Barely anyone plays this spec because the amount of work required to actually do damage is insane.
What’s the point in playing a high skill cap spec if I’m going to do mediocre damage?
I should have just rolled hunter or some other brain dead class that will do good damage without the headache of managing 7 dots, burst windows in between legendary procs do to high damage.
As usual blizzard just looks at a spreadsheet and makes decisions based off perfect patchwerk sims instead of actual gameplay, I predict next patch warlock will be on of the least played classes in the game.
What makes it worse is boomkin, the brain dead one button class gets zero nerfs and still gets to do insane damage but for whatever reason blizzard decides to nerf affliction.
Cancelled my sub, I won’t be re rolling and I certainly won’t be playing affliction with the amount of effort it requires to perform well.
It’s one of the most played specs. It’s also the best lock spec for all content. The nerf is deserved, last time this happened with lock the best spec got a 20% aura nerf, so a 5-7% ST and 10%ish aoe nerf isn’t going to kill the spec.
You realise barely anyone actually plays affliction because the amount of work you have to do to actually do the DPS is insane yeah?
Meanwhile Boomkins are everywhere and all they have to do is press one button and boom top dps.
Affliction is simply to busy and to high skill cap for your average player to actually do it’s full potential damage, this is why so many players avoid affliction to begin with.
For the typical raid spec:
Siphon life, UA, Agony, Corruption, Phantom Singularity, Soul Rot for dots.
Shadow Embrace, Haunt, and in some cases curses.
Phantom Singularity(45sec), Soul Rot(1min), Dark Soul(2min),Darkglare(3min or variable) for cooldowns, not including racials and trinkets.
That leaves us with 8 or 9 debuffs and 4 cooldowns, both with varying timers. And no, you shouldn’t macro any of those cooldowns together because you don’t hold them for more than 15 seconds outside of certain situations where targets are immune or have increased damage phases (Shriek, sludge).
If you want to make aff even more complicated then we can easily do that with legendaries and conduits that make our cooldowns on variable timers based on RNG.
Afflictions appeal was that it is is a high skill cap spec with a high payoff reward for perfect execution when played flawlessly, which in a mythic raid scenario, is rarely the case.
With this nerf, why would I bother playing affliction, when I can play any other brain dead class and put in less work for the same DPS?
I promise you come next patch warlocks will all vanish, no one wants to work 10x harder than everyone else for average dps, either that or affliction will be dead and people will just play destro instead, which again won’t happen, aff locks are either going to re roll hunter or boomkin.
Is this for classic or live? because live aff is arguably one of the easier specs in the game. You can purple parse just by keeping dots up and rapture dumping on singularity windows. No advanced mechanics needed.
Playing affliction in this current iteration isn’t exactly hard, keep up dots and dump all your shards in burst every minute. I’ll agree it’s annoying to maintain all those dots and debuffs constantly, but not difficult. As long as you have good rapture windows you’re good to go. That said I do personally dislike this version of affliction simply because of how many gcd’s it takes before you start doing anything meaningful
Anyone here saying Affliction needed the nerfs does NOT play the class and has no standing to say this. The OP is completely correct in everything stated. Yes, Affliction is doing very well in RAID ONLY SINGLE TARGET. In PvP we are mediocre at best, in Mythics we are shunned and avoided due to the ramp up time of dots. The DPS payoff for the work needed is outlandish at best. It’s not a terrible high skillcap but I’m used to it… but compare other classes that get IGNORED for nerfs like hunters, mages, rogues, boomkin and Shadow Priest and others that have a much lower skill needed and pay out in HUGE numbers. Playing affliction is like paying 100 dollars for a donut you really like… yeah you want the donut so you’ll pay for it but why does Afflcition need to pay 100 for the donut that other classes pay 5 dollars for? GET IT? This nerf is unwarranted and ridiculous and Blizzard has lost it’s mind. As it is my guild barely gets 1-2 locks ever, me and 1 other lock…sometimes and he doesn’t touch affliction. We are a dying class and Blizzard just keeps shooting us in the foot and telling us to dance better.
The thing that annoys me the most, is that boomkins remain untouched.
The one button “I-WIN” class gets to keep their number.1 spot, but we get the shaft for whatever reason, it makes absolutely no sense.
If they nerfed locks AND boomkins things would make more sense, nerfing affliction but letting boomkins blow everyone else away on the dps meters with a rotation a monkey could play makes no sense at all.
That a bit overdramatic, wait it out, tuning is just starting and more should be coming, i suspect they want to reduce MR damage into buffing dot damage
The logs don’t reflect this unless your argument is that no one plays lock outside of raid groups that log.
Just looking briefly at WCL, I’m seing 63,161 Aff logs on H Shriekwing. That’s more than Frost mage, Arcane mage, DPS monk, Ret, Elemental Shaman, Enh Shaman, Frost DK, BM Hunter, Survival Hunter, Arms warrior, Fury warrior, all THREE rogue specs, Havok DH.
Literally the only specs that have more logs are Shadow (only barely), Balance, Fire Mage, and Marks Hunter. So the three other crazy strong classes and Shadow, which isn’t weak by any means.
It’s a good thing the only thing Affliction warlocks are interested in is raiding. You check out PVP and Mythics and watch your numbers fly right out that door…