New Soul Swap will cause problems

Classes Warlock
1

The new addition to Soul Swap:

  • Soul Swap now correctly copies Soul Rot, Phantom Singularity, and Vile Taint.

I have big concerns about this change!
On the first hand: Yes this will increase our performance!
BUT the change will bring a whole bunch of problems and adjustments for sure.
It will increase our needs of GCD (now that we need to play this)
It will add a thought process of how and where we copy Phantom/Soulrot or if we use it to make it just 10 sec more duration by exhaling 10 seconds later. And do we wait with swap for the 45 sec windows on Phantom and Souldrot?
It will add more complexity and our rotation will be even less forgiving.
I bet: if we perform much better now (i don’t checked numbers) how to fix this
 they will lower our core dmg instead or copies do less dmg!?

Please fix our core-problems first, don’t make shiny changes to niche spells!
core problems:
GCD starvation (applying/reapplying dots + weaving in other spells)
Complexity (though processes when to refresh, when to run, when to swap, when to 
)
Ramping up (we need 10-20ish seconds to start doing real dmg)

There are many many good and easy ideas here in the Forum to fix these. We dont even need big changes - just change maybe dmg multipliers to just be longer dot durations or enhancements per cast for the duration. We dont want that more dps we want QoL!!!
I already have a very good academic position, i don’t want to make a PHD-like thoughtprocess every time i do m+ or pvp for my rotation^^

I will not open more threads, i think i’ve added enough for the moment.

2

well
 about that 
 Soul rot is applied to multiple targets, no need to copy it, same for Vile Taint, only good if you missed a mob somewhere. As for Phantom singularity i doubt you will get 2 damaging at the same time (will check later on today) but even if it duplicates the effect it will probably not be better than vile taint in M+ . Keep in mind vile taint applies Agony.

When it comes to Soul Swap i still see a point worth placed in something else. The 30 sec cd is making this unusable for decluttering our rotation. This only works for 2 targets which is rubbish.

3

I think more of it to get a longer duration in ST (you can exhale 10 seconds after inhaling = 10 second longer duration on both dots).
So you will have to sit on your shards until you have your Soulswap Window where you can Malefic Rapture on 5/6 dots instead of just 3/4.
In AOE, i still need to check the performance myself - if it performs well there
 yeah get prepared to apply agony manually again xD

The whole point is: I DONT see any improvement, i only see more problems incoming with this change.

And yeah, IF it still underperforms its just a dead talent now^^

4

So what? They removed 1 talent with any WORD, so cant use the Soul Rot. So what? So what? So what? (This is no Metallica)

5

Ez fix: Revert Soulswap to how it was before it got changed.

3 Likes
6

Their idea I guess is for Soul Swap to become a bit like Havoc for Affliction ?
It’s just the spec is already such a complicated mess to play with. It really didn’t need more stuff to think about and manage.

You will kind of want to copy Soul Rot from your main target via Soul Swap, because the secondary target will get the full damage Soul Rot, not the 50% version applied to targets 2/3/4. Also, does reapplying Soul Rot with Soul Swap refresh Dark Harvest ?

I still don’t think we’ll play Phantom Singularity over Vile Taint in M+, that seems too complicated. But the nerf (I think it’s a nerf?) to Grim Reach, and the massive buff to Soul Rot, means maybe we will play the Soul Rot Branch instead of the Darkglare one ? It’ll make things more complicated there as well.

And the fact that Soul Swap copies UA, and we lose our malefic Affliction stacks when moving UA around, it’s just so rigid, so needlessly complicated and punishing.

Soul Swap still has a bug with the display of its CD. If you inhale the DoTs, but don’t exhale them and the 10s window expires, Soul Swap goes on CD, but it doesn’t show it on the icon of the spell (or related WeakAuras tracking it).

Easy ways to make Affliction more enjoyable and SIMPLER:

-Reduce Malefic Affliction stacks to just 1. And the second rapture then procs Dread Touch. 4 shards is way too expensive, it’s absurd.
-Reduce the power of Dread Touch to just 20% but make it last 8 or 10 s. Have we learned nothing from Malefic Wrath and how annoying it was ?
-GIVE US BACK DELIBERATE MALICE, and get rid of Pandemic Invocation.
-Make Tormented Crescendo more accessible and not compete with Soul Rot or Darkglare.
-Revert the changes to Soul Swap, make it apply Siphon Life if talented into it. You can change the name because yes I know it would not really be a “swap” anymore. And maybe remove the shard cost.

