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PTR Talent Perspectives

Posted: June 17th, 2016, 3:58 pm
by Heimgang
Been spending the past few hours playing with talent combinations for affliction. The link takes you to the google sheet that I am inputting the information into. Rules of the test is 5 minutes w/o raid buffs, ring proc, major CDs (doomguard), and potions. Looking for the base damage available for each set of talent changes. 736 ilvl.

Affliction Talents PTR

Re: PTR Talent Perspectives

Posted: June 17th, 2016, 5:53 pm
by sercai
Thanks Zuver, the spread is interesting to look at! I haven't done any particular damage tracking myself, as I'm waiting to see what happens with tuning, and I haven't looked at affliction too closely because it's not my first love. Here are some playstyle/feel observations on PTR destruction:

- Playing without Reverse Entropy feels terrible to me in a way that's hard to describe, exactly. I recall thinking life tap was kind of cool back in Vanilla, but I used it very rarely. Actually being mana starved, while managing a secondary resource, is bothering me. Cataclysm is okay, but getting use out of Mana Tap makes me feel very mana hungry. I can imagine a world where Mana Tap is the strongest on certain fights, and I don't love what I'm seeing!

- New Havoc is a boatload of fun. Cleave all the things. Wreak havoc is two boatloads of fun. Cleave literally all the things. You get a chaos bolt, and you get a chaos bolt...

- It seems like eradication checks collision, not cast, which is a meaningful difference for a spec with relatively long travel times. I think the window on this needs to be a couple seconds longer.

-I don't really pvp; I can't imagine why I would ever not take demon skin on the 45 row. Considering that there's a separate PVP talent tree, is it weird design to also have some pvp only talents in the pve talent tree? Does anyone else see a case where they'd take say, mortal coil, for a raid or even for soloing?

- Boomkin envy: they keep Incarn, as a better version of incarn. We get soul conduit, as a significantly worse version of dark soul.

Not a talent, but I don't care for the new mastery at all. With the stat redistributions on PTR I clear 200% mastery on Sercai, and the damage spread is enormous. I have incinerates hitting for more than chaos bolts in some cases. The overall dps averaging will be wherever they tune it, of course, but it makes the rotation feel kind of goofy when the filler outdps-es the spender in some cases, and rip bursting priority adds when chaos bolt randomly decides that it's not time to do damage yet.
And this is all at 745 in HFC gear. I can't imagine how big the spread will become in Legion raid gear.

Re: PTR Talent Perspectives

Posted: August 18th, 2016, 7:14 am
by Taly
wow Zulver - nice job! . I miss affliction. I tried Destruction and find it frustrating because of chaos bolt dps swing. I tried Demonology and find if i need to switch to kill an add away from boss quickly it hurts rotation and for smaller adds it takes too long. I found that if i took improved stalker that seemed to do the trick but that means i need 2 shards and that is not so easy to maintain with HOG using as many as 4 at a time. Im going to try affliction again - apparently i used the wrong talents and i wish i had checked here first.

Thanks!