In a recent midnight beta build, blizzard made a few changes to affliction, but I want to highlight how Darkglare doesn’t increase dots duration anymore, and how malefic grasp is now only active during Darkglare, and you don’t have access to this ability otherwise.
Darkglare now instead makes dots do 20% more damage, which means that we’re holding unstable afflictions and using them all after Darkglare is out, and also keep in mind, no extensions.
That’s not the only thing we have to do during darkglare, you also have to plant for 25 seconds to cast malefic grasp as much as possible, which is a channeled spell, you also have to refresh your dots and haunt because they’re likely to be falling at this point
Deathbolt is a bfa talent that used to be instant cast and did 30% of the remaining damage over time of our dots on the target
Obviously having an instant is much better than having to plant for a channeled ability.
But there’s another important thing is that Deathbolt only had a 30 second cooldown, so every 30 seconds, we should have some unstable afflictions on the target.
And with blizzard wanting to move away from holding shards for Darkglare, I think Deathbolt can be a very good reason to spent all soul shards every 30 seconds.