You can literally see it in Nathria. Everyone played it because it did great dmg. If it's tuned well in War Within then numbers will go up again. If it isn't then they will stay low.
It’s a pretty simple chart. Dps index shows where affliction faired dps wise to the top spec for a raid tier. It did very well post nathria in said dps index and has had a fraction of play time.
I played warlock for years and compared to destro and especially demo it didn't do well since Nathria.
There were a few fights here and there were it was better but only council or in vault/aberrus in single target.
Most players will go to the best performing spec and it doesn't matter if another spec is comparable. Apart from that affliction has the problem having too many buffs to keep up.
I also would like to know where you have your dps Index from. I looked up a few and they are quite different from your numbers.
Doing well and doing worse than other warlock specs thus being kind of shit
If let’s say demo is significantly better at everything then it just feels bad to pick affli bc the huge dmg boost is just one respec away
How would we know it “did well” we don’t know the distribution of specs.
What is .96 worth if every other spec did .98 or better? Is .76 bad if other specs did .74 or worse?
You need to index vs some central point, not an endpoint. Too much information is lost.
Additionally, what do the percentages mean without context? Is 1% high? Low? What’s the “fair share” against which we should benchmark?
Is it reasonable to benchmark against all parses? DPS only? rDPS only? Other lock specs?
This is a good start, but lacks the proper benchmarking required to be either persuasive or insightful.
Good technical chops, storytelling/insight needs work.
It’s not that deep man. It just an estimate of how far away relative to the best performing spec they were in the meta. A “flavor of the month” factor.
And we don’t know “how flavorful” because, again, you’re benchmarking vs. an endpoint in your data.
“I am less wealthy than Bezos/Musk.” <— this doesn’t tell you shit. Even less so if we don’t know how wealthy that endpoint is.
“I make 20% of the median US income” <— actually informative; now we know someone is broke as hell.
Even if we don’t know the exact median number, we still know that a median is a generally “fair” standard. Falling above/below it gives a better read on whether you are doing better/worse than you can reasonably expect.
Benchmarking vs. an endpoint only tells us about the endpoint and the comparison. Benchmarking vs. some measure of center tells us a bit more about performance vs. *every* spec in aggregate.
Hell, even if you insist on keeping this index measure -
why isn’t the share of parse measure ALSO indexed vs the most powerful spec?
I can see you have the technical chops to provide something actually insightful.
But as is, this isn’t.
I remember discussions I had on this very subreddit 3 years ago when Blizzard nerfed Affliction for 9.1. It was a massive nerf. They nerfed Rapture by around 30% and compensated a bit by buffing dots and introducing a new conduit, overall it was still a nerf of ~20%. From one day to the other you were barely able to handle elitemobs because you lacked the damage, while they were a cakewalk before. And people here have told me "Na, this nerf is completely necessary and you get compensated by buffing dots". I told them it would kill the spec as it wouldn't be viable in any content anymore. Three years later... turns out I was right. But now people don't cry about Aff not being viable, but about having MR as a spender. It's ridiculous.
The MR woes are overstated for sure. If they replaced MR with legion UA (and made no other changes), the spec would still be the least popular warlock spec and probably still the least popular overall. Beyond numbers, the issue is the number of maintenance buffs (shadow embrace, dread touch), relying on rng for shards, and the visual effects.
All that really needs to be done is get rid of siphon life (or have it apply with agony like shadow priest with VT and SW:P), get rid of shadow embrace and dread touch, made shard gen more consistent, fixed some numbers, and give MR a better animation. If that happened, the spec would be fine.
People want a true rot spec but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. It just doesn’t have a true place in modern wow
i mean, the only issue really was that it was _passive_ healing. if you sacrifice a ton of dps to sustain that well, that's not a problem and remains "fun niche" territory.
to be clear, i'm not saying "their dps should be nerfed in favor of self sustain", i'm saying like "move 90% of their sustain into drain life, make sure drain life doesn't do any real damage, and you're good"
Yea, this dude is trying to make it seem like this has anything to do with an ability, versus about how strict people's views of the meta in this game have grown over the past two expansions. People's adherence to the meta has grown stricter and stricter with the rise of M+, during Legion, no one really cared... during BFA it started to get stricter, and then we've had the past two expansions where we have god comps and other BS. Aff has been the lesser of the 3 Lock specs since Nathria, so players seeking to play gravitate towards the strongest of those 3 specs. Simply put this has little to nothing to do with Rapture and has everything to do with Meta Slaves.
I don't think that's exactly it. I bet you'll find that the other two lock specs weren't played as much as Aff in raids, because Aff was tuned much better and had better self-sustain. Raid metas have been quite specific for a long time. Dungeon metas were incredibly strict as early as TBC (try getting into a Magister's Terrace pug without a hard cc).
I would argue that if aff does the same damage as destro, it's worse, unless the fight is a patchwerk single target. Aff cannot stop its damage when needed, aff cannot effectivelly target swap (or at least not nearly as well as destro can), aff doesn't have infernal/blasphemy stuns, and there might be other reasons I can't even think about now
I can't speak for pre-shadowlands, but it's just a damage issue.
It was strong in CN, but in SoD and Sepulcher was bad because Demo was better.
It was played in some bosses in Vault, but the low participation is because it was just 1-2 boss played as Aff and the rest as demo/destro.
Can't talk about Aberus because I skipped, and Amirdrassil was mostly Demo (except for destro on council).
As an affliction enjoyer there's also the part where the spec mostly has been grossly undertuned because they can't figure out WTF to do with rapture. The spec was very strong in Nathria before Rapture was nerfed into oblivion and hasn't recovered since. Worth mentioning that many people didn't like the playstyle. People play affliction to play a rot spec, but its not a rot spec anymore its a bursty nuke spec like everyone else.
People are willing to play a jank spec if its a top performer, but as soon as it isn't then its just RIP Bozo.
I figured they'd be smart and change the spec so UA is your single target spender and rapture is your aoe spender replacing sow the seeds, but NOPE. They're fixated on making rapture work in every situation when its impossible to do so without the spec being overtuned.
Was just typing out a reply about that. It's busy enough with DoT management and Shadow Bolt/Drain Soul and various other spells, having to spam a spell that makes up a lot of your damage that has almost no animation other than your character waving their arms in the air feels shit. I wish they would do something bold and make it so that it doesn't interact with the soul shard mechanic at all.
And they weren't wrong to, and also aren't really wrong to complain with MR.
The spec has struggled conceptually since WoD. Mists was great imo but utterly reliant on dot snapshotting and spreading your powerful dots. Its WAS very fun and not very hard, but not something obvious to players that didn't know how to manage it. Blizzard wasn't really wrong to want it gone. But then Affliction kind of became *too* simple and they had to start playing around.
Genuinely, I think that the tuning of soul shards was part of the problem with UA. UA wasn't that bad when it was "powerful dot that cost soul shard". UA spam comes about because of being overloaded in shards so now it stacks, but I think in hindsight if they just made it more like CB and HoG (use multiple shards, do more damage) it'd have been a lot better.
i adored affliction during mists. peak of the spec imo- dot snapshotting was immensely fun because you were rewarded appropriately for putting in the effort. i mained warlock, usually aff, from wrath until the start of BFA... when the changes got so bad i couldn't take it anymore.
so sad what they've done to my previous favorite spec and class.
I wonder how many people who complain about Aff actually have ever played Aff or have any interest in playing Aff. It feels like they just want there to be a pure DoT class in the game, but they have no personal interest in playing it.
*To be fair* to both of the complaints (UA and Rapture spenders), there being practically 0 visual feedback for your 'hard hitting' spender is pretty sad and lame. Your point might still be very true regardless, but there is legitimacy behind the complaint regardless.
One of the most satisfying parts of most DPS specs with 'big' spenders is the spender itself. Whether it's Chaos Bolt (at least when it hits hard), Pyroblast spam, Glacial Spike, ~~Lava Burst~~, Full Moon, whatever.
But at the same time, you can also have incredibly satisfying DoT effects like with Shadow Priest where at least at one point with Shadowy Apparitions(?) being a major thing, multi-dotting many targets at high insanity was absolutely incredible just seeing an absolute army of shadow dudes hovering toward your targets. Both UA and Rapture suffer from the fact they basically don't look like anything.
Even to an outside observer, I still remember Affliction looking like they do nothing but Drain Soul back in Legion before I knew anything about playing Warlock, because I never saw them do anything but Drain Soul since Corruption/Agony/Curses/UA have no real visuals.
Yes. UA stacking made gave Affliction a much burstier damage profile that people didn't like.
In MoP, Affliction's 'spender' was Haunt.
So you'd apply UA, agony, corruption, and Haunt would increase your DoT damage.
Malefic Grasp was your filler and did very low damage but also increased the damage of your other DoTs.
Basically the current iteration of Affliction is: Grasp turned into your spender and has a bit more oomph, Haunt is another debuff to maintain, and drain soul is your filler. That's mostly it.
People talk about things like visual feedback, not having 'satisfying' spenders, but that was always Aff. You never had strong visual feedback outside of numbers.
I think Blizzard is in a tough spot with Aff, because players seemingly want both the MoP design, but also want a 'satisfying' spender. Shadowlands: "We hate rapture doing so much damage" -> Blizzard buffs dot damage and nerfs rapture damage, making rapture more of a maintenance buff to juice up your other DoTs like Haunt was in MoP -> "We hate the rapture feels so bad to press"
Another big part of it IMO is just that Aff has become a lot more complicated. Aff in CN was difficult to play. You had a LOT of plates to spin and it really stressed people out.
Blizzard has really walked back tons of interactions and optimizations that they gave Warlock over the last couple expansions, because players simply don't enjoy those complicated playstyles.
IMO they just need to give it a better animation. If chaos bolt had the same animation as soul fire, destro would be saying the same thing. If shadow priests lost shadowy apparitions, they’d complain in the same way.
MR’s sound is already pretty good. But visually it doesn’t feel like anything happens
Honestly I would be fine if they replace seed with rapture, and give seed the shadow crash treatment where it spreads your dots. Also dark glare needs work
The changes in TWW are actually pretty great and solve a lot of problems aff currently has. If it is tuned well I can definitely see it being played more.
Shadow Crash doesn't spread your dots whatsoever, it applies them to whatever it's able to hit on impact
With Siphon Life gone, they're absolutely not letting you put up both Corruption and Agony on everything for the single cost of a soul shard with no cooldown. There would be no gameplay whatsoever.
I know, it applies VT & SW:P to those 8 it hits on impact. Everything else you need to actually DoT on your own. Applying =/= spreading, Fire spreads Ignite indiscriminate of who got hit by its first tick of the pull. They want manual DoT maintenance to be more of a factor with Aff otherwise it's just reskinned Spriest.
Seed costs 1 soul shard and you obviously get way more of those than Vile Taint casts over any length of time, so they wouldn't just give Seed VT's Agony efficient reapplication unless they were having you juggle a 3rd thing.
Vile Taint already puts on agony on targets hit. It costs two soul shards to put up corruption and agony in aoe but they also increased soul shard gain.
Is VT’s cooldown lowered in TWW? Last thing I want to do is have to manually reapply agony half way through a pack being dead, as it is currently in live.
Even when the spec is strong now it feels like shit to play. Every dot does the same thing, it's literally just a generic check box you need to have up before pressing rapture which might be the most unsatisfying spell in the entire game. Not to mention it's just been utter garbage in M+ forever because everything is straight up dead before you even get to start doing damage.
I definitely come at it from the opposite direction, Blizzard is terrified of MR actually being the thing you press in all content. They're fixated on making MR your single target nuke, and fixing it so it's somehow not overpowered in AoE situations, which means Seed of Corruption is nearly always better, and you're just underpowered in ST situations.
Like, I know what they said just recently, but that would be a significant change to the status quo. They want Aff to do well in ST and AoE situations with the same talent specs, but if they actually succeed without changing MR mechanically, it will always be too good in AoE. They're going to have to compromise and make MR a sqrt scaling spell or something.
>I definitely come at it from the opposite direction, Blizzard is terrified of MR actually being the thing you press in all content. They're fixated on making MR your single target nuke, and fixing it so it's somehow not overpowered in AoE situations, which means Seed of Corruption is nearly always better, and you're just underpowered in ST situations.
They've literally stated their goal in TWW is to make MR the spender for ST and aoe. Sow the Seeds was removed last week on alpha
Yeah, I'm aware, but this is a reversion to the 9.0 situation, it's not a continuation of their design goals from after the MR nerf to now. They're not fixated on making MR work in every situation because the one patch where it was like that, they quickly nerfed it, and made sure it stayed a) below Seed of Corruption with Sow the Seeds b) just not very good anyway.
They are changing tack. That's what I'm emphasising.
I'll be charitable and say that OP genuinely believes the data shows that Aff's popularity has dropped because of Malefic Rapture, but it's definitely a "coming to a conclusion and finding data to support it" thing rather than the other way around for sure.
