With Unstable Affliction soon to have multi-target functionality baked into the spell for Midnight, the Rampant Afflictions PvP talent is made completely redundant. Blizzard could just remove the talent and move on, but that would be boring. Instead, here is a fun and wacky idea for how we could redesign the talent.
Burning Affliction: Unstable Affliction is now replaced by Burning Affliction, a spell in the Fire school which can only be applied to a single target. Burning Affliction costs 2 soul shards to apply a damage over time effect to the target which deals the equivalent of Unstable Affliction’s DPS over 12 seconds. The target afflicted by Burning Affliction deals a percentage of Burning Affliction damage to nearby enemies.
Why stop at making your enemies die of shadowy illness when you can also make them burn while you do it! Fire Mage has more instant impact burst damage, so it feels more like making your target explode than it does about the burn.
The problem with that suggestion, in my opinion, is that thematically, fire based damage simply doesn’t fit into Affliction’s theme of Shafow/Void, or Rot and Drain. Not to mention a 2 shard cost for a DoT seems more of a reason to invite heavier penalty, either a longer cast time or slap on another cool down. A cool down on shard spender? Just look at Oblivion and see how it was literally ignored.
I am cautiously observing the… Fallout, to having UA being a shard spender - again, as this isn’t the first time we tried this iteration.
Given the track record of how ‘older’ warlock talents/skills gets brought back into new expansion - but without fixing all the previous bad issues/problem with them (like how they initially bring back shadow embrace with shadowbolt, but still only applies 1 stack at a time, making ramp up time even longer for Affliction), I expect we’ll relive some of the old issues that we have complained before, and only gets ‘fixed’ after several patches (hopefully).
Affy use to have access to immolate and searing pain. Both fire spells. I dont think the OPs idea is bad but costing two shards in a bit much esp since it prob wouldnt have any spell protection.
IMO RA just needs to be baseline and remove it from the pvp talents along with the dmg reduction associated with it
True, but those are like eons ago, back in Vanilla/Burning Crusade, which then eventually phased out as each spec gets more of their spec specialty/identity more pronounced.
Just my opinion, instead of bringing in Fire damage to Affliction, an element that has been absent for a long period - why not make use of some element that are more aligned with our theme?
For example: ShadowStrike damage, an existing in-lore element that combines Shadow Damage with Physical properties. Arguably i’d say Drain Soul should have been converted to ShadowStrike damage long ago.
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I’d rather see better defensive tools in PvP talents if I’m honest. Aff doesn’t have a problem with damage or spread pressure. Maybe kill pressure… but living long enough for the rot to take effect is the issue.
Honestly I’m surprised Aff doesn’t have some sort of Mortal Strike effect. Would pair well with the rot style of play. Maybe making UA damage stack a MS effect could be solid.
To play into the stacking UA of Midnight have each stack of UA apply a 5% healing reduction for X seconds.
Probably too much but it’s something I’d like to see.
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With Unstable Affliction soon to have multi-target functionality baked into the spell for Midnight
Can you share how this will work? I don’t think I see this on the ability itself or talent tree on Wowhead.
My reasoning on why they didn’t do this, is likely in order to avoid ‘generalising’ or ‘diluting’ abilities, they decide to treat certain utility as a ‘specific spec only’ perk, much like how Mortal Strike effect is limited to only Arms warriors, but not for Fury/Protection warriors.
But I do agree that we could use more survival tools. Let’s put it this way: If they insist to keep sticking the ‘tough but immobile’ concept as the general rule on warlock design - since they went out of their way to shaft our mobility, we should be appropriately compensated in terms of survivability.