I'd just like to put my number into the hat as another affliction warlock over 6k dps that thinks the current affliction playstyle is perfectly fine - fun even.



Now, there has been discussion on this thread about doing something to the UI that makes it easier to track dots. I have an idea that would probably be simple for them to implement and would work just fine - its essentially what I do with mods:

1. Have your own debuffs on the target be 2x the size of all other buffs / debuffs on the target.
2. Have a Numerical timer on the debuff - so when UA has 5 seconds left there is a big yellow 5 on the UA icon.

Suddenly, the default UI would be sufficient.

Leil: I'm not saying that affliction is over- or under-complex. I'm going by blizzard's stated goals, which is that they like the spec except for needing a UI mod. I'm trying to find a solution to blizzard's problems that avoids touching any other concerns I or anyone else may have (which is what I meant by "we"). Addressing the complexity and noob-friendliness of the class is something where you have to start arguing with blizzard's intention for the class, which is something I often do, but is not the scope of this thread. The issue at hand is a minimally-invasive fix to the need for a DoT timer, which I'm trying to find. Not casting UA or Immolate at all is, I think, more than you need to do to fix the UI problem.

I truly hope they at least wait until we have some hard content to do whatever they're going to do. Raiding Affliction is really the only thing keeping me playing this game because everything else is so incredibly boring. I don't like bashing other classes or anything but the playstyles involved with most are so incredibly dull I don't see how most players can put up with it... After playing the same game for a few years it's bound to get dull unless things get really really complicated to keep your interest. This is coming from more of a hardcore player though, so I'm not expecting Blizzard to believe this as far as their average player base is concerned.

I guess the point I'm trying to make to my fellow players is: There's plenty of easy DPS classes/specs you could play. There's very few that are as engaging as Affliction is. By dumbing the difficult ones down you're completely removing the ability for those of us who like this "overwhelming complexity" to play something that's actually mentally engaging.

I don't think blizzard would add a message that actually said "Cast this spell next!". It was only meant as an example. More likely would be a message like [ + Unstable Affliction ] when you apply the spell and [ - Unstable Affliction ] when it falls off. The latter would prompt you to cast the spell again and thus eliminating the need for a third party addon such as a dot-timer.

Will you break your dps record using it? Definitly not. But at least it is a way to lessen the need for an addon, which I understand was to be the point of this whole thread.

My thoughts on tweaks to the affliction tree to simplify and improve it, without necessarily pushing the dps through the roof or making it idiot proof.

Flip Improved Fel Hunter and Nightfall on the tree.

Change Improved Fel Hunter to return part of it's mana to 10raid/party members when Shadow Biting. 0.5% maybe 1%, would have to be balanced for sure.

Change Nightfall to a 1pt talent that makes Shadowbolt an instant cast spell with a 2 second cooldown which would be affected by spell haste.

Change Demonic Power in the Destro tree to also speed up the Fel Hunter's Shadow Bite.

Change Grim Reach to Dark Reach affecting all Shadow Spells, change Destructive Reach to Flame Reach affecting all Fire Spells.

(Saw this one in the thread and liked it.) Increase Haunts damage, but make any mob affected by Haunt immune to your fire spells.

These changes would make the Fel Hunter a viable and worthwhile pet to utilize regularly in groups/raids, even in non-Dark Pact builds. They would make Affliction rotations easier, by eliminating cast time on Shadowbolt which makes keeping Shadow's Embrace up easier and simplifies throwing a filler bolt in when dots are about to fall. The cooldown helps alleviate some of the dps increase a pure instacast Bolt would bring. Of course Glyph of Corruption would have to be modified to compensate. It also eliminates Immolate in deep Affliction builds, simplifying rotation more. And the changes to the Fel Hunter and Nightfall would lead to some interesting Affliction/Destro hybrid builds.

