Seriously though, a talent that allows vampiric touch to apply shadow word pain. Why have affliction warlocks not gotten something like this? or at the very least soul swap back?
Malefic rupture is a spammy mess with how little damage it seems to do. Might as well put the malefic rupture damage into our felhunter again passively because spamming malefic rupture feels like a waste of time.
MR is most of our damage profile? Not sure what the issue is. Maybe confused by stay/level squish? Or bad setup?
I don’t think one fits better than the other, both are dot different implementations of dot classes.
Yes, shadow priests can apply shadow word pain using vampiric touch if they talent that, but they loose their aoe spender who is also a talent, or loose single target damage from the other talent.
On the other hand, Affliction can make Corruption last forever, or can pick Dot n.4, or improve Agony to become even stronger and you AOE spender isn’t locked in a talent, its baseline, you actually have 2…MR itself and Seeds of Corruption who you can use to spread Corruptino in AOE.
Both are Dot classes, but they do it in different ways, if you think the “grass of the shadow priest is greener” i would suggest you give them a try.
Shadow deals with a lot of crap that warlocks don’t have to, I would not argue that they fit the Affliction theme better because of a single talent. I do miss soul swap though. To be honest, I kind of wish they had kept Shards as a utility resource but I understand that the current design is a bit more compelling and interactive.
Also, yeah, Malefic Rapture is going to be your top damage source typically, it’s basically just another dot tick on everything but it’s been normalized to make the rotation/kit better.
They don’t, really. Shadow has the same problem as affliction where their dot damage is so low that they seem more like debuffs used to enable other damage sources than actual damage sources themselves.
Losing near-constant voidform means they’re back to having to manually refresh dots all the time, too, which feels just as bad for them as refreshing low damage affliction dots does for us.