I concede on that fantasy, it does sound super sick! Too bad the chances of that not happening are… pretty high 
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Does Blizzard plan to have separate versions of Wither for Corruption and Immolate?
Reading the proposed tooltip, Wither appears to have an 18 second duration. Affliction doesn’t rely on Corruption for resources (that’s Agony’s job), but Destruction generates additional shards/embers at an average of 1 + (0.5*crit rate) every 3 seconds through Immolate.
How will Wither impact the role of Immolate in a Destruction warlock’s resource economy?
Will Wither be 2 or 3 seconds for both Affliction and Destruction, or will they observe different frequencies?
Can the warlock devs for once focus on any other spec than Demo? So frustrating playing this class nowadays.
Frankly given what happened to Locks after our best Developer left; I almost consider any focus for Destro that deviates from overarching concept of overwhelming and explosive magic, a pretext to remove Green Fire down the road “Because it’s a Demon Hunter thing.” or “It’s not fair to other classes that you have a spell tint.” or some nonsense, because we have to ‘always’ seem to play second fiddle to Mage, Death Knight and Demon Hunter.
Honestly, I forget the last time they even heeded feedback. I feel like we’ll ‘maybe’ see 1-2 more posts by Kaivax, and then this thread will become an echo chamber where it’s all thunderously silent save hopeful players shouting into the darkness for answers. Mage by contrast will get frequent communication. How it always is.
I mean, sure the Devs claim to want it and I’ll deal in good faith; but realistically the inner voice in my head says that after 20 some odd years; I still feel like we’re an after thought to Mages, and this ‘theme’ is set in stone no matter what we say, because it’s some Dev’s baby.
Maybe Blizzard will prove me wrong. Maybe Gul’dan was just a well intentioned old Orc who wanted to promote Mountain Dew also. I mean even if nothing changes, I’ll most likely just ignore the talents / written text / fantasy and replace it with my own. Its just what we roleplayers do, and have done since Shadowlands anyways. 
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Could really use a post detailing exactly how Blackened Soul works and the idea behind it. Maybe even a short clip of how it’s supposed to look.
Feel like that could go a long way in addressing people feeling like Hellcaller isn’t on-theme for Destro.
How is this focused on demo? Or are you saying this is nothing? At the very least this is solidly themed for affliction, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
Did you mean to post on the Diabolist thread?
I understood him perfectly fine. The current devs have a fixation of their favorite specs and Demonology is one of them. I too wish they’d stop this attitude and give the other specs their time in the limelight.
The Hellcaller hero talents should be a wake up call to them but I think Sulek said it best in the post above.
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I think the hate on this from the destro enjoyers is misplaced. Immolate is a huge part of their damage, this has numerous potential interactions with their spec, it is easily spreadable in aoe, likely easy to maintain in aoe with rdf and improved immolate, makes immolate instant cast to improve mobility… and more. But because it isn’t a big nuke, it is not destro. It is kind of baffling to me that theme is so much more important than how well it interacts with a pivotal part of their kit.
Plus, until we get animations, I don’t really get the complaining. The diabolist tree might on description read more demo because you get demon spawns as part of the flavor. But you also get an aoe incinerate cast which seems pretty destro to me, I dont think that demo cares much about aoe shadow bolt. And the capstone could end up being a massive green meteor that just so happens to spawn imps instead of an … infernal. Maybe if they made it spawn little internals instead of, destro would be happy.
There is just too much complaining to me when these are shared trees where you’ll have aspects from both demo and destro or both aff and destro.
I think a big part of it just comes from how long the 3 specs have been pulled so far apart from each other that warlock in a whole has really not had a shared core identitiy other then we have pets and many people (not all) have grown to really identify as an individual spec rather then a warlock.
When was the last time aff had a fire spell in its spell book. Cataclysm with fel bolt I think? Cata was so long ago that were getting it back with classic cata… just to show how long its been since something was shared dps wise other then pets and defensives/utility.
Most people dont like change in general, even more so ones that mess with theme and identity and hellcaller and diabolist for sure are merging things visually and play wise. I can see both sides of where people are coming from.
Me personally I was hoping to get more from it from the aff side playwise. More shared fire spells and interactions - to really bridge the 2 - while this tree is mechanically sound and can possible end up super strong it just feels thematically week. “A large part of it is the words/names that were chosen to describe talents and effects” and the 2nd part is how passive and how many self contained talent interactions are in the hero tree itself.
Now that I think about it I realize I was really just hoping for more of a frostfire hero talent tree style. Which is on me.
