Hello my fellow Afflictionado’s,
So as we all know, Soul Swap has gone through 2 iterations in DF so far. The second being a rework that ultimately failed at fixing what the intent was. And since, was bugged in PvP for months and still is with the inhale exhale + dispels & feigns.
The way I see it, Soul Swap should have no cooldown. If I choose to spend my Shards (spenders) to spread my DoT’s that should be my choice, I either spread with swap, or ramp / “burst”.
Really I think this change would be incredibly beneficial in PvE and PvP.
For PvE this would help get damage out on pulls for 1-4 targets or transitioning boss phases / ads. Which from what I gathered in PvE is part of where affliction is really weak, and would provide another option other then standing still casting seed + blossoms.
But for PvP…
We are in a world of Fade MD, Aug dream projections, Guardian MD’s, Feign Death backlash immunity, Micro Stuns, ext. Part of the largest issue for affliction is that into competent teams, you rarely ever get to just use spenders all the time because your gameplay is mainly re-applying dots and min/maxing drain life (for which without pre-cog this class would genuinely never be viable and we all know that).
This is why most affliction players have the feeling “I just don’t get to play my class”. Instead of using shards on mainly rapid, soul burn drainlife to live, soulburn port, or just simply staying capped. It would relieve SO MUCH stress spending 1 cast and 3 globals on each target in one school just to get the minimum pressure out (while weaving through kicks, micros, lining, dispels, dot timers… you name it).
In terms of a design standpoint, you really cannot argue that its current state is fun in PvP when your basically just a fake kick re-apply dot simulator while being the trained into the ground. This change could be spec wide, or a PvP talent.
Could a no cooldown soul swap be overpowered, potentially. But the more important part is that it would simply just be more fluid and FUN to play. Which in the end, is the point of playing games. And hopefully this change would allow warlocks to play with more specs other then its 1 or 2 viable comps because of the survivability and PI they bring that affliction needs.
I think Chan said it best. An affliction warlock doing 60k DPS, is just 20k on 3 targets. The pressure simply does not equate to 40-50k + ST with large peak burst and an MS. I think fixing this specs ability to get its damage out is important, because as we have seen from 10.1.5, reducing its ramp with MA/DT changes has not affected its win con or win rate by much at all. It handicapped by its ability to keep damage out and the globals needed to maintain and apply.
This was longer then I intended but I am just incredibly passionate about this spec and want to keep discussion moving on it.