Why is the affliction talent tree objectively terrible?

Classes Warlock
1

I genuinely don’t understand. I understand that there is always cookie cutter builds for every spec, certain setups are always better than others, but it’s usually only about 1-2% unless the talent is obviously for a niche situation. Of course taking an aoe talent on single target would be a hefty loss when there is a single target talent in that row, but this isn’t the problem Affliction has.

Why does every talent EXCEPT for the meta setup suck absolute butt? It’s astonishing how bad some of these talents are. I don’t think a single class has a talent selection THIS bad, when I play my alts I at least have a tiny semblance of choice in what I want, but if I take one or two WRONG talents on affliction, I do 20% less dps.

Some examples include:

Nightfall - Seemed like it would be good for multi target making us into a shadowbolt chaingun, but you gave it a RPPM timer so it only procs 3 times a minute. 3 times. Shadowbolt does 4k damage, over 60 seconds this talent only brings us 200 dps. Compare that to deathbolt which does 30k damage on its own, on a 30s cooldown, and can hit for upwards of 150k and you realize how laughable this talent is. Was it even tested?

Drain Soul - This one honestly blows my mind. I loved drain soul in Legion, but in the state it is in right now, selecting drain soul deals 10% less DPS than having no talent selected at all on the row. Taking drain soul over deathbolt is a 22% DPS loss, absolutely cripplingly bad. Somebody did the math on how many shard snipes it requires to pull even with deathbolt, and it was somewhere around 9 to 11 shard snipes per minute; a snipe every 5 seconds. Absurd. This talent needs to be overhauled asap and it’s sad that it has remained in this state for 5 months.

The 30 row is actually quite good, they all have reason for selection and should be how the other rows are balanced.

Sow the Seeds; Actually terrible unless you have 10 stacked targets for 20 seconds and even then it barely does more than phantom singularity.
Vile taint is the same thing, these are supposed to be the “AoE” talents but they cripple single target dramatically (10% or more) and do LESS on AoE than phantom singularity does. There is no situation where you would ever take them.

Shadow Embrace - Why is this talent objectively worse than Haunt? Haunt deals damage on its own, and is a 10% damage buff. This talent is harder to maintain than Haunt is, but is only 9%. Sure you CAN maintain 3 stacks on 2 targets but that’s basically impossible in any circumstances other than hitting 2 target dummies, it eats up so many globals that it becomes realistically not worth it at all.

Grimoire of Sacrifice - Why does this talent do less damage than having no talent at all? Sure, it’s passive, and you don’t need to think about it, but it should at least get its AoE function back. Maybe aff lock will be bearable in m+ without the player wanting to tie a noose as they do 8k dps on a 6 mob pull with CDs up while everyone else soars to 50k dps just mashing one AoE button.

Soul Conduit is just pathetically bad and has no use what-so-ever, and creeping death BARELY has use in m+ and only on extremely high keys during fortified week.

The thing with this class right now is this one talent setup (DB/SL/PS/Haunt/DS:M) all synergize with each other in a perfect way, that’s why Aff has been quite dominant in raid environments. Yet none of the talents have been addressed, instead you just nerf our unstable affliction by 10% and think that’s going to balance the spec when all it does is further cripple how terrible it is in anything except for raiding.

The tree needs serious overhaul and has been ignored for so long strictly because affliction has performed well in raid. I’ve seen a casual player or two in the wild that run talent setups like drain soul + absolute corruption + vile taint + sacrifice + soul conduit and I feel deeply bad for them because this talent setup is a 55% damage loss in all situations What class deals half as much damage because of a couple talent choices? It’s equivalent to taking off half of my equipment.

I’m not suggesting an absolute rework of the class at all. Just make the talents have at least a semblance of viability in even casual content. A couple of the talents could really help in a m+ environment if they were numerically consistent.

43 Likes
2

Well said. Will blizzard listen? Our talents are so pigeonholed we even use the same talents in PvP. That’s how bad these other talents are. PvP where you would think instant cast dmg would be good. Where removing the need of cast bars is a good thing, you still go raid talents.

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Waves Just join the demo train. It’s a lot more fun over here.

