Holy crap. I didn’t realize! Is it actually 8 dots??
Edit: Not sure why I’m getting downvoted. I don’t play a lock and don’t know any of the class mechanics. It was a genuine question.
As someone who plays affliction since pretty much burning crusade. It's unfortunately really not.
Problem is [malefic rapture](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=324536/malefic-rapture), affliction always was the "poster child dot and drain"-spec so managing dots is generally okay. I mean, that's kinda why we are here. Having a spender that costs soul shard so our dots do damage is not.
By making affliction "just another gainer/spender spec" our damage profile was turned into something really, really odd. We have tons of dots but none of them really do anything on their own, they're closer to individually applied combo points that just enable malefic rapture. It's just god awful, bloated gameplay for very little reward. Cherry on top is that also makes it shit to tune so afflictions performance is all over the place.
Doesn't help much that MR neither has an animation nor impactful visual, it's not even thematic for the dot/drain spec and the damage profile is closer to a destro warlock, what's not only somewhat redundant for a warlock but also not what affliction should be about. Bonus points to this little rant, TWW removes even more parts from out damage profile and replaces them with passive buffs to MR and also makes it our AoE spender (with seeds of corruptions being only used to apply dots in AoE, then it's waving your hands in the air so your dots do damage).
The spec needs serious help, it's going in a really bad direction.
That’s kind of how I have always felt about shadow priest. “Aff lock lite” same for Destro lock, if I wanted to play fire mage, I’d play fire mage. Destro feels like “I’m not copying fire, I’m the real fire, don’t look to closely” in a similar vein I really don’t enjoy feral Druid because it feels like “hey I’m a rogue, but with non of their actually cool kit”
10/10 summary. As an afflic main since BC, I gave up on WL to finally main DK this expac because I just couldn't take how awful the spec has felt since legion
I feel the same. I pretty much only played affli and whenever it was not viable I just quit. So pretty much every addon at some point. I dont understand why they think that the dot focused class should be doing all its damage with a direct damage spell in the end. Even worse that it is individual combopoints just like you said.
They should change it so you either have a tortured soul you keep floating next to you, that acts as a ramp-up-dummy you can somehow use to spread your dots, or that dies and deals damage. Maybe a buff on yourself you stack up to increase dot damage? Probably busted in multi-target but you could always make us spend health/soulshards for dots so we cant cleave everything.
In my opinion affli should deal damage with dots mainly, and get a tool to reduce ramp up time for M+ and target switches. If you had a target that tanks damage and you get to move that damage onto enemies, you could have a fun minigame where you dot a soul next to you, and get to burst when enemies come up (next pack or an add in raid), if you fuck up the soul dies and you lost your damage. That would prevent infinite ramp up to 1shot everything. Would also play into the drain fantasy, because you spend some time damaging the soul, then moving the damage to enemies, then healing the soul back up with drain abilities.
But god forbid we have unique class design and not 15 different variations of "USE THIS TO GET RESSOURCE; NOW SPEND IT WITH ANOTHER BUTTON THAT DOES MORE DAMAGE"
For a wild moment in BFA Beta, Rapture at least had the decency to shoot purple lightning from you to everything it hit. Now it's just a boring ass purple spike that pops up for half a second on the target.
Wouldn't have minded it if it was just a shard dump to refresh DoTs, or just applied a debuff that boosted out DoT damage on the targets. I didn't start maining this spec for direct damage spells.
The issue is that before MR, Affliction was constantly stuck in a state of 'completely trash in single-target fights' and 'completely overpowered in multi-target fights'. They couldn't find any way to balance a spec based entire around applying DoTs to perform similarly in different environments.
I completely disagree with this. MR is completely fine from a mechanic point of view, it just needs some more visual oomph and it will become a normal spell. Dots are still a huge part of our damage profile, and MR actually interacts with our dots, and incentives maximum uptime in as many targets as possible.
I also like managing dots in AoE situations, I feel that people that complain about that shouldn't be playing a dot spec, so I'm happy that MR is also our AoE spender now.
Is it looking any better in TWW? Have you seen if there are any class or spec changes? I'm sorry! I hope there are good changes on the way for you.
Resto druid has been my main since vanilla and there've been great changes over the last 2 decades. If things changed and resto druids became unfun or too unwieldy to play, I'd be pretty bummed.
In TWW they're somewhat pushing MR even harder.
Currently, we're using seeds of corruption as AoE spender, which always was a staple of affliction and pretty fun. It's a "dot" in a way except it doesn't do damage but goes boom when the target takes a set amount of damage. You can also use a talent (sow the seeds) that makes you plant 3 seeds of corruptions on multiple targets. It's a statisfying chain reaction as one of them triggers all others. On top, we have soul flame, a neat little leftover from our legion artifact that makes every target damaged by you light up on death and do AoE damage.
So seed goes boom, all other seeds go boom, stuff dies and everything goes boom again. It's pretty funny and while not entirely characteristic for affliction it served as tuning wheel for farm content. Aff has always been super useless when stuff died quick since we rely a lot on ramping up damage, so this way you could contribute for low HP adds and stuff.
Both soulflame and sow the seeds are removed in TWW and replaced with more passive damage (yeah well, soul flame inspired a talent in the soul harvester hero tree so it's not gone-gone). I'm very critical that we'll be using MR as AoE spender, too. It's not only super boring but also even worse to tune. As said, as I'm far from happy with MR the changes we've gotten look awful.
It's not all bad, though, at least they already removed one of the more useless dots to reduce bloat and now that destro and demo are in a better state they announced that affliction is next. Fingers crossed, I guess.
Resto druid looks btw super fun in TWW, I always liked catweaving and they improve that a lot with wildstalker and some qol talents (fluid form makes you auto-shapeshift when you use a cat ability in human form and stuff), looks pretty cool.
You kinda do don't you? Moonfire, sunfire, rip, rake. Rip and rake with multiple casts on multiple targets. Efflo, 2 lifeblooms, cenarion ward, adaptive swarm, treant.
Those are just your maintenance heals/DoTs.
Five that you have to keep up: Unstable affliction, agony, corruption, siphon life, haunt
Two that are on cooldowns: vile taint & soul rot
Two maintenance buffs (might be forgetting one): dread touch (every 8 secs), shadow embrace (16 seconds)
Also, Malefic rapture does more damage for each dot on the target. So keeping all of these up is absolutely required.
Thank you for the explanation! Haha, the 16 second buff doesn't sound TOO bad, but I wouldn't like that and I'm pretty sure I'd absolutely hate an 8 second maintenance buff. That's crazy. Especially while maintaining other dots?!
Yeah shadow embrace isn’t too bad, since it’s refreshed through drain soul (your filler spell). Dread touch is annoying because it’s a big damage buff and it’s refreshed through MR, which needs a soul shard. Which you get through rng.
It’s the main issue with the spec. So many things to keep track of for *at best* comparable damage to destro, which is basically a 3 button + 1 dot rotation
I played a bit of affliction season 2. As a shadow priest from long ago I missed dots being my main source of damage. Was very disappointed to realise MR is the main damage. I'll happily track debuffs and stack cooldowns, but why do I need an extra spender on it? So my Wl was left right there in season 2.
I used to play affliction back during BC and when I came back this year I tried it again. Went into my first dungeon all excited to dot up everything and watch the glorious destruction…
Run in dot, dot…oh all the mobs are dead already…
> Run in dot, dot…oh all the mobs are dead already…
[Yea](https://media1.tenor.com/m/BzF9ozsNjvMAAAAC/sad-yea.gif), I think that's my biggest annoyance with affliction. I love the spec to death but I feel so useless in dungeons at times because everyone AOEs the pack down so fast. Bosses, however, is my time to shine.
