Disagree with me all you want, Agony having to ramp from 4 stacks to 18 to start doing normal damage that the entire spec is balanced around is bad design.
If Agony didn’t have stacks, it would be fantastic
Also, Vile Taint not lining up with Agony’s duration feels really bad, but that’s been posted hundreds of times at this point.
Yeah, this is actually a good take btw!
In some of my feedback, I’ve also mentioned that agony taking that time to stack up also inhibits a lot of affliction burst, but with the reworks to rapture this expansion, on top them leaning heavily into wither (corruption), I’m not as worried anymore.
That’s not to say I don’t think it’s outdated mechanic
I just swapped to Hellcaller because I’m kinda tired of Soul Harvester already.
Tired of having so many Nightfall procs, almost annoying lol.
Maybe Hellcaller is more what I’m looking for (dots and more dots)
Pretty common opinion, and it’s made worse that there’s no real way to get around the problem.
Infirmity with vile taint is the only solution on offer, and that’s only slightly better than agonizing corruption was Dragonflight, which isn’t saying much.
I understand that Agony’s ramping damage is a flavor choice that’s existed since the vanilla days, but they seem to have forgotten to give Agony any upside to make the downside worthwhile.
Even just letting rapture add +1 agony stack per hit would go a long way in helping.
I’m surprised this is a common opinion, just started playing lock this xpac, last was during legion.
Usually simplifying class mechanics is met with friction and despised, thats why I assumed it was a hot take lol.
or another take is affliction is a rot spec and the point of the stacks is to make the rot intensify. Stop trying to make warlocks like every other class.
I totally agree it should be a sustained dps spec, but ramping damage is almost always a problem, unless the ramp can’t be lost.
Like if Agony ramped to 18 stacks but then became perma and couldn’t drop off then it would be fine.
You are not going to be able to maintain Agony in a pack of 10+ mobs without Vile Taint, so you end up dropping it, and your damage plummets, then it takes another 10 seconds to get the Agony back up to 18 assuming Vile Taint CD.
And the answer isn’t “you shouldn’t be trying to maintain agony in 10+ target situations”, then that’s a design problem imo.
And also, taking stacks off Agony doesn’t just suddenly turn it into Vampiric Touch or Flame Shock, the only thing that matters is class/spec fantasy.
Like if Flame Shock all of a sudden could stack to 10 and the damage went up with stacks, that doesn’t make Shaman a Warlock does it? 
Or, maybe Agony should go back to how it USED work… which was the tick rate, not the damage, increased over the duration of the dot.
Right now, a single mis-step with dot refreshes is without question the punishing thing that can happen. you have 18 stacks, and are trying to re-dot your targets (cause VT doesn’t line up with duration so you are trying to re-dot 5 targets)… BOOM INTERUPT… now you can’t refresh Agony in time on 2 targets. all stacks lost, and it will take almost 30sec just to ramp the damage back up and resync with your other dot refreshes.
if they swapped it back to tick rate increase, you now have an opportunity for something like: Skillful dot timing can keep the tick rate high, and missing the re-dot simply reduces your tick rate to the start.