Look, I don’t think you should be rewarded with chunking someone for half their health just because you got a Chaos Bolt cast off in your shadow fury or seduction CC window, but these big casts feel pretty toothless right now.
11 Likes
You chain them back to back, the resource to spend them is easily acquired so much so that you can often struggle to spend it, and they can have pretty short cast times too.
The notion of CB being a big cast is purely from memories.
It’s also a spell that scales vert well with every stat, so we could see it going from average to strong purely when Season 1 kicks off from the ilvl alone.
Anyone that let’s a warlock chain cast chaosbolts is doing something wrong.
That’s the issue really. And yes i am factoring in precog but with the amount of micro-ccs and semi invuls in the game it’s highly improbable, at best 2 casts if you preplan it.
Edit: but 2 chaos bolts hardly dent anything with the way its currently tuned, which is what op is referring to i believe.
10 Likes
Literally there’s so much garbage in the game to stop cast, its getting to the point that everyone is picking abilities with instant procs over w.e the benefit of a cast can be.
There’s a huge problem when you have so many ways to interrupt casting in a game where you can go back to back with instant doing double to triple damage of a longer than 1.5 secs. And the faster this game keeps getting the worst off having a cast in anything will be.
Like I’m sure if blizzard made half the heals in this game have to cast for their main heals/cds in pvp w.o no immunities to cast, most of them would probably quit.
7 Likes
Judging by RSS wait times healers quit a long time ago. I said it in another thread but the arms race of melee vs range and cast vs interrupts has been nothing but toxic for the game. There really does need to be a serious disarmament in which a lot of abilities including, CC/gap closers/kiting spells/interrupts/etc need to be removed. Having some is fine but when multiple classes have an embarrassment of riches of these tools it becomes eztremelt unhealthy.
It is fine to have say a frost mage that specializes in kiting being strong at it as long as it gives up something else, like damage or interrupts, so it has a notable weakness. Mean while a warrior might struggle with being kited but could easily be the melee juggernaut who can brawl with anyone in melee.
That is good design, but designing everyone to do everythinf is just stupid.
4 Likes
This is literally the key to balancing the game.
I remember choosing a warlock in The burning crusade because he had fear and no one else had this plethora of cc.
I would also agree that thr amount of immunities in the game are kinda overkill. Divine shield, ice block, and deterrence is all there should be.
I also believe too many classes have too many self heals which is why there are so many mongo melee running around rabid all the time
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Chaos bolt/Soul Fire damage is pathetic considering you can spec aff, have way more pressure, and spam shadowbolts that hit ~1.5m
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I don’t know why anyone here make excuses for chaosbolt doing that dmg.
“Lots of controllable resources bla-bla”.
We literally have affliction hitting 1,5kk with SHADOWBOLT and haunt. You don’t need any resources for shadowbolt, nightfall procs so often and you get guaranteed proc after haunt - you use it instantly most of times. Then you get even more dmg with those procs because of soul harvester passive - another 300k. Non-crit sb from nightfall hits like chaosbolt.
There is no any single reason why aff instant shadowbolts should hit twice harder than chaosbolt.
I don’t want to nerf affliction as it’s dope ash and fun. Just chaosbolt shouldn’t be that weak - that’s it.
11 Likes
Imagine if chaos bolt was instant and dealt 2M damage instead.
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Yeah affliction is the new destro. Higher burst plus sustain.
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As others have mentioned, our instants (conflag/SB) do just as much damage as chaos bolt, and our spammable filler spell incinerate isn’t that far behind it. The damage payoff by hardcasting Chaos Bolt simply isn’t there outside of Ritual of Ruin (RoR) burst windows. Chaos Bolt worked well in Dragonflight because of RoR’s lower shard requirement (and I think it did more damage proportional to people’s max health).
