Affliction
Unstable Affliction and Seed of Corruption are returning as Afflictionâs main Soul Shard spenders. Malefic Rapture solved a lot of issues that plagued Affliction towards the end of Battle for Azeroth, however, placed a lot of emphasis on rotational setup and increased its overall complexity. Malefic Rapture constantly poses the question âwhen should I spend my Soul Shards?â and itâs difficult to answer given how many factors impacted its throughput. Additionally, each new damage-over-time (DoT) effect added to Afflictionâs arsenal subsequently diluted the throughput of Malefic Rapture which makes it feel less impactful in settings with multiple targets. While we could have easily reduced the number of effects impacting Malefic Rapture, we wanted the answer to the question of Soul Shard spending to be ânowâ most of the time, outside of pooling for Darkglare.
Overall, we want less conditionals to affect Afflictionâs throughput to reduce setup time, increase consistency, and add clarity to when a spell should be cast. For example, Shadow Embrace has been removed, and the damage increase Unstable Affliction provided prior to Shadowlands via its Contagion talent has been omitted. Both effects further dilute the throughput of Affliction and intrude on the identity of Haunt which is to signify a priority target.
Now, to address the elephant in the room: Vile Taint. While many specializations have tools to solve DoT application, DoTs do not define their moment-to-moment gameplay and shouldnât as that is the realm of Affliction. Agony would lose a lot of texture, and throughput, if its application played out in a similar way to Corruption. In addition, there is less emphasis on having every target afflicted with Agony with the removal of Malefic Rapture as your spenderâs throughput is no longer dependent on having Agony active. Since Vile Taint cannot maintain Agony on its own, weâve removed it and replaced it with Shared Agony â an effect similar to Balance Druidâs Twin Moons. This gives us a controlled, tunable method of scaling Agony application in multi-target situations that maintains the core, DoT-centric gameplay of Affliction.
Lastly, we are introducing a new 1 minute cooldown: Dark Harvest. This is an experimental channeled spell that mirrors Malefic Rapture in some ways but instead of scaling per DoT it only needs a single DoT to maximize its throughput. Let us know what you think about this new cooldown and the other changes to Afflictions as weâre excited to hear your thoughts!
Demonology
Our first goal for Demonology as we move into Midnight is to address Demonologyâs reliance on addons to monitor Wild Imp energy to make decisions on when to cast spells like Implosion, Power Siphon, and Summon Demonic Tyrant. To accomplish this, we are removing the energy component from Wild Imps which means that Wild Imps will be around much longer (40 seconds) before disappearing. In efforts to prevent many Wild Imps from running around, we are adding a limit to how many Wild Imps you can have summoned at once that can be increased via multiple talents.
Secondly, we want to take a hard look at Demonologyâs ramp time and make adjustments to the number of casts or cooldowns needed to execute high throughput. Itâs also important that each spell can stand on its own and doesnât feel like it exists purely for Demonic Tyrant. Some examples of changes made in service of this goal are: Vilefiend has been folded into Summon Dreadstalkers in the form of a high-level talent and Grimoire: Felguard has been removed.
Lastly, we want to provide better onboarding for new or returning players wanting to play Demonology. Upon reaching level 10, a slew of new spells would fly to your action bar without much explanation and the spells you had used prior were either changed or are now sub-optimal (looking at you, Corruption). Additionally, itâs never communicated to the player of how powerful Summon Felguard is compared to your other demons. To address these problems, we have moved several baseline abilities to the talent tree to reduce confusion and smooth out early leveling.
These changes make up a huge shift in Demonologyâs gameplay, so please let us know your thoughts! Weâll continue to iterate based on our own playtesting and your feedback.
Destruction
Overall, weâre fairly happy with the current state of Destruction. That said, we did want to make some changes going into Midnight to streamline its gameplay and reduce the amount of conditional power Destruction relies on, such as temporary damage windows or maintenance buffs.
As a Destruction Warlock, we want your Chaos Bolt and Rain of Fire spells to feel impactful and to accomplish that we need to cut a lot of the temporary increases so we can move that power into those spells baseline. Now that a lot of those effects have been trimmed, we can make tuning adjustments based on data provided through testing and feedback.
