Affliction is a mix of many new and good ideas and some old stuff which in the end are not working in one cup. Typically, when we look at Balance or Shadow design, it’s hard to avoid feeling that Affliction is left behind in design. Playstyle of Affliction can feel sometimes clunky in M+ and some talent choices are too far obligatory after changes since expansion released.
Personally, in my opinion the Affliction strengths should be:
- mobile souls master who bases mostly on instant and quick cast spells, including those on which he is spending his soul shards,
- calmful strategist of the battlefield, who spend most of the time of looking out of opportunities to deal most damage to its enemies with his powerful spells,
- spending period between casting deadly spells during combat to refresh his damage over time effects and gather soul shard to prepare to another harmful combo upon enemies,
- most dangerous when enemy is weakening and close to death, using it as opportunity to deal finishing damage.
Siphon Life, Malefic Rapture and Darkglare
Current version of Affliction due to the changes in 10.0.5 and 10.0.7 like Focused Malignancy and Darkglare rework brought impactful and mandatory talents which need to be included when tailoring own tree.
With current version of Malefic Rapture and Darkglare, the Siphon Life due to the dot-amount scaling for those spells is overshadowing Absolute Corruption pick. By not selecting this talent it brings three times punishment
- first is loss of pure DOT value,
- second is loss additional dot-count for Malefic Rapture,
- last is loss is additional dot-count for Darkglare.
When Siphon Life came back into game there was no talents like Malefic Rapture and Darkglare, the value of it was just pure damage and spell was never reviewed during BFA or Shadowlands with new dot-amount scaling damage spells.
Haunt and Shadow Embrace
With new expansion we came into version of Affliction when spending 3 talent points is responsible for 19% damage increase in single target by Shadow Embrace and Haunt and I’m not sure if any other class have access to so much power with so little points. This leading into situation where both of talents are highly mandatory in any build but does not bring any fun or improvement to the rotation, just giving additional frames over nameplate to track which we are already full off.
For multi target it gives 19% raw damage for abilities like Darkglare and Doom Blossom. In the perfect vacuum it can sound like “mastering the class” portion of the game, but when we include environment and need of manually refreshing of Agony, it’s getting more and more frustrating. On the top it brings additional delay in multi target combat.
As final remark, there is no world in which Shadow Embrace talent is currently balanced correctly against 10% Drain Soul damage increase from Dark Virtuosity which is placed in same row and requiring same point cost investment.
Agony refreshing
One reason of it is losing Deliberate Malice, this effect did very well for Affliction when it came during Shadowlands season 3, but I understand that in the past two seconds extension and level of available haste could move away Affliction little too much from necessity of refreshing dots. In comparison Shadow have (had 
) talent which extends his DoTs duration when spending his Insanity for AoE or cast filler spell. In 10.1 Shadow is receiving possibility to constantly keep DOTs up with Shadow Clash. Balance Druid have their option to select talent which increase DOTs duration when spending accumulated power in AoE. Affliction as only one of DOT-range specializations have no possibility to easily keep DOTs, which can be core reason why it’s not popular in M+.
Due to the Vile Taint, there are in worst case scenario 8x Agony to refresh at same time. To been able to do that you need around 8x1.5=12 seconds to refresh all of them when 0% haste value and 8x1.0=8 seconds with 50% haste value (+ human mistake factor). With Agony lasting 18 seconds it means 66% - 44% of the time you should spend to refresh Agony cause Darkglare is not always available to extend its duration. By doing that you are not spending Shards and very often sit overcapped with 5 of them, unable to spend them efficiently.
Some of community ideas was to bring back Deliberate Malice or make Agonizing Corruption talent extending Agony duration. As I understand with months into expansion passing by, this is not direction preferred by Warlock developer, as there were already two opportunities to do it. Challenge to overcome would be to find unique way, which is only Affliction kind, but doing same thing: improving gameplay quality around Agony without making it brainless.
