My ideal Destruction warlock (very idealized)

[Khooba-argent-dawn]

So, following the demonology post I made, I have decided to also look at destro.

My ideal Demonology warlock 2.0 (very idealized)

Ahhh this is why I make disclaimers… Anyway I understand your mentality and I to a degree would agree. But I am demo lock and I care about my spec a lot. And no, even if you tweak it a bit it’s stil not enough. First of all Dreadstalkers have delay before they start attacking and have to run if target moves, that is a design problem. Second of all what we have is not good. If you want me to talk about how I’d patch up demo check my other post but as I said all is mentioned in the early parag…

Now first of all before we get into it, I’d like to say two things

1. I am not destro main, never was and never will be
2. I am not PvE player, I’ll try to focus on general gameplay but my PvP nature might bleed into this post in parts.

Identifying the problem
While destro doesn’t seem to be obviously flawed in design, at least not as much as the other specs, this specialization has major problems, so unlike rework that I propose for demo, I will mostly focus on tackling these here.

Alright, so there are two most common complaints about Destruction warlock, the gameplay complaint from warlocks themselves and complaints about their power from other classes (lets be honest though lot of these players are just bad, but there is truth to this aspect too), however despite there being two problems, I believe they can be tackled pretty easily at once.

So how do we identify them? We have to look at destruction gameplay.

Gameplay
The way destro plays right now, is more than anything inspired by the charred remains talent. In an attempt to make all specs have clear builders and spenders in their rotation, Blizzad has decided to standardize chaos bolt as standart spender spell. This is where we run into the first problem, Chaos bolt is strong, like really strong and thus destruction spender is an incredibly strong spell that is very easily built up by the warlock.

We can divide this problem into several points:

1.The spell is too powerfull for standart spender, and for all of this with its relatively low cost, only drawback is the cast time, which is not hard to cheese

2.The spell being main focus makes destruction warlock very easily shut down, considering this is how their damage is dealt

3.As I was explaining with my charred remains analogy, this spell is really strong, and to make it work as standardized weapon, other abilities had to be nerfed, which means whenever chaos bolt is not up, all you do is press pointless filler spells that deal no damage, this is also incredibly boring due to how little options you have to kill stuff and it also goes hand in hand with my interrupt argument, as you have no means to defend yourself when you are shut down

4.Last but not least standardized chaos bolt makes the ability loose all its niche and completely mitigates the point of the ability having so high damage. We can see chaos bolt looks way too strong sometimes, but that is not the problem, its not nerfing the spell that will solve it, because this is not a standart spell. Chaos bolt should be strong, maybe even bit stronger than rn (tho if that is whats necessary Id not go over 125% of the current damage) because the very point of chaos bolt is to be pressed at the very end, when you know you are gonna kick some serious backside, with a build up leading to the spell.

The fix
So we can derive two main things from this

1.Chaos bolt is too standardized and easy to get

2.Other warlock spells that should build up to chaos bolt are very weak and only serve to gain shard, instead of being genuen damaging abilities that will slowly lead you to that glorious green blob while still being able to provide decent damage before you get there.

I must also add both of these points need to be adressed. Making chaos bolt rare while keepign the other abilities weak will make destro extremely weak, while making other abilties strong but keeping bolt easily accesible will lead to extremely overpowered spec. See how dependent they are on eachother.

So lets get to my overly idealized Destro lock

Playstlyle
New destro lock will make full use of his toolkit. Our incinerate, immolate and conflagrate will deal more damage and serve as the main spells of our rotation. The damage of these spells won’t be anything crazy but will be increased in comparison to today as they will be the spells we’ll use majority of the time.

While using these spells , we can’t think of damage only, soulshard fragments will be built during this process, however their generation rate will be significantly slower. This will provide justification to use abilities that are not chaos bolt while also making up for the increased damage and making getting a chaos bolt slower.

Then when you finally get that chaos bolt, if you did not manage to kill the enemy before (which is in my opinion ideal situation since my desgin philosophy for all classes would be way more abilities and more long skilfull fights) fire out your chaos bolt and blast them to the login screen.

So without further ado let’s look at the bread and butter

Resource
I will put this up here because I did so in my demonology post.

Not much will change from now, we will still keep soulshards with the burning embers mechanic, same as we have now, however as said, the ramp up to generate them will be much slower, however this will be compensated by the higher base damage of the builder abilities.

