Guess about Affliction

[bangorme 0]

With todays patch it looks like Affliction got a pretty big bump. I know it's way too early, but any guesses about whether or not it is competitive with Destruction now?

[Lockybalboa 618]

lololololololololololololol.

No.

The problem with Aff is its ridicualusly horrid single target damage, the buffs today did very little to change that. Over the buffs are at most an 8% net gain on ST (not 100% sure on that  final number, but I'm like 85-90% sure)

[TsuruXelus 0]

On 10/25/2016 at 2:45 PM, Lockybalboa said:

lololololololololololololol.

No.

The problem with Aff is its ridicualusly horrid single target damage, the buffs today did very little to change that. Over the buffs are at most an 8% net gain on ST (not 100% sure on that  final number, but I'm like 85-90% sure)

Since my raid last week, ive noticed a significant increase in damage with this week raid. And in mythics too, i seem to be doing higher damage earlier.

[itisasitis 1]

I have better damage as well, but still ridiculously outclassed by destro and demo. I also CONSTANTLY OOM, which I have never ever done as destro.

[Shiftybtch 0]

On 10/26/2016 at 6:05 PM, itisasitis said:

I have better damage as well, but still ridiculously outclassed by destro and demo. I also CONSTANTLY OOM, which I have never ever done as destro.

your not suppose to go oom in destro its pretty hard to do 

[Devkarin 5]

I´m playin my Affli since vanilla...and i love it :D would never play Destru just because of the higher numbers poppin around.

The last small buff increased my raid DpS about 7-9% depends on the Encounter.

At Ursoc, Nythendra or Spider its definitly lame...but on every other Encounter with more than one target (dragons, eye, cenarius, xavius). 

[Lockybalboa 618]

What you're talking about is playstyle though, not competitiveness/viability. Aff is fun and this iteration of Aff is one of my favorites - but by every quantifiable raiding/content progression metric it is non-competitive with the other two specs.

[Devkarin 5]

Sure, if you take the pure statstic an math, affli is non-competitive with the other specs. 

In my opinion there is more than just the simcraft results. A well played affli is truely competitive with an "i-have-to-do-so-because-of-the-DPS"-Destru oder Demo-lock. The last small buff brings back a bit fun to the affli playstyle and i guess Blizz is on the right way to getting the affli-lock competitive again.

[Genu 0]

On 4.11.2016 at 9:27 AM, Devkarin said:

A well played affli is truely competitive with an "i-have-to-do-so-because-of-the-DPS"-Destru oder Demo-lock.

Affliction mainly competes with Destruction, as Demonology is uncontested in the niche it fills.

But your statement showcases the problem. An excellent Affliction locks can put up similar numbers to an excellent Destruction lock in quite some of the current encounters. But if you just decrease the skill level of the player by a margin, Affliction starts falling behind very fast - a partial reason for that is the punishing Nature of the spec through the way Agony and it's Talent work, as is the lacking ability to generate  secondary resource controlled which makes resource planning more crucial than in other specs. But doing everything right just puts you on par with the rest - thus the extra amount of conentration needed to play it right is not rewarded properly.

And now lets face the truth: most players - i'm not excluding myself here - are not excellent. The average skilled player actually is better off playing destruction over affliction, simply because of the more forgiving nature of the spec. And this is the real problem at tuning Affliction: If you would tune the way that the average player would perform the same with Affliction as they do with Destruction you would reproduce the problem we had with Demonology during Warlords of Draenor - an excellent player would outperform every other Spec, while the rest of the players would be seen as "bad", although they might even be above mediocre in skill.

In Warlords, that caused masses of player to reroll to Warlock, just because they saw the gifted few outperforming everyone, then getting frustrated and reroll back to their respective classes or unsubbing the game. That should not be the goal of balancing. At some point you have to decide, wether to balance around the average player or the excellent player and it mostly depends on how abusable the mechanics are. DoTs are a very abusable Mechanic on their own and differ from every other damage dealing Mechanic drastically (as they open the possibility of maintaining them on more targets, allowing the player to use skills with high damage per Execution time more often than possible at single target, where the ability to switch to targets without delaying the use of abilities is crucial), so balancing around the excellent player is a necessity for other classes to remain viable through the progress.

So while the last patch that got harsh critique because the changes to Affliction were only a minor boost to single target, it displays that they know things can get out of hand quickly. (While some patches don't display class knowledge and changes are odd, they often do display knowledge about the underlying mechanics, which often gets overlooked or is too subtle to notice for people who don't dive deep into theorycrafting).

 

The best way to improve balancing for Affliction would be to close the gap between high skilled individuals and the average player. With Affliction it is not even that hard: Biggest problem up until today is the lack of support for Multi-target DoTting in the UI and the constant deconstruction of Addons like EnemyGrid or Quartz. They should just integrate these things into the basic UI instead of closing the API because people who use these Addons gain a competetive advantage. These Addons do pop up again and again for a reason - they are quality of life improvements for everyone who plays classes that need to Track DoTs and Debuffs on multiple targets. In my opinion, that is an issue worth addressing.

[Kencredible 0]

The PSA on aff is very wrong. I do agree with you somewhat genu, but as you get into mythic aff surpasses destro because of increased movement on most fights. You do need to run a dot tracker including pandemic notification, should use shift/alt modifier macros (for example, my corruption is on my 4key, if I hit 4 it applies/refreshes my target, hold shift it applies/refreshes my effigy, and if I hold alt, it refreshes on my focus), amongst other adding to achieve best performance.

 

Aff is viable and in fact top 3 in half the fights in EN (not a lot of parses, but if you play well it is great).  Go look at log rankings over the last two weeks. As long as you can keep your dots up on both target and effigy, refresh in the pandemic window, and maximize your traits you will be competitive on All fights and top 3 out of all classes and specs for half the fights. Following the above you should be doing more ST damage than destro, especially on movement fights like Nyth mythic. Use a shift (effigy) alt (focus) on your dot casts so you don't need to actually switch targets. Make weak auras to track those dots and pandemic.

 

lets take spider for an example to maximize traits.

pop your artifact before the little spiders, seed--> UA on one ad, go back to dps on boss. You will get bigger seed damage, bigger damage on the death explosion, bigger corruption damage, more damage on the boss and effigy and you will regain stacks for your artifact ability without over capping (which is s huge dps loss). Make sure you refresh dots before platform change, agony won't fall off boss, tag one spider with agony or seed during the run and again regain your stacks when they die. You will have to place a new effigy on second platform, but you will have reap running so your damage will be increased during that time. If your raid is good enough boss will be dead before third platform. Dump extra UAs when reap is active to have 12% chance of reapplication.  You should be running supremacy  so all shards will go to UA. You can have close to 75-80% uptime on contagion with some luck. Get a UA off before you have to move, use movement to tap and refresh dots.

 

In ST demo is significantly better than aff, but again aff is currently best for half the boss fights out of the EN. You just need to understand the nuances of the spec and artifact. 

Edited November 8, 2016 by Kencredible

[Lockybalboa 618]

14 hours ago, Kencredible said:

The PSA on aff is very wrong.

There is a huge difference between wrong and slightly out of date, the PSA when posted was 100% correct and widely agreed upon by many top warlocks - however, as time goes on and people are able to try new things with new gear information changes. 

I was going to update the post last week but blizzcon prep, blizzcon itself, and post-blizzcon stuff got me to busy to do it till tonight.