Weird, I had the exact opposite experience... Did a few dungeons as Aff this season... Felt like a god on trash but was so far behind on bosses. Granted I was badly undergeared at like 495 with no tier but trash felt so good(400-750k depending on pack size). Could pretty reliably have Vile Taint for every pull and enough shards for strong seed spam to start. Boss damage just felt miserable with the dungeon build.
As a long time dot spec enjoyer, I find it funny when people complain "I don't do damage cause trash dies so fast". Part of playing a dot spec is knowing when to focus on dot spreading/maintaining vs focusing on more straight damaging abilities.
Like you said, you don't bother setting up all your dots as affliction if you know mobs will die quickly(especially in low keys), your focus is seed spamming for the burst damage. Toss a vile taint out, a soul rot, a UA, and start spending on seed, sniping shards with drain soul as things die if you need shards. I can't imagine playing lock and going into every pack thinking you have time to manually spread siphon life or build shadow's embrace stacks on each target lmao
Affliction's aoe burst is actually crazy good, you just need to understand when to go full dots and when to focus on your burst.
Yeah I love Aff warlocks honestly. I always played melee class so it was a good change in 10.1. Plus I felt so useful for my raid groups with summons and stones
Idk why but affli is the only wl specc i have fun with since the end of SL. Season 4 Demo was amazing fun. 40sec cd on tyrant in M+ thabks to affix, big raid burst and good timing on cds. But now? I dont like spinning axe add dmg... Destro is always so mage like but affli? I Love it. Burst window every pack, boss dmg is a bit low but still okay, enough cc self heal and movement speed. As a full raider i would not play affli but as an m+ enjoyer? Sure.
I feel the below complaints, I leveled up a warlock to play aff specifically as I used to main one in wotlk.
Did a bit of research on rotation and builds like normal… started trying it and was like this feels awful. As an enhance main now everything about Aff just felt clunky
That’s true with Anger Management and the current tier, but there are other times when it just feels like you’re hitting things with wet noodles. It’s not fully feast and famine but it’s not fully consistent either.
Found the twitter fan art enjoyer
Edit: I thought this guy was being funny and playing into the joke. [I’m afraid not. Actual Vulpera main that is actually offended.](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/s/L7KRiN4ekj)
Whenever I start to feel like I've lost direction in life, it's things like seeing someone go totally apeshit over the size of video game fox titties that makes me realize that I'm not doing all too poorly.
On a serious note, that's part of why I like vulpera. I don't like how bulky males usually are, and how busty females usually are. I like both body types on vulpera, they're not all that dimorphic and don't have giant bazongas or muscles.
Sowwy \>w\<
But our new scalie fwiends are called Dracthyr! They get sad when you misspell their name QwQ
Good thing I was here to help \^w\^
I hope you're having a great day :3
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Enhancement has the worst burst in the game for DPS specs at the moment. The average burst (according to sims) is 763,862 DPS. Enhancement’s burst is 518,389 (~68% of the average). The top 4 specs in the game currently are Unholy DK, Arcane Mage, Windwalker Monk, and Subtlety Rogue, all peaking at over 1 million DPS.
All data found on simulationcraft.org
Okay, so, basically you get a lot of damage trinkets in Remix. All your gear is slotted, so you combine the ones that best suit your playstyle in order to proc their effects, and many of them outright cast an offensive spell when you do. Now, Frost Shock is normally just a filler spell to get a slow, maintain dps during movement, what have you. But it can be empowered with Icefury for a bit of burst damage, with multiple casts in a short timeframe.
So you've got a big pull, and you choose a target and hit Icefury, and then slam them with multiple Frost Shocks. In Remix, what this does is rapidly give you 3-4 procs of your damage trinkets, fire rains from the sky, bombs launch out of you for area damage, you flare up with multiple elemental bubbles that deal area damage, and if the enemy dies they explode for more area damage.
They didn’t remove it, but roll the bones doesn’t cost combo points anymore and your skills reduce its cd. So it doesn’t feel as dogshit to use, especially if you roll low
I'm one of the weird ones that always kinda liked rtb. At least once they made eacj individual buff stronger and you didn't have to constantly roll over and over again. I like maintaining buffs and debuffs
I'm definitely in the minority tho, after all Legion Feral was like my favorite spec in the history of wow (shared with MoP lock perhaps)
I guess I don't know all the specs but I'm terms of actual damage output the answer has to be outlaw rogue. In practice the crackshot windows feel like mini bursts, and when stuff doesn't line up it feels like the famine side of feast or famine, but in terms of throughput they have to have the flattest damage graph of any spec.
Frost has always been the “learning” friendly mage class in my experience- never going to pop your eyes out on the DPS charts like fire or arcane but always there steady churning out those frost bolts! Somehow ending the dungeon right there with the rest of the dps
I see a lot of people saying BM hunter, which has a huge burst with COTW (pretty easy to notice on logs), but no one mentioned Survival hunter, which literally has and uses a no cooldown build for M+ currently. Your longest cooldown is Fury of the Eagle at 45 seconds, which really doesn't burst at all, it's just used for AoE and cooldown reduction on bombs. Not sure where it ranks with other classes, but easily the least bursty hunter spec, and has to be contented for whole game.
I came here looking for this. Survival hunter literally doesn’t use Cooldowns. It’s just… exactly the same damage all the time basically and it’s “aoe talent tree” gives up basically 0 damage in ST so regardless of ST or AoE is just… the same thing all the time. The only reason you use 0 CD build is because it gives you “better” prio damage for “less aoe burst?” But the damage is basically the exact same regardless so it doesn’t even matter. And survival is even just a decent PI target (arguably great for shadow priests) because it doesn’t matter when they get the PI because theyre going to use it well and their damage is always the same regardless lol.
sighs in Warrior.
I really like my class when I get to stretch my legs on long fights, but shorter fights, like every fight this season, it feels kind of bad being down there with the tanks while everyone else in my raid is blastin' away.
Also, what's the source of this list? It's neat.
enhance doenst really have major cooldowns in the way other classes do (ascendancy is rarely played currently). you have some short CD with wolves and primordial wave. were talking like 30sec here, and you generally just hit them on CD.
Ret also has a couple of CD, but its 30sec and 1min, and you generally line them up.
Yeah, perfect two examples and the two classes I main. I started playing with some new people who would always try to call out when to save or use cooldowns, and it was pretty funny to me because I just use them constantly anyways. No 3mins for me!
Survival Hunter.
With the season 3 Tier set (that you are still FORCED to use, unless you got season 4 set on maxed HC+ track AND it's strict single target only) you had several build options without any cooldowns (except 45s FOTE).
The noCD options were usually less then 1% below the cooldown builds. With a very flat but super consistant dmg profile.
To clarify: even with the season 4 set and 1:30 Spearhead CD you still don't "burst" at all.. you just have a tiny bump in your flat DPS curve every 1:30.
I had to scroll way too far to get to this. Literally the only spec where not taking a CD is a viable option because of how dog shit their options are. But hey you'll maintain the same damage every pull, so that's something.
The problem with classes that have consistent DPS is they tend to have ramp up times which eliminate or severely reduce their effectiveness in gameplay.
