Was removed, worst decision blizzard made.
Is it only me or does the talent Grimoire Felguard not count towards reign of Tyranny?
I would love that as Cap Stone of the Warlock tree… the old and beautiful talents “Kiljaeden Cunning”, “Mannoroth Fury”, “Archimonde Vengeance” <3
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Some further feedback and bug reporting, mainly concerning the warlocks class tree and the Affliction spec.
- Class tree
-Amplify Curse When it comes to amplified Curse of Tongues, there doesn’t seem to be a general rule as to when amplified Curse of Tongues can work on enemies and when it can’t. There are some bosses in dungeons for example that can be affected with the 70% cast time incrase, and others that can’t, it’s 30% max.
Some bosses that can be affected by an amplified curse of Tongues, such as Medivh in karazhan for example, have their adds immune to it however. The 3 birds he creates at some point can only have “normal” curse of tongues applied to them.
-Fel Synergy This talent still doesn’t work when our pet is dead/dismissed/sacrificed. It’s clearly a remnant of the fact that this was a part of the old Soul Link. However Soul Leech is not linked to having a pet out, so this should heal us whether or not we have a pet.
-Soul Link This talent still doesn’t grant +10% stamina when Grimoire of Sacrifice is active.
-Teachings of the Black Harvest This talent hasn’t beeen redesigned since Spell Lock was given back to the Felhunter. This creates an issue, because if you play with Grimoire of Sacrificee and sacrifice your felhunter, this talent becomes useless, because it affects Devour Magic. We get Spell Lock via the Demon Command ability, not Devour Magic anymore.
-Grimoire of Synergy This doesn’t interact with Grimoire of Sacrifice, that’s fine. However that’s different from how it works in Shadowlands. Something in the tooltip about the lack of interaction would be nice.
-Inquisitor’s Gaze This eye still attacks targets that I have not attacked nor targeted. I still don’t like this, it’s just additional bloat on our bars, it does nothing (not that it should do anything, the weaker this is, the better), so why having it here at all. This is barely 1% of our overall damage in a ST scenario. it’s just additonal set up after every wipes and Warlocks already have too many things to do already. I wish this was removed from the game.
-Summon Soulkeeper This talent is super weak compared to any other things any of the 3 specs can do in AOE. So it’s almost always a loss of DPS to cast this atm. The best thing to do would be to give this thing a CD, 30s/45s/60s or whatever, and buff its damages accordingly. The only scenario where this is good is when there are 10+ targets with very very little HP that are gonna die before we can do any of our normal AOE spells. This is very niche.
We’re better off always playing Inquisitor’s Gaze at the moment, it’s just free DPS that happens on its own.
-Grim Feast I think this could be buffed up to 50% increased channel speed for Drain Life.
-Soulburn This is amazing, I’ve had time to play with it now in M+ and Mythic raiding, the instant gateway is just so nice to have.
- Affliction
-Agony On Beta this spell is a bit broken. It doesn’t reach the normal maximum amount of stacks it should. Baseline it should go up to 10, and with the talent Writhe in Agony go up to 14/18. However, it goes 4 stacks lower than it should, resulting in a lot less damages.
-Xavian Teachings Again, this talent feels so bad. having to spend a point to get instant corruption is ludicrous. In AOE builds we’re better off not taking it at all and having to hard cast a spell that I’ve cast instantly for the past 15 years is very annoying. I wish corruption would be made instant baseline for Affliction, and this talent could be changed. We could use additional duration on our DoTs, Agony, Corruption and Siphon Life and or a reduced GCD on those same 3 spells. Or just add a 10% damage increase to corruption to this ? Just something more please.
-Agonizing Corruption This talent is badly designed. This does nothing really for Affliction in AOE. This talent needs something more or it’ll never be picked in any kind of even slightly “competitive” content. A reduced cast time on seeds of corruption, or an agony extension when seeds explode, something else.
-Shadow’s Embrace The Affliction Single Target build and rotation is too complicated.
Shadow’s Embrace is one of the components that makes the ST rotation needlessly complicated.
It would be very easy to change this talent by the old Legion talent, Contagion. Or just make it a choice node, Shadow’s Embrace or Contagion. And if some people really want to try to min max shadow’s embrace on 2 targets they can try.
