Well, yes but it shouldn’t be that big of a deal if it was old Affli (pre-BFA or even pre-Legion). The main reason why is that the spec was not only more straight forward with how it dealt damage but also it actually did something without a long ramp up. Right now it’s even clunky in PvE. It’s literally 13 buttons builder to them damp your resource on spender. It would require Affli to stand still. Old Affli literally casted UA, Haunt and the only other dots it had were Agony and Corruption. In a meanwhile you just added few ticks of Soul Drain. Imo they have to simplify it’s rotation and get rid of Malefic Rapture. Otherwise this spec will never be good.
Regarding defence it’s the most squishy Warlock spec while it’s the dampen one. Maybe only Affli Dark Regeneration back would be good.
It was nice for RBGs indeed. But I think pre-Legion version was even nicer to play. It wasn’t extremely broken but still really good and effective. You applied UA, Agony And Corruption. Then you could Soul Swap them with no CD. Once you had all dots you casted Soulburn Haunt to increase all your dot damage by 20% and then other Haunts on the other targets. You could pop Dark Soul then and Soul Drain. Life Drain dealt almost no damage but healed for a lot.
In MoP it was even more complex as there was snapshotting still. So you wanted to cast your dots during CDs or trinket/weapon enchant procs and then extend them as long as possible.
If you compare Lock’s defence back then also you had Unending Resolve, Dark Bargain, Dark Transformation and Soul Link on top of it. This might be too much but Affli seems to be too squishy now against physical damage.
Yea, there were times it felt nicer to play for sure. I just felt seed of corruption procs felt good even in arenas because it removed one of the GCDs with applying corruption when you just spread it with seed x)
But I do feel Aff prob need some kind of rework so its not fully depending on dampening if they want the game to be fast.
Indeed thanks to snapshotting it was extremely cool in MoP and even though Soulburn + Soulswap applied all dots instantly it required a lot of skill and focus to maintain strongest snapshotted dots. It was unique and complex playstyle by itself. They made it simplier in WoD but still fine imo.
Imo there are two solutions. Either bring back WoD if they want to get rid of snapshotting or bring back snapshotting as unique mechanic for Affli.