Iam talking about beta for affliction not retail.
M+ Affliction is not fun to play…
- Going from 3 to 1 Seed makes Corruption more harder to spread correctly, Soul Shard cost feels unjustified. Cast time is very long and sometimes you need to cast 2-3 until all Mobs will be applied with Corruption. Now this is poor button which could be removed / passive.
- Button blow is high, all active talents are must to have, not optional.
- Soul Harvester scales poorly with Mastery, some damaging talents don’t scale with Mastery at all.
- Basic UI nameplates are horribly to play with Affliction.
3 Likes
I agree with you. However stacking the adds is more or less tank’s job. While it does hurt our corruption/wither spread, it does feel kinda weird using only Malefic Rapture. Mastery scaling is currently bugged for most of the classes since its early beta yet. Capstone talents are not fit to be capstone for affli at all. As for soul harvester its in a really bad spot for both specs after nerfing it.
Please go back to the Doom from the Tierset in Dragonflight where it applies automaticly from Demon Core Procs. It feels clunky to press doesnt interact with shardregeneration, and makes the gameplayloop from dämo clunky. Its for me in my opinion a “doesnt feel good to press” ability and could easy be a passive with the demonic core interaction from the tierset.
AFFLICTION FEEDBACK
- GENERAL FEEDBACK
I’m a bit less negative about Affliction after playing it quite a bit on beta these past few days but there are still a lot of things that are disappoiting/annoying.
Good stuff
- The reduction in shard generation accomplished by nerfing the Hellcaller tree (removing the +40% haste to Agony) and removing Improved Unstable Affliction helps to rebalance the spec and restore a bit of a distinct identity for Malefic Rapture. We do want to save our shards to some extent, and mainly use them during our 1min burst windows. We’re no longer drowning in shards.
- And the tier set helps make Nightfall/Tormente Crescendo procs feel more relevant because we’re hoping to activate our 4p bonus with them
Bad stuff
- The biggest letdown remains the bottom section of the Affliction spec tree. It just all feels so underwhelming, there’s no clear direction. A lot of the talents there are extremely weak and randomly connected/scattered. There is no “capstone”-worthy talent. Several should be merged together frankly.
2 point nodes in the top/middle of the tree should become 1 point nodes and get nerfed. Then you can transfer a part of the DPS budget to talents in the bottom section of the tree where it’s sorely needed.
- Drain Soul is still a mess from a mechanical standpoint, in regards to Nightfall and Tormented Crescendo procs. I don’t see why we would ever play anything other than Improved Shadow Bolt.
Drain Soul and Nightfall are still heavily bugged.
- There is very little choice in the tree. There’s no choice in the top section. There’s maybe 2 points you can switch around in the middle section.
There are also some clear pathing issuess that are easy to solve.
- And there a lot of talents that just do nothing and/or cost 2 points despite being weak/useless. Again I don’t understand why we can’t have just 1 point nodes.
- Soul Harvester doesn’t feel like Affliction. With a name like that you’d be tempted to think that you would want to play Drain Soul but no, this is a hero tree built around spamming Shadow Bolt.
Our Dots are irrelevant. This version of Affliction doesn’t scale with Mastery at all. It’s not necessarily a big deal. But when you don’t have to manage DoTs (because of/thanks to Absolute Corruption AND your DoTs deal a very small portion of your damage, is this still Affliction at this point?).
The tier set feels very underwhelming for Soul Harvester for those reasons.
- Hellcaller does feel a lot more like Affliction, and I really hope it will be the “best” hero tree for the spec at this stage.
- AFFLICTION TALENT TREE
- Dark Virtuosity
Very weak and costs 2 points. We will never take this, it’s not competitive, even for Soul Harvester.
So we always take the same 8 points in the top section of tree. It never changes.
- Seed of Corruption
We’re forced to pick this talent, which is not the biggest of issues. However Seed of Corruption is now a much more niche spell.
Why do I have to talent into this in ST/2 targets/3 targets builds when I can’t ever pick Dark Virtuosity?
- Absolute Corruption/Siphon Life
5% damage difference to Corruption/Wither is not good enough to justify not picking Absolute Corruption, even for Hellcaller that’s all about Wither.
