What the title says.
I’ve been dabbling in frost mage recently and I’ve come to realize just how bad the destruction warlock skill tree and the decisions it forces you to make are. For those who don’t play frost here is what you’re missing out on.
Take AoE for example. The current frost single target build gets blizzard baseline, gets mandatory frozen orb to grab flurry and then has multiple single target skills that naturally cleave on top.
Meanwhile destro has no baseline AoE, havoc is a mandatory skill point and picking any amount of AoE through rain of fire takes away from your single target and lands you in a position where you have havoc for two target cleave, rain of fire for high target counts and nothing for situations in between those or when havoc is on cooldown because rain of fire won’t deal enough damage to be worth casting (plus it requires the enemies to stay completely still for extended periods of time or you waste a huge amount of soul shards).
Next, if you look at various active abilities in the destruction skill tree:
-Channel Demonfire, I personally like it but mostly I’ve heard other warlocks complain about it, good for them because it will likely become irrelevant again when we lose the current tier set and will probably revert to soulfire at the default.
-Soulfire? I’ve only ever heard negative feedback about this skill. Very long cast time that breaks the flow of the rotation and the immolate application lines up strangely with the duration of immolate making it so you can’t really maintain immolate on a single target using only soulfire but you also don’t have enough downtime to justify casting immolate manually either.
-Shadowburn. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone actually use it. Questionably useful on single target, hard to use optimally on AoE.
-Dimensional Rift, the star of next tier’s set. Currently a dead talent in PvE (I heard it’s good in PvP but I wouldn’t know) is gonna be under two layers of RNG with next tier set as the extra charge generation with immolate is random and so is the type of rift you open, only one of which will deal any AoE at all. Destruction is billed as the chaotic, random spec but this is just bad design that punishes you for bad luck by stripping away some of what little AoE you have.
Most skill picks are just the lesser of two evils for the current patch and most of these skills have little to no value in AoE.
Next let’s look at skills used in the current best single target frost mage:
-Glacial Spike, regular part of the rotation, very satisfying capstone skill with slow cast but high damage that also freezes the target. Essentially frost Chaos Bolt, the highlight of the rotation.
-Ray of Frost, 1 min CD very high damage skill that also gives you some downtime in an otherwise fairly fast and busy spec. Also applies an outrageous slow that while not always useful is very funny. I could see this one being a love it or hate it situation on account of its long channel.
-Comet Storm, another AoE currently also picked as part of the single target build, quickly drops 7 comets on your target. Instant cast, just straight damage.
Aside from spread two target cleave, there’s very little that frost can’t do as well or better than destro with less investment and far, far better versatility. They have simpler, less finicky skills that behave exactly how you expect them to.
To add insult to injury, in next patch Destro is also losing madness of the azj’aqir, removing one of the few high points of the rotation: very fast chaos bolt dumping. It’s being replaced by a flat damage increase which might as well just be baked into the skills it affects. Much like demonology this expansion, instead of balancing the problem talents they just remove them and replace them with boring old % damage increase.
All in all, while I agree different classes and spec should have different strengths and weaknesses the discrepancy between some of them is staggering.
Destruction is currently crippled by barely functional AoE that requires heavy investments, RNG, and unfun and often clunky talent choices that add little of value to a rotation that is very static.
The spec needs a rework.
PS: Bracing for the comments that say warlocks get too much attention from the devs already because of pet customization and the Darkmoon Faire questline. We may be getting non-combat stuff aplenty, maybe too much, but combat-wise demonology has been getting all the attention and it has been mostly negative, stripping away the fun talents in the name of balance which has done nothing as it’s still a top 3 single target spec.