Affliction has always had legendary GCD bloat and grotesquely long ramp time. This expansion is no exception. Though I think the current Affliction is one of the better versions of Malefic Rapture it still has numerous old problems and that still need to be addressed.
Right now shard generation isn’t so bad because we have Vile Taint to apply Agony en masse. However we cannot refresh Agony without the tab targeting and VT is a 30 second cooldown.
Having to manually refresh Agony and manually apply it between VTs is a significant undue burden to Affliction’s overall performance and general enjoyment. It does not feel like unique or interesting game play. It does not feel like a fair sacrifice for higher performance. Especially since we already pay for higher ticks with Agony also having to Ramp up stacks, so an Agony dropping and losing it stacks because you can’t refresh in time feels like being kicked when down and blamed for it.
I believe simply allowing for this talent to at least add time to Agony on targets it hits will at least alleviate the overt issues facing Affliction.
Redesigning Volatile Agony to allow for Agony to be extended or refreshed would also be a very effective way to address the issues.
There are many other problems but I do genuinely believe that resolving this one discrepancy will significantly improve quality of life for Affliction. At this point I don’t even care much about the relatively minor performance increase and just want the Spec to feel less tediously clunky.