How can it be that Kalamazi, in one day, came out with a much better aff talent tree than blizz devs did in “months” of development? Either they are lazy or they r clueless, or both. Embarrassing.
19 Likes
hes better than the current person whos devloping this class… he’s known and played warlock for yrs and have a solid understanding of their mechanics… thats the difference between blizzard just putting a jag (just another guy) on the job to do it, vs someone who has spent time and effort to understand, play and grasp the class to its full potiental on all fronts.
16 Likes
I disagree,
I think the dev for our class did an amazing job on his or her current design.
Not hating on the streamer, but he ruined my build and ruined what I wanted to do for my pvp content.
I also don’t like the idea of making Drain soul our main filler. I don’t understand the want of Malefic grasp. I don’t see that fun or engaging at all. I hate drain soul and its effect. I prefer drain life over it. Drain soul should just go back as a soul shard generator.
I hope they don’t do the changes he made onto this tree at all.
4 Likes
Kalamazi is a great lock and a great person to have in the lock community. That said, anyone who is doing build videos or tier lists at this point is doing nothing more than clickbait videos for views. It’s completely irrelevant until we know the relative damage these talents will end up bringing.
3 Likes
So I was watching Kalamazi’s stream when he was testing out some aff builds on Alpha as they flowed, seeing how damage was but overall the whole rotation was BAD. I think the goal of this video he made is to help develop a better talent tree that does not feel bad, which is not clickbait, but is good honest feedback that I hope Blizzard listens to. When he tried affliction on Alpha, dots where falling off before he even had the chance to cast deathbolt, he couldn’t keep up stacks of malefic wrath because the renewing on dots, and a lot of other issues that this tree fixes. So I don’t think this is clickbait, I think he wanted do make a video for the community and for the devs to help them see what a lot of the community is wanting.
I hope Blizzard sees this video and makes some edits to the aff tree to give the community more of the dot based build like we’ve been asking for for years. This accomplishes that dream fairly well I think. I do believe that in the Warlock Talent tree post, the devs mentioned that they wanted to move away from Dark Souls which Kalamazi’s tree includes so I don’t think they’d implement this whole tree, but I do hope they look at it and make edits to match the idea - a dot based damage class.
10 Likes
The main lessons to take away from this tree are that the spec looks better to play without MW and Deathbolt, and could probably do with siphon life being combined with something else to free up more time.
The lack of our current 2-set (Deliberate Malice) is a huge miss. If any sort of shard spender change does happen, this bonus needs to remain tied to it.
1 Like
The streamer didn’t ruin anything, lol! They have no control over you.
wat
(ten chars)
He was referring to this…
i know what he was referring to lol. His comment was a wat though.
What else would i say but reiterate that his design sucked for me and I wouldn’t like it? I think the devs one is fine.
Balance is easily dealt with. It’s called Tweaking numbers. This shouldn’t be a huge worry.
I don’t think Kalamazi’s version of the Aff tree is particularly bad. I think the bigger takeaway here is that the “single target” build for Aff is too busy and just not fun. There is way too much going in terms of casting, channeling, refreshing dots, maintaining buffs, hitting procs, lining up cooldowns, etc.
I do agree with Kalamazi here in that Rapid Contagion should definitely be in the Aff spec tree here. It lends itself to helping the spec feel that it’s more about DoTs than burst.
I’m kinda torn about the Malefic Rapture vs Unstable Affliction being the shard spender. I don’t think I have a preference. They excel in different areas.
I also definitely agree that the Darkglare tree and the Soul Rot tree should be swapped. In the tree’s current state, a single target is bad enough to have to stretch across the entire tree to pick up Darkglare because it’s our biggest cooldown.
Soul Swap is significantly lacking in this iteration. I would like to see more utility incorporated. The WotLK Soul Swap version inhaled your current dots and applied them to another target and that just felt right. I would like to see that again.
Overall, I certainly think there is something to be learned from Kalamazi’s tree, whether his suggestions are incorporated or not. The single target build of Affliction is severely lacking and at the same time “too busy.”
4 Likes
I like Kalamazi’s talent’s alot more than the current Dragonflight talents.
6 Likes
I don’t think MR should exist in its current state from SL. Now, I want the 2pc set to be there, so MR is fine to stay, but I think it should be reworked into “causes all current Affliction DoTs to tick” so basically MR just becomes 2pc AC hidden set bonus but for every single Aff DoT up. It should go to a charge system; 2 charges, 8 second recharge period and the extending mechanic should be 2 seconds per use.
I think Affliction filler should be Drain Soul, don’t care who agrees or disagrees, it fits perfectly regardless of whether the graphic is bad, outdated, etc. It literally thematically fits this spec to have that as a filler. Drain Life should honestly just either be baked into Drain Soul(via a talent for 30% of DS damage is healed back to you.) or it should just be scrapped, only usable when you are below 30% HP or something akin to that.
Shadow Bolt should go. It doesn’t thematically fit this spec at all whatsoever, doesn’t matter whether you want a “caster” esque type style or not, this spell makes 0 sense being in this spec.
Malefic Grasp returning is a very good design for the spec for ST. He split it up, which is fine.
Darkglare should be removed from the spec, not try to redo it or make it work, it should be completely gone. Aff is not a spec that needs more pets or minions, it’s a Damage over Time spec.
