Plus, in ANY raid you’ll always have at least one warlock. Why? That closet. That makes summoning people take less time and because people are lazy, you will always be wanting at least a single warlock class in every raid setup, even with mythic because of spec/class swapping if your guild/group does that sort of thing.
pretty sure soul harvest didnt share a row with goSup for aff, i believe it was tied to StS and PS? so we had a CD in our talent tree.
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You are actually correct, I did not remember soul harvest being there. Thank you for that, It was apparently in the tree with Siphon LIfe and Sow the Seeds. I appreciate your correcting me there.
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i only picked up warlock in antorus so my knowledge of pre-antorus lock isnt super up to par so i just wanted to check hahaha. Cuz they removed soul effigy, put in DE, then moved SL to last row i think? lemme see if i can find antorus logs
The Venthyr covenant ability, a seed, and rapture should be quite nice. One can hope!
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Soul Harvest was a 2min CD. It shared the talent row with Phantom Singularity and Sow the Seeds. In raids Soul Harvest was usually the goto choice except for a tiny few niches. A well balanced 2 min CD can give you some great opportunities. You could burn down the Kin’Garoth adds, or who doesn’t remember the 1st boss upper kara and its burn phase. Soul harvest was really shining in these situations. Even more profit could be gained as it would extend its duration with Agony applied to multiple targets, Antoran High Command as great example.
I agree that being too dependent on a CD is bad, but Legion was a perfect example for a very well balanced 2min CD.
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SL was moved to level 100 to compete with the execute talent and SC, PS took its place, and everyone still took the perma big demon so no more CD on doomguard/inferno. But, yeah, so we can have Soul Harvest back, though I think it would still be fine without a CD and just giving us Inevitable Demise baseline as our burst mechanic for when we need it.
Rapture just does not fit. You do not need DoT specs doing instant damage like that, other than our pet for Warlock. I think they should make GoSac go back to the way it was before, I think it was back in either MoP or around pre-MoP when it was an HP boost and a flat 10 or 15% damage boost to yourself. That would be awesome.
Rapture can be reworked if needed so it can stay in name, but, the spec itself doesn’t need to do instant/direct damage. Rapture can just make your DoTs tick faster if you want faster damage, or maybe having a talent row either entirely based around it or in that same talent giving us like a “stance” dance kind of thing where we have 2 options to select and based on either of those, it does different things.
An example of this could be like… “Rapture makes your DoTs tick faster and for less” which would be a faster style of game play, especially on top of Creeping Death talent for those who want it faster. Then “Rapture extends the duration of all DoTs currently on the target, and makes them deal X% more damage for Y seconds.” Something like that, too, would not be a bad idea. They slow the pace of the spec down a bit to give the player more time to renew DoTs.
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well teh current hope is whatever Soul Wrack (continually datamined ability not yet on alpha) is the single target spender that effects your dots beneficially. i actually dont mind rapture at all, it removes some of the ramp needed to start doing AOE and i think thats kinda necessary, it still works around your dots based on how many you can get out as it scales with amount of dots on each target. But i can respect your POV on rapture as it applies to flavor, i just think the practicality of it outweighs alot. we actually have a button to do damage to multiple targets that doesnt require a 10s second windup
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It’s not just about flavor, it’s about the practicality of the spec. When you look at your damage meter, logs, etc. If we have an ability like that, especially if it’s our shard spender, it’s going to be the top and honestly there should not be an ability at the top that is not a DoT for a DoT based spec. Now, if it just did SOME damage or like the damage wasn’t big but big enough to burst your SoC so we can do some damage instantly and it had like a CD or something where you could not endlessly spam it, thereby increasing your instant damage and making it a top damage ability, yes, that’s fine. That reduces your ramp in the beginning and then allows the DoTs to shine the rest of the fight, or if they increased the shards it takes from like one shard to two or three so you could only use it very few times comparatively, yeah.
I just don’t want it to be tied to a top damage spot where people end up going “I wish I could have Affliction having more of these abilities.” That’s just not how the spec is supposed to be. It’s always been a super sustain damage spec with some or a lot of ramp depending on the xpac. Does this style fit into mythic+? Not at the lower levels, no, but in higher keys absolutely! The higher the key the longer each fight takes, the longer those fights take plays right into Aff’s profile of sustained damage. That’s how it was in Legion, too. Though, for that the weapon being broken also was a big thing.
But, yeah all in all I just don’t think anything non-dot or non-drain related should be a top damage ability in your logs at the end of the fight. It should be your DoTs first, then whatever else after. So if Rapture does X amount of damage, they can reduce that and just give it to the base of your DoT damage instead. Plus, with Rapture it has no bearing on Mastery stat, which increases your DoT damage. It would be going “We want haste and crit” instead, which feels weird for Affliction because in every other expansion, barring BFAs rework, Aff has always wanted haste and mastery I believe.
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I like rapture both for the sake of playstyle and because they just seem unwilling to change seed of corruption, so I like have a “diverse” AOE toolkit to compensate. Also flavor/lorewise is fun.
But yes back in the day you would sacrifice your demon, gain their utility ability, and gain a flat % damage and health increase. That was MoP.
