, i have an extended section on this. I like darkglare but having a DSM component to the cooldown, which I do suggest, would be ideal for spending extra talent points. MV just isn’t a good talent imo. And grim reach should just be baked into a darkglare with the eyeball on a much shorter action time so that in most contexts, it feels like it is a good cooldown to press.

Yes darkglare.

Yes I did read it. It’s coming from someone that doesn’t raid mythic and is downplaying afflictions viability.

No they actually don’t.

Take three specs.

X

Y

Z

X is performing the best over Y and Z so most people are going to play spec X.

Y and X share the same stat priority and spec Y is played on fights that favor it over spec X like council for example.

Spec Z is performing ok but not as a strong as spec X or spec Y because of this the majority of players of this class are playing spec X.

The strength of spec Z doesn’t change because 10% of people are playing it over 60%.

Good thing I wasn’t arguing mythic plus. I’m talking raiding. I only do mythic plus for vault slots. It’s not my primary enjoyment in this game. If I was to only prioritize mplus I’d play a more meta class better for mplus like my mage.

On top of that I only have one week of affliction keys because I swapped to affliction for mythic tindral prog as Aff is performing better for that fight.

So yeah nitpick a Monday night pug 18 eb for a vault slot that wasn’t timed and talk about my “bad faith” arguments.

PS I never said affliction couldn’t use some qol changes. I just said it’s not as bad as OP implied it was.

I’m sorry you can’t refute points and go straight to in trolling.

I read through the entire thing. While I do agree with a good majority of what was written, there’s a few things I’d like to highlight and ideas to throw in there:

  • I honestly think that UA being limited to a single target hampers the spec. Obviously any talent that affects it should be rebalanced;

  • I like the idea of SoC being a CD. What I would like however is for it to also spread Agony instead of VT. I’ll detail more below;

  • I agree that Shadow Embrace provides more bloat than anything. It also contributes to one, if not Affliction’s biggest weakness, which is target swapping. The talent in my opinion should be scraped and its effect should be baked in Affliction’s spec aura.

  • On Vile Taint, I think there’s 2 things (Disclaimer, this suggestion is assuming it would be balanced appropriately):

                            1. It should lost its CD/or if it keeps its CD, extend the DoT's duration to match the CD;
                            2. Going back to UA not being limited to a single target, I feel that VT should spread UA, either via a cleave effect or by applying a fresh DoT on the targets;
    
  • Agreed on DB and DT being on separate nodes. These two sharing the same is an anchor on the spec.

  • I might be wrong here but I feel that Blizzard is afraid of MoP’s Soul Swap and that it limits its potential. I feel the ability should have no Shard cost nor any CD but a limit to the amount of target that the DoTs can be copied to should imposed. It would at least be a step forward in alleviating Affliction’s dreadful target swapping capacity.

In the end, I feel that it’s possible for the spec to be DoT centric and strong in every aspect of the game, whether it’s ST, AoE or target swaping.

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I personally dont think either of these comments are helpful to the discussion.

Correct, I don’t raid mythic. But i also think you are overstating the quality of affliction in the raid. it isn’t hard to be a part of a community that discusses these things and talks about strengths and weaknesses. And i also feel like you just completely discount the spec in mythic plus because design which in my view is a failure on the dev’s part.

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You’re entitled to your opinion.

Which is what I was commenting on. The game isn’t just about mythic plus.

You said a statement about affliction in raid. I commented that you’re downplaying how affliction is in the raid.

Not once did I say affliction couldn’t use some qol changes but it’s not as bad as you were making it out to be. Even Kalamzi stated that Aff is on the come up in his last video

Looking at mythic logs affliction is performing in a solid spot for most of the fights. I will say it could use some ST love and there’s only a few fights where it’s the worst lock spec.

I “discount” the spec in mythic plus because the way it’s designed to do damage as a dot class is against the core goals of mythic plus which is speed.

Having a class that’s designed around managing dots on multiple targets isn’t going to fair well in mythicnplus. It’s playable sure but it won’t be meta.

The changes needed to make Aff more mplus viable hurts the spec overall in raiding.

That won’t happen because if you make one spec strong in every aspect like that without a trade off you’re going to force everyone to play that spec.

With pure dps classes each spec is supposed to have its own unique damage profile that gives it an edge in certain situations compared to the other specs. If you make one spec excel in each situation there’s zero reason to play the other specs.

Yet you have people still playing Assassination and Outlaw for Rogues and not just Subtlety at much higher rate than people playing Destruction or Affliction vs Demonology.

It’s possible to have two balanced specs in Pure Classes that are strong in all aspect yet having two different playstyle. These are not mutually exclusive.

Shadow Priest somehow managed to do so in both raid raiding and M+.

This is not a spec issue, it’s a balance one.

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You’re either starved for shards or You’re flooded by them. No in-between that i have experienced. Fix the rng for shard regen or have shadow bolt or drain soul give shards similar to how shadow bolt does for demo. Vile taint cd needs to be more in line with agony’s duration, like shadow crash is for shadow priest dots. Remove darkglare and bring back Misery (the haste CD). Malific rapture needs empower dots, not dots empower malific rapture. Affliction “fixed”.

Because some people are one tricks. Sin play rate was extremely high early patch because of how strong it was. Outlaw and sin both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Most people will play outlaw for keys and raid sub and outlaw depending on the fight.

Outlaw for fights like gnarl/igirra and sub for smolderon/tindral as examples. It can even be something simple as not having proper weapons for each spec.

Easier said then done.

You’re also ignoring how damagenprofiles work.

Shadow priest isn’t a pure class. It’s also been awful most of this patch.

You’re comparing apples and oranges.