On every encounter. The justifications for these are as follows:
"Reason: Souls are a resource, and we have a rules about resetting your resources/stacks of a buff before an encounter, so that every attempt is standardized. Having souls the first time you fight a raid boss feels good, but it makes every other attempt after that feel worse by comparison."
Essentially this boils down to - we want every pull to feel equally shit for affliction warlocks.
Affliction feels awful starting with zero souls on a pull. Particularly a heroism on pull. We've already got the damn ramp of Agony, and affliction is of necessity grossly underpowered without Reap active because otherwise we'd be overpowered with it. We are pretty much totally reliant on a maintenance buff to perform adequately, and that buff is unreliable. They are taking away any possibility of having that buff at the start of a fight, which is often the phase where you get free damage and also where you go all-out with heroism and pots. Yet it is also the phase where affliction performs the worst, by the time we reach fullpotential the heroism and pots are expired, which is why you get burst classes with cooldowns pulling millions of dps whilst we are like the fat kid at school who constantly has to yell "hey wait for me to catch up". Whether or not you get a soul to power up Reap is random in that first phase. Otherwise we are just held hostage to whethe ror not an encounter will have killable adds and also whether the devs decided to allow those adds to give us shards and souls and wrath.
It is ironic that they decided that a ramp class was made much worse by starting out with virtually no resources and hence gave us three shards instead of one, and now they have decided to go against that by zeroing the tormented souls.
It will be absolutely horrible in dungeons, how many dungeon bosses live long enough for affliction to ramp up and for tormented souls toproc to get us reap? Wait for Agony to ramp and tormented souls to proc to use reap and...oh, it;s already dead cos everyone else just blew their cooldowns and did 3M+ dps. The only thing that really lets an afflock do wel in a dungeon, except high + levels, is being able to run through and reach bosses with a stack of souls so we can immediately do Unstable Affliction+MG+Reap. Effectively starting on empty will make affliction feel grossly underpowered on short duration fights and that is how normal, heroic and standard to low + dungeons are.
In any sane world we'd have an execute phase to compensate for poor pull performance, but we don;t. But Shadow Priests do even though they have less ramp.
In a PUG affliction can be horrible on wipes. They just look at the first thirty seconds of dps and affliction is dead last. They aren't interested when you say "yeah but I catch up later on"
This is a stupid change. On top of those godawful tier bonuses.
Only possible reaosn it could make sense is that the proc from the new trait which causes Drain Soul to generate tormented souls is reliable enough to immediately give us souls to power reap....
Imagine if hunters were told "yeah you will start every fight with zero ammo, but don;t worry, you can kill adds and steal ammo of them. If there are no adds ammo will randomly appear in your bags, and when we say random, we really mean random"
(assuming hunters still use ammo of course)
Or warriors
"You abilities will sometimes generate rage or not"