Absolute Corruption just makes everything so much easier. The GCDs freed up amount to a significant DPS buff as well. This comes at the cost of essentially removing the concept of DoT management to the spec though.
Affliction is too complicated in DF, this makes the spec a lot easier, which has positive and negative effects.
- Kindled Malice
Powerful talent but why does it cost 2 points? Make it a 1 point node, nerf it a bit, and transfer its power budget down in the bottom section of the tree where talents are super lackluster.
- Improved Shadow Bolt/Drain Soul
Improved Shadow Bolt is just the better option all around in all situations.
You can’t waste Nightfall or Tormented Crescendo procs with Shadow Bolt.
You only have to build 2 stacks of Shadow Embrace with Shadow Bolt.
→ Make Drain Soul under Nightfall lasts only the duration of the GCD.
Nerf the Nightfall damage amp to compensate. And change Shadow Embrace to just require 2 stacks for Drain Soul as well.
This would solve most issues.
Drain Soul is bugged and doesn’t trigger Cunning Cruelty in the spec tree, nor Quietus and Sataiel’s Ambition in the Soul Harvester tree.
- Nightfall
Heavily bugged.
Quietus and Sataiel’s Ambition only trigger with Shadow Bolt and only if you have 2 stacks of Nightfall and then both stacks are consumed by a single Shadow Bolt.
Nightfall consumes itself automatically if you get a proc during the travel time of a previous Shadow Bolt.
- Shadow Embrace + Improved Haunt
You can stack up Shadow Embrace without picking the talent by just using Improved Haunt, it’s an issue.
Picking Shadow Embrace is what should allow Haunt to apply/refresh it. Haunt has historically contributed to it, and it would solve the issue.
It’s even worse because if you play Improved Shadow Bolt your Haunt would apply a 4% extra damage amp via Shadow Embrace. If you play Drainsoul it would apply only a 2% extra damage amp via Shadow Embrace.
Also we don’t want some weird gameplay cheese where you cast your first Haunt max range, then the following ones in melee range to maintain Shadow Embrace without actually picking the talent.
- Malediction
Talent has been mega-nerfed. There’s no possible jutification for this costing 2 points at this point, it’s just not competitive.
The Hellcaller hero tree has a similar talent, Xalan’s Cruelty, that’s MUCH better and only costs 1 point.
This creates issues because we were already tempted to pick Haunt + Improved Haunt + Shadow Embrace in all scenarios. But now those talents are really the only viable path to Creeping Death.
- Cunning Cruelty
This talent is way too strong, it needs a nerf.
In single target, since we’re spamming our filler quite a lot, we get so many free extra Shadow Bolts. This is easily 8/9/10% of our overall damage in single target.
This talent is meant to be a cleave/AOE talent, but it’s not. We benefit a lot less from it in AOE situations because we’re casting Malefic Rapture a lot more then and a lot less Shadow Bolts.
- Vile Taint/Phantom Singularity
Phantom Singularity is being pushed as the single target talent with Infirmity, maybe 2/3 targets talent.
Vile Taint becomes/remains the more AOE choice, which is fine and a good idea.
However, I don’t understand why Phantom Singularity remains a 45s CD. Everything in the affliction spec tree and both hero trees emphasize 1 min burst windows.
Phantom Singularity should be buffed by 33% and made a 60s CD.
VILE TAINT NEEDS TO STOP OVERWRITING AND REPLACING MANUALLY APPLIED CURSES OF TONGUES/WEAKNESS/SATYR. IT’S SUPER ANNOYING AND PREVENTS AFFLICTION FROM USING CURSES. PLEASE I BEG OF YOU BLIZZARD.
- Infirmity
So the effect for Phantom Singularity is great and makes the talent competitive again.
Infirmity isn’t properly applied/maintained on the targets around the target with the singularity. You don’t get 100% uptime on Infirmity on those extra targets, the debuff disappears faster than the duration between ticks that reapply it.
For Vile Taint this talent does nothing, it’s like Agonizing Corruption in Dragonflight.
However, this talent could do A LOT of good things for Vile Taint, such as :
→ Reduce Vile Taint CD down to 20s for example (Mark of Xavius in the Hellcaller tree no longer reduces its CD).
→ And/Or grant Vile Taint an extra charge.