How does modifying the felhunter do anything to the affliction rotation at all? Or changing the range talents? While the range talents could use that redesign, neither of these issues has anything to do with the complexity of the rotation.
And I'm going to categorically state that giving your filler spell a cooldown will increase, not decrease, the complexity of your rotation, as you will either have to use another filler spell, or you will have to manage your rotation such that you're always refreshing a DoT when shadowbolt is on cooldown.

I suppose you're trying to make shadowbolt remain(?) effectively a two-second cast while also being an instant cast, ie front-load shadowbolt. First, this isn't going to work unless you're actually using a 2 second Global Cooldown, which a) should remain 3 seconds (2.5 with bane) since there's nothing wrong with affliction DPS b) is a complicated and unnecessary mechanic. More to the point, what you're proposing doesn't actually adress the core issue. Shadow Embrace is not the reason we need UI mods. I don't think people that use DoT Trackers even have Shadow Embrace as one of the things it tracks.

While the range and felhunter changes are things I would like to see, they're outside the scope of the thread. The rest of your changes are jury-rigging an unrelated wishlist into being tangentially related to the thread. I don't want to be too harsh, because I like the creativity, but your post really is more wishlisting than it is discussing the problem or solution.

Instant shadowbolt would be incredibly Op in pvp unfortunately.

I as well think affliction is dumbed down enough as it is. With the elimination of an entire click!! (corruption) oh my!. If they dumb down affliction anymore that is one foot out the door for me. The other foot is if Ulduar does not present some sort of challenge.

If they want to mess with the locks at all...give us a few more places to play with our 1-3 points that are always just sort of dumped wherever, or fix the one hit wonders in our trees...I can't stand having "loose" points.

Thank you for your well-reasoned defense.

Unfortunately, it's not up to us to decide what the problem is. Blizzard has explicitly said the major problem, from a game-design perspective, that they intend to address, is the reliance of affliction on third-party UI mods (we make the reasonable inference they mean DoT timers). We both agree the range talents need modification because they're currently both-or-neither for all three specs, but that has nothing to do with DoT trackers. I also agree that improved felhunter needs a buff so long as the imp is better for affliction than a talented felhunter, but that also has nothing to do with DoT timers.

I don't think the problem is untenable, as you seem to think. You are right that a player has to pay attention one way or another to DoTs falling off. However, as I've outlined before, there's a difference between seeing a debuff fall of and refreshing it, and needing to precast before it falls off to refresh it after it falls off. The latter requires a timer, due to game mechanics, the former generally does not, excepting lag.

Adding a normal cooldown to shadowbolt will not keep its DPS in line, because you can cast another nuke while shadowbolt is on cooldown. And this adds to rotation complexity because you have two filler spells to juggle (although you can macro them together easily enough with a reset=2 castsequence). Your only option is extending the GCD for the spell, but then it doesn't allow you to slip in DoTs more easily, defeating the point.

I currently do not and have never used a timer. I easily pull just at 6k dps without one and hope to never have to use one. If I can do this I am sure many of you can and are already doing this thus the need for eliminating third party "crutches" is moot...gg blizzard.

My main problem actually is the statement that affliction were a broken spec and needed fixing.

I know I'm not the first to say this, but actually it's the complexity that for me is part of the appeal of affliction. It may be not a simple matter of spam-casting two spells... but that's actually a good thing.

Where would be the fun in doing massive damage with just two clicks? How can you feel you have "accomplished" (let's assume doing anything in a game could count as an accomplishment) anything being on top of the damage metre if it took no skill whatsoever to get there?

At this point, I have to pay more attention in fights on my warlock than on my healy priest.
You have to watch your dot counter closely, time your spells/refreshes, possibly lifetap just in time for Haunt to come swooshing back and top you up again... it's complex, subtle and still deals a lot of hurt. I love it.

Be that as it may, "fixing" the spec is unlikely to result in an actual improvement without causing additional problems.

