Class tree is even worse than before

Classes Warlock
21

I like the idea of ‘Pacts’ and feels very thematic, but there needs to be a little more imagination.

For example:

Pact of the Eredar
Spell Tie-In: Shadow Bolt, Incinerate, Drain Soul
• Effect: “You can cast Shadow Bolt, Incinerate, and Drain Soul while moving

Pact of the Satyr
Spell Tie-In: Curse of weakness, curse of tongues, curse of exhaustion
• Effect: Replaces foul mouth as a talent and multiple curses available. Bake curses back into the toolkit.

Pact of the Annihilan
Spell Tie-In: Damaging spells
• Effect: “Your damaging spells have a chance to trigger Annihilan’s Fury, increasing your spell power by 5% for 8 seconds. While active, your spells deal bonus Shadowflame damage.

Pact of the Nathrezim
Spell Tie-In: Agony, Corruption, Wither, Immolate, Bring back doom for Demo
• Effect: “Your pets and DoTs leech 1% of their damage as health to you. If you are below 50% health, this effect is doubled.

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22

And I had this idea for Abyssal Walker that would change Demonic Circle similar to Door of Shadows.

Abyss Walker (Passive Talent)
Effect:
“Your Demonic Circle is transformed into an Abyssal Rift. Instead of placing a static circle, you open a rift to the Twisting Nether. After a brief cast, you teleport to any location within 35 yards in line of sight. Upon arrival, infernal energy erupts, dealing Shadowflame damage to nearby enemies.

23

I’d really like it if the Oppressive Darkness talent make Shadowfury instant and decreased its CD similarly to Howl of Terror. If I play Destruction, I’d like to be able to use Shadowfury in PvP because it’s such an iconic (and useful) destruction spell

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24

We should also bring back Dark Intent. It’s a "pact between us and our party.

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25

I always hope that soulburn will be incorporated into the spells that currently use it (if you have the shard the spell will be empowered, otherwise not), and that in place of soulburn - following the logic of the previous talents related to the “mobility/teleport” theme - a talent will be inserted to be able to cast fillers on the move

I’m very surprised, in a negative way, by the current absurd and incomprehensible choice of curse stances. It’s truly eye-watering; you basically have to press the curse you want to activate in your stance, and it appears in the bar, transforming. Then you have to cast it. One of the most abominable things I’ve seen in this game since 2004 XD

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26

I think empowered healthstones is suppose to be a buff to group utility. I dont have alpha so i cant test myself but if anything it would make soulstones normally be a 2 charge for a total of 60% hp over the course of a boss fight. When currently its 1 charge for 25%.
If this is not the case they literally made another useless talent node.

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27

Its actualy a Raid/Group nerf and a self Buff. The additional charge doens’t matter for the group, because they don’t get the benefit of Path of Glutony. So they just heal 5% less than what it’s now on retail. But with the combination of Path of Glutony and Empored Healthstone you heal 25% + 30% over 6 sec instead of 35% flat.

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28

A new iteration of the class tree has been released, undoubtedly more logical and organized than before, and there are no longer any completely unnecessary talents to be acquired

However, some obvious problems remain:

  • The curse system is terrifying, simply the worst modification a human mind could conceive of in this game. Two talent points for two curses, and the absurd thing is the “stance” to switch between curses, with its accompanying global CD. If this system stays live, we’ll send the real curses to whoever designed this abomination :laughing:
  • Strength of Will/Dark Accord no longer makes sense since the Resolute Barrier talent has been removed. At this point, it would be enough to replace this talent with two nodes with Resolute Barrier itself, and ensure that Unending Resolve always has 40% damage reduction every 3 minutes (although lowering it to 2 minutes is long overdue)
  • The lack of a health funnel and the introduction of the Infernal Beneficiary talent are a problem because if you play as a demon you will have to invest points in Fel Dom, Infernal Beneficiary, and presumably also in Demonic Resilience. With the current Grimoire of Sacrifice, this is a problem.
  • Teaching of the Black Harvester is another of the mysteries of the game, a talent that has enormous potential but remains identical despite being really poor, it was mainly taken to access demonic resilience or for the spec-meme with succubus and diabolist destruction for the 20 sec cd seduction
  • The capstones, once again, are lacking and decidedly uninspired, as well as being completely out of place within the logical sequence of talents. Soulburn must be integrated directly into the spells that can use it; if you have a shard, the spell will be empowered, and if you don’t have the shard, you won’t get the benefit. The current problem with Soulburn is primarily that it requires a macro to be optimally managed, but for example, it’s not uncommon for the Gateway Instant to fail using the macro and send Soulburn into CD for 6 seconds.
  • Pact of Gluttony should be placed elsewhere, on the right side where drain life and the talents that enhance it are thematically located. I don’t understand the redundancy of the empowered healthstone talent; I’m not a fan of centralizing almost all of a warlock’s self-healing in a large CD like Demonic Healthstone.
  • Blight of weakness is another curse that doesn’t follow the logical thread of the class tree and thematically it can be good for affliction but not for demonology nor especially for destruction

