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.
Семя порчи's damage was increased by 25% - pretty massive for AoE. In addition to this,
Порча damage was increased by 15%. Going back to the recent PTR build about a month ago where they increased
Агония 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
Пагубный восторг. The
Семя порчи change especially compounds this - if an Affliction Warlock wants to spec into heavy AoE damage, you can take the
Посадка семян 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
Пагубный восторг.
Second, the quality of life change that every Affliction Warlock in the world has been asking for;
Объятия Тьмы and
Призыв созерцателя тьмы have swapped places entirely for Affliction Warlocks. Now,
Призыв созерцателя тьмы is a baseline ability every warlock learns at level 58, whereas
Объятия Тьмы is now a talent in the same row as
Блуждающий дух. Not only does this change remove the unintuitive playstyle that
Объятия Тьмы brought to Affliction, it removes the forced
Похищение души talent option in the first row. Also,
Призыв созерцателя тьмы being baseline makes your
Призыв созерцателя тьмы line up perfectly with
Черная душа: страдание 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
Объятия Тьмы added was more valuable than the damage increase that
Призыв созерцателя тьмы provided.
The final change was a result of the swap between
Объятия Тьмы and
Призыв созерцателя тьмы - the conduit
Иссушающая стрела was removed since
Объятия Тьмы is no longer baseline, and replaced with an entirely new conduit -
Иссушающая стрела. This new conduit increases the damage of your filler spell -
Похищение души or
Стрела Тьмы - 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
Стрела Тьмы, or 32% damage for
Похищение души.
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,
Пагубный гнев has seen some play on the PTR. Since the way
Пагубный гнев 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
Стрела опустошения 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
Пагубный гнев 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,
Объятия Тьмы could actually end up being better than
Блуждающий дух on pure single target - missing out on 4 filler casts to cast
Блуждающий дух 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
Темный пакт. 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.
