Hi Everyone!
Posting here since I don’t have Alpha access regarding the new Alpha Changes they made to Destruction in the latest Alpha patch 05/29/24.
While I like the new talents overall I think there are some key feedback points I’d like to focus on and they mainly revolve around overall Destruction gameplay and viable builds for Raids and Mythic+.
1.-Mobility
While I agree with Blizzard that Warlock as a whole needs to feel less mobile than other casters given how much healing and mitigation they have, I find hard to believe that precisely because of this ailment imposed to Warlocks by design they now have chosen to put Dimensional Rift in the middle of the Tree citing “mobility” issues, I find this to be contradictory, specially when the other 2 specializations are getting their Guardian Demon in the same centre location of their Tree, this one just seems weird and would be nice to see further clarification from Blizzard as to why exactly they’re moving forward with this.
2.-Dimensional Rift Gameplay
I like what they did with Dimensional Rift both in the previous Alpha Build and in Season 3 of Dragonflight, it created a new playstyle and it was all encompassing meaning it didn’t really matter if you were in M+ or in a Patchwerk fight in Raid, Dimensional Rift was a good option, my main point of feedback here is that they should probably aim to maintain some of that universal applicability to Dimensional Rift if they want to put it in the center of the Destruction tree, as it stands right now and after playing with the Alpha talent calculator to create builds for both single target and AoE there’s no compelling reason to take Dimensional Rift in any situation given our other options, essentially creating a dead space right at the center of the tree and I guess it’s ok if that’s the design goal but I really don’t think Blizzard wants this to be the case.
3.-Gate 3 is too Single Target focused and has almost no AoE options.
As it stands right now a Destruction Warlock looking to build a loadout for a Single Target fight would want the following Talents:
1.-Overfiend
2.-Infernal into Crashing Chaos
3.Decimation
All of these options are prime time Single Target DPS increases and they encompass all of the 3 paths to our 3 Destruction capstones, 2 of those are pure Single Target and with Infernal being the only hybrid option, if that’s the case for Single Target you don’t even have the points to grab Infernal our number 1 Signature Spell/Guadrian Demon, it feels wrong.
4.-Suggestions:
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Make Dimensional Rift Cleave baseline and replace Dimensional Ripper for Flame Rift, balance around that should be easier now that it doesn’t have an RNG proc for new charges, or add the charge proc back with an additional talent node to create healthy friction with talents like Pyrogenics or Channel Demonfire.
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Remove Ritual of Ruin or make it Cleave like the Doom Fiend of Demonology’s S3 Tierset, this will help with making it a flavor/hybrid node that doesn’t overlap in it’s Single Target design with it’s other 2 Gate 3 capstones, as it stands it only has Single Target applicability, having the Overfiend Cleave would fix the issue where all Gate 3 capstones function as or build heavily into Single Target.
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Please do something about Infernal Brand, either buff it to it’s 10% baseline back in Shadowlands or redesign it, I would honestly prefer if it was removed but I can see a world where it gets a new design called Infernal Core or something that just makes it so that infernal explodes when it expires and it would go well with Hero Talents such as Abyssal Dominion, I don’t have high hopes of this but it’s just a suggestion.
Overall I think this talent tree is looking a lot more interesting and fun to play around with, it has it’s issues as I outlined above but I think it can land very strongly if they iterate on those.