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.
Semilla de corrupción's damage was increased by 25% - pretty massive for AoE. In addition to this,
Corrupción damage was increased by 15%. Going back to the recent PTR build about a month ago where they increased
Agonía 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
Éxtasis maléfico. The
Semilla de corrupción change especially compounds this - if an Affliction Warlock wants to spec into heavy AoE damage, you can take the
Siembra de semillas 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
Éxtasis maléfico.
Second, the quality of life change that every Affliction Warlock in the world has been asking for;
Abrazo de las Sombras and
Invocar miradaoscura have swapped places entirely for Affliction Warlocks. Now,
Invocar miradaoscura is a baseline ability every warlock learns at level 58, whereas
Abrazo de las Sombras is now a talent in the same row as
Poseer. Not only does this change remove the unintuitive playstyle that
Abrazo de las Sombras brought to Affliction, it removes the forced
Drenar alma talent option in the first row. Also,
Invocar miradaoscura being baseline makes your
Invocar miradaoscura line up perfectly with
Alma oscura: Angustia 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
Abrazo de las Sombras added was more valuable than the damage increase that
Invocar miradaoscura provided.
The final change was a result of the swap between
Abrazo de las Sombras and
Invocar miradaoscura - the conduit
Descarga debilitadora was removed since
Abrazo de las Sombras is no longer baseline, and replaced with an entirely new conduit -
Descarga debilitadora. This new conduit increases the damage of your filler spell -
Drenar alma or
Descarga de las Sombras - 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
Descarga de las Sombras, or 32% damage for
Drenar alma.
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,
Cólera maléfica has seen some play on the PTR. Since the way
Cólera maléfica 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
Descarga exterminadora 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
Cólera maléfica 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,
Abrazo de las Sombras could actually end up being better than
Poseer on pure single target - missing out on 4 filler casts to cast
Poseer 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
Pacto oscuro. 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.