Changing this talent into Contagion would remove some weird set up on pull where we have to do 2 ticks of Drain Soul before starting to rapture.
-Harvester of Souls This talent is poorly tuned. it’s too weak at the moment, it’s never worth taking no matter the situation.
-Siphon Life This is another key component to the complexity of Affliction in Single Target.
Before the rework of talent trees, there was this 1 row of talents for affliction that was actually well designed, it was the one with Write in Agony, Absolute Corruption and Siphon Life. It gave us 3 different levels of difficulty. Did we want to manage 4 DoTs with Siphon Life. 3 With Write in Agony, or just 2 With Absolute Corruption.
Now it’s either 4 DoTs to manage, or 2. With the loss of deliberate malice and Dark Soul, and all the new added things to manage, it’s impossible to manage siphon life on more than one target, so it’s become a purely ST talent.
The difference in complexity it creates is massive. We have as many DoTs to maintain in Single Target than we have when we’re playing against 3 targets with Absolute Corruption. The more targets are involved, the less complex the spec becomes (because yes, the complexity of a DoT spec is essentialy down to the number of DoTs you have to maintain).
It makes also the spec very weak in 2 targets scenarios, because we have essentially the same build for 2,3 or 4 targets, because it’s impossible to play Siphon Life on more than one target, when currently in Shadowlands, we can play Siphon life on 2 targets. But weaknesses for specs are fine, affliction has a lot going for it.
-Soul Swap This is another talent that needs to be tweaked to ease the Single Target rotation. This talent NEEDS to apply Siphon Life if talented into it. It makes no sense that it dosesn’t apply it, it follows it directly in the tree. The set up in ST is very cluncky, we have to channel 2 ticks of drainlife “for nothing” to get to 3 stacks of Shadow’s Embrace, then we have to Soul Swap AND Siphon life, then we can get on with PS and SR and Dargkalre. It’s needlessly long and complicated. Soul Swap applies our core DoTs, so it should apply Siphon Life as well if talented into it.
-Soul Tap This talent is very strong, it allows us to pull bosses with 5 shards. That’s why a passive should be added to this talent, that allows affliction warlocks to regen passively up to 5 shards when out of combat. Because it’s very annoying having to cast 2 soul taps every single time for every pull during the countdown for the next few years.
-Pandemic Invocation This talent doesn’t do the amount of damages the tooltip says it does, roughly 50% less.
The main problem with this talent is the added, needless complexity it brings to the spec in Single Target.
It requires us to refresh our DoTs later than we usually would to get the maximum duration on them, and take advantage of the real pandemic window.
It requires a great amount of constant attention to our DoTs.
It’s unplayable as soon as there’s more than 1 target and really only works when play Siphon Life, because Absolute corruption renders this useless. This talent is very niche, weak and too complicated.
I would much rather this talent was replaced by something else, something easier. Like Deliberate Malice or Wracking Brilliance.
-Soul Rot This needs to be added to the Affliction Mastery. It makes no sense that it’s not affected by it. Our only DoT that does not benefit from it. This spell is super weak on its own since it has lost its conduit. It’s a no-brainer, add it to the Mastery please.
-Tormented Crescendo This is a ST talent. it’s a very good one at that. However we will NEVER be able to pick it because of how the bottom section of the tree is laid out. It’s a shame. This talent is here to help us maintain Dread Touch, but in any scenario where we would play Dread Touch, we would never have the point to spend it into Tormented Crescendo.
-Seized Vitality This talent is absurdly weak. In ST it’s barely a 0.2% DPS increase. 2 points spent for barely a 0.2% DPS increase in ST, it’s ludicrous. I know the following talent is very very strong, but still, it needs tuning. The damage buff to Haunt should be 50/100% per rank instead of 10/20%. The healing could be reduced accordingly.
-Dread Touch This talent is one of the main ST tuning knob of the spec.
It’s one of the talent that adds the more complexity to the spec in ST, too much complexity.
This talent has replaced Malefic Wrath in a sense, a very short buff window created by spending a shard on rapture. It’s easier to benefit from it because it’s our DoTs dealing the damages, we don’t have to be channeling on top of it.
