I think that every class that has dots should not all be the same. However, why does warlock have to suffer when it comes to keeping my dots up. Destro has been asking for a good way to get cataclysm forever, yet it is still a choice node. Affliction, mainly for agony, has been wanting Vile taint to function like shadowcrash for priest with some talent that lets me extend atleast my agonies regularly. Yet my vile taint does not come off CD before agony drops. Vile taint for one, cost a shard and has a cast time, seed of corruption cost a shard and has a cast time. Shadowcrash has no cast time and doesnt cost insanity but applies both of priest dots. Why does every class that has dots have a way to easily apply and maintain dots besides warlock?
The good class designers left Blizz long ago
You will hate the answer but it is what it is. Shadow priests dots have the instant application because they also have full caster rotations to do. Aff reapplying dots is a part of our rotation. We don’t have enough stuff to do if we didn’t. It’s the same reason moonkins don’t have a mass moonfire applicator. Those globals fill the rotation and are balanced around.
Edit: not saying it’s good or bad but just the way it is at least in the current iteration
Because shadow priests are a different class, and are balanced differently.
Shadow doesn’t have rapture, their dots don’t do as much damage (minus DP but that’s not really a conventional DoT), etc. Vile taint, in addition to applying agony, is also itself a DoT, which matters for rapture, a lot. Taint is wayyyyy better than shadow crash in terms of the damage output over its duration. Taint is a straight up dps cooldown in AoE, shadow crash is more or less just filler.
You’re comparing apples and oranges.
I think some important context is slightly lost due to the time thats passed since this thread was actually made. But there was an issue raised with the DF Tier 2 Warlock set that still lingers today, albeit it not as prominent, but 4 months ago was a hot topic.
Refreshing our DoTs is fine, you’re absolutely correct that it’s the core gameplay loop of Affliction verse SPriest. The issue is Vile Taint refreshes Agony but the cooldown of Vile Taint is longer than Agony’s duration.
So we fall into a window where Agony is about to expire, but Vile Taint will be back up in like 12 seconds. You’re forced to manually refresh Agony, but then you also cast Vile Taint 10 seconds later, refreshing and Agony that was refreshed just a few GCDs prior. During season 2 it was like a 5 second difference lol
If Vile Taint is our mass Agony applicator it is a bit odd that it also isn’t the mass agony maintenance tool.
Yea the annoying thing is how close it is to being able to refresh. But if you take what I said out further i would say that it would be correct for the vile taint cd to actually be longer so a manual dot refresh happened in between.
Although that sounds right rotationally it would feel terrible and I think the real answer is to make vile taint able to refresh agony inside the pandemic window and then give us something else to do in between. I feel like if siphon life was good enough that would be the answer.
At this point either reduce the CD of Vile Taint below the agony duration OR give use some way to extend the duration of agony on multiple targets like malefic Rapture adding 2-3sec per cast?