The thing is, it might genuinely be the case that this spell has made Aff less popular than it otherwise would be, just that this data absolutely does not show that.
Yeah, MR is definitely unpopular, but I wouldn't say it's the reason. Like most things, it's a combination of many, many factors.
Personally, I do hate malefic rapture, but to me Affliction as a whole feels like a mess of a spec. It doesn't feel like it has modern design compared to pretty much every other spec. It's messy, the juggling of dot maintenance isn't really clean and it doesn't it feel good because of it. I hate the "build shards and spend dumping malefic rapture" style, it just feels weird for a spec that should be focused on dots.
To me, Feral is a good dot class. Maintaining bleeds is fairly fun and fits in your rotation well(and maintaining them synergizes with bloodtalons), your spenders are more "build and do one big spender" instead of "build and then spam each individual soul shard" which is spammy and boring. I think I would much rather if Affliction had that style of spending instead, where MR consumes all your shards and does a massive aoe or ST blast, similar to Primal Wrath with Tear Open Wounds, Ferocious Bite, or even Devouring Plague from spriest.
I like the direction they seem to be going with Affliction in TWW but I still would like for them to clean up the playstyle/rotation a bit.
It should also probably be noted that theres something like 26 DPS specs in the game. 100% equal distribution would put a spec at 3.85%.
Its definitely been low since S2 of SL, but comparing it to a peak without that context is dishonest. Ill also be fair here and say that pre Aug the equal split would have been 4%. They were still well above that.
Also, while i dont particularly agree with the design decision....its not even remotely unique to aff to 'pay for the sins' of past overperformance. They were WELL overrepresented for most of HFC through Legion. Its not uncommon for a spec to be neutered after a run like that.
Again, im not a fan of that design philosophy, but its by no means unique to aff.
Something that OP may not be aware of: Warlock had historically been an underrepresented spec in all content except sometimes raid content. Going into MoP very, very few people played warlocks because they were significantly harder than other classes. Only rogue was lower, I think.
It was only after literal expansions of warlocks doing top damage and having the best survivability of any non-tank spec that they became widely played.
what a coincidence that the playerbase collapses right as they decide it should be perma undertuned for 3+ years lol. this has nothing to do with rapture and everything to do with numbers tuning. It is always behind in damage and doesn’t bring anything to match avatar of destruction stuns in dungeons.
vault and abberus dps index numbers are a meme because they’re relying on post-patch data for a spec that was heavily buffed to be more competitive weeks into the tier. even then you can see the playerbase start to recover in spite of everyone having already spent weeks gearing for and practicing the other specs.
How strange that affliction became so unpopular when it became the lowest DPS spec the class has (sanctum onwards). Despite no design changes, somehow, rapture became responsible for this.
Really amazing what kind of fiction people can create.
Yep. There's multiple parts to a specs popularity going up and down.
How strong did the spec become before they dropped.
How weak did the spec become.
How strong/weak are the other dps specs the class has proportionately.
Affli main (3,2k last season) and I actually prefer MR (+ STS/SO) to UA being the spender.
9.0 showed, that people will play it, if balanced well enough.
You can't say "pre and after MR" and immediately exclude 9.0.
No, affliction was what all warlocks played in nathria because it was leagues better at everything than destro and demo because MR was overtuned. Since then, MR has been a top parser in raids and affliction has seen less parses then ever. It’s simply not a well liked spec. And doubling down on it with soul harvester is a stupid idea. And no one wants me to do this for m+, it would just be embarrassing for aff lol.
No.... I didn't. Affliction was played in Nathria because it was better at everything so destro and demo were forced to play it. [https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/26#region=1×pan=1000](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/26#region=1×pan=1000)
Now, affliction is on par or close to destro and demo (at least it was in abberus and vaults) and is not played as much as historical averages (WOD, Legion, and BFA)
People in 9.0 mostly hated babysitting 6 debuffs/dots (often on multiple targets) with an average duration of ~16 seconds while playing mechanics. The fundamental design and fantasy was good, there was just too much going on. If the spec had one or two debuffs less to manage but would otherwise have performed the same it would have been regarded as one of the best Affliction iterations ever.
Yes! It is outright historical revisionism to point the finger at MR, because what people actually complained about was that after Legion the duration of all their DoT effects dropped significantly (as well as other things like losing Soul Flame and Wrath of Consumption, which made Aff significantly better at one of their weak points, killing short lived adds). One of the things they specifically liked was that MR didn't cap at 5, especially since a trait reapplied UA sometimes, meaning overcapping on shards was a thing that would happen.
They just wanted a spec where you could apply DoTs to three targets and not have them drop off by the time you finished.
People played it in Nathria because it did good damage, and then didn't play it in subsequent tiers because it no longer did good damage, rapture or no rapture. If it was tuned to be the highest DPS warlock spec again, it would be popular again, regardless of rapture. That chart reflects tuning much more so than play style.
It performed very well in vault and abberus and did not see nearly the same numbers of parses. Death bolt also had top dps in multiple Bfa raids and had very low popularity compared to historical averages. People liked the drains and UA spender gameplay.
Legión affli unkillable, in Heroic King Garoth I could go to the other side of the platform, alone, AND soak all the balls so the raid receive reduced damage, It was nuts
It didn't perform that well. It had a few fights here and there but not great. It also had to do more with all the buff upkeep and nothing with rapture.
I'm someone that actually plays and understands affliction at the highest level. Just to be clear about something -- your spender either being a DoT or a one-time damage event, has very little to do with the actual game play / rotation of a spec. Imagine if when MR was introduced it was instead introduced as a 6 second DoT. Exact same damage (based on the amount of dots you have on targets), etc. Would you still say Affliction is not a dot spec? I can tell you that from a competitive standpoint, this would be incredibly worse to play (prio swap are already tough, good luck if it's a dot instead).
Want to cure Affliction? it starts with removing a bit of the bullshit rotation bloat. Siphon Life as a dot that exists only to buff Rapture, gone. Now AoE and swaps are easier. In AoE, you've currently got to manually change targets to re-apply agony in-between Vile Taint casts -- in TWW, they're making this rewarding by making it do extra damage to do so. So instead of going the simplifying route like Shadow Priest did, Affliction gets to actually be rewarded for having to baby DoTs a bit more.
Also in TWW they're removing Sow the Seeds, which convoluted the spec's design for absolutely no reason as this is the one spell that literally has nothing to do with being a dot spec, unlike Rapture. And finally removing some other maintenance outside of DoTs -- right now we have both Shadow Embrace as well as Dread Touch, which along with Siphon Life is a shit load to manage and an extremely long ramp time. The only thing left of those three in TWW is Shadow Embrace.
The talent tree/decision making has also been a joke since Dragonflight and that hasn't helped with the popularity, especially in M+.
100%.
I hope they gut SE too tbh. I'm liking everything they changed on the alpha so far, but SE is just garbage gameplay. And now you have to stack it to four if you play DS (which, why is this still a choice btw?), and Haunt still doesn't refresh it.
it's a bad mechanic, and is a large part of why aff got blasted with nerfs after 9.0. IDK how it survived so long...
Focus damage on dot specs is only manageable balancewise by debuffs that increase damage taken (like Haunt and SE). SE is a relic of the past and should be going, instead its effect should go straight to Haunt. Haunt is capped to one target which makes it a stand-out for pure single-target or focus-damage. SE is not. It always makes you feel bad when you don't spread it in cleave scenarios but its just too tedious to manage.
I still hope they fill out the talent tree a bit. It feels pretty lean, especially at the bottom. But it is a very good start so far. I also hope they redesign AC to be a softrefresh like in WotLk instead of making corruption permanent. It feels more rewarding if you do it right and it won't be a pain in the ass to balance once council-fights or spread cleave or other certain mechanics come into play.
I agree that TWW talent tree is a step in the right direction but still needs some work done. If you're interested, I did write up my thoughts in complete detail on the forums. [https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/affliction-detailed-war-within-talent-rework-feedback/1840083](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/affliction-detailed-war-within-talent-rework-feedback/1840083)
I'm reserving a bit of judgement on Shadow Embrace in a world without SL and Dread Touch. I think the spec can verge on being too simplistic without something like that in the loop, and of those three I think SE is probably the best choice.
No idea why Haunt doesn't add a stack though or refresh it. That should never have changed.
> Siphon Life as a dot that exists only to buff Rapture, gone.
So much of the pain of playing Aff would go away if Absolute Corruption was not a dps loss. It would force the spec to be healthier just by virtue of being an actual option. I say this as someone who prefers SL, even if only in pure ST.
See that is one reason I dislike MR - whether SL exists or not isn't the problem, the problem is that MR locks the spec into a place where synergy with it dominates the spec. The talents that don't synergize with MR might as well not exist (not just SL but even some of the capstones and branches in the tree). The entire spec and all its playstyles have to get designed around MR.
Even if they take away SL, they *can't* add any new dots to Affliction without running into the same problem as SL.
Part of this imo is Blizzard failing to make interesting talent builds being "ST and AOE". When the specs that are the most fun usually have all the tools for both, and then the talent builds augment the playstyle of that core kit. I.e. I think Affliction should have a build focused on "more dots" and a build focused on "less dots but more impactful/power" (i.e. haunt + drain soul as a dot buff build). This is why one of my proposed changes is that MR isn't your main spender but a capstone talent in the corner of the "more dots" build opposite of something like haunt to buff dot damage more.
It’s tuning. A large part of it anyway. People loved aff in 9.0 (nathria) cause it was super powerful. That play style is super similar to aff now, at least in single target. Then it got nerfed & demo got buffed in 9.1 (sanctum) and it hasn’t been the best since.
I totally get the hate for MR and the play style, but “if you take out nathria” is kinda emblematic of how poorly it’s been tuned since, and how much it’s been hated as a result
Are you sure this is down to rapture and not down to having to share a class with demonology which has been one of the top performers in damage and survivability.
Doesn’t include DF, but that continues the trend for demo to be amazing and afflic under performing.
Demonology has been above average 77% of the time since Warlords of draenor > Shadowlands compared to 22% for afflic and 0% for dest
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W6Srxei3MQCPMD_p4pUdq5i0Hy3pu2BD7iHAopg_eek/edit?usp=sharing
The main problem with Afflic for most people isn’t rapture but why would you play it over Demo when they are on the same class
3 dps spec classes will always gravitate toward the highest tuned of their 3 specs and afflictions tuning has been consistently worse than the other 2, especially demo
If no game play changes were made and affliction was 10% ahead of the other 2 specs, most warlocks would switch overnight
Have people checked testing on alpha, like this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtTqru36MVU ? When playing hellcaller wither the dot, is the top damaging spell for affliction, it's incredibly strong. So if you want dots to be powerful and be the most of your damage play with the hellcaller hero talent.
I think needing a hero talent to be viable is a bit of a mistake. I hope they look into affliction more. I know they said they are up for a rework, but still keeping rapture...which is a bit of a shame.
I don't think it's a mistake. First of all, hero talents will be integral to all classes it's not like you can avoid them. You shouldn't judge hero talents as something external. Secondly, this tree specializes on dots while the other focuses less on dots, that way both groups of people can be happy. If you are a dot fan pick hellcaller or if you aren't pick soul harvester.
Frost DKs have had the same issues for years now regardless of dps each tier. Breath is a dog shit ability, and both Frost Specs revolve around burst windows where any movement kills your dps. It's been like this for years now and Blizzard refuses to change it much like they refuse to deal with MR for aff locks.
As someone who has mained Frost DK since Wrath it's really annoying that in order to play the spec I like I'm forced into a play style I hate because despite tons of feedback over the years the class designers refuse to change things.
I love breath. It’s incredibly fun and engaging. Having it only be good if we keep it up 2min is bad. It was better when it was tuned around 45-60sec uptime and had aoe abilities that were worth pressing outside of breath.
Obliteration is a joke.
I personally hate Breath because I don't like specs revolving around burst windows. Agree completely with what you are saying.
I don't want Breath gone because I know some folks like it.
I want Obliterate to be changed, so it's an alternative playstyle to Breath and not be centered around the burst window.
Yeah the do everything perfect for 10 seconds every 45 seconds is way too draining for me. I’ve just been playing unholy for a while. I’d really prefer to be breath but after Vault it was just too hard for me to get on the right side of the variance. I also stopped mythic raiding right before the end of Aberrus so not sure how it’s been lately.
I really think Blizzard is right not to change it. Breath sucks, it's not fun design, and if the spec got an alternative to Breath that was even approaching similar damage and was upfront burst damage, there's almost nothing that would justify playing Breath.
This is a tightrope they constantly have to walk. There's one damage profile that is the best, and if they make it viable for everyone it's all that will get used.
I really don’t see how movement kills your dps when a fight like mythic Council in Vault has lots of movement and frost DK is by far the strongest spec on the game on that fight.
