Posted this after news of Malefic Rapture nerfs (now reverted). IMO, I wish they went through with the nerf and buffed dot dmg. Any other aff players miss the rot fantasy?
OG Post
A lot of locks are upset (with good reason) about the nerfs to Malefic Rapture (MR) on the PTR. It appears to be targeting affliction’s performance in raid, however, affliction is not a strong performer (and/or considered meta) in other content like mythic+ and arena.
I’m hoping that with the nerf to MR, other balancing/tuning can be looked at to keep Warlock in a healthy place. Some people have been comparing the damage profile of affliction’s current iteration to previous ones, and our dots really don’t do that much damage anymore. I, and others, would like to see this addressed.
I’m looking at WotLK PvP videos where dots are hitting harder on smaller health pools [1]. Legion raiding logs where dots are doing twice as much in someone’s damage breakdown when compared to live [2]. It feels like the ‘class fantasy’ is out of whack… is it too much to ask for my ‘damage over time’ spec to have… good dot damage?
Because they want MR to be our main source of DMG, they want an active ability to make most of our dmg on a fight. What they don’t want is people to jump around, dot everything and wait for everything to melt.
Their reasoning is that if you don’t actively use an ability to do DMG, you fall behind on the matters. Same for AOE.
In a mythic+ context if you want to keep all your dots up on all targets as well as Haunt on your priority target and SE on 2 or 3 targets then you’ll be actively using an ability to do damage. Keeping corruption, agony and SL up on 5 targets as well as Haunt and UA on one target and SE on as many targets as possible will require you to always be casting something.
they want that but only with affliction warlocks, i dont see a nerf to balance druid dots, or fire mage combustion, or hunters, they are super strong but no nerf to them, actually they are getting buff, explain me that?
It’s entirely because during beta not enough time and effort was put into Warlocks as a class. They had no real direction with their reasoning. Scaling and damage of every single Warlock DoT was not only reduced, but effectively gutted from past iterations of the game. Where as a class our effective DoT abilities would weigh down upon someone the more DoTs on them.
I look back to TBC and Wrath with this mentality and gloriously, the nostalgia comes back to me in prep for Classic TBC. The damage we could output in both PvE and PvP along with flavor was just perfect. Sure we still had some glaring issues when compared to other classes back then, but that was more an over-tuning of their specific specs and classes in comparison to us.
All of our DoTs should be dealing nearly 200% more dmg compared to what theyre doing now. I did a numbers stat in a previous post showcasing how unbelievably underwhelming our DMG via DoT abilities was, something like 30k over 20 seconds on average. In that time any other class would have obliterated their targets and moved onto the next one, if not their third in that given time.
Warlocks need a DoT buff, a direct damage spell buff and arguably a mid season hotfix + rework. There just isn’t any sense behind their notion of nerfing something now, then coming back to it in 6 months when they cumulatively come up with an idea (For worse I’m sure) to make the spec / class viable, while people playing that class either reroll or drop subs.
they face a sizable problem.
dots are somewhat awkward to balance. balance them around st and you ascend to godhood in multitarget situations. balance them around aoe and you are pointless in st compared to others.(aside from the extraordinary mobility)
this was their idea to exit from the situation and it… well it stuck them into a weird mixture of the two
tldr: basing a class on dots is writing yourself into a corner mechanically speaking and blizzard tried to break down a wall instead and just hurt their own fist.
Its actually because people whined about old spender and Blizzard caved and gave aff new spender. People then praised new spender and stopped giving feedback on it till it already had hit live servers.
Every other class and spec in the game got changes due to feedback to assume warlock was left out is absurd. especially since they were quite literally one of the first classes to get changes(MR was VERY early in alpha).
MR being extremely early in alpha is proving my point. 1 Singular idea got pushed through untweaked, from start to finish in Alpha without so much (as we clearly found out) as any testing into M+ and Raiding.
More time was needed, more testing was needed. This was clearly not the case. If they wanted a spell like MR to exist, they needed to make effort in hosting it’s DMG outside it being spamable when using all 5 shards. We needed more, we got less.
Malefic Rapture -
Cost - 1 Soul Shard
CD - 15 seconds
Your Damage over time abilities erupt on all targets, causing them to take damage based on the total remaining time left on their afflictions.
