Rework Affliction to become fun

Classes Warlock
1

Hello Everyone,

It’s been some time since we have heard anything about Affliction,

I’d like to read the temperature in the room here on how “fun” Affliction is. In my own opinion I think the time of Malefic Rapture has outstayed it’s welcome. I don’t think Affliction’s gameplay is fun even if it was aura buffed to an overpowered state. Maybe it’s because I’ve become annoyed with the new and miss the old gameplay. But this is my own opinion.

So here’s what I feel needs to happen…Affliction was well known as DoT based spec. The argument of “it’s impossible to balance” is all I ever heard about DoT based and I understand. But who here thinks it’s quite odd Affliction has become less DoT based than ever before and become more instant damage than ever.

The gameplay change needs to happen sooner or later in terms of fun, mobility, and viability. Affliction has been reworked thanks for Hero Talents and community uproar but here we are again due to the spec needing help once again.

My idea of making Affliction fun would simply be removing Malefic Rapture and here’s why I think it would improve the gameplay overall. After Rapture is removed what take’s it’s place you may ask? Simple answer would be to uncap Unstable Affliction and I would agree but I think the spec is still outdated for current content when it comes to target swaps and managing DoTs on targets. We already have the tools to make Affliction fun and viable. Next, rework Vile Taint to become more like Shadow Crash and Earthquake where it can be toggled to a cast of your choosing but also reduce the cooldown to keep 100% uptime. After that, I would recommend making Seed do the AoE damage again. Finally, I would recommend to bring back Kil’Jaeden’s Cunning back and also bring back Soul Swap but in a whole new redesigned way where it can snapshot the dots and spread to multiple targets up to a target cap of 5-8.

This is just my idea of how Affliction could be fun and embrace of what the spec was always known for. It was never known for instant damaging abilities that require DoT abilities that tick for nothing to empower a button that isn’t fun to press (Malefic Rapture) while managing DoT abilities to maximize uptime. Also when has the spec become a Shadowflame damaging spec? Affliction was always known as a Shadow based spec.

Maybe I’m whining here but I know lots of people and content creators that play Warlock would agree Affliction hasn’t been fun or enjoyable since Legion or BFA.

3 Likes
2

Sorry, but Blizzard would rather you didn’t play affliction.

4 Likes
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It’s either that, or they’re doing a major rework of Aff and haven’t told anyone, like they did with MM Hunter.

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Are you trolling? You want to bring back one of the worst iterations of Aff back? MR isn’t an issue outside of people who think spamming dots as a playstyle should return. Aff is never going to go back to the throw dots up and spam a filler. It’s not viable in today’s game.

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It could be, if done right. There’s zero point in affliction being a shadow-based destruction clone.

The spec really needs two things before anything else: a significant reduction in ramp-up time before getting to deal damage, and better funnel into single/priority targets.

If that means moving back to UA as our spender, and shifting back to a role where drain soul is our funnel spell that amps up per individual DoT on the target, I could live with that. As long as rapture exists, the dot component of the games primary dot spec just wont be viable.

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That can be achieved with the current design tho

They could combine vile taint and seed of corruption to reduce ramp time

And as far as funnel damage, they can adjust the damage of UA and the modifier of Haunt. Both serve as single target modifiers for this very reason. Buffing them doesn’t impact AOE or cleave.

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Please do not bring seed spam back, I’m sure the developer can think of better gameplay loops. just make MR an AoE mechanic and lower the # of dot scaling.

1 Like
8

In a world where MR disappears, seed could be a theoretical aoe spell, with some tweaks.

Just needs a clause where if seed hits a target already afflicted with Corruption, it deals 100-200% increased damage instead.

9

malefic rapture suck badly!

3 Likes
10

Ftfy. /10chars

2 Likes
11

I am not trolling.,

There’s many ways to make DoT management fun and doable. Affliction is outdated for current content. Refreshing dots on multiple targets isn’t fun. Every tooltip it has it’s all about refreshing or reapplying and it’s not fun. Make Seed and Taint less of a problem than they designed it and allow special fun tooltips in the talent tree to make DoT application more passive with damaging spells.

They could really make affliction fun if they designed something around nightfall to allow drain soul to AoE instead of shadowbolt volley and extend DoT duration. But hey that’s just me. Affliction could be fun if they took notes on from Shadow since they can apply dots and MANAGE your dots on AoE gameplay.

4 Likes
12

Rapid Contagion as spender coming back and making DoTs tick for much bigger numbers.