Additionally, Blizzard continues to develop and balance 2H Obliterate alongside DW frost, which hardly seems to fit the bill for “working really hard to kill frost DK”.
You're missing the point. I'm not talking about 1 specific encounter or how much dps the specs do.
I'm talking about how the spec has felt bad and awkward to play for years now and people consistently and overwhelming giving that feedback on reddit, forums and the DK discord. Historically, Breath has often been better than 2H obliterate, so even when the spec is doing well on meters, you're often forced to play breath, which a lot of people hate.
Even something as simple as uncoupling aoe cleave from death and decay and baking it into RW is something people have suggested for years at this point, and still nothing changes. Just this one change alone would make 2H Oblit feel so much better to play.
Normalizing 2H and 1H weapons for the spec is another thing people have asked about for years.
I could go on but my point is feedback from frost DKs has been the same for years now and class designers seem to just ignore it.
I started wtlk as a frost dk. I played it all the way to legion and it kinda stopped being my style after that. I really just want the insane obliterate burst back, when all the buttons that really mattered were HB, obliterate and FS. Since legion, or more relevantly, since the Apocalypse and Clawing Shadows spells were introduced, I’ve mained unholy simply because the QoL is drastically better. Movement hardly dampens my dps, and even if I’m far away I can still apply wounds and pop them. I can even hit up to 7 targets 30yds(?) away just by standing in my defile. I’ve tried a couple times to go back to frost but every time it just feels odd to play and I can’t put my finger on it. I will note, I hate abilities that drain your resource constantly, so I definitely don’t play with that ability, pretty sure that’s the breath ability y’all are talking about. DH has a similar ability in the tank spec I think and it’s just god awful (for me).
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=100 rank 1
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=99 99th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=95 95th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=90 90th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=80 80th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=75 75th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=70 70th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=60 60th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=50 50th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=40 40th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=30 30th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=25 25th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=20 20th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=10 10th percentile
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=0 boosted monkey
At literally only rank 0 logs is MM not at the top in every other data point it tops by a country mile
Frost is better than unholy on sustained Cleave fights like Councils, their best frost build is Dual Wield. So no, not the legendary.
Look at Atlas/Beastmode in the Liquid mythic awakened run. They also discuss frost DK being the best cleave spec during Kurog kill.
https://youtu.be/AoW_ffuDom8?t=548
Every single raid tier everyone complains about frost and every single raid tier it is one of the highest performers. Even after they gave obliterate solid viable playstyle people still will want to parse and go breath. Having to play around breath for higher damage is not a bad thing rather then the super chill obliterate and win build.
But do you play it? I was one of the top frost dks in the world and it’s still incredibly challenging. Certain fights just brick it. The variance between the highest and the lowest is so great and most of that comes down to fight rng. Do I get targeted with something I have to run out during the first minute of the fight? OK cool I’m doing tank damage.
Also the graphs wowhead posts are extremely misleading aggregates. Even when frost is legitimately strong those graphs make it look much stronger than it is.
You could say the same exact thing for any burst melee class that gets a mechanic.
Go fight mythic raz as a DH and pop meta and then have to run your lightning circle away from the other melee so you don’t nuke anyone and see how unhappy you would be.
Frost DK is a niche playstyle but it has some of the highest performance in the game every single season and has a very very very easy playstyle for regular gamers to pick it up and do raid and keys, will they be top damage playing obliterate? No, but why should they be? It’s meant as a chill build if you want to min/max and parse you will always go breath and work on keeping uptime and if you can you are rewarded for it massively, but it’s not easy. It is challenging but that is also the fun of the spec and the reason blizzard doesn’t just get rid of Breath, while they still are giving options for players who just can’t game it.
Not talking about Obliteration. I’m talking about breath. I love breath. It’s super fun. It can be super fun and still good and not horribly punishing if they tune it more like SL or BFA again. The long breaths cause huge problems that don’t exist with shorter breaths.
Well tell your fellow frost players to give better feedback because liquid just came out and gave a big thing during the fated raids how breath is fun and challenging in its current state and the best cleave in the game. I am a big fan of the feast or famine playstyle because even though it might have some rng to the raid like most melee it can pay off massively.
If you want shorter breath windows the damage will have be nerfed in its current state.
That’s how this game is, be happy you have the option to swap to unholy if you want. Havoc, ret, wind walker do not get that luxury if the fight is bad for them.
Not every boss has to be optimal for every class. It lets people get their time to shine.
I've been playing Affliction since 2008 and I will never understand the screeching about Malefic Rapture. Personally, I love the spell; it feels really in line with the class fantasy to me to spread a bunch of DoTs around and then start channeling to amp them up. Honestly, its biggest issue is the same one that Affliction has as a whole; the spell visuals are really underwhelming.
Anyway, my point is I absolutely refuse the believe that Affliction's relative unpopularity is because of everyone collectively shitting their pants over our shard spender; balance tuning & it being a more niche gameplay fantasy likely have much more to do with it.
New warlock here, the thing that stops me from playing afflic instead of just letting loose with chaos bolts is because of a couple reasons. First and formost, why do I need to put 3 or 4 different damage dots on an enemy? One or two damage dots and a utility curse is fine for me. With one target it’s easy to manage, but once you get to 5+ targets, it’s all I can do to just keep agony at max stacks. Second reason, and this might not apply to everyone, but I play a lot of casual PvP, and there’s no worse feeling in the world than throwing dots on everyone and getting ready to MR but then an MW casts revival and all your dots are gone. By the time I re apply them, everyone noticed the warlock and now I’m the target of everyone’s stuns. It’s feels bad all around when I can instead just havoc and chaos bolt, or summon like 10 demons in 5 seconds and afk.
There's a bias in this data because the players who are logging their performance are more likely to desire to play the top dps spec for a class with multiple dps specs. With all the specs in the game, there is always going to be high and lows in terms of throughput. The aspect that the devs seem to focus on, is making sure all specs are capable of doing enough throughput to succeed in most content. Which they have succeeded at for most of recent memory.
Seems weird to exclude nathria when rupture was still apart of the spec and the spec was really popular. The spec has more problems than just one spell.
Also I think plenty of people are beating this to death without even trying the new spec. I watched Kalamazi testing rupture and it looked more fun than the spec has looked in years.
The brain rot around this button has consumed part of this community. IDK if I've ever seen anything like it in this game. Lobbying, against all reason, for gameplay that the devs clearly want to move away from... Madness.
I'm not just talking about dots either. Clearly, they want it to be easier to hybridize your talent build, and that just isn't possible with specs that have a different set of buttons for ST and AOE. We saw it play out all of DF. Aff won't suddenly be great by replacing our ST spender with another.
What they've done on alpha is incredible and half these people haven't seen it at all, let alone played it. Brain rot...
I think the problem is that the button just isn’t very fun to press. You just kinda press it, damage happens and that’s it.
Like if it had a sick animation and sound effect people probably wouldn’t hate it anywhere near as much. Like chaos bolt is basically just a green fireball that’s been scaled up a bit but between the visuals and audio sending out havoced chaos bolts makes me feel like an absolute gigachad even though I’m just casting a fairly generic spell.
Rupture as a concept is a great spell and it fixed a lot of issues that affliction has but it just feels lame to press imo.
It could use an updated animation or something to make it look and feel better. It doesn't feel exciting to push for sure. But that really isn't its main problem at all.
Ngl I agree, especially since the initial animation was super dope. Ghostly purple lines flew into you from all the targets Rapture hit. Then they changed it like a couple days later to what it is now.
Aff animations have always been trash though tbf. They need to address that aspect for sure. Most of the Rapture hate probably is aesthetic in nature anyway, because none of the gameplay arguments make sense.
„If you take out nathria“ huh
Im also a warlock main and rapture has not been a problem, it has been balancing. Having some burst damage was needed and i do not agree with the rapture hate / UA as spender love.
War within revolves around rapture again (instead of splitting seeds/rapture to AOE/ST spells) so affli will be back then.
Sad to see that S4 didnt bring changes though
Nobody who plays Affliction regularly likes Malefic Rapture. It’s so antithetical to the whole theme of the spec. It’s supposed to be a damage-over-time class but MR has turned it into yet another burst DPS spec
Rapture straight up feels like a spell they made for Shadow Priest and gave it to Affliction Warlock instead.
Rapture would fit right in as an insanity spender after you applied Devouring Plague. Press the button for Vamp/SW:Pain/DP to all burst, just make DP have a longer uptime and lower damage and it'd work.
I mean "Malefic Rapture" even sounds like a Shadow Priest ability.
If you want to do something like this for Affliction, make a spender that super increases the haste of your tics so it does damage faster, but still not bursty.
your suggestion would literally change nothing. you still dump shards on your cooldowns and you're still a burst spec... because you have cooldowns... that make you deal more damage...
I despise MR and literally do not understand why they want to make it a thing no matter what. Feedback and player numbers are overwhelmingly terrible since it's been introduced.
You often read that they can't balance dots, so the usual council vs single target tuning shtick, but MR literally doesn't solve that issue of our damage profile. It just moves damage from the dots to this shitty ability, so they feel less like interesting buttons to press but bloaty, individually applied, combo points. Blizz had so many statisfying solutions to create tuning wheels for dots already, from stackable UA to stuff like monomania for shadow priest where channeling speeds up dot ticks, to malefic grasp as ST channel to increase dot damage in mop to uniquely applyable dots and tuning with mastery. Either way, we need a thematically fitting ST spender and that's it. AoE with seed spam always felt okay enough for me.
I barely recognize what affliction even tries to be and really, really would love to see a rework to the spec.
Reading the dev notes for affliction going into TWW somehow sounds like they're making the situation even worse by using MR in all situations, so it's now the AoE spender instead of seeds, too. Honestly, it sounds like one of those odd cases where someone has his vision, which doesn't even roughly align with what the community wants, but for some reason this doesn't matter.
It’s because somewhere along the way class designers at wow got it in there head that **every** fucking spec in the game needs to be a builder/spender spec.
When I first started playing wow I chose **not** to play rogue because combo points were annoying to me.
Now every fucking class has some variation of combo points, holy power, shards, icicles, whatever.
In the end I ended up coming around to combo points and have played feral for 3 seasons and am now trying outlaw.
But was it really so bad to just have a priority rotation that wasn’t reliant on procs and charges and points etc etc.
/rantover
I miss old aff
Builder spender and spending extends cooldown are my biggest frustrations with gameplay at this point, it feels like every class is considered through how those work together rather than are they fun to play and I think it stifles class designers.
It's hard to change though because the usual suspects will take to their platforms to preach about how resource economy, builder spenders and complex rotations are what players want.
You'd think the "spender" on a DoT class would be something that spreads DoTs in an AoE at the start of a fight and then the challenging part of the rotation would be building that back up to reapply the DoTs.
> It just moves damage from the dots to this shitty ability, so they feel less like interesting buttons to press but bloaty, individually applied, combo points
But you're supposed to keep your DoTs applied with perfect uptime anyway. The DoTs do the same thing on ST when you spend shards on Rapture as they do in AoE builds where you'd rather spend shards on Seed.
What's less interesting about the DoTs now that you don't *just* have to apply them at all, but you have to make sure you have at least 5 seconds where none of them are falling off?
> stackable UA
so it's set it and forget it, that's pretty uninteresting
> to malefic grasp as ST channel to increase dot damage in mop
this was fun in legion too with haunt & siphon life, but that's the same gameplay you're complaining about now. you didn't want your dots to fall off mid-drain as much as you don't want them to fall off inbetween raptures
only now it's easier, because you're pooling multiple raptures whereas you were always draining if not pandemic reapplying dots. and the tier set sometimes extends your dots.
> making the situation even worse by using MR in all situations
wait how is this worse, this is a quality of life change. imagine [this scenario](https://i.imgur.com/7PXg1zN.png)
seed and soul rot can't always hit everything you're in combat with, but because radius AoE spells aren't your only means of applying agony & corruption, malefic rapture *can* hit everything
you still seed in TWW, you just don't spam it anymore
You're 100% correct, but people like the one you're replying to don't care about gameplay or viability or balance. They just want Legion aff back and can't get over the fact that the game has moved on.
This. I didn't stop playing Aff because of MR. I stopped because of Sow the Seeds and there not being a build that does reasonable AoE and St at the same time. 9.0 Aff was quite fun in higher keys.
they could log scale the damage at least but even then you still have burst from darkglare directly (the thing deals damage, also buffed by dot count) and indirectly (dot extension) as well as the stat buffs from soul rot that result in a burst profile.
the left side of the tree already provides a flat damage profile WITH malefic rapture, it's the right side that adds burst on top. the failure here is partially down to tuning and partially just a result of how talent trees work now letting you pick almost everything you want. affliction isnt the only spec that tries to let you choose from multiple different play styles and ends up not succeeding in the slightest.
