Feedback: Warlocks

In Development Guardians of the Dream PTR
23

I dont really care for the chance in talents and such as you just play what is given to you.
But i hate the tier-set bonuses, last raid we were forced to take “Channel Demonfire” just to get a 8% damage increase and now we are forced to take “dimensional rift” just to be able to use the procc on effekt we gain!
I understand changing it so drasticly and early is not something that might happens but as a casual player i beg you to not force us to take talents that are undertuned and weak.
It gives more mobility but its a choice node of with “Chaos incarnet” which can be a 25-30% damage boost to your spenders!!!
Its like choosing plain pasta or a greasy fresh pizza, one is WAAY better in taste(damage).

Next tier dont do this, just make it some cool bonus to us or just plain passiv that can sync with MULTIPLE talents.

24

I agree, the whole idea of talent trees is having choices, and “Either take this talent, or you effectively won’t have a 4-piece tier bonus” is only the illusion of choice.

2 Likes
25

There is little to say about demo that hasn’t already been covered by other posts in this and the NA thread.

The decision to somewhat flatten the profile, reduce PI scaling is a good one but the way it’s been done is absolutely shocking and feels like the playerbase is quite simply shouting into the void.

Demo - Some Key points
-Going back to inflating Shadowbolt - a concept MASSIVELY rejected in the 10.1.5 PTR.

-Netherportal row is now entirely pointless. NP always felt terrible to play but now its output and desync from Tyrant makes it obsolete.

-Tyrant has been butchered beyond recognition, ROT is now capped without a single imp and the extension and empowerment cap of 10 imps kills the spec, there is no nuance, no skill at all anymore.

Destro thoughts
-Madness removal is nice, short term maintenance buffs are quite simply boring and restrictive. ROF seems to have been forgotten in this however as Chaos bolt got a baseline buff and placed on the new talent ROF did NOT receive a baseline buff to compensate.

-Tierset forcing us into an unused talent yet again. Tierset has no real AOE practicality while also harming our AOE by making us talent away from CI. Very likely this tierset will simply be ignored in Keys and Dimensional rift not picked.

-Why is the talent tree still so bloated? Destro has 50+ points in its tree, the sheer amount of 2 point nodes is staggering

Affliction thoughts
-Siphon life still exists?
-Absolute corruption still exists?
-Tierset useless in aoe (a running theme) because Seed is not included on it
-grand warlock’s design change has no purpose in the aff tree, the change to its time means nothing.
-Forcing Soul Rot into every build via tierset is just frustrating
-Seized vitality still exists
-Soul swap being the most efficient Single Target pathing is by definition awful design
-Inevitable demise vastly undertuned and even in a SR focussed tier won’t be used

3 Likes
26

Affliction Feedback

  • Tier Set Bonus

-The affliction tier set bonus is the most interesting (and powerful) of the 3 warlock specs. Makes me wish Deliberate Malice (Malefic Rapture extends the duration of Agony, Corruption, Unstable Affliction and Siphon Life by 2s) was added back to the spec tree. The tier set bonus from Sepulcher was beyond amazing and should never have been removed.

-This might make us spend 1 or 2 points in Soul Eater’s Gluttony instead of Malevolent Visionnary. This would typically lower Soul Rot CD to 40s, so one additional use per 2min cycle. It’s fun and switches things up a little bit.

-The 4p bonus has a few issues :

  1. It’s useless in AOE. Above 3 targets we want to cast seeds of corruption (SoC), this tier set bonus doesn’t change that.
  2. The 12s duration to get those 3 Malefic Raptures (MR) off is too short and too punitive. There are many scenarios where you won’t have the shards, won’t be able to get them in time, and/or you won’t even want to spend those 3 shards on raptures.
  3. Damage buff to Soul Rot could be a bit higher I think, +30% instead of 15%, but numbers are not the most important thing at this stage.

-A few ways the 4p could be changed :

  1. Instead of buffing the next 3 MR by 50%, it makes your next 3 MR cost no shards, with no timer, or a much longer one, say 30s. Of course those 3 free raptures wouldn’t have the 50% buff.
    It would have to work alongisde Tormented Crescendo procs.
  2. Or it needs to also grant the same buff to Seeds of Corruption. And maybe when Sow the Seeds is talented, the 3 stacks are consumed by a single cast, for the 3 seeds ?
  • Spec Talent Tree

-Agonizing Corruption still exists. This talent does nothing and costs 2 points. It needs to be changed.
Could be a buff to Agony damage and duration. Could also make seeds detonations extend the duration of agony, etc.