Redesigning the bottom tier talents:

Left bottom row should be about DoT ramping execute damage. It should start on all targets at 100% HP, for every missing 2% HP from the target’s health our DoTs scale up in doing X% more damage and X% faster tick speeds up until it reached 30-40% increased damage and 25-30% faster ticking speeds for every DoT.

Middle left row would be DoTs splashing damage, literally every DoT you have cleaves 15-30% of its damage into all other targets.

Both of these give us a DoT centric left side that functions to make Affliction play more DoT like.

Middle right side bottom node would be about Drain Soul being able to be casted while moving and giving us Malefic Grasp back, amplifying DoTs on the target with Drain Soul.

Full bottom right node is: Your Drain Soul hits up to 2 (or 3) additional targets within 40 yards with your Corruption/Wither spell on them.

Now your right side becomes about Draining playstyle.

You have a new spender in RC, a better core fantasy gameplay loop of throw DoTs, empower DoTs, channel while moving or casting shadowbolts while moving.

If you have Shadow Bolt picked instead of Drain Soul, fair enough then when it hits the target(s) it does the same thing as the Spriest talent where, for 3 or 4 seconds after hitting the target your DoTs are empowered on said target.

Get rid of Shadow’s Embrace, don’t need it. Get rid of Haunt, don’t need it. Buff DoT damage instead to compensate for this tuning knob go away.

Bring Soul Swap back and make it cost 0 shards and have 0 CD. Now you have a way to copy all DoTs over, a way to burst all DoTs in RC, a fitting thematic gameplay and now you can decide whether to go with the DoTs playstyle or the drain playstyle.

Snozzy would hate this but everyone else would love it. Affliction gets more players playing the spec.

Much like if they remade Spriest nodes into machine gunning spirits, having tentacles and empowering all your DoTs in the same way I said up there with cleave n amp damage, it would also be 1000% better and more well played than now.

Nonetheless, Affliction has now been fixed to a much better design direction. I did the work for the devs, they could figure out the balance part though.

Quadratic scaling of “Beyond X targets, deals reduced damage” should be added to every Affliction DoT spell including Drain Soul to make it not scale so insanely, but that would be fine for 90% of players or more. “Beyond 2 targets, deals 10% reduced damage.” Just keep applying that behavior modifier to where your DoTs, themselves, deal like 40% less damage to 8+ mobs and it’s fine, it’s not gonna scale so ludicrously.

8 Likes
13

I would 100% love this change…this would be so fun to play. I hope they consider this feedback but I have always heard from every Warlock discord that “It’s impossible to balance DoTs” and I find that to be a insane answer and I don’t really believe it.

I really hope class designers shift into gear soon because current Affliction is just awful to play in any content. You can make the argument that you can but it’s just more effort to do so than playing 1 of the other two specs that will do even better at with less effort.

2 Likes
14

I nominate you as head aff warlock dev. Serious site note, the players generally know better how to manage a spec than a team lead that probably rolled ret pali. We aren’t asking to nuke things into oblivion but content changes and the specs like aff need to be up to date with new mechanics

15

Ill say it again. Seed shouldnt be a 1.9 sec cast time. Should be under 1 second

3 Likes
16

I hope this post gets some attention and transparency from the Devs. This gameplay they force us to play now is a punishment. I really want to return to my lock and it’s just sad the class I mained since MoP is just in a terrible state for gameplay because it’s really not fun at all to play. I usually welcome changes and the hero talents made me retire after I saw Malefic Rapture gameplay got doubled down.

5 Likes
17

It should benefit from nightfallen and get an instant cast proc that can be carried over.

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Maybe if you want the spec to be beyond unplayable.

19

I’m not an Aff player, so this opinion is probably far from what the Aff fanbase will want, but I think Aff would be a good candidate to be reworked into a support spec.

The devs seems to struggle to tune around Aff’s dot based damage profile, so why not lean more into the curse aspect of Aff’s identity? Rather than buff allies like Aug, Aff can curse targets to amplify damage.

You can rework UA to increase damage received by players in your party (keyword party, not the whole raid).

You can transform the 3 curses into big defensives. Like turn curse of weakness into a raid cooldown that weakens the boss’ damage output for a few seconds.

Soul Harvester can be reworked to bring back the raid buff proc Demo’s tree used to have back in the day.

Well, that’s my 2 cents anyway.

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Personally I’m thinking about rerolling SPriest.
Slightly less of the DoT maintenance playstyle but Devouring Plague is what I wish Unstable Affliciton or even MR was.
And it’s a lot more fun visually.

4 Likes