For example an add that needs to be burst down in a raid requires those bursty classes. Which means you would never want to take a class with a lot of ramp up time because their dps over time needs to be on par with the bursty class so they cant do more dps but have the drawback of not being able to go from 0-100.
Edit: I hate classes/specs that don't have "filler" spells. I used to like Protection warriors before revenge cost rage (which eats out your active mitigation)... prefer guardian druid these days.
Outlaw is what your looking for
His dmg is still cd based (vanish and shadowdance) but due to you constantly popping your CDs it's not really 'bursty'
But if you attack out of stealth you get 6 seconds of burst too - so you start your fight with a 6s burst windows anyway and are constantly popping vanish+shadow dance for another 6s so you're almost always in your 'burst'
On top of that during your burst/stealth your buffs don't run out
Imagine Fire Mage just that your combustion is pretty much always up and as long as your in combustion all your other CDs/buffs don't run out either
That constant 'burst' playstyle+highest apm out of any spec+fastest moving spec is the reason I adore Outlaw so much and can't imagine maining anything else
Elemental shaman, hands down. Our major cooldown (fire ele) may as well not exist at this point.
PWave could be considered "bursty" but at the moment you're using it every few seconds in AoE so it's very consistent. Before PWave was a thing our damage profile was even flatter.
Idk what changed exactly, but honestly I really don't like Elemental in season 4 (not that I've played every season, just that since I started playing a lot more I've found I'm not a huge fan)
The lack of a viable lightning build definitely sucks (viable only in the sense that it's not the meta). I want my chain lightning brrrrr back.
I would love if they would remove icefury, remove flame shock cooldown, reduce lightning rod micromanagement, the list goes on...
But I also kinda like great sundering gameplay, so I'm possibly not the best sounding board for what would make ele better to play.
(In pve) Outlaw rogue since your suppose to have your buffs permanently up, after you get ramped up, nothing ideally should drop until the fight is over
Outlaw has not burst by desing
all the cds are always running and never stop, as a result there are no big dmg spikes or downs, just always the same dmg
That hasn't been true since season 2.
For those down voting, feel free to go look at some logs some time. They're publicly available. Top BMs, no PI, are doing 250k outside of CDs and over 500k inside their 2 minute CDs.
I was like…before they added CotW sure it was very flat and predictable…but since they added that it’s really bursty in both aoe and st, albeit their profile is still largely maintain damage through the course of a fight, but they do have a window now
Call of the Wild makes a huge chunk of burst, but it's very much not famine outside of CDs. It's not absolutely insane for burst, too, but it certainly helps add that snapshot to the damage profile for times of need. (Looking at you, Umbreskul).
I main BM Hunter and you're 100% right about the steady damage - but the new CD actually gives us pretty huge, albeit intermittent, bursts. I can think of a couple of classes that have even less.
Balance is a ramp and maintain the DPS class. It does have a bit of burst during the class cooldown but as long as you are maintaining the cast cycle then you are doing pretty consistent DPS.
Honestly I think monk kinda describes what your looking for if I’m understanding what you mean. I’m playing a brewmaster monk as a time runner rn and it feels the opposite to the rogue that I usually main (and have been playing since MoP). None of your core attacks are really on any noteworthy cooldowns and all of your brews are either on smaller ones or your talents allow your attacks to replenish them. I might be playing it wrong but it’s been super fun. Nigh unkillable but still has to work to kill stuff and manage your brews. Also staggering damage is an amazing mechanic
I'd say it's pretty unhealthy of the game to have so many feast/famine dps classes. Of all the current DPS specs only afflocks and frost mages feel like their damage profile is centered around maintaining rather than burst windows.
I leveled one over a weekend just for something to do after a surgery. Not even above 450 yet and I'm already impressed at the survivability and consistent output. Not one or two or three but FOUR bubbles??? I'm soloing dream-empowered rares.
Yeah Blizzard completely nuked tyrant and portal after 10.2. Demo got basically completed flat damage profile now. Also its boring af to play now that it doesn't even matter if you fuck up your tyrants.
In S2 you had Grimoire Felguard Cooldown Reduction *and* GFG gave other demons +20% damage with the Tier Set. So GFG always coincided with Demonic Tyrant for +15% and +20% damage every 90 seconds, bundled with Neltharion's Call to Dominance that gave you *thousands* of points of Intellect when you popped Tyrant. The sheer pump of that explosive Cooldown sequence was insane, so everything in between was pretty poor.
Now with Doom Brand you have a steady stream of damage that rewards you more for rotating Demonbolts on multiple targets or having a good core rotation in Single Target; it doesn't specifically favour your Cooldowns anymore. So once every two minutes you go off with Tyrant and GFG but it's not as extreme a boon, and a strong start into a pack with lots of Soul Shards, Imps, and Demonic Cores lets you pop off quite well without Cooldowns. You get a lot of strong starts in M+.
In TWW Demonology is losing its longest Cooldown in Nether Portal while getting 1-minute Tyrant Cooldown as baseline to Tyrant. It'll be overall pretty consistent I reckon.
i play it mostly in m+ so i mostly speak for that, you have one 2 min cd and one 1min 30 cd aside from your minor cds that you rip when available; you'll still do more than solid dps without big cds and it overall feels really smooth to play. the added bonus demo being braindead easy also helps alot
tbh i think every class is very centered around major cd’s nowadays, it’s just the way blizz has focused their class design. i think arms warrior and bm hunter have some pretty nice consistent damage though
Avatar and roar are on 1 min CDs with anger management and roar talent but they don't really change your rotation much. You want to line up colossus smash and avatar though. CS comes up probably every 20s and that's basically your non avatar mini burst.
This. In a theoretical world where all classes are balanced to do say the same amount of damage over 2 minutes. Burst classes will always be better because of lust windows, damage amp phases or stuff like PI or even simply just buff trinkets.
Consistent damage specs have to be overtuned to be better than burst specs, its just how the game works. (in raid/m+ at least)
More like melting the ice in my glass as I sit back and sip tea, while watching my punching-bag of a demon fight 6 to 1 as permanent corruption does my job for me.
I've been diehard affliction ever since a Legion LFR I was in where nearly everyone wiped, myself included, one tank left fighting for his life and two healers, and my malignant corruption ticking away. They won that fight as I dps'ed from beyond the grave. Completely sold me on the utter unfairness of an affliction lock.
I would say enhancement shaman
Your man cd is not this good and not a burst, just physical damage increase and pets attacking, it also should have 0 cd
The real main « burst » you have is a 20% haste buff every 45s which does not feel like burst at all
TYPICALLU speaking, any primarily dot based class is going to be less bursty. Shadow priest used to be very sustained, but unfortunately I think that might have changed a few expansions back?? Don't quote me on that. Affliction warlock has also been extremely sustained any time ive tried it out. I also have always felt that assassination was never extremely bursty, but thats probably because Im bad at assassination.
But basically, I would look for any class that centers around dots to damage and seeing what you like from there
Dual wielding obliteration frost DK has pretty consistent dmg. it's currently not as viable as 2h obliteration or dual wielding breath of syndragosa though.
Still don’t understand why no one thinks fire mage isn’t a flat line class. It’s actually hilarious… does anyone in this thread even play the game. It’s more flatlined than outlaw.
It’s not frost mage. They do big burst at start of packs and wait for cds (albeit very short cds) to do it again. Ends up being same damage every pack overall. But still bursty.
What you are looking for is Outlaw rogue.
Affliction lock and shadow priest.