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Demo is an example of a spec done really well, pretty much all the talents have certain uses and it feels fun, I really like it in m+

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Yeah I never feel like there’s a dull moment in the rotation either it’s so fluent, visuals are awesome. Actually makes PvE enjoyable for me, I couldn’t stand it as affliction.

Really fun for PvP too!

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I have to agree with pretty much everything. At least in pvp, grim of sac for aff is rediculous damage for some reason.

It’s a shame how bad nightfall and drain soul are because i don’t always like dumping all shards for deathbolt. I honestly feel those should be baseline. Shadowbolt spam with instant procs occasionally and drain soul finishers when targets are low. That’d be ideal gameplay imo.

I have literally never touched soul conduit in my life. I despise it’s design so much. So boring.

The fact that singularity is instant cast and doesn’t cost shards while the others have a cast time and cost shards makes it outclass them incredibly. I think they need to come up with something better for sow the seeds and make vile taint instant cast or have no cost tied to it. Sow the seeds could apply a max stacked agony or launch a shadowbolt right after the cast to deal more single target and help seeds explode sooner.

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It feels like affliction really doesn’t have a dedicated dev paying attention to it.

Most of the honor talents are trash compared to other classes (or should be baseline)

Like you say there are no viable alternate options for regular talents. 1 of them is ridiculously better than the others in each row. There are no choices.

And just spec design in general is gutted and boring

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This was a great write-up. I still love how my affliction plays, but the talents are useless. The rows in legion allowed for more diversity.

For example, why not switch phantom singularity with creeping death or soul conduit? Now that aoe row has aoe choices and/or a single target choice. At least that would make sense in terms of adding variety to gameplay that wouldn’t diminish potential by such a large margin.

Bottom line, unlike legion, I agree that the talent choices are not really choices at all.

1 Like
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Affliction talents felt rushed. I assume at the time when they were working on them the intent was to fix them a little later(8.1) but they just forgot about it. I do not think anyone who was in their right mind would of thought putting Deathbolt in the same tier as talents that do not scale with Mastery was a good idea much less making DS weaker then being talentless. Same issue with SE vs. Haunt.

There was a big debate between DS/MG gameplay vs. Nightfall/Haunt gameplay. I think the original goal was to satisfy both crowds but thy ended up satisfying neither because of poor balancing and simply put, just plain forgot about it completely. If they were actually looking closely at the data they would see the only talents Afflocks are changing is between Absolute Corruption and Siphon Life.

Edit: As far as you comment about other classes go, i play a Shadow Priest and its pretty bad for most rows(not as bad as Affliction). Row 1 and 2 are cookie cutter. Row 3 all 3 talents see use but its only 1 for raids and another for dungeons. Row 4 is cookie cutter, Row 5 is 1 for dungeons and 1 for raids. Row 6 and 7 are cookie cutter.

Really the only Difference between Aff and Shadow is they have 2 rows where they choose between 2 talents while aff only has one row.

3 Likes
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Sac does a lot in PvP because PvP is not a PvE rotation, sac procs a flat amount of times per minute on a RPPM timer. If the other team is pillar humping and hiding, it will be the great majority of your damage because you are not casting UA’s or shadowbolts, the fact that it is consistently proccing no matter your dps is why.

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This is extremely well put and highlights what I find so enraging about the spec.

I feel that this is Affliction’s biggest issue at its core and lends itself to the dumpster fire that is its talents. Affliction’s fundamental design is flawed and was iterated on in a way that made it objectively worse moving into Legion. It’s also really telling that the only meaningful changes made to affliction since Legion’s inception were in the form of tuning passes that made them the top pick for most content (raiding especially).

Due to how affliction works there is absolutely no place for talents like Nightfall or Drain Soul or Vile Taint. Furthermore, Deathbolt fits so well in Affliction’s already skeletal design that it’s literally a must pick, which is stupid considering that a spec at its core should have a fully fleshed design and baseline mechanics that are interesting and easy to branch off of (in the form of talents or otherwise).

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Give Sow the Seeds an extra seed and let it apply Soulflame to anything the explosion impacts.

