Feedback: Tier Set Bonus in Patch 10.1

They have a lot to be desired.

Major concern that I thought Blizzard set they wanted to avoid was forcing Destro warlocks into talenting for Channel Demonfire for the set bonus to even function. This has to be changed immediately because this is not what was advertised to us.

Also, I want to ask, how did you make one of these set bonuses look cool, while the other set is just boring with … +stats?

Retribution
(2) Set Bonus: Judgment and Hammer of Wrath deal 10% increased damage and 20% increased critical strike damage.
(4) Set Bonus: Judgment increases the damage enemies take from your Holy Power spenders by an additional 5%. Hammer of Wrath applies Judgment to enemies.

Windwalker
(2) Set Bonus: Rising Sun Kick deals increased damage and has a chance to go nova, dealing Fire damage to all enemies within 8 yards.
(4) Set Bonus: Your melee auto-attacks have a chance to launch a Shadowflame spirit at your enemy that duplicates your next 3 abilities at X% effectiveness.

Overall, really uninspiring over season 1.

Anyways, Destro Warlocks the floor is yours.

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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.

Well I’m a DK guy… so let’s talk about the DK sets.

The wording of the (4) set is a little odd, but I think I understand the point to be whenever you either A) Activate Vampiric Blood, or B) when it is activated by the (2) set.
I like this interaction of making a defensive CD also offensive, so you can choose to use it offensively if needed, and if not needed for defensive reasons.
Secondly, the ability to extend the duration is interesting and I’d be curious to know what the “intended” duration of Vampiric Blood will be. Personally I hope we aren’t in for a re-hashing of Sepulcher tier sets, but who knows.

This is fun. Frostwyrm’s Fury is my single favorite ability in WoW. It’s so much fun to use and watch. My biggest concern with this is that I will need a weakaura to track the number of Rime procs used in M+ so I don’t start bricking keys by accidentally pulling a pack at the wrong time.
In raid I have some concern about wasting rime procs to get a double Frostwyrms Fury at an opportune time.
That being said, It seems like fun, and I like the direction it’s taking. More uses of a fun ability is good.

This one concerns me. I checked a recent mythic Terros log of mine, and it was the 40 second mark before I casted my 20th Death Coil. I’m not saying this is a perfect timing, I’m far from a perfect player, and I probably could have spammed out a few more, but even if 30s is when this comes up… its right at the end of all our big CDs. So… do we have to delay CDs more than we already do? Is the purpose of this set to help the troughs of unholy or make the peaks even higher? (Not going to talk about Puzzle Box probably still being BiS in 10.1).
The 4 set might make this even worse as Sudden Doom is common enough a proc to have full, or near full uptime on the added mastery.

This all comes with a similar concern to the frost set. There is a world where the “optimal” way to use this buff at some point in the fight is to cap out on runic power and not cast the 20th Death Coil/Epidemic to hold the mastery buff for CD usage. If this is 5 seconds, sure. That’s fine. If it’s anything longer than 10seconds, that’s a problem if you ask me.

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In raw numbers the 2p is already much stronger than the current one (also stronger than fury imo). So maybe tweaking the %age might be appropriate.
The 4p - as mentioned by others - is forcing you into 3 talent points for boosting Slam damage even further. Slam in general has the problem of being super weak and Whirlwind with Storm of Swords is already a pick for single target rage-dump over Slam. The AoE effect is quite nice since it only adds ontop of the massive AoE burst window but also gives arms a bit more variety for sustained AoE outside of alternating cleave/OP.