As many of you have probably already read, Ghostcrawler has stated (many times) that they are planning on making changes which will impact the rotation in a manner such that 3rd party addons (DoT timers) will not be quite as necessary to do competitive DPS. He listed options such as removing DoTs from the rotation or making the durations of the DoT line up more- IE how UA & Immolate currently function, but more comprehensive.

I'm curious, however, if any of you smart folks can think of a way to somehow meet the goals of the development team to reduce 3rd party mod dependence but without going to such extremes as dumbing the spec down. There is the obvious "make the native debuff tracking better" solution, but I don't quite think that's going to fly. I cringe at the thought of Affliction being dumbed down and am willing to go to great brainstorming lengths and much forum posting to try to pitch any successful ideas to Ghost.

So, any ideas?

I think there are several great methods that can be used to reduce the complexity of Affliction without resulting in Shadowbolt spam again, but the term 'dumb down' is in the eye of the beholder. Making Everlasting Affliction affect even one other spell would be huge, and would take a massive timer off our rotation. Perhaps if Haunt had a significantly longer duration, or was part of EA, that would reduce our need to cast a very low DPS, but important debuffing spell.

If every DoT had the same duration, it would also benefit a rotation. Say for example that every DoT was about 15 seconds long (a large decrease in duration), but did the same amount of damage as they currently do. This would virtually eliminate the need/ability to cast Shadowbolt as a filler spell, but would also increase the DPS of all our Dots, and I'm sure the numbers could be tweaked to make the damage out remain constant. That would actually lead to a 'rotation' of DoTs, which is far easier to execute than the current implementation. I'm sure there are other great ideas as well.

Increase the base duration of Curse of Agony by 2 seconds (1 middle tick). This would not impact the DPS of the spell, and would greatly simplify the spell priority queue. (with CoA glyph)
Then your durations would all line up:
UA: 15
Immo: 15
SL: 30
CoA: 30
Possibly extend the Haunt debuff duration too? 15 seconds would be ideal ^^. However just adding 1 tick to CoA would be quite helpful. As it is though affliction isn't terrible..

My preliminary thoughts are to eliminate "hot spots" in the rotation where you have several debuffs expiring around the same time (it sounds counterproductive to do this but bear with me) which leads to a somewhat hectic few seconds where things can get fairly messy because so much is going on.

2 tweaks I would propose:

1) Increase the duration of Shadow Embrace to 15-20 seconds. There can be, at times (especially when there is movement involved) situations where this will fall off due to trying to keep a higher priority DoT up. By expanding the window of opportunity to get a Haunt/SB in there exists a much lower chance of SE helping to create an undesirable "hot spot"

2) Attach in one manner or another Siphon Life to Corruption. IE whenever Corruption is cast/refreshed Siphon would be cast/refreshed as well. Damage might be ever so slightly scaled down to compensate for gaining a GCD every 30 seconds. This would completely remove one DoT from the rotation, albeit one which is cast more rarely than the others, but without impacting the core of the rotation. (1 less spell every 30 seconds makes the spec minimally less complex, but at the same time is one less DoT to have to worry about)

This would have a huge effect on PVP as well, which wouldn't fly.

Removing the travel time from haunt would a step in the right direction.

I don't think making all of the DOT's the same duration would work.

The reason:

Because you don't have the luxury to stand in the same spot the entire fight. There's almost always some reason that you have to move. And as soon as you move and miss a cast, this new rotation is skewed. And you know what you are left with? The exact same situation we are in now.....unless of course you are going to stop casting everything just so you can line up all your DOT's again.

I love this spec, I love the complication and the challenge. Hell, you know what I think? I think they should make it even harder, and buff up the damage. Give us the potential to break 6 or 7K DPS and the potential to have a nervous breakdown, all in the same pretty package!

Yup hit almost 6500 last night, and my numbers just keep getting better. Pushing for 7k!

I think the best thing that would improve Affliction would be to add a new filler spell that was either 1.5 casting time, or even better, a channeled spell like Drain Life. To me, it's always been the odd casting time of SB that's made maintaining dot rotations annoying.

Along the same lines as Pidge, it would be great to have a filler that could benefit from Grim Reach. While it makes sense with the current talent tree for that filler to be drain life, if it was buffed to do competitive damage with SB, drain life would probably be too good in pvp.

A talent could easily be implemented to function similarly to Blood Gorged. IE While above 90% health Drain Life does +50/100/150% damage. Numbers obviously tweaked as necessary.

Or make a core change to Drain Life that converts overhealing to damage...

Haunt needs to be instant cast and/or have no travel time.
More dots need similar lengths, even with glyphs or however.
Remove Siphon Life and add its functionality into the aff tree other ways. Add healing to Corruption and buff CoA dmg, something like that.

Those are my top 3.

