DoT Tracking, AoE, and Shard Economy: Warlock Must-Haves for Midnight

Top 5 Midnight Wishlist

Return DOT Extension
Recently, there were changes made to both Summon Darkglare and Dark Harvest, removing their ability to extend active DOTs when cast. With Affliction shifting to being based around Unstable Affliction spender in Midnight, one could argue that DOT extensions are more important than ever. With the Darkglare restructuring, Blizzard has made it so that Darkglare now increases the damage your DOTs do by 20% while Darkglare is active, promoting a playstyle that casts Unstable Affliction AFTER Darkglare, no longer before. With this change, it greatly alters how we approach our Darkglare window every 2 minutes. This in conjunction with Malefic Grasp being a talent that is active only during our Darkglare has made things incredibly awkward. Malefic Grasp promotes a strategy based around DOT extension, but that was removed a couple weeks ago. With Malefic Grasp also being triggered upon Darkglare cast, one would assume that its likely better to cast Unstable Afflictions before Darkglare, for max Malefic Grasp value, but that is not the case.

You then enter this odd window of wanting to stand still and channel Malefic Grasp when Darkglare is active, but your DOTs are no longer extended by Darkglare or Dark Harvest, so when you finish casing your final Unstable Affliction and want to begin channeling Malefic Grasp, your Agony,Corruption and Haunt are all falling, which you are required to refresh. When you are done with that, you then can begin channeling Malefic Grasp, but all the Unstable Affliction effects you just applied have ticked for nearly half their duration already, GREATLY reducing the value of Malefic Grasp.

The issue here is that we pretty much have an oil and water scenario, they just don’t mix. With Malefic Grasp being tied to Darkglare and Darkglare having its DOT extension removed, you struggle to find identity with either ability, and are fighting against one another. There’s basically two design ideologies at work here and while they both would likely work if each was build around individually, they don’t work together in their current forms. Reintroducing Darkglare DOT extension fixes this issue and I feel is something that should highly be considered before launch. This greatly improves Affliction’s QOL as well as general cooldown play. If they stay how they are, I fear for Affliction’s Cooldown window in Midnight.

DOT Tracking on Boss Frames
Having the ability to track your DOTs on boss frames is exceptionally important for DOT classes. Over the course of WoW’s history, addons (such as Shadowed Unit Frames) have been used to do just that, making DOT tracking much easier and efficient in cleave based settings. Sadly, the current Blizzard boss frames have no functionality of that sort at all, not even a cast bar. The boss frames that the default UI uses are quite outdated and if not updated for Midnight, puts DOT class players (that won’t use addons) at a large disadvantage in certain settings.

Making Shared Agony “Smart”
Shared Agony is Afflictions new way of spreading Agony in 2+ Target settings. This comes with the removal of Vile Taint in Midnight and while it is a welcome one, the ability sadly is not “smart” at the moment. For example, let’s say you are in a 5 Target scenario with varying durations remaining on your Agony effects. By refreshing Agony, you would expect it to refresh on your target and another mob near the target, with the lowest remaining duration on Agony. That sadly however, is not the case. In its current form, doing so will often refresh the highest remaining duration Agony on a nearby mob and possibly refresh that same one multiple times, if Agony is cast more than once. This make DOT maintenance MUCH more demanding and quite frustrating, knowing that a small functionality change would greatly increase QOL. Hopefully this is something that is planned to be implemented in the next few weeks, or at least before Midnights release.

Buffs/Bug Fixes to Certain Talents
Currently, both Fatal Echoes and Malefic Grasp are functioning in an odd manner. Fatal Echoes reads that “When Unstable Affliction expires, it has a 10% chance to reapply itself.” This however, only works for the FINAL copy of Unstable Affliction that is active, meaning that if you have 2 or more stacks of Unstable Affliction on a target, the additional stacks do not have a chance to reapply themselves, it is only if you let additional stacks fall, and then the last remaining copy has a 1/10 chance to reapply. Malefic Grasp is also only benefitting one Unstable Affliction when it is cast, even if there are multiple stacks of Unstable Affliction active. I am assuming that these are both bugs and will be fixed, but if they are not, these talents provide exceptionally little value and likely need to be reworked.

Wanting to move away from Resource pooling
Its been mentioned that Blizzard wants to try and move away from “Resource pooling” for Affliction, and while I do understand their reasoning, it feels like trying to do so has led to a less exciting version of Affliction. With the return of Unstable Affliction as our spender in Midnight, people are quite excited to give Affliction a shot. Legion Affliction is heralded as one of the more exciting specs in the games history, and with good reason. The spec has changed since then, but does still retain a good bit of the Legion identity in Midnight. The effort to shift Affliction away from resource pooling however, I feel has made things a bit lackluster.

With our current cooldowns in Summon Darkglare and Malefic Grasp, our rotation is still build around pooling for these damage windows, which affects both Hero Talents. Malevolence in its current form also promotes a pooling strategy to do optimal damage. It also feels exciting having a damage profile where “Cooldowns Matter” and pooling around them further amplifies that feel. Knowing that you are going to do a large bit of damage in 20 seconds gets players excited to hit their buttons, flat profiles don’t. It feels subpar when you hit all of your cooldowns and barely see your DPS increase at all, the playstyle feels unrewarding.

It also feels quite hard shifting Affliction away from a pooling playstyle based on how its built in Midnight. Its possible that the Darkglare duration extension change was made in an attempt to do so, but it has sadly left Afflictions Major CDs in a state of confusion. I feel that pooling resources is ok, its fun honestly and the current version of Affliction is built to do just that. Trying to change that feels a bit awkward.