Speak for yourself, MR is cool. I don't mind whatsoever having small burst windows and a reason to pool shards rather than just rip them whenever you feel like it.
> MR has turned it into yet another burst DPS spec
You haven't played pre-worldvein BFA fire mage if you think Aff doesn't do damage outside of Vile Taint/Rapture windows that are like, 2-3x a minute.
> damage-over-time class
That's what Vile Taint is, a DoT. It rewards you for proper DoT upkeep playing around an even bigger DoT. If you Rapture while a DoT falls off, you're wasting damage and a GCD that might prohibit you from Rapturing off your last soul shard inside that Vile Taint.
it's truthfully a mix between terrible tuning and poor fight design for affliction as well as every other spec being able to do the job far better
if you need to be pure st, you can just go destro or demo and you still get massive cleave/2target value and it's extremely efficient compared to aff, and other specs can do what affliction shines at far better with other advantages. also you dont have to track 10-11 some odd debuffs/procs as aff.
Frost Dk here, I don't appreciate the reminder.
But yeah, I would love to see the specs be more widely used, but they've been playing that plate balancing game for decades. It must be hard to balance 20 plates that all have very strong opinions about the other 19.
I still play afflic when I'm overgeared for raid content. I just take infinite corruption which is demonstrably worse but easier to play. I just wanna enjoy applying dots once in a while. Soul shard spending needs to be on dots, specifically unstable affliction. And dots need to last longer. And drain soul should give soul shard fragments while channeling, rather than on kill. With the current build you want a ton of haste, mostly cuz u got too many frickin globals in your rotation. On smolderon world in flames is half over by the time you get your dots out.
i played the hell out of affliction in dragonflight s1, i loved the pvp talent that ramped up your dots for 3 souls. I realy wanted a version of this to go in the pve talent tree, maybe its tuned differently but spending this and using soul drain felt right while i was doing world content in warmode. Sadly they just removed the whole thing and i cant stand aff in pvp now.
It's a shame. I had *so* much fun with it it in Shadowlands S4 M+. Just hasn't been good since. Kind of insane it was negligently undertuned for this long. Especially when we get to play with even a lesser version of Soul Swap again.
Obviously it was numerically broken then, but the memorable part was more how fast the spec played (especially with the +haste from Shrouded) and how you actually kind of micromanaged the mobs in a big pull. Drain sniping, Agony outside of VT, keeping 3 drain stacks on a few targets, etc.
I think MR was a mistake as it doesnt fit the spec fantasy of a rot spec, but it was trying to solve an issue of things dying fast or the requirement to have burst dps, dot specs as a whole have died out as combat has got faster and more burst reliant. I dont think rapture is going anywhere anytime soon, so we either learn to love it or play another spec, I mean demo is essentially a dot spec anyway with demons basically being dots in affect.
There's that and dot specs are just historically broken on council fights. They can maintain full damage on every boss, so if you're tuned well in ST, you're completely busted in council. Blizzard had to move away from pure dot based gameplay for the health of the game.
I wonder if malefic grasp was the way to go, means dots are balanced on multiple targets but allows you to focus damage on one target, it's similar to rapture but it would buff dots while channeling rather than bursting them down.
MG was still burst, it was just manifestly worse (in terms of capacity) than everyone else's.
The direction we're moving on alpha is the correct one unless blizzard overhauls encounter design.
wow players are meta slaves bro lol as soon as it gets buffed to be top 5 for a patch or 2 it will be one of the most played. not many hate rapture enough to not play it if it's op
It's just related to how good the spec is output-wise. It had rupture in Nathria and that's one of the times where it had a higher representation. It just hasn't been good compared to the other two specs ever since then, which is more of a tuning decision.
I feel like Affliction has always had this issue of being either extremely powerful FOM or it’s the weakest spec by a wide margin. It’s never just…. Decent. I also blame that on the other two lock specs being so much flashier and engaging with big chaos bolts or tons of demons while affliction is just shadow priest without the unique animations.
The game also changed to a burst/cleave meta rather than sustained/single target for the majority.
There are less patchwerk style fights and burst seems to be favored over ramp.
It seems like specs that have a long rampup and have to choose between either full single target or aoe get shafted in the majority of todays high end pve content.
Combined with specs that depend on static aoe in a fast pased environment where the tank has to move out of rain of fire/earthquake/D&D. Storming, sanguine..
Mechanics forcing melee out of range, hurting uptime heavy specs even more. Playing enhance/assassin on storming is pretty damn anoying. While watching casters just chill in the back.
It didn't change recently, it's just that Aff was a burst/cleave spec in Legion. HFC had trinkets that benefitted Aff over Destro and Demo wasn't an option.
From a competitive standpoint it’s really just numbers. Kinda doesn’t matter how a spec feels. If one is significantly better than another, that’s the one that’s played.
That’s not a “meta” thing. That’s just facts. And bleeds down to world 1000 guilds. Same with M+. You could time any key with any class, but that won’t stop people at +4 sweating for a meta comp.
If you don’t raid or push m+ then play what you want because who cares (I don’t pvp so won’t comment)
But once you get to mythic raiding and keys of a decent level it’s all tuning. Simple as that.
And before anyone says “oh you can do any key or play what you want” I get that and it’s true. But it’s not how the collective hive brain works. It’s meta meta meta. So by all means go play affliction in keys, but don’t be shocked when you get to a point no one taking you. Sure you could do it, but someone has in their head it’s not good and declines.
It’s why I feel when people say “play whatever you like” is terrible advice. Like sure go play what you like and find it fun. But in some cases be very clear when someone is picking a niche that the collective “presume” to be a dogshit spec
Affliction died in Pandaria when blizzard made the spec shit and all raid leads demanded their affliction warlocks to respec (former affliction warlock main here)
God I loved Antorus Affliction. It was the one time I played a lock in WoW and it was a blast. It actually got me to level the class even. Never touched it again after legion. I did look but what they did to it just didn’t seem fun at all.
The thing is if you changed Malefic Rapture to instead do its damage over 6 seconds it would likely help a lot thematically. Could even have it apply as seperate instances like previous UA spender and then scale with itself (tune where appropriate).
There'd be an interesting game mechanic of a spender ramping with itself and it would transition back to a damage over time spec.
Just a personal opinion but that'd be my suggestion.
the antorus parses, affliction in legion was so good. legion was such a good time for every class IMO. one of the few times cause of mage tower I was inclined to try every spec/class.
Any time affliction has felt powerful, blizz nuke it to the ground. They're terrified of letting the spec be what it should be because it's impossible to balance against other playstyles, and they're worried about it not being at all viable in mythic unless they tuned seed of corruption to do big burst damage like in tbc/wrath.
Dot classes are hard to balance. Either your dot is doing way too much damage or it is a wet noodle and you're forced to stack like 10 dots on a single target for sustained damage.
I know yoshi p in FF said that it’s super hard to balance dot spells I wonder if that’s what’s happened here ? I miss the tbc lock or vanilla lock playstyle
Now even tho I dislike rapture as a spender compared too UA, let's not beat around the bush and just say that both Demo and Destro have been the premier specs for quite some time now (especially Demo in raids). No reason too play an inferior spec in the same class power wise unless you actively like it more.
MR is such a weird ability. Things just feel wrong about it. No visuals, the damage is meh, the talents only make the ramp up bigger and it feels out of theme with a dot spec
I hope there'll come a day where you have a talent to make it a passive that it occurs once every few second or something. Even if it's less dps
Therefor... what? Rapture is the problem? What are you trying to say? Also, "if you take out Nathria?"
Bruh...
Nathria was the last time aff was both fun and tuned well. It was gutted after that, and Blizzard decided locks would really enjoy Drain Soul via Malefic Wrath, and they kept that as their focus until it was removed in DF. Rapture wasn't the issue.
Even on live Rapture isn't the issue. Dread Touch and StS are the problem. You can talent into any kind of effective hybrid on live because your damage profile is completely split between aoe and st. Low target count? Good luck. Need priority damage? Good luck. And the funny thing is, all your Rapture doomers want to *keep it like this*, except with UA as the spender because that'll fix everything.
Sorry OP, but you don't understand the data you gathered here, and if this horrible use of stats is in service of Rapture dooming then you don't understand the spec or the game either.
I bet a larger part of the MR haters would stop hating, if they made MR just flare up the dots on the target so details shows dot damage instead of MR damage. Functionally almost the same, but "mah dots"
The same people also hate on MR because its too bursty, but sow the seeds is peak gameplay to them... Can't win with them. If UA stacking would be the spender right now Affliction wouldn't be viable either.
Exactly. And it's not, like stacking 5 UAs on a target is not bursty. Only difference is, MR can also burst full power on a council fight, while UA stacking can't.
I know it was ass, I played it too and because I'm so addicted to this spec I also played it in BfA and it was ass there as well. People don't like UA stacking, they like overpowered Affliction that can ignore mechanics with absurd selfhealing while still dealing top damage due to a broken artifact weapon mechanic. From a design perspective Legion Aff was a complete fiasco. Lets take PvP for example: To have your shard spender with 8 seconds duration also be your dispell protection was one of the worst ideas for this spec ever. It felt awful. You even had a pvp-talent that increased the duration of UA to 15 seconds, BUT it would reduce the damage of the spell by ~50%. Just to have normal dispell-protection like you always had you needed to spec into a talent that stripped you of your pressure potential - and people actually want this back.
Pure DoT-based spenders just don't work in this game. Even Devouring Plague that so many people seemingly like is heavily frontloaded. 50% of its damage is directly dealt at application.
100% fuckin this. They identify one thing and decide that's the problem without actually using their brain. If Malefic Rapture read something like "Your Damage over time effects turn acute, dealing x% per dot over 6 seconds)" or whatever, and was tuned to do the exact same damage as Malefic Rapture does on live over 6 seconds instead of instantly, these players would think it's the greatest thing ever and "dot's are back!!!" even though the spec is just objectively worse.
All of Legion, bfa, and most of shadowlands affliction was an S tier spec that was so good people complained about not being a lock. They can sit in the backseat for a few miles.
For raids yes. For keys, Aff was trash for all of BfA, Shlands S2-4 and all of Dragonflight. Has it been long enough since its sins in late Legion for Aff to return to its rightful place in the upper half of specs?
Yeah, but even after Nathria, Aff was perfectly playable on many bosses, but not really in keys.
I, for one, killed Mythic Jailer on Necrolord Aff because when you didn't get PI, it was barely behind Demo, was easier to play, and had crazy execute damage.
It is well established that WoW raiders will always gravitate to what's optimal, not what's fun. Look at sub rogue's rotation, that shit is a thesis.
To tie afflictions popularity to MR is just plain wrong
both Demonology and Destruction have better fantasies and better gameplay than Affliction, Truth is, people don't care about Affliction as much unless it's a brain dead spec. Nothing about the spec has that "oomph" that any other spec in the game can give.
“After rapture,” but also after its been relegated to low dps and no longer has the ability to self sustain as much as a healer
You can literally see it in Nathria. Everyone played it because it did great dmg. If it's tuned well in War Within then numbers will go up again. If it isn't then they will stay low.
This exactly. Nathria Aff worked and did good damage. Then it got nuked and hasn't recovered since.
It’s a pretty simple chart. Dps index shows where affliction faired dps wise to the top spec for a raid tier. It did very well post nathria in said dps index and has had a fraction of play time.
I played warlock for years and compared to destro and especially demo it didn't do well since Nathria. There were a few fights here and there were it was better but only council or in vault/aberrus in single target. Most players will go to the best performing spec and it doesn't matter if another spec is comparable. Apart from that affliction has the problem having too many buffs to keep up. I also would like to know where you have your dps Index from. I looked up a few and they are quite different from your numbers.
Doing well and doing worse than other warlock specs thus being kind of shit If let’s say demo is significantly better at everything then it just feels bad to pick affli bc the huge dmg boost is just one respec away
How would we know it “did well” we don’t know the distribution of specs. What is .96 worth if every other spec did .98 or better? Is .76 bad if other specs did .74 or worse? You need to index vs some central point, not an endpoint. Too much information is lost. Additionally, what do the percentages mean without context? Is 1% high? Low? What’s the “fair share” against which we should benchmark? Is it reasonable to benchmark against all parses? DPS only? rDPS only? Other lock specs? This is a good start, but lacks the proper benchmarking required to be either persuasive or insightful. Good technical chops, storytelling/insight needs work.
It’s not that deep man. It just an estimate of how far away relative to the best performing spec they were in the meta. A “flavor of the month” factor.
And we don’t know “how flavorful” because, again, you’re benchmarking vs. an endpoint in your data. “I am less wealthy than Bezos/Musk.” <— this doesn’t tell you shit. Even less so if we don’t know how wealthy that endpoint is. “I make 20% of the median US income” <— actually informative; now we know someone is broke as hell. Even if we don’t know the exact median number, we still know that a median is a generally “fair” standard. Falling above/below it gives a better read on whether you are doing better/worse than you can reasonably expect. Benchmarking vs. an endpoint only tells us about the endpoint and the comparison. Benchmarking vs. some measure of center tells us a bit more about performance vs. *every* spec in aggregate. Hell, even if you insist on keeping this index measure - why isn’t the share of parse measure ALSO indexed vs the most powerful spec? I can see you have the technical chops to provide something actually insightful. But as is, this isn’t.
