If devastation were overperforming, they would be nerfing disintegrate first no matter what…
Do you not think that S3 with so much more essence burst sends just as much (if not more) power into disintegrate?
Dots for a class relay on burst is bad for pvp. You see mages asking for more dots. It is great for pve.
In PvP disintegrate is already massive amounts of damage and we’re lucky it hasn’t been nerfed
But if S2 tier comes back, that’ll probly be the final straw, Even tho the DoT is removable by multiple sources in PvP. Which is why I’d rather have frontloaded Disintegrate damage like right now, and not a removable dot
Yeah I mean understandable and like I said earlier, there should be two separate votes and it shouldnt be done like this.
That said, it seems like making it a bleed/not dispellable or having a big penalty for dispell (have it release a pyre at 300% dmg or bleed out instantly) is something they should do with it if it wins so that it isn’t trivial.
Our burst window is 28-36 seconds. We aren’t trying to one-shot people. We will have higher peaks with the S2 bonus than we would with the s3 bonus, where we’re being infused with a bunch of extra resources over an extended buff window.
Having the DoT contribution of our most recent Disintegrates before a kill “wasted” is an incredibly small price to pay.
This makes no sense to be concerned about while not having greater concerns over the impact of the s3 bonus. You’re acting like the s2 DoT will be balanced into oblivion, but we’re getting a whole 12.5s/12.5% buff that feeds us multiple Essence Burst procs for free. The s3 bonus is incredibly powerful.
I don’t think this is actually true at all in pvp, mainly because of the way the pvp modifiers effectively double nerf shards. Instead of 12->36% in pve, its 6->12% in pvp. 12% disintegrate damage as a dot over 8 seconds is actually such garbage
We won’t have higher peaks primarily because of what the s2 set does, but rather because of what the s3 set does, and which we won’t have. An extra 12.5s of 12.5% increased damage and multiple Essence Burst procs added to the end of Dragonrage is quite powerful, and on average basically extends our threat window by like 40%.
The other poster was correct that set bonuses aren’t just free. We are balanced around them, and if Disintegrate hypothetically did 50% more damage due to a set bonus it would have its baseline efficacy nerfed in all likelihood. In the grand scheme of spec design, the practical impact of extending a spec’s threat window is that that window is likely going to be balanced into being less threatening per unit of time. This is a fairly basic principle, whether you’re talking about a buff with 50% uptime being less potent than a buff with 10% uptime, or a spell with a 10s CD being weaker than one with a 30s CD.
Changing the structure of our damage cadence to increase our threat window logically results in a flatter damage profile. Replacing that with a bonus that is instead a flat average damage increase to our primary damage spells, which becomes a larger increase during the windows where we are already spiking, would logically result in a less flat damage profile.
If I could choose an option to not have a set bonus at all, I would, because all of our set bonuses have been garbage in comparison to having that power budget diffused into our unmodified kit. The s3 bonus is mildly entertaining in a “why can’t I hold all of these Disintegrates” kind of way, but that fades like any cheat code, and ultimately it has the impact I’ve outlined and which I’ve had an issue with most of the season, well before this topic arose. The s2 bonus is the closest to no set bonus, and so that’s the one I prefer
idk, they keep buffing disintegrate to the moon regardless of what our set bonus is, so I don’t really think our set bonus in s4 will result in them nerfing disintegrate. They’ll probably buff it again
Yeah, the literal balancing we do or do not receive is going to be the largest factor in our ultimate power level, but I still think it’s correct to view set bonuses through the lens of them being changes to the shape of our spec rather than its net power. Maybe we could get lucky and choose the most powerful set bonus, and then still be tweaked up and just kind of sneak our way into being overpowered, but I don’t want to be overpowered and I’d rather not treat discussion surrounding game balance or other community interactions (like these polls) as a Game of Thrones-esque political metagame where we jockey for power.
I just wish we had a set bonus that was more entertaining (in a non-cheat way) to use, like Preservation’s s1 bonuses. Our s1 is just RNG power, our s2 is nearly non-existent as it doesn’t really change anything, and our s3 4-set took the solid middle-ground we hit after they did our mini rework, where we still had to manage our EB procs and Essence, but without being starved for them, and made it feel like we’re just overwhelmed with resources to the point of barely feeling like we have them.
Once you add in the tiniest amount of natural disruption to our ability to chain-cast that comes with any combat scenario, it feels like we can just cast Disintegrate any time we are literally capable of casting it. It takes away from the power of each Disintegrate cast, and the power of having access to EB on-demand during Dragonrage, when it feels like we don’t ever really run out of gas. It also puts just such a high premium on uptime, which leads to zugging being such an overwhelmingly powerful starting point. Uptime should be a big part of our playstyle of course, but I almost feel dumb these days for trying to make plays or consolidate burst instead of maximizing DPS exclusively.