-Shadow Embrace. First off, removing the interaction between Haunt and Shadow Embrace made and still makes no sense. It’s a very old interaction, it was not a bug that needed to be fixed contrary to what the bluepost said, and it should be reverted

It’s very annoying to maintain it now without Haunt contributing to it. It makes the rotation feel a lot less pleasant and “natural”. It impedes the flow of the spec quite a bit.

Better yet than reverting that change, Shadow Embrace should be changed. Turned into a passive damage amp baked into Unstable Affliction : “Target(s) afflicted by Unstable Affliction take 4.5/9% additional damage from the warlock”.

This would remove needless set up and improve the flow of the spec. It would not impact the DPS of Affliction on 2/3 targets because it’s impossible to manage it on more than 1 target anyway.

-Dark Virtuosity and Kindled Malice are near mandatory talents that are boring, increase by a slight % the damage of a spell or 2, and cost 2 points each. We can do better than this.

-Vile Taint. Amazing talent BUT, please do something about the curse of Exhaustion application. Vile Taint SHOULD NOT remove manually applied curse of tongues or weakness, ESPECIALLY amplified ones with a short and useless slow.

Either replace the curse of exhaustion application by the old slow, or make it so that it doesn’t override already applied curses, PLEASE.

It prevents Affliction warlocks, which is the curse/DoT/debuff spec, to actually play with curses in M+, when Destro and Demo can.

-Pandemic Invocation. This is a bad talent that should be removed from the game.

  1. This talent actually ignores the real pandemic window of our DoTs.
  2. It removes mobility from the spec as it punishes us from refreshing our DoTs while moving, which is supposed to be a core strength of Affliction.
  3. It removes freedom in the management of our DoTs and adds a lot of rigidity to the spec that has already a lot to manage.

-Soul Swap. We’re forced to pick Soul Swap in pure Single Target talent build because it’s the cheapest way to get to Withering Bolt, a near mandatory talent. Soul Swap is useless in Single Target.

-Withering Bolt is a pure ST talent stuck behind 3 AOE/cleave talents, Inevitable Demise, Soul Swap and Soul Flame. It feels bad having to pick one of those 3 to get to it.
Withering Bolt should swap places with Sacrolash’ Dark Strike

-Soul Rot will be mandatory in 10.2. It’s already a widely picked talent in a lot of situations. It’s annoying that it’s stuck behind Grimoire of Sacrifice and Sacrolash’ Dark Strike. Those 2 talents are meh, Grimoire of Sacrifice is no longer the powerhouse it once was.
Swapping Withering Bolt and Sacrolash’ Dark Strike position would also solve this.

-Seized Vitality still exists. Like Agonizing Corruption, this talent does nothing and costs 2 points. I know Haunted Soul is very powerful, but making us spend 2 points, IN THE LAST SECTION OF THE TREE for virtually no benefit is absurd.

-Grand Warlock Design. We will simply never pick this. If you want us to use it, it should be made a separate node next to Grim Reach instead of a choice between the 2. If we could get both, then maybe in AOE/M+ it would become desirable.

-Dark Harvest. This talent is too weak, it’s not competitive.
It either needs to be buffed back to its Shadowlands power level, so +5% haste and crit per target hit, and/or allow Soul Rot to hit more than 4 targets.
Or it could make Soul Rot deal its maximum damage to all 4 targets instead of 100% to the primary target and 50% to the other 3.

  • Miscelleanous

-Grim Feast (talent in the class tree) should be merged into Inevitable Demise. Only Affliction warlocks play with drain life and Grim Feast. Affliction is punished for it by often having to spend an extra point in the class tree to get it.

Something would have to replace Grim Feast in the class tree obviously.

-Mastery : Potent Afflictions. Soul Rot is sill not listed in the tooltip of Affliction Mastery as benefitting from the mastery stat.
We wouldn’t want any future dev to mistake that interaction as a bug that needs to be fixed now, would we ?