However, 6 s is too short, Affliction in ST has CONSTANTLY 9 different debuffs/procs/DoTs to manage, Dread Touch included, and that is simply too many things.
So, to ease things, Dread Touch duration should be increased to 8 s for example. Or, it should be possible to extend its duration, up to a maximum amount, for example 12 s, when we’re casting multiple raptures at a time, instead of always going back to 6 s. It would give the spec a lot more breathing room to do the rest.
-Dark Harvest This talent still only gives 2.5% haste and crit per targets hit by Soul Rot instead of 5%.
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The Capstones of the Demo Tree are a Joke! 
NO DMG, To high Cooldown, NO DMG XD
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The recent change to Malefic Affliction on the live servers have created a big bug.
Now we do get the stacks of Malefic Affliction as a buff on ourselves instead of a debuff on the target, but now we lose those stacks every time we refresh Unstable Affliction on the target.
Even if Unstable Affliction never falls off we’re constantly having to rebuild 3 stacks of Malefic Affliction constantly, which is a big problem because it becomes impossible to get any real uptime on Dread Touch.
This bug completely destroys the Single Target damage of the spec.
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On demo tree I suggest AT LEAST remove Doom and give back Decimating Bolt. Spec is in very bad state (an analysis is already in another thread [Demonology] Critical alent spec/talent tree review - Classes / Warlock - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)) and you must do something.
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Decimating bolt for all spec, please… maybe a pvp talent?
It would be too much for current affliction. Decimation bolt is more suited for Demo/Destro. But Destro already has good stuff in the tree. Demo on the other hand has Doom and Nether portal that easily could be replaced.
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Those nerfs to dark pact maybe little bit too much, but ok, many were asking to nerf it which i understand, but why warlock especially demonology does not have a normal 20% soul link as he has for about forever, this feel out of the place as demo is by the lore and past expansions has have always something extra for defense and now he is only sharing it to Destro and Aff. Demo should have for example 10% soulink as base line builded in + those general talents.
Why Antoran Armaments still does not changing the visual of Felguard? To Fel Lord or some other upgrade to actual Fel guard look.
Why Nether portal is been ignored and does not summon demon per each soul shard spent?
Why Doom dot still works the same without any try to change it? The soul shard gain does not make sense. The damage increase with the other talents of how many demons is active does not make sense either due to ± 17seconds window when it do a dmg. Why not to add some % of damage per each demon summoned until it do a dmg?
Why inquisitors gaze does not interact in some way with the specs? If you dont want it to do damage thats is fine, but it should instead do something with each spec.
Btw instead of 3 dogs summoned with the talent it would be much better design to transform those dogs to a 1 bigger meaner strong dog (with 3 small dogs strength). + Adjusting visual a to be on a different level. something like in your Diablo 3 game if i recall it correctly.
Also we miss a proper Doom guard play (could be melee version), but it can be easily builded in to a Grimoire of Felguard if you connect some additional talent to it to power it and balance it. Replacing Hounds of War to empower Grimoire of Felguard would be the way…
There is really a lot of ways…
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True but they wanted nerfs because its Frequent Donor, so why not only nerf the talented version?
Once a weak i post this on the beta forum. We need 20%! Especially after the DP nerf.
I addressed this a lot in the beta forum. Remove Inquisitor’s Gaze and give us Grimoire of Supremacy back.
I always thought of soul swap as a PvP specc and it works fine there. Although I agree that it should apply siphon life if talented into.
100% agree that Xavian teachings should be baseline. Basically, most of the post makes alot of sense.
My two wishes for affliction right now is first, that it would be possible to get more adaptable builds where you don´t hit like a wet noodle if you specc for AOE in Mythic+
Secondly, I much preferred spending my soul shards on multiple Unstable Afflictions rather than Malefic rapture. I think Malefic rapture ruined the specc to a large extent. I see how it would be difficult to make this change now since most talents are built around malefic rapture… but regardless, I was so much happier when DoTs did more damage and you could focus damage by spending shards on UA instead.
