Fix for Affliction PVP

PVP Arenas
42

Main problem with Affliction as I see it is that you need 5 UAs to do pressure.
That means 5 casts.
That pressure is instantly gone (5 hard casts, 5 resources) instantly gone by using instant button of healer.
Other classes do similar pressure that cannot be erased instantly without hard casts.

I don’t wish for UA to be instant. I wish for it to do a lot of damage on its own and not be stackable.
And having Haunt for Warlock to have some single target pressure too.

In current state of game I’d say it’s like “UA deals 150% more damage and is no longer stackable” PvP talent.
Maybe more, but I feel this number is reasonable in current state of game.

Having to cast 5 UAs to deal meaningful pressure is unreasonable in a world where classes do equal amount of pressure pressing instant buttons with no outplay mechanic. Why to play a class that requires you to do more work, gives enemies easy option to outplay, where you can play the opposite, no work easy mind-numbing class with no outplay?

Answer lies in tournament participant’s choices - You don’t.

1 Like
43

UA being made instant would probably not solve the problem, nor it would be as you seem to think.

Affliction has a wide set of problems:

  • It literally has no baseline ccs or mobility options besides fear (casted, limited use against a lot of classes) and demonic gate (slow to use, high cooldwon, predictable, requires positioning and casting). It has no talent options either besides death coil/demonic circle. Even with demonic circle, melees have a 100% uptime against afflilocks. Compared to that, destro at least has conflag snare, double death coil and infernal.

  • Only one school of magic.

  • Negligible damage from dots, not really good at rotting any longer. Affliction t’s actually a single target burst spec, with the burst needing long preparation and being resetted if interrupted, etc.

  • Darkglare: not viable in pvp due to not being controlable and line of sight issues.

  • No tankiness, low self heal outside inevitable demise.

1 Like
44

This is not necessarily true, you can do 10k DPS without casting UA once, which is equivalent to Shadow Priest’s DPS.
You can definitely do some decent damage without casting, but again this damage is irrelevant until deep dampening, to which you can’t live vs melees.

The change you proposed would definitely be good vs certain stuff like wizard cleaves where you can actually cast, but we already do alright into them.

However when you face a cleave, you just wish you could do something else than press Corruption and Agony and run around.
Even if this is doing 10k DPS you will still lose, due to your healer ooming before the enemy healer does.

I just don’t see any other way around this, than to make Affliction much more tankier, or give us some instant damage.

1 Like
45

You’re right, and like I’ve mentioned before, we don’t necessarily need more damage - we need more survivability. The UA suggestion is just to fix the fact that vs certain comps you can’t spend your resources, which is just stupid.

However I don’t agree with all of your points.

  • Affliction definitely has some decent mobility, they just have to be used perfectly at the right moments (Port + long gate). The real problem is that outside of these two cooldowns, you’re taking way too much damage, which is ooming your healer really fast.
  • I agree it’s a bit sad to have only one school, while the other Lock specs have like three
  • Yeah and no - Your dots do damage, it’s just irrelevant until dampening, + if you’re playing Affliction as a single target spec, you’re doing it wrong
  • I mean Darkglare’s damage is pretty much irrelevant, it’s main use is to extend your DoTs such as Phantom Singularity or UAs if you can get them out, preferably spread them out to as many targets as you can
  • True, need more survivability + you shouldn’t be playing ID
1 Like
46

Not only other Lock specs… Affliction is the only spec in the game that doesn’t have multiple schools, every single other damaging caster spec does have at least two.

well you shouldn’t be playing Affli

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47

Disagree. With both talents, you get 4 and a half “movements” every 1 min 20 secs. Which can only be used, in principle, defensively (yeah, I get they can be used offensively in certain situations, but they are suboptimal for that) plus
they telegraph your destination point to your enemy. And that is using two different talents. Mages, with 0 talent points used, get 6. Depending on the specialisation, that number can go up, plus have other mobility options.

And again, I was not talking about mobility alone, but mobility and CC. Yeah, if you pick all the mobility options, obviously, your mobility improves. But that also means 0 instant ccs.

Ok, maybe I didn’t explain myself properly. Yeah, obviously the basic playstyle of affliction is still dotting everything. Even if you are going for a ID build, it would still benefit you due to quicker ID stacking and shard generation.

Even without ID, UA now stacking stacking and using shards, basic dots representing a lower percentage of our damage, talents like death bolt or even PS (even if it deals AOE damage), clearly means that current affliction has shifted some of its capabilities from spreading rot on various targets to fixed, single target damage.

Same for darkglare: yeah, its main use is increasing dot duration, but is again a single target dps increase.

I am not playing with ID (not in arenas at least, which I am not playing seriously anyway). I am simply saying that without it, our self healing is very low in comparison to previous expansions.

When I pointed all those issues, I did not mean “we need all of this solved for affliction to be playable”. Solving a couple of the most pressing ones would probably be enough.

Making UA instant would definetely help, as more instants means more mobility and damage that is less counterable by interrupts.

1 Like
48

That is very true, and I don’t anymore :smiley: Quit after they made Aff from almost unplayble to definitely unplayable by nerfing Demon Armor

2 Likes
49

Yep, almost every DPS spec has better mobility than us, and we can get punished super hard if we misuse it, but personally if I had the choice, I’d pick tankiness over increased mobility/CC

Agree to an extent - In BfA Blizzard is pushing Affli down the single target road (they said they wanted to shift us back to spread pressure, but who knows), but with the build I was playing (3x Sudden 3x Wracking + WiA + Creeping), you are literally just an Agony bot, and even if you get to spam out UAs, most of the time you want to be spreading them out to play around dispel a bit.
Of course sometimes you stack UAs on one target if you’re going for a kill, but optimally you should be spreading them

Yep, if I remember right, the main reason we were so tanky in Legion was the self healing from our DoTs through artifact traits. You could literally outheal healers sometimes, now we get outhealed by pretty much everything, including Mages - would definitely like some healing back.