Passives
Soul leech- Identical+ demon skin

Backdraft- Will work same as it does now for Chaos bolt and now also Soul fire, however now with 4 charges

Backlash- This is more of a curiosity but to spice things up from the very simple rotation destro has, this like in past will give you chance to get instant incinerate if hit by a physical attack

Mastery- I am gonna keep the current one, just for the fantasy sake, however I am not opposed if you want this out and would prefer reintroducing Emberstorm

Builders

Incinerate- stays the same, generates low ammount of shard fragments, also doesn’t hit like wet noodle anymore

Immolate- your dot, does dot stuff, generates fragments over time

Conflagrate- our favourite big boom, works basically identically to now, does the most damage, has two charges and generates most soul shard fragments, however that is going to be nerfed from now, so we dont go up that fast on them.
I have also thought about conflag getting back it’s slow, however this would have to be done in one of the following ways:

1.When you spec into root PvP talent, this root is replacing your slow, they cant be both there at once
2.Root could get removed and instead we just have slow, though I am skeptical of this option because I am afraid of even further prunning and removing stuff from our class
3.Root stays, no slow

We cant have mix of any of these, nor can we have slow and root at once.

Spenders

Chaos bolt- This is the main ability, in my version this ability costs one shard however that is now way harder to get since abilities generate less fragments, however it can remain at two shards, however the shard generation would have to be adjusted to this accordingly so it remains the same phase but for two shards.
What to say, its big, its green, its bad.
Furthermore Chaos bolt will now be exclusively single target spell not affected by Havoc. This allows the devs to be able to adjust single target damage of this spec without Havoc being in the way, this will also add one extra button making the gameplay more interesting as you will see in a bit.

Soulfire- Hard hitter, however does less damage than chaos bolt. Unlike Chaos bolt though this ability can be used with Havoc, which will make it Destruction cleave spell.
Mechanically in all other ways it works same as CB and is affected by Backdraft.

This idea for Chaos bolt and Soulfire with Havoc come from Pocman’s post here on forums so credits to him for that.

Other abilities
-Havoc- same but doesnt affect Chaos bolt, though Id put that part in Chaos bolts tooltip instead of Havoc’s

-Shadowfury - now also instacast

-Demonic cirlce- yes that is supposed to be there

-Infrenal- I am not sure if to actually nerf the shard generation there since its the main cooldown, though might be against it, though I will leave that up to seasoned Destrolocks.

-All the other abilities we have rn, theres nothing Destro would be lacking that much.

Talents

Now the yummy part

Tier 1- lvl 15
-Felburst (didnt come up with a better name, please do that for me)
Your incinerate has a chance to reset remaining cooldown on conflagrate (lets say you have one charge, if this procs you are getting additional charge back)

Reverse entropy
-Stays same as live

Shadowburn
-It might be surprising but I like the current iteration of shadowburn and intend to keep it as talent

Tier 2- lvl 30

Eradication
-Exactly the same effect as live, this doesnt apply on Soulfire as this is single target focused talent and is the single target option for this tier

Internal combustion
-I see no problem here, this stays and will be the more bursty option

Soulburst
-Soulfire applies/refreshes immolate on the Havoc’d target, this will be the cleave talent as counterpart to eradication.

Tier 3- lvl 45

Dark regen
-Still not confident about putting this in this tier but I wanted to make you choose between absorb and heal

Burning rush
-PvE stuff, I see no problem with this talent

Dark pact
-Now takes 20% of your max health but otherwise the same

Tier 4- lvl 60
Literaly the same, wouldnt change a thing (if Inferno has the chance to generate fragment with each hit which I assume it does)

Tier 5- lvl 75
Blood horror
-Melee strikes have chance to make opponents flee, as it was in MoP

Mortal coil
-This stays. its excelent talent that can have many different uses and should remain for the game until the very last day.

Unstable rift
-Demonic gateway is created instantly and upon use either grants movement speed buff or defenive buff.

Tier 6- lvl 90

Roaring blaze
-Usefull against teams with interrupts, so I’d keep this

Grimoire of Supremacy
-Works the same as now

Grimoire of Sacrifice
-I mean sure, why not?

Tier 7 - lvl 100

Fel infusion (Now this one will be controversial)
-Chaos bolt has change to make incinerate castable on move for short time

The other two are fine

Alright, I apologize if I missed anything and I see that this will be very controversial and possibly quite bad but I enjoyed writing this so please have a nice read and thanks.

Any suggestions are welcome.