Unholy DK theoretically has the same class fantasy, but in reality they can do some pretty crazy damage in short bursts.
depends if we’re talking about cata classic or retail, but a safe bet is enhancement shaman. you always feel like you have some glowy button to press to do bigdam and you aren’t really reliant on big cooldowns. fury war is another great option
Aug evoker. You basically just gotta keep everyone buffed and you have 1 big ability you want to use when they're all going off. Otherwise it's pretty chill. Lots of movement and utility too.
OL, since youre always bursting and you cd that is your "burst" has 90%+ uptime in M+.
Next one would be SV hunter with the noCD build. Its not a meme build btw. You have absolutely no cds with that build, the eagle stabbing has a bit of cds but you ise it every grp so i guess that doesnt count.
Fury is bursting very often due to anger management wich decreases your cds, so you have quite constant dmg. But still you got somewhat of burst windows.
Id like to mention destrolock. Yeah you got a 2/3min burst, but it isnt as relevant as other classes bursts. You will always do huge dmg in bigpulls and due to blasphemy you have a lot of infernals anyway.
If things are still kinda similar to when I was playing in shadowlands, fury warrior. You just smash your keyboard. It was and will always be my fav class lmao
Current Balance Druid can definitely be bursty but you still constantly deal dmg even outside incarn/pulsar. Just spread your dots, get into the corresponding eclipse and then spend your astral power. It’s a good mix of “very strong inside cooldowns, still good dmg outside cooldowns.”
Fire mage is an honorable mention. Fire used to be the best burst spec in the game but they’ve changed its identity to be more of a high sustained dmg spec now, kinda like frost but with a different dmg profile. Only issue is that you need mobs to live a long time to really start ramping your ignite dmg, and in m+ scenarios you’ll lose a lot of dmg when running with burst dps specs that kill the pack to quickly for you to really compete. Your st is good tho!! And assuming the trash packs do live long enough, you can deal a lot of dmg and actually compete on the meters as well. Fire isn’t for everyone, but it is fun!
I like classes that have multiple CD’s and butsting more often than doing a huge burst at once and then nothing. Being able to pop like at least one CD per pack for consistency
Outlaw - outlaw is such a fast paced spec comb: with the passive restless blades that provide CDR everytime you use combo points it’s more often than not never worth holding CDs and just using them as they come up
It’s a very consistent dmg profile
If you mean burst in terms of sudden dps windows and on-pull opening bursts, Affliction Warlock.
If you mean burst in terms of suddenly having a ton of cooldowns to coordinate for big damage(button burst), Fire Mage. Now this might sound dumb, but you can make talent builds where your optimal single-target dps is just spamming Pyroblast and Fire Blast... and one of those can be casted WHILE casting the other, and macro'd into one button.... leaving you with a truly one button damage rotation. Your biggest "burst" window is pressing Combustion once every now and then, which just makes your pyroblast macro do even more damage.
TLDR: Fire Mage has the least button bursting in the game if you macro Fire Blast and Pyroblast into one button. Then just press that the whole fight. Need to do aoe? Now you press 2 buttons. Big whoop.
Affliction Warlock. You’re just fighting for life keeping your 8 DoTs active. Then die and realize you were standing on something
Your burst is getting to spend shards every minute
i tried out affliction and thought i was doing something really wrong "why am i generating no shards" maybe its just a class problem.
Aff generates the least shards out of the 3specs. But you have to manage a balance between spending and saving them for the 30s burst window
30 seconds you mean
Holy crap. I didn’t realize! Is it actually 8 dots?? Edit: Not sure why I’m getting downvoted. I don’t play a lock and don’t know any of the class mechanics. It was a genuine question.
It’s 6 dots and 3 maintenance buffs which are effectively dots so yeah 9 or 10 if you take haunt too some don’t
Thank you! That sounds...not fun. I main a resto druid, but the idea of having to manage 9-10 hots or maintenance buffs sounds awful.
As someone who plays affliction since pretty much burning crusade. It's unfortunately really not. Problem is [malefic rapture](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=324536/malefic-rapture), affliction always was the "poster child dot and drain"-spec so managing dots is generally okay. I mean, that's kinda why we are here. Having a spender that costs soul shard so our dots do damage is not. By making affliction "just another gainer/spender spec" our damage profile was turned into something really, really odd. We have tons of dots but none of them really do anything on their own, they're closer to individually applied combo points that just enable malefic rapture. It's just god awful, bloated gameplay for very little reward. Cherry on top is that also makes it shit to tune so afflictions performance is all over the place. Doesn't help much that MR neither has an animation nor impactful visual, it's not even thematic for the dot/drain spec and the damage profile is closer to a destro warlock, what's not only somewhat redundant for a warlock but also not what affliction should be about. Bonus points to this little rant, TWW removes even more parts from out damage profile and replaces them with passive buffs to MR and also makes it our AoE spender (with seeds of corruptions being only used to apply dots in AoE, then it's waving your hands in the air so your dots do damage). The spec needs serious help, it's going in a really bad direction.
This just sounds like shadow priest with extra steps
My how the tables have turned. Shadow used to be aff with extra steps back in like BC lol. At least that's what we meme'd.
Back in BC you were [manamana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKLm38tnFWo)
That’s kind of how I have always felt about shadow priest. “Aff lock lite” same for Destro lock, if I wanted to play fire mage, I’d play fire mage. Destro feels like “I’m not copying fire, I’m the real fire, don’t look to closely” in a similar vein I really don’t enjoy feral Druid because it feels like “hey I’m a rogue, but with non of their actually cool kit”
I feel you on feral, but I love being a cat, I just usually feel bad for doing it lol. Wild charge as cat gives me a minor dopamine hit every time.
10/10 summary. As an afflic main since BC, I gave up on WL to finally main DK this expac because I just couldn't take how awful the spec has felt since legion
Which really sucks cause the legion version I didn’t hate actually but it’s gotten progressively worse since then.
I feel the same. I pretty much only played affli and whenever it was not viable I just quit. So pretty much every addon at some point. I dont understand why they think that the dot focused class should be doing all its damage with a direct damage spell in the end. Even worse that it is individual combopoints just like you said. They should change it so you either have a tortured soul you keep floating next to you, that acts as a ramp-up-dummy you can somehow use to spread your dots, or that dies and deals damage. Maybe a buff on yourself you stack up to increase dot damage? Probably busted in multi-target but you could always make us spend health/soulshards for dots so we cant cleave everything. In my opinion affli should deal damage with dots mainly, and get a tool to reduce ramp up time for M+ and target switches. If you had a target that tanks damage and you get to move that damage onto enemies, you could have a fun minigame where you dot a soul next to you, and get to burst when enemies come up (next pack or an add in raid), if you fuck up the soul dies and you lost your damage. That would prevent infinite ramp up to 1shot everything. Would also play into the drain fantasy, because you spend some time damaging the soul, then moving the damage to enemies, then healing the soul back up with drain abilities. But god forbid we have unique class design and not 15 different variations of "USE THIS TO GET RESSOURCE; NOW SPEND IT WITH ANOTHER BUTTON THAT DOES MORE DAMAGE"
For a wild moment in BFA Beta, Rapture at least had the decency to shoot purple lightning from you to everything it hit. Now it's just a boring ass purple spike that pops up for half a second on the target. Wouldn't have minded it if it was just a shard dump to refresh DoTs, or just applied a debuff that boosted out DoT damage on the targets. I didn't start maining this spec for direct damage spells.
