Destruction
- (2) Set Bonus: Channel Demonfire bolts, Immolate, and Incinerate have a 20% chance to fire an additional Channel Demonfire bolt.
- (4) Set Bonus: After casting 15 Demonfire bolts, your next Demonfire bolt deals (103% of Spell Power) Shadowflame damage to the target and (35% of Spell Power) Shadowflame damage to enemies within 8 yards.
Destruction tier being so centered around Channel Demonfire has two issues for me:
Synergy with other Destruction Talents
Madness of the Azj’aqir is pretty universally used by any variations of the Destruction spec, both Single Target and AOE, due to how much it increases the damage of our soul shard spenders. With the short timer of 4 seconds and the nature of how many soul shards we regain via stuff like Diabolic Embers, Soul Conduit and Inferno (in the case of Rain of Fire), we are pretty consistently spamming Chaos Bolt or Rain of Fire depending on the situation.
This leaves very little time to use Channel Demonfire, as we want to abuse the bonus on Madness of the Azj’aqir as much as possible.
Yes, the tier set DOES function without Channel Demonfire, but without the spell (which triggers the exact 15 bolts required to trigger the 4-piece), it does take much longer to cast enough bolts to trigger the 4-piece, heavily reducing the tier’s effectiveness.
Destruction and Movement
Destruction has had movement issues for a long time now. Having to stand still to build soul shards and casting Chaos Bolts has been a problem for a very long time, as this is a very significant portion of Destruction’s damage profile.
It doesn’t help that most of the recent Destruction buffs have targetted Soul Fire, which is… a 4 second baseline cast. Even though Soul Fire is already much stronger, it is still a talent most players who still play Destruction actively avoid, because the damage it deals is often not enough when compared to how long you need to stand still to cast it.
Channel Demonfire is a spell that requires you to stand still and channel for 2 seconds baseline to get all 15 bolts. Having the tier’s effect heavily tied to Channel Demonfire worsens considerably the already poor movement that Destruction has.
Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything that I can recommend here besides a solution that has been brought up time and time again by the Warlock community: allowing Channel Demonfire to be cast while moving.
Since this is a solution that I believe will never happen, it might be time to simply scrap that entire tier set bonus and start over.