Had an idea. Not married to it. Just wanted to see what folks thought.
Ive always loved Affliction, but i really hate this Malefic Rapture playstyle. It bothers me. But i also understand why its there. And I was trying to come up with an idea as to another way it would be viable in M+ (i dont do M+, so i could be way off here).
What if the DoTs, in addition to their damage, modified the damage other DPS was doing to the target?
Maybe MR could be a choice node with whatever this new thing is called. It would feel support-ish, but it also would make DoT management playstyle viable.
In the levels of M+ where class balance matters, you’re not dealing with mobs that don’t live long enough for Aff to ramp.
Aff has problems in M+, but short kill times in low keys where it doesn’t really matter isn’t exactly a pressing one (un-target cap Vile Taint, and give us a CD reduction node to get it down to 20 second CD).
As for the specific fast kill time issue, they solved that in Legion: Soul Flame. Sadly, it was removed, then re-added, then removed again.
Aff already is viable in M+, but vile taint having a 30 second cooldown makes refreshing agony extra clunky. It really just needs to address that and aff gets a whole lot better in keys. Aff has some serious aoe burst damage, but manually reapplying agony just to have vile taint come off cd after you finish reapplying feels bad.
Affliction probably has the best burst out of all the DoT specs at the moment. The main pain points for Affliction are sustained, specifically shard generation and maintaining agony on multiple targets.
Vile taint going to 20 seconds and being instant cast (basically just give them shadow crash) is the only change aff needs. (Not speaking to an entire rework, but as it stands).
Doesnt even need to be that, you could have MR extend agony duration enough that you can keep agony up with taint+rapture spam into taint again, kind of like how destro has cataclysm+channel demonfire+raging demonfire talent
There’s so many ways to fix it. You just need to eliminate that ~5s window between Agony falling off and Vile Taint needing to be refreshed. It’s so awkward and makes Affliction feel infinitely worse for zero reason.
I don’t play dot specs/classes so this may be a terrible idea, or already implemented. But I guess an ability to ‘consume’ dots and have it do instant damage through that might work? It’d do more damage if you let the dots tick but it would do respectable quick damage for short duration fights.
What your suggesting is essentially turning affliction into another support spec, which I think would be cool.
Designing affliction around maintaining debuffs tied to your dots would be cool. But it also requires warlocks to have another spec completely overhauled and reworked. So I’d rather see it as a 4th spec.
I like affliction though and it does make me sad that it suffers in quick kill scenarios but that’s the curse of dot specs. Maybe include a little bit of instant damage to applying the dots?
My main beef with affliction AOE is seed having a glacially slow cast, travel and detonation time. We don’t spam it as our AOE anymore, so why not give it a bit of a CD but make it faster to get out there, perhaps eliminate the travel or detonation time?
As others have said though, the thing with vile taint agony not matching up for the refresh is super clunky, but it just isn’t my personal beef lol
