Affliction 50%+ nerf to multidotting vs live?

#1 - May 21, 2012, 6:55 a.m.

Looking at the dot damage coming from each spell for 4.3.x affliction vs 5.0.x affliction here is what we see. Keep in mind this is single target patchwerk based on sims.

Agony/Doom: 13.9% vs 8.2%
UA: 8.7% vs 13.1%
Corr: 13.3% vs 12.3%
MG vs Shadowbolt: 10.5% vs (15.2% + 1.7%)
DS: 14.2% vs 10.4%
Haunt: (9.8% + 1.1%) vs (3.6% + 0.4%)
DTR: 6.9% vs 5.0%
Felhunters: (1.8 + 1.2 + 6.8 + 6.4) + (3.5 + 13.6%)
Doomguard: 6.0% vs 4.3%

If you ignore little stuff like gaps between trinket procs, ebon imps, the very occasional soul fire, etc and look at the bigger stuff you see some trends. DS gets muddled since you end up using it so much in non execute range. DTR goes up due to more dot ticks from MG.

1. Biggest thing I see is despite more dot damage coming from dots the average per tick damage of UA is down. Corruption is slightly higher and the DPET of agony vs doom is about a 40% drop.

2. Felhunters come out to a wash except instead of it coming from a single pet its reliant on a second service/guardian pet you don't have as precise a control over. The upgraded pets are presently weaker still (hopefully that will be addressed). Point is that even if you balanced upgraded pets dead even with service pets you'd still only match live baseline pet.

3. Damage from fillers of all kinds goes down slightly. However when you consider the amount of support our dots take putting dots on a second target may be a DPET loss. This is certainly NOT the case for other dot specs and should be a significant concern.

Sims don't calculate dpet of unsupported dots but you can infer that pretty easily. So while MG has a low dpet its true effect of its absence is halving the dpet of our dots. That means instant 50% nerf to multi dotting. More if you consider a good lock on live could stack up SEx3 on 2 targets.

This makes affliction basically a single target spec since perfect uptime on 2 targets = 1 target you MG on. Haunt just makes the gap bigger and being a severely limiting resource we chase more uptime via DS channeling.

I get the devs wanted to reduce multidotting but when shadow, balance, firemages, etc all still have their multi dotting at least as powerful as it was in cata (where its already higher than afflocks were) this is a fairly brutal move.

Melee cleaves and can vastly increase its damage if multiple mobs are near each other. So clearly that precedent is well established and supported in game. The dot classes I just mentioned all multi dot far more potently than affliction ever did so clearly multi dotting is okay and well supported in the devs minds.

SO why beat the warlock dot spec down so it can't multi dot as competitively? Destro has 1 dot that isn't very strong so its clearly a 1 target or aoe situation. Demo is pretty much the same. Affliction is the only spec in the warlock toolkit that could theoretically even compete with other DOT classes and melee cleaves on fights that favor such mechanics. Now affliction doesn't even get to keep that bit of idenity? I'm pretty sure affliction will not get higher single target damage to offset this. We still get a big cooldown and all this drama on soulswap when at this point its a wash and our soulburn version isn't even as good as DK outbreak.

Also is it safe to say that with the reduction of UA's damage its kickback is also nerfed even more? Thus our one bedrock pvp deterrent has been reduced to a point nobody would care about removing it.

Look at the sims of shadow for pre/post cata. Its dots tick harder and can be multi dotted without penalty. So again...why the draconian afflock treatment when shadow gets the free pass? IF devs want to stamp out multi dotting then they need to do it to ALL specs and ALL melee. If melee and other non lock casters are "fine" then aff needs a toolkit that keeps up. I recall GC saying something about not wanting casters doubling dps when multiple targets are present but look at what rogues do via blade flurry. It just seems a rather steep double standard so which is it GC?

As a pure with 3x dps specs its not unreasonable to expect one of them to be competitive with the best from others in nearly every situation. Warlocks need a competitive toolkit for multi target fights. Grimoire of Sacrifice was specifically altered to curb lock multi dotting so I am guessing there is just an excessive prejudice against warlock multi dotting that isn't carrying over to other classes doing the same thing. (or effectively the same thing in melee's case)

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#11 - May 22, 2012, 4:18 p.m.

Multi-dotting is one of those mechanics that provides a benefit to dot specs (especially Affliction, Shadow and Balance) and we're not trying to kill it. We do need to keep it under control however. When there are 2-3 targets then players have some decisions about whether to spend their GCDs focused on one target or trying to keep dots up on multiple targets. Doing so can mess with the rotation, in a good way, and as I said, it's one of those mechanics that makes dots feel different from cast time spells.

The benefit of multi-dotting depends a lot on the situation -- the dot classes can out-perform the melee cleave guys when targets aren't clumped and the melee tend to do a lot better when they are. The value of multi-dotting in PvP depends a lot on the power of dispels, and I don't think anyone has a good feel yet for how that is going to play out. (Our intent, once again, is to make dispelling in PvP more strategic and less spammy so that you can remove things when you need to, but anything dispellable isn't immediately regarded as worthless.)

When multi-dotting becomes broken, in our minds, is when a dot class would rather try to maintain dots on many targets at once rather than focus on single targets at all because they end up doing more damage from just dotting. (Let's assume for the sake of argument that such damage is useful and isn't just trying to win meters at the expense of beating the encounter.) When multi-dotting large numbers of targets becomes too good, we have several problems. For one, we have to choose how to balance the dot specs. Do we just let them be overpowered when there are many targets? Do we make them weak against single-targets to compensate? Casting too many dots also comes at the expense of cast time spells, which means that stats and mechanics that benefit cast time are less attractive and the casters themselves are too good at moving and too hard to interrupt.

It's too early to worry about whether Affliction, Balance or Shadow will be the best multi-dotter, or whether such a title is even worth much. In an ideal world there will be situations that benefit each so that the classes don't play too similarly but don't convey such an advantage that players feel like they need to stack the right class for the right encounter.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#16 - May 22, 2012, 5:07 p.m.

It would seem that the lack of burst, or 'on demand' damage, would be the reason that Afflocks should excel at multi-dotting.

Sure, that's fine. But it can't be "I win the meters, but you have high burst." For better or worse players focus a lot on who does the highest damage, not whose damage was most useful to beat the encounter. If the situation is "I win the meters when I can multi-dot but you win the meters when you burst," then that would work better, but it's harder for us to frequently engineer encounters with those situations. Even better would be "I benefit the group because I can multi-dot but you benefit the group because you can burst." :)