Siphon Life should be removed. Affliction should just have 3 DoTs, maybe 4 not more than that. VT can stay to count as the 4th DoT, tops, on a 20 second CD I guess or VT can be changed into something like:
“Vile Taint; Your Seed of Corruption cast time reduced by 50% and now also makes Seed of Corruption apply Agony and Curse of Exhaustion in addition to Corruption to all mobs it damages.” This would be fine. They can put SoC on a charge system because:
I don’t think Affliction needs a shard spender. I don’t think it needs Soul Shards, but if I had to choose a shard spender for it, then honestly just keep Rapid Contagion as the Shard spender. SoC can have 3 charges, and then using a talent it can get 2 more charges or something so you can use SoC 5 times in a row and then have to wait. If a ST spender is needed, throw Haunt back into it just like it was in WoD.
UA should be a regular DoT, more than 1 out at once but only 1 per target just like how it was in WoD. It was just a more powerful regular DoT you did that because it had a cast time with it it dealt more damage than the rest of the DoTs along with dispel protection, too, still being there. Dispel protection; cannot crit but it deals 35-40% of the dispeller’s max HP in damage. This makes absolute certainty you don’t want to dispel at bad times. 35% is fine, much like how greater pyro hits for 35% max hp on a 15 second CD.
Death’s Embrace: I love he put this there, but I think this should actually start at 100% mob HP for a 0% bonus and scale upwards as the mob’s HP scales downwards. Every 1% missing health from enemy target your DoTs either tick 1% or 0.5% faster or they deal that same amount more damage, instead. Honestly speaking I’d prefer faster tick speeds for it, and then let your Mastery give you much more damage scaling.
Having all of these “faster ticking” speeds gives DoTs burst damage. No, it doesn’t shorten their duration, just speeds up their ticks much like how Rapid Contagion does in PvP currently.
This is how DoT specs will keep up with burst specs while keeping true to the “over time” nature, by just speeding their time over without reducing their duration.
We can address the scaling of this by “Beyond 4 targets. deals 20% less damage.” “Beyond 8 targets, deals an additional 30% less damage.” This kinda thing would be fine, imo.
The Soulburn: Haunt thing was so awesome that they added in there, I loved it. Glad he kept it.
Creeping Death: just changed to reflect the same thing as RC: “Your Agony, Corruption and Unstable Affliction spells deal their damage 22% more frequently.” However, you lose Rapid Contagion and all CDs upon choosing this talent. Your DoTs tick faster at all times, or you can have them burst for about 10% more with RC, so choose to have a CD and do more damage faster or choose to not have a CD and still be dealing almost as much.
Soul Swap the way he had it was good.
I agree wih a lot of his premise, just disagree on a few things is all.
I will say, however, Kala’s video/design tree was far better than blizzard’s is currently imo. Like, that’s a D tier spec tree for blizzard and his I would rate at a B tier, they’re night and day.
Also; glad he addressed Grimiore of Sacrifice cause blizzard seems to not get that this talent is bad. It’s just bad, it should be exactly as he put it; and it can buff damage by 10%, 15% I don’t care, but it basically just buffing Aff damage spells and giving us the Command Pet Ability is the better version of it.
7 Likes
Wasn’t that great. 1node for 4 % crit on 3 dots was garbage, he pull out the observer cd cause its wasnt a aoe ability from the right hand side then put it in the middle and make it aoe?
Then put haunt in the aoe side thats powerful for single target. He added Malific Grasp back in, then made 2 nodes to add just plain 10% damage, apart from boring frim memory it didnt work that way. Im sure it double the rate at which dots ticked while draining soul which is way better.
At this point unless we get the full WOD affliction, id rather Malific Rupture than Unstable Affliction stacking.
Look he is a top guy,great for the warlock community and I’ma fan , but I’d rather what the devs have atm than his trees
1 Like
hmm, I think my concern with adding a spender that makes affliction DoTs tick faster is that corruption and agony ticks are pretty directly tied to procs of nightfall and resource regeneration. I think it’s notable that there are quite a few ways to empower DoTs, and even some ways to extend DoTs, but I only see one way to make DoTs tick faster via a haste buff, and it is both short duration and buried deep in the tree. That just reads to me as the developers are trying to avoid that kind of interaction.
Which would be fine adding more things to make them tick faster. Nightfall should be redone, SBolt scrapped and Nightfall just redone into something like “You can now channel Drain Soul while moving for 5 seconds.” They could also do something like this, instead: “For the next 10 seconds Drain Soul will also drain into another enemy near the main target.”
The dev(s) don’t even know what they want with the spec. They literally threw nearly everything of every expansion for the last 3-4 expansions to see what sticks. It’s pretty bad when your “ST” spec wants to select every node and not really go all the way to the end node, rather spread out over the whole tree to pick up more things.
WoD Aff wasn’t bad at all, it was nice and Haunt was the spender for Soul Shards which was pretty cool.
Ehh, I’m half and half with that. I like UA more cause it’s a DoT so it fits more, but I don’t like UA stacking itself.
Well he’s played the same class for years.
Current tree is pretty wholly trash and anyone who likes it drinks the almond milk that has 19g of sugar per serving. Until Malefic Rapture is gone dots won’t do meaningful damage on their own and will be relegated to a backseat while Soul Rot/ID Windows/MR Spam amp their damage.
8 Likes
I wish they would just add in Siphon life like it was in wrath 40% Corruption damage returned as health or that the Dot gets applied with corruption if they insist on keeping MR we need to get rid of some cooldowns without taking away playstyle.
4 Likes
Lol how do you even know are you on alpha? Looks clunky as hell to me.