If they made all affliction spells instant cast, we'd do "too much damage" and have an advantage over all other casters since we'd not have to stand still. Now in PvE scenarios that'd be perfectly fine (even though it would mean a massive advantage for affliction locks in certain encounters) but since the game appears to be balanced around PvP for whatever reason, that's irrelevant. The only way that could work, I suppose, would be by decreasing the initial damage of all/most affliction spells so opponents in PvP wouldn't die as quickly while we kite them around for a few seconds. The issues that would create in PvE are pretty obvious.

Taking away DoTs as a whole... is - sorry - ridiculous, since that's what makes affliction what it is.

Changing the duration of DoTs also isn't a cure-all simply because there'll always be something keeping us from casting at any given time in raid encounters and then the rotation is just as "messed up".

Including additional on-screen messages to let us know when DoTs expire might work in a way, but may lead to lag and - unless you've turned off all the other combat messages - make it impossible to actually see what's going on. Also the countdown aspect of dot timers would be missing making it much more stressful.

Again though, I don't see where there's an actual *problem* with the spec. We don't *depend* on the mod since there's a debuff counter built into WoW, it just makes things easier...which is what addons/mods are supposed to do. How is there a need for fiddling with a spec's mechanics if the only point of concern is that there's a tendency for players to use third party scripts? Why did Blizzard implement the option to have addons/mods in the first place if they don't want them to be part of the game? I don't get it.

To clarify: what you say we're doing is manually moving the "fade event" for a DoT that has a cast time to T + (D - CastTime) where D is the DoT's duration. This requires quite a bit of attention and most likely is the the reason behind Blizzard's notion that they're uncomfortable with having to use AddOns to play DoT based classes, affliction and shadowpriest in particular, properly.

Blizzard's UI people could quite easily implement a UI widget that does this for you and therefor removes the need to watch timers by presenting DoT durations as a set of "traffic light" action buttons which glow and pulse in different colors based on whatever DoT's state they represent. Think of it as a standard action bar with a "guitar hero" element added to it that'll show you when you need to refresh a casttime DoT (or any DoT/HoT effect for that matter) by making it glow yellow and emit a sound when the fade event is fired, before making it glow red when it actually fades. If you've ever played guitar hero or similar games, you'll probably know how good this works. It would work very well in WoW, too.

Obviously one might say »Well that's what DoTimer is doing, duh!« to which I'd respond that DoTimer doesn't actually present a meaningful visualisation for this event apart from the time display which you have to actively read and analyse before making a decision of what you will cast next. With a "guitar hero" UI (sorry I can't think of a better way to describe it) you're not reading timers, you're simply responding to the flow of icons and sounds more by reflex. The decision making process using this UI would be a hell of a lot faster. No reading involved. It would pretty much equal a heavily simplified game of Tetris.

I agree that your proposed UI would solve the problem. A graphic (ie non-text) change of the debuff icon to represent being within [cast-time] of expiring is basically equivalent to checking whether an instant-cast DoT has fallen off or not, meaning it doesn't cross a drastic line into functionality the default UI doesn not have, and it preserves the affliction playstyle of juggling the refreshing of DoTs. There are some possible problems, though, with getting the UI implimented in the first place.

If the UI auto-magically warns you based on the cast time, this could push uncomfortably towards the UI playing the game for you, since it's making a decision for you. If you have to add in the times yourself, the complexity is quite a bit beyond anything else in the game, which doesn't really address the issue so much as dodge it. The first situation of knowing what warnings to give, to me, is clearly the superior option since it actually solves the problem. The debate then centers around whether the UI is making important decisions for the player, automating a trivial and silly task, or making important information available in a cleaner, more obvious, and more intuitive manner. This inevitably touches on the whole "what is skill in WoW" debate.

I share the view that an UI addition could solve the problem rather easily, without adding intrusive or gamebreaking changes to the interface. However when you listen to GC it sounds alot as if he is looking for a simplification of the affliction rotation (unfortunatly) rather than a UI change. I would very much prefer an ui change before a gameplay change.

