Hey all, back again with another feedback thread. I was thinking of splitting this into three to try and consolidate feedback for gameplay of each of our specs, but what’s the point really? Here’s hoping more of us get into alpha to post on the alpha forums.
Since this alpha fundamentally changed all 3 of our specs, this post is going to be long, sorry for that off the bat.
Things I don’t know much about or chose not to discuss here (trying to give pretty general feedback): PVP, general feeling of simplifying the class, broad discussion on spec thematics. I also did not add hero talents because they are currently non-functional and don’t work with several of our new base spells (rapture vs ua etc.)
Alpha Week 5 (tier set no changes)
Base UI changes needed to play Warlock:
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Nameplate Debuff Tracking options: Time remaining, size, glow, pandemic, choosing which debuffs to track and where on the nameplate
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Boss Frames: Need to be customizable with the same options as the current target frame/focus frame/nameplate. Current boss frames just aren’t functional for dot specs.
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Cooldown manager: Needs debuff tracking on current target, needs debuff tracking on all targets (do I have UA up on any target).
Destruction
Base Spec (buttons you will always have
Shard Generation: Destruction has suffered from having extremely high shard generation in aoe, to moderate shard generation in single target for a long time. I’m not sure what the solution is here to have a good combat pace, but the goal should be that both spenders (rain of fire and chaos bolt) feel good to press. The loss of ritual of ruin and decimation hammers this part of our kit tremendously, so TBD on how this feels through alpha/beta
Rain of Fire: Worried about Alythess’ Ire in single target, particularly if we are overloaded with shards in multi-target settings, where it might be optimal to just spam Rain of Fire on our priority target.
Movement: While it is still worthwhile to see where encounter design pushes low-movement specs, I’m still worried about our ability to use abilities on the move. Chaotic inferno is an interesting node, but atm with 1ppm it doesn’t really do anything for us aside from holding an incinerate “proc”. I don’t see us taking this talent unless the 5% increase to Chaos Bolt is worthwhile. It feels pretty pathetic to pick a talent that way.
Talents
First Talent Gate
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Stat Increases: Not a fan of the stock stat % increases, but I know why they’re in the tree.
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Roaring Blaze: Needs to prioritize enemies that do not have immolate/wither, then it needs to prioritize targets that have the lowest duration left on immolate/wither.
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Improved Havoc: Seems way better for mayhem than it does for havoc at the moment. I don’t see a place to play havoc unless there is a fight where there are multiple targets alive and you want to target a specific enemy (which feels worse in farm raids since you just play mayhem anyway).
Second Talent Gate
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Fire and Brimstone and Emberstorm: Talents should swap places. Emberstorm is a universally good talent, while Fire and Brimstone is a situational talent. There might be situations where I wouldn’t want Flashpoint either.
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Man’ari Erudition: Extremely lame talent, maybe merge this with Chaotic Inferno or something. There are a lot of passive damage increases in this talent gate that overlap with each other.
Final Talent Gate
This talent gate is a complete mess, with talents that feel bad to play and are not even enticing to take.
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Soul Fire: Either remove soul fire, or never put this in the tree without decimation. Soul fire, even with backdraft, is one of the most miserable spells to press; it does less damage than chaos bolt, more than incinerate, but has a much longer cast time than both. Decimation was the best thing to happen to destruction in the war within, and maybe even in the past few expansions.
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Dimensional Rifts: This talent just sucks, I think it doesn’t really have a place on the tree other than “hit when moving”. It’s RNG and just feels bad to press, especially since it doesn’t feel punchy or impactful when I spawn a rift – it feels much less impactful than hitting incinerate or chaos bolt (which shouldn’t be the case). However, a small change would be if it had a predictable cadence to which rift you would summon; it might feel better with the capstone talent.
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Avatar of Destruction: Just an abomination of a talent. Overfiend requires a chaos rift to summon, but it is completely RNG. Soulfire needs to be cast, which feels horrendous without decimation. Not sure the solution here, but maybe making this node decimation (fast cast soulfire, or free dimensional rift charge on crit strikes) would do better. Move this node elsewhere.
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Mark of Ruvaraad: Horrible talent, does not even sound enticing to take. Complete redo on this one.
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Channel Demonfire and Demonfire Mastery: Horrible capstone talents without the ability to refresh our immolate and wither (not to mention in aoe). Complete do over on this one (do not add the passive one into the tree either, it will never be picked).
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Conflagration of Chaos: It feels out of place, and I’m unsure what to think. The tiny DPS increase for conflagration is offset by the requirement for deep investment into shadowburn to make it worthwhile.
