Rain of Fire and Hellfire are both useless because of their horrible scaling and inability to crit or interaction with basically any sets.
The devs have a crazy hyperfixation on Shadowbolt, both on ST and AoE, while dots are still trash and are horrible to apply as we don’t have any way to spread them.
We are now in Phase 8 and Dark Pact, the last talent of the affliction tree is still the by far most useless, unused, and ignored ability next to Siphon Life, meanwhile everyone and their mother is abusing the Ruin crit talent, and this has been the case for all of SoD.
Basically every single set directly buffs, or rewards spamming Shadowbolt on ST and AoE, and the entire strat has been to stack as many % multis on Shadowbolt crits as possible.
Not only was the T3 Agony Bonus bugged & is still bugged on a ton of Undeads, even a ton of bosses in Naxx, but they also decided to nerf the dot dmg bonus from the T3 set, leaving again literally only Shadowbolt spam (Tier 2.5 2-set, T2 6 Set, and now T3.5 set) while they crushed the already niche Fire spec, that was already awkward as it had horrible missing overlap with SBV (gone now anyway lol).
The raid now already received a ton of nerfs, adds die too quickly to dot, and SBV is basically just pad besides on the last bosses, and the only people that “abused” SBV on the last bosses, were already strong enough to even acquire the set pieces and trinket.
Basically every single Tierset needs their effects changed, runes need to be adjusted, so that using stuff you talented in, like Siphon Life and Dark Pact actually do something and stop this degenerate abuse of the Ruin talent, and actually make dots strong & easier to apply.
You could make Dark Pact a buff that is required for the Pandemic rune to work, similar to Backdraft, and then buff it to compensate for the loss of Ruin + make it buff Siphon Life significantly/or have it so your dots automatically apply Siphon Life & make it worth to actually play Invocation by making it reduce the GCD of Dots & Nightfall based SB proccs.
You could also change Haunt, or other runes to spread or apply our dots, just something so we don’t have to spend like an hour applying our dots to mobs, only for them to die while you’re still applying them.
The fact that Everlasting Affliction is still anti-synergistic with Invocation, while taking up the spot of our only raidbuff is insane, especially when Demonic Pact received the 10% buff to not make it a choice anymore.
We have so many mandatory runes, that are Jack of all Trades, even if they go against the theme of the spec you play, just because they are just better/easier in all cases, while cool runes are impossible to pick because of how mandatory the others are, while there are so many cool things that you could change is so sad.
I really like SBV, but this change only hurts the only really useful place we had, while still leaving it 10000000% mandatory, just worse for everyone without the BiS set.
You could’ve literally just removed Shadowbolt from being affected by the T3.5 4-Set bonus (similar to how you crushed Fire-lock with removing Incinerate) and buffed our dots to compensate on ST.
This is an issue that you created yourself by hardcore fixating on Crit, Crit Dmg, Spellcasting Speed, and overlapping buffs to Shadowbolt.
You already made us spam Shadowbolt for so many phases, play the exact same talents, please don’t now punish us for doing the only thing that we could do without compensations.