→ And/Or buff Vile Taint damage.
→ And/Or increase its target cap.
→ Or just make it apply Infirmity, just like Phantom Singularity.
- Contagion
This is an okay talent, especially for Hellcaller, but lackluster for Soul Harvester.
We’re forced to take it in non-AOE scenarios because it’s the only realistic path to Tormented Crescendo and the bottom right section of the tree.
This talent needs to become a 1 point node, at a cost of a slight nerf if necessary. And then transfer a part of its power budget in the last section of the tree.
You need to spend 5 points in the middle section to get to Tormented Crescendo, whereas Soul Rot and Creeping Death only require 4.
- Cull the Weak
It’s a very strong AOE talent, however I would prefer it if became a 1 point node at the cost of a nerf. And transfer a part of its power down in the bottom section of the tree to make it more interesting.
It’s also quite hard to get to. At this moment it’s stuck behind essentially 2 ST talents, Cunning Cruelty and Infirmity.
I say that because Infirmity is only good for Phantom Singularity at this stage and Cunning Cruelty is just much better in single target (for Hellcallers mostly).
Soul Harvesters would probably prefer picking this talent in single target scenarios over Contagion at this point as well.
There should be a direct path from Vile Taint/Phantom Singularity to Cull the Weak
- Creeping Death
Only real path to it is via Haunt/Improved Haunt.
Still mentions Siphon Life in its tooltip.
- Xavius’ Gambit
One of the many underwhelming talents in the bottom section of the tree.
Unstable Affliction is now quite weak compared to the rest of our toolkit, that’s true for Hellcaller and Soul Harvester. Just +15% is not competitive. It should be something close to +30/35%.
It should also be merged with Perpetual Unstability.
This talent just feels like a tax to get to Oblivion.
- Perpetual Unstability
This talent does nothing, it’s kind of ridiculous. Merge it with Xavius’ Gambit.
- Oblivion
With its recent buff this thing hits quite hard and could be competitive.
However this talent has many issues.
First, it has a 45s CD like Phantom Singularity. It should be 1 minute because we will always want to hold Oblivion for Phantom Singularity and its debuff Infirmity.
Since we will always hold Phantom Singularity for our Soul Rot/Darkglare burst windows, we will only use Oblivion every minute.
Also, the hero trees heavily emphasize casting Malefic Rapture during our burst windows, so it’s quite counter-intuitive to add this extra spender to use at the same time.
I’m not sure what the intent is with this spell. The fact that’s it’s stuck behind Xavius’ Gambit makes getting to it feel bad. There’s no logic as to why Oblivion is stuck behind an Unstable Affliction talent.
For Soul Harvester that relies so heavily on the Shadow of Death burst window, I don’t know why we would cast Oblivion instead of Malefic Rapture. If it’s somehow better to cast Oblivion during that time then there’s a design issue.
- Death’s Embrace
This talent does nothing, it’s extremely weak and underwhelming. We will never pick this.
- Dark Harvest/Malign Omen
2 very good talents, but they need to swap positions.
We always want Malign Omen, we only want Dark Harvest in certain scenarios.
It’s a no-brainer to swap these 2 talents. Right now it just feels bad to go get Malign Omen.
- Relinquished
This is an okay talent, nothing special. Basically a +10% damage to Malefic Rapture.
- Improved Malefic Rapture
Very weak and underwhelming talent. It just feels like a tax to get to Malefic Touch.
Destruction has the same talent for Chaos Bolt that’s twice as powerful for just 1 point.
→ Buff this to +10% damage to Malefic Rapture AND reduce its cast time by 20%.
You could also frankly merge this with Malefic Touch and then we’d have a decent “capstone”.
- Malefic Touch
It’s a decent enough talent. I’m worried it will scale poorly in the long run because it doesn’t benefit from the spec’s mastery.
We have to pay the Improved Malefic Rapture tax to get to it, which feels bad at the moment. These 2 talents should be merged somehow.
3 Likes
I yeah I speak for beta too. As long as agony duration stays on 18 seconds and vile taint at 25+ seconds the spec will always feel interupted and without a flow or harmony. Distruped and disturbing gameplay at its peak. Try to re apply agony for that 7 lost seconds when it drops off is the most painful thing i do experience in wow history. It even outdates the classic wow things.