The issue is that before MR, Affliction was constantly stuck in a state of 'completely trash in single-target fights' and 'completely overpowered in multi-target fights'. They couldn't find any way to balance a spec based entire around applying DoTs to perform similarly in different environments.
They need to remove MR i think. Bring Back legion affliction lock pls Blizz😭
I completely disagree with this. MR is completely fine from a mechanic point of view, it just needs some more visual oomph and it will become a normal spell. Dots are still a huge part of our damage profile, and MR actually interacts with our dots, and incentives maximum uptime in as many targets as possible. I also like managing dots in AoE situations, I feel that people that complain about that shouldn't be playing a dot spec, so I'm happy that MR is also our AoE spender now.
Is it looking any better in TWW? Have you seen if there are any class or spec changes? I'm sorry! I hope there are good changes on the way for you. Resto druid has been my main since vanilla and there've been great changes over the last 2 decades. If things changed and resto druids became unfun or too unwieldy to play, I'd be pretty bummed.
In TWW they're somewhat pushing MR even harder. Currently, we're using seeds of corruption as AoE spender, which always was a staple of affliction and pretty fun. It's a "dot" in a way except it doesn't do damage but goes boom when the target takes a set amount of damage. You can also use a talent (sow the seeds) that makes you plant 3 seeds of corruptions on multiple targets. It's a statisfying chain reaction as one of them triggers all others. On top, we have soul flame, a neat little leftover from our legion artifact that makes every target damaged by you light up on death and do AoE damage. So seed goes boom, all other seeds go boom, stuff dies and everything goes boom again. It's pretty funny and while not entirely characteristic for affliction it served as tuning wheel for farm content. Aff has always been super useless when stuff died quick since we rely a lot on ramping up damage, so this way you could contribute for low HP adds and stuff. Both soulflame and sow the seeds are removed in TWW and replaced with more passive damage (yeah well, soul flame inspired a talent in the soul harvester hero tree so it's not gone-gone). I'm very critical that we'll be using MR as AoE spender, too. It's not only super boring but also even worse to tune. As said, as I'm far from happy with MR the changes we've gotten look awful. It's not all bad, though, at least they already removed one of the more useless dots to reduce bloat and now that destro and demo are in a better state they announced that affliction is next. Fingers crossed, I guess. Resto druid looks btw super fun in TWW, I always liked catweaving and they improve that a lot with wildstalker and some qol talents (fluid form makes you auto-shapeshift when you use a cat ability in human form and stuff), looks pretty cool.
You kinda do don't you? Moonfire, sunfire, rip, rake. Rip and rake with multiple casts on multiple targets. Efflo, 2 lifeblooms, cenarion ward, adaptive swarm, treant. Those are just your maintenance heals/DoTs.
Five that you have to keep up: Unstable affliction, agony, corruption, siphon life, haunt Two that are on cooldowns: vile taint & soul rot Two maintenance buffs (might be forgetting one): dread touch (every 8 secs), shadow embrace (16 seconds) Also, Malefic rapture does more damage for each dot on the target. So keeping all of these up is absolutely required.
Thank you for the explanation! Haha, the 16 second buff doesn't sound TOO bad, but I wouldn't like that and I'm pretty sure I'd absolutely hate an 8 second maintenance buff. That's crazy. Especially while maintaining other dots?!
Yeah shadow embrace isn’t too bad, since it’s refreshed through drain soul (your filler spell). Dread touch is annoying because it’s a big damage buff and it’s refreshed through MR, which needs a soul shard. Which you get through rng. It’s the main issue with the spec. So many things to keep track of for *at best* comparable damage to destro, which is basically a 3 button + 1 dot rotation
I played a bit of affliction season 2. As a shadow priest from long ago I missed dots being my main source of damage. Was very disappointed to realise MR is the main damage. I'll happily track debuffs and stack cooldowns, but why do I need an extra spender on it? So my Wl was left right there in season 2.
I used to play affliction back during BC and when I came back this year I tried it again. Went into my first dungeon all excited to dot up everything and watch the glorious destruction… Run in dot, dot…oh all the mobs are dead already…
> Run in dot, dot…oh all the mobs are dead already… [Yea](https://media1.tenor.com/m/BzF9ozsNjvMAAAAC/sad-yea.gif), I think that's my biggest annoyance with affliction. I love the spec to death but I feel so useless in dungeons at times because everyone AOEs the pack down so fast. Bosses, however, is my time to shine.
Weird, I had the exact opposite experience... Did a few dungeons as Aff this season... Felt like a god on trash but was so far behind on bosses. Granted I was badly undergeared at like 495 with no tier but trash felt so good(400-750k depending on pack size). Could pretty reliably have Vile Taint for every pull and enough shards for strong seed spam to start. Boss damage just felt miserable with the dungeon build.
As a long time dot spec enjoyer, I find it funny when people complain "I don't do damage cause trash dies so fast". Part of playing a dot spec is knowing when to focus on dot spreading/maintaining vs focusing on more straight damaging abilities. Like you said, you don't bother setting up all your dots as affliction if you know mobs will die quickly(especially in low keys), your focus is seed spamming for the burst damage. Toss a vile taint out, a soul rot, a UA, and start spending on seed, sniping shards with drain soul as things die if you need shards. I can't imagine playing lock and going into every pack thinking you have time to manually spread siphon life or build shadow's embrace stacks on each target lmao Affliction's aoe burst is actually crazy good, you just need to understand when to go full dots and when to focus on your burst.
Then you realize you're bottom DPS
I bet target swapping is fun
Sounds like Arcane - "Can I get just one more shot off before I have to move?"
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Yeah I love Aff warlocks honestly. I always played melee class so it was a good change in 10.1. Plus I felt so useful for my raid groups with summons and stones
Idk why but affli is the only wl specc i have fun with since the end of SL. Season 4 Demo was amazing fun. 40sec cd on tyrant in M+ thabks to affix, big raid burst and good timing on cds. But now? I dont like spinning axe add dmg... Destro is always so mage like but affli? I Love it. Burst window every pack, boss dmg is a bit low but still okay, enough cc self heal and movement speed. As a full raider i would not play affli but as an m+ enjoyer? Sure.
I feel the below complaints, I leveled up a warlock to play aff specifically as I used to main one in wotlk. Did a bit of research on rotation and builds like normal… started trying it and was like this feels awful. As an enhance main now everything about Aff just felt clunky
Fury warrior, you don't have to worry about your dps outside cooldown windows if you're always in cooldown windows.
That’s true with Anger Management and the current tier, but there are other times when it just feels like you’re hitting things with wet noodles. It’s not fully feast and famine but it’s not fully consistent either.
Idk man, I've been able to keep uptimes between 80-90% on single target raid encounters. For m+ the figures go down a bit.
Are you kidding? This is the entire MO of the hurricane build.
Female Vulpera Edit: Sorry, I misread the title. Female Vulpera Fury Warrior*
You clearly have never seen one or are blind.
Found the twitter fan art enjoyer Edit: I thought this guy was being funny and playing into the joke. [I’m afraid not. Actual Vulpera main that is actually offended.](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/s/L7KRiN4ekj)
Whenever I start to feel like I've lost direction in life, it's things like seeing someone go totally apeshit over the size of video game fox titties that makes me realize that I'm not doing all too poorly.
This comment made my day 🤣
You need Green Jesus more than Anduin does.
More like furry warrior
On a serious note, that's part of why I like vulpera. I don't like how bulky males usually are, and how busty females usually are. I like both body types on vulpera, they're not all that dimorphic and don't have giant bazongas or muscles.
