I'm worried when I read the changes coming for Affliction in 7.2 and it looks kinda grim. If we exclude the general damage decrease we'll experience from having less Souls at the start of encounters and the loss of our T19 set bonus being replaced with something that'll barely affect us, my main concern is the design we're being moved towards. The major contributors to why everything's turning for the worse is the new traits, the new set bonuses and bad balancing in our talent tree. Being forced to play a Malefic Grasp build with 15%(25% if head ain't BiS) less shard regen will feel absolutely horrible.
Some things Blizzard could do to adress our problems.
- Make Siphon Life Baseline. No clue why this hasn't happened yet. Replace it with something to help our mobility. Something like,
Kiljaeden's Cunning: Unstable Affliction can now be cast while moving. That way we have the option between more mobility, more AoE or more single target damage.
- Make Soul Harvest also gain the effect of Reap Souls during it's duration. This would help us with openers immensely, especially considering they're removing our option for gathering souls prepull.
- Buff Agony and Corruption damage by ~10%.
- Buff Soul Effigy to 40% up from 35%.
These changes are to make Writhe in Agony a more competetive build, especially in multitarget fights where Malefic Grasp is still superior. Due to the mean damage going down now that we can't prepull with 12 souls Affliction damage in raids, especially farm content will be reduced drastically compared to all others. Affliction is currently dependant on 12 souls and even 5/5 Wrath of Consumption stacks on pull to even do comparable damage to other classes. This will most probably warrant a slight single target buff across the board. While the changes sounds substantial these aren't for Malefic Grasp. A minor buff to the filler dots and getting Siphon Life baseline with the option of Soul Harvest should both make Affliction useable for raid progression and more engaging while playing without making Affliction broken for Farm content, something that never was an issue to begin with.
Regarding the new traits we're getting, they should see a rework too.
- Sinister Seeds: Seed of Corruption has a 20% chanse to spread another Seed of Corruption to a neraby target when it detonates. The current itteration is an embarassiament of a talent. Make it do something useful instead. Another Idea could be to have Seed of Corruption spread one agony to a nearby target.
- Rend Soul: Move this procc to unstable Affliction instead and reduce the procc chance to 5%. Being balanced around 100% uptime on Reap Souls is retarded to start things off. Secondly, locking Affliction to Malefic Grasp is not what we want. Make the trait useable across all speccs.
And lastly we have the horrible set bonuses that basically grants us nothing. The 2 part will probably net us a 0,5-1% dps increase whilethe 4 part will make us reapply our dots 10% faster after we've finished a drain cycle. Absolutely insignificant. Just look at the Demo and Destro set bonuses, absolutely amazing. Give us something like that instead. Something like:
-2/4: Each Agony present increases your haste by 3%
-4/4: Unstable Affliction has a 15% chanse to replicate itself onto it's target when cast.
Just give us something fun that'll help us and make our damage rotation more engaging. As it stand right now the T19 set bonuses are so superior we'll probably lose out on switching from them to T20. Think about what we're losing, 10% UA dmg and 15% higher Soul Shard generation. And what do we get as a replacement? Higher Ilvl. Don't make farming Mythic Nighthold for Titanforge the primary source for gear upgrades.