Title:
Buff Affliction Single Target
Edit:
To elaborate a bit what really grinds the gears of affliction players.
Don‘t make it a talent choice to choose between ST and AoE. You have many options, one is to change something for the talent row with seed and singularity. Other ones include buffing malefic rapture or conduits again. There are also options to change legendaries.
worst thing is even with the st talent,phantom singularity, afflictions st is just bad, which is even worse for a dot spec with no real target switching capabilities.
Also our “st legendary” is one of the worse things i have seen, design wise. Its only about 200dps beter than synergy and gameplay wise its just bad to use your shards to buff your filler and having to essentially stand still the whole time so you can fully take advantage of it. And if they buffed it so it took into account movement it would be broken for fights with little movement.
People say they can’t buff ST without multi target fights making us OP. I disagree. Build our big ST damage around Unstable Affliction (either by a direct damage buff to the DoT or through synergy with other DoTs) and its problem solved. I’d love to see what a flat 20-30% UA buff would look like*
*Don’t shoot me, I’ve done no maths on this, I pulled the number from my rear end.
Remove MR.
Decrease SoC damage, buff DoTs further.
Problem solved. It will also help Affliction PvP a bit 'cuz games last at least 6 minutes even in this fast meta, which is just bonkers.
Why remove one of the best things that happened to affliction, front loaded dmg that synergizes with our dots. The old playstyle of affliction doing damage with only dots isnt viable anymore.
I enjoy MR , it made me play affliction this expansion. But I don’t enjoy not being rewarded for a stacked agony and strong mechanics. Since MR you can do burst with affli, but you still have ramp-up and so are behind in a lot of fights against on-demand burst classes. As affli you should excel in long-term fights more than other classes like e.g. a demonhunter or warrior. They can do on-demand damage, which we can’t. This designwise bit of imbalance is balanced and fun in every game. That is why classes differ. And in the current state, affliction isn’t balanced.
I love Warlock right now as all specs are viable. Demo for ST, Destro for cleave and Aff for AOE. For me it’s perfect. I hate playing the same spec for all content 
And Aff is extremely fun to play in M+ right now. Better than it has been for years. I would hate for it to change just to buff ST.
A way they could buff single target damage is by buffing pet’s damage.
This way it’s limited to ST and will not scale in AOE scenarios.
They have much better options for buffing st dmg before resorting to buffing the pet’s dmg.
Buff SL, UA, revert the nerf to FM conduit, put a damage modifier on target with UA, give us an actual st legendary, even buffing the Darkglare dmg.
Blizz will let this spec stew for a while. It’s been too good at everything for far too long and needed knocking down. What we now have currently is one of the best AOE specs in the game. As a class, it seems more balanced, get over it.
last season it sucked in m+
It didn’t. It was one of the top performing specs in higher keys.
The trouble was getting to those higher keys in the first place. The meta was AOE and our AOE was trash. Buffing SOC is what we really needed and this season feels much better for it. We actually have a useful damaging AOE now. It’s just a shame that the pendulum swung too far the other way on single target. Some balance would be nice!
Is far too long a single patch and is almost killing a spec excused because it was one of the better specs for that patch? What we are asking is to bring afflictions st closer to other specs, i dont think thats too much to ask.
It was one of the better specs - in the middle yes. But nowhere near boomkin, mage, hunter, monk or rogue
Game should never be adjusted around top 5-10%.
On the topic, a solid buff to DoTs themselves and a slight nerf to SoC would solve the issue. This would also help the PvP side of the things as well since Affliction does absolutely nothing for the first 5 to 7 minutes of each arena game.
buff single target
Ways to Buff Single Target of aff - examples
-Shadowbolt/drainsoul
The PvP buffs from today, 09.08, apply them to PvE
Buffing warlock ST with the 9.1 AoE buff that it received (Sow the Seeds build) would probably make it a bit too strong. If anything I think warlock should receive a bit of love on the utility front. I would argue that comparing a spec to mages or boomkins is not really a good metric though. They’ve both been somewhat overtuned this xpac.