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The other talents we’ve had for a while (chaos incarnate etc.) seem like permanent picks, which is ok, but not fantastic.
Apex Talents
Super cool apex talent, visually buggy, but also really flavourful. Due to the way that destruction functions in multi-target, it seems extremely multi-target skewed. I’m not sure how enticing this will be in single target, as the main reason you would take this would be for the stat increases (Embers of Nihilam).
Affliction
Base Spec (buttons you will always have)
Agony: Doesn’t quite fit the goals of reducing class complexity if you keep agony stacks in the game since it requires more attention to your nameplates. If it doesn’t require your attention (which is true at the moment), then it becomes worthless to track and is not needed in the game.
Unstable Affliction:
- Stacking unstable affliction does not accomplish the goal of reducing class complexity the same as agony. There are a couple of ways to fix this, but nameplate accessibility is of particular issue here, as well as having to track this on multiple targets in aoe (which might be a possibility).
- Having a max cap of 5 on unstable affliction puts us into a difficult spot during darkglare windows, where adding additional unstable afflictions on top of the 5 you have out is actually the wrong way to play. In this case, there needs to be a solution to solve our resource consumption during lust and cooldown windows (see dot tick rate section). If the goal is: “get a shard, spend a shard” outside of pool windows, then this is not being accomplished at the moment, and is especially bad in your darkglare window.
Drain Soul and Shadowbolt: Shadowbolt has overlapped with demonology for a while and has kind of lost the “uniqueness” of it being the filler for every warlock spec, which hasn’t been present for almost 15 years. Maybe eliminating Shadowbolt and replacing it with drain soul is the right direction here; it also fits the theme of the spec more – having a distinct filler spell for each spec is fine – Shadowbolt just feels weird for a “drain spec”. More on Malefic grasp in the talent section (TLDR: this would help grasp)
Absolute Corruption: I think the time has come to kill absolute corruption. This talent causes issues with DPET for corruption and wither, and also does not meaningfully change the flow of affliction in general while also diluting our “theme”of drains and dots. Similarly, it eliminates the only skill cap left with affliction, which is managing your dots and learning to juggle them on multiple targets. There are some niche cases where it also breaks affliction, or locks us in combat with enemies in multiple different scenarios (thinking of m+ and clicking release spirit too quickly and being locked in combat across the zone).
Dot Tick Rate: Big elephant in the room. For some reason, affliction as a damage over time spec has no way to increase dot tick rate aside from creeping death as a flat modifier. I think with the new unstable affliction debuff, it makes sense to transition Darkglare into increasing dot tick rate by X% instead of extending dot length. This would also help solve the issue of Unstable affliction caps during our darkglare window, while pumping more flavour into our base kit. There are also a lot of “positive feedback loops” where it will increase the speed of the rotation and make it more fun to see damage numbers being spammed everywhere.
Affliction Mastery: I think it’s time to do a flavour change for affliction mastery. Maybe pushing this into a tick rate increase, something like: “unstable affliction causes your damage over time effects to deal damage faster by X% on all targets”. This would feed into both hellcaller and soul harvester (would also require a retuning of nightfall chance).
Talents
First Talent Gate
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Nightfall and Improved Shadobolt/Drain Soul: Nightfall and the shadowbolt/drain soul node should swap places. It doesn’t make sense that I’m gaining a buff to my filler before empowering my filler. See above for reasoning on why Drain Soul should be the only option here.
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Stat Increases: Not a fan of the stock stat % increases, but I know why they’re in the tree.
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Shared Agony: Needs to prioritize enemies that do not have agony first, then prioritize enemies that have the lowest duration agony left.
Second Talent Gate
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Cunning Cruelty and Sudden Onset: Should swap cunning cruelty and sudden onset. It doesn’t make sense why the left side of the tree has the improvements to our filler, but then a modifier to our filler is on the opposite side of the tree. It would be better if cunning cruelty were just a node below the drain soul choice node that connected to withering bolt without having to go through haunt (weird visual difference in the talent tree, but still).
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Dark Harvest and Cull the Weak: Dark Harvest is a cool talent, but I would much prefer it if the channel just increased our dot tick rate instead of being a channelled damage nuke. Maybe building this type of functionality into Cull the Weak would be the best option.
Final Talent Gate
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Relinquished: Seems to be in a weird spot. In an ideal world, this is just a single point node that increases agony shard generation by 1.10 (10%) and replaces sudden onset node higher up in the tree (if you were to replace sudden onset).
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Nocturnal Void: Should take the place of relinquished.
