The way these two spells interact with stacking Withers feels like it’s trying to be a more intricate mechanic than it actually is. There’s no real thought process behind collapsing withers because they have a random chance to passively collapse at any point. Spending shards and popping Malevolence when it’s off cooldown to trigger Blackened Soul is essentially just passive damage…
I wish Wither and Blackened Soul functioned more like Unholy DKs and how Festering Strike causes Festering Wound stacks to burst on-command. Instead of wither collapsing randomly, I wish we could stack it to higher levels (anywhere between 15 - 30), and use our on-demand Malevolence to collapse them, meaning the enemies will take massive rot damage as long as we can consistently keep Wither applied to the target (Unless the enemy gets dispelled, or they kite us until Wither falls off).
Fighting an affliction warlock should feel like a race against time. The longer we live and are able to consistently spread/upkeep our DoTs uninterrupted, the more damage we should do.
Thoughts?
Yes you are correct, none of hero talents have actually much involved gameplay, it’s intended that way, they are intended to be additions to the class without creating button bloat or complexity increases to the specs.
It’s important to understand the context and considerations that lead Blizzard towards this, in resume:
1 - Players experienced that as blizzard added things, it also added needless complexity.
2 - Players experienced that adding new buttons created a bloat in regards to how many different keys one had to press.
This lead to Blizzard reaction of making Hero Talents largely self-contained within themselves, you play your spec and for most part the hero talent does its thing.
It’s funny you mention Festering Wounds because it’s a good exemple of a mechanic that many Unholy Death Knights absolutely hate and would rather see it removed.
As for the ability to colapse a quantity of stacks at once who would inevitably mean the person can’t do anything outside of die, i think its not something blizzard would ever intentionally do.
The random consumption, the guaranteed consumption after 8 stacks are all mechanics done to avoid extreme cases, and this is probably one of them.
It’s a bit like, “if we have a CD who deals 1m damage on a 1 minute CD, would it be balanced to have a CD who deals 20 m damage on a 20min CD?” it wouldn’t.
Having a bit of control over it would be nice, but as mentioned, many hero talents are designed to be more passive and not add much complexity to the rotation. Malevolence already does add a fair amount of stacks for the burn phase while turning them acute. It’s not 15-30, but it’s a fair amount to keep it rolling for a while if you’re spending soul shards.
While that may be nice for affliction, how does it fit the them of destruction. Remember that it has to work for both. Mechanically, it likely doesn’t matter, but if you’re trying to make changes for themes, it needs to work for destruction as well as affliction.
If I’m pressing it after applying wither… which is every packs pull or when off CD in raids… it might as well be baked in passive.