[Eerin-moonglade]

If the goal is for chaos bolt to feel rare and meaningful, why can it not just cost 3-4 or even 5 shards? Otherwise, what’s stopping the warlock from doing mediocre damage for a minute or two before launching 5 bolts in your face one after the other? I don’t think that solves the problem with chaos bolt feeling spammable.

I think the bigger problem for me is that atm the only reason people would ever play this spec is to see a flying 6-digit number. It’s so one dimensional, there’s almost nothing else it brings to the table.

I’d like some more varied rotation and more choice between chaos bolt and rain of fire. As of now, destro rotation resembles balance druid except blander. Where they have an aoe nuke and two different dots, destros have an ST nuke and an ST dot. Boomkins can drop lasers or moons on people, destros can just flamestrike with the same dot. Yay.

1. Give destros a spammable aoe nuke. Doesn’t have to be super special, just something other than a talented incinerate that sacrifices cataclysm. Perhaps a channelled hellfire eruption in a 6-8yd aoe that generates 1 fragment per sec for every 2 enemies hit.

2. Make chaos bolt cost 3-5 shards, with a 12 sec cooldown, and scale its damage for every extra shard. Overall it should maybe do about 60% more damage than its current version when cast at 5 shards. To compensate for the fewer casts, increase the damage of the other abilities and rework the grimoire and the azerite traits that encourage bolt spam.

3. Increase rain of fire damage (against NPCs anyway).

4. Give the option to talent into a strong CC that consumes soul shard/s, such as:

• Petrify - curse, stuns target and reduces damage taken, OR
• Greater Banish - banishes a target to the twisting nether, deals shadow damage upon return if cast on an enemy

This will replace fear for balance reasons. I just find it unfair that mages can spec/talent into extra CCs, but warlocks just have fear and non-instant shadowfury in all specs.

[Khooba-argent-dawn]

The thing is, we don’t actually want a different thing, I think my post kinda goes towards this kind of playstile.

If the goal is for chaos bolt to feel rare and meaningful, why can it not just cost 3-4 or even 5 shards?

That is basically what I want, making the shard generation slower is literaly the same as making it cost more, you still need to cast more abilities to get there, this is just another way to approach what I did, you still deal damage with your other abilities for longer.

what’s stopping the warlock from doing mediocre damage for a minute or two before launching 5 bolts in your face one after the other?

The damage will be increased so it will not be mediocre and at that point in time, if you already used your damaging abilities you have no reason to cast 5 chaos bolts because the target will have taken quite lot of damage already from your combined abilities.
And with slower generation it will not be efficent to to get up to 5 shards. Why would you do that, Chaos bolt deals enough damage so you do not need to cast multiple of them and everyone would be dead by the time you’d get to 5.

I think the bigger problem for me is that atm the only reason people would ever play this spec is to see a flying 6-digit number. It’s so one dimensional, there’s almost nothing else it brings to the table.

Thats why I want to make use of more abilities, you do this by making them generate less shards and do more damage.

Make chaos bolt cost 3-5 shards, with a 12 sec cooldown, and scale its damage for every extra shard. Overall it should maybe do about 60% more damage than its current version when cast at 5 shards. To compensate for the fewer casts, increase the damage of the other abilities and rework the grimoire and the azerite traits that encourage bolt spam.

I agree with this however again its the same as I am trying to do

Lower shard generation = more time to get a shard to cast chaos bolt
More expensive chaos bolt = more time to get 3 shards to get a chaos bolt

Though I agree that CD is not bad idea

• Increase rain of fire damage (against NPCs anyway).

The DPS doesnt seem to high yeah

• Petrify - curse, stuns target and reduces damage taken, OR
• Greater Banish - banishes a target to the twisting nether, deals shadow damage upon return if cast on an enemy

Thats not bad idea

[Eerin-moonglade]

I mean, burst damage is very valuable in pvp. That’s why you see top destro warlock players toy around with the itty-bitty flames until the stars align perfectly and that’s when you eat 3 bolts at once while the healer is in deep CC.

You want to both make bolt stronger and cost 1 shard. That’s even more burst than before.

Also, from a design point of view, it makes no sense to have 5 shards when it would take you forever to fill them out and you’re only going to use one at a time. It makes much more sense to navigate around the existing design. Besides, destro is already tedious enough with its ‘fragments’, especially since it’s hard to tell how many ‘fragments’ you currently have – you feel like you’re struggling and scrounging for random change to finally get an euro coin while other specs get a full shard at a time. Can you imagine if paladins collected 0.72 and 1.28 glimmers of power from their attacks, or if rogues had 7 energy that recharged at a rate of 0.7 per second? That’s how I feel about ‘fragments’.