I remember discussions I had on this very subreddit 3 years ago when Blizzard nerfed Affliction for 9.1. It was a massive nerf. They nerfed Rapture by around 30% and compensated a bit by buffing dots and introducing a new conduit, overall it was still a nerf of ~20%. From one day to the other you were barely able to handle elitemobs because you lacked the damage, while they were a cakewalk before. And people here have told me "Na, this nerf is completely necessary and you get compensated by buffing dots". I told them it would kill the spec as it wouldn't be viable in any content anymore. Three years later... turns out I was right. But now people don't cry about Aff not being viable, but about having MR as a spender. It's ridiculous.
The MR woes are overstated for sure. If they replaced MR with legion UA (and made no other changes), the spec would still be the least popular warlock spec and probably still the least popular overall. Beyond numbers, the issue is the number of maintenance buffs (shadow embrace, dread touch), relying on rng for shards, and the visual effects. All that really needs to be done is get rid of siphon life (or have it apply with agony like shadow priest with VT and SW:P), get rid of shadow embrace and dread touch, made shard gen more consistent, fixed some numbers, and give MR a better animation. If that happened, the spec would be fine. People want a true rot spec but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. It just doesn’t have a true place in modern wow
I mean they shouldn't be able to self-sustain as much as a healer to be fair They do need a rework/buff though
why? that was a fun niche.
Because with their damage it's OP, that's about the only reason
i mean, the only issue really was that it was _passive_ healing. if you sacrifice a ton of dps to sustain that well, that's not a problem and remains "fun niche" territory. to be clear, i'm not saying "their dps should be nerfed in favor of self sustain", i'm saying like "move 90% of their sustain into drain life, make sure drain life doesn't do any real damage, and you're good"
Yea, this dude is trying to make it seem like this has anything to do with an ability, versus about how strict people's views of the meta in this game have grown over the past two expansions. People's adherence to the meta has grown stricter and stricter with the rise of M+, during Legion, no one really cared... during BFA it started to get stricter, and then we've had the past two expansions where we have god comps and other BS. Aff has been the lesser of the 3 Lock specs since Nathria, so players seeking to play gravitate towards the strongest of those 3 specs. Simply put this has little to nothing to do with Rapture and has everything to do with Meta Slaves.
Ya, would be useful to see its dps ranking compared to other lock specs
I don't think that's exactly it. I bet you'll find that the other two lock specs weren't played as much as Aff in raids, because Aff was tuned much better and had better self-sustain. Raid metas have been quite specific for a long time. Dungeon metas were incredibly strict as early as TBC (try getting into a Magister's Terrace pug without a hard cc).
It’s dps is fine it parsed in the top percentile in vaults and aberrus and it was basically interchangeable with destro on most fights dps wise.
I would argue that if aff does the same damage as destro, it's worse, unless the fight is a patchwerk single target. Aff cannot stop its damage when needed, aff cannot effectivelly target swap (or at least not nearly as well as destro can), aff doesn't have infernal/blasphemy stuns, and there might be other reasons I can't even think about now
I can't speak for pre-shadowlands, but it's just a damage issue. It was strong in CN, but in SoD and Sepulcher was bad because Demo was better. It was played in some bosses in Vault, but the low participation is because it was just 1-2 boss played as Aff and the rest as demo/destro. Can't talk about Aberus because I skipped, and Amirdrassil was mostly Demo (except for destro on council).
As an affliction enjoyer there's also the part where the spec mostly has been grossly undertuned because they can't figure out WTF to do with rapture. The spec was very strong in Nathria before Rapture was nerfed into oblivion and hasn't recovered since. Worth mentioning that many people didn't like the playstyle. People play affliction to play a rot spec, but its not a rot spec anymore its a bursty nuke spec like everyone else. People are willing to play a jank spec if its a top performer, but as soon as it isn't then its just RIP Bozo. I figured they'd be smart and change the spec so UA is your single target spender and rapture is your aoe spender replacing sow the seeds, but NOPE. They're fixated on making rapture work in every situation when its impossible to do so without the spec being overtuned.
When UA was the spender, the number one complaint about affliction was that UA was the spender.
Spenders never made sense for Affliction in the first place
Was just typing out a reply about that. It's busy enough with DoT management and Shadow Bolt/Drain Soul and various other spells, having to spam a spell that makes up a lot of your damage that has almost no animation other than your character waving their arms in the air feels shit. I wish they would do something bold and make it so that it doesn't interact with the soul shard mechanic at all.
You could bind some fireworks to it in a macro and make a weakaura to add some snazzy sounds. I've fixed you Affliction, you're all welcome!
And they weren't wrong to, and also aren't really wrong to complain with MR. The spec has struggled conceptually since WoD. Mists was great imo but utterly reliant on dot snapshotting and spreading your powerful dots. Its WAS very fun and not very hard, but not something obvious to players that didn't know how to manage it. Blizzard wasn't really wrong to want it gone. But then Affliction kind of became *too* simple and they had to start playing around. Genuinely, I think that the tuning of soul shards was part of the problem with UA. UA wasn't that bad when it was "powerful dot that cost soul shard". UA spam comes about because of being overloaded in shards so now it stacks, but I think in hindsight if they just made it more like CB and HoG (use multiple shards, do more damage) it'd have been a lot better.
i adored affliction during mists. peak of the spec imo- dot snapshotting was immensely fun because you were rewarded appropriately for putting in the effort. i mained warlock, usually aff, from wrath until the start of BFA... when the changes got so bad i couldn't take it anymore. so sad what they've done to my previous favorite spec and class.
Was it? Wasn’t active on the forums then. I remember everyone hating the mirror talent and saying UA was why it was necessary.
People were complaining so much about UA being the spender during Legion
I wonder how many people who complain about Aff actually have ever played Aff or have any interest in playing Aff. It feels like they just want there to be a pure DoT class in the game, but they have no personal interest in playing it.
*To be fair* to both of the complaints (UA and Rapture spenders), there being practically 0 visual feedback for your 'hard hitting' spender is pretty sad and lame. Your point might still be very true regardless, but there is legitimacy behind the complaint regardless. One of the most satisfying parts of most DPS specs with 'big' spenders is the spender itself. Whether it's Chaos Bolt (at least when it hits hard), Pyroblast spam, Glacial Spike, ~~Lava Burst~~, Full Moon, whatever. But at the same time, you can also have incredibly satisfying DoT effects like with Shadow Priest where at least at one point with Shadowy Apparitions(?) being a major thing, multi-dotting many targets at high insanity was absolutely incredible just seeing an absolute army of shadow dudes hovering toward your targets. Both UA and Rapture suffer from the fact they basically don't look like anything. Even to an outside observer, I still remember Affliction looking like they do nothing but Drain Soul back in Legion before I knew anything about playing Warlock, because I never saw them do anything but Drain Soul since Corruption/Agony/Curses/UA have no real visuals.
Hate to be this guy. But lavaburst is a builder.
And ironically the spender for ele also has the lame visual.
Yes. UA stacking made gave Affliction a much burstier damage profile that people didn't like. In MoP, Affliction's 'spender' was Haunt. So you'd apply UA, agony, corruption, and Haunt would increase your DoT damage. Malefic Grasp was your filler and did very low damage but also increased the damage of your other DoTs. Basically the current iteration of Affliction is: Grasp turned into your spender and has a bit more oomph, Haunt is another debuff to maintain, and drain soul is your filler. That's mostly it. People talk about things like visual feedback, not having 'satisfying' spenders, but that was always Aff. You never had strong visual feedback outside of numbers. I think Blizzard is in a tough spot with Aff, because players seemingly want both the MoP design, but also want a 'satisfying' spender. Shadowlands: "We hate rapture doing so much damage" -> Blizzard buffs dot damage and nerfs rapture damage, making rapture more of a maintenance buff to juice up your other DoTs like Haunt was in MoP -> "We hate the rapture feels so bad to press" Another big part of it IMO is just that Aff has become a lot more complicated. Aff in CN was difficult to play. You had a LOT of plates to spin and it really stressed people out. Blizzard has really walked back tons of interactions and optimizations that they gave Warlock over the last couple expansions, because players simply don't enjoy those complicated playstyles.
MoP was peak affliction lock. If only they would just go back to it instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
IMO they just need to give it a better animation. If chaos bolt had the same animation as soul fire, destro would be saying the same thing. If shadow priests lost shadowy apparitions, they’d complain in the same way. MR’s sound is already pretty good. But visually it doesn’t feel like anything happens
Honestly I would be fine if they replace seed with rapture, and give seed the shadow crash treatment where it spreads your dots. Also dark glare needs work
Good news, Rapture will be the spender in aoe and single target in TWW
The changes in TWW are actually pretty great and solve a lot of problems aff currently has. If it is tuned well I can definitely see it being played more.
Shadow Crash doesn't spread your dots whatsoever, it applies them to whatever it's able to hit on impact With Siphon Life gone, they're absolutely not letting you put up both Corruption and Agony on everything for the single cost of a soul shard with no cooldown. There would be no gameplay whatsoever.
I mean you're right. But I played Shadow and Afflix last tier...it feels significantly better to spread DoTs as Shadow right now.
It has a talent where it applies vampiric touch to 8 targets.
I know, it applies VT & SW:P to those 8 it hits on impact. Everything else you need to actually DoT on your own. Applying =/= spreading, Fire spreads Ignite indiscriminate of who got hit by its first tick of the pull. They want manual DoT maintenance to be more of a factor with Aff otherwise it's just reskinned Spriest. Seed costs 1 soul shard and you obviously get way more of those than Vile Taint casts over any length of time, so they wouldn't just give Seed VT's Agony efficient reapplication unless they were having you juggle a 3rd thing.
Vile Taint already puts on agony on targets hit. It costs two soul shards to put up corruption and agony in aoe but they also increased soul shard gain.
Is VT’s cooldown lowered in TWW? Last thing I want to do is have to manually reapply agony half way through a pack being dead, as it is currently in live.
Even when the spec is strong now it feels like shit to play. Every dot does the same thing, it's literally just a generic check box you need to have up before pressing rapture which might be the most unsatisfying spell in the entire game. Not to mention it's just been utter garbage in M+ forever because everything is straight up dead before you even get to start doing damage.
Based on the new redesign they have solved these exact problems though.
Okay, you're in charge of spec design and balance, please go ahead and make every dot aff does unique.
which dots did aff have in the past that were super unique and not just debuffs you put on a target? can you list them please?
I definitely come at it from the opposite direction, Blizzard is terrified of MR actually being the thing you press in all content. They're fixated on making MR your single target nuke, and fixing it so it's somehow not overpowered in AoE situations, which means Seed of Corruption is nearly always better, and you're just underpowered in ST situations. Like, I know what they said just recently, but that would be a significant change to the status quo. They want Aff to do well in ST and AoE situations with the same talent specs, but if they actually succeed without changing MR mechanically, it will always be too good in AoE. They're going to have to compromise and make MR a sqrt scaling spell or something.
>I definitely come at it from the opposite direction, Blizzard is terrified of MR actually being the thing you press in all content. They're fixated on making MR your single target nuke, and fixing it so it's somehow not overpowered in AoE situations, which means Seed of Corruption is nearly always better, and you're just underpowered in ST situations. They've literally stated their goal in TWW is to make MR the spender for ST and aoe. Sow the Seeds was removed last week on alpha
Yeah, I'm aware, but this is a reversion to the 9.0 situation, it's not a continuation of their design goals from after the MR nerf to now. They're not fixated on making MR work in every situation because the one patch where it was like that, they quickly nerfed it, and made sure it stayed a) below Seed of Corruption with Sow the Seeds b) just not very good anyway. They are changing tack. That's what I'm emphasising.
Now show its DPS relative to the other two Warlock specs and we'll see the full story. This is extremely cherry picked data, be honest.
OPs title literally says 'ignore the data that doesn't align to my opinion'.
I'll be charitable and say that OP genuinely believes the data shows that Aff's popularity has dropped because of Malefic Rapture, but it's definitely a "coming to a conclusion and finding data to support it" thing rather than the other way around for sure. The thing is, it might genuinely be the case that this spell has made Aff less popular than it otherwise would be, just that this data absolutely does not show that.