1 Like
27

Is there any plan in PvP for affliction instead of a flat damage dispelled Unstable Affliction to make damage per Dot dispelled ? Feels bad that 3 dots dispelled is the same backlash than 5 dots dispelled ( 7,5 seconds of GCD for only a backlash of 1 Unstable affliction seems very punishable and don’t push the warlock affliction to set multiple dot on 1 target)

28

Continuing the discussion from Guardians of the Dream PTR Development Notes:

This talant deal 150k. talant with 3 min cooldown from last row deals 150k looks like a joke.

Continuing the discussion from Guardians of the Dream PTR Development Notes:

this talant is still very weak. In addition, the cooldown of 1.5 minutes makes this talent even more inconvenient due to its incompatibility with trinkets and felguard.

But. If you want to turn one of the strongest burst classes in the game into an elemental shaman(without negative to elemental shaman players) with filler buttons on the first lines in damage meters, then you are moving in the right direction. In this case, you should also not forget that the elemental shaman has many talents that synergize with each other, making the button filler quite noticeable in terms of damage. And the demolock has 2.5 talents which somehow enhance DB and SB

29

Demonology

“Demonology’s damage profile is currently too reliant on Nether Portal and Tyrant windows.”

Killing synergy on Demo cooldowns and core mechanics is not the way you should approach unhealthy gameplay.
Inability to fix degenrative gameplay with soulburn - demonic circle - soulburn in order to gain more stacks to pitlord and multiplicative scaling with trinkets and externals is not reason to remove all synergy.

  • Ner’zhul’s Volition has been redesigned – Demons summoned from your Nether Portal deal 15/30% increased damage.

Reduction of Nether Portal duration and making demons deal increased damage is a good change.

  • Gul’dan’s Ambition has been redesigned – When Nether Portal ends, you summon a Pit Lord that serves you for 10 seconds.

I do not agree to removing stacking damage buff from Pit Lord. Haste portion of it can go so it doesn’t have exponential scaling to make it nightmare fuel to balance. You could make it go by shards used during duration instead of shard spenditure events. It is already tracked somewhat by talent Dread Calling. Adding similar clause to it would not force 1 shard Hand of Guldan gameplay.

  • Summon Demonic Tyrant has been redesigned – Summon a Demonic Tyrant to increase the duration of your Dreadstalkers, Vilefiend, Felguard, and up to 10 of your Wild Imps for 15 seconds. Your Demonic Tyrant increases the damage of affected demons by 15% while damaging your target.
  • Reign of Tyranny has been redesigned – Active Wild Imps grant 1 stack of Demonic Servitude and active greater demons grant 3 stacks of Demonic Servitude, up to 15 stacks. Demonic Tyrant deals 10% additional damage for each stack of Demonic Servitude active at the time of his summon.
  • Reign of Tyranny has been redesigned – Summon Demonic Tyrant empowers 5 additional Wild Imps and deals 10% additional damage for each demon he empowers.

Now this abomination: Capping cooldown maximum potential to levels attainable without any effort? Why even have the cooldown instead of buffing core abilities by the same amount?
This change should be reverted if my earlier suggestion of change to Nether Portal would be enough to nerf Pit Lord portal into reasonable level then half of the power of cooldown sync would be demon extensions from portal.

  • Imp Gang Boss has been redesigned – Summoning a Wild Imp has a 15/30% chance to summon a Imp Gang Boss instead. An Imp Gang Boss deals 50% additional damage and Implosions from Imp Gang Boss deal 50% increased damage.
  • Inner Demons no longer has a chance to summon an additional demon during combat.
  • Bloodbound Imps has been removed.
  • Demonic Knowledge now has a 10% chance of causing Hand of Gul’dan to generate a Demonic Core (was 15%).

I get that these are to remove random elements of refunds, which you rely heavily on weakauras and co to track, and that makes spec harder to play (and use hekili rotation helpers).
It also kills ability to move and while you still have some cores to use while moving then you are making tier set require you to bank up one core in order to re-apply doom brand, reducing effectively your core bank from 4 to 3.

On topic of tier set:

  • Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (2) Set Bonus has been redesigned – Demonbolt now applies a Doom Brand that explodes after 20 seconds, dealing Shadow damage to nearby enemies. Hand of Gul’dan reduces the duration of your active Doom Brands by 1 second per Soul Shard spent.
  • Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (4) Set Bonus has been redesigned – When Doom Brand explodes, you have a chance to summon a Doomfiend that casts 5 Doombolt Volleys before departing. Each Doombolt Volley deals Shadow damage to up to 4 nearby enemies.