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Malefic Grasp: Feels extremely out of place with Shadowbolt, but feels much better with Drain Soul. Something feels off; maybe it’s because this doesn’t really get affected by other drain/bolt increasing events. If this wasn’t a proc but just modified your filler (only drain soul) permanently it would feel better. Have all the other effects that affect drain soul apply to this talent (essentially port the mop version of the spell into the game).
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Soul Miser: Doesn’t really have a cool interaction other than flooding us with resources in aoe, which we already experience if we decide to go down the path of nocturnal void. I don’t see this ever being played at the moment, and it causes more harm than “fun”. On the other hand, Cascading Calamity is a fantastic gameplay-changing talent.
Apex Talents
Right now, you would use this everywhere; it’s a pretty powerful talent node in general (even shadow of Nathreza, which is almost like a flat 2-2.5% increase per node invested). It feels super thematic and worth investing points into just visually.
Demonology
Base Spec (buttons you will always have)
Wild imps: I understand the intent behind the imp cap, but this poses a few different problems to the theme of the spec, as well as the changes behind Hand of Gul’dan vs Eye of Gul’dan.
- Ancient imp timing is horrible. This shouldn’t be on a 15s cadence where you need to track ancient imps if you ever hit implosion.. Something needs to drastically change about this talent if you want to keep implosion as an integral part of the spec.
- Implosion is now counter to the builder spender aspect of demonology: We technically have two spenders in Hand of Gul’dan and the individual imps themselves. The amount of imps get tracked through implosion, but it’s still ambiguous when to hit implosion for most players. New players might think that implosion is always the button to hit in multi-target scenarios, but due to the presence of effects that increase the damage of imps (tyrant, the vast number of talents that buff imp cast damage and not implosion damage) can lead you in the wrong direction. For example, a new player might hit Tyrant then implode right away in multi-target situations when that would be fundamentally an incorrect decision, unless the enemies will die before you can implode (since you want to gain the benefit of the tyrant damage aura on your demons).
- The amount of damage that Eye of Gul’dan does with max imps is also counterintuitive to how demonology should play, since it is difficult for the player to parse whether implosion is more overall damage, hitting all targets, vs a single Eye of Gul’dan (which is a very hard-hitting spell now comparatively).
- The fantasy of having an imp army is being further constrained through capping imps at a fixed amount, while also retaining implosion as an AOE spender. Ideally, we get to keep our imps while also doing some form of AOE damage to keep that “master of demons” / “imp swarm” up. Perhaps finding a way to shift implosion to an aoe cooldown (with new interactions like old imp gang boss respawn functionality) and making Eye of Gul’dan cleave once you reach max imps would solve this issue.
Felguard axe toss: This is still an incredibly cumbersome way to have our felguard use a kick. I would much rather have a dedicated button like the old PvP talent that would spawn in a Felhunter to kick for me while leaving Axe Toss as a separate stun-oriented button.
Demonic Tyrant: With imp energy being removed, this is particularly annoying to figure out the duration of imps, especially if you want to implode as soon as the imps are about to disappear in aoe setting. I think it’s time to take a good look at the buff and duration function of Tyrant, and maybe look to iterate on what a new Tyrant might look in this type of demonology (maybe it doubles your imp cap, maybe it spawns all your imps for you and reduces the cast time of Eye of Gul’dan, etc., etc.)
Talents
First Talent Gate
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Implosion: Needs to swap spots with demoniac. This part of the tree just doesn’t flow right, considering how integral Demonbolt functions as a universal ability to demonology vs the niche setting of implosion.
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Improved Implosion: If implosion moves, this needs to swap positions with imp gang boss. That would flow better into executive decision.
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Felguard: I see the intention, but this absolutely makes no sense. At this point, it would make more sense to just restrict the player to only using Felguard since it is the optimal demon. If that’s too restrictive, make it the first ability in the tree and make Hand of Gul’dan baseline. It shouldn’t take up a node like it does now. If this does leave, swap carnivorous stalkers into this slot.
Second Talent Gate
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Doomguard Bracers: Super cool talent, but just completely dead in pve. It’s frankly just a bad idea to have the ability to dispel yourself on your interrupt (what if I need to interrupt, but I have a bomb debuff on me that would kill the raid if I dispelled it). Either move it to a PvP talent or rethink this one.
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Unholy Power: One of the lamest 2-point talent nodes I’ve ever seen in the game. It needs something extra here (maybe adding in transferring more hp to your pet through soul link, like old demonology defensively).
