Affliction Warlock Review - Battle for Azeroth Community Opinions

Moving our filler from a "Drain" ability to Стрела Тьмы. This not necessarily something that everyone will like, but its a flavor thing a lot of warlocks have called for, which is overall a good thing.

Loss of Похищение души baseline means the ability to shard snipe low health adds is now limited to talents only.

Addition of a baseline cool down: Призыв созерцателя тьмы. When summoned he extends the duration of all dots by 8 seconds and deals bonus damage based on how many dots are out. The duration extending includes both Нестабильное колдовство and the level 60 talents.

Good Things:

The addition of Призыв созерцателя тьмы gives affliction a really nice burst window for about 16-20 seconds. This is something that's been significantly lacking in all versions of the spec since MOP. It may be too strong, but we’re still not 100% on that.

The removal of Похищение жизни / Похищение души as our filler will make balancing raid mechanics much nicer in the long run. While it was fun being extraordinarily overpowered and being able to stand in things without the risk of dying, this is a much needed change for the greater balance of the game and the spec overall.

Contagion has been rolled into Нестабильное колдовство for 10% damage increase, making it just generally nicer and freeing up more decisions.

Неистовство Тьмы added back to the spec, and it's a baseline ability. All stuns have been normalized so the 3 second Неистовство Тьмы stun is still comparable to all other stuns in the game. The only thing that’s annoying is the cast time, but this is fine for now, but this is a thing that you can plan around.

Bad things:

None of our artifact traits made it to the baseline or talent system after the BFA changeover. There’s not much that can be done, but we were definitely one of the more impacted specs when it comes to the loss of the artifact going into BFA. The loss of Soul Flame specifically is definitely noticed in smaller HP packs, as well the loss of being able to transfer weaker adds into more raw boss damage with Wrath of Consumption and the Reap / Souls mechanic.

Похищение души not being baseline is extremely noticeable in Mythic +, and will be touched on later.

Поглощение души is only 7.5% of your max health instead of the 13% that we have been used to with Legion. This is definitely noticeable with how squishy the spec is compared to legion.

Good

Tier 45 row offers some nice amplification of your toolkit depending on your needs now, since Demonskin doubles the effectiveness of Поглощение души.

Пагуба is a great concept, solid utility and decent enough damage.

Медленная смерть provides a solid option to speeding up the spec.

Черная душа: страдание: A solid haste cooldown for us. The GCD change will make swapping to this from Soul Harvest feel a bit strange, but that is a global issue.

Блуждающий дух: I was originally against this implementation, but it honestly feels great. Personally I do wish the old heal effect from TBC / WOTLK era was still incorporated, but we can’t have everything.

OK but needs a number tuning:

Похищение души: I am here and there about whether or not DS should be baseline or not, because it would have a massive impact with talents like Стрела смерти, and we’re not sure if that's good or bad yet. However, it is currently a 5% single target Loss from untalented as seen here. While this talent is primarily meant for adds, no talent should be a loss from not taking a talent, in any situation, period. It needs to be buffed to 18.75% spell damage per second (~94$% over the duration) to at least be a net 0 from Стрела Тьмы. From here it’s a matter of how many bonus shards per minute should put it above Стрела смерти, this number puts it at about 4 bonus shards from adds per minute to be equal.

Стрела смерти: It’s an excellent idea, but it is currently way overtuned compared to Сумерки, let alone Похищение души. Unfortunately this is due to the fact that Сумерки scales off of neither Haste or Mastery, and Похищение души is dealing less damage than Стрела Тьмы as stated above.

Посадка семян: This currently flat out doubles the damage of Семя порчи, which is an absurd power spike. Семя порчи probably needs to deal more damage baseline and ideally have seed embed seeds with current damage, and then this ups the damage to a third seed.

Медленная смерть: Currently reduces your shard generation rate by 15% to compensate for the 15% faster tick rate of Агония. It’s something that should be noted to avoid confusion: Медленная смерть does not actually increase your shard generation. This is a very important thing to leave off of the tooltip and will be incredibly misleading to newer players if it is intended.

The actually bad things:

Объятия Тьмы: There are two issues with it right now. Firstly, the duration on all previous versions of this spell, from wow version 1.0 through its removal in MOP had a duration of 12 seconds. There is a very important reason for this, and the current 10 second duration means you’re literally forced to cast it every 5 GCDs or it falls off. Those extra 2 seconds really mean a lot for a dot class, especially in multi dot situations. Secondly, this is a second “Maintenance Debuff” placed in this row, and a much weaker one at that. This talent should really just be made baseline and with a 12 second duration. This both helps tune the affliction single target better to keep this spell in mind, removes this scenario of 2 “Maintenance Debuff” spells on the same row.

Абсолютная порча: Say hello to the balancing nightmare of this spec. Currently, it’s always better than Болезненные мучения because of the GCDs you save not refreshing Порча. It caused issues for all of Legion, and it will continue to until it's removed and replaced.

Гримуар жертвоприношения: While it’s super nice that we can actually use Управление демоном again, the talent itself is just weak, especially when compared to Блуждающий дух.

Сумерки: Numerically bad, and highly unimpactful gameplay. The current talent does not scale off of haste, which causes the scaling problems we are seeing with prepatch, and these will resurface by the end of the first tier of raiding. If it were to be switch to hasted RPPM, and buffed to 4 rppm with 100% increased damage, it should sit within 2-3% behind Стрела смерти, and gives better mobility than either option.

Объятия ТьмыSoul Rip:

Drains the target, causing x% of all dot damage to be replicated on this target 20 second cd.

2 casts. First cast inhales all dots around you (but not removing), the second cast is a channel that replicates all dots on the target while you are channeling for full damage.

These are two separate implementations of the idea. This would just be a channeled havoc, that when active, will replicate all dot damage (not dot effects / procs like shards) onto the target you are channeling on. This number would have to be tuned down a lot, but lets you bring some extra focus damage to an encounter where you have a lot of multidotting going on. This also allows the affliction warlock to have some semblance of add burst through a talent.Soul Sap

Your Стрела Тьмы progresses the duration of your Порча by 4 seconds (Похищение души: 2 seconds).

Порча has a higher DPET than Стрела Тьмы so spending more time using Порча is a good thing.Grimoire of Supremacy:

While Призыв созерцателя тьмы is active, your Стрела Тьмы increases the duration of all dots by 1 second. Half duration for Похищение души.

While your Призыв созерцателя тьмы is active, your Стрела Тьмыs cause the Призыв созерцателя тьмы to amplify the damage of all dots on its target by 5% per Стрела Тьмы cast, lasting for 10 seconds.

Numbers for these ideas can be tuned to make sure things aren't overturned, but its the effects that we are after, the concepts are based on Destruction’s Grimoire of Supremacy.

Pet Survivability: Tank pets (including Demo's Felguard) are insanely squishy right now, mostly now due to Поглощение души's reduced effectiveness. A possible fix is to have Поглощение души double in effectiveness on pets to allow it to not die whenever more than 1 mob is pulled at later levels.

The Агония shard formula has changed from Legion and we would love for any devs reading this to please share how it has changed.

There is one other issue that's been brought up in a few discussions that needs to be touched on and that's our PVP utility spells. Between Страх and Drain a warlock can very rapidly OOM themselves in a situation literally 0 caster is in. 15% mana for Страх vs 4% mana for a mage to sheep is pretty ridiculous when the base mana regen is the same for the two classes. It may be almost necessary that manatap at least come back as a pvp talent to allow the warlock to maintain CC and Похищение жизни, but a smarter maneuver is to reduce the outlandish cost on these CC spells.

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