Just call it Doom. No need to create another Doom@home. Already Destruction tier is using Rift, which is a talent not used.
Make Demo tier use Doom. Make Doom baseline in Spec tree and replace with Hand of Doom. We already have corruption in there so what’s another unused button. At least with Hand of Doom, you would increase baseline damage of the spec.
And Doom has pandemic application for easier maintenance. And it is a hasted effect so no need for active cdr on detonation.
With that you can make tier set easier:

  • 2p: Volatile Doom: Doom detonates dealing x amount of damage split among all targets in y radius.
  • 4p: When Doom detonates, summon Wild Imp. If only one target is hit, Summon Doom Guard.
    (Why I chose wild imp as base summon was due to Hand of Doom interaction in mythic+ and stacked cleave applications, where you want to implode often.
    And you cannot implode Doom Guard, no matter how funny it would look like.)

The changes to rest of the tree are not such of an eyesore for me, so I won’t comment of those and as a demo one trick since Legion I definetly won’t comment on Affliction or Destruction. At least as long as Rupture playstyle is a thing and dots don’t deal damage.

1 Like
30

Honestly you pointed out pretty much everything that is wrong with the new changes.
I rather take your tier than our current one as it then we arent forced into a degenerative playstyle with spreading doom with demon bolts.
The 4p even goes well into aoe as you would use implosion and then its more skill based, so do it correctly = more dopamine cuz high dps.

To be fair the biggest problem i have with current tier is that it forces you into taking talents and the fact your pointed it out making doom baseline would just be good.
To balance it i would make it only generate shards if it hits 1 target, if it does hit 2 then it doesnt.

31

There is nothing positive to say about warlock.

The tier sets are awful, especially demo and destro.

The changes are awful, demo has been destroyed, gwd fixed cdr.

Just, i have nothing positive to say, get a grip.

1 Like
32

With the PTR build that went live moments ago:

  • WARLOCK
    • Affliction
      • Umbrafire Kindling now lasts 20 seconds (was 12 seconds).
    • Demonology
      • Soul Strike has been redesigned – Your primary Felguard learns Soul Strike: Strikes the soul of the target, dealing Shadow damage.
      • New Talent: Shadow Invocation – Bilescourge Bombers deal 20% increased damage, and your spells now have a chance to summon a Bilescourge Bomber.
      • New Talent: Fel Invocation – Soul Strike deals 20% increased damage and generates 1 Soul Shard. The cast time of Summon Vilefiend is reduced by 0.5 seconds and your Vilefiend now deals Fire damage to nearby enemies every 1 second while active.
      • New Talent: Spiteful Reconstitution – Implosion deals 10% increased damage. Consuming a Demonic Core has a chance to summon a Wild Imp.
      • Imp-erator is now a 1-rank talent (was 2).
      • Malefic Impact is now a 1-rank talent (was 2).
      • Pit Lord’s Felseeker damage increased 40%.
      • Volatile Fiends has been removed.
      • Power Siphon now prioritizes Wild Imps that are not Imp Gang Bosses or empowered by Summon Demonic Tyrant.
      • Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (2) Set Bonus has been redesigned – Demonbolt applies a Doom Brand that explodes after 20 seconds, dealing Shadow damage to nearby enemies or Shadow damage to a single enemy. Hand of Gul’dan reduces the duration of your Doom Brands by 1 second per Soul Shard spent.
      • Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (4) Set Bonus has been redesigned – When Doom Brand explodes, you have a chance to summon a Doomfiend that casts Doom Bolt Volleys before departing. Each Doom Bolt Volley deals Shadow damage to up to 4 enemies or Shadow damage to a single enemy.
33

So, since I haven’t participated in any PvE content this XPac I can only look at it from a PvP perspective. Furthermore I didn’t actually play any PTR, so my opinion is purely based on theoretics.

In terms of the set boni I am very happy about the new sets, for Affliction as well and especially for Destro. In S2, while the Affliction set feels like worth having, the Set for Destro is kinda wasted imo. The new sets for both specs seem to be quite good or at least like an option for PvP this time.