IMO, Chaos Bolt needs some sort of added utility besides its raw damage with the way Destro’s spells are currently tuned. One idea is bringing back the old school Chaos Bolt in Wotlk, which ignored absorptions and resistances. In modern WoW, maybe Chaos Bolt could bypass all absorb shields and damage reduction effects (including passive and active effects like Pain Suppression). Alternatively, they could integrate the Fel Fissure PvP Talent into CB as a baseline effect, and make the % healing reduction an actual debuff on the target instead of a 5 yd wide spot on the ground.
Historically, Chaos Bolt’s big damage was its main selling point, but that’s no longer the case in the current meta. They need to give it another mechanic to compensate. I miss when seeing a successful chaos bolt flying across the arena caused a huge sense of dread for the enemy team.
5 Likes
Honestly it feels alienating to not have Chaos Bolt do big damage. I feel like that’s what a lot of people loved about previous iterations of the spec, and now having it essentially play like a fire mage, throwing out conflags / shadowburns / instant Rain of Fires and withers doesn’t feel good.
I feel like it’s a hard place to be in - the game feels like it’s moving on from casters actually, ya’know, casting that much in favor of extremely short casts and instant cast spells. But I feel like so many people still want to be a the turret hurling giant chaos bolts that chunk health bars. Or maybe I’m overgeneralizing my own desires for the spec.
I do think at the very least Chaos Bolt needs some added flair and utility if they’re not going to adjust the damage numbers. Or they should bake a lot of the chaos bolt talents in the destruction tree into the base spell and add new talent points that make more sense for the new way destro plays. It feels like such a trap to have so many talents that increase chaos bolt damage only for it to still not hit hard.
2 Likes
I think we have the same brain
1 Like
I’d also like to suggest that the PvP talent ‘Fel Fissure’ should also work with Soul Fire like it does Chaos Bolt.
Feel Fissure is our main valuable MS & with having to be on the move constantly in arena & casting so few Chaos Bolts, Fel fissure has become more of a dud talent.
Having Soulfire procs work with fel fissure wouldn’t be OP and would be a subtle QoL change that would make me consider taking the PvP talent again.
3 Likes
yup desto feels horrible in pvp right now.
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Eh, it’s a bit of a balancing act to get the ratios just right. It’s always fun to hit big chaos bolts, but I have to admit in the long term I think I always enjoy destruction the most when all of the damage isn’t backloaded into chaos bolt, but maybe that’s just me preferring when the kit is well rounded to when it’s bursty. I always enjoyed when incinerate did healthy amounts of damage and remember the least fun I ever had playing destruction being when we had that talent that reduced incinerates damage by like 75% but made it generate insane embers so you could machine gun chaos bolts.
Now having said that, and while I like the gap between chaos bolt and incinerate being smaller, I do think that as a consequence of that chaos bolt should at least have a shorter cast time than it does. Honestly with the way they’re currently balanced I’d even go as far as to suggest making chaos bolt the faster of the two. Though I imagine giving things to chaos bolt might be difficult while Touch of Rancora exists in diabolist.
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Chaos bolt should be hitting for at least 3 million with these health pools. You should only be casting it about once every 12 seconds, but it should definitely be hitting that hard.
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I think this sounds reasonable. When I say “Chaos Bolt should hit hard” I think people think what I’m saying is you should be able to constantly turret out 50% cast time reduction chaos bolts that do 3M each. Which isn’t the case; I don’t think it’s fun for anyone where you just die because the destruction warlock found 4 seconds to cast chaos bolts back to back.
I do think Chaos Bolt needs to pull away from the rest of the Destruction Warlock kit and feel satisfying to push. I’m glad it’s getting a bit of a buff for next week and I’m curious to see how it’ll feel.
1 Like
honestly i dont think affliction or destruction lack damage. Demo probably could use some help, but i dont think we need a chaos bolt buff.
this is in regards to pvp.
With Wither getting a nerf I disagree; I think it makes sense to move some extra damage into our casted abilities like Chaos Bolt, Incinerate, and Soul Fire.
Wither is incredibly strong and will continue to be despite the nerf, but I do think the buffs coming to Destro spells are appropriate.
I do agree though that more so than Destro, Demo could use some help.
2 Likes