Hello. I was excited to see that affliction was going back to using unstable affliction (UA) as spenders again, so I had to check in and test my warlock. I think the dot and drain gameplay is interesting mechanics wise, and I would like to come with a few feedbacks that emphasizes on just that:
- There seems to be no incentive to spread your UA’s around multiple targets. I think this is a missed opportunity for some more interesting gameplay: Affliction can really shine on spread AOE targets, and it is fun (at least for me) to move my cursor around the different targets and keeping track of all the dots. To have an incentive to spread my UA’s around would encourage such a playstyle more, and I believe the dotting gameplay would feel more fluid. This was the case in legion, were the incentive to spread UA came in many forms:
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Contagion talent: You deal 10% increased damage to targets affected by your Unstable Affliction
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Power cord of lethtendris legendary: Casting Unstable Affliction on a target who is not already affected by Unstable Affliction has a 25% chance to refund the Soul Shard cost (kind of opposite of todays talent: cascading calamity. Only that it gives you haste instead of a soul shard)
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Stretens sleepless shackles: Each enemy afflicted with your Unstable Affliction increases all damage you deal by 4%
- I think the idea of planting a seed on an enemy to spread corruption around it is neat, but I don’t find it very interesting (nor visually appealing) having to spam that same ability over and over to do AOE damage. I’ve always fantasized about having mass drain, i.e. drain soul as an AOE ability. That fantasy also opens up some opportunity for how you could do AOE drain soul damage: 1) Drain soul could damage all targets afflicted by agony 2) Drain soul could damage all enemies around x yards to your targeted enemy 3) have a cooldown tied to mass drain (which is a very fitting name for https://www.wowhead.com/spell=1257052/dark-harvest)
extra) I always thought the drain soul visuals from the warcraft movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSoDPwx8NTw at 4:00) was pretty cool. It’s a little more subtle than todays ingame drain soul visual.
Thanks you for reading.