The increase of Chaos Bolt baseline damage is something I talked about with my arena mates quite often, Chaos Bolt feels like it just should hit way harder but I’ll admit, in combination with Madness it would have been way to strong then. Thats why I think the baseline increase together with the talent change may just hit the spot.

All in all I’m looking forward to these changes hit live to see how they pan out.

34

It’s actually quite terrible, because madness although it had a short timer, actually reduced the cast time of chaos.

So in the end, madness just needed a longer duration.

There is frankly basically no positive change i can point out for warlock.

They need to go back to s4 shadow/pre patch and start from there.

35

After a few hours of testing around I have some feedback I would like to share in hopes the devs might consider some of these. I am sad to see that the Nether Portal remains extremely underpowered in its current state, even though the pit lord did receaved buffs he is still at the low end of the DPS meter and therefore not worth the 4 talent points compared to immutable hatred, but damage aside I find it weird that unholy dks are allowed to keep their burst ramp with the gargyole/dark arbiter while the demo’s lost their burst ramp through nether portal. I understand the dmg output nerf for the pitlord but I dont see a need to remove the entire ramp for him, I would like to see the old nether portal ramp by using up soul shards to increase the dmg of the Pitlord beeing back but at a lower dmg output rate ofc.

I see the reasons of the removal of blood bound imps and the freshly added talent Spiteful Reconstitution seems to be a nice replacement for it, I am overall happy with that, however the removal of the Imp gang boss talent to not summon normal imps back after an Implosion does seem to be unecessary. It added a very unique gameplay to Demo which I am sure many ppl here would agree with me here.

The Live version of imp gang boss add’s some planing to demo in keys, you can think ahead of the upcoming packs if you wanna keep those imps or just implode them in the last second of the fight to get some imps with a refreshed duration you can take over to your next fight which you can use therefore for a tyrant play and so on. It also felt nice to recycle your imps you are using, if you got unlucky and got no demon bolt procs you atleast got some imps back and could reuse them to even out that bad rng, and maybe get some more procs out with them

Right now without this imp gang boss in the PTR demo feels very stale in Aoe, you are simply pressing implosion just for pure dmg without any planning nor consideration afterwards which makes me very sad as an old time Demo player. I am hoping to see the old imp gang boss (the version that is currently in the live server) returning or reverted.

*I am sorry for potential mistakes, english is not my main language.

1 Like
36

Amen to this brother!

37

FEEDBACK on 3 specs:

Destruction: The small changes are welcome and feel better for movement intensive encounters where I can continuously pump out fully amped up chaos bolts rather than maintain a 5 sec buff and make sure it doesn’t drop and this feedback is solely about single target.

The AoE rotation on the other hand does not feel fluid at all with the new set, in fact as simple as Destros rotation is I just feel I have too much that I want to press yet I can’t find the space for it.

I have to constantly refresh/apply immolates, I have to get my rolling havoc stacks rolling for increased damage and I got to use my rifts and make sure I don’t overcap shards whilst trying to dump rain of fire. I feel I can’t get the max potential of rifts or if I do I’m just overcapping on shards, it just overall feels bad to play AoE rotation with the new ptr set. Simply put the GCDs taken by using rifts create an overcapping scenario.

Demonology: I feel the changes are impactful and has nearly completely negated the power level of tyrant on its own which is a good thing in a way but also I feel my pets only really do damage when they’re amped up with tyrant damage modifier. Somehow I feel I do have more sustain but my damage starts to show overtime and not instantaneously which some how is what blizzard was aiming to do but I feel the ramp might be a bit too long VS other classes in dungeon settings, I just end up not getting full value of my CD.

Affliction: Affliction is in a place between being weak or strong, it just doesn’t excel in anything particularly which is fine. I feel nothing really needs to change for affliction it just needs to be tuned correctly if needed to be brought up with other Specs of the game.

38

My heart is broken, because I want to keep playing demo. But looks like you don’t want anyone to play it anymore.

Demo changes since the beginning of PTR are horrible, ruining the fun and destroying the skill ceiling. Nether Portal is the problem to all this, so just rework or remove that talent so you don’t have to do all these awful changes and destroy the spec. What I have been following these balance changes through PTR, you haven’t even managed to fix the issue what you are trying to fix with all this. Please go back and don’t force the Nether Portal to work when it clearly doesn’t. I’m fine with that you tried it, that is why the PTR is, but now just accept it, it does not work. Now it’s finally time to change direction.