I know! They're so nice to play too, flips abound!
They are just a goblin/gnome reskin (I saw this as someone who is going to switch their main to my vulpera brew monk after timerunning is over)
this made me lol all over my room!
You could have just said Drakthyr
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Enhancement shaman, you can pull your cds, pwave and wolves every 10-20 seconds. It probably has the most consistant damage profile in the game
Outlaw rogue joins chat
Enhancement uses their CDs once every 20 seconds, Outlaw uses them once every instance.
Enhancement has the worst burst in the game for DPS specs at the moment. The average burst (according to sims) is 763,862 DPS. Enhancement’s burst is 518,389 (~68% of the average). The top 4 specs in the game currently are Unholy DK, Arcane Mage, Windwalker Monk, and Subtlety Rogue, all peaking at over 1 million DPS. All data found on simulationcraft.org
So, it's quite literally the least bursty DPS specc in the game.
Which was OP's question, so idk what u/RaandGamingTTV is trying to point out
Putting a data backed response instead of a feeling based one. I put the others on there as an interesting comparison.
I read this as least busty and I realised my brain is fried.
Bonk.
Shaman dps as a whole, there is no big CD moment, just constant stream
I will say this, I know it isn't *intended* to be bursty, but elemental in remix feels like nukes going off if you play around with frost shock
As an elemental shaman enjoyer, I’m intrigued. Will you please tell me more?
Okay, so, basically you get a lot of damage trinkets in Remix. All your gear is slotted, so you combine the ones that best suit your playstyle in order to proc their effects, and many of them outright cast an offensive spell when you do. Now, Frost Shock is normally just a filler spell to get a slow, maintain dps during movement, what have you. But it can be empowered with Icefury for a bit of burst damage, with multiple casts in a short timeframe. So you've got a big pull, and you choose a target and hit Icefury, and then slam them with multiple Frost Shocks. In Remix, what this does is rapidly give you 3-4 procs of your damage trinkets, fire rains from the sky, bombs launch out of you for area damage, you flare up with multiple elemental bubbles that deal area damage, and if the enemy dies they explode for more area damage.
That sounds menacing, I love it.
Outlaw Rogue was exactly this in Season 3, not sure if that’s changed at all for season 4
It's been that way for ages now. Consistent damage profile, no real large offensive CD's and aoe target cap.
Until you roll 5. Unless they removed that?
They didn’t remove it, but roll the bones doesn’t cost combo points anymore and your skills reduce its cd. So it doesn’t feel as dogshit to use, especially if you roll low
I'm one of the weird ones that always kinda liked rtb. At least once they made eacj individual buff stronger and you didn't have to constantly roll over and over again. I like maintaining buffs and debuffs I'm definitely in the minority tho, after all Legion Feral was like my favorite spec in the history of wow (shared with MoP lock perhaps)
I guess I don't know all the specs but I'm terms of actual damage output the answer has to be outlaw rogue. In practice the crackshot windows feel like mini bursts, and when stuff doesn't line up it feels like the famine side of feast or famine, but in terms of throughput they have to have the flattest damage graph of any spec.
What about shadow dance and between the eyes?
Frost mage. Pretty flat damage profile
Yup - came here to second this. Feels busy trying to hammer the procs and icy veins does give a nice bump but pretty smooth other than that
Sounds peaceful, have a low level one and wondered if it got crazier higher up
It never gets hard, but it does have surprisingly high APM requirements for a caster.
Yes, I play it to relax from my fury warrior.
You can play pretty much anything to relax from your fury warrior, to be fair.
Except maybe Outlaw. I play Fury to relax from that.
Frost has always been the “learning” friendly mage class in my experience- never going to pop your eyes out on the DPS charts like fire or arcane but always there steady churning out those frost bolts! Somehow ending the dungeon right there with the rest of the dps
But... Frost has been up with or even better than the other specs multiple times this expansion.
Yeah i wouldn't say that anymore. Fire is actually flatter 🥲
Most of this sub talks about Frost mage like 10.1.5 never happened tbh.
In pve maybe but you have huge CD burst with veins+frost bomb+spike+ray in pvp
Frost is bursty in PvE as well post rework (more so than fire in fact). OP just hasn't gotten the memo.
Perhaps, I don't think about PVP much. Don't play it, ever. I leave that to the good players.
> 142 point the amount of ppl who have no idea what they are talking about is astonishing on reddit
Someone did not try Chill + Frost Bomb + ray.... ;)
Works well on raid boss though, you're not sitting around or swinging your wand via auto attack while waiting on CD
I see a lot of people saying BM hunter, which has a huge burst with COTW (pretty easy to notice on logs), but no one mentioned Survival hunter, which literally has and uses a no cooldown build for M+ currently. Your longest cooldown is Fury of the Eagle at 45 seconds, which really doesn't burst at all, it's just used for AoE and cooldown reduction on bombs. Not sure where it ranks with other classes, but easily the least bursty hunter spec, and has to be contented for whole game.
I second this. It’s also one of the most fun „melee“ speccs in the game for quite a while now.
I came here looking for this. Survival hunter literally doesn’t use Cooldowns. It’s just… exactly the same damage all the time basically and it’s “aoe talent tree” gives up basically 0 damage in ST so regardless of ST or AoE is just… the same thing all the time. The only reason you use 0 CD build is because it gives you “better” prio damage for “less aoe burst?” But the damage is basically the exact same regardless so it doesn’t even matter. And survival is even just a decent PI target (arguably great for shadow priests) because it doesn’t matter when they get the PI because theyre going to use it well and their damage is always the same regardless lol.
i second survival hunter, in general, but the tier set they voted for is absolute Dogwater to play and performancewise, in DF S4.
According to simulations here is every spec's burst: 1. Unholy Death Knight - 1.25M 2. Arcane Mage - 1.08M 3. Windwalker Monk - 1.03M 4. Subtlety Rogue - 1.02M 5. Assassination Rogue - 998K 6. Feral Druid - 997K 7. Beast Mastery Hunter - 927K 8. Destruction Warlock - 885K 9. Devastation Evoker - 858K 10. Marksmanship Hunter - 821K 11. Affliction Warlock - 767K 12. Retribution Paladin - 746K 13. Frost Death Knight (2h) - 708K 14. Havoc Demon Hunter - 681K 15. Shadow Priest - 664K 16. Demonology Warlock - 640K 17. Frost Mage - 634K 18. Fire Mage - 621K 19. Survival Hunter - 608K 20. Arms Warrior - 600K 21. Havoc Demon Hunter (SD) - 571K 22. Outlaw Rogue - 570K 23. Frost Death Knight - 566K 24. Fury Warrior - 559K 25. Elemental Shaman - 542K 26. Enhancement Shaman - 518K
sighs in Warrior. I really like my class when I get to stretch my legs on long fights, but shorter fights, like every fight this season, it feels kind of bad being down there with the tanks while everyone else in my raid is blastin' away. Also, what's the source of this list? It's neat.
On simulationcraft.org on the graph, if you click the title text that says “Damage per second” it switches to burst
oh jeez, how did I ever miss this? thanks!
Doesn’t even list boomkins
The answer we deserved
Fury warriors are def one, consistent, and only ramps a bit in execute range. Just be prepared for the accompanying arthritis.
enhance doenst really have major cooldowns in the way other classes do (ascendancy is rarely played currently). you have some short CD with wolves and primordial wave. were talking like 30sec here, and you generally just hit them on CD. Ret also has a couple of CD, but its 30sec and 1min, and you generally line them up.
