Ok so I’ve been playing affliction a bit in shadowlands and there are some good points and some bad points about this.
To start off and the biggest factor here is, why does it even have a soul shard system? What I mean by this is that I believe it would feel effectively no different to play if it just had no soul shards, using shadowbolt and haunt to deal damage rather than malefic rapture which could just be a basic cooldown for higher damage. This is important because if you are going to have a system, then that system needs to make sense and have a real purpose which currently with affliction the systems only purpose is to lower your damage when you don’t have shards available which in my opinion is not a very good basis for a system, it is also a build up and burst system that is not within the players control which i also do not find good.
Other than my issue with the soul shards, the overall gameplay is rather good, the spec applies DoTs and maintains them and has a few ways of changing the priority of things or making it harder or easier to do so, however i have some balance concerns with phantom singularity however being simply too strong vs the other options as free damage leading down the road of why would you not always take this.
Currently I use the full centre column with demon skin, this gives a good mix of burst and sustained damage although I am now considering adding siphon life with the new perpetual explosion legendary but this pushes into what I said about the soul shards, if they were not there then this would be easy enough to do but as it stands I have more or less ran out of reasonable keybinds to do this which wouldn’t be the case without malefic rapture.
The talents seem to actually sync with one another as well as the baseline which is something that doesn’t exist on death knight for example.
Overall affliction is a fun spec to play with different ways to interact with the spec but with some minor technical confusions within, the spec is good but it also feels that the spec would be better without the additional unnecessary system holding it back, for context, with withering bolt added, shadow bolt and malefic rapture are now performing more or less the same general role anyway making malefic rapture rather unnecessary in comparison to just having a stronger basic shadowbolt.