Need sow the seeds back in some capacity to our aoe profile…
I feel there is nothing Hellcaller or Soul Harvester could bring that makes up for Rapture being awful as an aoe ability. It’s horrid. I don’t have 3 to 4 dots up on all mobs at all times, esp on aoe burst phases on bosses. Sometimes you just need to be able to spam seeds. And having to cast seed to just get one dot up, not mention if other mobs join the pack later due to chain pulling or a second wave, I’m having to cast multiple single seeds and just feels terrible. Melee can just cleave without much effort, while I’m in global button hell and mobs dead.
Several boss fights currently in Dragonflight, aoe profile for affliction just feels terrible where before we were one of the best for several of those kinds of fights. Such as the first Academy boss and first Amirdrassil boss, and Tindral for aoe DMG. Now, if vile Taint is on cd and have to cast seed followed by rapure with just one dot up, feels really bad. Seed won’t do any DMG and rapture obviously bad because only 1 dot up. Even hero talents won’t help these burst phases.
Sow the Seeds needs to come back and just make it to where you Sow Seeds if there are 2 or more mobs near your target. Also, Rapture and all other abilities currently do reduced DMG beyond a number of targets. I got much higher aoe DMG in retail before prepatch than I’m getting in beta with hero talents and higher ilvl gear. It’s night and day and needs fixing badly.
If we are going to just have a single seed only, remove the shard requirement. Seed should not have to cost a shard whatsoever. Esp when we have Rapture, Oblivion, Vile Taint all requiring them.
Perhaps can make Seed baseline talent but then make Sow the Seeds a Talent option for the tree, and flip the spot for Sow and the Rapture/Corruption DMG talent. If Sow talent is selected, seeds cost a shard.
The whole point of removing Sow the Seeds was the make it so MR is always our go-to spender. This is important in order for our talent tree to not be strictly pure ST verse strictly pure AOE. I got so tired of having my Lock be either useless in ST or useless in AOE when most others specs can achieve a happy medium.
Spam seed.
Spam MR.
Outside of visuals what exactly is the difference here?
I’m not entirely sure if you’ve played with the hero talent trees on beta, but this is actually incorrect. Rapture is one of the strongest aoe globals in the game from a button to dps ratio purely because wither (hellcaller) is the strongest single global any class can press; rapture’s damage directly impacts your dots in this case. You don’t need more than just wither up on a target (although you’d like to have more) to do high aoe throughput anymore in TWW. They made our upfront burst significantly better than DF.
I think, if anything, this is the first time that you want to spam rapture as much as possible to enable your dots (blackened soul/wither) to do your damage. It’s pretty satisfying as hellcaller watching your blackened soul stacks increase each time you rapture, and it’s really good because you don’t have to worry about tank positioning anymore.
This also isn’t a thing. Rapture has the same target cap as Seed of Corruption (as in it deals max damage up to 20 targets, then square root scales afterward). Considering what I said above with blackened soul, I’m imagining a scenario in which seed is our spender again, and not all the mobs are grouped up and you can’t stack blackened soul because seed didn’t hit them.
Rapture should definitely stay as our spender.
This also isn’t a thing either. What you’re experiencing is both a reduction in overall damage contribution because warlock is one of the most affected classes from the oversight of blizzard not importing beta changes into live prepatch, and live prepatch being a buggy mess. Several of affliction’s strongest aoe talents are either bugged, don’t work, or are undertuned compared to beta. Once those are fixed, you should see an increase in damage.
This also has to do with other classes simply getting the better end of the slot machine that is prepatch: expect some sort of slight buff or bug tuning compensation in the next couple of weeks.
I have played beta. I even say it in the post. If our aff spec is bugged to hell, then sure. Fix it. Otherwise, if things are as intended, something needs fixed and without sow, honestly, feels bad when you only have corruption or wither and that’s it. Rapure requires multiple dots to max DMG and if you don’t have taint up or soul rot on cd because it’s 1 min now, rapture just feels bad where sow, seeds didn’t require other dots up to blast for full DMG. Seeds could even build wither stacks. But if rapture is the main spender, Vile Taint and Soul Rot need dramatic reduced Cds. The aoe is fine, but burst aoe/cleave is absolutely horrible for the aff spec and non existent tbh compared to other classes.
And no. I hard disagree as rapture being the only spender if things stay as is on prepatch and beta. Coming from a 20 year Aff Vet.
I mean, yes and no. You could spam seed, but you also want to put your dots up at the same time (which I’m just saying, but I know you know) which is the exact same aoe setup as now: seed, UA, taint, soul rot, seed (rapture), seed (rapture) etc. Seed is just an inferior spender to Rapture purely based on positional requirements. In TWW, it’s still worth the button press to hit rapture with just wither on secondary targets, the same as you would do with seed; I’m not seeing the difference here at all, except for lower skill expression and tank positional requirements. I’d rather be incentivized to hit my dots than not hit my dots, which gives skill expression if you can keep your dots up more than bobby affliction #20 who just hits seed and does the same damage as you.
As a 20 year aff vet, you should want to press your dots instead of a direct damage spell.
right now, it’s tuned the same as if you were to have sow the seeds. It increases the skill cap minorly because it increases the need to have dots out instead of spamming seed regardless of dots outside of taint windows.
On the other hand, this is a significant buff to aff spread cleave. Making rapture equivalent to seeds on aoe, but also have no need to have enemies stacked just significantly increases our potential split cleave. It’s also a huge quality of life if tanks ever kite, or enemies aren’t stacked up together.
In TWW, you’ll almost always have taint up on every pack, you just need to keep an eye out on refreshing agony (which is better with volatile agony now). For anytime you don’t have taint, you can just hit seed and malevolance and spam rapture with only corruption and UA out and do more damage than what sow the seeds would have done.
you can just seed of corruption (wither replaces corruption not agony) and just spam rapture, ideally with malevolence (new hellcaller CD).
As soul harvester it’s a little more complex because the goal isn’t to have consistent damage. Instead, almost all of your damage is built into soul rot. Your secondary goal is to use succulent souls as you get them, so you’ll hit rapture regardless of how many dots you have out (but ideally with more than just corruption on everything).
I wouldn’t say either are “easier” than the other; hellcaller is just much more consistent damage, and has a really fun cooldown to play around.
Soul harvester has pretty cool animations, but plays a little bit more around cd’s.
You’re welcome! Warlock is looking pretty fun playstyle-wise, and the tuning changes that happened this afternoon for the next beta build are correcting our damage issues.
Looked up the hellcallers visuals and it fits perfectly with a dark voodoo witchdoctor vibe im going for with my zanda warlock, all the shadowy abilities looks amazing! Im torn between warlock and dk now.
It looks good and had a good sound and made a great explosion animation which made it feel good to press, MR has been updated more now but it had a pretty lack luster casting animation and no missle or spell flinging