Aff was viable. but still b tier in the meta. So far away from s tier and op.
and it wasnt underrated. ppl knew the state of aff and it was reflected in the ladder and at awc where noone ever picked it.
Pretty sure there was one. Also pretty sure he got slaughtered.
i could imagine only one player even trying it, or maybe 2. And thats walliriks. I think it was the 15 min match where nothing died to his top scoreboard dmg and then he got bursted through wall? 
He didn’t die at all but Deathbolt dealt 1 dmg. For me Deathbolt is a gimmick and the only good aspect of it is that people are aware of it so you can bait them into big UA dispel.
For example I watched Smexxin yesterday and when he played WLS they killed the guy because he was forced to dispel UA while Dark Soul and Banner so he got 30+ k hit.
Our openers are insane.
I haven’t played since SL season 1 and i know affliction warlocks are still terrible (just look at ranks on xunamate, not hard to understand). I also read and laugh about people complaining about locks on the forums.
However, deathbolt is not a well designed ability in any of the iterations blizzard (or holinka i guess) tried to implement since bfa.
From a class design perspective makes no sense in the affliction tool kit. Affliction is a slow burning, with some single target potential (haunt) spec.
By slow i dont mean you should have to wait for 80% dampening but you shouldnt have the same burst as a fire mage/destru lock etc. You should have constant pressure through single target and some rot damage. You should also live to see the damage actually rot (biggest problem of the spec since the removal of soul link + unending resolve glyph going into legion. It was 30% dmg reduction).
Said all of that, deathbolt does nothing for the spec besides being able to meme around in 2s and should be removed.
I see the point you are trying to make “its easy to counter” which is true, still the fact that is easy to counter doesn’t make it less of a stupid design. These type of talents shouldnt be in the game.
Instead of deathbolt, there should be a talent to make Shadow bolt hit way harder for example. Sustained damage should be king and deathbolt is everything that is wrong with the game.
A spell that can kill someone in a blink of an eye.
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When a healer can top himself with an instant spell without even losing mana until 80% dampening this is not going to happen.
Unless instant healing won’t get nerfed hard (swiftmend, NS, riptide, serenity) at least to the level of disc priest one, rot won’t work. Hybrid healing included too.
If healer doesn’t get oom and can top himself at any point he wants without even casting you can never rot him down because he will always have that button that brings him back to 100% and makes your entire efforts meaningless.
It works in TBC only because you can CC chain the healer for 20+ seconds and even if he gets out of it, his only big heal with NS has 2 min cd.
Here, if we take the same rdruid for example you have 2 instant heals, swiftmend with 15 sec cd and the NS with 50 sec cd (with conduit). Both of which don’t cost even 1% of mana.
Good luck rotting someone with this lol.
Nightfall Proc should be baseline and there should be a talent to get it on demand instead. And yes Deathbolt is stupid 100% but it’s nothing absolutely broken or strong right now. People just rerolled to fotm and think they are invincible while they die to the most telegraphed one shot ever.
What I blame for Affliction doing no pressure are all these passive healing effects like Rune of Spellwarding, passive damage reduction from Demon Hunters etc.
Necro Feral does have decent sustain pressure.
I enjoy its playstyle… it’s like Affli Lock used to be.
Rake = Corruption
Moonfire = Agony
Rip = UA
Adaptive Swarm = old version of Haunt
Like very old pre MoP Affliction.
Necro feral has way more than sustain pressure. He has burst with frenzy every 45 seconds that he will setup with all his dots in a stun. He has a great survival kit, great CC and heals for himself and his teammates.
Something the lock doesn’t have. As a lock you don’t even have a real defense cooldown, a warrior with banner and avatar can still kill you through wall.
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while i can see passive healing being the biggest issue, i think the class damage is poorly distributed and tuned.
While they did buff the dot dmg by 50% (?) the hp pools are still 6x times more than tbc and the dots only hit for double the dmg.
All of affliction problems in pvp can be solved within an afternoon of coding, but i guess we will never see that. It was very frustrating waiting for it for 4 years.
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They have tools to do so just make “Agony, Corruption and UA deal 30% more dmg in PvP” and maybe Malefic Rapture less and Affliction might be fine and back to it’s roots. They did it with Frost Mages, DKs. However to do so they need to put effort.
a bit too memey for my tastes, and lets not talk about using that voice addon, come on dude…
but sir that voice addon tells me when to press kill button
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that priest went from 54 % hp to dead in a single frame.
I can do it to a priest as a warrior with a random execute proc
I wouldn’t base whether something is balanced by comparing it to an unbalanced class.
I wasn’t debating whether there are other unbalanced classes with random oneshots.
I’m saying you should acknowledge that they aren’t good, regardless of which class has them.
50->0 isn’t really a oneshot
I know, there were other “oneshots” in the video, I was just looking in awe at the priest in that particular case, as his hp went from ~50 % to immediately dead in less than a frame.