I have 2 things I would like to see to help some of the problems for Scale Commander Devastation.
Mass disintegrate should do max damage to your primary target. This helps avoid being punished by incidental dmg split if there are immune/99% dr targets around.
Mass disintegrate having a 360 degree targeting field like eternity surge. This helps avoiding having the have perfect positioning to hit targets that are barely within the frontal view of your character.
Additional changes I believe should be addressed.
Being forced to take Lay Waste to get to Power Nexus. As flameshaper in 12.1 you are going to want to take Power Nexus but Lay Waste does nothing for you.
Power Swell is basically required and should just be made baseline.
Scintillation should work with the 12.1 tier set. Including the at 40% power.
Burnout proc should give an essence burst when consumed.
It’s interesting how, with this expansion, the thinking behind Devastation is: “No one will play Flameshaper.”
It’s actually kind of strange to see a development team go to such lengths to steer players toward a specific hero talent instead of letting the player base choose what works best for them.
I am not worried about overall tuning; the spec was doing well in ptr testing in raid with many cleave fights. Deep Breath and Pyre buffs are good for M+. They will aura buff/nerf many specs after final ptr week, preseason, and rwf. But what a strange reversal for a tier set.
This was actually a necessary change; Scint Stars were doing unreasonable damage in low-target spread cleave, so without this we would likely have caught an aura nerf aimed at raid performance that unfairly impacted other abilities. It also warped our gameplay to spam Disintegrate at much higher target counts, gambling for procs.
Applying Scintillation’s ratio to stars was the preferred solution in a community poll on Wyrmrest Temple and I am glad to see it.
But this seems like an overreaction. The massive Disintegrate buff should make up the lost Shattering Star damage in single target (and for Scalecommander, spread cleave). But the aoe value is gone; we already get max-rank stars from upranking Eternity Surge, so the 2pc’s only effect in AoE is now +50% Star damage, which seems like too little to justify taking Star Salvo. Dropping it sends us back to rank 1 Eternity Surges - with just a bit of prio damage added - removing the main “gameplay impact” of the tier set.
This seems like a failure of design; refusing to fix the talent tree problems makes the tier set subject to those problems. Star Salvo is bad and we have no talent points to spend on it; the capstones, and Shattering Star, need a rework. It would have been better to make the 2pc “+X% Eternity Surge damage” to grant similar value without the talent costing issues.
I will have fun playing Scalecommander with Power Swell, buffed Deep Breaths, and very strong Mass Disintegrates on short cooldowns, and I expect it can be competitive. But I’ll consider it a failure if Star Salvo doesn’t see play in M+. It may be too late for more creative changes, but either rethink this tuning, or plan to rework some talents by 12.1.5
In general it is an anti pattern forcing specs into a specific build just to utilize a tier set bonus. Tier set bonuses should come from a baseline spell, not from a spiecial build.
I already see Blizzard officials like Ion saying: “We can discontinue talent trees because everyone plays the same build”, ignoring the fact that Blizzard forces people into these builds by their inflexible set bonuses.
I’ve been feedbacking on the EU forums before, but sadly that forum reaches a very small amount of players, so if some people cannot see what my feedback was until now (the latest set of changes), here is a short tldr:
Red spells in a very weak spot
Blue Spells in the right spot but with lots of rng due to tier set
Upranking Eternity Surge felt very nice with the amount of damage it did
Bombardments not showing up properly on damage meters
Deep Breath being a polarizing button for some players
Talent tree rigidity and the tier forcing dev into Star Salvo
Rising Fury duration and ramp up time (mostly M+ issues)
Power Swell and its importance regarding general flow of the spec
Strafing Run recast window being too short
With the recent changes:
We can enjoy Swell once again with Scalecommander, which is just a blessing
Upranking is pretty much dead
RNG heavily reduced by putting damage back into baseline spells instead of the tier giving insane amounts of damage, this is a very good change. (Being reliant on a 15% chance to have 20% swings in damage output given you rolled D20 or not)
A much better damage pattern and profile overall for Scalecommander in every scenario
I’ll have to say I disagree with you here with the part of the disintegrate buff being an overreaction. Eternity Surge (scint+stars) dealt more damage than Deep Breath in a dungeon or Disintegrate. Reducing RNG and increasing the output of the base spells is a good way to streamline damage. Deep Breath, Disintegrate feels absolutely nice to press, to use, each use of those spells feel impactful, and not only did Star Salvo rid us of Power Swell, it was also brutally RNG reliant. And also don’t forget the 4P effect, which basically buffs Causality by 20%, 0.5 seconds every disintegrate cast, which further drives the rotational loop of using Empowers, getting back essence quickly (with swell) for spenders.
Where I agree with you that this tier was doomed from the second it was released.
I do believe that this adjustment was absolutely the correct move and it addressed most of Scalecommander’s issues for now but Devastation as a whole will need help in its talent tree. (The most important part moving Swell higher up so you can reliably get it.)