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fel flame, yeah. and soul fire might be used as well depending on the circumstance.
expectations can definitely predispose people to negative reactions when things don’t meet them. i don’t think this tree is bad for either aff or destro although I do think there needs to be a lot of details fleshed out so we actually understand how everything works. it definitely reads more mechanical than thematic, which is fine for me.
I understand your concerns, but why reply to me with them? I don’t have any kind of pull within the company.
Go read the rider of the apocalypse tree to see the theme, flavor, and love poured into that one. Come back and tell me that hellcaller meets the mark.
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Yeah fel flame that was it and soul flame for a bit of it.
Agreed that mechanically and visually there is just so much that blizzard didnt give that needs to be explained to make a final call on the tree. In the end if the theme doesnt work/mesh for the group of people complaining about it doesnt matter how it works mechanically.
Im waiting for soul harverter - and really hoping they get that one right - but already scared cause seeing the agony combo skill for spreading it easier in this tree “which is poorly done” specificly doesnt give me much hope. Cause that kind of fix needs to be in actual spec tree…
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on the note of the rider of the apocalypse tree -
Imagine they change the demons in Diabolist to summon 3 high level lore class demons/warlocks from the past. Its a good idea and point.
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I do have to agree that the four horseman tree is the coolest thematically there is. hellcaller still doesn’t bother me.
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Too much focus on Wither being a dot and not enough on Blackened Soul being a chain of explosions.
We demand explosions.
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That was because I always hit reply when I post, and Fixbelfem responded while I was writing my post. Please don’t take what I said as being either leveled at, or addressed to you specifically. 9/10 times my posts are generalized and if I have an issue with another poster, I’ll quote them and mention the issue.
We’re all Warlocks here. Aside from a few, I think we’re all pretty unified in our dislike of Satyr fantasy.
I don’t think anyone is complaining about the actual talent mechanics friend.
Immolate Instant Cast? That is huge. Brush off the names and the theme and I love Hellcaller.
It’s the Class Fantasy and the spells themselves being so alien to Destruction that I have a problem with here. I think that’s the common complaint too. It’s the fantasy that people are annoyed by. Satyrs? Lol. Because the Satyrs have been such iconic Warlocks and prolific threats to all of Azeroth since… …when?
There’s not even one of them in the Warlock Order Hall for goodness sake.
That’s how obscure and lame it is.
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I see it less as Satyr fantasy and more seeing us as arrogant enough to see those satyr losers trying to use hellcaller magic and deciding we’d be way better at it.
To be fair I think this issue stems from that fact that as a class, warlocks are woefully under represented with sources to draw from. Every other class has multiple major characters to draw inspiration from, or multiple variations of itself to draw from.
For warlocks specifically after gul’dan the next most notable warlock is… the player character. Every other warlock npc is a mirror or one of the three player specs instead of the other way around (and the more powerful ones just phase shift through all 3). Drawing inspiration from any of them is just self cannibalization. That pretty much just leaves the only sources to get fantasy from being either taking some shared aspect of the class and cranking it up to 11 (diabolist) or taking it from some flavor of demon (hellcaller).
I see that as just enabling a very bad idea myself, which is why I will not. Honestly, we shouldn’t even try to justify it mate. We’re not evil Druids, and Satyr have never been noteworthy Warlocks outside of Lord Xavius ‘pre-death’ and that’s debatable as well.
Instead of Wither, why not name it “Searing Shadow” or something? Go full in for the Black Dragon Shadowflame stuff. That’s been there and way more visible since Classic. With Shadowflame users the argument that there’s only a few sources to pull from is just not true.
When people think Shadowflame, they don’t think “Those Satyr in Ashenvale”.
They think. “Oh crap, Nefarian is landing! I forgot my Onyxia Scale Cloak!”.
This kind of stuff isn’t hard to resolve, but the problem I think a lot of us have is that Blizzard is going to probably pull the “What…? Sorry we can’t hear you.”, stance. There won’t be further responses, and they will drag this out all the way until release in November, regardless of how many people post a complaint on the matter.
So their going to have to forgive my disbelief in their claims that our feedback matters. It’s what they’ve done for 20 years and I’ve become suitably numb to thinking it’ll ever be anything but that. I simply expect more of the same. Perhaps they will surprise me.
Edit:
So after a few days, I finally have figured out why I never heard of Xalan even though I try to stay up to date on most Lore. He’s not even a character from WoW, he’s a character from the War of the Satyr Comic, which again was mostly tied to Druid lore / Worgen lore.
The same can really be said of Legashi and others. These are all super obscure out of the way characters / factions that a lot of players probably never really dealt with, because Satyr have always been hyper underused aside from as Night Elf enemies. Either way they are not exactly evocative of Destruction as a spec to be honest, but we’ll see. Seems like we’re going to be saddled with it whether we like it or not.
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