There has been a lot of discussion about how Affliction doesn’t feel strong or particularly good to play in some scenarios. This post is half feedback, half my fun ideas about how to take Affliction from a mid-at-best spec and make it as thematic and cool as Demonology feels at time of writing.
- Affliction used to be the premier DoT caster (ignore the period when Fire mage’s Combustion used to create a mega-DoT. That was a weird time.) Now, all of our DoTs combined do less damage than Malefic Rapture, our main spender. And despite Unstable Affliction having a cast time and a 1-target limit, it does less damage than Agony! These abilities make no sense.
Buff UA and Corruption substantially so they’re a much larger share of total damage. Maybe nerf MR a hair for balance. Players should be rewarded for maintaining DoTs more than min/maxing the Tormented Crescendo slot machine. - Malefic Rapture is a very unsatisfying spender to press. First because it has practically no spell effect. Just a little greenish pop around the target that you can easily miss unless if you’re looking for it. Second because its sound design is awful. Somewhere between a sigh and the woosh of air you get when entering a US supermarket. The only thing this spell has going for it is that it does basically all of our damage (see problem #1).
Give Malefic Rapture either a more flavorful visual or auditory effect. A column of purple smoke rising from the target would be more appealing. And a reverb-y wail sound effect when as we fracture the souls of our victims would be way more thematic. Even better if it becomes a chorus of wailing in AoE! - On the topic of our lame spender, what the heck is a Malefic Rapture? Why does it do direct damage to the target when our class identity is draining the souls and vitality from our targets?
Make MR apply a debuff to the target that increases our DoT effects by 300% for 3 seconds. That’s way more Affliction-y. - Affliction is terrible at switching targets. Even if the new mob spawns right next to your current target, you need to spend several seconds prepping dots to even BEGIN to do damage. By that time your shaman has already killed the mob and you’re back to square 1 again. We used to be able to cut/paste DoTs from one target to another and use Soulburn to make it a copy/paste.
Bring back Soul Swap and Soulburn: Soul Swap. Not just as PvP talents - let us use them in Raid/M+. - Affliction’s AoE loop sucks in dungeons. The first main problem with Aff AoE is that nothing really lines up. Once you’ve popped Vile Taint, Soul Rot, Darkglare, and dropped three Malefic Raptures; you hit this weird spot where 5 targets have Agony applied for 32 seconds total but the rest of the pack only gets it for 26 seconds. The cooldown on Vile Taint is 30s and its base cast time is 1.5s. So unless you’re REALLY on it, you’re probably going to miss refreshing those 5 Agonies that you spent time stacking up. And the other Agonies that weren’t on a Soul Rot target are already gone unless you manually refreshed each one (probably losing damage). This feels bad to play and is a core reason why you don’t see many people playing Aff in M+.
Remove the cooldown on Vile Taint. The ideal AoE loop will still be VT → SoC → MR spam but now it won’t feel so awkward. - The second problem with Aff AoE is that it has a frontloaded shard cost but does damage on the back end. For context, either Demo or Desto can create a soul shard on demand via generator spells but Aff doesn’t have any direct generators. Still, our AoE loop requires 2 soul shards to even begin - one for Vile Taint and another for Seed of Corruption. This means you have to constantly hold 2 of 5 shards in reserve to do any damage on the next pull of a dungeon. That sucks given that most of our damage comes by spending further shards for Malefic Rapture (see problem #1).
Remove the shard cost from Seed of Corruption. Its cast time is already uncomfortably long, I don’t need further punishment. - Perpetual Unstability is an ok talent in a row full of better talents so we never take it, even though it’s kind of cool and would be a fun way to introduce players to Affliction. Also, it’s spelled wrong and I hate that.
Move Perpetual Instability higher in the talent tree so new players can nuke mobs with UA and feel cool. Also so we might ever choose it for endgame content. - Speaking of our spec tree, it’s pretty confusing to me. Why is Ravenous Afflictions on the opposite side of the tree from Nightfall? Why does the Grimoire of Sacrifice/Summoner’s embrace node even exist? (It’s not a choice for PvE because GoS is woefully undertuned.) Why is Withering Bolt on the opposite side of the tree from Dark Virtuosity? Why do I have to choose between Crit Chance and Crit damage in row 7; shouldn’t one feed into the other?
Take a good hard look at the Affliction tree and move nodes with synergies closer to each other. And consider buffing Grimoire of Sac by a lot. “There is no path for your pet” isn’t a fun thing to see on fights with ledges or airborne enemies.