1 Like
Agony duration is 18 seconds only the first time it is applied. Depending on when you refresh it it is extended to a max of 23 seconds. For example if you refresh your agony at 5 seconds (which is something that every good affliction player should do) it is refreshed at 23 seconds. If anything this is a very minor thing for now. Affliction’s problem’s lie mostly within their capstone talents that feel underwhelming except Malign Omen maybe.
Nerfing Hellcaller was also very impactful on the spec. Should they change some stuff, it would be the cooldown on Vile Taint which 30 sec makes 0 sense and of course to remove it’s soul shard cost because it is only there to apply agony, curse and increase the damage of your malefic rapture. And maybe add some meaningful capstone talents.
On the recent beta build Doomguard doesn’t cast shadowbolt volley anymore. Is that a bug or intented change since it is not confirmed by a blue post ? I do hope it is just a bug otherwise I will be very dissapointed just as many other warlock players…
Also Infernal bolt from Mother of Chaos buff happens way too quick to respond because of the 0.5 sec cast time. Please consider making the cast time even with shadowbolt.
This talent’s tooltip below can be confusing / unclear to warlock players - especially new ones.
“Foul Mouth: Increase Vile Fiend’s damage by %20 and Vile Fiend’s Bile Spit now applies Wicked Maw.” “What is Bile Spit and what does it do ?” can be bit hard to find out. I think it can be added to Vilefiend’s tooltip.
Cant see Soulshards anywhere as Destro with Blizzard Default UI
I don’t really know how “Soul Harvester” is about having a Demon inside… sounds like kind of Venom fan kind type design. Harvest Souls… souls slayer, with mind blowing souls reaping animation from enemies body. What went wrong again with Affliction…
I think Diabolist is only which hits in any theme mark. Lost opportunities.
Agreed. Tbh, I thought Soul Harvaster was gonna be about inevitable demise + drain life yet it got removed from the game lol.
Hello Warlocks.
This beta build contains several changes that have been implemented based off feedback we received over the past few weeks. Before we dive into those though, we wanted to thank you for the bug reports that have been sent in. We are continually working through those reports so expect fixes in this build and future builds.
Without further ado, let’s get into some of the changes you’ll see for Warlock in this beta build.
Demonology
We’ve redesigned Doom to be passive, like the seasons 3 and 4 tier set bonus in Dragonflight. The primary reason for this change is to reduce the increased number of actions per minute we observed during playtesting. Additionally, Demonology has a lot of plates to spin as it is, and it felt that adding an additional cooldown to watch was a bit much.
It is also because of this reasoning that we’ve removed the cooldown reduction for Power Siphon from Blood Invocation. Further, Blood Invocation caused a desync with most Demonology’s cooldowns.
Destruction
Summon Infernal has returned to the center of the Destruction tree to serve as a powerful cooldown for players to look forward to unlocking while leveling. We’ve returned Dimensional Rift to the third section as well with a new talent that adds cleave functionality to your rifts.
To retain accessible pathing through the center section of the Destruction tree, we’ve had to remove Infernal Brand and condense Crashing Chaos and Rain of Chaos into a choice node.
Thank you for the feedback and we will continue to keep an eye out for any further feedback and discussions.
After a lot of testing, the new version of Doom is even worse than before…
Honestly, you did something so well thought out on your 1st rework that it leaves a really bitter taste, a very bland gameplay.
You have to put the Doom back as on the 1st try, that it summons a guard at 100% and this last can cleave, otherwise as we can see currently it is useless
It was simple, just reduce the damage and not touch anything else
You had done a really good job, I really don’t understand why you went back on it
After the last build you implemented yesterday there are a lot of problems with demonology, including the following bugs that have appeared:
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Stop nerfing down Mark of F’harg, for god’s shake this ability has been nerfed to the ground and it feels too undertuned now. You might as well remove it from the game.
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Again there has been no information regarding Pact of the Ered’ruin. Is the doomguard going to only cast 1 doom bolt at a time ? Because if it is then the talent is never going to be played. Its literally worse than Sacrificed Souls which is a talent that should have been removed. Another issue with this talent is that doomguard’s proc chance, is BAD. FIX this. Simply copy paste the tier set of season 3 and season 4 of dragonflight with 2 changes. Make the spawn of doomguard 100% and give him back his doom bolt volley that has been removed, while nerfing down it’s damage.