Like, if that’s how it’s going to be, I’d rather have a 0-100 chaos bar like the other casters so I know exactly how many more spells I need to cast before I can unload the big nukes. I think the only reason blizzard haven’t done this already is that they wanted to preserve the shard system that warlocks have always used since the beginning. But smashing them into even tinier splinters for gameplay reasons is pretty much the worst thing you can do from a UX point of view.

As for the spammable bolts – there already are two types of special resource spenders in the game. One is moderately strong attacks of which you can store about 2 at a time (starsurge, earthshock, chi points, holy power, chaos bolt etc) and the other is the finishing move type (combo points, void form, arcane charges). If you want chaos bolt to be a finishing move, you have to make it mechanically an actual finishing move, something you build up and release like void form, instead of simply slowing its build up rate.

This is why I think it’s much more intuitive, straightforward and user-experience-friendly to make chaos bolt more like arcane barrage (costs everything and scales accordingly).

[Khooba-argent-dawn]

You want to both make bolt stronger and cost 1 shard. That’s even more burst than before.

It is not though, because it would take far more time to get to that point, as it used to be anyway. If you have ever seen any of Cobrak’s videos you’d know Chaos bolt usually is the last ability he drops.

Also, from a design point of view, it makes no sense to have 5 shards when it would take you forever to fill them out and you’re only going to use one at a time. It makes much more sense to navigate around the existing design.

Well arguably it doesn’t make sense already, I very often dump only one chaos bolt, you rarely every will build up 5 shards and spam even now, unless you are PvE player and need to fire off lot of Chaos bolts in a burn phase, which is where my system would work as good as any.

Besides, destro is already tedious enough with its ‘fragments’, especially since it’s hard to tell how many ‘fragments’ you currently have – you feel like you’re struggling and scrounging for random change to finally get an euro coin while other specs get a full shard at a time. Can you imagine if paladins collected 0.72 and 1.28 glimmers of power from their attacks, or if rogues had 7 energy that recharged at a rate of 0.7 per second? That’s how I feel about ‘fragments’.

Well we aren’t Paladins, we aren’t rogues, each class has their unique way of getting resources and this was how burning embers worked at it worked just fine, thats why Blizzard had to give them back to us in Legion.

Like, if that’s how it’s going to be, I’d rather have a 0-100 chaos bar like the other casters so I know exactly how many more spells I need to cast before I can unload the big nukes. I think the only reason blizzard haven’t done this already is that they wanted to preserve the shard system that warlocks have always used since the beginning. But smashing them into even tinier splinters for gameplay reasons is pretty much the worst thing you can do from a UX point of view.

First of all, yes soul shard as resource is very limiting.
Second of all Destro is about slow buildup where you know that you’ll kick backside when you finally get that chaos bolt off, and since the damage would be higher, you’d have something to do in meantime.
This is also better since my system allows you to burst very well in PvE since there you should have no problem getting to 5 shards and keep them for burn phase.

As for the spammable bolts – there already are two types of special resource spenders in the game. One is moderately strong attacks of which you can store about 2 at a time (starsurge, earthshock, chi points, holy power, chaos bolt etc) and the other is the finishing move type (combo points, void form, arcane charges). If you want chaos bolt to be a finishing move, you have to make it mechanically an actual finishing move, something you build up and release like void form, instead of simply slowing its build up rate.

I don’t want it to be execute move per se, that is what shadowburn is for, its not really meant to finish the player but it is like the ultimate button you press to do a lot of damage, you also have to account for the fact that the players will heal so the chaos bolt wont just be to finish them off, again this has worked in the past.
Also finishing move is just a fancy name for normal ability, I never remember using rupture for example to finish anyone.

This is why I think it’s much more intuitive, straightforward and user-experience-friendly to make chaos bolt more like arcane barrage (costs everything and scales accordingly)

It is also a solution but you’d have to take into account that as I said I can’t overlook PvE entirely and making chaos bolt scale to ammount spent on it would make it into a different spell, it would be arcane barrage. Once upon time warlocks just casted their abilities and dealt damage with them, then when they were ready they used their chaos bolt to absolutely obliderate the enemy, it wasn’t free and it was unique,

Chaos bolt is just huge nuke you build up slowly and then when you press it you know it is gonna land a kill, making it cost multiple shards would be the clunkier variant and you would need to scale cost of rain of fire accordingly.