Final Talent Gate
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Sacrificed Souls: Needs a rework or a massive buff. Unlikely to ever be used at the moment with capped demons.
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Demonic Calling: Would like to see this move higher up in the tree (could even replace unholy power). It’s too integral to demonology at this point to have a must-take talent so far down in the tree.
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Anotran Armaments: Kill the added armour bonus, the flavour isn’t even worth the text. I also have qualms about this being in melee because this causes all types of issues on bosses where melee have a tough time reaching the boss, and whether or not our tyrant will “charge” into the fight. The aoe component of Tyrant is cool, but is really weak considering how weak Tyrant as a cd is in general.
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Ancient Imps: Ancient imps need to either be immune to implosion or reworked. The 15s timer is an awful idea, and needs to be tracked in aoe to accurately assess when to maximize your ancient imp cycles.
Apex Talents
Really passive and bland talent. Nothing exciting about this other than the visual flavour to the spec. At the moment, you take it because it’s powerful, but Dominion of Argus doesn’t even fit into the theme of the greater dread stalker at all. I would rather that all three talents fit the same theme (greater dreadstalker → 2 point node that improves greater dreadstalker somehow → Soulkeeper)
EDIT: October 9th adding in the hero talent updates
Hero Talents
Hellcaller
Good.
- Depends on how exactly the proc functions in regard to the rest of the kit synergy. If this is hasted ppm, it will feel good. If it is not hasted ppm, and is not based on an ICD, it will be an RNG fest. I’m not sure how to make this feel impactful without fully explaining the RNG system you guys will be implementing to avoid us having any issues with there being significant pull variance. My biggest worry is that this will be like the problems with enhance and ele having a major CD (Malev is major) have a random proc. This could also swing us to be more like current hunter (which is overly reliant on “casino” RNG).
- Destruction needs serious iteration with Hellcaller still, since the problem with blackened soul having any differentiation between the two specs has caused it to be an overbearing part of destruction’s kit.
- Seeds of their demise has not been changed to adjust for new affliction. It still procs tormented crescendo (which is gone). This tree is still half-functional for affliction and is missing key components.
Diabolist
Good and Bad. It was already good this tier, curious to see how they tune this to be less impactful
- These talents cause a lot of issues, particularly with destruction becoming very complex to get the most DPS out of your rotation. Right now, the highest performers in Manaforge Omega can “clip” the end of demonic art, triggering a new demonic art while also proccing the tier set, allowing you to have more uptime on the intellect buff, and also having much more uptime on demonic art in general. This turns into an incredibly high skill-capped minigame that doesn’t mesh with design goals.
- EDIT: Somebody in discord also mentioned this could be fixed if you allow for diabolic ritual to “rollover” when you use an ability that would reduce the timer on diabolic ritual (in essence if you were to cast chaos bolt with 1s left on the ritual, it would activate your next spender to summon a demon, while also starting the cycle for your next demon instantly instead of only activating your next demon spawn). This would eliminate the ability to allow people to “clip” the end of your diabolic ritual (if your cast hits as close to 0 it does the function mentioned above). For instance, you could have the buff to spawn a pitlord up, while also having a ritual ticking down for your next felguard.
- Solution: I think this just needs to be dumbed down to not be a trackable buff and just activate at X value whenever you spend a demonic art, so that there is less friction. The pressure put on the player to keep 3 stacks is high, and is directly related to movement in combat. There also needs to be some debugging and work done to not allow players to clip demonic art cycles.
- Eye beams are kinda cool I guess?
Soul Harvester
Bad. Affliction in general, in relation to hero talents, is a mess on the alpha at the moment, but it has good potential.
- Affliction is still completely unplayable with Soul Harvester, particularly with the issue where our shard spender has a hard cap and we can generate significantly more shards than the cap in our burst windows. This problem just got exacerbated with these additions to soul harvester. More resource generation is not what we need. If soul harvester wants to go the route of pseudo-summoner / buffing our spenders, there needs to be more emphasis on buffing our shard spenders and less on increasing the amount of spenders we use.
- Affliction still has a ton of issues with determining when to hit seed of corruption, vs when to spread unstable affliction to multiple enemies. With Soul Harvester having no links to seed of corruption, this is incredibly difficult to determine now with the AOE component of Soul Swipe.
- Affliction still has major resource issues in general, and dark harvest directly impacts the likelihood that we cannot spend past our cap of 5 unstable affliction stacks.
- There are 0 improvements to demonology, and this hero tree still is incredibly bland, unimpactful, and frankly disappointing as a demonology warlock – see my first point. I Would much rather a complete overhaul than the current design direction.