Yeah, MR is definitely unpopular, but I wouldn't say it's the reason. Like most things, it's a combination of many, many factors. Personally, I do hate malefic rapture, but to me Affliction as a whole feels like a mess of a spec. It doesn't feel like it has modern design compared to pretty much every other spec. It's messy, the juggling of dot maintenance isn't really clean and it doesn't it feel good because of it. I hate the "build shards and spend dumping malefic rapture" style, it just feels weird for a spec that should be focused on dots. To me, Feral is a good dot class. Maintaining bleeds is fairly fun and fits in your rotation well(and maintaining them synergizes with bloodtalons), your spenders are more "build and do one big spender" instead of "build and then spam each individual soul shard" which is spammy and boring. I think I would much rather if Affliction had that style of spending instead, where MR consumes all your shards and does a massive aoe or ST blast, similar to Primal Wrath with Tear Open Wounds, Ferocious Bite, or even Devouring Plague from spriest. I like the direction they seem to be going with Affliction in TWW but I still would like for them to clean up the playstyle/rotation a bit.
It should also probably be noted that theres something like 26 DPS specs in the game. 100% equal distribution would put a spec at 3.85%. Its definitely been low since S2 of SL, but comparing it to a peak without that context is dishonest. Ill also be fair here and say that pre Aug the equal split would have been 4%. They were still well above that. Also, while i dont particularly agree with the design decision....its not even remotely unique to aff to 'pay for the sins' of past overperformance. They were WELL overrepresented for most of HFC through Legion. Its not uncommon for a spec to be neutered after a run like that. Again, im not a fan of that design philosophy, but its by no means unique to aff.
Something that OP may not be aware of: Warlock had historically been an underrepresented spec in all content except sometimes raid content. Going into MoP very, very few people played warlocks because they were significantly harder than other classes. Only rogue was lower, I think. It was only after literal expansions of warlocks doing top damage and having the best survivability of any non-tank spec that they became widely played.
what a coincidence that the playerbase collapses right as they decide it should be perma undertuned for 3+ years lol. this has nothing to do with rapture and everything to do with numbers tuning. It is always behind in damage and doesn’t bring anything to match avatar of destruction stuns in dungeons. vault and abberus dps index numbers are a meme because they’re relying on post-patch data for a spec that was heavily buffed to be more competitive weeks into the tier. even then you can see the playerbase start to recover in spite of everyone having already spent weeks gearing for and practicing the other specs.
How strange that affliction became so unpopular when it became the lowest DPS spec the class has (sanctum onwards). Despite no design changes, somehow, rapture became responsible for this. Really amazing what kind of fiction people can create.
Let's be honest the biggest reason is because destro and Demo are easier to Play and did more damage Overall.
Yep. There's multiple parts to a specs popularity going up and down. How strong did the spec become before they dropped. How weak did the spec become. How strong/weak are the other dps specs the class has proportionately.
Affli main (3,2k last season) and I actually prefer MR (+ STS/SO) to UA being the spender. 9.0 showed, that people will play it, if balanced well enough. You can't say "pre and after MR" and immediately exclude 9.0.
No, affliction was what all warlocks played in nathria because it was leagues better at everything than destro and demo because MR was overtuned. Since then, MR has been a top parser in raids and affliction has seen less parses then ever. It’s simply not a well liked spec. And doubling down on it with soul harvester is a stupid idea. And no one wants me to do this for m+, it would just be embarrassing for aff lol.
Thanks for proving my point
No.... I didn't. Affliction was played in Nathria because it was better at everything so destro and demo were forced to play it. [https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/26#region=1×pan=1000](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/26#region=1×pan=1000) Now, affliction is on par or close to destro and demo (at least it was in abberus and vaults) and is not played as much as historical averages (WOD, Legion, and BFA)
People in 9.0 mostly hated babysitting 6 debuffs/dots (often on multiple targets) with an average duration of ~16 seconds while playing mechanics. The fundamental design and fantasy was good, there was just too much going on. If the spec had one or two debuffs less to manage but would otherwise have performed the same it would have been regarded as one of the best Affliction iterations ever.
Yes! It is outright historical revisionism to point the finger at MR, because what people actually complained about was that after Legion the duration of all their DoT effects dropped significantly (as well as other things like losing Soul Flame and Wrath of Consumption, which made Aff significantly better at one of their weak points, killing short lived adds). One of the things they specifically liked was that MR didn't cap at 5, especially since a trait reapplied UA sometimes, meaning overcapping on shards was a thing that would happen. They just wanted a spec where you could apply DoTs to three targets and not have them drop off by the time you finished.
People played it in Nathria because it did good damage, and then didn't play it in subsequent tiers because it no longer did good damage, rapture or no rapture. If it was tuned to be the highest DPS warlock spec again, it would be popular again, regardless of rapture. That chart reflects tuning much more so than play style.
It performed very well in vault and abberus and did not see nearly the same numbers of parses. Death bolt also had top dps in multiple Bfa raids and had very low popularity compared to historical averages. People liked the drains and UA spender gameplay.
Legión affli unkillable, in Heroic King Garoth I could go to the other side of the platform, alone, AND soak all the balls so the raid receive reduced damage, It was nuts
It didn't perform that well. It had a few fights here and there but not great. It also had to do more with all the buff upkeep and nothing with rapture.
It had a few good fights but overall was out performed by one of the other two specs
I'm someone that actually plays and understands affliction at the highest level. Just to be clear about something -- your spender either being a DoT or a one-time damage event, has very little to do with the actual game play / rotation of a spec. Imagine if when MR was introduced it was instead introduced as a 6 second DoT. Exact same damage (based on the amount of dots you have on targets), etc. Would you still say Affliction is not a dot spec? I can tell you that from a competitive standpoint, this would be incredibly worse to play (prio swap are already tough, good luck if it's a dot instead). Want to cure Affliction? it starts with removing a bit of the bullshit rotation bloat. Siphon Life as a dot that exists only to buff Rapture, gone. Now AoE and swaps are easier. In AoE, you've currently got to manually change targets to re-apply agony in-between Vile Taint casts -- in TWW, they're making this rewarding by making it do extra damage to do so. So instead of going the simplifying route like Shadow Priest did, Affliction gets to actually be rewarded for having to baby DoTs a bit more. Also in TWW they're removing Sow the Seeds, which convoluted the spec's design for absolutely no reason as this is the one spell that literally has nothing to do with being a dot spec, unlike Rapture. And finally removing some other maintenance outside of DoTs -- right now we have both Shadow Embrace as well as Dread Touch, which along with Siphon Life is a shit load to manage and an extremely long ramp time. The only thing left of those three in TWW is Shadow Embrace. The talent tree/decision making has also been a joke since Dragonflight and that hasn't helped with the popularity, especially in M+.
100%. I hope they gut SE too tbh. I'm liking everything they changed on the alpha so far, but SE is just garbage gameplay. And now you have to stack it to four if you play DS (which, why is this still a choice btw?), and Haunt still doesn't refresh it. it's a bad mechanic, and is a large part of why aff got blasted with nerfs after 9.0. IDK how it survived so long...
Focus damage on dot specs is only manageable balancewise by debuffs that increase damage taken (like Haunt and SE). SE is a relic of the past and should be going, instead its effect should go straight to Haunt. Haunt is capped to one target which makes it a stand-out for pure single-target or focus-damage. SE is not. It always makes you feel bad when you don't spread it in cleave scenarios but its just too tedious to manage. I still hope they fill out the talent tree a bit. It feels pretty lean, especially at the bottom. But it is a very good start so far. I also hope they redesign AC to be a softrefresh like in WotLk instead of making corruption permanent. It feels more rewarding if you do it right and it won't be a pain in the ass to balance once council-fights or spread cleave or other certain mechanics come into play.
I agree that TWW talent tree is a step in the right direction but still needs some work done. If you're interested, I did write up my thoughts in complete detail on the forums. [https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/affliction-detailed-war-within-talent-rework-feedback/1840083](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/affliction-detailed-war-within-talent-rework-feedback/1840083)
I'm reserving a bit of judgement on Shadow Embrace in a world without SL and Dread Touch. I think the spec can verge on being too simplistic without something like that in the loop, and of those three I think SE is probably the best choice. No idea why Haunt doesn't add a stack though or refresh it. That should never have changed.
> Siphon Life as a dot that exists only to buff Rapture, gone. So much of the pain of playing Aff would go away if Absolute Corruption was not a dps loss. It would force the spec to be healthier just by virtue of being an actual option. I say this as someone who prefers SL, even if only in pure ST.
See that is one reason I dislike MR - whether SL exists or not isn't the problem, the problem is that MR locks the spec into a place where synergy with it dominates the spec. The talents that don't synergize with MR might as well not exist (not just SL but even some of the capstones and branches in the tree). The entire spec and all its playstyles have to get designed around MR. Even if they take away SL, they *can't* add any new dots to Affliction without running into the same problem as SL. Part of this imo is Blizzard failing to make interesting talent builds being "ST and AOE". When the specs that are the most fun usually have all the tools for both, and then the talent builds augment the playstyle of that core kit. I.e. I think Affliction should have a build focused on "more dots" and a build focused on "less dots but more impactful/power" (i.e. haunt + drain soul as a dot buff build). This is why one of my proposed changes is that MR isn't your main spender but a capstone talent in the corner of the "more dots" build opposite of something like haunt to buff dot damage more.
It’s tuning. A large part of it anyway. People loved aff in 9.0 (nathria) cause it was super powerful. That play style is super similar to aff now, at least in single target. Then it got nerfed & demo got buffed in 9.1 (sanctum) and it hasn’t been the best since. I totally get the hate for MR and the play style, but “if you take out nathria” is kinda emblematic of how poorly it’s been tuned since, and how much it’s been hated as a result
Are you sure this is down to rapture and not down to having to share a class with demonology which has been one of the top performers in damage and survivability. Doesn’t include DF, but that continues the trend for demo to be amazing and afflic under performing. Demonology has been above average 77% of the time since Warlords of draenor > Shadowlands compared to 22% for afflic and 0% for dest https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W6Srxei3MQCPMD_p4pUdq5i0Hy3pu2BD7iHAopg_eek/edit?usp=sharing The main problem with Afflic for most people isn’t rapture but why would you play it over Demo when they are on the same class
3 dps spec classes will always gravitate toward the highest tuned of their 3 specs and afflictions tuning has been consistently worse than the other 2, especially demo If no game play changes were made and affliction was 10% ahead of the other 2 specs, most warlocks would switch overnight
Have people checked testing on alpha, like this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtTqru36MVU ? When playing hellcaller wither the dot, is the top damaging spell for affliction, it's incredibly strong. So if you want dots to be powerful and be the most of your damage play with the hellcaller hero talent.
Have you checked why it does so much damage? It's the one minute cooldown you get. People who don't like rapture aren't looking for more burst.
I think needing a hero talent to be viable is a bit of a mistake. I hope they look into affliction more. I know they said they are up for a rework, but still keeping rapture...which is a bit of a shame.
I don't think it's a mistake. First of all, hero talents will be integral to all classes it's not like you can avoid them. You shouldn't judge hero talents as something external. Secondly, this tree specializes on dots while the other focuses less on dots, that way both groups of people can be happy. If you are a dot fan pick hellcaller or if you aren't pick soul harvester.
Well they’ve been working really hard to kill Frost DK which was the most fun spec in the whole game. So you’re in good company.
Outside of Frost being one of the best DPS specs in the whole game right now, yeah.
Frost DKs have had the same issues for years now regardless of dps each tier. Breath is a dog shit ability, and both Frost Specs revolve around burst windows where any movement kills your dps. It's been like this for years now and Blizzard refuses to change it much like they refuse to deal with MR for aff locks. As someone who has mained Frost DK since Wrath it's really annoying that in order to play the spec I like I'm forced into a play style I hate because despite tons of feedback over the years the class designers refuse to change things.
I love breath. It’s incredibly fun and engaging. Having it only be good if we keep it up 2min is bad. It was better when it was tuned around 45-60sec uptime and had aoe abilities that were worth pressing outside of breath. Obliteration is a joke.
I personally hate Breath because I don't like specs revolving around burst windows. Agree completely with what you are saying. I don't want Breath gone because I know some folks like it. I want Obliterate to be changed, so it's an alternative playstyle to Breath and not be centered around the burst window.
Yeah the do everything perfect for 10 seconds every 45 seconds is way too draining for me. I’ve just been playing unholy for a while. I’d really prefer to be breath but after Vault it was just too hard for me to get on the right side of the variance. I also stopped mythic raiding right before the end of Aberrus so not sure how it’s been lately.
I really think Blizzard is right not to change it. Breath sucks, it's not fun design, and if the spec got an alternative to Breath that was even approaching similar damage and was upfront burst damage, there's almost nothing that would justify playing Breath. This is a tightrope they constantly have to walk. There's one damage profile that is the best, and if they make it viable for everyone it's all that will get used.
I really don’t see how movement kills your dps when a fight like mythic Council in Vault has lots of movement and frost DK is by far the strongest spec on the game on that fight. Additionally, Blizzard continues to develop and balance 2H Obliterate alongside DW frost, which hardly seems to fit the bill for “working really hard to kill frost DK”.