One of solution worth consisted, which might help also with “Vile Taint 8 Agony refresh problem” mentioned above, would be to make casting Agony extends other Agonies duration by two seconds. With such mechanic player is not relieved from having to refresh the Agony at multiple targets manually, but doing it feels less pressured as you are able to refresh all your Agonies just if you are willing to do it. With 2 seconds extension it would require casting 7 times Agony to pass Vile Taint cooldown so it would not become too much powerful.
Seed of Corruption and Malefic Rapture
To give proper feedback in this case, we need to go back in time, same as Seasonal Affixes was for M+ system, the Malefic Rapture is slowly becoming a solution to issues that no longer exist.
Malefic Rapture was implemented during Shadowlands to solve Affliction ramp-up time. On paper it was interesting, in the reality it was solution to the problems in which specialization run into by some design decisions. I will try to bring up two most important point for me to explain why Malefic Rapture did very little for playstyle of the souls master and its existence is questionable.
- Malefic Rapture never solved problems which it was supposed to. In 9.0 the spell was overpowered (due to many reasons) and in final we saw it being nerfed. After it, to help Affliction in M+ buffs to Seed of Corruption came into play. It brought solid multi target damage but due to the talents system we could choice only between being good in single or multi target. In current expansion from the start the Affliction did very poorly in M+, from 10.1.5 we can see it raising, again due to the Seed of Corruption changes/buffs. Simple conclusion which we can take, Malefic Rapture was never helpful for Affliction when fast multi target ramp-up was required.
- Malefic Rapture was never needed to implement. The only thing which Affliction was missing in BFA was solid multi target damage for purpose of M+. This could be easily solved with same steps which was already taken over Seed of Corruption in Shadowlands and Dragonflight (additional Seed and reduced cast time) without need of implementing addition spell.
In the end, our currently state with Seed of Corruption is where it should be since long ago and Malefic Rapture is there only for single target right now. This way it could be worth considering coming back into Unstable Affliction as single target / cleave shard spender again. During Legion two Affliction builds was existing in parallel, first was focused around spreading Unstable Affliction, second around Seed of Corruption, both was good in what they were doing, and both were fun.
Random Soul Shard generation
Across all of three Warlock specializations (and probably also most of the classes) the Affliction is only one which generate their class power by random during the combat. Unstable Affliction and Drain Soul makes their count only when targets are dying, outside of that only Agony can provide Soul Shards during the combat. Random effects reduce the possibilities of player to control the gameplay and put the output damage more to the value of luck.
Dead or confusing talents (talent tree placeholders)
Dark Virtuosity, Kindled Malice – ok fix for 10.0.7 and good placeholder for more interesting talents in the future.
Agonizing Corruption – Two-point investment feel little too much in the current form, as it brings no value after Agony reach 18 stacks.
Pandemic Invocation – Basic UI does not show DoT timers. In current form this talent does not make any sense as it requires additions addons or Weakauras.
Sacrolash’s Dark Strike – Death talent after nerfs. If the problem is PvP balance, then it should reduce curse extension duration just there.
Wrath of Consumption – Completely death in Single Target. I understand that this is in AoE talents area but making last tier talent which has totally 0% value in pure Single Target is confusing.
Dread Touch, Doom Blossom – during normal M+ run no matter which talent we will pick it will be death in single or multi target scenarios due to the soul shards spenders which are used. In case of capstone talents this situation should not have place or be at least limited. Mine feedback is to combine both talents into one, as their effects are be based on two different spells which never are used parallel.
Reasoning as follow: as a player I’m already selecting how I want to go into next approach, for example:
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First pack has scary mob which must be nuked = go with Malefic Rapture on this pack.
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Second pack has no priority and its bolstering week = go with Seed of Corruption to equalize dps across all mobs.
Adding another layer of choice with talent looks to be not needed as moment of choice is moment of decision which spell to cast. If team will fail in combat, I can change mine approach to bring damage type which is currently needed, this is decision making stage which is most encouraging.
In the end, instead of having talent working 50/50% during dungeon, it would be the way to make it work 100% of the time and not breaking the game. Another way would be to just let both talents work with both Rapture and Seed, but then the value of the decision you made has less value.