I still maintain that the Pacts in the tree are very interesting, and it would be even more interesting if the “stance” system was applied to these Pacts so as to buff the group within a 40-yard range. It would help the warlock a bit in the M+ and raid utility

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29

When I read about the curse changes today, I felt utterly smacked. Everything you wrote about it is true, and the Health Funnel too, and the Black Harvest Teching … but not the Blight of Weakness part! I can see use for Demo and Destruction a like, But with this new curse system, not only does it take longer to apply curses, it’s also harder to target them beacuse of this little stance rotation we’ve gotten. The answer to the curse problem was written further up in this thread. This stance stuff must go away.

Im struggling with 2 of your other points. Probably Strength of Will is the go to choice 9/10 times. But even if it’s only 10% for the other talent, this still creates a choice and an option for us. And how can more options be bad. We could talk about how to bring both talents more in line with each other, but taking the option out completly doesn’t make sense to me. Also you are wrong on the assumption that we centralize our defensive power in Demonic Healthstones too much imo. Sure it is a big part right now because of how spiky the dmg income is, but with the recent changes to Drain life, still having Dark Pact and in regards to the changes to defensive options for other classes and dmg profiles of Mobs, I think it shows that the devs want us to have a variety of defensive tools and be a very tanky class in general.

The other point of yours was the Soulburn Capstone. I like the option tbh. Its a bit like the curses. If you have spells that you always want to have Soulburn active with, then marco it, and else keybind it and use it if you want it to. I only use a Stone/Soulburn Macro and this Soulburn Gate macro, if anyone is interested :

#showtooltip Demonic Gateway

/cast [mod:ctrl] Soulburn

/cast [@cursor] Demonic Gateway

/cast Gateway Control Shard

It works for me atleast.

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30

I looked more closely at the “stance” issue, and fortunately it’s not in the global CD, but in any case, it’s a completely incomprehensible choice, as macros will still be needed to avoid having to double-click to apply a curse. I saw that the blight of weakness transforms with the stance of the curse of exhaustion into blight of exhaustion, which slows all targets by 80% within 10 yards of the primary target.

Changing “stance” for curses is too convoluted, and pointless since macros will be used if necessary. If you want to empower a curse, it would simply be enough for them to be empowerable with soulburn, maybe. By the way, there’s a rather obvious problem and redundancy with the Foul Mouth talent

If they really want to emphasize curses, I think they should reconsider their effect, especially in PvP. Weakness used to make sense when it slowed melee attack speed, but now it’s completely useless unless you use Amplify Curse, which was removed in Midnight. The curse of tongue could slow down the casting of next three spells by 30 or 50%, or reduce the global CD a lot since many casters now only have instant casts
for example. All curses should have a small cooldown in this case

I say that I don’t see blight of weakness as thematic for demonoloty and destruction simply because, having played warlock since 2004, I’ve always had the clear concept that curses to weaken the opponent and slow them were thematic for affliction (CoEx has always been a purely affliction talent). Destruction had no chance of slowing enemies with the curse, but there was the Aftermath talent that gave destruction spells the ability to daze the target, slowing them by 50% (another great talent was Pyroclasm, which gave certain spells like Soulfire and Rain of Fire the chance to stun). But it’s simply a “thematic and personal flavor” issue

