Hello there fellow WoW enthusiasts, I would like to welcome each and every one of you that is going to read my post.
As the title suggests I would like to give my opinion on Destruction Warlock spec.
This topic was floating around my mind for very long time (few years) and finally I
have decided to at least make a post about it.
My destruction experience starts back at MoP which is the expansion i have played the most, with considerable amount played in legion and now in SL.
Ever since MoP, destruction felt to me like an empty shell of its former self.
I will now list the things that i feel made destro so fun back in the day, with first on the list being the most important and last being the least important:
Grimoire of sacrifice:
Nowdays there is many demon pet builds that I feel
belong to the Demonology specialization.
-Having more dmg on spells rather than having pet deal
dmg for me felt so good. I imagine destruction warlock as master
of destruction that is DESTROYING by himself rather than relying
on his pet to do it.
-Pets on their own can be a nuisance, although needed for leveling and solo
content.
-Using it together with soul link talent was super nice bonus HP bonus
Chaos bolt:
Chaos bolt is THE spell that defines destro. In Mop SoO it was normal to hit 2-
3 million crits (not to mention ppl actually hitting 4-6m), while DPS in opening
30 seconds was around 400k. Now with dps in 30 seconds of pull being
around 10k cb is hitting what? 10k?
Doesnt feel powerful at all.
I know resource generation was
different with a lot of other things, but hitting those few well timed atomic
explosions felt so satisfying, in contrast with modern - “use cb when you are
near 5 ember shards or to maintain 10% dps buff on target”.
Imagine hitting 50 - 60 k cb in Nathria…
Shadowburn:
Baseline spell that used to separate good destro from great destro.If you
could utilize its potential in executing enemies and generating ember shards,
you had so much more power.
AoE:
There was no such disparity in ST and AoE builds. FnB was better and
baseline. Now you have to chose between Inferno and Cataclysm with
FnB being mostly useless.
There were few interesting new abilities after MoP which are Channel Demonfire,
Cataclysm,Dimensional Rift.
As you can tell I didn’t mention PvP at all, and that is because PvE was always my
primary thing, although I have always played PvP too.
To sum my wishes up: remake destro not to be budget demonology and make cb great again!
I stopped playing after MoP because they butchered Destro which was my favorite spec. The guy who was in charge of it, Xelnath, got fired before WoD dropped, and while I don’t know the details of his termination I can say that whoever replaced him did a very poor job of making Destruction fun for the following expansions.
I mostly agree with the elements you mentioned and would like to see them back but I think there are some points you didn’t mention (keep in mind that I’m mostly talking about PvP though I think some of these would also make Destro more fun in PvE).
Chaos bolt feels very unrewarding as a Shard spender, as you mentioned it used to be such a big hitter and felt rewarding to crit with, nowadays it’s like another boring way to keep a debuff applied. In PvP too such a big cast should be more rewarding than it currently is; put a Cooldown back on it in exchange for making it more powerful, make it ignore resistances and shields again, I don’t know, it should feel better than it currently does. I’ve seen a bunch of warlocks over the year suggesting to make it a huge nuke that’d cost 5 shards though I’m not sure that’d be the correct answer. I saw someone in this forum suggest making it have random chaotic effects like tearing through reality and opening chaotic rifts like in Legion.
Current summon infernal needs to go, Destruction is ridiculously reliant on this one CD and it feels SO bad to have your soul shards generation so tied to that one summon, if I wanted to play a spec that was overly reliant on demons I’d go with Demonology and not Destruction which historically has been maybe the spec that relied the least on summons
^ these two problems are at the core of why destruction feels so bad to play right now in my opinon and feed into one another: the spec is so centered around Chaos Bolt that the rest feels like boring filler that you can only speed up using Inferno, but CB itself isn’t all that fun to use. Seeing the alternative Necrolord Soul Fire spec on the SL beta gave me hope that Destro could budge out of this very rigid playstyle it grew into but Blizz promptly deleted this alternative.
Rain of Fire as a Shard spender feels AWFUL to use, I much preferred when it was a versatile, spammable shard generator that you could use for example to pull packs, keep rogues in combat in their smoke bombs or a lot of other things with tools such as Fire&Brimstone to spend it for AoE, right now it feels extremely rigid and even clunky to use because you can just spend 3 shards of RoF for nothing because mr.bear has to move the packs around for whatever reason
Bring back Fel Flame to have at least a little GCD to spam on the move, make Shadowflame baseline again. Destruction is supposed to be a low mobility spec but currently it feels so much worse to move than it used to. Curses being back helped a little but it isn’t enough. Or maybe make Corruption not a complete dead spell because of its ridiculous cast time. Or make the azerite trait “Chaotic Inferno” or rework the old Backdraft back into Warlock’s kit to give us some instant Incinerates now and then.
Shadowfury needs to be instant cast again, a stun tied to a cast time isn’t fun at all to use and it would make the spec way better against all the mobility it’s up against without making it broken
bring back succubus bump, that thing was versatile and FUN to use
I hope this post doesn’t reek too much of OLD GOOD NEW BAD but for me Destruction Warlock has just been a shadow of its former self since the WoD pruning and while I like some of the new spells we got over the years (Havoc, Cataclysm) I’d very much like to see some of its core gameplay mechanics reverted.
Would love to see chaos bolt on a 12 sec cd and act same as in wotlk, it felt always awesome when you sent it away, knowing it would do some serious damage, and that your other spells actually contributed to your total dmg as well.
