This right here undermines your entire argument.
If it was worthless, it wouldn’t be part of your rotation.
You’re not getting his point tho. He’s talking about how Chaos Bolt went from a really meaningful, impactful, devastating cast, to something that is just a formality. And it is true, if someone was casting up a Chaos Bolt in PvP by example, you either stopped it happening or you were dead.
Now I don’t play Warlock so I have no idea how it plays now, but you making the example of simplistic Classic rotations when he’s talking about a MOP ability being watered down, there is a disconnect.
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that’s my point. thanks. and chaos bolt is an example to demonstrate my argument here. my issue is not chaos bolt. my issue is, blizz giving us much frequenter access to CDs and significant spells are causing all of them to do less impact in game.
and even worse, other filler spells (like frostbolt for instance) becoming even more and more insignificant. it has come to such a point, you don’t even care if you are missing your Fingers of Frost procs any more because even FoF procs are not that important now cause you have Frozen orbs, Comet storms and Glacials Spikes to fire away.
I get his point. I just dont agree with it.
Execute in warriors was in the same situation. It used to be a button that made huge numbers when you pressed it.
In PvP anyone bellow 35% was practically instantly dead. Which was an annoying thing to many players. Especially considering that this “abilities do XYZ less damage in PvP” did not exist until recently.
And in PvE. That created a very frustrating situation for many players as well.
In AoE it was annoying because you lost a ton of DPS to overkill.
And in raid scenarios what happened was that in the 100 to 35% bracket, warriors (and specifically Arms warriors) were hitting for a wet noodle. And would only do competitive damage if that 35% to 0% phase was long enough.
And just to remind you, historically Arms has been the PvP spec of warrior. It has never been on par with Fury for almost 20 years. And the cause was :
EXECUTE.
When they reduced the damage of Execute. And buffed the damage of everything else, THEN and only THEN you could play Arms in a fun and engaging way in PvE.
And Chaos Bolt is the same thing. If you want abilities to hit that hard, you inevitably turn the spec into a 1 button spec. Which is what happened in Vanilla… Mages for example had other skills. Had a TON of skills because all Fire + Frost spells were baseline.
But why press anything else if Fireball hits so hard ?
Basically, what blizzard is wanting you to do is : You got X buttons, so you have to press X buttons to do meaningful DPS.
What they don’t want is this : You got X buttons. But you can ignore all of them except 1. And spam that 1 button.
Like Elemental Shamans in DF S3 and S4 for example.
Same with Mortal Strike and even Bladestorm for that matter. It used to be something you looked forward to coming off cooldown but then it became just meh… I remember a while ago when using bladestorm in PvP and no one even bothered trying to move out of it because it didn’t do anything 
I don’t have a solution but it doesn’t feel good. Agree with OP.
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good example. yes ! thank you.
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I mean not really. Execute was an ability that did huge numbers at low level and lower gear levels but always suffered from poor scaling (it didn’t scale with AP). Now in some situations with full rage it would hit really hard and blow all your rage, but on average it did less damage than Bloodthirst, and even Whirlwind (due to the offhand hit change/buff) by TBC.
In WOTLK Execute had hit the point where it was now barely worth using, and this was a point of contention back then. But Execute never really had the impact Chaos Bolt had, because that was like firing up a nuclear bomb and would send people into panic in PvP.
Is Execute watered down today? Slightly, but it’s more valuable than it was in WOTLK and for Fury right now it’s far and away the most powerful hitting ability, with Juggernaught stacking to an additional 50% damage for the execute phase, making it quite impactful (tho not as hilarious as Juggernaught was in previous expansions).
My point of contention is with class design is less the specific number of buttons a class or spec has to press, and more whether or not interesting decision making is enabled by the range of abilities.
For example, if a class has two offensive cooldowns that are always pressed together, you simply have one decision to press two buttons, rather than those buttons being considerations in and of themselves. At that point, I would be inclined to describe such a design as bloat.
I generally prefer designs that focus on a smaller range of abilities and with decision making centred on resource management, as opposed to a more rote rotation that uses a wider variety of buttons.
I won’t suggest however that the latter doesn’t constitute fun or interesting gameplay for some players - there is something to be said for feeling a sense of mastery and precision of a wide range of inputs.
Does it though? My average Chaos Bolt casts hit way harder than anything else I have.
What’s funny though? Look at this log from Ulduar, in the expansion Chaos Bolt was added to the game.
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/Hz2RCVpdDYFxav6m#fight=17&type=damage-done&source=1
Average Chaos Bolt 43k, average Incinerate 31k.
