Affliction talents that need changes

Classes Warlock
1

Warlocks are, in general, in a extremely boring phase design way. They need a redesign, imho.

However, I am assuming Blizzard is not going to do that, so I think I will insist (because I assume this problems have been mentioned hundreds of times to no avail) on some of the most immediate issues in the affliction talent tree.

Tier 1:

  • Nightfall: a very weak talent that adds little extra dps: it proccs more or less 3 times per minute, which means in a minute your dps will increase by the equivalent of 1 shadow bolt and a half (75% extra spell power plus 1,5 extra casting time from reducing a 2 sec cast to 1,5 gcd). A single death bolt adds several times that damage.
  • Drain soul: Even if it didn’t force you to use it during all the fight and you could choose to use it only at the execute phase, it would still be much worse than DB. It so bad that it actually reduces your damage, as using it only improves your dps over using shadow bolt as a filler during the execute phase. But as it does not complement shadowbolt, but replaces it instead, forcing you to use it outside of the execute phase, which means it will gimp your dps for 80% of the fight. On average, it decreases your filler dps by something like 20%.

Proposals:

  • Nightfall: Increase the proc and the extra damage. The talent basic design is OK, simply not good enough to justify bringing it over DB.
  • Drain soul: Increase the damage a little (at least up to 22,5% spell power per second, so that our dps is not reduced in comparison to shadow bolts). Make each tick give a chance of generating soul shards.

Tier 6:

  • Shadow embrace: You can choose Haunt, that adds dps directly (deals more damage than a shadowbolt with a shorter cast time) and indirectly (10% damage buff with a single cast) or you can choose this one, that adds no direct dps buff and only adds a 9% indirect buff with 3 casts (which means it is not even good for situations where you need to change targets). The only advantage is that it makes your rotation simpler…
  • Grimoire of sacrifice: Gives a little extra damage to your spells, but makes you lose your pet’s damage (and its secondary abilities). It could be great for multitarget situations but… it seems the number of procs are determined in a rppm way, meaning it adds the same damage in a single target situation than in a multi target one.
    Haunt: It’s an okay talent for pve, but a very lackluster one in PVP.

Proposals:

  • Shadow embrace: make it proc from the seeds of corruption explosion too. That way it would have a situational advantage over haunt. Make it add a 4,5% bonus in two stacks.
  • Grimoire of sacrifice: Make it a 20 second duration buff, 2 min CD, that kills your pet in exchange of a pet specific buff + allows you to summon a demon instantly. That would really make it fun in PVP, giving locks a way to change pets, while also making it useful in PVE, as the current permanent buff is useless.
  • Haunt: Maybe bring the healing back?

Tier 8:

  • Soul conduit: A very boring talent that, in addition, simply isn’t good enough. At least increase the % of getting the shard.
3 Likes
2

Personally I think we should take active abilities off the talent tree and make them baseline, with talents instead modifying or empowering those abilities. Classes feel very stripped down right now.

3

I also made my own idea for talent redesign;

This was an old post from me though, despite being recent so maybe could be use as a basis but I do think they should bring back warlock armors, like how mages got their shields, baring in mind that they used to also increase healing received from spells and effects in addition to whatever buffs they used to give, which could benefit our self healing more.

4

By ‘warlocks’ you mean affliction… Destru isn’t much different. Both have pretty static talent choices.

Demo has about 3 or 4 different ways to play it, depending on what azerite gear you have. 2 of those are really smashing some damage out in raids right now. Not OP damage, but good damage.

5

I think the biggest offender in the affliction tree is Absolute Corruption, this talent simply has to be removed.
Just from the start, if you need an annotation for your talent to explain that in certain situations it works differently, then it’s a BAD DESIGN. And it’s not only this one exception, every encounter has to be designed with AC in mind and have some changes made behind the scenes to disable it whenever it breaks the game, like at G’huun.

The biggest problem with AC is that it limits design space, as long as this talent exists you can’t really have cool effects, like azerite traits, for corruption, as seen with Inevitable Demise which had to be changed to Agony because AC exists.

One solution maybe it could be made to be refreshed by shadowbolt/drain soul in order to preserve this idea of removing 1 dot from our rotation.

As for the other talents mentioned here, for Soul Conduit i don’t know why they nerfed it. It worked well at 20% in Legion but now they reduced it to 15% and it’s completely useless.

Shadow Embrace also needs to change, it’s too similar to Haunt. What i liked in legion is that due to a certain artifact trait crit was for the first time important to affliction, or if not important at last not garbage.

I think Shadow Embrace should take that spot and instead of another dmg increase it should increase crit damage. This would make the talent influence your gear choices, or it could become a better option if you just happen to get predominantly crit gear.

As for Nightfall and Drain Soul, they just need a boost in damage, however i wouldn’t mind seeing the same crit synergy for Nightfall. Like granting both damage increase and crit chance, or have it’s proc triggered by corruption criticals.

1 Like
6

I meant all of them.

Well, i must admit I meant all of them in pvp (due to mobility issues) and destro and affli in pve (which are the specs I play).

But I decided to focus on affli because it has, in my opinion, the most obvious “offender” talent wise.

7

I wish if they would do something about drain soul, its insanely bad. 3 dots + Haunt + Drain soul as filler was my all time fav. affliction rotation. I cant use that anymore or i will be like 20%+ behind dps wise. I thought the whole idea about the new talent system is to have different viable play styles maybe with a 1-2% difference in dps between different builds but not that huge gap.

1 Like
11

Just make nightfall baseline . What’s the point of being a talent ? It’s like having Enhanced Pyrotechnics https://www.wowhead.com/spell=157642/enhanced-pyrotechnics as a talent… Grimoire of sacrifice is nice in pvp, randomly hitting though it feels clunky, it would be nice if it would prioritize your main target somehow . Soul conduit is a disgrace in general , terrible design and whoever made that thing should be ashamed of him/herself, same goes for Shadow’s Embrace . Drain Soul should also be baseline and be usable or buffed at low % hp .

12

How is grimoire of sac nice for pvp? The extra damage barely covers the pets’ damage, and, as you say, you can’t even control it, while you can keep your pet focused on your desired target. The only use it has is an extra defensive cd if combined with void walker, but at the expense of losing an interrupt and a purge, or a slow and a cc. It may be a good choice in certain situations, but is niche at best. And let’s face it, it is good due to the voidwalkers ability, not due to the talent itself, which is a joke. Make the voidwalker’s ability affect both the warlock and the pet instead of just the pet and no one will pick that talent ever again.

Edit:

i wanted to add to the list one of the main problems for afflilocks: aoe.

The main problem is, imho, that all the talents that should help us in this situation are gimped in some way.

Part of the problem is that our 4th tier of talents does not respect the basic rule Blizzard is using in their designs: most of the times, each tier of talents shares a single role, such as defense, single target dps, multi target dps, etc.

However, that is not the case with our 4th tier: phantom singularity is, in fact, more of a single target/priority target dps ability with extra utility when the main target has some kinds of adds, but is pretty much useless in every other situation, because the cd is too long, the target dies to quickly, etc.

On the other hand, the other two talents (Sow the seeds and sow the taint) are literally useless in single target dps scenarios: the shard cost means that using those abilities is one less UA being casted.

The above means that you don’t really choose the type of AoE you want to deal (cleave, continued, bursty, etc) according to the necessities of the encounter, but that you have to actually choose to be able to deal a little AoE (not that great) in exchange of gimping your priority damage.

The solution should be obvious: take the shard cost away from Vile taint. That way, you can actually use it in single target encounters, meaning picking it it won’t feel as much as a sacrifice as it currently does.

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