Un-Nerf True Affliction

Suggestions
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Currently, True Affliction is, let’s be honest, downright awful. I understand why it was nerfed initially, but after all the rebalancing efforts and the evolution of spam casting, allowing True Affliction to spread DoTs properly would potentially bring more diversity to the class, along with encouraging players to learn more than just Fireball 2 spam (which has been a common complaint on the forums among newer mages).

With Mages, Scoundrels, and Rangers all having confirmed being able to sustain over 100k, and Shamans consistently being in the upper 60s/low to mid 70s, I don’t believe giving mages back their old DoT spread would overpower them in the least.

Also, kind of a side note but still related…Arcane Ray could use a buff. It’s a 3 second spell that locks you from casting anything else, and does pitiful damage unless you’re running True Affliction. Normally I get it to tick for 3637 per second, and with True Affliction I can get UP to 24234 per tick, but that’s very rarely due to having to keep 3 DoTs up at once and being unable to reapply them while Arcane Ray is up. Bringing that damage up, or increasing the DoT timers would go a long way to helping True Affliction come back into an actual play style.

This is an issue mages have been concerned about for at least two years (True Affliction is actually True Terrible now) (True affliction mage alternative single target) (If class balancing happens Q4... fix useless/broken runemage mechanics)

Scott also ran the numbers and found True Affliction to be next to worthless (Maximum mage dps analysed)

When I did my DPS tests to help with rebalancing, the single True Affliction mage I could find was unable to pull over 30k (New Data for DPS Balance, this time with Potions!)

Riley stated, regarding True Affliction, “Our primary goal is to figure out a way to balance the Runemage Affliction tree such that it is still better suited to groups of targets, but at the same time provide an option where single-target DPS, while not as good as Affinity, is still better (and certainly not worse) than untalented spell casting.”
(Beta 6 Patch 2.91 - #9 by Riley_D)

With the way spellcasting has evolved due to quicker casting techniques, untalented spell casting is currently better than Affinity :frowning:

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Pleeeease!!! I wanna be a True Affliction Mage. :sob:

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Yess please make it good again! It would be amazing!!!

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Wow 30k, God mage

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Honestly though, with True Affliction, I’m impressed :laughing:

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who was it

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I support a full revert of the talent to how it was back in old game. If that is deemed too good for AOE then at very minimum make the spells do the same amount of damage as the other talent like back in old game. For example back in old game fireball would do say 10,000 base damage before talent modifiers and for true affliction you would get the 10k plus the DoT. Now you do like 2k and you get the rest of the base damage in form of a DoT (that gets overwritten with each spell and therefore does not tick at all making you just lose 8k damage for no reason).

A few notable changes that curb-stomped true affliction:

  1. Arcane Explosion Radius Fix

    • This really was what made the talent “OP” back in old game; the radius was like 2x the size of the actual graphical effect.

  2. Cap max number of spreads

    • Back in old game you could spread to an infinite number of enemies; this was limited to 6.

  3. Removed ability to spread DoTs to stack 3 of each DoT

    • Instead of having 3 affliction, frost, and fire DoTs; now you can only spread for a max of 1 of each DoT to the others (you cannot use multiple blasts to stack the DoTs)

  4. Using the talent means that you do reduced initial damage and then the rest of the base damage is done as a DoT.

    • The devs made a change where you will do “the same amount of damage as if you had no talent equiped” by making the inital damage do less and the DoT do the rest. Casting fast enough renders the DoT useless as you reapply it before it does all of its damage (wasting damage)

The first change listed that crippled the talent I agree with and don’t think should be changed; it was very nuts in old game and would break PvP due to having a spammable and undodgable spell (unless you are pally)

The second and third changes however crippled the usefulness; the whole point of using it in oldgame was the massive spreads that were very important for large trash groups and the extra DoT damage was also nice considering the fastest caster was ~1.5 - 2 spells per second max. Without being able to mass spread the DotS the talent is essentially useless.

Reverting the talent would also see more people debating between contamination and triplicity for the extra DoT time. As of now its either you can choose useless or slightly less useless.

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8

The hardest class in the game has been nerfed out of it’s mind! And now a person that can spam fireballs only is considered a good mage?! It makes no sense!

Ya, all good mages can do 2.5-3 fireballs per second. But this is taking away from the true purpose of the class!!

I know multiple mages that can do 80k+ DPS and can’t even do an Affliction 2???!!! What is this?!

For rotation Mages, it doesn’t even make sense to use a lvl 30 Talent any more… It’s :cry:

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The Hardest Class In The Game To MASTER Is The MAGE!

No other class requires the hours of practice for precision outside of dungeons or monster slaying! That’s why I find it extremely demeaning when a Mage stands there and shoot just :fire: balls and can do as much damage as a Mage that is practicing specific rotations for hours!

Such as : Fire/Affliction/Frost/Fire/Affliction/Frost/Fire/Fire/Fire/Fire/Fire/Fire -> REPEAT for every enemy… While the other mage sits there and fires Fire/Fire/Fire/Fire/Fire over and over again wherever they want without precision or accuracy and are doing such numbers… IT’S A DISGRACE!!

Do you remember why almost all of ALPHABET left when the #DEV’s decided to NERF TRIPLICITY? Same grounds!!! Give the mages a reason to practice and Hone in a Special Routine/Rotation AGAIN! It’s ridiculous!

A Scoundrel only has to pull their arm down and burn a card or two here and there and are hitting extremely high numbers by simply pulling a trigger!! PEW PEW said CounterStrike and some people don’t even bend bullets and hit over 80-90k just by burning cards…

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While we’re on the subject of off-meta talents being re-worked to be included in the game in a meaningful way…

Maybe at the same time we could do Rapidity Ranger? Huh? Huh?

