What needs to be done with Affliction to make it Viable (PvE)

[Miim]

Hey

Thinking about this and posting earlier got me excited about affliction.
I want to hear your thoughts on what can be done to make affliction viable as a DPS spec in Wrath of the Lich King.

Here are some of the things I'm thinking of:

1) Give us a valid affliction filler spell.

I don't want to use a destro spell as filler as affliction. Is just wrong that a untalented destro spell (SB) > talented Life Drain. This more or less forces us to use destro as a sub-tree and that means you HAVE to get ruin, and makes the 51 talent in affliction untakeable. Thats just wrong imo.

My suggestion would be to either give us a new affliction channeling spell that could work side by side with life and mana drain. But functions as a pure damage drain. This should be a affliction talent. Or give us a way to talent drain soul to make it a damage spell.

Making Life drain ticks able to crit could aslo be a choice, but that could maybe have some PvP issues. A pure damage channeling spell would not be unbalanced for PvP.

2) Crit and afflction.
Crit should be worth something for affliction. At least now that they are generalising caster gear. Making DOTS crit would be both fun and give them a huge damage boost. Without some talent the crit would be a 50% damage increase so I dont see it as beeing OP, it ofc has to be scaled to match other options.


But really I think the 1) would be a main fix for affliction.
I want to see locks going full affliction and using demo as a filler tree. And with 0 points in destro.

Might just be a dream though.

[Theleb]

Hey Miim, long time no see

Interesting thoughts - I guess the problem with making Drain Life a viable source of DPS is thats its healing component would need to stay as is, or risk it becoming overpowered (I can hear the PvP QQ's already) but a new, seperate spell (like mind flay without the slow) could be implemented.

Allowing a DoT tick to crit is potentially horrific in my opinion - they allowed it for Death Knights who's spells recieve a far lower coefficient but for a typical affliction Warlock sitting on (at a guess) 1500 damage at level 80, with the huge array of available DoTs then it could easily overtake ruin. It itself thats no bad thing if affliction Warlocks are really disgruntled with having to use a Destro Filler but I get the impression that as the community has been clamouring for that particular change only to see it finally go to a seperate class that its not going to be implemented anytime soon - if at all.

Perhaps a Deep Affliction talent in the same way that the DK talent is deep unholy would be workable.

[Miim]

Hey
So nice to see some familiar faces on this imba forum.

The only reason I am bit worried about crit being useless for Affliction is cause of the generalization of gear that Blizz seems to be going for. That means most caster gear might have some crit on it (assumption).

But maybe just making our channeling spells able to crit could be a solution.
I just hope Destro and Ruin wont be so crucial in Wrath of the Lich King as it was in The Burning Crusade.

I would hate to see such a superior damage spec as 0/21/40 was in The Burning Crusade specually if its destruction.

Guess I just want Warlocks to be something else than a shadowmage.

[Theleb]

At the moment, the theorycrafting seems to lean towards 0/13/58 or if Molten Core procs from Curse of Agony then something like 7/1*/4* but as it is the other problem I can see with heavy destruction specs is that owing to the rating requirements at 80 then people might not be able to stack enough hit/crit to make them worthwhile (even with 5% coming from talents) initially so we end up with the situation we had in The Burning Crusade (at least to start with) - Affliction had the lightest gear requirements and so ended up as the de rigeur DPS spec.

WoTLK Speculative Talent Builds - Part Deux - The Warlocks Den Forums

[Rleab]

Well drain life's heal portion can be based on the base damage on the spell while the damaging component can crit. Same with siphon life. Easy fix. Crits would be a non-talented way of adding a very healthy chunk of DPS.

A nuke could be introduced that gains in power, similar to incinerate, with the more (personal) affliction based effects on the target. The low crit chance of affliction locks would keep this from gaining too much scalability as well as being considered an affliction spell so destro talents don't affect it.

I'll think of more when I'm home this afternoon.

[DrkSnpr14]

In my thread here - Askawarlock's Beta Adventures - Updated periodically - The Warlocks Den Forums toward the bottom you'll find my report on Haunt, and it's lovelyness with affliction talents. Forget the fact that it heals you, the important bit is that it increases ALL your dots by 20% while active.

[mindtrapper]

Fix: Your Shadow Bolt has a 3/6/9/12/15 chance to refresh your Damage Over Time spells on the target by half their initial duration for no mana cost.

Percentage and duration would be a topic for discussion but i think that would do it without too much hassle. PvE we use SB all the time so it would be a great benefit and PvP we still would have to cast SB so it wouldn't be OP.

PS. Just remembered Everlasting Affliction talent. Something like that but not only for Corruption

[wude]

I remember seeing theorycrafting pointing to UA as better for DPS than Ruin when crit and +damage are not high enough to support a 0/21/40 build (202 hit, 20+%crit, +1100dmg). I have come to accept prior to t5 content / gear it is difficult to attain the +20%crit while keeping yourself hit capped and +1100dmg.

I do agree, however, that an affliction tree nuke would be nice so you can use suppression to lower the hit cap. Fire / frost mages only need 165 hit to cap out with talents. Arcane tree only requires 74 hit to cap out.

Wrath of the Lich King talents look like a solution to some of the problems however (except I dont remember seeing anything that adds to your +hit) Haunt in particular looks outstanding.

I love the solo play options of Affliction, but it is not ideal for raiding (its great for now until I tweak my gear properly). With a few upgrades remaining until I get really comfortable with my gear; I'm landing somewhere mid pack for DPS in raids with people with much better gear.

[Necroscope]

What bugs me is that other classes are always telling me to go Affliction. I'm Demon specced...and my damage is around 1100-1200 right now...but when i respecc to full Affliction my damage drops about 200 pts. Yet it never fails...I'm in a raid...and somebody always loves to point out that I shouldnt be Demon anymore and I'd do better dps if I respecced. I would if they made some changes to help the numbers make more sense.

[Quinthyll]

A simple change that would allow affliction locks to actually rely on an affliction spell in place of shadow bolting, AND push it back into the realms of debuffing would be to tweak drain soul.

While drain soul is activly being channeled, the targets attack and cast speed is reduced by 5%.

This would have very limited affect on pvp, as just like drain life/mana it yells "Hey, lock out my shadow spells!" and really, 5% wouldn't make a huge difference in fast paced pvp. Over the coarse of a long boss encounter though, 1 or 2 locks slowing down a boss's attacks would lighten the load on healers.

In addtion to this little change, perhaps the damage coefficent would be looked at. Not enough to make drain soul actually do more damage then bolt spamming, but just to make it not JUST a debuff and laughable damage.

Anyway, just a thought.