Even if I liked the MoP Destruction, I think the chaos bolt spamming started there which to me was a negative thing. Would gladly take it over SL destro any day tho.
I heard about the Xelnath dude before, guy is a legend judging by his work on destro… As of his replacement(s) the first question that comes to mind is, why did they even change anything? I can’t imagine that Blizz felt like destro players are unhappy.
I am glad that you agree with my points, and I was sure that I would miss some things, since more than 7 years have already passed…
I am also very glad that You mentioned stuff concerning pvp since I have completly avoided that, and I almost completely agree, beside that Corruption and Chaotic Inferno azerite trait, since I don’t know how that would work out.
Hopefully someone will take notice…
I am absolutely against Shadowburn ever returning to the degenerate thing it was in WOD.
Problem with Shadowburn basically was that whole spec in WoD was balanced around assumption you get to Shadowburn spam adds like no tomorrow. MoP masked that fact by Destruction being strong even without it.
In WoD, once they nerfed the OPAF part of destruction and suddenly the weakness behind Shadowburn design was exposed - you basically had to have these adds or you were useless.
So no, no thanks for that one. I am very glad it’s a talent and limited at that - people who want can have it, but certainly not a spammable baseline - that would just make Destruction even worse in ST.
As for CB, you basically said it - as long as they let us generate shards like a nuclear power plant - you can’t really have those bajillion CBs.
They could bring Supremacy back, but that one is its own can of worms there with you being useless outside these 30 seconds of glory.
Big CBs of MoP were sure nice but there was a problem you forgot - you also had to Incinerate for like 20 seconds in between just to get resources to cast one.
Having spec balanced around Shadowburn was not what I suggested, it seemed fine to me the way it was used as an enhancing tool to generate bonus shards where you can.
I don’t think they nerfed OPAF part of destruction, the changed/destroyed it completely. They could have tried with tuning down the numbers, just as they are giving destro flat 5% buff this patch.
As I stated already destro seemed the best without pet, and supremacy is exclusive with sacrifice which was by far the best thing destro had in glory days.
Incinerate spamming for one meaningful cb seems much more appealing than jumping from incinerate to cb for more or less same output.
There was something very rewarding in being able to focus and concentrate your power in few dozen seconds while all your buffs were up to deal insane dmg. And you had to do it properly - time all the procs and buffs together and nuke or you are pretty much out of dps race.
You were casting same bloody spell for 20 seconds straight, with just conflag, immo in-between until they gave Charred Remains in WoD.
Big CB was nice, but the incinerate drought in-between was genuinely bad.
I do think that current spell repertoire is much better and healthier as a whole - not being balanced around Shadowburn crutch and not sitting there spamming filler all day long.
Other than that - current Destruction design is all fine, except for RoC, which imo is not what destruction should be about. Damage-wise CB is not even bad, if you see its average damage - it’s not that far off from other big hitters once you put some juice into it with DSI, but we can for sure cast it a lot more too.
This 5% + NF Niya capstone will do a lot of good. Destruction imo needs also a look at its underwhelming number-wise conduits. Ashen Remains is a conduit done right, but the numbers there should have been double that.
I must completely disagree. We obviously have different preferences in playstyle.
You mention balancing around shadowburn again, while I have never said that it was desired.
Current design is just mediocre, there is nothing in spell rotation that is unique in this game compared with other ranged casters. And chaos bolt which should be something special since it is mix of all the schools of magic.
Night fae covenant for any lock is also just laughable. Its surely very inspiring for any lock player to go play with their little tinker fairy friend.
Whatever works - works. I, personally don’t give a damn about whether I’m emo vampire or skeleton, edgy angel or a fairy, as long as the throughput and utility is there.
And NF simply has best soulbinds and abilities for warlocks across the board. Guess I should cry myself to sleep now with having one ability be starry blue sparkles instead of sickly green soul goo, because that’s all it boils down to ingame as far as covenant presence goes.
Not all of us just do LFR, after all. Maybe that’s the difference of perspectives there.
And maybe the chaos bolt’s power should depend on the order of rotation, the more correctly pressed rotation strengthens the chaos of bolt, and a missed one lowers it. Somethink like this?
If you want to play what works, there is fire mage broken atm.
Covenant presence goes way beyond one or two spells, its basically the theme of the place where one spends most of his time.
What kind of argument is this ? I have played only LFR so far but as soon as possible i will do heroic Nathria for sure. It wont change my oppinion.
I did raid Antorus mythic when destro was very competitive (not broken as affli) and I felt the same. Spell summary sucked same as it does now.
People who raid LFR care, people who want best performance - don’t give a fudge.
NF is simply best throughput and utility covenant for Affliction/Destruction, as simple as that. And whether I afk in a blue tree or green cave - does not really bother me. In the end when you actually play - it’s all down to 2 abilities with long cds that are sparkly dark blue instead of sickly green.
My biggest problem with destruction currently is, that blizzard does too little to make the baseline specc feel good. Our spells deal so little damage outside of cooldowns and proccs…my chaosbolt’s damage varies from like 6k at the dummy to over 20k at the boss in av. Incineraty deals like 900 noncrit to 5k crit if I stack the dmg modifiers.
Imho thats just bad design and leads to an awful feeling whenever I dont have all my modifiers up. They should remove the terrible procc/cooldown stacking and make the baseline spells feel good first.
Mid legion, when they reworked the soulshards for destro, they also changed the direction of the specc from spamming noodlebolts to less, but bigger bolts and I have no clue why they decided to kick us in the face in bfa and revert that philosophy
