Soul Rot, or rather the AoE Drain Life that becomes available after casting Soul Rot is far and away the coolest part of Affliction. But moving into TWW the highlight of the spec has been absolutely decimated by having key supporting talents removed. The following talents are painfully absent from the TWW talent tree:
Soul-Eater’s Gluttony - The cooldown of Soul Rot is reduced by 30 seconds.
Inevitable Demise - Damaging an enemy with Agony increases the damage of your next Drain Life by 15%. This effect stacks up to 50 times.
Grim Feast - Drain Life channels 30% faster and restores health 30% faster.
Below are suggestions for changes that I would like to see made in order to include these talents in the TWW talent calculator so the best part of Affliction can continue to be enjoyed as it should be rather than a depressing husk of its former glory:
Soul-Eater’s Gluttony
Bake Focused Malignancy into Xavius’ Gambit.
Move Perpetual Unstability to the vacant spot where Focused Malignancy was.
Move Malign Omen to the vacant spot where Perpetual Unstability was.
Place Soul-Eater’s Gluttony in the vacant spot where Malign Omen was.
Inevitable Demise
Adjust this talent for placement on the class tree. Change to :
Inevitable Demise - Damage from your Agony / Immolate / Dread Stalkers increases the damage of your next Drain Life by 15%. This effect can stack up to 50 times.
Yo i been saying this. Welcome to the big brain club. Drain Life is ICONIC as a warlock spell, no reason for it to only be viable in the affliction tree
So wait we are 5+ months into testing…have they not tuned drain life at all to account for the removal of ID? Are they really just letting the spell stay dead?
They can literally just bake it all into one node. Either name can be used
I don’t mind drain life leaving and being replaced with in-combat healthstone charges being the source of tankyness for locks, it’s another iconic warlock spell and more fitting for all specs imo. Also, aff lock currently suffers from excessively snowbally pvp playstyle, where if we get to cast we have huge damage and self heals and are generally unfun to play against. However, it’s also a frustrating for newer players to play aff and constantly get interrupted (these aspects have vastly improved with the new direction in tww).
But without inevitable demise the remaining drain life synergy on a few talents is a sad relic of the past. Soul rot feels awful at 60s cd to just get a weaker version of DF S3/S4 tier set bonus, rot and decay is pretty bad now, and the 30% drain life healing while under 35% capstone (Death’s Embrace) is laughably bad even after the buff. I can’t imagine soul rot being back at 1 min cd helps aff in mythic plus either, because it seemed that dark harvest soul rot was the only worthwhile thing about aff in m+, but I don’t PvE so I won’t speculate too much. Just commit to putting drain life in the bin fully, these talents will just bait new players into thinking they should be using drain life when we should probably just unbind it.
Imo soulrot with inevitable demise shouldn’t exist.
I’d much rather have drain life buffed to be a strong sustain tool untied to cds, if drain life is only strong when fully stacked and cleaving off multiple targets then it will be tuned to be extremely weak baseline.
Soulrot should do something else, instead of drain life, shadowbolt/ drain soul should cleave.