Dark Aggravation not working as intended?

Originally posted by Hina

For whatever reason, soe made this work so that its based on spell cast, rather than targets hit, so on single targets, you are more likely to see it proc, which is rather unfortunate considering the nice DPS we gain if it hits multiple targets.

As for the AOE portion, I havent fully figured out how it works-- it's either buggy or just has a strange rule-set. First, like others said, when you hit a mob and it dies from the initial hit, the AOE portion doesnt work. Also, i could be wrong on this, but it seems that unless targets in AOE are already engaged, it will not hit them. Meaning that if the mob is rooted in the middle of a bunch or other mobs and I hit DA, the AOE portion wont agro mobs in AOE. Likewise, on grey mobs, I wont get adds from hitting it. I could be 100% wrong on this, its just what i noticed, it could also be a bug.

The majority of the warlock community would appreciate you looking into this as we don't feel it is working as intended. Thank you

,Naeca

Biggest issue I see with this is triggering the damage itself once target has been infected.

Being Taunted / Detaunted, target moves out of sight, out of range, caster is stifled/stunned/mezzed, a random target in the encounter is the infected one etc etc can all prevent this going off and when its such a low chance of proccing in the 1st place it makes the whole aa less valuable than it should be.

In my opinion once the target is infected you should be able to just detonate it without having to target it. Of course range, and control effects can still stop this being cast within the small duration of the infection but it at least stops a 5% chance of doing this becoming in actuality a less than 1% chance

2 things should be changed. First it should be triggered by mobs hit, not spells cast. This is an aoe spell that is only available 10% of the time for ae fights as most mobs are long dead by time this thing triggers. Secondly it should ALWAYS proc the ae portion of it, even when the initial tick kills a mob, this is another thing that negates this spells ability to be an ae spell.

The AE portion also has a rather pitiful AE range.

Am i the only one that's quiet happy how its working atm...
Well procing it maybe hard for instances because fights are going way to quick with a strong setup like 20-30 mins cella run...
But for raids especially on named fights its doing great with some luck and some casting speed help like UT or TC i landed it
between 7-12 times on some fights according to fight time. Another issue is why propagation line not affecting dark
aggravation... The thng is it would be so pwrfull.

Trick is try to max out your casting speed or make it up to %75-80 solo at least so with the buffs i mentioned you can
get the extreme efficiency from that spell. Also make sure that u cast your dark pyre and acid everytimethey come up.
quick casting skills like dark pyre,acid,aura of void, plaguebringer will make it proc much more.
Btw im just curious is it dark aggravation itself making it proc much more.. it seems like dark aggravation has procing
itself %30 chance or so.

I did some test with procs and i chaincasted our lvl 2 cataclysm spell on 8 training dummies. i chain casted that spell for a good 9 min so a total of about 80 casts and 80x8 hits on the dummies (had no resists).
not only i had zero, not even one ! proc of dark infestation but when i checked ACT i noticed also that many of my procs didnt even trigger once.
zero torrent procs (from T1 raid robe)
zero pestilential rain proc ( from BG boots)
zero gravity flux proc (or whatever the name is on the staff from erudin palace, that was the proc i was trying to parse in the first place since i play on the french server Storm and the translation on that proc was messed up)
mystical chaos (sp?) proced fine (from staff and jewelery)
aftershock proced fine.
i did some other test with our "green" ae spells and they are procing everything just fine, so im guessing only "blue" ae spells have that problem.
So... i dont get it ! why is one of our main ae spell (even better than apocalypse in the case of non linked encounters) nerfed to the point where it doesnt even proc one of our AA endline? no wonder i dont see much dark infestation procs during AE encouters half the spells i cast cant even proc it !

Blue AE will only proc (any triggered effect) off of the target when that is the direct target.
Green AE will proc these things because it is working as if you had 5 direct targets since 1 of them MUST be selected in order to use the spell.
Hence, no, you will not see Cataclysm proc item or spell triggers on all targets (we wish!). Nor will it proc a number of other effects such as you list. Except on the single mob which is directly targeted, in which case it acts as a direct damage DoT only for that mob, so it only triggers for that one mob, and only on the first tick, as all DoT's operate. Thus, if you are standing in the middle of a group of training dummies without anything targeted, you will never see any procs -- as you have discovered. If you target one, you may see it proc off that one which you have targeted.
Exceptions are: Gift (which is a self buff and so procs), Curse (a group buff, and so procs), or Netherrealm (which is an AE proc field in and of itself).
I don't know the mechnics behind Mystic Chaos and Aftershocks, or why they proc when other things don't, unless they operate in an AE field the same way Netherrealm does, in a fashion, I only know that this has been the general mechanic for a long, long time.
It's been this way since day 1. It's just not noticed, much.
That's what the entire thread is about.

(Actually, back in 2005 when DoF was released, they did alter the mechanic to where it proc'd off of targets hit under AE, every tick. The trick was something like Maelstrom - which had a damage component at the time - along with Abhorrence and Netherrealm, and it proc'd literally a screen full of orange numbers and lagged everyone to hell in raids, lol. But the damage was nice!)

Ara

I'd actually been wondering if there had been a ninja-fix to it. No numbers. Just anecdotal. I'd been playing other characters for a while since they fixed resists in BGs which is where I'd been running my warlock a lot. Anyway, just this last weekend I felt like running some BGs again and went in with him. DA seemed to proc a lot more to me than it had before. Also, I had fewer issues with the "find the target" to cast it on issue. (Almost none.) Anybody else notice any change for the better? Did I miss a patch note somewhere along the way? Maybe the RNG proc god was just with me.

It's hard to say. This past couple of days it seems to proc a lot more for me but I wonder if it isn't due to some other buff stacking in groups.

