It is absolutely atrocious. While it had some neat ideas on the side and a fun Artifact, Legion Affliction’s core was the worst state Affliction has ever had. There’s a reason why it was the shortest lived major iteration of the spec, lasting only two expansions. Having your iconic dot serve the spender role means you don’t have UA up when you’re out of shards or have to pool shards for burst windows. Which means that THE original dot spec of the game has two core rotation dots.
Malefic Rapture was great. It solved Blizzard’s obsession of suddenly realizing that a dot spec deals dot damage and therefore can do council fights really effectively six months into the expansion and then doing the usual dance of knee-jerks nerfs that left the spec handicapped for entire tiers, if not the rest of the expansion.
It also solved Affliction’s identity issue in contrast to other dot specs, in that for being one it doesn’t interact with their own dots in any way. Without it Aff just throws the dots and that’s it. By tying Grasp’s scaling with the amount of dots it related your “techically not a dot so it won’t trigger Blizzard’s aforementioned obsession” spender to your dot-based identity anyway, and further increased that interactivity during burst windows related to CD dots.
Speaking of which, I don’t know where you’re seeing Soul Rot or Phantom Singularity there, but they are both gone in the current beta calculator. So yay for more atrocious changes. Instead the new CD we get is Dark Harvest. A dot that lasts whooping 3 seconds. Very thematic.
Back to Malefic Rapture, if anything Blizzard had a great opportunity to further emphasize its dot scaling while allowing for the alternative playstyle of focusing on your core three dots by letting the additional dots from Soul Harvester hero talent tree to also work with MR. So with proper tuning you’d have a playstyle with more dots and stronger MR and one with stronger core three dots.
The only meaningful issue Rapture had was that it felt bad to press. Which was entirely caused by its fast cast time followed by a complete wet fart in terms of aesthetic oomph. Because all its animation does is summon teeny tiny orbs of shadowy-green energy somewhere near the enemies (that you can’t even really see unless the enemy is right next to you, which is rarely) and then quickly slam these orbs into them.
And the tragic irony is that the datamined spell changes of this very beta that didn’t manifest into the end result were the exact perfect fix for this problem. Which was to make Malefic Rapture a channel and let it consume additional shards if you have them. Which would let Affliction either get back nice shadow swirl animations of either Soul Harvest or Soulburn: Haunt or get an entirely new fancy channeling animation.
For good measure you could even throw the Evoker mechanic of being able to end the channel early without moving. And I don’t think it would have needed the 4 shards cap, instead you should be able to channel it as long as possible if you have additional shards generated during the channel like during Soul Harvester’s 11.2 burst window with 4 set bonus.
The only good part of UA-as-spender is its stacking mechanic. But you know what else had it? Deathbolt. Which was also a nice thematic shorter CD for the dot spec to deal more direct damage that still interacts with its dots (while applying yet another dot). The downside of Deathbolt was the busywork of extending your dots before casting DB. And coincidentally, Blizz ALSO was on the right track to solving DB’s own problem in Dragonflight’s beta before ultimately scrapping it two builds later, i.e. the Pact of the Nathrezim talent that made DB extends dots before it itself dealt damage.
With DB also working on charge mechanic or possibly axing the actual CD and giving it a long cast time that then gets shortened with procs a’la Demonbolt+Demonic Core (also toyed with during DF’s beta with Death Dealer talent that gave a proc that made it instant and cost no shards), it could have had been a neat addition to the spec’s burst window, especially if it was talent-only option. With the aforementioned multi-cast stacking mechanic further strengthening Aff’s dot focus in a more nuanced way.
Continuing the joke that is the Midnight Affliction tree, it looks like the devs went back in their mindstate to Dragonflight’s design and oversaturated the tree with explicitly AoE talents. Meaning you either build for AoE or ST and suck at the other task. That was fer sure the way to go and it totally wasn’t changed in TWW for a reason.
Also, the tree in general is a mess. Moving the stat stick talents from class tree to spec tree is just sad. They can’t even be called filler talents. They are the “we ran out of ideas” talents. The tree is also weirdly narrowed in the last transition to the 20+ pointers and you are forced to take both Malediction and Contagion while in current tree you can (and do in most builds) skip at least one of them. Which for whatever reason reorients the spec that has almost favored either Haste or Mastery as your main secondary to Crit, as if we didn’t already have specs that like that stat more.
And Relinquished, one of the most boring talents in the entire spec tree not only didn’t get the axe (while much stronger, more thematic and more fun talents are gone), but it was changed to a two-pointer that ALSO serves as a gateway to capstone paths? Including the sole pathway to one of them? Brilliant, just brilliant.
And as Mage talents showcase - shocking pretty much noone - there’s a more than solid chance that the yet-to-come new hero talents are just the current raid tier bonuses hacked apart across three different talents.
All the while the class tree is also a mess, has some weird focus on specializing your curses and the capstone is a Blight, i.e. AoE curse. Even though earlier in the tree there’s a talent that applies your curse to enemies near your target anyway.
The only positive thing I can say is that the 4 point beyond-capstone talent looks nice. And Malefic Grasp is brought back. And in a fun, proc-based way that won’t lead to Blizzard removing it again after two patches because they remembered what scaling issues it was giving them as the filler. But those are just two drops in an ocean of badness.
Between Aff and SP both looking absolutely terrible, at least Unholy DK finally abandoned the needless secondary mechanic of wounds (though it introduced a new one of lesser ghouls, but maybe it will be fun to play) and aside from making the Dark Arbiter and Abomination a choice node (which messes with my “ultra Forsaken” themed DK) it seems all around neat, so I may finally switch after maining Affliction since Cataclysm. Thanks Blizzard.