39

PTR so far

Demo player feedback: Massive nerf to Demonic Core generation & having to constantly hardcast shadowbolt feels bad, you are taking the fun out of the spec.
Dev: Here have some dmg

Demo player feedback: Massive nerf to Demonic Core generation & having to constantly hardcast shadowbolt feels bad, you are taking the fun out of the spec.
Dev: Here have some dmg

Demo player feedback: Massive nerf to Demonic Core generation & having to constantly hardcast shadowbolt feels bad, you are taking the fun out of the spec.
Dev: Here have some dmg

Guardians of the Dream, Week 2
Dev: Demo dps is performing slightly higher then intended,Smal adjustements made to following spells
X,Y,Z,V,T,U & P dmg lowered by 500%

Me: :,\

5 Likes
40

Demo has serious issues that require a total rework. Basically it has no rotation, just spam HoG and dogs at CD until u have ur big CDs on. Thats not an spec.

Spamming SB, an spell that has 0 interaction with the rest, its not fun. It turns even worse now on AoE. Its stunning that since the removal of Demonwrath Demonology has no aoe generator.

SB needs talents that interaction with the rest of the kit, and a aoe version (Shadowbolt volley), just to start.

Im not going to talk about Nether Portal, a talent totally clunky and never reworked, or the massive number of passive talents the spec has. Or the class talents, the worst and most boring of all the classes. Mage’s last nodes includes a second BL for yourself meanwhile the warlock ones are a minimal passive dmg or spending 1 shard to non-dps stuff.

Demonology should be about demons, summoning and controlling, and no the abomination it has become. You should be able to summon the “main” warlock demons, as succubus or the felhunter, as part of your rotation; even as a second permanent pet. Like Gul’dan himself did in the Legion encounter, Hand of Gul’dan should be the pinnacle of the rotation and summon a big demon, not spamming imps.

A summoner should be about summon, steady and flexible, not massive burst and then nothing for an entire minute.

3 Likes
41

Demonology is going through a lot of changes, and clearly a lot of things are going to change again.

I just want to talk briefly about the tier set bonus for Demonology with the latest change on the PTR.

Demonology has the strongest tier set bonus in the game in Aberrus. Until the latest PTR patch, demonology probably had the weakest tier set bonus in the game coming into 10.2. This has now changed.

The tier set bonus, especially the 4P, seems very overpowered on the PTR now. It accounts for at least 15% of your overall DPS in ST, which is insane. The 2P accounts for nearly 3% of your overall. So you have a tier set bonus that buffs the output of the spec by nearly 20%.

I don’t play other classes, so I don’t know how impactful/powerful the other tier set bonuses are comparatively, but the bonuses for Affliction and Destruction simply don’t match up against the demonology bonuses.

I think the demonology 4P bonus needs quite a big nerf to bring it in line with the other 2 spec, probably around a 50% nerf. Or the other 2 specs need a rather substantial buff to their bonuses or toolkit if they hope to compete in PVE.

42

My feedback will mostly center around Destruction, since Demonology has been covered extensively by others and I didn’t play enough Aff on PTR to form an informed opinion. I will speak mostly from the M+ perspective:

Going from 10.1. into 10.2., Destro is one of the specs whose playstyle got significantly worse. This is a result of a) issues within the talent tree and b) the new tier set centered around Dimensional Rift.

Issues with the Destro talent tree are following:

Several choice nodes offer no real choice at all, as one of the options is clearly superior to the other. This is also supported by WCL when inspecting the talent builds of Destro Warlocks in M+ runs. These are following:

a. Reverse entropy/Internal combustion node

Reverse Entropy is so good for how the Destruction spec plays that even when it is slightly behind numerically, it still gets taken over Internal Combustion.