Legion affliction warlock just played much better in my opinion. I know we can´t fully go back to the way it was… but yeah MR just feels clunky. The only way I could see Malefic rapture feeling good is if it wouldn´t be better the more dots are on the target. 2-3 dots should be enough for max damage and instant cast proccs should be more common and not just from tormented crescendo.
I think what bothers me is that Affliction plays much more like a set-up and then burst specc where all the stars should align in order for you to deal decent damage. Sub rogue plays this way… but with less set-up required and I certainly don´t think affliction should.
This is my last post for Warlocks in general and for Affliction.
Unfortunately we’re now too close to Dragonflight to get any real changes besides numbers tuning at this stage, and any talent changes will have to wait until 10.0.5 or 10.1.
Concerning the Warlock General tree, most bugs have been fixed, all talents seem to be working. Some are weaker, some will never be taken, such as Abyss Walker, Desperate Pact, Nightmare, Gorefiend’s Resolve but that’s down to the fact that most of the tree is really good.
-Teaching of the Black Harvest, it’s very minor, but this talent still hasn’t been updated since spell lock was given back to the felhunter. The fact that this still affects the CD of devour Magic makes this talent incompatible with Grimoire of Sacrifice when playing with the felhunter (which is 90% of the time in PVP), because we get spell lock as the command demon ability, not devour magic.
-Grim Feast could probably be buffed to 50% channel speed.
-Inquisitor’s Gaze is just free DPS, so why not take it. I still think this is pure clutter, visual clutter, bar clutter. I know some people like this floating eye, I don’t.
-Summon Soulkeeper is still too weak, even after the buff. This spell needs to have a CD and its damages increased greatly, otherwise it will never be picked. Anything any of the 3 specs can do at any time in AOE is better than this. Casting this will almost always be a DPS loss. Animation is clunky, the AOE radius is too small. Inquisitor’s Gaze is permanent free DPS, it’s always better at this moment.
- Affliction Tree
Unfortunately the spec has a lot of issues left unresolved, those issues concern the Single Target rotation and build and the cleave 2-3 targets talent builds. Which unfortunately covers 90% or raid encounters.
The single target build and rotation is way too complicated, with some badly designed talents, which are also weak and very rigid talents.
Affliction is simpler to play currently on 3-4 targets rathen than on a single target, which makes no sense.
They have now overtuned the single target damage of Affliction because the spec is so complex that you cannot reliably play the single target rotation in any real fight. So the damages need to be buffed to make up for it. It’s better than not buffing it, but it’s ridiculous that it’s come to that.
-Xavian Teachings This should be baseline. I have had instant corruption for the past 15 years, the fact that most if not all cleave/aoe builds don’t take that talent and forces me to hard cast this spell is ridiculous.
This talent needs to be changed:
Longer duration on our core rotational DoTs : Agony/Corruption/Siphon Life (SL)/Unstable Affliction (UA), +3/4
And/Or a reduced GCD on Agony/Corruption/SL
And/Or replaced by Tormented Crescendo (more on that later)
And/Or replaced by Focus Malignancy https://www.wowhead.com/spell=339500/focused-malignancy
-Harvester of Souls This talent does nothing. It’s absurdly weak, it’s so weak that it’s never worth taking in any situations. This should either be buffed or replaced by:
Deliberate Malice https://www.wowhead.com/spell=387056/deliberate-malice
Or Focused Malignancy
Or Wracking Brilliance https://www.wowhead.com/spell=272891/wracking-brilliance
-Shadow’s Embrace This talent makes the single target rotation of the spec needlessly complicated, and makes the set up on pull extremely weird and clunky.
This should be replaced by the old Legion talent, Contagion https://www.wowhead.com/spell=196105/contagion
You won’t find a single warlock that will disagree with this.
-Agonizing Corruption This talent is badly designed, it does absolutely nothing for the spec in AOE. It is absurdly weak, two points in this is laughable. This needs changing. Reduced cast time on Seeds of Corruption or something. This will never be picked.
-Vile Taint Amazing rework of that spell, this is incredible. Just a minor thing, it would be great if the curse of exhaustion applied by this would not override a curse of weakness or tongues we already applied on a target.