Deals Damage equal to 25 seconds of all Damage over time currently remaining on any given target. (Targets remaining DoT afflictions will not be reduced by this timer)
Now its more based on our spell power coefficients and how much dmg our DoTs deal and therefore can be balanced according to our gear more accurately without having to spiral our MR dmg around how many DoTs we have on a singular target.
Lets objectively compare MR(or Affliction in general) to Shadow Priest.
Affliction going into SL had 2 complaints that were pushed through, not liking UA and wanting DS filler viable. got both things and again no complaints until it hit prepatch.
Shadow had a myriad of problems and the feedback about VF was VERY consistent and persistent so they ultimately got better results from it.
It being released early doesn’t prove your point but instead proves mines. Its been existed early into the alpha and it took till prepatch until people voiced concern about it.
MR had more testing then shadow changes did, the key difference is one community gave better feedback than the other as simple as that.
I feel like your post is essentially saying ‘it is what it is’. It’s clear to anyone playing the spec that MR is the main source of damage and that dots are weaker than previous iterations. But why did they make this change and do people like it? I personally do not.
And with affliction being less competitive in a lot of end game content, there is an opportunity to buff dots after nerfing MR (which is why I’m voicing my opinion).
See, now you’re just implying that it was the Communities job to differentiate between low level content + leveling with MR and fine tuning the DMG it puts out in M+ along with raiding. Instead, it was the Devs Jobs to give the Warlock community better tools to better give said feedback.
Most of the community agrees here, seeing a big number when you press a single button makes people happy. But when things advance in gear and said number never really changed, ultimately lowering your damage later, no one was prepared for that information. We never got to test it, we got shoe horned information about a “Fancy new ability” and all we got to see was it’s functionality, never it’s statistics at later points.
I miss when our rotation consisted of keeping up dots, maintaining soulburn: haunt and filling with malefic grasp. The big payoff was having all your debuffs/dots on the target and then channeling malefic grasp and seeing your dots just melt people. It actually felt like a rot spec. Soulburn had so many niche applications and utility as well.
I disliked in Legion when they made us spam shards on unstable affliction but at least our dots still did damage. In BFA they ruined the identity of the spec by designing affliction around deathbolt, nerfing dot damage, designing dot timers around darkglare, and making our filler shadow bolt.
Shadowlands got rid of the UA spamming but changed our shard spender to malefic rapture. I’m not sure why blizzard is obsessed recently with affliction’s damage profile being burst damage instead of rot damage like it was for the past 15 years. Despite having more dots than I think we have ever had in the history of the game, they are nothing but meaningless setup spells for malefic rapture and do pitiful damage on their own. It feels awful and it doesn’t feel like a rot spec.
You can make the argument for dot damage not having a place in mythic plus, but affliction was still a rot spec in Legion and it was fine in m+ because seed of corruption was still a useful spell and we had soul flame. And warlock has 2 other specs that can be designed around burst AoE, you don’t need to ruin the identity of affliction lock for the sake of balance purposes.
Bring back Xelnath, a dev that actually understood and fought for this class.
i enjoyed both MoP and Legion aff. afterwards i didnt and it just seem to have gone downhill since then.
The thing is though i know what made MoP aff enjoyable and i know what made Legion aff enjoyable to me as well. I can break it down a bit i suppose.
In MoP there wasnt really an emphasis on dungeons so their dungeon performance did not matter. Secondly, snapshotting existed so it made things very engaging(knowing when to refresh DoTs early to get the most out of them and getting the most out of soul swap with snapshotting). They took away snapshotting(a decision i really did not like to the point where it made me completely skip WoD in protest) and i knew the spec would be extremely binary without it.
Then Legion came out and friends convinced me to come back. i didn’t like the shadow changes so fell back onto affliction.
Now off the bat i guess the UA spamming didnt bother me so much because again th elast time i played was MoP at that point and you were dumping Haunts in a similar fashion in ST anyways so in my eyes it was just that but a DoT in terms of feels. Soul Effigy was awful and ill say by Tomb they had most of the minor issues i had with the spec ironed out.
What i did like about Legion Aff more than anything was Reap Souls. It was a CD that fit Affliction quite well IMO with giving a similar feel to snapshotting without it actually being snapshotting.
A lot of the feedback after legion just overall has made the spec worse imo and even now people are not talking about the real issues with the spec but instead clamoring to a past thats not possible/dont even work in today’s game.