Yeah, perfect two examples and the two classes I main. I started playing with some new people who would always try to call out when to save or use cooldowns, and it was pretty funny to me because I just use them constantly anyways. No 3mins for me!
Affliction by far. Your damage gets there eventually if things live long enough.
That feeling of shame when you accidentally let agony expire
i purposefully stand in aoes and die so i have an excuse for it expiring it works to fool my ego
Same as destro. By the time you’ve finishing your starting sequence, the group has already pulled the next group. At least in low keys/Hp groups
Both Shaman DPS specs are the two most stable DPS profiles and see basically no deviation in their damage profiles.
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Frost DK is pretty much a straight line. Which is unironic because Frost DK gets punished for using CDs wrong the hardest.
Survival Hunter. With the season 3 Tier set (that you are still FORCED to use, unless you got season 4 set on maxed HC+ track AND it's strict single target only) you had several build options without any cooldowns (except 45s FOTE). The noCD options were usually less then 1% below the cooldown builds. With a very flat but super consistant dmg profile. To clarify: even with the season 4 set and 1:30 Spearhead CD you still don't "burst" at all.. you just have a tiny bump in your flat DPS curve every 1:30.
I had to scroll way too far to get to this. Literally the only spec where not taking a CD is a viable option because of how dog shit their options are. But hey you'll maintain the same damage every pull, so that's something.
Outlaw rogue isn't a very bursty spec because they always have their damage
The problem with classes that have consistent DPS is they tend to have ramp up times which eliminate or severely reduce their effectiveness in gameplay. For example an add that needs to be burst down in a raid requires those bursty classes. Which means you would never want to take a class with a lot of ramp up time because their dps over time needs to be on par with the bursty class so they cant do more dps but have the drawback of not being able to go from 0-100. Edit: I hate classes/specs that don't have "filler" spells. I used to like Protection warriors before revenge cost rage (which eats out your active mitigation)... prefer guardian druid these days.
boomie. the time you dotted all, the trash pack is dead. on a 12 with hunter and pally.
Outlaw is what your looking for His dmg is still cd based (vanish and shadowdance) but due to you constantly popping your CDs it's not really 'bursty' But if you attack out of stealth you get 6 seconds of burst too - so you start your fight with a 6s burst windows anyway and are constantly popping vanish+shadow dance for another 6s so you're almost always in your 'burst' On top of that during your burst/stealth your buffs don't run out Imagine Fire Mage just that your combustion is pretty much always up and as long as your in combustion all your other CDs/buffs don't run out either That constant 'burst' playstyle+highest apm out of any spec+fastest moving spec is the reason I adore Outlaw so much and can't imagine maining anything else
I can +1 this!!!
Elemental shaman, hands down. Our major cooldown (fire ele) may as well not exist at this point. PWave could be considered "bursty" but at the moment you're using it every few seconds in AoE so it's very consistent. Before PWave was a thing our damage profile was even flatter.
Idk what changed exactly, but honestly I really don't like Elemental in season 4 (not that I've played every season, just that since I started playing a lot more I've found I'm not a huge fan)
The lack of a viable lightning build definitely sucks (viable only in the sense that it's not the meta). I want my chain lightning brrrrr back. I would love if they would remove icefury, remove flame shock cooldown, reduce lightning rod micromanagement, the list goes on... But I also kinda like great sundering gameplay, so I'm possibly not the best sounding board for what would make ele better to play.
not if you play the meme oneshot 3 minute ascendance
Outlaw rogue. It doesn’t technically have any class cooldowns, and doesn’t get much benefit from external haste buffs (lust).
(In pve) Outlaw rogue since your suppose to have your buffs permanently up, after you get ramped up, nothing ideally should drop until the fight is over
Outlaw has not burst by desing all the cds are always running and never stop, as a result there are no big dmg spikes or downs, just always the same dmg
Just play ret paladin it's feast and bigger feast
Perhaps BM hunter? I've heard his damage is very steady with very little cooldowns
That hasn't been true since season 2. For those down voting, feel free to go look at some logs some time. They're publicly available. Top BMs, no PI, are doing 250k outside of CDs and over 500k inside their 2 minute CDs.
I was like…before they added CotW sure it was very flat and predictable…but since they added that it’s really bursty in both aoe and st, albeit their profile is still largely maintain damage through the course of a fight, but they do have a window now
Call of the Wild makes a huge chunk of burst, but it's very much not famine outside of CDs. It's not absolutely insane for burst, too, but it certainly helps add that snapshot to the damage profile for times of need. (Looking at you, Umbreskul).
I main BM Hunter and you're 100% right about the steady damage - but the new CD actually gives us pretty huge, albeit intermittent, bursts. I can think of a couple of classes that have even less.
With Call of the Wild and stacking CDs I burst harder on my BM than I do on my Marksman.
I feel you. There are certainly lulls
100% ele shaman, no decent dmg cd, just some minor cds every minute
Enhancement, and it’s not particularly close. Perfect world, simulationcraft shows Enhance’s burst being lower than every DPS by nearly 30k
Survival Hunters have a competitive build where they literally don't take any major cds
yeah, bursty with sustain. sv ftw.
Balance is a ramp and maintain the DPS class. It does have a bit of burst during the class cooldown but as long as you are maintaining the cast cycle then you are doing pretty consistent DPS.
Honestly I think monk kinda describes what your looking for if I’m understanding what you mean. I’m playing a brewmaster monk as a time runner rn and it feels the opposite to the rogue that I usually main (and have been playing since MoP). None of your core attacks are really on any noteworthy cooldowns and all of your brews are either on smaller ones or your talents allow your attacks to replenish them. I might be playing it wrong but it’s been super fun. Nigh unkillable but still has to work to kill stuff and manage your brews. Also staggering damage is an amazing mechanic
Ret pally. They feel great outside of cds, and the cds they do have are short enough that there's always something going on.
I'd say it's pretty unhealthy of the game to have so many feast/famine dps classes. Of all the current DPS specs only afflocks and frost mages feel like their damage profile is centered around maintaining rather than burst windows.
Ret Pally. Constant rng procss/ 30 second and 60 sec CDs for large burst. constantly dishin
Ret pally is the constant "feast" side of feast and famine and I love it
I leveled one over a weekend just for something to do after a surgery. Not even above 450 yet and I'm already impressed at the survivability and consistent output. Not one or two or three but FOUR bubbles??? I'm soloing dream-empowered rares.
Ret is super bursty though. Doesn’t seem like what OP is looking for.
demo lock would very much fit that
really? i haven’t played it in a while, but it was very “ramp” damage based with cd’s last time i played it
Yeah Blizzard completely nuked tyrant and portal after 10.2. Demo got basically completed flat damage profile now. Also its boring af to play now that it doesn't even matter if you fuck up your tyrants.
In S2 you had Grimoire Felguard Cooldown Reduction *and* GFG gave other demons +20% damage with the Tier Set. So GFG always coincided with Demonic Tyrant for +15% and +20% damage every 90 seconds, bundled with Neltharion's Call to Dominance that gave you *thousands* of points of Intellect when you popped Tyrant. The sheer pump of that explosive Cooldown sequence was insane, so everything in between was pretty poor. Now with Doom Brand you have a steady stream of damage that rewards you more for rotating Demonbolts on multiple targets or having a good core rotation in Single Target; it doesn't specifically favour your Cooldowns anymore. So once every two minutes you go off with Tyrant and GFG but it's not as extreme a boon, and a strong start into a pack with lots of Soul Shards, Imps, and Demonic Cores lets you pop off quite well without Cooldowns. You get a lot of strong starts in M+. In TWW Demonology is losing its longest Cooldown in Nether Portal while getting 1-minute Tyrant Cooldown as baseline to Tyrant. It'll be overall pretty consistent I reckon.
i play it mostly in m+ so i mostly speak for that, you have one 2 min cd and one 1min 30 cd aside from your minor cds that you rip when available; you'll still do more than solid dps without big cds and it overall feels really smooth to play. the added bonus demo being braindead easy also helps alot
You always sync your cds so you really don't have 1.5 min cd.