From m+ perspective, this is even more pronounced, as Internal Combustion gives you nothing in AoE, while Reverse Entropy is useful in every situation. Additionally, consuming Immolate has never been an appealing gameplay among the Warlock community (see old Conflagrate) and it is only suffered when the option is significantly better in Single Target.

b. Havoc/Mayhem node

Mayhem is there to provide a passive option to Havoc, which is numerically weaker than Havoc, probably for beginner players. While I understand the intent behind the talent, nobody will reasonably pick it, because even more casual players nowadays pick what is best.

c. Pandemonium/Cry Havoc node

Due to the way Destro plays in any AoE settings, Cry Havoc is completely dead. It doesnt do well in AoE, it doesn’t even do well in cleave/low target count AoE. Destro AoE is completely dominated by Rain of Fire and the idea that someone would cast a Chaos Bolt in AoE because of this talent is preposterous.

d. Inferno/Cataclysm node

Probably the biggest offender. If Warlock wants to do any respectable AoE damage, you just cannot choose anything else but Inferno, making Cataclysm a dead talent. This is doubly aweful, because Cataclysm is a great ability that fills an important hole in the design of the spec - it serves as a burst AoE option and AoE Immolate applicant, both of which Destro is currently sorely missing. It has also a natural synergy with Channel DF, making even that talent better.

In age where other classes need couple of GCDs to do their AoE damage, Destro is there tab targetting Immolates. If the worry is the Immolate spell itself loses purpose, lets compromise and let Cataclysm apply shorter Immolates. You can weave in Immolates refreshes in between RoF casts, the important thing is that you still have the burst and efficient Immolate application even at a price of shorter Immolates.

Solution here is very simple - bake Inferno into RoF baseline and allow us to pick Cataclysm.

e. Roaring Blaze/Improved Conflagrate

This one is about mathematics really - third charge of Conflagrate just doesn’t compare to the power of Roaring Blaze. Solution is to remove Explosive Potential talent which is right next to it and replace it with Improved Conflagrate.

f. Channel Demonfire

I’ve already discussed the solution - making Cataclysm accessible makes this talent much more attractive, even after the loss of current tier set.

g. Soul Fire

This ability has been reworked more times than Shadow Priest and it never really works out. I don’t think what the spec needs, especially after losing Madness and the cast time reduction on Chaos Bolt, is another spell with very long cast time. It might be heresy, because it borrows a bit from a Fire Mage, but listen to me:

Change Decimation from the execute talent and instead make each shard we spend have a chance to give charge of Soul Fire and make it instant. It would give Destro another “high point” in its gameplay, which I think it very much needs.

h. Fire and Brimstone

I had high hopes for this talent being played in Burn to Ashes, however the way things worked out with our build, we never really pick either in AoE.

For me, the dream scenario would be to turn this spell into an active - a damage CD: once pressed, it would make all Incinerates AND Conflagrates cleave all enemies around a target. Give it a 1 min CD and it once again gives Destro some interesting gameplay alternative.

i. Scalding Flames

This talent is not picked due to its position in the tree - while Flash Point opens both Eradication and Ashen Remains, which in turn unlock all three capstone nodes, Scalding Flames only unlock Ashen Remains and Sacrifice, which only unlock two capstones.

I think the fix here is more complex, as this talent is a victim of the most efficient pathing, which is to always go through Ashen Remains and Eradication. Conflagration of Chaos suffers from the same issue.

j. Shadowburn/Conflagration of Chaos

Speaking of Conflagration of Chaos, the talent further suffers from Shadowburn being always the inferior option to Chaos Bolt. Shadowburn just needs buffs.

Problems with a set are as follows:

Unlike the S2 tier set, the current set puts very strong limits on the build flexibility of the Destro spec. While the S2 tier set encouraged us to select a particular talent as well, the position of the talent within the tree still allowed us to make a meaningful choices later, depending on content - we could play Chaos Incarnate/Blasphemy build or choose Grand Warlock Design/Blashemy build for m+. There was also a distinct Single Target build.

Mostly, this is now over, because not only we now cannot use Chaos Incarnate - a major contributor to AoE damage, we also cannot use the Grand Warlock Design node, as we simply need the Blasphemy talent to ensure our consistent damage from pack to pack. And Destro can only ever pick two of the three capstones.

While Chaos Incarnate and Grand Warlock Design weren’t played together, they fulfilled a similar function for Destro - buffing our AoE (and ST) damage considerably - in case of Chaos Incarnate, we just always had the maximum benefit from Mastery for Rain of Fire, while in case of Grand Warlock Design, we got a buff from Crashing Chaos every 1.5 minute (with current version of the talent).

The Rifts will need further significant buffs to compensate for our inability to pick these talents.

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