Affliction 11.1 and Beyond (PVE)

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
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Right now, I think affliction is hamstrung by three main issues:

  1. Dark harvest and cull the weak being some of the highest-value talents in the entire game if you can abuse them properly (which is extremely rare), which makes tuning harder.
  2. Soul rot being a permanent pick talent and forcing us into a 1m rotation with rapture cycles.
  3. There are no talent selections that allow us to move away from 1m burst and spec into consistent damage, or high consistent spread cleave with bigger burst every 2 minutes.

In the past affliction had a super high consistent damage profile that both increased during execute and during high-value cooldowns like dark soul or soul harvest. The swap to a dot-based spec having low consistent damage and high burst damage is not only counter to the theme of the spec (draining your target, not obliterating it) but also puts it in direct competition with the other two specs. I think if affliction had a higher cadence of soul shards that allowed us to use raptures once we had dots up consistently, it would feel better than having to hold on to the raptures for our burst cycles, and being tuned around that soul rot window.

I’m not a rapture hater, I’m just not a fan of affliction moving away from high consistent damage to become burst oriented. It’s double taxed in a sense since you have to add dots to then start your burst, which is backwards from most other specs in the game that do their burst and end up putting dots either through their burst or after their burst. IMO, if I succeed as an affliction player in putting up all my dots properly and then hitting rapture, I should be doing more damage than somebody that hits their burst sooner but tapered off later – this isn’t the case now.

Last thing is to point back to feedback about our 11.1 tier set here

Obviously there is some more nuance here, but I wanted to shorten the feedback. For more info look at this thread in the warlock section.

My personal preference would be that rapture would affect our dots rather than our dots affect rapture. For example, hitting rapture would enhance our dots in some respect instead of doing upfront damage (whether it be dot tick rate or dot damage).

An even more unique way to think about this would be to have rapture be a single cast that used all of our shards to then multiply its output instead of having to sit there and cast multiple spenders at once, reducing the burden of movement. I’m curious whether hitting a single rapture that consumed 5 shards but then increased dot tick rate by something like 40% per shard would feel incredible.

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