I had mentioned to my raid lead that I wanted to swap to warlock when SL’s comes out. To where he basically said if I did I would have to be affliction which is fine. Yet he added that I would need to know how to snapshot which from my understanding is when you continue a buffed dot on adds and so forth to amp your damage up. I can’t find anything though about it for SL’s and was curious if they were indeed bringing it back, or keeping it dynamic like it is currently?
I could be wrong but haven’t heard anything about snapshotting so I don’t think so. I am pretty sure snapshotting is unique to Feral Druids now.
But there is a mechanic with DoTs called Pandemic (named after an old Affliction talent) that extends the duration of DoTs by 33% if you refresh at 33% duration remaining (it is either 30% or 33%, I believe 33%).
In other words, if you refresh Agony at 6-7 seconds you will get a 24 second Agony which you can maintain if you keep refreshing Agony within that time period. As far as I know it works for any DoT that can be refreshed. Currently it does not work for Unstable Affliction because you are unable to refresh it, but it will work for UA again in Shadowlands.
edit: looks like it is a thing for Assassination too based on what the guy below me said.
Snapshotting, deliberately allowing an empowered dot to expire from the target rather than overwriting it with a weaker dot, is a thing in BfA and will probably continue to be a thing moving into SL unless I’ve missed something.
If my garrote on the target is strengthened by stealth and the shrouded suffocation azerite trait, I let it fully expire from the target rather than refresh it within its pandemic window with the standard, weaker version of garrote.
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I am pretty sure that Snapshotting is actually making sure not to overwrite a Dot with a weaker Dot. Like if you had popped your CD’s and such and applied corruption and then overwrite that corruption with one that is not buffed and does less damage.
It’s interesting to me because I thought Snapshotting was axed in WoD but I actually heard Preach talking about it on Feral Druid in a video I watched yesterday.
Yeah from what I’ve researched its “snapshotting” in the sense of their using tigers fury and another ability to buff their bleeds for their duration. Rather than infinity continuing it, at least that’s what I read when it used to be a thing on fire mage and aff lock.
Feral snapshots with things like Bloodtalons and the like.
Affliction does not have any snapshotting mechanics and hasn’t since WoD. The closest thing they have is the Malefic Wrath legendary and Necrolord ability to buff drain soul, so you would want them to run their full course, but that is much less DoT snapshotting and making it so you don’t waste damage proc buffs by clipping your channeled spells.
Well, the idea is that when you have a DoT that benefits from a buff you only refresh it if you can get benefit from that buff when you refresh it.
Otherwise you want the DoT to run its full course before applying it again to get the most damage you can out of the buffed DoT. But if you can reapply the DoT with the same buff, I believe it makes sense to refresh it during the Pandemic window.
Like the Rogue example, you wouldn’t want to refresh Garrote without the Subterfuge buff because you would lose those seconds of stronger Garrote ticks by refreshing it without the Subterfuge buff.
I mean yeah, pretty much what you said. Just confirming and adding a little more detail.
Okay so that’s how it works, I guess I would have to install a couple addons to track it all then given the random nature.
You won’t need them for Warlock. Things like trinket procs/Dark Soul and all the like update your spells dynamically. And since there aren’t any traits that empower individual applications of DoTs, the main goal is to just keep them all up, then start blasting with Rapture. The tricky part will be keeping the Shadow Embrace buff up on multiple targets during the DoT juggling.
Snapsshottings sounds fun…
Yeah. Pretty much what this means is if a proc buff or trinket effect expires during a DoT’s duration the damage will be readjusted automatically, so you can refresh freely without concern.
Frost dks have something that people call snapshotting but its just using your important abilities in the last seconds of pillar of frost. Its likely just called snapshotting as a throwback.
I want to echo this… you specifically don’t need them for warlock as snapshotting was removed because of warlocks. Thus blizz is very careful not to let us have it back.