-Siphon Life/Absolute Corruption I like this talent node. The problem is the difference in difficulty this node creates is massive. Affliction is too complicated, it’s impossible to play SL on more than one target. I personnaly don’t think Siphon Life is the issue, but other talents like Shadow’s Embrace, Pandemic Invocation and Dread Touch are.
-Soul Tap This talent needs to have passive effect added to it : Affliction Warlock can now regenerate up to 5 shards passively out of combat. It’s a needed QOL improvement that will save us thousands of GCDs.
-Soul Swap This needs to apply Siphon Life as well if talented into it. It makes no sense that it doesn’t. The whole point of this talent is to apply our core rotational DoTs that are supposed to be up 100% of the time, which is exactly what SL is. This would help simplify Affliction Single Target rotation, and make the set up on pull much less awkward and clunky.
-Pandemic Invocation This talent is badly designed, very weak, very rigid and anti-synergistic with how DoTs work and how DoT management works in this game. *t only works if we play Siphon Life, and it’s very hard to play Siphon Life at the moment given how convoluted the spec is. This should be removed and replaced by:
Deliberate Malice
Or Focused Malignancy
Or Wracking Brilliance
-Sacrolash’s Dark Strike I understand the nerf to the curse extension, but 0.4 s is too short. Especially after the nerf to the curse of exhaustion applied by Vile Taint. The curse extension might as well not exist anymore.
-Soul Rot This spell needs to be added to the Affliction Mastery. It makes no sense that it isn’t buffed by it. Our only DoT not buffed by our Mastery.
-Tormented Crescendo In theory a great talent for Single Target/2 targets cleave scenarios. In practice, we will NEVER be able to pick that talent, because of how the bottom section of the talent tree is set up. That’s why I said this should be moved up the tree, so that we actually get the chance to play with it.
-Seized Vitality This talent is absurdly weak and needs to be buffed. The damage amp to Haunt should be 50-100%, not 10-20%.
-Dread Touch The debuff duration is simply too short. 6 s is TOO SHORT. Have we learned nothing from the massive failure that was Malefic Wrath ? We should be able to extend the duration of that debuff when we’re casting malefic raptures less than 6 s apart, up to a maximum duration, for example 12 s. This would make the Single Target rotation of the spec more manageable.
-Dark Harvest The nerf to this talent makes no sense to me. It’s what made this branch competitive with the others, especially the Haunt one in AOE/Cleave scenarios.It wasn’t busted at all in terms of damages. It made the spec feel a lot better to play. I have trouble seeing us picking this branch now, I think this was an unwarranted nerf. In AOE/Cleave we will most likely now always go for the Haunt and Darkglare branches.
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That would be bad. You’d lose a lot of value from Carnivorous Stalkers.
And the Demonic core procs.
Guys, you are shortsighted. Both things can be adjusted and balanced properly.
Thing is that adding just 1 dogo is much easier than what i suggested. It works yes but the design miss opportunity to add something more.
bring back decimating bolt and rifts back to class tree and we gucci
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I was always a big fan of the affliction spec and choose to start with it in DF. Everything was fine till I got into my first dungeon. Oh boy was I shredded by every dps. Dungeon after dungeon after dungeon. I changed affi builds several times but it does nothing. Its weak af. Its needlessly overcomplicated and has severe lack of power. Will switch to demonology because its the only spec that looks promising. Shame on what has the class become.
Affliction is strong on long fights, so as longer the fight the more dmg you deal.
Now that I’ve had the opportunity to play affliction in some real life situations, it’s very clear how tedious the single rotation of the spec is and really needs some tweaking.
So, the opening for Affliction in Single Target, is more or less this:
Soul Tap x2 → Haunt → 2 ticks of Drain Soul (DS) → Soul Swap (SS) → Siphon life (SL) → Phantom Singularity (PS) → Soul Rot (SR) → Darkglare → 4 Malefic Rapture (MR)
This set up is incredibly long and very tedious.
-Having to cast Soul Tap twice to get to 5 shards before every single pull is tedious.
-Having to channel 2 ticks of DS just to get Shadow’s Embrace up, and thus delaying apllying our DoTs, is annoying and counter-intuitive.
-Having to apply SL manually when clearly, Soul Swap should also apply it if we’ve taken Siphon Life as a talent, is also very annoying.
