I don't usually gush over abilities/talents that haven't been locked into existence yet, but this one has to be noted.

Everlasting Affliction is a hilarious talent that is the 45-point-tier of the Affliction tree, and causes all damage done by (meaning every tick of) Corruption, Unstable Affliction, and Siphon Life to increase the bonus spell damage received by 5%.

Okay, so let's use Siphon Life, and 1000 spell power as a base for the test. 81 damage every 3 seconds for 30 seconds, and it gets 100% bonus spell power for the duration. That means: (81*30/3 + 1000) * 1.05 (SE) * 1.1 (SM) and let's say you don't have any other buffs up (Haunt, ISB, etc). That's base damage of 2090 over 30 seconds... not bad.

BUT WAIT, every time it ticks, it gets stronger. Okay, let's divide that by 10 to get the first tick: 209. Now, the second tick is going to have 5% more spell power, so - (81*30/3+1000*1.05)*1.05*1.1/10 = 214. That's pretty good, I went off and crunched the numbers and found that the very last tick of Siphon Life(max rank) will tick for 273, which is almost 70 additional damage from the first tick. This gives us a complete bonus of 298 damage, very nice.

Hold up, getting extra damage from dots is nice and all, but wasn't there another part of Everlasting Affliction that was pretty neat? Oh, you mean the "your Shadow Bolt and Drain Life abilities have a 100% chance to reset the duration of Corruption" and Corruption gets this nice +5% spell damage thing as well? Yeah... that's pretty ridiculous. Let's go over the math here. Same exact stuff, except we have to change the numbers up a bit. For one, they are changing Improved Corruption (because Corruption is going to be base instant cast now) to be 20% more damage done by Corruption. Also, we get 5% more damage from Corruption from Contagion, and again we are not using CoE or any other shadow buffing abilities.

Okay, so the math rolls like this: (1080+1000*1.26*1.05^T))*1.05*1.1*1.2*1.05/6. That's Corruption's total damage, plus spell power times the coefficient for Corruption with Empowered Corruption times T, the tick multiplier which starts at zero (which makes it multiplied by 1 for all you non-math-wizzes). Then we multiply that number by our multipliers (Shadow Embrace, Shadow Mastery, Improved Corruption, Contagion) and divide by the number of ticks to get the tick damage. The first tick will do 576. The last tick will do 683. That means that this 5 point talent deep in the Affliction tree will give us 359 additional damage from a full Corruption duration.

However, there is no "full" Corruption duration anymore, we can keep tacking on time because of Everlasting Affliction. If I hit the opponent with a shadow bolt while corruption is up, I get a whole new timer, but the same Corruption, so the multiplier keeps stacking. If I only get it to go around twice, it will be ticking for 855. If I continue to keep Corruption up, it will continue to grow. This is where the stupidity of the talent comes into play. The Blizzard devs have not implemented an upper-bound for this yet. So, on beta we are seeing locks going up against those mobs in Blasted Lands who become immune to death unless you have the quest item, putting a Corruption up, and keeping it up with drain life. After 1 minute of Corruption being continually refreshed, it will tick for 1096. This is completely bonkers... look at this graph that shows the damage Corruption would do in a 5 minute boss encounter.



I'll let you think about this... the numbers speak for themselves in my opinion.