The Dev Note is correct that Patient Zero caused degenerate behavior, but it was a way for Warlocks to do priority damage in AoE: now they don’t have that contribution to a group. That replacement talent doesn’t really help Affliction Warlock playwise; they will likely need some form of tuning to compensate (e.g. bump the UA from the tier set back to 50% now that there is much less incentive to use Seed at low-target counts).
I’d still caution people about the tuning of this talent. I do think in general that this talent is pretty lame for a capstone and fits better in the spot where cull the weak is (remove that talent pls, just my opinion), but the throughput should be close to neutral if I were to guess.
This is not to say that the damage profile is better, just that it’s getting shifted.
Not sure this will ever be the case
FYI the reason why patient 0 is gone now, is because you would use it in single target with the new tier, talking about in raid pure single target etc. and also would’ve had to pick nocturnal yield in single target (still tbd on this btw, even with patient 0 gone) to keep up your 4set stacks.
Nerfing spec talents because they can’t design tier sets well is a bad idea……
2 Likes
I mean tbf, you didn’t even notice the talent, you just knew you had to hit seed in single target.
Hellcaller still feels pretty bad, I think the only glimmer of hope for that hero talent is if they like 2x - 3x the throughput of through the felvine to actually make it have a bursty / prio target profile (that also warps gameplay toward malevolence).