Thank god UA stacks are gone. The wording seems vague and is bugged on alpha at the moment, but here’s hoping it’s limitless stack count and not a rolling dot. Win for Unstable Affliction here.
Aff Feedback in General
With the way that affliction is designed to “extend” our dots, it will never be the right play to “spend shard now” rather than “spend shard later”. Affliction is indisputably a “pooling” spec now – you pool for dark harvest (even more so with soul harvester and hellcaller) and you pool for darkglare. Other than that, you just ideally do not spend unless you have a free UA or you will overcap your shards.
What does this mean for Affliction, looking at the original design goal?
TLDR: This has not changed, and affliction will play the same way from The War Within → Midnight
Rapture required you to put dots up prior to casting; however, UA can be cast without any dots on the target. This does not mean that this is the correct way to play at the moment, as it would still make sense to put your longer dots up on the targets before your UA to take “extend” effects (glare + dark harvest) into consideration
UA will only play differently than Rapture between your dark harvest spell cd and darkglare cd and during short-lived trash packs in m+. This seems quite niche.
Is there a solution?
The underlying gameplay that pushes affliction to pool for damage windows needs to be looked at if the combat designers are attempting to push for the goal stated during Alpha 1 (quote above)
There seems to be something missing for affliction to want to spend shards “now” (which isn’t most of the time at the moment on beta, it’s most of the time you want to pool resources). Perhaps UA needs to do something other than damage to want you to keep it on the target instead of pooling (outside of something minor like cascading calamity).
Destruction
Soulfire
Kind of a whatever change. It’s a positive that you made Soulfire feel better (I’m not sure the animation fits the amount of damage it deals now, but perhaps?), but you guys kind of forgot about Dimensional Rift, which feels pretty bad to press now anyway. For most classes that have these weird medium-length CDs, they usually feel inordinately impactful and can affect multiple targets. Not sure how to feel.
Class Tree
A bunch of good changes so far defensively, which is a massive win
Massive changes to the viability of drain life (which seems grossly overtuned to me, but I’m not complaining), which is a huge win
You can take so many of these talents that it just feels good that I can get what I want
Howl of Terror should just be an uncapped stop at this point (unless you want to cap Shadowfury). I’m assuming this change was made for RBG, unless they were made with m+ in mind, in which there is no parity between Howl and Shadowfury.
I honestly don’t mind the passive stat nodes as long as they don’t block foundational nodes for warlock (think soul link/dark pact/Demonic circle).
No health funnel is diabolical (pun intended). Rethink this one.
Curses as an aura (“pact”) are just not good. Just have curses be their separate buttons, please.
Things not changed or iterated on yet
Soul Harvester still lacks a seed of corruption clause for affliction. At this point, it is unlikely that you will ever hit seed as a rotational aoe spender (especially with cloying power)
Hellcaller parity is still completely out of whack between destro and affliction (might be time to make blackened soul hit hard for affliction to make it more impactful)
Implosion is still unintuitive for 99% of players. There needs to be something that makes the player know that implosion is the best button in multi-target settings (maybe a CD on it and more damage or bonuses)
Seed of Corruption vs Unstable Affliction in multi-target is in the same boat as implosion. In the same vein as implosion, seed currently only fits the niche of burst damage and dot application, while also just having fewer talents that augment its damage. Cloying power and soul harvester are big contributors to this problem.
The demonic occuli talent nodes for diabolist add thing to track for anyone using this hero talent. It might be better to make this passive
Demonic Ritual is still very min/max. I think it would make sense for diabolical rituals to be able to trigger whether you have consumed the ritual (with demonic art) or not. It feels fairly restrictive to have to consume my demon summon (Demonic art) to start the next ritual instead of it rolling into the next ritual seamlessly. Right now, you have to be staring at your diabolical ritual length to make sure you don’t cast a chaos bolt at 1s left on the ritual so that you can spend art instantly (complexity issue).