... please buff Affliction's Cooldowns!

Classes Warlock
1

We’re at two weeks left of PTR before 11.1 launches. Three if you count the first week of the patch before Season 2 starts as testing too. It looks unlikely Affliction will see any design changes. But hey, there will always be 11.1.5, or 11.2, or Midnight (please). I’ve really enjoyed this PTR cycle reading everyone’s contributions and suggestions for Affliction’s design. Who knew so many Aff Locks were still kicking. Hint hint Blizzard.

So hopefully before go-live for 11.1 we see a percent-based aura tuning sweep at the very least. But if there is still time for any select-spell-tuning, please Blizzard…

Buff Affliction’s Cooldowns!

Specifically I’m talking the damage of Haunt, Vile Taint, Phantom Singularity, Soul Rot, and Summon Darkglare/Malevolent Visionary. Haunt is included as it is a Spell with a cooldown and it deals damage. I’m not going to include Oblivion in this list because I believe while it still costs Soul Shards, and it’s damage-increase-per-DoT is capped, it will continue to not be worth the two Malefic Raptures it could be. So it needs too much of a rework to be considered ‘tuning’.

Currently a random unbuffed percentage breakdown of my damage looks to be:

AoE 5-target dummies (1 min 16 sec):

  • Haunt (5 casts) dealt 0.9%
  • Vile Taint (3 casts) dealt 3.3%
  • Soul Rot (2 casts) dealt 5.3%
  • Summon Darkglare (1 cast) dealt 1.3%
  • Malevolent Visionary (1 cast) dealt 1.5%

Single-Target dummy (1 min 22 sec):

  • Haunt (5 casts) dealt 4.4%
  • Phantom Singularity (2 casts) dealt 1.7%
  • Soul Rot (2 casts) dealt 4.8%
  • Summon Darkglare (1 cast) dealt 2.9%
  • Malevolent Visionary (1 cast) 0.6%

The suggestions (in order on each Spell from ‘easiest fix’ to ‘design-change’):

Haunt:

  • Increase the damage dealt.
  • Have the improved Haunt Talent make it instant cast.
  • Remove it as a standalone Spell and instead have the Talent tie the 10% increased damage effect into Unstable Affliction.
  • Have Haunt apply X seconds of Unstable Affliction/Agony/Both. Maybe just enough to get them out instantly but still have to hard-cast if needed.

Vile Taint:

  • Increase the damage dealt.
  • Uncap the number of Vile Taint/Agony DoTs it applies. Of course, this will slightly increase the damage of Rapture over 8 targets due to the increased number of DoTs. But honestly, it’s hugely annoying when pulling more than 8 mobs having Agony apply on a non-elite which will die in 2 seconds instead of the big bad scary full-health elite mob.
  • Cooldown reduction to support Agony spread and overall damage dealt by Vile Taint itself.
  • Remove it as a standalone Spell and instead have the Talent tie the effect to Seed of Corruption and give Seed a cooldown. Would give us a reason to keep casting Seed in a fight, and you could create another talent to make Seed do more damage/other interactions.

Phantom Singularity:

  • Increase the damage dealt. Preferably a huge increase. It is so incredibly low and only taken for the infirmity bonus.
  • Have the DoT spread to a different target if the host dies while affected. Or have the Phantom Singularity attach to the player and drain everything around it. Sure you lose Rapture DoT on the Single Target, but a damage-boost can more than compensate for this.

Soul Rot:

  • Uncap the number of secondary targets affected. Cap the Dark Harvest talent of course.
  • Increase the Damage Dealt, to the primary target and secondary targets.
  • Have the primary target take increased damage up to a certain amount per missing secondary target.

Summon Darkglare/Malevolent Visionary

  • Increase damage dealt by both Talents.
  • Reduce the cooldown of Darkglare to 1 minute (this will help with the Season 2 11.1 ‘Jackpot’ Tier Set Bonus as well.
5 Likes
2

Perhaps the problem is that there is a list of 5 abilities that all fundamentally do the same thing.

1 Like
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Haunt doesn’t need a buff. It shouldn’t even do any damage to begin with, it’s a very weird talent. You shouldn’t care about it’s damage, just the damage amp it provides and the CD reset mechanic to keep buffing everything else on other targets.

SR should just be removed, as should PS and VT, honestly, but I’d be fine keeping VT if we could get rid of the others. I don’t know why we need more DoTs, it just ruins the amount of damage all DoTs can do. Like, we have Corruption/Wither, Agony, Unstable Affliction, Drain Soul, Vile Taint, Phantom Singularity, Soul Rot. Why do we need so many DoTs? Remove more than half of these, buff the rest to compensate so the actual rot styled DoTs can become very powerful on their own.

Less is more! You also don’t need 15 damage amps on targets, either. You’ve got Haunt, Shadow’s Embrace, the execute talent and then in the case of PS you have Infirmity or whatever. All of these do the same thing: buff DoT damage. You don’t need 15 damage amps, just buff the execute DoT damage talent we have and set it starting at a much, much higher threshold of 100% and make it go up for every 2% missing HP from the targets. By the end of the target HP it should be 35-50% damage amp to all DoTs. Give Malefic Grasp back and make that a damage amp, too, then be done fully.

The rest of the nodes should be cleaving DoTs to where they deal splash damage to all nearby enemies per DoT up, and then multiple Drain Souls out, Drain Soul able to be casted while moving and then yeah, like I said Malefic Grasp making Drain Soul empowering your DoTs to do more damage faster. And get rid of MR or rework it to more DoT style things so the profile makes sense thematically speaking. Give Rapid Contagion back as a spender for PvE and PvP. Done, ez.

3 Likes
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Yes to all this - and you’re right, I don’t ‘want’ Haunt to be doing damage, but it’s what we’ve got at the moment, so if it did do something it would be helpful. Unfortunately I don’t think we’ll see any broad design changes for a while. Hopefully in the future though!

For the moment I do think a targeted and quite significant damage-buff on all the cooldown abilities would help our profile overall. All the damage is so loaded into Rapture sweeping ‘All damage increased by x%’ changes mean Rapture ends up getting even more boosted into the frontline of our damage and making everything else less impactful.

5

I don’t think seed needs or should do more damage, and vile taint shouldn’t be another dot. The more debuffs we add, the less others can do. Aff should be incredibly efficient at spreading its core dots.

more dots = more rollercoaster rapture. Reducing the # of dots will make it more consistent and reduce ramp.

I think a cool change could also be, nightfallen applies to seed of corruption too. So you can hold a proc and go into a pack with an instant seed.