-Finally, having to cast 4 raptures to get Dread Touch going is simply too long. There’s also a bug right now, where Malefic Affliction stacks don’t build if you rapture on a target with an absorb shield, so your set up can get even longer.
This set up is on top of every pull preparations we have to make, which got longer with Dragonflight which is:
Summon Pet → Healthstone → Soulstone → Circle/Gate → Soulburn → Inquisitor’s Gaze
I love Soulburn, great utility. However I dislike Inquisitor’s Gaze a lot, it manages to be at the same time useless and mandatory. It has vanilla green fire bolts, deals just barely enough damages that you should always take it, and it’s just one extra button that we have to press all the time. I wish Inquistor’s Gaze would not disappear on death and when we change talents but keep it in our build.
Anyways, back to Affliction. There are very easy things that could be done to make the Single Target opening and rotation simpler, because it is simply too complicated and too convoluted right now.
-Add a passive to Soul Tap, that allows Affliction Warlocks to passively regen up to 5 shards out of combat. Soul Tap is basically just there to allow us to pull at 5 shards. On most fights, since Soul Leech takes priority as the first shield to take incoming damages, we will almost never be able to get any shards in fights with this. With this version we have to hard cast this spell twice before every single pull, it is maddening.
-Change Shadow’s Embrace. Replace it with a version of the talent “Contagion” from Legion. The target afflicted by Unstable Affliction takes 4.5%/9% from the warlock. It’s very simple. Shadow’s Embrace is technically manageable on 2 targets, but the reality is, we have much better things to do than to manage this on more than 1 target. So this would not be a nerf to our 2 targets cleave damage.
-Soul Swap must also apply Siphon Life if talented into it. This is a no-brainer, it makes 0 sense that it’s not already the case.
-Reduce the number of Malefic Affliction stacks to 1 or 2 and allow the Malefic Affliction buff to stay for a few seconds on the warlock when UA expires. Having to cast 4 raptures to activate Dread Touch is silly. Reduce it 2 stacks, each buffing UA damages by 20%, or really just one stack, just one rapture to get the Malefic Affliction buff, and another to proc Dread Touch. By the time we get to proc Dread Touch right now, our DoTs are already falling out.
Allowing us to keep our Malefic Affliction stacks for a while when UA expires to then be able to “carry it over” to a new target would make everything much simpler, smoother and less rigid. It would allow us to get Dread Touch on a new target much faster. Asking us to pay another tax of 4 shards to activate it is nuts. UA is meant to be swapped arround, because of the shard refund on death. But this talent makes this DoT usage so strict, it’s extremely frustrating. Dread Touch is cool, but the initial cost to activate it is not. Malefic Affliction as it is right now is really not fun.
This would be the new opening in Single Target:
Haunt → Soul Swap → Phantom Singularity → Soul Rot → Darkglare → 2 Malefic Raptures.
We’ve won something like 5/6 s on our opening before reaching max power. It’s still a significant set up. It doesn’t make the spec OP at all. It just makes everything smoother, and yes, better.
There’s a bunch of other things that should be changed, but it has bigger consequences for the spec tuning:
-Changing Agonizing Corruption, either add a reduced cast time on Seeds, or an agony extension on seeds detonations, something more. This is a dead talent, but affliction AOE is still very good.
-Pandemic Invocation is horrible and should be banished into the twisting Nether, it’s badly designed, super rigid, forces us to manage our DoTs a certain way, removes freedom in dot management, very weak, very tedious.
-Add Soul Rot to the Affliction Mastery. For some reason it’s our only DoT that doesn’t benefit from it. It makes 0 sense that it isn’t.
-Dark Harvest should be buffed back to 5% per target hit by Soul Rot. This nerf makes no sense.
-Bring back Deliberate Malice somewhere in the tree, probably instead of Pandemic invocation. This bonus from the tier set was SO FUN, it was THE BEST, I miss it dearly, and it would fit extremely well with the spec in Single Target/Spread Cleave builds/rotations. But I’m not getting my hopes up on this.
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It’s crap, no matter the fight length. It’s only good in PVP
That’s not the rotation… but OK, whatever. You do you.