Or this one from Marrowgar in ICC:
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/zrh6yMbAf1vdYjaD#fight=23&type=damage-done&source=5
Chaos Bolt 21k, while Incinerate at 20k. Looks like there’s a downward trend.
Or maybe this one from Cata:
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/RxX2GvpkjDyqcgLf#fight=23&type=damage-done&source=35
Chaos Bolt at measly 23k, while Incinerate is at 33k. Definitely a downward trend.
So while it was on a cooldown, it either barely hit harder than your filler spell, or straight up less.
Now let’s look at something more recent:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/K6tRnd3yzBPbYmh2#fight=18&type=damage-done&source=7
Hold up, slap me with a flip-flop and call me a pancake, Chaos Bolt is BY FAR the hardest hitting spell? Crazy.
Looks like those famous 360 noscope chaos bolt giga hits from the good old days are not quite real.
Didn’t knew that chaos bolt, incinerate, conflag and immolate are 3 abilities, thank you very much!
Burst window, soul shards/ki/runic power and runes e.t.c, not every boss has dmg amplifying mechanic by the way, and if anything if boss has mechanic like this it becomes harder to efficiently enter your burst window because you need to save your buttons for this specific mechanic. Usually
I talk about warlock because it’s my main and the only class i can talk about in somewhat competent manner. Just because Chaos bolt is more “spammy” right now doesn’t mean that spell became less significant, it’s highest prio spell on destro spellbook, and it DOES hit like a truck during crashing chaos window, what you really argue for is “i want chaos bolt to be a burst button instead of spender” which is bullcrap because you just want destro to be completely reworked, and anyway infernal as burst button is much cooler.
Yo that’s very interesting post, thank you Deadguy
Conflag is instant.
But you need to efficiently use it for backdraft because without it you cast chaos bolt like a drunk pandaren
ok man. ok.
Funny enough you don’t even play Crashing Chaos now, so no buffed Chaos Bolt, and it’s still the hardest hitting spell we have by a mile.
Just going to a target dummy now, no cooldowns, just doing my rotation for a minute, average Chaos bolt goes for 773k and Incinerate just 189k.
It’s like they’re looking at Chaos Bolt with a rose-tinted magnifying glass.
Warlock is my main and favourite class which I’ve been mythic raiding as for over 6 years now. If they wanna talk smack about my class I’m coming back with receipts.
This is a bad design. It’s self-interaction and it becomes second nature, bringing us back to not thinking.
Instead there should be different spells for different situations and enemies who pressure you into them. Vanilla and tBC mage was some of the most fun WoW has ever offered, but only in PvP, because bosses didn’t do anything to stop you from just spamming Frostbolt all day. In PvP though… I think the Vurtne PvP videos speak for themselves.
I think we tend to forget that there are two sides to a fight. If too much emphasis is placed on the class and not enough on the enemy, that’s going to make the game very same-y in PvE and overwhelmingly complicated in PvP, which basically describes the current class situation absolutely perfectly.
Really? Didn’t even thought about, playing demo and affl rn without touching destro
Okay i checked kalamazi website, RoC and AoD into ST, wild
I agree with your statement.
But in PvP, and especially in PvP it is beyond frustrating to have 1 chaos bolt that nukes people.
Its frustrating for the target, because you die in 1 second… and its frustrating for the warlock because if it gets CCd or countered you do absolutely nothing beyond chaos bolt.
Because balance in specs == this :
In 5 min you have to do 100 damage.
Where does that come from ?
90 == chaos bolt , 10 == the rest.
Or an even distribution ?
Its not. Becouse if you let Warlock cast Chaos Bolt on you it means you failed and you should die.
A Chaos Bolt should not do 90% of the damage - maybe 40% or so. But the important point is that if there aren’t 3 billion things flying around everybody’s head, then a Chaos Bolt cast is noteworthy. It is something you can see and understand. It’s simple - there are limited modifiers. If it hits you, it hurts because it’s a Chaos Bolt, and you can pick it out in the action. Because the screen isn’t full of particle effects in every corner, you can see the warlock’s hands go green, and you can see that cast bar - and you know… That’s it.
I’m just a bit tired of it honestly. I mean it’s not like the damage you do or take has gone up or down - it’s just 10 abilities doing what 2 used to do, and nobody can tell what’s going on.
They should replace all this rotational busywork with real options. Spells that find their own niche. Do less damage but can be done while moving for example, or is good against enemies moving close to you, or are far from you, or slows the target but deals less damage and has a CD, or eats a huge amount of mana for a huge amount of damage, etc.