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While i like that you listened the warlock community in returning doom as a passive, its currently bugged. After testing it, consuming a demonic core does not always apply doom to a target.
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Now, going from dragonflight to the war within demonology has lost his ability to gain exponentially more demonic core procs. That said this “capstone” talent called Immutable Hatred, and i will say this with all my heart, is USELESS. Like in what scenario, consuming a demonic core proc makes my pet carve its target is good ? Not to mention that its so undertuned, you dont even understand if you did any damage with it.
1 Like
I kinda hate the current doombrand weaving we do on live with the tier set, so im not excited about the Doom changes on beta. It will be interesting to test with the lower amount of cores.
I have two ideas for Doom that I feel would better and good QoL.
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Keep the application method, keep the duration reduction from spending cores, but cap Doom to 1 active application at a time. Buff the damage and make it guarantee/much higher chance of summoning a Doomguard.
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Change the application of Doom to Hand of Gul’dan and have it AoE apply Doom to all targets hit by Hand of Gul’dan (Just like Hand of Doom). Reduce the chance of summoning a Doomguard and also reduce the damage of Doom or just remove the splash damage of Doom as its not needed when every target has doom.
The damage of Doom could also scale with how many Doom applications currently active, so that the more Dooms active, the less damage it will deal. This way it can be competitive in both ST and AoE.
There are so many ways to tune both ideas to be good in both AoE and Single Target, and not completly broken or useless in either.
In the current form of Doom, I really hope its undertuned so I dont have to play it.
Although I agree it was fun to have a bunch of doomguards, that version wasn’t healthy at all gameplay wise. Imagine you are in a m+ and there are some mobs with very low HP in packs. You would have to keep spamming doom on dying ones and also have to watch your doom resets - not fun. On the other hand, I agree the Doomguard cleave should have stayed.
1 Like
Putting another talent behind "when you consume a Demonic Core " together with, again, reducing the total amount of Demonic Cores we get over time.
- Spiteful Reconstitution: Consuming a Demonic Core has a chance to summon a Wild Imp
- Doom: Consuming a Demonic Core reduces the duration of Doom by 2 sec
- Doom Eternal: Demonic Cores reduce the duration of Doom by an additional 2 sec
- Immutable Hatred: Consuming a Demonic Core makes your Felguard carve the target
If you’re gonna keep reducing our Demonic Cores, you have to make ALL of these work with Shadow Bolt. Make Shadow Bolt do 25-50% less of the effect, but it needs to do something. Otherwise it’s not worth taking these talents.
In the same vein, it’s time to increase the chance to proc Demonic Calling when you spend a Demonic Core. When we do get a lot of Cores, there’s a lower chance to proc Demonic Calling and have to hard cast it.
Turn Doom back into an active, put a 1target limit on it, whatever you need but don’t try to make us do S3/S4 Doom spreading with half the Demonic Cores of the previous seasons.
3 Likes
Did some quick testing on dummies and here what i found ;
- Lacking guranteed demonic core procs hurts Tryant setup a lot. Even we have the new talent that increases the imp cap to 15, I could barely get 10 imps - even while rotation was going on, not only on pull. I know you guys don’t like it but yeah - Loosing %100 demonic core proc chance from dreadstalkers still hurts.
- The balance between fillers / capstones are really off. Shadowbolt and Incinirate doing a lot more damage than most of the capstones.I know it is still early beta and some set of tunning will come but i think as players, at least we need to get the feeling of the new talents roughly to give you guys healthier feedbacks.
- Doom seems to be the most problematic department to be fixed both for developers and players at the moment. Turning its application to passive was a good move for sure, but loosing doomguard’s shadowbolt cleave still doesnt feel right/fun.I think reverting the change and bringing back the season 3 tier set fully would be the most acceptable and easiest solution.
- I couldn’t understand why the 4p bonus been nerfed by %50 while the proc bug is fixed. It almost doesn’t exist on the dps meter now.
2 Likes
Why cant Warlock have access to Infernal as a pet like in Legion?
Thematically it makes sense. Instead of a dumb little imp.