Affliction: fails in 3.3

#0 - Dec. 11, 2009, 6:59 a.m.
Blizzard Post
Dear forum readers, this is NOT a QQ about aff DPS. This is about viability of a spec that has NO burst damage at all in a new dungeon that *requires* burst damage, and also no longer does on par with muti rogue single target DPS due to a now fixed bug.

Well the bug that was rolling corruption is "fixed", despite being known as a bug in the PTR for ages, and despite Ghostcrawler quoting PTR DPS of affliction based on that bug as 'good'.

So where does that leave affliction now? Answer is it's a dead spec again because it's single target no longer is so good that afflocks can just be left on the boss and ignore adds/spikes/shields/CC.

I never abused the corr bug because I wanted to see just what kind of DPS aff can do now, and the answer is it's not very impressive because there is NO BURST DAMAGE.

4 new fights so far, all of them have adds/shields/spikes so plenty of target switching which aff is not good at - in theory lots of adds means lots of dots, but without haunt we're losing 23% damage, and without dots running their full course their DPET is poor.

Aff of course can do semi decent DPS *IF* your RL allows you to sit on the boss and ignore the adds, tho saying that if the muti rogue, arcane mage or hunters sit on the boss ignoring adds they will murder an afflock for DPS.

So, question to Ghostcrawler;
1. Why does aff still not have any real burst* DPS? You design ICC to require burst DPS and a lot of target switching yet you leave aff as a spec that does extremely poorly at it.

Suggestions;
1. Haunt already has extremely low DPET, let it become a (dispellable) self buff rather than a target debuff. This rewards afflocks for target switching since they have such a high ramp up time.
2. Allow haunt to boost Shadow Bolt. Affliction SB with a 23% increase is still one of the weakest DPET spells in the game.

To put #2 in perspective the DPET of other caster spells in T9:
Destro lock incinerate = 8.2k
Arcane mage arcane blast = 7.9k
Moonkin wrath = 8.2k
spriest mind flay = 6.1k
Affliction lock SB = 4.8k

Yes afflock burst should be low, it's heavily dot based DPS but it's *too low* to be viable in raids without giving afflocks special dispensation not to switch targets.

*burst - this is NOT a PVP term in this case. Burst means I need to kill an add/shield that is going to (needs to) die in 3-10s and it's worthless to DOT it.
#4 - Dec. 11, 2009, 7:11 a.m.
Blizzard Post
If you thought the Affliction Corruption rolling was fine, you probably weren't playing it correctly.

I'll admit it required some level of sophistication to pull off. But we don't think it's fair to let some players do ridiculously high damage just because the average player can't do it.