That was ye olde Malefic Rapture, a channel.
I’d bet money they had scrapped that idea before Alpha and accidentally left it in, ergo the post being edited rather than a dev update like other specs have gotten so far.
I have a groundbreaking idea…
Return us to MoP… every spec worked… every spec was unique.
Crazy I know.
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Honestly that would be the easiest. It ain’t gonna happen but it would be the easiest. Don’t fix what ain’t broke etc.
Save for Demo, RIP Meta. Demo literally just needs Baleful Invocation baseline and HoG to summon diverse demons and I’ll stomach it for another expac.
Feel like crap just want her back:
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i really like your points here, especially the foresight of mastery scaling i genuinely never took into account. i get that you want our dots to be top damage far and away, it makes perfect sense, and id like it that way too in council fights, make me juggle my dots right and give me the payoff, hell yeah. the current issue is burst becomes infinitely more important than sustained damage in a chunk of situations. obviously M+, cuz if aff has time to ramp its dots in M+ and actually get value, chances are that pull was botched. in raid aff has godawful priority damage besides ID, which again is a necessity in alot of cases. rapture at least allows us to apply direct damage to something without the ramp and at least feel useful. i think a happy medium is introduce soul wrack as a single target DoT amp, it purely affects our dots and makes them feel powerful. im willing to bet itll be channeled too, dont ask me why. rapture can be a “press and do direct damage” ability for when we dont necessarily have a priority target and just want the standard AOE pressure, have it deal more damage than an early stack agony, but have agony outscale its damage once fully stacked.
I also have another idea. They edit the mastery to include drains in it as well.
With this; they bring back grasp, make it a talent to replace baseline Drain Soul, then after that give us Soul Burn back, which interacts with the entirety of the whole Aff toolkit, utility and damage. Then, they give us a Soul Burn: Drain/MG effect. Can be a talent on a diff row or just built into Soul Burn itself. Hell, they could even put Soul Burn as a talent and have it do all of these things.
Soul Burn: Drain Soul/MG makes it where Drain Soul/MG affects all targets within Xyards of the target, forcing your DoTs to tick that are currently on the targets each time it deals damage.
Rapture also has a…what is it 1.5 second cast or something? Plus GCDs from DoTs being put up/casted, so even Rapture still has rampup damage.
i got no argument against soulburn, theyre just not gonna do it tho. but i wouldnt be against it at all, in favor of it in fact.
yes rapture has a cast time but it requires significantly less ramp than the alternative. so far ive just seen seed, haunt, agony main target, and spam MR. you can weave in agonies for shard gen, but thats alot better than waiting for your agony to ramp to get any useful value if that makes sense?
Honestly I think separating Rapture from mastery scaling is good. If Rapture was, say, “each damage over time effect immediately ticks” then if we’re too strong on AoE they can only nerf us by hitting our single target and cleave. Rapture being separate means they can tune Aff’s cleave/AoE separately from its single target.
Sure it means mastery doesn’t affect all of our damage, but I’m not at all convinced that’s a bad thing. Let us stack mastery to do good single target and cleave, and haste/crit for good AoE. If mastery is the best for everything then we live and die by just how that one stat is tuned.
Oh yeah, but if they gave us an AoE grasp:
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It keeps in line with the fantasy / philosophy they’re going for with DoT management and drains.
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It keeps the DoTs the star of the show for the most part, as it forces them to tick faster.
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It reduces ramp entirely for Agony and talent like WiA since Agony ticks even faster/more often and gets ramped up much faster that way but less overall ramp.
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It creates good synergy between your spells and filler or at least to me it does as it actually affects the DoTs up there and is good both ST and AoE. Just needs a talent for AoE or two talents for AoE.
I understand your viewpoint, and I actually overread this one. Just trying to make the spec feel better to play overall rather than people enjoying Rapture and then going “Aww…I want more abilities like this” kind of thing on a spec that is mainly or should mainly and philosophically be a Damage over Time spec, not a bursty spec. That’s destro spec, not affliction.
Also trying to make the DoTs more meaningful in a way that would be much better for the expansion, in my opinion.
if they gave soulburn back with AOE grasp, yeah that would be pretty amazing. if you think about it you would have a Single target option in soul wrack (again assuming it exists), a stacked cleave option 1 with the big suck. a stacked cleave option 2 with sow the seeds. and a spread cleave option with rapture which seems to be completely position agnostic. that MIGHT be a bit too much to give to a single spec, but im on board haha
I’d like to see Darkglare removed and have the dot extension put onto malefic rapture. One of Aff’s biggest problems is their short dot durations, and if you’re trying to run dots on multiple targets, all your globals are being put out to refresh them. Would be nice to have a way to keep your dots ticking that didn’t involve tabbing around and reapplying them. Tying that functionality to a 3 minute cooldown is no good, and without UA stacking, Darkglare is going to lose a lot of its value regardless.
I’m still salty that they chose the worst of the unique resources to apply to every spec.
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I was joking in discord that they could even rename the abilities and no one would bat a eye.
Simp swarm
Shand of Guldan
Smetamorphosis
Hmm yes… fresh and innovative.