Help regarding:
Power Nexus baselined or moved up to the position of Ruby Essence Burst meanwhile the two Essence Burst talents get merged and would take place where Azure Essence Burst is currently.
Power Swell needs to stack when Empowers are used back to back and moved higher up in the tree so we can take it reliably. The loss of Swell makes both specs incredibly sluggish.
Capstone part is very-very rigid with no wiggle room.
Some other talents gatekeeping the other hero talent, main offender being Lay Waste.
Burnout being incredibly weak
Onslaught being an absolutely dead talent
If you seriously believe the 20% increase to Causality and 10% damage is nothing to Devastation then oh boy you’re wrong, the change to the tier was for the betterment of the spec without a doubt and its so much better already.
Overall though, I feel like this iteration of Scalecommander is very close to reaching dopamine levels of TWW S2 Flameshaper for me. I was genuinely having so much fun playing dungeons on PTR with this iteration and I do hope the devs preserve this aspect of the spec.
I agree with all of this and I’m happy if Scalecommander’s core (Deep Breath, Mass Disintegrate, Empowers) lands in a satisfying place; Disintegrate may have needed this buff for its own sake.
But how much of this came from Eternity Surge casts (with Star Salvo)? Ignoring the contributions from Scintillation, do you think on-cast stars needed a nerf, and to such an extreme that even Flameshaper is dropping Salvo?
I always argued that Scintillation should not proc Shattering Star at all because it locks down Shattering Star’s base damage, limiting its value outside of sustained single-target scenarios. Eternity Surge has the same problem; most of its damage comes from Scint, so its base damage is tuned low, making upranking in AoE worthless. The talent tree needs a shakeup to make Star Salvo affordable, but the problem remains that Eternity Surge and Star Salvo don’t add enough in AoE regardless. And Star without Salvo is just a disguised Eye of Infinity, so instead of enhancing gameplay, the tier now minorly buffs an ignorable passive worth 2-3% in single-target with no impact on AoE, at the cost of locking in some row 6-7 talents.
I am disappointed by the 150->50% 2pc nerf abandoning the effort to make Star Salvos worthwhile. I would have shipped the Scint change without the 2pc nerf and waited to see results after players stop spamming Disintegrate in AoE scenarios. Maybe Scint-Stars still need additional nerfs, but do on-cast Salvos also deserve this?
Instead of nerfing the entire star package, they could apply the same fix already recommended for Eternity Surge: nerf the ratio on Scintillation, so you can add power back to the primary cast. (I would rather rework Shattering Star to have a completely different trigger mechanism but that’s out of scope here.)
Given the circumstances, Eternity Surge now in a dungeon run is around 11-12% of my total damage output where as before the nerf this could be around 27-33%. A pretty hefty amount, which is mostly RNG (Mass Disintegrate).
I am going to say I’m not disappointed as long as I keep being able to play Power Swell. Before doing anything, they need to give us a better position for Swell, therefore we can have variety in the capstone part.
Its not that Swell is that much of a damage up or anything, but it is what makes the spec feel smooth and nice to play, it is something that drives your rotation forward.
All it needs is a little touch up in terms of:
We use empowers sometimes back to back, this shouldn’t reset to the maximum of 4 seconds but rather increase it, it shouldn’t be punishing to cast your spells and keep your rotation flowing.
They called Bombardments spreading unintuitive, but having Swell on a fixed 4 second duration isn’t exactly good, there is a reason we spread out Empowers on SC in S3 of TWW. If you didn’t open in a way you spread your empowers then you were just there, with always losing approx 3 seconds of swell every set of empowers.
Less than a week left. There’s still time to make a simple change to save Star Salvo; just move Power Swell.
Here’s a simple solution: swap Power Swell and Burnout. Let Scalecommander choose between Burnout and Star Salvo, while getting Power Swell on the path to Imminent Destruction. Flameshaper takes the exact same nodes in their new positions (arguably it can now drop Burnout when taking Engulfing Blaze, but there’s not much you can do with this, the top section prevents you from getting everything you would want with both Feed the Flames and Star Salvo).
Ignore how weird it looks. You don’t need to fix the entire tree. Just give Scalecommander one point of flexibility in its capstone choices.
Another option, just for Scalecommander: baseline Onyx Legacy. It doesn’t hurt anyone to give this to non-SC Devs (ok maybe there’s some PvP impact idk). Or make Onyx Legacy a choice node with Burnout.
There are better fixes, these talents should be higher on the tree, but all we need is one point to get Star Salvo without giving up critical talents. We’ve been saying this since alpha. Do something about it, please.
I would swap Power Swell and Burnout, then also merge Shattering Star into Star Salvo. Remove the node at Shattering Star’s location, and both specs also gain one point above the 20 line for M+ builds, just enough for Scalecommander to afford all of Azure Sweep + Eternity’s Span + Charged Blast, and for Flameshaper to reach Feed the Flames by dropping Arcane Intensity without losing Eternity’s Span.