Making Aff decent wouldn’t even require many changes, but making it fun again is a bit more tricky. We’ll see, hopefully Blizzard is reading these posts and decides it’s time to do something :smiley:

1 Like
50

They never did and won’t start it now for sure.

51

this is what needs to happen.

Since haunt aint gonna be baseline in BFA just make a pvp talent.

Focused Affliction (lame name).
Now your Unstanble affliction is no longer stackable but the damage is increased by (fixed amount, i would say 3x UA’s would be good) and backlash damage is increased by (5x UA’s… does nothing).

Then on top, nerf darkglare, deathbolt and demonic sacrifice in pvp, buff dot damage by a lot.

Fixed damage in 2 steps.

Tankability, make demon armor for aff as it was before or give soul link.

1 Like
52

Not a big fan of this… This would be good against wizard cleaves, but vs everything else you’re forced to pick Demon Armor (for tanking obviously), Nether Ward (Maledicts and whatnot) and Gateway Mastery (you need the extra mobility, might not need this if we were tankier).
Your suggestion just doesn’t seem good enough to warrant dropping either Nether Ward or Gateway Mastery.

You’d still have to fake interrupts, and even if you manage to do that, there are still other ways of interrupting casts.

Too high risk for not that good of a reward, imo.

Yesyesyes, however if they nerfed GoSac, the whole talent row would literally be dead, Shadow Embrace = useless, Haunt = if you are able to cast, should go for UAs anyway imo, nerfed GoSac = would be little to no damage gain, and you lose purge + ability to stop drinks

Pre-nerfed Demon Armor wasn’t good enough, would definitely like baseline/talent (not a PvP one though) Soul Link

1 Like
53

wich you should lol.
I dont want my class to be mind-numbling like others nor should we ask talents that go towards that kind of design.

this is a problem wich needs fixing indeed.

I said it a while ago that the gateway pvp talent should be a normal talent and demonic circle baseline.

That would fix the issue for this expansion, but not gonna happen.

I would trade netherward for that talent, i think a lot of warlocks if not all would.

I think shadow embrace would be alright if nightfall wasnt proccing every 2 expansions.

yeah soul link just needs to comeback baseline, but with that it needs to be with current armor.

1 Like
54

I agree with the other things you said, but not this

I don’t want this either, but that’s just how the game is right now.
It would be fine if everyone had to fakecast, but Affliction is literally the only spec that HAS to, this would just be unfair.
If you get interrupted, you’re stuck standing there for 5 seconds doing absolutely nothing, and once the lockout ends, you have to start reapplying your instant dots.

This is a realistic scenario, and this is how it usually goes when facing a cleave, you don’t get to cast.

1 Like
55

Another thing that would help affli immensely is increasing dot duration. Right now, just keeping the basic 3 dots (if talented) already requires 100% of your time with 3 targets. Which basically kills the specs “spread pressure” approach.

Increasing dot duration would allow affliction to increase it’s spread damage without having a big effect on dps, as on a single target situation it would basically mean more free time to cast fillers, which do not add that much dps. Death Bolt may need some adjustment though.

4 Likes
56

another thing being asked for around 3 years now.

its not only the “globals” that we use on dots… its just BORING.

Legit boring gameplay when you have to reapply dots every 15 secs or so on each target.

By the way, this fact alone (dots are so short in duration) clearly shows that no dev plays a warlock.

Im not bashing, but when your gameplay revolves around stacking a dot and refreshing with “windows” (lol) of burst damage wich doesnt really burst unless you have darkglare… yeah maybe they should try the spec for more than 2 days straight .

If they did it and thought it was fun to play (not talking numbers, just fun you know? its a game) i would shut up forever about affliction.

1 Like
57

What about Arcane lock? :stuck_out_tongue:

58

Do you use grim sacc? I never understood that talent. Seems to me that it is only a real dps increase in multidotting situations, but then I read that it is actually capped in a “procs per minute” kind of way, limiting its utility. Seeing how you lose purge, autoattack, and the advantages of having a pet (silencing while stunned, etc.) i never really got the point. Never tested it in terms of actual dps increase, so i am not sure,

In pvp? Not really… it needs three stacks and lasts for only 10 seconds. In order for it to work, you would need constant nightfall procs just to keep it into one target.

The problem is that haunt, as it is, is also useless. Low damage, needs casting (in a build that already has enough difficulties with casting), etc.

59

I was very clear. Every single other damaging caster spec has at least two.
So if you’re asking about Balance Druid or Arcane Mage, they are damaging caster specs and they have 2+ Magic Schools.

For Arcane it’s Frost and Arcane.
For Balance it’s Nature and Arcane.

60

What damaging frost ability does Arcane mage use? I couldn’t name 1 for hell

1 Like
61

New PvP Talent

Virulant Affliction.
2 soul shards.

Transforms Unstable Affliction into Virulant Affliction.
Increase its damage by [x% of spell power] and when dispelled, all damage overtime effects on the target will burst for [x% of spell power] in Shadow damage, silencing the target & the dispeller for 3 seconds.

Virulant Affliction cannot stack on a single target.
Last 12 seconds.

1 Like