#1 - March 13, 2017, 10:26 a.m.
Reason: Souls are a resource, and we have a rules about resetting your resources/stacks of a buff before an encounter, so that every attempt is standardized. Having souls the first time you fight a raid boss feels good, but it makes every other attempt after that feel worse by comparison."
Please, please, PLEASE do not let this go live. You guys are missing the point of our entire feedback the past few months. Not having Reap Souls on the pull feels horrid, sluggish, and constrains our damage significantly.
A few examples of why this would be bad:
- 1. Heroism on pull -> Oh, you spent half of heroism just ramping up to deal as much damage as everyone else? Nice, there goes your opportunity to contribute to the greatest overall "free" uptime of damage in most fights.
2.Mythic+ dugeons -> Why is this Warlock sitting at low numbers unable to deal reasonable damage to the boss until it's 3/4 of the way dead?
This change does nothing but increase the ramp up on Affliction damage, and unless Rend Soul goes completely un-nerfed (very unlikely) there will continue to be significant variances in damage based on:
-UA crits
-MG uptime (ability to stand still for long periods and use Drain Soul effectively)
-Shard procs off of soul conduit and Shard generation in general
-Soul generation in the first 40s of the fight
I think a lot of Warlocks in the community would be happier if you changed it to just passively generating 2-3 souls out of combat, and allowing us to maintain the souls for the boss, but don't allow us to maintain the buff pre-pull. (I.e., can't game the system so that we can pop reap souls 15 seconds before the pull and have 3 souls again by the time pull starts). This would add consistency and slightly lower variance.
Even without this nerf though, it doesn't change the fact that Affliction damage is, perhaps, the most inconsistent damage in the game due to the reasons mentioned above. It also sucks our entire damage distribution is based around MG uptime with UA, and that the rest of our DoTs are literally just there for flavor.
None of this even takes into account you're pigeonholing us into Malefic Grasp through the t20 set bonuses, and your attempt to make Drain Soul a significant damage dealing spell completely contradicts the nature of both MG, and the fantasy of being a DoT casting class, as we literally will have to sacrifice DoT uptime just to keep those drain soul procs rolling.
Please listen to the feedback of the community and make changes. Warlocks could really use some love with how their design has been this expansion.