On the latest PTR build, Affliction Warlocks were hit with a large number of quality of life changes, some spell tuning, and a few changes to talents and conduits.
First and foremost, the spell changes.
腐蚀之种's damage was increased by 25% - pretty massive for AoE. In addition to this,
腐蚀术 damage was increased by 15%. Going back to the recent PTR build about a month ago where they increased
痛楚 damage, both of these buffs fall in line with the idea that the developers' idea for Affliction is that it should be more heavily focused into doing damage with DoTs, rather than having power baked into spells that deal damage based off of DoTs like
灾难狂欢. The
腐蚀之种 change especially compounds this - if an Affliction Warlock wants to spec into heavy AoE damage, you can take the
腐蚀播种 talent and just spam away in Mythic+, instead of having to go through the current headache of spamming out DoTs, and then spamming out damage with
灾难狂欢.
Second, the quality of life change that every Affliction Warlock in the world has been asking for;
暗影之拥 and
召唤黑眼 have swapped places entirely for Affliction Warlocks. Now,
召唤黑眼 is a baseline ability every warlock learns at level 58, whereas
暗影之拥 is now a talent in the same row as
鬼影缠身. Not only does this change remove the unintuitive playstyle that
暗影之拥 brought to Affliction, it removes the forced
吸取灵魂 talent option in the first row. Also,
召唤黑眼 being baseline makes your
召唤黑眼 line up perfectly with
黑暗灵魂：哀难 every single time, which has always been a weird interaction as an Affliction Warlock. While this is a very nice quality of life change, it does in general mean that as a baseline, Affliction will be doing a bit less damage before any tuning happens, as the 9% or so damage that
暗影之拥 added was more valuable than the damage increase that
召唤黑眼 provided.
The final change was a result of the swap between
暗影之拥 and
召唤黑眼 - the conduit
凋零箭 was removed since
暗影之拥 is no longer baseline, and replaced with an entirely new conduit -
凋零箭. This new conduit increases the damage of your filler spell -
吸取灵魂 or
暗影箭 - by a certain amount per damage over time effect on the target. This will definitely be subject to tuning - initial PTR tuning has a 226 conduit at 64% increased damage to
暗影箭, or 32% damage for
吸取灵魂.
In addition to this already ridiculous tuning, there's some definitely unforeseen consequences of this new conduit just now being found out by Affliction Warlocks testing on the PTR. With the increase to filler damage,
灾难狂怒 has seen some play on the PTR. Since the way
灾难狂怒 works is by increased the base damage of your filler, the multiplier provided by the new conduit then multiplies on top of that, resulting in exponential scaling. On top of this, Necrolord's
屠戮箭 is yet another multiplier on top of that. This results in your baseline filler spell, which would normally hit for 700 or so with 1400 crits, hitting for upwards of 80k crits when the stars align. It's definitely not an intended design. Because of the conduit changes and tuning not yet being implemented from the looks of initial testing, its hard to gauge where this lands in terms of strength in numbers - what it does entail is a very involved playstyle. If
灾难狂怒 does end up being the play for Affliction, it will result in a high involvement playstyle where you'll not only have to manage your same DoTs and debuffs from before, you'll also have to maintain uptime on a 10 second buff that more than doubles your filler damage, and is highly subject to soul shard generation RNG. I'm very interested to see where the tuning will fall with this conduit. One extra side note - in a hilarious turn of events, based on the strength of filler spells,
暗影之拥 could actually end up being better than
鬼影缠身 on pure single target - missing out on 4 filler casts to cast
鬼影缠身 would result in a much larger damage loss than the 1% lower damage increase.
The final change, albeit a minor one, was a slight spellpower coefficient buff to
黑暗契约. While not super significant, it will result in an extra few thousand absorb, which is always great for heavy burst damage on sub one minute cooldown nukes in encounters.