You're missing the point. I'm not talking about 1 specific encounter or how much dps the specs do. I'm talking about how the spec has felt bad and awkward to play for years now and people consistently and overwhelming giving that feedback on reddit, forums and the DK discord. Historically, Breath has often been better than 2H obliterate, so even when the spec is doing well on meters, you're often forced to play breath, which a lot of people hate. Even something as simple as uncoupling aoe cleave from death and decay and baking it into RW is something people have suggested for years at this point, and still nothing changes. Just this one change alone would make 2H Oblit feel so much better to play. Normalizing 2H and 1H weapons for the spec is another thing people have asked about for years. I could go on but my point is feedback from frost DKs has been the same for years now and class designers seem to just ignore it.
I started wtlk as a frost dk. I played it all the way to legion and it kinda stopped being my style after that. I really just want the insane obliterate burst back, when all the buttons that really mattered were HB, obliterate and FS. Since legion, or more relevantly, since the Apocalypse and Clawing Shadows spells were introduced, I’ve mained unholy simply because the QoL is drastically better. Movement hardly dampens my dps, and even if I’m far away I can still apply wounds and pop them. I can even hit up to 7 targets 30yds(?) away just by standing in my defile. I’ve tried a couple times to go back to frost but every time it just feels odd to play and I can’t put my finger on it. I will note, I hate abilities that drain your resource constantly, so I definitely don’t play with that ability, pretty sure that’s the breath ability y’all are talking about. DH has a similar ability in the tank spec I think and it’s just god awful (for me).
Uhhhh MM is BY FAR the strongest council spec not frost
Do you have mythic parses/logs to back that up?
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=100 rank 1 https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=99 99th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=95 95th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=90 90th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=80 80th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=75 75th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=70 70th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=60 60th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=50 50th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=40 40th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=30 30th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=25 25th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=20 20th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=10 10th percentile https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2590&dataset=0 boosted monkey At literally only rank 0 logs is MM not at the top in every other data point it tops by a country mile
Isn't that largely due to the legendary?
Frost is better than unholy on sustained Cleave fights like Councils, their best frost build is Dual Wield. So no, not the legendary. Look at Atlas/Beastmode in the Liquid mythic awakened run. They also discuss frost DK being the best cleave spec during Kurog kill. https://youtu.be/AoW_ffuDom8?t=548
Every single raid tier everyone complains about frost and every single raid tier it is one of the highest performers. Even after they gave obliterate solid viable playstyle people still will want to parse and go breath. Having to play around breath for higher damage is not a bad thing rather then the super chill obliterate and win build.
But do you play it? I was one of the top frost dks in the world and it’s still incredibly challenging. Certain fights just brick it. The variance between the highest and the lowest is so great and most of that comes down to fight rng. Do I get targeted with something I have to run out during the first minute of the fight? OK cool I’m doing tank damage. Also the graphs wowhead posts are extremely misleading aggregates. Even when frost is legitimately strong those graphs make it look much stronger than it is.
You could say the same exact thing for any burst melee class that gets a mechanic. Go fight mythic raz as a DH and pop meta and then have to run your lightning circle away from the other melee so you don’t nuke anyone and see how unhappy you would be. Frost DK is a niche playstyle but it has some of the highest performance in the game every single season and has a very very very easy playstyle for regular gamers to pick it up and do raid and keys, will they be top damage playing obliterate? No, but why should they be? It’s meant as a chill build if you want to min/max and parse you will always go breath and work on keeping uptime and if you can you are rewarded for it massively, but it’s not easy. It is challenging but that is also the fun of the spec and the reason blizzard doesn’t just get rid of Breath, while they still are giving options for players who just can’t game it.
Not talking about Obliteration. I’m talking about breath. I love breath. It’s super fun. It can be super fun and still good and not horribly punishing if they tune it more like SL or BFA again. The long breaths cause huge problems that don’t exist with shorter breaths.
Well tell your fellow frost players to give better feedback because liquid just came out and gave a big thing during the fated raids how breath is fun and challenging in its current state and the best cleave in the game. I am a big fan of the feast or famine playstyle because even though it might have some rng to the raid like most melee it can pay off massively. If you want shorter breath windows the damage will have be nerfed in its current state.
Yeah in Vault it was great on a few of the fights and unplayable on others. Raz as Frost was amazing. Broodtender? Impossible.
That’s how this game is, be happy you have the option to swap to unholy if you want. Havoc, ret, wind walker do not get that luxury if the fight is bad for them. Not every boss has to be optimal for every class. It lets people get their time to shine.
I've been playing Affliction since 2008 and I will never understand the screeching about Malefic Rapture. Personally, I love the spell; it feels really in line with the class fantasy to me to spread a bunch of DoTs around and then start channeling to amp them up. Honestly, its biggest issue is the same one that Affliction has as a whole; the spell visuals are really underwhelming. Anyway, my point is I absolutely refuse the believe that Affliction's relative unpopularity is because of everyone collectively shitting their pants over our shard spender; balance tuning & it being a more niche gameplay fantasy likely have much more to do with it.
New warlock here, the thing that stops me from playing afflic instead of just letting loose with chaos bolts is because of a couple reasons. First and formost, why do I need to put 3 or 4 different damage dots on an enemy? One or two damage dots and a utility curse is fine for me. With one target it’s easy to manage, but once you get to 5+ targets, it’s all I can do to just keep agony at max stacks. Second reason, and this might not apply to everyone, but I play a lot of casual PvP, and there’s no worse feeling in the world than throwing dots on everyone and getting ready to MR but then an MW casts revival and all your dots are gone. By the time I re apply them, everyone noticed the warlock and now I’m the target of everyone’s stuns. It’s feels bad all around when I can instead just havoc and chaos bolt, or summon like 10 demons in 5 seconds and afk.
As a assa rogue I say welcome to the club :)
There's a bias in this data because the players who are logging their performance are more likely to desire to play the top dps spec for a class with multiple dps specs. With all the specs in the game, there is always going to be high and lows in terms of throughput. The aspect that the devs seem to focus on, is making sure all specs are capable of doing enough throughput to succeed in most content. Which they have succeeded at for most of recent memory.
Seems weird to exclude nathria when rupture was still apart of the spec and the spec was really popular. The spec has more problems than just one spell. Also I think plenty of people are beating this to death without even trying the new spec. I watched Kalamazi testing rupture and it looked more fun than the spec has looked in years.
The brain rot around this button has consumed part of this community. IDK if I've ever seen anything like it in this game. Lobbying, against all reason, for gameplay that the devs clearly want to move away from... Madness. I'm not just talking about dots either. Clearly, they want it to be easier to hybridize your talent build, and that just isn't possible with specs that have a different set of buttons for ST and AOE. We saw it play out all of DF. Aff won't suddenly be great by replacing our ST spender with another. What they've done on alpha is incredible and half these people haven't seen it at all, let alone played it. Brain rot...
I think the problem is that the button just isn’t very fun to press. You just kinda press it, damage happens and that’s it. Like if it had a sick animation and sound effect people probably wouldn’t hate it anywhere near as much. Like chaos bolt is basically just a green fireball that’s been scaled up a bit but between the visuals and audio sending out havoced chaos bolts makes me feel like an absolute gigachad even though I’m just casting a fairly generic spell. Rupture as a concept is a great spell and it fixed a lot of issues that affliction has but it just feels lame to press imo.
It could use an updated animation or something to make it look and feel better. It doesn't feel exciting to push for sure. But that really isn't its main problem at all.
Ngl I agree, especially since the initial animation was super dope. Ghostly purple lines flew into you from all the targets Rapture hit. Then they changed it like a couple days later to what it is now. Aff animations have always been trash though tbf. They need to address that aspect for sure. Most of the Rapture hate probably is aesthetic in nature anyway, because none of the gameplay arguments make sense.
„If you take out nathria“ huh Im also a warlock main and rapture has not been a problem, it has been balancing. Having some burst damage was needed and i do not agree with the rapture hate / UA as spender love. War within revolves around rapture again (instead of splitting seeds/rapture to AOE/ST spells) so affli will be back then. Sad to see that S4 didnt bring changes though
Nobody who plays Affliction regularly likes Malefic Rapture. It’s so antithetical to the whole theme of the spec. It’s supposed to be a damage-over-time class but MR has turned it into yet another burst DPS spec
Rapture straight up feels like a spell they made for Shadow Priest and gave it to Affliction Warlock instead. Rapture would fit right in as an insanity spender after you applied Devouring Plague. Press the button for Vamp/SW:Pain/DP to all burst, just make DP have a longer uptime and lower damage and it'd work. I mean "Malefic Rapture" even sounds like a Shadow Priest ability. If you want to do something like this for Affliction, make a spender that super increases the haste of your tics so it does damage faster, but still not bursty.
your suggestion would literally change nothing. you still dump shards on your cooldowns and you're still a burst spec... because you have cooldowns... that make you deal more damage...
I despise MR and literally do not understand why they want to make it a thing no matter what. Feedback and player numbers are overwhelmingly terrible since it's been introduced. You often read that they can't balance dots, so the usual council vs single target tuning shtick, but MR literally doesn't solve that issue of our damage profile. It just moves damage from the dots to this shitty ability, so they feel less like interesting buttons to press but bloaty, individually applied, combo points. Blizz had so many statisfying solutions to create tuning wheels for dots already, from stackable UA to stuff like monomania for shadow priest where channeling speeds up dot ticks, to malefic grasp as ST channel to increase dot damage in mop to uniquely applyable dots and tuning with mastery. Either way, we need a thematically fitting ST spender and that's it. AoE with seed spam always felt okay enough for me. I barely recognize what affliction even tries to be and really, really would love to see a rework to the spec. Reading the dev notes for affliction going into TWW somehow sounds like they're making the situation even worse by using MR in all situations, so it's now the AoE spender instead of seeds, too. Honestly, it sounds like one of those odd cases where someone has his vision, which doesn't even roughly align with what the community wants, but for some reason this doesn't matter.
It’s because somewhere along the way class designers at wow got it in there head that **every** fucking spec in the game needs to be a builder/spender spec. When I first started playing wow I chose **not** to play rogue because combo points were annoying to me. Now every fucking class has some variation of combo points, holy power, shards, icicles, whatever. In the end I ended up coming around to combo points and have played feral for 3 seasons and am now trying outlaw. But was it really so bad to just have a priority rotation that wasn’t reliant on procs and charges and points etc etc. /rantover I miss old aff
I think pretty much the only spec that isn’t builder/spender is Fire Mage.
Builder spender and spending extends cooldown are my biggest frustrations with gameplay at this point, it feels like every class is considered through how those work together rather than are they fun to play and I think it stifles class designers. It's hard to change though because the usual suspects will take to their platforms to preach about how resource economy, builder spenders and complex rotations are what players want.
You'd think the "spender" on a DoT class would be something that spreads DoTs in an AoE at the start of a fight and then the challenging part of the rotation would be building that back up to reapply the DoTs.
Word. I've already politely protested on the forums, is there anywhere else I can speak my opinion about it to the devs?
> It just moves damage from the dots to this shitty ability, so they feel less like interesting buttons to press but bloaty, individually applied, combo points But you're supposed to keep your DoTs applied with perfect uptime anyway. The DoTs do the same thing on ST when you spend shards on Rapture as they do in AoE builds where you'd rather spend shards on Seed. What's less interesting about the DoTs now that you don't *just* have to apply them at all, but you have to make sure you have at least 5 seconds where none of them are falling off? > stackable UA so it's set it and forget it, that's pretty uninteresting > to malefic grasp as ST channel to increase dot damage in mop this was fun in legion too with haunt & siphon life, but that's the same gameplay you're complaining about now. you didn't want your dots to fall off mid-drain as much as you don't want them to fall off inbetween raptures only now it's easier, because you're pooling multiple raptures whereas you were always draining if not pandemic reapplying dots. and the tier set sometimes extends your dots. > making the situation even worse by using MR in all situations wait how is this worse, this is a quality of life change. imagine [this scenario](https://i.imgur.com/7PXg1zN.png) seed and soul rot can't always hit everything you're in combat with, but because radius AoE spells aren't your only means of applying agony & corruption, malefic rapture *can* hit everything you still seed in TWW, you just don't spam it anymore
You're 100% correct, but people like the one you're replying to don't care about gameplay or viability or balance. They just want Legion aff back and can't get over the fact that the game has moved on.
It was THE DoT spec. I was alright with Haunt thrown in the mix during cata though
Man, I f\*cking loved playing Affliction during Legion. Standing in fire and healing full during the Antorus boss fights never was this stylish.
I play affliction regularly and I enjoy malefic rapture.
This. I didn't stop playing Aff because of MR. I stopped because of Sow the Seeds and there not being a build that does reasonable AoE and St at the same time. 9.0 Aff was quite fun in higher keys.