I'm under the impression that many of us are very interested in optimizing the "sportive" aspect, e.g. patchwerk damage or similar encounters, which are basically dolls to shoot at. but a raid consists of much more that this, and in most of the encounters (where the optimizers seem not to be analyzing as closely) cast times and cooldowns are a bit anti-dot, don't you think?
I managed to get the cast-times pretty well into my rota, what I hope is that blizzard manages to somehow get rid of the necessity to stare at different castbars for cooldowns and lags. Unfortunatly, I think that this is an internet thing and can't easily if at all be removed.

my whish list:

remove cd from haunt (yes yes, dotting is useless on trash, but that's what we ARE)
remove cd from teleport (it's hardly useful as it is, but if i can't skip running at each lava wave, it's a joke)
remove cast time from dots

visions:

surplus healing of sl conversed to damage, apply same bonuses to sl as to ds
remove the completely useless curses and spells and give some decent easy-to deal trash damage, so we have something to do whil trash-thrashing.

my 2 cents

Yes, good point. My opinion is that the implementation of a decent UI is a much better alternative compared to simply lowering the skillcap by dumbing down the game to a point where you don't need the UI anymore. The UI element would certainly ease decision making for what you'll cast next, but compared to a change in game mechanics it wouldn't remove it altogether. Affliction would basically play exactly the same way, but you wouldn't be staring at bars all the time while doing it. I think this is a much better solution than basically destroying the current gameplay through simplification. Even if it involves just a tiny bit of automation. A bit that in reality pretty much every player already uses in form of third party addons.

Think of it this way: If Blizzard go in and simplify affliction rotation, then you can argue that in this case its actually them playing the game for you. To make matters even worse, you'd still be using DoTimer and similar stuff on top of the already simplified gameplay, making it that much more boring and monotone.

You're right there - indeed I'm a PVE only. It's a pity that classes get crippled time and again just because Blizz doesn't get it right to implicate a part of the game that just doesn't seem to fit (my point of view).
Maybe some kind of pvp-specc would fix that. Shouldn't be a problem when dual-specc is coming up. I know Blizz doesn't want to do it, but frankly I don't give a

And: what would be so bad if warlock for a change became top pvp-class? We had so many changes who leads the tops in PVP and I wouldn't mind to stand a chance for a change.

So I did the math on gloves of token respect compared to valorous. If you choose to use valorous over respect you will:

Gain 0.89% Crit
Gain 0.30% Haste
Lose 16.4 spell damage. (this is only figuring in fel armor and no other raid buffs.)

I am not sure what the crit and haste losses equal out to be in raw spell damage but I don't like the idea of losing 16.4. The only viable reason I see for wearing valorous is to achieve the 2 pce bonus while wearing hood of rationality. If you don't have hood yet I suggest wearing respect with valorous circlet for the 2 pce. (This is assuming you are wearing valorous shoulders).

I'm confused.

Doesn't the default UI already show a little timer on the debuff icon? Or am I just playing with so many add-ons that I just assumed it was default when it's from an add-on? I know that the soulstone icon shows the amount of time left when I check it once cast on the healer.

It just shows the cooldown pie clock by default. You need an AddOn such as OmniCC to show the timer as a number on the buff texture.

Yes, but isn't the argument exactly that having to do the "thinkwork" of processing numbers is a bind? So actually there already is an entirely graphical dot-counter implemented. It's tiny, but it's there. They could start blinking when about to expire as someone's suggested, but that's about it.

Apparently that isn't what Blizz considers a possible "fix" though. To be honest, in order to render dot-counters entirely useless, they would *have* to remove dots simply because these addons would remain useful in any other scenario.

And that would be the most extreme case of exaggerated reaction since I started playing this game.

The default pie timers might actually be good enough for DoTs without cast times, since you generally don't want to recast until the DoT falls off. A custom timer would still provide benefit, since it might be a little more easy to see. Meanwhile, DoTs with cast times are where the precision of custom DoT timers really comes in handy.