There are only 4 classes that didn’t get their talents yet which are warrior , monk ,demon hunter and warlock, so it’s a pretty good time to start talking about what we liked from the shadowlands borrowed power, what to keep , what to not , as well as some potential returning abilities / mechanics for warlock,
Today I will be focusing on affliction
but starting my wishlist, there some points I want to talk about
- The 9.1 Affliction nerfs have and still are affecting the spec in a bad way, but what I think affliction is struggling to be is a good aoe spec and a good single target spec without either of them being broken, having the same spender for AoE and also single target could be a very difficult talk to get balance wise , malefic rapture was ok in mythic plus, maybe it wasn’t good enough, but it was bonkers in pvp and single target situations < I know demonology kinda has the same thing with hand of Gul’dan but hand of Gul’dan is two different abilities if you think about it, the imps do the single target damage and the splash damage and implosion are the AoE damage.
- Blizzard has been trying to shift our some of our damage away from malefic rapture to drain soul, with abilities like decimating bolt and the legendary malefic wrath, and I think the goal here is to make affliction have to choose between single target or AoE builds, more like every other spec in the game, but we ended up having to swing too far in either direction
- The weird sow the seeds rotation in 9.1 is something I personally hated and I really wish it doesn’t come back, because it’s gimmicky and it doesn’t really have to, affliction can be a much more fun m+ experience than just spamming one button with a lot of haste , I personally prefer playing vile taint and malefic rapture, like how the spec is supposed to be played, but the problem is we need some time to ramp at the start of every pack
and I think manually spreading agony is the problem, none of our other dots take too much time to be spread, except for agony, the haste from decaying soul sachel actually helped with that in 9.1 , but if we’re not getting that in some way , I would much rather have seed of corruption also spread agony , please blizzard, there are other solutions i will discuss later
now with that out of the way, I can finally start telling my wishlist:
- soul rot is weird, in it’s current form, in a way that originally, a lot of people were confused about if they should cast drain life with inevitable demise or not, when it comes to mythic +, I don’t like having to make this kind of decision based on tuning because not every player will know what to do in that situation , and it will also feel like you’re ignoring something that your class can do , doing that AoE drain life is really cool, and I absolutely don’t want to skip it
my fix to this is to make it so inevitable demise hits another target each time it gains a 10th stack, so for example it hits 1 target with 9 stacks and once you get your 10th stack, it hits two, up to 6 at 50 , and then if necessary, make soul rot just a regular cooldown dot that you’re supposed to burst a few raptures after using , or make rapture extends it so we can cast drain life once we’re out of shards , but honestly while this sounds more complex and interesting , I don’ think we’ll have this kind of time in a mythic plus especially when we have multiple agonies rolling , I would just remove it at this point
- malefic wrath gameplay surely is a problem, because it sounds cool making affliction the patient spec that doesn’t really want to spend all shards like crazy as soon as they proc, but at the same time you can’t really miss the buff,
the tier set bonuses we got absolutely help, and an instant cast rapture is definitely the fix for this buff, but I wish there was a small talent that guarantees an instant free malefic rapture in some way, if you fully channel drain soul, also I hate having to spend 3 shards to reapply the buff should I move or enter a boss transition
- bring soul flame back in some way, it doesn’t have to deal damage, maybe just refresh the duration of dots on the enemies that it hits so you don’t have to do so manually , or to maybe make enemies vulnerable to shadow damage over time
- If decimating bolt is going to make it in the talent tree in any form, please consider making it a passive ability : drain soul’s damage is multiplied by 1,2,3,4 times depending on the target’s health , not everything needs to have a cooldown that the player has to manage, decimating bolt with drain soul is also kind of impractical , due to unability to move during that channel time, and also sometimes missing the third missile if used on an ad that died really fast
- remove one of the dots, Now may sound crazy but hear me out, corruption does nothing for affliction, the damage is pitiful, the only time I’m happy to have corruption is during explosive weeks, or if I’m farming some low level stuff or something , it’s definitely nice to have that instant damage on a it but really you can remove it and just buff agony or siphon life and make seed of corruption spread them instead of corruption ,and that’s one less button we need to press, corruption in single target feels like an uptime debuff we need to keep on the target that does no damage and is just there to annoy you , the duration is also too short
- Increase siphon life’s healing in pvp, really this dot does no damage and it heals only for 30% of that nothing it’s doing , so unless it’s on 50 targets at once it’s not really doing much , just an extra global if you have it talented
- please do something to seed of corruption , make it spread agony, maybe even spread all the dots that you have on a target to other targets it hits, that way we can somehow maybe spread our unstable affliction around , I don’t know
it’s really weird having a spell that spreads only one dot and you have to spread the others manually, I don’t want to spam this ability, I want to play it the way it’s supposed to be played, this is an easy fix and I don’t know why it’s not already in the game
you can even make it spread curses , better than impending catastrophe
or maybe make it so it grants haste equal to how many corruptions targets it hits, so kind of like decaying soul sachel , so it gives us enough haste to spread agonies fast , or maybe have a talent that makes it so casting agony also applies it to nearby targets
- let affliction cast immolate:
currently we can only cast shadow spells, so in arena we are really vulnerable to interrupts , immolate can really solve this problem, so if you’re locked from shadow you can throw an immolate or vice versa ,
also this was doable back in the day, although you couldn’t have both unstable affliction and immolate on the same target
- The existance of focused malignancy now means that haunt is a useless maintain debuff, it does nothing for the spec.
- Make me transform into a jailer, or an inquisitor demon when I’m under the effect of dark soul misery, come on blizzard it’s only 20 seconds
- if nightfall is supposed to be the AoE option in that row, or an AoE option at all , cause we’re not really going to have rows in the same way anymore, then make the shadowbolts from generated by it cast to all targets like fire and brimstone
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