So, first of all, I don’t do group content, but, I see lots of complaints about how bad affliction does for AOE. I think Blizz thinks we should simply dot everything, but that sucks, IMO, because of the global cooldown.
How do you guys think it would work if affliction had a talent that greatly reduced or eliminated the GCD on some or all of our instant casts?
Affliction is literally a DoT spec, if it sucks for people don’t play the spec. There are 2 other specs that aren’t DoT oriented specs, play those instead.
Now they could reduce the amount of DoTs it has and should reduce it cause currently it’s like 8 DoTs you can have. That’s absurd in itself. Reducing the GCDs is good, but I think Affliction should 100% be dotting everything, though.
I just don’t think it needs like 8 DoTs, though, and should just have 3 DoTs in total: Agony, Corruption and Unstable Affliction, UA should be casted like it is now and be up for a long time while also doing way more damage than everything else, too. It should be able to be up on multiple targets at once, just 1 per target like it was back in WoD and earlier expansions.
Reduce GCDs by reducing the amount of DoTs needing to be out and they can, then, increase DoT damage of the 3 DoTs remaining.
I would like for them to bring back the talent that causes Malefic Rapture to add 2 seconds to Agony, Corruption, and Unstable Affliction every time you cast it. It was a set bonus in Shadowlands and then they had it as a talent during Dragonflight beta but removed it.
Which kind of annoyed me when I saw that Shadow Priest has a talent that adds time to Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain just by channeling Mind Flay, which is their filler spell. Granted, it only works on the target they’re channeling on where as Rapture would be adding time to any target it hits with those dots on it.
But Rapture is also limited to Soul Shard procs and Affliction Warlocks have more debuffs to maintain overall. Siphon Life, Phantom Singularity, Vile Taint, and Soul Rot weren’t affected by it. Not to mention the need to maintain Shadows Embrace, Haunt, and Dread Touch (for single target) which also were/would not be affected.
Affliction AoE wouldn’t need it but single target and spread target cleave would greatly benefit. I loved that set bonus in Sepulcher of the First Ones.
EDIT: Now that I think about it. I’m pretty sure that set bonus only worked on a target that had Agony, Corruption, and Unstable Affliction. So if it returned I’d like for it to apply to those dots on any target to help with multidotting.
I’d like the ability to just remove soulswap and have UA usable on 3 targets and automatically apply agony and corruption as well. Make each (3 targets) and the additional dot application entries on the tree.
This would take care of small packs and you can supplement with vile taint.
Having seed of corruption on a shorter cast time (1.5) would help out a lot too.
The main problem with multidotting is that it does no damage and you are hard locked behind the GCD. You can only get so many Agonies applied. The Vile taint ability is nice but you cant keep up your agony stacks even on those targets unless you are dark glaring and even then you are struggling ontop of that the way that Affliction works now in AOE you need to be spamming Seed. So you end up in a feast or famine game play loop where you are loaded with shards during your vile taint window and then starved outside of it without the GCD’s to cast enough agonys to keep it ramping. If you sit and try and reapply agony by the time you get back through that loop your either capped on shards because your gcds are being used to Vile taint is back up. There needs to be a way to extend the duration of agony through seed or Malefic rapture that makes the gameplay something other than Vile taint, DG, Seed spam. Im cool with seed being the main AoE ability and spamming it but we need some kind of way to keep our agony rolling without having to waste 8 Gcds ontop of trying to keep your UA and Haunt rolling on your prio targets
That’s why I said just reduce the number of DoTs from like 15 abilities it has to 3. Kill SoC ability and replace it with something like a Defile like ability where every time Agony and Corruption tick, if there’s a target nearby that you’re in combat with that hasn’t had either of them applied at all yet it auto applies itself to them on the next tick. That literally solves the “we gotta spread these DoTs up each target” problem without needing to cast, meaning you just throw 1 Agony, 1 Corruption out and it’ll cast itself the very first time.
After that you do need to reapply them yourself because that’s what Aff is all about; applying and maintaining DoTs.
You don’t need to extend them if there’s way less GCD bloat. Also if they either got rid of MR and put Rapid Contagion in or they reworked MR into 1 of the following: reworked it into Rapid Contagion like ability where it’s just a CD that spends all shards at once and makes your DoTs tick faster for a duration or if they made it where every time you cast MR your DoTs do 3 ticks worth of damage per DoT per cast you have out on each target. This would mean like if you had 5 targets with 3 DoTs each, each DoT would tick 3 times per cast so it would be something like 15 ticks happening at the same time every cast because 5 targets x 3 dots per target x 5 casts = 15 x 5 = 75 ticks over all 5 casts so in the span of 5 GCDs worth you just got 75 ticks worth of damage out. That’s the only type of burst that makes sense for the spec and rot profile, that or just faster ticking things. Everything else is just nonsense that doesn’t need to be in the spec that takes away from the profile.
They had this as the hidden 2 or 4pc from Shadowlands Season 4 where if you took AC every time you used MR with Corruption up each Corruption ticked again. They could literally copy that over but put it for all DoTs you have out and multiply it from 1 tick to 3 ticks and there’s your burst while still pertaining to the “DoTs do more damage” type of deal and keeping true to it being a full on DoT spec.
We don’t need more ways to apply DoTs entirely, we just need it to be a passive spread itself kinda deal. That reduces the GCD bloat itself, and then we just reapply it ourselves. We also need a profile that full on fits DoT spec themes that isn’t counter intuitive to its design like how MR currently is. You’re a DoT spec, not a burst spec, not a nuke spec, so things that don’t deal DoT damage or pertain to it don’t necessarily need to be in it. I know I know, it goes against the game design for things like mythic+, but, the reason people don’t have fun is either a numbers game, as in it’s an ego thing, or it just literally doesn’t feel right playing the spec because the spec is counter designed to how people would imagine it or how it’s told to people.
Dots used to do damage many years ago, PvP people complained and that is why we are where we are now.
Faster gcd for dot spells. Or pairing 2 dots using a talent kinda like how shadow priest have shadow word pain paired with VT