I really like demo minus a few talents, and same with destro. Great job all around, but I just don’t get affliction. Like honestly, it feels really awkward to play, unenjoyable, overly complicated, way to much stuff to track for what it actually does.
Maybe it appeals to a very select group of people, and then who am I to argue with them. But after speaking to tons of people on the Beta EVERYONE has said the same thing, “affliction feels like a** to play”.
It’s a shame because I would like to see myself playing all three warlock specs come dragon flight, but as it stands now, unless things change there is zero chance, I will pick up affliction. It feels like you are laboring actually struggling with effort instead of enjoying your spec whilst playing it.
It’s definitely an improvement compared to SL, and the AOE gameplay is pretty fun, but I would agree the ST gameplay feels very “clunky” and unsatisfying. It’s also hard to find many scenarios where you would play aff over demo/destro, unless it’s overturned to compensate, and players feel forced to play it despite the negative gameplay experience
I have never liked Aff myself so take what I say with a grain of salt here, but I don’t think Blizzard knows what to do with a heavily dot focused class anymore. While I’m sure there were probably times when Aff was in a healthy spot while also being heavily dot based, there’s also been plenty of times, and I do mean plenty, where Aff was incredibly strong, on occasions way too strong, with the multi dot based playstyle.
This came to a head in Legion where for a period of time Aff was insanely overpowered for a raid tier or two and still incredibly strong for most of the rest of the expansion. Yeah, Emerald Nightmare was to blame as Aff was quite weak there on account of the raid not suiting Aff playstyle plus Aff generally still having low stats, no tier and incomplete weapons, which made Blizz decide to give Aff a significant buff… right as Nighthold was about to release, which was a raid well suited for Aff, and stats were getting to the point where Warlocks infamously good scaling was about to kick in, people were completing their weapons and Tier was coming… nice work there, Blizz… but my point still stands that for the majority of Legion Aff was either basically one of if not the top spec, or absolutely dominated to a ridiculous degree, and no one but Aff players liked it. If the Nighthold incident didn’t happen I think history would have gone a different direction, but it did happen and Aff became a sore point in WoW.
And Blizzard is afraid of that happening again. Because of that, they’re trying to find more or less every gimmick they can to avoid the traditional multidot playstyle. I can’t say they’re wrong to think that, either. Not because I don’t think ot can be balanced, clearly it has been before and can be again. But rather because I do not trust Blizzard to be able to balance it… It’s no secret Blizz class design team is very small, split across multiple classes, and are unable to give any one class an extensive and careful design approach. That’s partly why class evolution these past few years has been “Take all the borrowed power away and give it back in a new borrowed power system”. And if they tried making a multi dot focused Aff lock… It’s going to be very poorly thought out and either really, really bad, or really, really stupidly OP
No no, so what had happened was: 2 weeks before Legion came out blizz decided to edit the way in which the weapon interacted with the user. At first, an add would appear that only that affliction warlock could see, dot up and kill. This procced the weapon since the souls were based off of killing blows required. 2 weeks before the expac launch they scrapped the ghosts idea, but didn’t fix the weapon.
This meant that Affliction literally had to get the killing blow in order for their weapon to proc, but GL getting a KB as a DoT spec when everyone else does more damage. Due to this, blizzard decided to change the switch to count anything you damage as you getting the killing blow, even if you did 1 damage to it and didn’t get the killing blow, it still counted as it. Thus, the switch went and made the spec from being 3rd worst, above Frost mage n Frost DK to the literal best spec in the game for the rest of the entire expansion. They didn’t buff it, they just flipped the switch and fixed it so you could actually proc the weapon, itself.
Nothing to do with stats or anything like that, that weapon had so many damage modifiers, all of which were multiplied onto each other, and then also to add in they were able to keep their weapon active for 90-99% of the entire boss fight or dungeon. All this pulled together to bring it into god mode.
This is exactly what a lot of people think and feel, too. It will either be too op or too bad. I think they can balance it, they just need to stop being too afraid of making a full on rot style DoT spec with no burst or extremely little burst and a full on rot profile with only 3 DoTs, not 7-10 DoTs, and a drain filler that buffs other DoTs, execute DoTs, faster ticking DoTs, and a Misery like talent like how Spriests got. They basically did it with Spriests, that spec on beta is so very fun right now with the build I was playing. I don’t think the build I was doing will be meta for them, but it made DoTs feel so very good and awesome playing.
My favorite specs are demo and destro so tbh I don’t know if I’ll play aff either. I want to but I’ve not found the dot play fun as it feels wonky and for me it’s always kinda hard to pull of good numbers.
I do love the tree choices for demo, and destro looking solid so I’m excited more then not.
They had it right with haunt. The original haunt. That way you can spread, but your spread isn’t as powerful as your main target. Even if haunt was 15 sec duration, 15 sec CD, no shard cost. It would be easy to balance.
No I’m talking about Haunt. It would fly to the target cause %damage and the ghost would fly back to you and heal you for the damage done.
That was back in Wrath
That’s exactly what Haunt + Seized Vitality does. They simply broke it into 2 talents. The healing component has always been negligible I have no idea why you would miss it.