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Wondering we have dead talents in our tier options.

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Agreed, and guess I’ll be changing out my talents after seeing just how much damage I’m losing out on.

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Demo should be good. Unfortunately, if it wasn’t for server-side spell queue lag on Demonic Consumption, the spec wouldn’t be in the greatest place right now. It would be OK, midpack, but not where it is right now.

That’s not exactly a shining beacon of a spec done well. Still miles more interesting to play than Affliction currently, not that I’m whining. I’d rather play it anyway.

Affliction’s talents are rubbish. Deathbolt may as well be baseline and the way the spec operates as a one-trick burst pony is almost the direct opposite of how the spec currently plays.

There’s one dps talent build for Aff PVE. One. Every other talent may as well not exist.

Observer is awful. It ruins the spec more than anything else. Remove observer, neuter Deathbolt and shove damage back to the DoTs and you may have at least some flexibility.

It really wasn’t hard but the class devs seem to ignore what Aff was traditionally good at. Aff should have the talent flexibility to either buff direct damage (burst) (aka a talent build for Sbolt) or DoT damage for sustained.

It is not a cooldown based spec and shoving the MOBA design onto WoW’s class design has been an abject disaster.

1 Like
16

im assuming youre referring to the tyrant/implosion cheese?

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Not true at all, the spell lag bug is about a 3-4% overall dps increase. We are ahead of other specs in raid by so much that we’d still be top 2. one 3% nerf won’t push us to mid pack.

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I feel your frustration. I think it is just time to give up on Affliction. The current Devs don’t understand what a player who enjoys a DoT spec likes about it. Even during Legion when we were “god tier”, as so many claim we were, a lot of our damage wasn’t from actually being a DoT class unless it was a council fight.

Racklinc - Affliction from 2005 - 2018. Now Demonology until a new class comes out.

These devs are just morons.

1 Like
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As one of the few (and lucky) warlock players able to participate Alpha/Beta BfA and actively providing feedback (fine, i was also aggressively pitching my ideas) to developers, getting involved with the back-and-forth between them and us, i feel like i need to clarify a few points.

1, In the alpha/beta of BfA, warlocks did get quite generous amount of feedback and reasoning/explanation between us and the developers. Affliction was one of the first specs getting a lengthy post on how the blues debate their internal decision on the big issues (yea, Shadow Bolt vs Drain Soul. THAT ONE).

2, The talents went through multiple rounds of changes and swapping places, which us playtester’s feedback did played a part in their decision. One such example was Haunt ended up swapping places with Drain Soul because some of us do like the gameplay of Haunt+Drain Soul, so they tried to satisfy that ‘player request’.

3, Of course, not everything turned out as we hoped, or even perfect. Talent Combo’s didn’t end up working as well as we hoped. Our concern on Deathbolt turned out too true. Some bugs/strange design still hits live server despite the blues acknowledge they know about the issue (GoS Succubus gives Seduction. Srsly still not fixed?) But on the general side of things, some of the biggest issues on beta/alpha gets worked out.

Did people realize that Deathbolt originally had a cast time previously, and initially only one UA is counted for the total damage because their fear it might be ‘too much’?

When you screamed in delight, pushing that button of death of yours, yelling ‘MAMMA SAYS KNOCK YOU OUT!!!’ - kindly remind yourself, that plenty of unsung fel-tainted souls have sacrificed their own souls to make sure your key press feels so good right now.

We are sad that the outcome wasn’t as best as we hoped it can be, but we tried what we could, and achieved some mild level of success.

At least this little experiment proved one thing which plenty of us memed on beta - Affliction without Drain Soul is like Pizza without Cheese.

When some people screamed how ‘old school’ they are, how much they ‘love’ Nightfall, but statistic proves Deathbolt being overly dominant picked, that really tells something, does it? And how about the ironic truth that Shadow Embrace works at least 3x better with Drain Soul than Nightfall, and people avoided discussing it completely?

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Why not. At the moment there is 0 class fantasy that is present in affliction. Its just maintain subpar ticking dots until you can burst your way back up to top dps spot.