With the upcoming patch 11.2, Affliction has received 0 changes. Meanwhile, Shadow Priests got a MAJOR change to their Shadow Crash. Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain last longer in duration in current design. I find it quite punishing and unfair that Shadow has received better quality of life of DoT (Damage over Time) spread.
What is my argument?
In any setting where an Affliction Warlock has to spread DoTs, we are limited to Vile Taint (a choice node between Phantom Singularity) for Agony spread. For one, it’s target capped. Second of all, Affliction warlocks have Agony lasting 18 seconds in duration. Vile Taint is a 30 second cooldown. So, my argument is basically in between those 12 seconds that Vile Taint has to come back up from cooldown Agony has already expired, Affliction Warlocks have to manually refresh Agony on every single target manually to maintain the duration. Shadow Priests have Shadow Crash with a 15 second recharge at 2 charges baseline in the tree. Not only that, but they also have the “at selected location” or “at target” option in their tree.
I just find it really unfair and a disrespect to Affliction since the past 5+ years since Malefic Rapture gameplay has been in modern wow that the spec is still behind for the modern WoW design. Whenever I talk about affliction it just seems to be the same response from other players “Well, you have 3 specs and Shadow has one”. This type of argument isn’t justified because why punish ANY of the specs if Blizzard’s philosophy of modern WoW design is you can play any spec in most end game content (Mythic + 15 and under) of your own choice. Affliction is in a dire state of reworks and same with the class tree which Morgan Day has stated in a recent Class Interview with Chinese guilds that he acknowledged himself.
Please just once even if we don’t get an entire spec rework, I’d love some Quality of Life just to play Affliction without tab-targeting the entire key. There are more problems with affliction alone with finding Unstable Afflictions in a pack of nameplates to maximize Rapture damage but just please give Vile Taint an equal level of fairness when it comes to the spec.