1 Like
7

Also, instant corruption should be baseline. It’s a travesty that we have to spend a talent point for it, and that 50% of the time we can’t actually pick it, and have to hard cast a spell we’ve had instant for the past 18 years (at least).

1 Like
8

Agreed what you posted above.
Funny to see: Each Topic I open or participate here talking about 90% the same things, and everyone want almost the same (and almost nobody demanding for insane buffs or changes, everything revolving around QoL)
I will try to do a selfmoderated gathering post these days (gathering the ideas of people here in the first post).
To be clear, not only this Topic, i mean any bigger topic from the last 2 months.
So we dont need to repost anything in a quadrillion topics^^
Maybe structured so ppl can vote 1-10 if they agree with it (are we allowed to do sth like this here?)

9

I think, when it comes to tweaking how the spec functions right now, and how to make it smoothier, simpler, more enjoyable, yes I think you can easily find more or less the same ideas.

The problems with affliction; I think, come from the fact that we are asked to manage more things than ever before, while losing some of the important stuff we had to help us manage it. We’ve lost Deliberate Malice (which was so FREAKING FUN AND COOL AND PERFECT, please bring it back) and Dark Soul. Those 2 tools were essential to manage all that the devs expected us to manage, and we had less stuff to manage then. We’ve also kind of lost instant corruption.

Also we had Tormented Crescendo “for free” before, it came with the tier set, now if we choose it, it comes at a cost. We’re probably heading towards not playing with Darkglare at all in ST with the buffs to Soul Rot, so we’re potentially losing yet another tool to help manage our DoTs. So more GCDs spent refreshing DoTs. Soul Swap as they’ve currently reworked it is not the solution to our problems, it creates more question and complexity, which is very unwelcomed, on my part at least.

Everything we had “baseline” at the end of Shadowlands is now competing with each other. You can’t get Soul Rot, Darkglare and Tormented Crescendo at the same time. It’s really annoying.

But I can tell you that a lot of people have very different ideas about what Affliction should be like. Some people want Legion back, some people want Unstable Affliction stacking back, some people want to almost get rid of DoTs, some want just DoTs and nothing else, etc.

1 Like
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A lot of the issues also come from the design of the bottom of the affliction talent tree, the fact that that you have to go down 2 branches, and it costs 8 of the 10 possible points. It’s very rigid, and the points in the middle of those branches are very often super lackluster, with or without the final point of the branch, and cost 2 points.

It makes us super limited in our builds, and we can’t get Tormented Crescendo, and Soul Rot, and Darkglare.

A radical solution would be to make a branch cost 3 points instead of 4. By reducing the cost of the talent in the middle to just 1.
And then you add a few additional talents in there to make up for it, like Deliberate Malice for example. You could probably make Malefic Affliction a talent of its own.

Or they need to move Tormented Crescendo up the tree, i think instead of Xavian Teachings that should be baseline.

11

Yeah you got a point there, me being one of these people favoring Legion UA stacking/spreading.
BUT I am still open for other playstyles. At the core Affliction is still at the same identity, the only thing i dont like is the way Malfic Rapture works. Tweaking the talent tree to make everyone happy is impossible i guess. I think the changes to the core-function of aff is more important right now (dot duration/shard spending)
I am already discussing another iteration of our spender in Gowus “Affliction M+ Feedback
” (attention, this is much to read^^) My personal Favorite is the Rapid Contagion at 10% being stackable. So we spend shards for stronger dots ending up doing the same dmg per use as if we press MR - just more for our dot/rot identity. You could change any MR-Talent easily to function with this aswell + we would have more flexible PvP-talents opening the spot for it + the spender would be instant as most casters have their spenders instant right now. But enough of this here^^ just look at our discussion if interested :>

At the core what we all want is:
*Deliberate Malice (+x seconds to dots per shard spent)
*Soul Swap being not this kind of Abomination to think about
*The Ramping of any dot/talent (improvements for it)
*smoother AOE gameplay
*any QoL change to Siphon Life + Corruption baseline

12

Yeah I see.

I’m on a different team, I love Malefic Rapture, I think it fills a very important niche in the Affliction toolkit. Makes multidotting feel more rewarding for me, doing a good set up of DoTs, and then rapturing and reaping the rewards, etc.

