Affliction much needed changes

[Lolth-twisting-nether]

Affliction has been left behind in terms of qol changes. Here are some suggestions:

Seed of corruption and soul rot radius increase. Like we saw in rwf from THD playing affliction in gally, he casted seed on adds and had corruption spread on a single add, even worse if he tied to cast seed on boss, then no adds got corruption, this feels just bad.

Ideally remove the shard cost and maybe even the cast time of seed and make it do no damage. Taking shadow priest as an example of dot spreading with shadow crash which spreads both its dots.
We have vile taint and seed doing the same job as shadow crash while costing 2 shards and 2 casts.

Vile taint shouldn’t remove curses with curse of exhaustion. It take away from pre applying curses, which already is a lackluster utility in m+.

Phantom singularity negative haste scaling is a relic of the past and probably also the cooldown needs to either become 1min like soul rot, or even bring it down to 30s for faster cycles.

Tormented crescendo played a big role when Dread Touch was still in the game to provide constant shards so we could maintain it, now it feels like all the extra malefic raptures muddy the actual damage of shards. A good replacement is soul harvester’s “Shadow of Death” talent which gives 3 shards when soul rot is cast. It performs a similar job without making us so dependent on our filler, which in turn makes us even less mobile.

Probably the next suggestions aren’t exactly qol, but I do think they are needed:

Our damage is too dependent on our 1min cooldowns, so many talents/abilities on top each other like soul rot, Phantom singularity, Infirmity, malign omen etc. A small suggestion is to remove the extra damage from malign omen and make it give us instant malefic raptures for a limited number or time, maybe even combine it with dark harvest. That would make more sense if Tormented crescendo was gone too.

So, affliction as a dot spec in a pure dps class, needs a niche that isnt as specific as now. At the moment we can do well spread council fights, which is barely one fight per tier, if that, and fights that have adds spawn on or near a boss which ideally dont die too fast, so we can take advantage of dark harvest and/or cull the weak. In my opinion that is too rare. And to add to that affliction as most dot spec suffers from switching targets to kill something fast.
A good solution would be to make affliction the de facto warlock single target spec. Then you could maybe at least excuse the bad prio damage.
Also to alleviate a bit of the prio target switching problems I would suggest to make unstable affliction apply agony and corruption if cast on a target with unstable affliction.

[Xanatas-nemesis (Xanatas)]

hello, there are several problems in the current affliction as unfortunately only many of us see excluding the developers and some warlocks who like the current dynamics. I’m quite old school playing since vanilla the warlock, so I consider affliction as explained in the same description of blizzard “a master of shadow specialized in drains and damage over time”.

There are several abilities with a decidedly old design that do not fit with the current game speed, for example seed of corruption which not only requires a long cast time but also a detonation time and the use of a shard to make sure we don’t miss anything.

Instead of such a mechanic, and to avoid using several redundant spells and useless CDs, one could very simply incorporate the vile taint/phantom singularity/soul rot/seed of corruption into a single instant+shard spell similar to impending catastrophe from the venthyr covenant in shadowlands. I find it absurd that practically every class can press a simple button or two to deal incredible, instantaneous damage, debuffing if necessary, while an affliction must use an excessive amount of spells to not have the same performance.

The current affliction burst is one of the reasons why I struggle to use it, it would be enough to go back to the old darksoul: misery with extension and enhancement of the dots and increase of haste, without the octopus with the laser beams.

Another perennial problem is the malefic rapture. If they really don’t want to eliminate it as a spell, it would be appropriate for it to be a very strong instant proc but one that does not involve in spamming. For personal taste I would also like a name change, in shadowy implosion and that it worked a bit like the old conflagrate (when it was very powerful) but based on the number of dots.

I would like the dots to do a lot of damage, but to avoid multidotting and class balance issues it would be enough for the dots themselves on a target during soul drain or haunt to receive a very large buff. We could resume the old dynamic of malefic grasp in soul drain, with the dots sped up (and strengthened).

Nightfall should allow you to cast Drain Soul on the move, and for the Drain Tank thing in PvP/PvE it would be appropriate to go back to the inevitable demise, not excessively powerful like in the past but not non-existent like now either. Or it could become an instant spell + soul shard with a CD that transfers health to the warlock while damaging the target. This would allow the mysterious “draintank” that hasn’t existed for a long time

On the soul shards front: soul recovery should also work during soul drain channeling and not just with agony, so that every tick has a chance to give back a shard perhaps using the SOC system.

Soul shards should no longer be used for malefic rapture/shadowy implosion, but for haunt, impendig catastrophe, aoe curses, soul burn. The syphon life talent makes no sense as it is designed, it would be enough to give a flat % of leech.

I’ll end this wall of text by adding that it would have been fantastic and very useful a PvP or PvE talent, Suppression, that incapacitates the target while damaging it similar to the shaman’s lasso. It’s an idea I’ve had for several years, unfortunately they thought of giving it elsewhere

[Zippi-draenor]

I think removing Inevitable Demise was a big mistake and it would fit like a glove to soul harvester hero talent. If the self healing was the issue it could be turned into mass drain soul instead.
Another big issue is Vile Taint being target capped which hurts the spec a lot in m+ but I don’t think it can be fixed as long as malefic rupture stays.
Also Hellcaller’s shard regen feels very clunky rotational wise.