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Bring back the fishermen

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That is nowhere close to the difficulty of scoundrel. It’s so hard that I follow all of Scott and Mew’s instructions and hit maybe 60k. You can dumb down any class as much as you want which is why I think it’s stupid to do so (literally what you did here). If it is so easy why don’t you record yourself hit over 90k just by burning cards :slightly_smiling_face:.

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It would be nice to see true affliction buffed or un nerfed. Its a fun play style, it doesnt need to be made so strong it becomes meta but just made that it its a viable choice.

I think the quote of making it “certaintly not worse) than untalented spell casting.” Makes the talent need to be looked at as it is currently a nerf to damage to most mages if they were to pick it.

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I just want to note a few myths in this post that I see sometimes.

It is not easy to “just spam Fireball and hit 80k+.” Or even 60k+ for that matter. It takes tons of practice and I’ve only met about a dozen mages or so who hit those numbers consistently with fire only. In fact, I am constantly practicing for a year now and 80k+ solo still takes a lot of effort to pull off with fire alone.

Rotation mage IS THE META, not fire mage, as it does the highest damage and debuffs the enemies with afflictions which helps the party also do more damage. If you play rotation well you should be able to out dps fire mage. If not, you’re doing something wrong or not doing it very well.

Casting fire over and over is not easier than casting the same rotation over and over once practiced. The rotation is actually more forgiving with mistakes and less exhausting due to using different muscles and less repetitive motion.

In case you don’t know, or forgot, there can only be one rotation mage per party or else both of their dps will be reduced since their afflictions will overwrite each other. This makes the fire mage necessary. So, if you want fire mage not to be necessary then the Afflictions need to stack no matter how many mages you have in the party which will make the mage even more OP in shards and raids.

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First note that I’m a pretty new player–I don’t think the leaf would be gone from my head if I didn’t idle between work tasks sometimes. I’m level 17 on runemage.

I found the following things terribly disappointing, especially with my new knowledge that True Affliction isn’t worthwhile anymore. Maybe we can fix more than one thing at once?

  1. Fireball 3 / Frost 3 being impractical outside of an opening attack (I can cast them though!). I was very excited to learn it, but pretty consistently players would see me cast it and go “YOU’RE WASTING YOUR TIME” (thanks fellows)
  2. Affliction stacking with other players :frowning: that was a weird lesson to learn, and it makes me feel like since I’m a relatively new mage, I shouldn’t be using affliction in a group at all if there’s a higher level/better equipped mage.
  3. Very little synergy between spells outside of the influence of talents, it seems like. I think frost synergizes with everything because slowing is nice, but that’s about it, right? (So that includes ice lance).

Now, here’s some ideas coming from a very new player, so they might be silly :slight_smile:

  1. Since the damage from True Affliction was overbearing before, maybe the tuning should go towards something like better CC or healing based on DoT. e.g.

What if affliction auto-interrupted enemy skills but consumed a stack(if you have true affliction)

What if when an enemy affected by affliction dies you heal a little bit(with True Affliction)

What if True Affliction somehow gave us a reason to use FB3 or F3? Extra dot? Extra debuff? Damage spread? Affliction/debuf spread?

What if when affliction hits but the stacks are at max, one stack is consumed for burst damage? Probably not the same as the amount of damage it would do if it ticked entirely, but getting close to that may help. Maybe this would make multiple afflictions okay. I see this mechanic with stacks “popping” in other games very often, so it’s probably easy to balance. (with True Affliction).

Forgive typos, typed in a hurry!

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It does deal extra damage, but fireball 3 just takes so much longer to cast that it’s really not worth it. Only ticking like, 3-4 times, doesn’t give enough time to synergize with Arcane Ray (which also only lasts 3 seconds).

The talent is just… bad at the moment.

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That’s so rough to hear. I was grinding to get to lvl 20 for that, but at least Affinity will still give me a reason to rotate spells.

Thanks for explaining!

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I’m trying to work out a rotation that does somewhat decent damage, but it’s just… not there lol. I can get up to 30k but that’s casting my butt off, following an odd rotation, and not popping spells. Meanwhile I can hit 80k with Affinity, despite being a True Affliction mage for a year or so.

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A couple of notes.

1 I feel like its good that affliction doesn’t stack between multiple players because it allows mage to be quite deservedly better than the other dps classes without pushing the competition out of viability. Affiction 2 is an incredibly good spell so that means the first mage in your party is super good but additional mages that don’t get the roughly 30k extra dps from doing afflictions end up being a lot closer to scoundrels and rangers in viability. I think its generally beneficial to passively encourage diversity in party comps through slight variances in strengths and synergies as well as not allowing certain abilities to stack.

2 Frost 3 is actually preaty useful to know how to do because it applies a very strong slow. It isn’t something that is really talked about in terms of strategy because its a very difficult spell and most mages just aren’t assumed to know how to do consistently. It can definitely buy your tank a lot of breathing room when they are kiting bosses and it can clutch out bossfights when your tank dies at the last second though.

Aside from that though I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I wish that mage was a little less fireball dependant. I feel like making runic diversity much stronger (but dialing back the overall class damage proportionally to avoid just straight buffing the class) would make mages cast a lot more interesting sequences of spells.

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Thanks for the tip on Frost 3! I’ll spend a bit more time on that, at least for boss fights.

Your comment does make sense about affliction as it currently functions…it would have to change in order to avoid what I think you’re getting at: 2(+) mages instead of other DPS classes in a group, doing more damage just because of that change.

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