Regarding the Healthstone, I forgot to mention that I was referring to a discussion more focused on PvP. Drain Life, despite being greatly buffed (in my opinion, there are too many dedicated talents; Gorefiend’s Avarice and Improved Drain Life should probably be merged), could still be a problem when channeling, even though it’s much faster. Drain Life also has the additional problem of being useless on absorbing shields, as it no longer heals based on a percentage of health, but only on damage done. If the game isn’t as fast as it seems, and there aren’t so many gap closers and CC/micro CC, then Drain Life will be really great (I really hope so)

Many thanks for the Gateway macro! Mine is slightly different and sometimes it fails and makes me go soulburn in CD (and that’s not a very pleasant thing in arena while a war puts the spear under you)

p.s. How do I modify the Gateway macro to use ctrl to no use soulburn and cast Gateway normally?

31

#showtooltip Demonic Gateway

/cast Soulburn

/cast [mod:ctrl,@cursor] Demonic Gateway

/cast [mod:ctrl] Gateway Control Shard

I think this is what you are asking for. Now it would only use Soulburn unless pressing ctrl with it.

1 Like
32

I think I explained myself badly, with your macro if I use CTRL it doesn’t use soulburn, and I would like the opposit

33

No you wrote it good but i missunderstood it. I think my last post should be the correct answer to your question now.

1 Like
34

The biggest problem with the new blight talent is the fact the duration is only 12 seconds.
Amp curse was just a straight up amp to the curse applied. No effect to the duration and if you really wanted to you could have 100% uptime on 1 target with a amped curse.

They really need to buff and change curses back to what it was and just switch amplify curse with blight, and make so the duration isnt a measly 12 seconds and at least a min.

35

I saw a video by Kalamazi where he demonstrates how the stance-based curse system works, and I couldn’t even figure out how the blight of exhaustion comes about. It’s truly one of the most absurd and convoluted mechanics in WoW history ihmo

If it actually goes live, they’ll need macros upon macros, and you’ll also have to double-tap the same macro to apply a curse to a target (it would be really fun for affliction in PvP with the jinx talent and having to be careful not to use CoEx on melee players if they’re immune). The hilarious thing is that they’re simplifying the game in various ways, and then they’re introducing a system like this to apply a curse.

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36

It is seriously ridiculous. I do not know how there can be such inconsistencies with how classes are designed. The classes that look great clearly are designed by people who know the class. Sadly, they don’t seem to have that with Warlock.

We had impending catastrophe that was a smart curse application. Why do they not bring this back? Replace Foul Mouth with it.

Pact of the Satyr should allow you to have two curses active.

Blight of Weakness/Exhaustion/Tongues should just be Blight of Curses and work like Amplify Curse.

How is this so difficult? Why is this so complicated?

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37

I’m going crazy thinking about how they’re simplifying the game, and they’re trying to help new warlock players by, for example, including Felguard as a talent to suggest using it… and then they’re introducing a complicated and useless system that, if it went live, would be completely bypassed thanks to macros.

And I’m wary that new players, who don’t know that Felguard is the most powerful demon to use, know what a macro is

A very simple and straightforward solution for curses could be this: you access all three curses with a single talent, one curse per target, and if you want to curse multiple targets within a certain range, you use the classic “amplify curse” with a CD before casting the curse. Each “amplified” curse will affect multiple targets and have a more powerful effect than the standard curse, becoming a “blight of”

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38

I am with you on this. The design philosophy and direction of travel is claiming to be more simplified yet using complicated mechanics.

Felguard should remain a baseline demon summon and they should just add a more powerful demon summon.

Your curse application sounds simple yet effective. This in keeping with what the purpose of these redesigns are for.

My frustration is that there are so many old and new ideas in these forums the team can take from that will make the class great but yet there is clearly someone who has no idea what they are doing or what the class means.

Another thing that frustrates me is that the warlock thread in the Alpha page had one comment. One?! I really do not trust this new approach and also a popular warlock streamer who will say they are frustrated with the travel but will always add “it is what it is” without even posting feedback on the forums.

I fear they listen to people that do not represent the whole community. Use polls. Engage with your player base. Actively scan the forums. Hell, you can use AI to help with that.

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