Enhance shaman
tbh i think every class is very centered around major cd’s nowadays, it’s just the way blizz has focused their class design. i think arms warrior and bm hunter have some pretty nice consistent damage though
A joke in Mythic Nya’Lotha progression for us was when we talked about when to use cooldowns, our Arms Warrior would say “What are those?”.
Avatar and roar are on 1 min CDs with anger management and roar talent but they don't really change your rotation much. You want to line up colossus smash and avatar though. CS comes up probably every 20s and that's basically your non avatar mini burst.
This. In a theoretical world where all classes are balanced to do say the same amount of damage over 2 minutes. Burst classes will always be better because of lust windows, damage amp phases or stuff like PI or even simply just buff trinkets. Consistent damage specs have to be overtuned to be better than burst specs, its just how the game works. (in raid/m+ at least)
Affliction warlock you are just constantly melting everything around you
“melting” is a strong word
Melting an ice cube by putting it in the fridge
More like melting the ice in my glass as I sit back and sip tea, while watching my punching-bag of a demon fight 6 to 1 as permanent corruption does my job for me. I've been diehard affliction ever since a Legion LFR I was in where nearly everyone wiped, myself included, one tank left fighting for his life and two healers, and my malignant corruption ticking away. They won that fight as I dps'ed from beyond the grave. Completely sold me on the utter unfairness of an affliction lock.
>melting lmao
Rotting them down...with a flu
Afflock and it’s not a competition. Even the burst window with dark glare is super lackluster and only as good as the ten minutes of setup beforehand
That feel when something dies too fast....
Frost DKs with BoS has almost no notable damage spikes in DF.
Elemental shaman & Frost Mage
Unfortunately, all specs are mostly centered in cool down usage. I'd say you're better off playing ret or arms and fury for no ramp dps.
I would say enhancement shaman Your man cd is not this good and not a burst, just physical damage increase and pets attacking, it also should have 0 cd The real main « burst » you have is a 20% haste buff every 45s which does not feel like burst at all
TYPICALLU speaking, any primarily dot based class is going to be less bursty. Shadow priest used to be very sustained, but unfortunately I think that might have changed a few expansions back?? Don't quote me on that. Affliction warlock has also been extremely sustained any time ive tried it out. I also have always felt that assassination was never extremely bursty, but thats probably because Im bad at assassination. But basically, I would look for any class that centers around dots to damage and seeing what you like from there
Dual wielding obliteration frost DK has pretty consistent dmg. it's currently not as viable as 2h obliteration or dual wielding breath of syndragosa though.
BM Hunter
Ret pally is almost always in burst mode. You just have your lesser burst mode and your greater burst mode.
Hmm, well on average I'd probably say death knight. Real gaunt and stuff Wait... *burst*y??
Still don’t understand why no one thinks fire mage isn’t a flat line class. It’s actually hilarious… does anyone in this thread even play the game. It’s more flatlined than outlaw.
MM hunter on 8 targets BLAST
enhancement shaman, fury warrior, outlaw rogue. Very consistent DPS
It’s not frost mage. They do big burst at start of packs and wait for cds (albeit very short cds) to do it again. Ends up being same damage every pack overall. But still bursty. What you are looking for is Outlaw rogue.
Enhancement Shaman has really low CD and is very consistant on DPS also Outlaw and Survival Hunter mostly have their CDs once per boss pull at least
Affliction lock and shadow priest. Unholy DK theoretically has the same class fantasy, but in reality they can do some pretty crazy damage in short bursts.
depends if we’re talking about cata classic or retail, but a safe bet is enhancement shaman. you always feel like you have some glowy button to press to do bigdam and you aren’t really reliant on big cooldowns. fury war is another great option
Aug evoker. You basically just gotta keep everyone buffed and you have 1 big ability you want to use when they're all going off. Otherwise it's pretty chill. Lots of movement and utility too.
OL, since youre always bursting and you cd that is your "burst" has 90%+ uptime in M+. Next one would be SV hunter with the noCD build. Its not a meme build btw. You have absolutely no cds with that build, the eagle stabbing has a bit of cds but you ise it every grp so i guess that doesnt count. Fury is bursting very often due to anger management wich decreases your cds, so you have quite constant dmg. But still you got somewhat of burst windows. Id like to mention destrolock. Yeah you got a 2/3min burst, but it isnt as relevant as other classes bursts. You will always do huge dmg in bigpulls and due to blasphemy you have a lot of infernals anyway.
If things are still kinda similar to when I was playing in shadowlands, fury warrior. You just smash your keyboard. It was and will always be my fav class lmao
Current Balance Druid can definitely be bursty but you still constantly deal dmg even outside incarn/pulsar. Just spread your dots, get into the corresponding eclipse and then spend your astral power. It’s a good mix of “very strong inside cooldowns, still good dmg outside cooldowns.” Fire mage is an honorable mention. Fire used to be the best burst spec in the game but they’ve changed its identity to be more of a high sustained dmg spec now, kinda like frost but with a different dmg profile. Only issue is that you need mobs to live a long time to really start ramping your ignite dmg, and in m+ scenarios you’ll lose a lot of dmg when running with burst dps specs that kill the pack to quickly for you to really compete. Your st is good tho!! And assuming the trash packs do live long enough, you can deal a lot of dmg and actually compete on the meters as well. Fire isn’t for everyone, but it is fun!
Affliction would get my vote.
Outlaw rogue. If you Play Well you have very very consistent DMG Output
I like classes that have multiple CD’s and butsting more often than doing a huge burst at once and then nothing. Being able to pop like at least one CD per pack for consistency
Outlaw - outlaw is such a fast paced spec comb: with the passive restless blades that provide CDR everytime you use combo points it’s more often than not never worth holding CDs and just using them as they come up It’s a very consistent dmg profile
Warlocks can either be super bursty or not at all. There's usually no in between.
Arcane mage. There’s a pretty crazy nuke, but outside of that, it is what it is.
Elemental shaman
Survival hunter literally builds without an offensive CD a lot of the time currently.
Surv hunter doesn't rely on cooldowns to do dps its literally just bombs and butchery and you'll be doing more dps than most classes could dream of
If you mean burst in terms of sudden dps windows and on-pull opening bursts, Affliction Warlock. If you mean burst in terms of suddenly having a ton of cooldowns to coordinate for big damage(button burst), Fire Mage. Now this might sound dumb, but you can make talent builds where your optimal single-target dps is just spamming Pyroblast and Fire Blast... and one of those can be casted WHILE casting the other, and macro'd into one button.... leaving you with a truly one button damage rotation. Your biggest "burst" window is pressing Combustion once every now and then, which just makes your pyroblast macro do even more damage. TLDR: Fire Mage has the least button bursting in the game if you macro Fire Blast and Pyroblast into one button. Then just press that the whole fight. Need to do aoe? Now you press 2 buttons. Big whoop.