I’m having a ton of fun with Season of Discovery so far. One of my favorite ways to play DPS in WoW is however with DoTs and I feel like you’ve forgotten a bit about this aspect in the game. The Warlock Affliction runes are very disappointing and it seems like you’re heavily pushing us to go into burst/nuke builds. Let’s give some love to DoTs too! Many of the old runes are borderline useless so I think we can revamp a few of them.
I have some suggestions, just for the fun of it.
Rune of Stacking; Every DoT effect you apply to the target increases the damage of all Damage over Time effects by 5-10%
This rune would be a definite DPS boost which Affliction really needs. But more importantly from a gameplay perspective, it incentivizes spending time to apply your vast array of DoTs. Applying Corr + CoA + Siphon Life + Drain Life + Immolate is a mess in dungeons. We almost never “get to” apply CoA since we have curses, but this way, we could have some reward from playing the 3D chess of applying all the different assymetric duration DoTs we have + fillers.
Everlasting Affliction (old); Drain Life, Drain Soul, Shadowbolt, Shadow Cleave, Searing Pain, Incinerate, and Haunt refresh the duration of your Corruption on the target back to its maximum duration.
EXTRA; Every time you refresh Corruption with Everlasting affliction, Corruption will spread to a nearby target engaged in combat but not under the effect of a crowd control ability. If Corruption is already applied and no other curse is active, Curse of Agony will instead be applied.
Affliction has very limited AoE capabilities. While this will not be a major gamechanger in terms of AoE DPS at all, it will help boost our numbers in AoE situations and save some GCD’s. Also it’s really fun spreading DoTs around.
Soul Siphon (old); Increases the amount drained by your Drain Life and Drain Soul spells by an additional 6% for each of your Warlock Shadow effects afflicting the target, up to a maximum of 18% additional effect.
This is a rune that nobody in their right mind would ever take since it competes with Master Channeler. I’d like it if this rune instead made Drain Life into the new DPS filler for Affliction. That way, Master Channeler would be a tank/pvp/heal choice whilst this would be the DPS choice. I’m not sure exactly how, but here’s a suggestion;
Soul Siphon (new); Your Drain Life spell is replaced with “Consume afflictions”; Channeled ability that deals Shadow DPS roughly equal to spamming Shadow Bolt. (doesn’t heal you anymore). Every time Consume Afflictions deals damage, a random DoT effect that you have applied to the target instantly ticks, reducing the remaining duration but instantly applying the damage/healing of a tick.
I think this spell really fits with the Affliction theme. It will also force us to pay attention and reapply DoT’s which will be running out at seemingly random intervals. I also think the Invocation rune you added to the Belt also plays well with this ability since it makes reapplying our DoTs more forgiving.
Anyway, my two cents. FEel free to add suggestions of your own. I think some of these ideas would make Affliction and DoT builds more fun to play. Thanks for reading!