Changing our nuke would do nothing to benefit affliction, nor would it simplify it in any way. And in fact, changing to a channeled spell would be even worse. Not much point in discussing it anyways, as blizzard has stated they are not going to replace shadowbolt with anything for affliction. Shadowbolt being our nuke is fine and shouldn't be changed. There's simply no benefit to doing so.

That said, I do think that getting something like immolate removed from the rotation, and maybe increasing the duration on haunt (but not the cooldown!) would be a big help. I actually wouldn't mind an increase to the SE duration either.

Another thing that could help would be making Haunt and/or UA instant cast. Or removing Haunt's cast time. There's a lot of little things that could be done. The spec needs some simplification. As it stands, once content becomes more difficult than hogger, the spec will be a problem if it remains as is.

The main thing with Haunt is that it cannot last as long as Corruption, or the refreshing part of it would be useless and something else to manage.

Now, I completely with agree with removing Haunt's cast time. It needs to be done. The point of being Affliction is mobility, except 20% of our DoT damage depends on a cast time spell. The change to balancing Affliction around a spell like Haunt was a nerf to locks, and I don't think people realize that yet.

Haunt is the main culprit behind the clunkiness of affliction. Increasing the haunt & SE debuff duration to 15s and making haunt instant cast are more than enough to simplify the spec.

I'd have to say that the most annoying part is Haunt travel time. With a lot of DoTs on different timers I don't need to guesstimate when to cast another spell when I know when to cast everything else.

As minor wishes there would be SE duration and possibly Haunt duration, they're deceptively low on fights where you move quite a bit.

And lowest prio would be DoT lengths and maybe, just maybe the mixing of dmg+utility curses (every curse does dmg or CoA/CoD become magic).

Putting DL with Corruption on Everlasting Affliction would be very welcome and probably fits best in terms of balance, but by name you'd expect Unstable Affliction to be the additional one, if anything. Either would work very well indeed though...but that'd have to go hand in hand with Haunt not having a travel time. Admittedly, I'd rather see Haunt lose its casting time and travel time above all else. That alone would go a long way towards clearing up mobility issues.

It is important to note that if DoT durations were increased, we'd have more time to shadowbolt, which would result in a DPS increase. This also has negative PVP implications, as they'd most likely have to nerf either the dots or the shadowbolts damagewise, a detriment to more than one PVP situation to be sure.

Yeah, it's not really something I would expect they could implement. But this is part of the mechanics they've gotten themselves into by making combat so fast. There really aren't many options for them to simplify this in the sense that they don't want people to use dot timers. You either make them last longer so you have plenty of time to get to the buttons, or you get rid of buttons to begin with (By combining dots).

One other option that came to mind is spell queues, I suppose. Being able to set spell priorities and allow players to queue each spell upwards of 5-10 times and let them autocast until the queue runs down. That would make it so people wouldn't need to watch a timer. They would need to remove cast times for dots entirely for this to work, though.

The main picture of any of these changes has to be that they want people to not use a dot timer.

Talking about removing haunts travel time, or making it instant, wont fix this fact.

It also would directly go against the whole point of the shakeup Destruction went through in this expansion - removing mind-numbing SB spam as a method of doing the most damage. And since Affliction's primary draw has always been mobility & dotting, rather than stand and nuke, expanding dot times by more than just a few seconds would actually make things worse off. To be honest, I'd personally rather see Affliction have enough dots that their entire rotation consists of nothing but dot casting, with a nice mix of 1.5-2 sec cast times & instants, with little to no Shadow Bolt / Drain Life / Drain Soul casting...but I don't see that happening. So, we have to work with what we have, which is finding some way to balance short duration dots with cast time / channeled fillers.

Edit:
Absolutely not. Too easy to bot, and Blizz isn't going to open that door. (edited in) Hell, even the playstyle that suggests is semi-botting all on its own.

why not remove haunt from the rotation? make haunt a passive talent which works through unstable affliction. something like this: "while your unstable affliction is active on the target, your damage over time effects do 20% more damage. when UA ends, you will be healed für x% of its damage done." x could be about 50%, maybe less.
everlasting affliction would need to work with shadow bolt instead of haunt.
why remove haunt? because the affliction lock was fine to play in bc. the scaling was off, true, but the playstyle, the rotation, was fine.

I'm happy with the current condition of affliction. I don't feel the need to link spells like UA and immolate even on encounters that require me to be aware of my surroundings (Sarth+3). I'd be very happy if they found a way to fix this "problem" by just improving the UI.

In my humble opinion, something that would simplify affliction playstyle a lot would be to remove dots clipping. I believe the technology is already in, as it's what Haunt does when it refreshes corruption. If you could refresh your dots in advance without the fear of losing a tick, I think the spec would be much more easy to play.
Refreshing the dot at the last moment would still be rewarding (you gain a bit more time to cast your filler), but the difference would not be as visible as now.

That, and providing an option to show only your debuffs on the target (or any improvement of the basic UI, really).