Ara

Biggest irritation with this ability in my opinion is the need for it to be maintained on an enemy to cast, rather than for it to be triggered by it proccing off the player themself. I've had it proc on an encounter and then have to manually target a different enemy because one of the encounter members, coincidentally the one I had targeted originally resisted it while it landed on the rest of the encounter. If it lands at all, I should be able to trigger it using my current target as the AOE source.

Araxes@Antonia Bayle wrote:

I redid my test with 8 non linked heroic dummies (after they fixed the procs they broke with the LU 56).
I made sure i had a dummi targeted during the 7 min it took me to cast cataclysm about 65 times :
Still no torrent proc nor pestilential rain proc and of course NO dark infestation procs.

Well im surprised nobody esle find stupid that our endline AA doesnt proc off our blue aes.

Edit : looks like torrent /pestilential rain are still broken and only proc from melee attacks, so i cant tell if catacysm can proc them.

Personally I think the whole mechanic of this AA is stupid to start with. I think we are the only class who has no control over when we can cast our biggest AOE hit and its still rare as hell on multiple mobs.
We are supposed to be the top dps for aoe fights yet with this broken mechanic Conjurors will outparse us because of them being able to choose when to cast theirs and get the most from it.

The idea behind it is a good fit for a warlock but its just not practical and benefits us far less than the other end lines benefit other classes. Stop with the messing about with procs and turn it into a castable spell so we actiually get some use out of it rather than it failing to trigger, triggering when the mob is about to die so we dont have time to trigger it, being unable to trigger due to target force, taunts, LOS etc.

Its supposedly got a 5% chance to trigger but taking all the circumstances where you can fail to trigger the actual damage that are totally out of your control its much less.

Fix this please so we can fill our role in raids as its not like we bring utility to the raids like soem other dps

anyone know? max target of overflow portion? and range? I'm woundering

Would be wonderful to know if the devs are looking into this issue.

As far as I know Warlocks are the only class who have no control over their endline AA and its obviously broken as it might proc once in 100 aoe fights but procs about the right amount on single target totally defeating its purpose and wasting most of the dmg. Lately I have even had a few fights where its triggered on a single mob fight only to get the message your target needs to be infected so I couldnt trigger.
This needs looking into as its obviously broken in its current form.

Would it be too much to ask to simply make DA a passive proc that triggers 5% of the time for the same (or even a little less) AoE damage that it currently does?
The current means of triggering DA may have been devised with the best intentions, but the actual results are impractical.
While proceeding through our casting order, we shouldn't have to keep an eye on the maintained window just in case DA triggers, only then to hope that the mob we currently have targetted was the one infected.
The only real situation in which DA is remotely practical is against epicx4 mobs, when there is actually time to get the spell off before the encounter is dead.

Any possible chance this has even been looked at by a dev? Also does our agonizing death SF aa work yet?

Hy there,

i'm german so .. sorry for bad english German side for Warlocks are dead so i try it here ...
The 5% chance for trigger isn't working right.i spend some hours on the epic training dummy with spell casting.
First to say, some spells have a large reuse timer so i must test, if the proc does work on autoattacks and Procs from gear. Epic Dummy for one hour autoattcked and zero Proc. (i read the logfiles .. "your target has been infected by ...." none ! zero

I test the Epic Dummy on autoattack and only one spell per parserlog. (thats the reason for autoattack testing befor).
the followed list's display's needed number's of casting to get 1 proc. All spells are Xpert.

Acid = 37 hits
Dark Pyre = 35 hits
Flames of Velious = 40 hits (bad reuse *ZZzzzZZ*)
Thunderclap = 22 hits
Dissolve = 36 hits (fast reuse so i test it 108 hit's and 3 Proc's)
It's ... 37+35+40+22+36 = 170 / 5 (procs) = 34 cast's needed for one proc of SF special. it's a ~2,9% Proc Chance.

The german Spell discription: Has a %5 chance to Proc on every hostile Spell...must be wrong ...
and by the Way .. i buffed "Propagation" the 4% extra chance for proc's don't work on this Spell .. why ?

Next test on epic Dummy 361 hits (only single Damagespells without dot's) get's 10 Infected procs for our SF spell ...

So pls Dev's take a look on it
Hope u don't get Eye cancer to read my text
greetz from germany mR_vAiN

Hello anything? Even a "we'll take a look at it"? This is supposed to be our big hitting end-line for this expansion, and it has such a low proc rate, it can get resisted, its buggy and you have to directly target the infected enemy sometimes, and it can also get stripped by raid bosses who dispel their debuffs!

Before reading this thread I was wondering if I should steal of AA from PB and some endline SF points just to fast track myself to get DA but I'm thankful I haven't. =)

I finally got enough AA's to spec in to this AA and I am decidedly underwhelmed by it.
I will admit, that in the (exceedingly rare) situations where it procs and you cast it and it does its full AE it's really nice. The problem is that "(exceedingly rare)" part of that last sentence.
If it truly is supposed to proc 5% of the time, that translates to a normalized 1.8x per minute, does it not? Why can't it simply be castable on a 30s recast timer then? Why does it need to be random chance?
I am also in complete agreement that we need to either be able to detonate it at will, or barring that, it should function like Netherealm does -- affect all mobs within a radius and can be detonated by hitting any of those mobs. The trigger should not be resistable either, though I suppose the damage portion could be at standard resist rates. Though since it's an AA endline ability, I don't think it would be a bad idea to make it either harder to resist or simply irresistable.
Or simplify it and simply make it a blue AE nuke centered on target with a 30s re-cast. That'd really be the most ideal situation. As it is, it's a very frustrating spell/AA to have. A nice little bonus for the (exceedingly rare) times it works, but not reliable enough to be anything other than that.