Obviously it’s kind of scuffed with the gameplay loop created by Dread Touch and to a lesser extend Tormented Crescendo, and the “loss” of Soul Rot. Rapture feels less like a burst reward from your Dotting and more like a rotational thing we have to constantly cast, so it reduces its appeal for me, makes the spell less distinct.

I think that, besides malefic wrath (which Dread Touch is sadly way too similiar with), Affliction at the end of Shadowlands was in a really good spot gameplay-wise. And it was so easy to improve upon it with the new talent trees, with the new Vile Taint, with Sow the Seeds becoming available in AoE scenarios, etc. But they just went full rework, and I think they shouldn’t have. Also they tweaked the Affliction tree once during the beta cycle and then nothing else, and it shows. The fact that a talent like Agonizing Corruption still exists


They are kind of slowly coming back to Shadowlands, with the multiple buffs to Rapture, to Soul Rot, etc. But now we’re in limbo between two (if not more) ideas of how the spec should work.

I also like Siphon Life. the problem is now it’s such a difficulty switch to the spec. Either you play infinite corruption and only manage 2 DoTs, or you pick Siphon Life and suddenly you have to manage 4. Their was one talent line that was good before the rework, the one with Absolute Corruption, Writhe in Agony and Siphon Life. It created a nice difficulty curb, and now it’s a lot more abrupt.
Siphon Life feels bad because we lost deliberate malice. I really really believe that if they just brought back Deliberate Malice, it would solve a lot of issues, and make the spec much much more fun to play.

Anyways, here’s hoping x)

13

I think I would still like to have option to select old version, but
 BUT
 after fix it offers really interesting two target bursts windows with 4set bonus. I would love to test it in 2s. On paper it is amazing, in reality with all the dispells (UA dispell dmg being laughtable) and CCs I don’t expect it to be reliable.

Also your daily reminder of: MR is heresy, give us back MG.

14

play something else like destro where u put immolate and go wroom wroom
affliction was always like this

15

I dont want something like that, i never said i would like to have a rotation without thinking/minmaxing.
If you compare the current state with Shadowlands or Legion for example you will see we have a much shorter agony duration, no refreshes and now we get another tool with two GCD needed and the need of minmaxing this with other CDs. It wasn’t like this before.

All we ask for is a way to get a less stressful rotation for our basedamage(rolling dots) and more intuitive way to play around this (for example pandemic invocation doesn’t even fit with our pandemic window). And yet the new Soul Swap is adding up to this “mess” instead of fixing it.

16

dont play affliction then lol

demo and destro are there for you

does it even matter this passive does literally 7k damage

its better for pvp than the old one
if u dont like it in pve then dont take it

17

I think you didn’t even read it. Replying to the opposite of what I have said^^

I will still play Affliction without these tweaks, i feel good in PvP (atm i almost only play rbgs) but I like to ask for a more well rounded playstyle. The biggest point for myself QoL would be the old soulswap for UA spreading because of all these dispells these days. Yes I know how to play around this, but can’t we ask for a smoother gameplay?^^
If you are fine with everything its good for you I guess.

pandemic invocation was an example no need to focus on it- i play only PvP myself, i dont take it anyway.
Yes the new Soul Swap is stronger i agree, but only going for more dps or killpressure doesnt always lead to a nice playstyle. I can even play a wheelchairrotation with success. This wont make it feel well rounded.

edit: btw i don’t want to make this personal or something, I want a rotation/playstyle that feels good for all of us that doesn’t gets clunkier as we go on in the expac.
What about you and the current state of Affliction. If you think its all good its an opinion as well as my own.

18

Drain Life

is supposed to channel on everyone affected by your Soul Rot. If you Soul Swap your Soul Rot onto a target
 Drain Life doesn’t register them as being affected by Soul Rot and won’t channel on them.

UA In PvP

The other thing that sucks is UA dispel backlash was over-nerfed and it’s becoming difficult to maintain dots. Healers are incentivized to dispel liberally and it’s aggravating issues with the spec. There is a heavy reliance on casting for affliction to do damage. Unfortunately, anytime you cast your dots are falling off and now you have to contend with spam dispels. Also the spec feels way too GCD starved. I know in PvE the rotation is very complex and does mediocre damage. Feels bad.

For UA in PvP, my recommendation is to make UA backlash do %hp for 1/3rd of someone’s health. That’s a pretty reasonable amount and would simplify balancing. Also consider putting something like Rapid Contagion off GCD and making it a regular talent instead of a PvP one.

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