I’m a longtime aff fan, but have been playing destro the last couple of expacs. and admittedly at the VERY casual level. I just love the big green fire.
Affliciton has always been about dots. I raided in TBC towards the end and WOTLK as affliction. we had 7 dots to manage.
to me, the biggest problem is how many GCDs it takes to put up the dots and the penalty for either not refreshing dots (esp. agony) or clipping dots (maybe that really isn’t a thing now).
i can think of two things that would improve game play in my opinion:
-make haunt a talent that spreads all dots from one target to everything within x yards.
and
-line up the duration of agony with the CD of vile taint. it is fine to have to reapply dots, but having to refresh dots on multiple targets individually kinda sucks. or maybe make drain life always be multi target and refresh agony, or something like that.
I agree consistent shard generation would be a vast improvement.
it is all still better than having to farm shards to fill your shard bag though
Think what affliction needs is more shard spenders. Malefic rupture is “fine,” but perhaps there can be another option for affliction locks to spend shards on.
I mean hell just grab some of its pvp talents and tune them to be actual talents, those are great shard spenders with satisfaction
No intention in arguing back and forth, but I’ve never understood the conviction behind this statement. Affliction was excellent in M+ during Legion. It was also reasonably strong in SL S1.
I’ve played affliction for years, and I have only recently stepped into Demo. I run haste/mastery with very, very minimal crit/verse yet demo does more damage than affliction on Single Target for me. Affliction only tops my demo damage if the tanks doing some significantly large pulls (like the hallways before pig face in waycrest where I can hit 1M dps with seed spam pretty easily).
MR is a very meh ability. It feels useless on trash, as SOC pumps more. It feels meh on ST. I’d rather MG come back to replace DS. Force extra ticks of dot damage single target. Hell, compared to how affliction currently plays, I’d rather go back to UA stacking. While my AOE wasn’t as high as Demo or Destro during the UA stacking era, I could dominate the other two specs single target.
It just makes me sad, because I don’t raid a lot and I don’t want to feel like a total hindrance bringing affliction (my absolute preferred spec) to a dungeon. I’ve enjoyed shadow priest, though, in DF so that’s helped curb my DPS fix.
Malefic Rapture is a charged ability.
Where 1 shard deals X damage and extends dots by 8 seconds.
Each additional shard spent increases damage and reduces dot extension.
5 shards deals heavy damage but no dot extension.
Just trying to think outside the box. Unlikely they’ll go back and resurrect old mechanics, so trying to think of something that hasn’t been done.
remove the 1 target limit restriction for UA.
Buff dot durations to 30secs for all dots.
Seed of corruption needs to be a baseline spell. Current design is bad making you choose only between an AOE or single target build while Demo gets both.
PREACH PREACH PREACH. I only fell in love with Warlock just because of Affliction. It’s gimped, It’s limited, bloated because of Malefic Rapture, Locked to Single Target or AoE, Darkglare does nothing as a cooldown, and finally dot durations are really bad to refresh.
Incorrect. MR is the tool
That separates council type damage and single target type damage. Without MR and just dot damage Aff would either be strong on st and broken on council fights or balanced on council fights and turbo dog on ST fights.
Having ua as a spender was a terrible playstyle. No thank you.
Yeah but council fights aren’t really the important fights of the tier, like who cares if you just destroy dream council then deal regular/higher damage on fyrak.
I think the devs need to pick a lane with Aff if you want MR to do damage give us abilities that make MR hit like a truck and vice versa for dots/UA spender. This middle lane stuff is really hurting the spec imo.
The fight affliction is currently performing well on is Tindral because of the burst aoe from doom blossom on roots.
I’m also not talking about design points of a single tier. MR is that tool in the current design.
Lots of people would also complain if Aff was performing too well on council and strong on st.
There is already a talent that gives Aff more MR damage if there’s only dots on one target. I do think it should be buffed a bit. I would 100% play Aff more in ST if it’s damage was better.
If blizz wants to have MR be our spender my wishlist would be:
-the agony shard gen buffed
-SL removed.
-our dots contribution to MR increased to compensate.
-VT/PS equalized cd/dam ect. The only difference should be aoe or single target.
-Dark glare should no longer extend dots but give us a DSM haste buff.
-agonizing corruption should extend agony for aoe.
-drain life should be baked back into drain soul for aff and any spell or ability that buffs drainlife should work with drain soul.
replace dread touch with malefic grasp (dots tick faster while drain souling).
-haunt should again add a stack or refresh shadows embrace.
We probably wont see these kinda changes but they’d slap if we did.
That would make the spec too easy. I could see VT applying it if VT was the pure aoe talent. Makes it easier in aoe situations but still need to maintain in ST.