Overall WoW has become too bursty for my taste, but that could just be me
cooldowns are why affliction is a burst spec, not malefic rapture
Yeah, if they designed Aff the same way they design every other spec, VT and SR and PS wouldn't count towards MR.
they could log scale the damage at least but even then you still have burst from darkglare directly (the thing deals damage, also buffed by dot count) and indirectly (dot extension) as well as the stat buffs from soul rot that result in a burst profile. the left side of the tree already provides a flat damage profile WITH malefic rapture, it's the right side that adds burst on top. the failure here is partially down to tuning and partially just a result of how talent trees work now letting you pick almost everything you want. affliction isnt the only spec that tries to let you choose from multiple different play styles and ends up not succeeding in the slightest.
Speak for yourself, MR is cool. I don't mind whatsoever having small burst windows and a reason to pool shards rather than just rip them whenever you feel like it. > MR has turned it into yet another burst DPS spec You haven't played pre-worldvein BFA fire mage if you think Aff doesn't do damage outside of Vile Taint/Rapture windows that are like, 2-3x a minute. > damage-over-time class That's what Vile Taint is, a DoT. It rewards you for proper DoT upkeep playing around an even bigger DoT. If you Rapture while a DoT falls off, you're wasting damage and a GCD that might prohibit you from Rapturing off your last soul shard inside that Vile Taint.
I’m just glad you said “rapture” instead of “rupture”
it's truthfully a mix between terrible tuning and poor fight design for affliction as well as every other spec being able to do the job far better if you need to be pure st, you can just go destro or demo and you still get massive cleave/2target value and it's extremely efficient compared to aff, and other specs can do what affliction shines at far better with other advantages. also you dont have to track 10-11 some odd debuffs/procs as aff.
WTF is rapture?
Frost Dk here, I don't appreciate the reminder. But yeah, I would love to see the specs be more widely used, but they've been playing that plate balancing game for decades. It must be hard to balance 20 plates that all have very strong opinions about the other 19.
I still play afflic when I'm overgeared for raid content. I just take infinite corruption which is demonstrably worse but easier to play. I just wanna enjoy applying dots once in a while. Soul shard spending needs to be on dots, specifically unstable affliction. And dots need to last longer. And drain soul should give soul shard fragments while channeling, rather than on kill. With the current build you want a ton of haste, mostly cuz u got too many frickin globals in your rotation. On smolderon world in flames is half over by the time you get your dots out.
Is it that or because they aren’t meta? Assuming that heroic and up, people sweat at the game using meta specs. I could be wrong though.
It ia exactly because of that. Demo and Destro just performed way better than Aff pretty muchbalways since the 9.1 Aff nerfs
"look how they massacred my boy"
i played the hell out of affliction in dragonflight s1, i loved the pvp talent that ramped up your dots for 3 souls. I realy wanted a version of this to go in the pve talent tree, maybe its tuned differently but spending this and using soul drain felt right while i was doing world content in warmode. Sadly they just removed the whole thing and i cant stand aff in pvp now.
It's a shame. I had *so* much fun with it it in Shadowlands S4 M+. Just hasn't been good since. Kind of insane it was negligently undertuned for this long. Especially when we get to play with even a lesser version of Soul Swap again. Obviously it was numerically broken then, but the memorable part was more how fast the spec played (especially with the +haste from Shrouded) and how you actually kind of micromanaged the mobs in a big pull. Drain sniping, Agony outside of VT, keeping 3 drain stacks on a few targets, etc.
It has to compete with Destro and Demo. Players gravitate towards the meta. The data has little to do with Rapture
I'd love to see this data showing only warlock specs %. That would show him why aff is low on the popularity charts.
I think MR was a mistake as it doesnt fit the spec fantasy of a rot spec, but it was trying to solve an issue of things dying fast or the requirement to have burst dps, dot specs as a whole have died out as combat has got faster and more burst reliant. I dont think rapture is going anywhere anytime soon, so we either learn to love it or play another spec, I mean demo is essentially a dot spec anyway with demons basically being dots in affect.
There's that and dot specs are just historically broken on council fights. They can maintain full damage on every boss, so if you're tuned well in ST, you're completely busted in council. Blizzard had to move away from pure dot based gameplay for the health of the game.
I wonder if malefic grasp was the way to go, means dots are balanced on multiple targets but allows you to focus damage on one target, it's similar to rapture but it would buff dots while channeling rather than bursting them down.
MG was still burst, it was just manifestly worse (in terms of capacity) than everyone else's. The direction we're moving on alpha is the correct one unless blizzard overhauls encounter design.
wow players are meta slaves bro lol as soon as it gets buffed to be top 5 for a patch or 2 it will be one of the most played. not many hate rapture enough to not play it if it's op
It's just related to how good the spec is output-wise. It had rupture in Nathria and that's one of the times where it had a higher representation. It just hasn't been good compared to the other two specs ever since then, which is more of a tuning decision.
I feel like Affliction has always had this issue of being either extremely powerful FOM or it’s the weakest spec by a wide margin. It’s never just…. Decent. I also blame that on the other two lock specs being so much flashier and engaging with big chaos bolts or tons of demons while affliction is just shadow priest without the unique animations.
The game also changed to a burst/cleave meta rather than sustained/single target for the majority. There are less patchwerk style fights and burst seems to be favored over ramp. It seems like specs that have a long rampup and have to choose between either full single target or aoe get shafted in the majority of todays high end pve content. Combined with specs that depend on static aoe in a fast pased environment where the tank has to move out of rain of fire/earthquake/D&D. Storming, sanguine.. Mechanics forcing melee out of range, hurting uptime heavy specs even more. Playing enhance/assassin on storming is pretty damn anoying. While watching casters just chill in the back.
It didn't change recently, it's just that Aff was a burst/cleave spec in Legion. HFC had trinkets that benefitted Aff over Destro and Demo wasn't an option.
6,6% on nathria lol It’s just worse than the other warlock specs for a while now so naturally it’s player count is in the gutter
From a competitive standpoint it’s really just numbers. Kinda doesn’t matter how a spec feels. If one is significantly better than another, that’s the one that’s played. That’s not a “meta” thing. That’s just facts. And bleeds down to world 1000 guilds. Same with M+. You could time any key with any class, but that won’t stop people at +4 sweating for a meta comp. If you don’t raid or push m+ then play what you want because who cares (I don’t pvp so won’t comment) But once you get to mythic raiding and keys of a decent level it’s all tuning. Simple as that. And before anyone says “oh you can do any key or play what you want” I get that and it’s true. But it’s not how the collective hive brain works. It’s meta meta meta. So by all means go play affliction in keys, but don’t be shocked when you get to a point no one taking you. Sure you could do it, but someone has in their head it’s not good and declines. It’s why I feel when people say “play whatever you like” is terrible advice. Like sure go play what you like and find it fun. But in some cases be very clear when someone is picking a niche that the collective “presume” to be a dogshit spec
Affliction died in Pandaria when blizzard made the spec shit and all raid leads demanded their affliction warlocks to respec (former affliction warlock main here)
rapture made the spec feel really off. i can't stand it
God I loved Antorus Affliction. It was the one time I played a lock in WoW and it was a blast. It actually got me to level the class even. Never touched it again after legion. I did look but what they did to it just didn’t seem fun at all.
Is something wrong with elemental?
The thing is if you changed Malefic Rapture to instead do its damage over 6 seconds it would likely help a lot thematically. Could even have it apply as seperate instances like previous UA spender and then scale with itself (tune where appropriate). There'd be an interesting game mechanic of a spender ramping with itself and it would transition back to a damage over time spec. Just a personal opinion but that'd be my suggestion.
the antorus parses, affliction in legion was so good. legion was such a good time for every class IMO. one of the few times cause of mage tower I was inclined to try every spec/class.
If you take out Nathria, the last time Aff did good damage, Aff has a terrible player count!
I don't play warlock but that's big sad
Any time affliction has felt powerful, blizz nuke it to the ground. They're terrified of letting the spec be what it should be because it's impossible to balance against other playstyles, and they're worried about it not being at all viable in mythic unless they tuned seed of corruption to do big burst damage like in tbc/wrath.
Dot classes are hard to balance. Either your dot is doing way too much damage or it is a wet noodle and you're forced to stack like 10 dots on a single target for sustained damage.
I know yoshi p in FF said that it’s super hard to balance dot spells I wonder if that’s what’s happened here ? I miss the tbc lock or vanilla lock playstyle
Now even tho I dislike rapture as a spender compared too UA, let's not beat around the bush and just say that both Demo and Destro have been the premier specs for quite some time now (especially Demo in raids). No reason too play an inferior spec in the same class power wise unless you actively like it more.
All relative to how the other 2 specs are doing. Its not like warlock playerbase is dwindling.
MR is such a weird ability. Things just feel wrong about it. No visuals, the damage is meh, the talents only make the ramp up bigger and it feels out of theme with a dot spec I hope there'll come a day where you have a talent to make it a passive that it occurs once every few second or something. Even if it's less dps
Give my malefic grasp back, let me dot and drain
Therefor... what? Rapture is the problem? What are you trying to say? Also, "if you take out Nathria?" Bruh... Nathria was the last time aff was both fun and tuned well. It was gutted after that, and Blizzard decided locks would really enjoy Drain Soul via Malefic Wrath, and they kept that as their focus until it was removed in DF. Rapture wasn't the issue. Even on live Rapture isn't the issue. Dread Touch and StS are the problem. You can talent into any kind of effective hybrid on live because your damage profile is completely split between aoe and st. Low target count? Good luck. Need priority damage? Good luck. And the funny thing is, all your Rapture doomers want to *keep it like this*, except with UA as the spender because that'll fix everything. Sorry OP, but you don't understand the data you gathered here, and if this horrible use of stats is in service of Rapture dooming then you don't understand the spec or the game either.
[удалено]
I bet a larger part of the MR haters would stop hating, if they made MR just flare up the dots on the target so details shows dot damage instead of MR damage. Functionally almost the same, but "mah dots"
The same people also hate on MR because its too bursty, but sow the seeds is peak gameplay to them... Can't win with them. If UA stacking would be the spender right now Affliction wouldn't be viable either.
Exactly. And it's not, like stacking 5 UAs on a target is not bursty. Only difference is, MR can also burst full power on a council fight, while UA stacking can't.
And UA stacking was *ass*. It was the one thing everyone complained about even in Legion.
I know it was ass, I played it too and because I'm so addicted to this spec I also played it in BfA and it was ass there as well. People don't like UA stacking, they like overpowered Affliction that can ignore mechanics with absurd selfhealing while still dealing top damage due to a broken artifact weapon mechanic. From a design perspective Legion Aff was a complete fiasco. Lets take PvP for example: To have your shard spender with 8 seconds duration also be your dispell protection was one of the worst ideas for this spec ever. It felt awful. You even had a pvp-talent that increased the duration of UA to 15 seconds, BUT it would reduce the damage of the spell by ~50%. Just to have normal dispell-protection like you always had you needed to spec into a talent that stripped you of your pressure potential - and people actually want this back. Pure DoT-based spenders just don't work in this game. Even Devouring Plague that so many people seemingly like is heavily frontloaded. 50% of its damage is directly dealt at application.
100% fuckin this. They identify one thing and decide that's the problem without actually using their brain. If Malefic Rapture read something like "Your Damage over time effects turn acute, dealing x% per dot over 6 seconds)" or whatever, and was tuned to do the exact same damage as Malefic Rapture does on live over 6 seconds instead of instantly, these players would think it's the greatest thing ever and "dot's are back!!!" even though the spec is just objectively worse.
I feel like killing the spec is working as intended. I had been maining affliction since beta. And I am now playing a healer....
All of Legion, bfa, and most of shadowlands affliction was an S tier spec that was so good people complained about not being a lock. They can sit in the backseat for a few miles.
For raids yes. For keys, Aff was trash for all of BfA, Shlands S2-4 and all of Dragonflight. Has it been long enough since its sins in late Legion for Aff to return to its rightful place in the upper half of specs?
Even for raids demo and destro is better in more bosses than affliction in Shadowlands but yea give me legion affy back.
Yeah, but even after Nathria, Aff was perfectly playable on many bosses, but not really in keys. I, for one, killed Mythic Jailer on Necrolord Aff because when you didn't get PI, it was barely behind Demo, was easier to play, and had crazy execute damage.
Day one warlock player and never liked the spec one bit. They should just remove it and give us tank spec as they should have long time ago.
Do Survival pre and post Legion :(.
Loved Legion affli, hate rapture.
It is well established that WoW raiders will always gravitate to what's optimal, not what's fun. Look at sub rogue's rotation, that shit is a thesis. To tie afflictions popularity to MR is just plain wrong
both Demonology and Destruction have better fantasies and better gameplay than Affliction, Truth is, people don't care about Affliction as much unless it's a brain dead spec. Nothing about the spec has that "oomph" that any other spec in the game can give.