The reason people view affliction as "hard" to play is that it's just different, especially in comparison to Vanilla and Burning Crusade days. Vanilla consisted of SM/Ruin as the "raiding" spec, while Burning Crusade was essentially a shadowbolt spam. Honestly, I'm very disappointed that the affliction simplication is actually happening. I was really enjoying the unique playstyle.

Currently, Blizzard does need to have some way in their default UI for you to track your OWN debuffs. Almost every class can agree to this - the default UI is simply ineffective for tracking anything related to debuffs or DoT's.

I really think the way to get someone who was "bad" at an affliction warlock playstyle and wanted to get "good" is to put physical cooldowns on the DoT's. What if when you cast corruption, you couldn't cast it again for another 18 seconds? Or what if when you cast UA, you couldn't cast it again for another 17 seconds? Suddenly our priority system would become no more complicated than an enhancement shaman or hunter.
--> Hit the buttons the moment they come off cooldown, and if there's ever a conflict, just check the priority.
That's basically what several classes do. Shadow Priests, Hunters, Enhancement Shamans, Elemental Shamans, etc.

So many people lose DPS because they can't translate DoT's to a cooldown. They can't get the priority system right.



WARNING! MSPaint incoming!

I honestly think the ultimate warlock affliction mod, for it's current state, would display 5 debuff icons: Corruption, UA/Immolate (one icon), Curse of Agony, Siphon Life, and Haunt, and have them be in that order, as marked above. Each one would have a timer on it until the next time you need to cast that spell. For the instant spells (Corruption, CoA, SL), the timer would be exactly equal to it's duration. For UA/Immolate, the timer would be 16.8ish seconds (assuming 1.2 second cast time). With a 1.5 second cast time, the timer would be 16.5. You get the idea.

Each one displays a fake "cooldown" time on it. Whenever there's a conflict (2 spells coming up at the same time), you just pick the higher one first. When the timer is 0, have it blink at you or something. This idea would essentially translate DoT timers into "cooldown" timers, which are much easier for people to manage. Having the hierarchy there and directly in front of you also helps a lot - I know I organize my main action bar from most to least important, and I do think it helps a lot (while now I have my priorities memorized)




Anyways, you get the idea. The problem with affliction now is that some people don't have the mental capacity to translate DoT timers into cooldowns on the spell, which makes DPS'ing with it impossible. Imagine a bell curve of DPS. For affliction, it's very steep sloping - clipping DoT's has a BIG impact, while not keeping DoT's up has a BIG impact. For 41/30, not so much.

I agree with Kana here.

I personally use DoTimer and have no difficulty whatsoever "juggling" the dots. Of course, I make mistakes and sometimes quite many... But that is not a problem of UI or programming in general.

I would very much prefer to keep the affliction rota as complicated as it is and have it make more damage according to its complexity. Building up a working rota takes a very long time and any mistake is "punished" very hard due to the many synergies the dots have. Missing a bolt of another class is not remotely as bad as missing a dot. It is a pity that Blizz doesn't have the guts to establish "true" damage dealers but evens out any differences, which consequently leads to the superiority of hybrid classes (which deal the same amount of damage whilst being in a dd-spec, but always having the choice(s) to become healer/tank/melee instead).

Well, the one good news is that the affli-dmg builds up a little faster than before. Still much too slow for trash, which is a little bit of a "feeling useless if not aoe-ing" time for me, but even bosses tend to die in less than 3 rotas now. Let's wait what the bosses and trash in Ulduar will be like...

Hadn't even though about that! But yeah, with 2 less DoTs, our DPS on bosses like Sarth3D will be better. Or just any boss which breaks the rotation with annoying stuff (Maexxna, we all hate you as there the Demo/Destro ladies will outDPS us :> )

Tell me more. I'm stuck at 3k.

I think the community should undertake serious effort to communicate the need for change in dot recast mechanic. If it works for corr with EA, why not use it everywhere when break is obvious? Having smooth 3 sec ticks as long as you wont let dot fall off will eliminate half the problem with squinting with one eye at 0,x second fractions at your quartz/whatevcer, and your remaining eye tracking haste/ cast timers. Unless GC wishes to pay for developing and paying for 3rd bionic eye implant for every aff raider, so that we can track actual encounter with it, that's the way to go.

True, CoA will obviosly neded to remain as it is, and there will still be some effort neede to minimize DoT downtime, but those are minimal problems compared to your dot refresh hitting 0,005 second too early because of, say, eradication, and taking away whole whooping tick for no real gain whatsoever.

As to problem with loosing SB casts because of too early dot refreshes, this can be easily taken care of with UI improvements. But first things first.

Really good idea. Why not simply continue the mana tick development recently introduced. Now mana regains more or less without steps, it ticks many times per second. Let DoTs tick the same. Change the 3 second interval to 0.3 seconds or 0.03 esconds with 1/10th or 1/100th the damage of each tick, keeping Pandemic and whatever other effects are valid. The whole problem of cutting off DoTs goes away and the class gets a lot easier to play. Only if you want to gain the last few % to top warlock DPS charts do you then need to recast perfectly like today.

Blizzard?

PS. Posted on suggestion forums on European site.

I do not really have any problem with DoTs ticking every 3 secs, with one exception being DS (since on trash it often just won't fire off before mob is dead).

What I do have problem with is a fact you cannot do your max potential dps without being able to factor things like lag to second decimal point, time needed for your finger to contract enough to push the key, queue your dots five to ten ticks ahead, track dot timer to at least first decimal point, and still spare your third eye to track all the fires that you need to run away from.

Smooth dot ticking would work only partially, since hardcore guys are likely to prefer death & deletion over clipping even 1/3 of present dot ticks (assuming smooth ticking would be tick/ 1s).

There are also problems with rescaling all "on tick" stuff...

Actually I really aggree with this. If the DoTs tick in rapid succession you will lose no dps at all from refreshing a DoT early. You will just spend you mana quicker, which isn't really an issue for an aff lock anyway. At that point DPS is more dependant on your build, and familiarity with the spell priority system, which brings it in line with the other DPS classes. It should be no more complicated to do then when they restructured the mana regen, but it would essentially fix the core problem of playing aff.

You'd be using more GCD's on dot uptime decreasing filler damage (Shadow Bolt/Drain Soul).

So the emphasis would still be on waiting as long as possible, but if you had cast early so you could move you wouldn't be penalized as much. It would all filter back to skill, and knowledge. If you loose a little dps because you can't use a filler due to movement, then so be it. The other lock specs have it even worse. and loosing the dps of a filler spell because you were ensuring that none of your DoTs fall off is better then letting them fall off in the first place, because several aregoing to drop at the same time.

The basic idea is that you would have had to refresh early anyways, this just reduces the penalty of having to do that.

Lately I'm having some serious trouble keeping my threat (especially due to SB) under the MT, and I was wondering if I was the only affliction lock with this problem, and if not how the threat looks on 3.1. Is it worth speccing for threat reduction?