Decimation using fire spells is not a good or fun cast for an affliction lock with 0 talents to improve fire damage and no bonus to periodic damage spells.
Mark of Chaos was on outset extremely exploitable for periodic spells, but also required destro talents and is now only single target non periodic. Maintaining ISB only for it to be immediately consumed by a single shadow priest is not a rune worth having/using for affliction.
I dont even remember the name of the tank rune but it is also not an affliction lock rune.
If I could make a suggestion, have an affliction based rune that required Dark Pact to be either used or learned. Which adds a very good shadow self buff like lake of fire did back in phase 1, or allows dot crits to do 100% damage as if it were a ruin talent. Reasoning behind tying it to Dark Pact is that you would not be able to double dip Ruin or Demonic Sacrifice and a dot crit buff that way.
Initially I thought having shadow burn give a massive number of stacks to ISB but most stacks of ISB are quickly used by Spriests and not the warlock casting shadow bolts. Also an affliction rune locking you into another tree doesnt feel the best.
I know that destruction locks didnt really get a go-to wrist rune but they also had a full other slot which did give them a rotation/buff change.
2 Likes
I agree here AND more! It is becoming obvious that affliction is a total after thought…
My biggest hope about season of discovery was to be able to ACTUALLY play an aff lock in vanilla raids without being TOLD to spec destro cause your just here to debuff as we want and TRY to pump with what you have left. (been there done that DONT WANT TO GO BACK TO IT!). i honestly hoped that we could find a way to let affliction to COMPETE with destro but instead it was somehow just a way to revamp the destro is BEST experience.
1 Like
Don’t feel bad brother, everyone is an afterthought except warriors 
1 Like
I’m really not sure what they were thinking. Decimation is obviously a Destruction rune because no affliction build is going to be using soul fire.
Sudden Death could work in a SM/Ruin build but why would I want to use shadowburn everytime I proc a insta shadow bolt. Obviously I might want to use so many shards that I have to generate shards during combat because that will help my dps… /sarcasm
It would make more sense that the rune worked in conjunction with nightfall proc thus at least forcing you to spec into affliction to make it look like an affliction rune. aka that it only gives the insta proc shadowbolt an increased crit chance.
Whats even the point of mark of chaos with the corruption synergy nerfed out lol. Casting a weak spell like shadowburn just to make a normal shadow bolt crit when world buffed characters already have 35%+ crit baseline is barely a damage boost if at all.
1 Like
Another idea, if they are married to requiring Shadowburn, remove the shard cost (just like they did with soul fire and decimation) and have the shadowburn debuff now be much longer and give either a large damage bonus to periodic damage while its up a-la haunt; or increased crit damage/crit chance to dots while its up.
I know there is much to balance around pvp wise but the way Mark of Chaos went from “Affliction is your new King” to being “Affliction who?” was almost comical.
1 Like
What did it originally do? Did they change it within hours of releasing the PTR?
It was notably busted. After a shadowburn use the next ability would be 100% crit. Which on its own (for destro) is fine. But Affliction could use it to have 100% crit corruption with everlasting affliction, basically 100% uptime on a 100% crit UA and a curse of doom every minute that would crit. Ill admit it was broken but it also made affliction a spec people would use and not be expected to be the support lock.
1 Like
Mark of Chaos needs to remove the Soul Shard cost for Shadowburn. I don’t want to have to carry bags full of shards and constantly drain soul between bosses.
Soul Shards are already so clunky. They should stack to 20 too.