Does anyone else feel like damage over time effects are getting more and more useless on every spec/class that has them as time goes on? Why is seed of corruption useful for the instant burst damage it does, rather than the damage over time effects it applies? Even if we didn’t take seed of corruption, we would probably be relying on Maleific Rapture for most of our AOE damage.
I feel like dots should be the main way that Affliction does damage, not instant bursty damage. I don’t get why they removed unstable affliction as a spender. And if unstable affliction as a spender is too difficult for some players to handle in AOE or whatever, why not make Maleific Rapture an AOE specific damage over time effect, rather than making it our only spender apart from seed of corruption?
It just doesn’t make sense. Affliction is THE damage over time class, so why is like half of our damage (or more?) from instant and bursty.
Sadly that all went over the shadow priests for some reason. After legion blizz decided to kneecap affliction so they wouldn’t have to deal with balancing it again.
Affliction done right is one of the main reasons i’m playing wrath rn
MoP soul burn Haunt coming back was a step in the right direction but even with that . Rapture and the new 4 set buffing rapture damage on proc by 40% - puts rapture back at the top of the meters, leaving aff feeling like shadowlands again.
I’m one of those strange Warlocks. I don’t love MR, but I don’t hate it either. It’s part of the game currently, something we just have to deal with. There are a bunch of advocates for a replacement, but there doesn’t seem to be any word that it will ever be changed.
You can fully talent in to all dots and mostly the only time you’ll be using MR is ST. Extending dots with DG, Creeping Death, super Haunt, Aff at least feels more Aff like than it did in BFA and SL, even though the playstyle is roughly similar.
Because in the current state of the game especially m+ a DoT isn’t worth bringing. M+ is all about bursty damage in a short time and DoTs simply takes too long to do full damage.
In most circumstances, burst damage is simply a more preferable profile. Having a large amount of damage tied into DoTs is a) really hard to balance in extended multi-dot scenarios, hence the constant rebalancing of Shadow, Aff, and Balance, and b) only good at single target or extended multi-dot scenarios, at least in PvE.
the current balance design team literally has some kind of love with long cooldowns. If every class does trash damage outside of cooldowns, you can color them up and make the spells all sparkly, and then now you only have to balance around 2-3 long cooldowns per class since everything else the class does is meaningless fodder damage.
They’ve literally taken the balancing out of the spells and just make sure they balance long cooldowns. Garbage design, i really hate this era of cooldown wow.
i’ve played spriest every expansion, and warlock a lot of that time as well, and they just ripped our dot damage away and turned dots into “combo points/abilities” per say. Dots do no damage, but hey, you must apply them so that other things do more damage. Once in a while we pull a rabbit out of the hat because they missed it and we can rot, but they quickly correct that mistake and put us back on lockdown with garbage like Malefic Rupture.
When i saw Malefic Rupture introduced, i knew Affliction dot damage was likely forever gone while this stupid spell is active. Yah so we can dot things, but we have to turret cast for the dots to do damage? Malefic Rupture is garbo. We already had haunt, now we have to cast so many things as affliction… what the funk. We have more cast time required spells now than we have instants.
Same for spriests, now we’re going to be applying dots to be able to proc coalescing shadows and to proc Talbadar’s legendary effect with mind blasts. We’re just mind spike spammers now with the occasional huge mind blast, but we still have to dot up everything with dots that do no damage so that our casts do damage… So depressing. Obviously design team lacks an old school experienced warlock/spriest player.
ive always thought afflic lock was strong but in pvp that is. though if they are weak right now in pve. they do need a just a huge rework. from a pvp standpoint i felt they were strong if u kited right. the fact u couldnt really have the healer dispell the dots because of some spell that the name i cant remember has a huge draw back of just taking so much dmg if u dispelled it. so really it was all about pillar humping as to not die.
I fully agree. The dots themselves do embarrassing damage. All you have to do is use this one none dot ability and then take these two other dots to make your dots do the damage they should BUT they are talents so if you don’t pick correctly in the “choice” Blizzard is giving you then all your dots will be worthless.
As others have implied, a lot of it has to do with encounter design and how that has impacted class/spec design. Not only is on-demand burst a preferable damage profile, but there is no cost to playing a spec that can do this. In older iterations of this game, Aff had staying power with LT and Dark Pact as mana was still a finite resource, thus while other casters had to throttle their damage and conserve mana, locks and aff especially could perform closer to max output. That sort of dynamic doesnt exist anymore so there are fewer gameplay mechanics and concepts to balance more dot-oriented classes around.
It’s more of just no spells hit for ANYTHING when you don’t have cooldowns up. This cooldown version of WoW that’s been going on for 3 expansions is soooooo boring. Why do they feel the need to balance every bit of damage around waiting for 3 mins?
It really doesn’t. It’s your generic builder spender that just has a couple of dots and in terms of utility the only thing you are correct on is how overloaded PI is with twins.
Affliction has no pvp burst at all. Spriest does and has similar rot damage. Higher consistent on a target and more utility.
For affliction to have no burst at all, it needs higher rot. They can just buff the pvp talent to give higher dot dmg while it’s active.
It’s also gcd heavy with too much bloat. Too many dots to keep up on 3 targets for the same effectiveness. Dots need consolidated yet they add more. Chanimal doesn’t even play soul rot cause of this