Shadow has been compared to Affliction in the past. But now, it is simply objectively true that Shadow literally does affliction better than affliction. Affliction IS Shadow, but with missing abilities, missing mechanics, missing quality of life features, less synergy between abilities, less tools in its toolkit. UA is plague, but given the “put a chick in it and make her…” treatment. It’s laughable.
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Yup sp is to affliction. As unholy dk is to demo.
The only difference is those specs get plenty of qol fixes and baked in talents, not just a scraps of qol. SP got dots spread with slam, udk got baked in range talent from old talents.
Where as warlock the talents get removed and depowered to the point where you only taking the talent to get to another one.
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Certainly feels like being neglected once more.
In the Fel themed Legion expansion, DH gets all the shiny while we sit at the back.
Now walking into a Void theme expansion, DH again - heck, a new spec to show off - follow by Shadow Priest and all their candy.
The OG Void player Affliction warlock…finally removing malefic rupture…oh, i can now randomly put agony on another target…
Oh yea, a talent to add armor to our eyeball…
Let’s just say that there’s not too much to be excited about when comes to functionality, and even less for eye candy/effects.
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The devs gave us the lovely explanation in beta that Aff is stuck with half-baked tools because DoTs are central to the class
Which is why the other DoT classes like Shadow and Assassination all got major quality of life upgrades while we got a hand-me-down boomkin talent
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I do not agree with SPriest being Affliction but better.
There is a key distinction, Afflictions gameplay has DoT application and management, SPriest does not. DoT application and maintenance on SPriest has almost been optimized into a purely passive system.
If you gave Affliction the toys Spriest has, we would never have time to manage our DoTs, the entire point of playing Affliction is for DoT management gameplay.
What we need is a snapshot mechanic. The only other spec in the game that actually cares for deliberate Dot management, Feral, has snapshotting.
2 Likes
100% agree with snapshotting, but not with anything else. Let’s do an experiment. Get on your shadow priest. Take tentacle slam, shadow word death, and mind blast off your bars. Take invoked nightmare talent instead of misery. Tell me you’re not now playing affliction.
If you take Invoked Nightmare you also lose the ability to spread SW:P and have to apply it manually, just like Aff does.
I play both Afflic and Shadow as two of my mains, and Afflic is blows shadow out of the water right now. Shadow is fun, but it’s just cooldown whack a mole and just doesn’t have the choices or tools that Afllic has.
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I guess this is where the fundamental issue lies - what exactly is a ‘DoT centric/management gameplay’ should be?
Is it as simple as casting more DoTs than other classes?
Or was it the ability to spread multiple DoT’s over multiple targets?
Or the key factor is the act of managing DoT timers across multiple targets?
Because other than the simple distinction of ‘we can cast more flavor and types of DoT compared to other classes’, by default we lacked the proper tools to spread our DoTs across targets, and even worse - a proper way to tell DoT timers across targets without using external addon.
If ‘DoT timer management’ is the game, then they certainly missed that mark.
That’s simply the situation we’re being stuck with, and even now it barely gets any actual improvement.
Except snapshotting as a whole are getting mostly phased out, in preference to dynamic updates - which is more intuitive and not forcing players to head to another external site just to learn how snapshotting works. Plus with Soul Swap no longer part of our base toolkit, ‘copying and spreading stronger DoTs’ are no longer possible.
Personally, i rather have some intuitive/synergistic way on how we can spread, maintain or even extend our DoTs. Some examples:
1, Seed of Corruption spreads Agony on main target to all targets hit by explosion.
2, Pandemic timer for warlocks now works at 50%, instead of the usual 30% for other classes (we are the premier DoT class, why not emphasize on that?)
3, Drain Life (just kill off Shadowbolt for Affliction, seriously) and Drain Soul extends and/or refreshes DoT timers on each tick.
4, Darkglare extends DoT timers again.
3 Likes
If it wasnt for the combination of Demonology often being very fun, me loving Green Fel Fire aesthetically, love having Demon pets (including somewhat Pit Lord popping up, my fav Demon), as well as huge nostalgia of my Warlock from Vanilla and stuff like having done the old Infernal, Doomguard and Dreadsteed quests….there’s a high chance I’d switch to my Shadow Priest. Affliction needs something….
I haven’t been able to get into that specc for SO long now. I missed the multi-drain and harvest Artifactstuff of Legion….but otherwise I dunno, it feels neglected and missing some huge identity for myself personally.
A snapshotting mechanic could be really fun!
I really don’t know how you get that from the current specs. Afflictions spells and primary rotation exist within shadow, but shadow has a bunch of additional functionality. Like I said in my other post, you can just remove some spells and talents from shadow, and you’ve basically got affliction.
Don’t forget Feral (my alt). MAJOR improvements with the flow and applying bleeds.
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lol, absolutely not, feral is awful now, the spec has been gutted with all the depth and complexity been stripped from it.
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Oh no I agree, having played it since WoD (the skill for it is gone). But the point is… it feels more flowing as a DoT spec than Aff, while not exactly being a DoT spec.
Honestly when I played Affliction for a bit it definitely did feel very complicated and hard to manage.
I wish there was a spell that had like a 30 sec cd or something to splash all the dots in a pile if needed.
I guess thats what seed of corruption is for but its still a little clunky especially for a pruning that was supposed to be easier but then again i didnt hit max level yet so lol
So ur main argument here is “if you take away a number of abilities that help distinguish spriest from aff, then it feels more like aff”?
Not a very strong argument.
With regards to everything else, tbh this is the most aff has felt like aff in years. There’s still some things that they could do better and they could start with removing Darkglare and replacing it with something else so the major dps cd of a “master of curses and drains” isn’t summoning an eye demon that shoots lasers.
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Maybe I wasn’t clear what I meant. I mean, current affliction is almost identical to shadow priest, but with missing abilities, missing mechanics, missing features, missing quality of life. If you severely gimp shadow, you have affliction. I can play affliction on my shadow priest, I cannot play shadow on my warlock.
Here’s an idea, don’t judge too harshly 
Return UA to baseline dot. Malefic Grasp is our spender. 3 shard minimum to cast, 3 second channel, can use up to 5 shards, 5 second channel. Add 2 new spenders. First, a one shard spender that extends dots on a single target. Diminishing returns or decent cool down. Second, a 1 shard spender that spreads dots on the target to surrounding enemies. Dark Harvest harvests an extra soul from the target, increasing the number of shards you can have to 6 for a short duration. Use Dark Harvest right before Darkglare, Darkglare instead empowers your shadow bolt or drain soul to deal increased damage and increased shard generation. Build 6 shards, dump Malefic Grasp.
This sounds much more interesting to me than spamming UA.
I was harsh on Afflic when prepatch first dropped but now it’s by far my favorite Midnight spec. I think you just need to play it more, experiment more with talents, etc. It sounds like you just want to revert it to TWW Affliction which was terrible compared to what we have now.
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I see no reason to play it. I can play affliction on my shadow priest, but I can also play shadow priest!