Until Aff gets nerfed into the ground because of council fights.
It maybe a weird opinion but aff should either be a dot spec or an malefic rapture spec, cause this hybrid playstyle isnât the play.
I donât think people realize MR is how Blizz is keeping Aff ST decent without breaking it on council/aoe.
Edit forgot about FM. Point still stands.
This exists. Focused malignancy
Youâre just moving goalposts at this point.
I donât see it this way. Malefic rapture is actually a dot pay off ability. You being capable of juggling debuffs, optimizing dot uptime and using shards at the right time is what makes rapture appropriate for the spec.
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Speaking of focused malignancy, isnt it kinda weird aff has multiple talent points that do essentially the same thing
MR buff (focused malignancy and kindled malice) Drain soul buff (sargeri tech, dark virtuosity and withering bolt)
Yeah, i talked about this a bit. Dark virtuosity i think it meant to be a small decrease in single target damage to enable taking seed and sow. so from a design perspective it is fine, if not uninspired.
My big problem with Aff is that itâs a spec of maintenance on top of maintenance.
Especially in aoe, it takes us so long to start doing real damage that by the time you start to do damage, your dots are already falling off. And with things like Rapture beating Seed in 2-5 target packs as long as you have SL spread, Aff is playing catch up from the start on every pack in M+. Then you throw on top agony needing to stack, 3 different debuffs to amp dot damage (though haunt sees little play in higher M+ these days) that basically do nothing beyond single target, and sometimes rng deciding you just donât get shards, and you end up never really reaching your real potential by the time itâs on to the next group.
Even in single target, you basically just switch between refreshing dots and refreshing debuffs to make your dots do damage. Fine for longer raid bosses, but a huge detriment to target swaps or immunity phases, which so many bosses love to have these days.
In my opinion, the first thing they need to address with Aff is the sluggish set up. And if they want Aff to have a slow ramp into big damage, then alternatively, it needs to have a way to maintain higher sustain damage that doesnât involve refreshing dots one at a time across multiple mobs.
Beyond that, a lot of our talents are just uninspired. Even the Azerite traits they ripped from BfA werenât the good ones. Surely thereâs a way to make Cascading Calamity work again, and even Wracking Brilliance would be a more interesting passive node than sacrolash or dark virtuosity.
I canât move goalposts when you flat out canât refute the points made.
Again sorry you canât handle the reality.
And lol at linking me focused malignancy. That doesnât factor into any of my points aside from it further proves that MR is their tool to balance Aff so itâs ST isnât awful or aoe isnât broken.
I definitely agree with this assessment. I updated my intro sections a bit for clarity. But a lot of my proposed talent changes are directly related to slow ramp (although i could still make this more explicit), poor target swapping, tension with how we play rapture in medium target counts and how bad it feels to be individually dotting because of mismatch of CDs and duration.
Yeah, it can be hard to get across Affâs issues because it has glaring problems that are then compounded with no shortage of smaller problems. Pretty frustrating, since Aff feels very close to being a great spec.
It definitely doesnât help that most feedback on Aff is useless whining about MR, either.
It does almost feel like a good spec, Iâd say this expac aff felt best right after 10.0.7 (the one patch where it was bugged out) sure it was very strong but it did enough damage on its own w/o dread touch, we never had to play a feast or famine will i get a proc game and it never really had shard gen issueâs due to the haste scaling bug. Maybe a rework to make it play like that would be a cool baseline for aff?
I think a lot of us are hoping for a rework for 11.0, but also wanting the spec to be more playable in S4 until then.
Theyâve done a pretty good job with other dot specs after their reworks, so I have confidence they could do a good job with an Aff rework, as well. Just a matter of if thatâs something on the table or not. Would love if theyâd give us a headâs up one way or the other.
A rework would be great, maybe give us the mage treatment just synergize the class more.
This is what I want as well. Something that covers what RPG said for weaknesses (slow ramp-up and terrible target swapping).
If they could alleviate these issues in S4 (while hopefully they do a rework for A War Within), the spec would already feel a lot better to play.
The community has taken the word rework to mean a lot more than it means. What iâve suggested is a pretty significant rework, but I try to stay within the bounds of what affliction is now. But there are changes that they could make that would instantly make the spec feel better to play that are more tweaks or some added abilities. And some just want the entire spec stripped down and built from the ground up because they dislike it so much and tweaks would just be a band aid on a gaping wound, so to speak.
Anyway, as I said, I hope the right people take seriously posts like this, ones that are meant in good faith to provide constructive feedback on the state of the spec and some of many possible solutions to address what are perceived weaknesses. And we get something to improve our play in season 4. And hey, once they finalize the hero talents, weâll see how those synergize with current aff gameplay, too.
It feels weird being a class without real cooldowns across the board.
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Yeah, a favorite suggestion in the warlock discord is to replace malevolent visionary with a DSM like cooldown associated with darkglare that is specific for dots. I incorporated that in my suggestions. Darkglare should feel strong, particularly with investment in additional talent points. And I have always been unimpressed with it MV and GR, even when it was pretty strong in season 2. Having that eyeball hanging around next to you while the pack is dead just feels so bad. This was common to see up to like +23-+24 fortified keys before the scaling difficulty change and then it was even higher.
No devs read these forums. They are more likely to reach out to the discords.