FEEDBACK: Warlocks (Midnight)

Classes Warlock
21

Blizz could just code HoG to not spawn a number of imps that would exceed the character’s max count.

But one good reason to take all the talents that increase the imp count… is to make EoG happen less often.

22

Yeah I agree on the part, the eye of guldan feels like it should be separated from hog…

1 Like
23

Now that I’ve a weekend to play around with the alpha talent calculator I want address a lot of concerns about the new class tree:

Class Tree

The new class is incredibly sparse in the first and second talent gates, especially when building for M+ and/or raid.

  • I don’t need Shared Vitality or Infernal Beneficiary, as my pet should never be taking damage (or very very rarely in keys when something goes wrong)
  • Fel Pact should useless in raid (baring the uncommon bug) and not something I want to talent into for keys (wishful thinking, I know)
  • Banish and Nightmare/Horrify are very niche and their usage depends entirely on boss mechanics

Curse of Tongues and Curse of Exhaustion both replace Curse of Weakness, but can be talented into at the same time. Clearly they were intended to be a choice node.

Going into the Final Gateway:

  • multiple pvp talents, but the options for pve also feel sparse. I can grab everything but Demonic Resilience, Gorefiend’s Averice, and Teachings of the Black Harvest, and have 2 points left over I still need to spend . . . after already grabbing basically everything from the above two gates . . .
  • Locking Shadowfury/Howl of Terror behind Shared Vitality and the Fear choice node feels awful as Shared Vitality is primarily for pvp/solo content, and the Fear is very niche cc in raid and keys these recent years. Throughout these 3 seasons of TWW there has never been a reason to cast fear in raid or keys, so why do I need to to grab them to pick up Shadowfury, a more universally applicable talent?

Demo

The new HoG → EoG and long living imps need quite a bit of QoL. With the new 40 secs duration of imps, they will rarely expire in single target which massively nerfs our core proc economy. Combine this with the at fact that our passive soul shard generators, Soul Conduit and Soul Strike, which accounts for roughly ~15% of our soul shards on live are being removed, we are left with casting many more shadowbolts to make up the difference. We need a way to generate procs passively without waiting for Dreadstalkers to expire or Power Siphon to come off of cooldown.

The amount of bland filler talents feels like we are returning to DF’s lobotomized Demo. We have 2 filler talents in the first talent gate alone! Master Summoner didnt just survive the culling, it got nerfed (we dont cast Vilefiend anymore, and Dreadstalkers are often free with Demonic calling anyway) and now costs 2 talent points. Rune of Shadows received similiar treatment, and Unholy power is just strictly worse Annhilan Training . . .

I do like the change to imp gang boss and the other new imp talents, but losing 3 buttons in our rotation is going to make Demo very bland to play, especially in single target after building up to imp cap. I understand removing Demonic Strength, and have suggested removing G:FG for a more impactful cool down in the past, but now we will just be sitting there spamming shadowbolt while we wait for Dreadstalkers and Tyrant to come off of cooldown. Despite the plethora of demons or past abilities to draw inspiration from this is the best vision for Demo they could up with?

Oh, mages got another big rework too? This is starting to make more sense now.

Demo’s Alpha Talents

I like the idea behind the SoulKeeper, and the idea behind the 3rd dog, but together they feel disjointed. Looking at the other apex talent other specs are getting, all apex talents are built together as a package, except for Demo. I think the devs need to choose to commit the apex talents to Soul Keeper, dogs, or some other theme. Right now you could move either 3rd dog or Soulkeeper into the main tree as a capstone and it wouldn’t look out of place.

2 Likes
24

This is one of the major reasons I gave up on Affliction.

Demo is essentially a DoT spec where the DoTs outlive individual targets.

Rogue used to function the same way in that their combo points were attached to targets, and they had similar challenges with nameplate tracking and their damage disappearing on kills that Affliction has. Combo points were moved to be tracked on the character (kind of like pets on Demo) 11 years ago. Assassination Rogues, which I consider one of the other DoT classes, are being reworked in Midnight to copy their DoTs to nearby targets with Crimson Tempest. That’s another huge quality of life buff that makes the tracking almost entirely based on the character rather than the surrounding enemies.

I’m not really an Affliction main (largely due to this + Malefic Rapture), so if people enjoy clicking through nameplates to apply and manage DoTs, maybe there shouldn’t be a major change. However, personally speaking, I just think it’s cumbersome gameplay. I end up fighting the UI more than thinking about the encounter.

25

TLDR: They are adding manaforge omega tier set bonuses into our base hero talents with a twist.

Initial impressions:

Hellcaller:

Good.

  1. 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).
  2. 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.
  3. 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

  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  2. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
7 Likes
26

Wish they had done something else like anything else reusing tier bonus is not “fun”

3 Likes
27

I would really like them to return Corruption as a baseline spell rather than turn it into Hand of Gul’dan. As, for Demo Warlocks, it’s our only instant cast damage spell outside of combat which, for open-world content, can mean the difference between tagging a mob and losing a kill.

Felguard should be baseline and replaced with a choice node between Bilescourge Bombers and, maybe, a beefed up version of Shadow Invocation for single target.

28

Their proposed changes seem awfully…boring.

Also, soul harvester empowering UA for 8 secs. I guess they really don’t want any snapshotting going on.

1 Like
29

So they disliked hoarding shards and dumping them in bulk (which i agree with), they wanted the correct time to spends shards to be “now”, but now theyre making it so Malevolance is a damage amp for UA so youd want to ensure a 5 stack for it?

Just seems counter intuitive. Unless the goal is for affliction to have 4-5 UA stacks at all time?

30

I definitely feel like UA stacking to 5 is too high and will constantly have me worrying about making a misstep with how many stacks I should apply to what target and when. Definitely not feeling like “Now” is the answer.

1 Like
31

just a slight PSA, but curses also tag mobs, since they changed the need to deal damage for credit a few expansions a go (this doesn’t help legacy content, but it does help open world if you are worried about that).

Both of these quotes are digging at the heart of the issue with unstable affliction being a stacked dot. What’s even more worrying is that if you eliminate the stacks (by having it be a rollover dot like devouring plague or ignite) you run the risk of a major spender feeling particularly “flimsy” since there is no visual feedback for you to see that the damage has been readded to the target like adding an extra stack does.

As for what Geledron mentions, you are correct, this version of UA will play nearly exactly the same as rapture, but without the dual purpose of both aoe and single target. Surprisingly, by splitting us into 2 spenders, they have upped affliction’s complexity to a significant degree, while also adding talents that make people question whether what they are doing is the correct thing to do (cascading calamity for one, or soul harvester feeding into only using UA on multi target).

There are a couple different ways you can avoid this if they decide to go the stackless route:

  1. Make UA have some sort of explosion visual on the target if you refresh it
  2. Make multiple different talents that improve the feedback of UA when you refresh it on your target (again mostly explosion or nameplate feedback here – think like UA exploding on your target and then being added to another target sort of like and unstable affliction bomb).

With other rollover dots the drawback is that they cost a lot to put up and are really short in duration while doing multiple different things on your target aside from just damage.

EDIT: I guess the easiest option would be to just completely rework darkglare and dark harvest to never increase dot length.

3 Likes
32

I’m not surprised they are re-using the Manaforge tier sets for our hero trees. Visually Diabloist and Soul Harvester’s are quite fun.

I am curious about the way they have set up SH’s demon summon identical to Demo’s Soulkeeper. Makes me wonder if they are considering reworking Demo’s apex talent package.

And I have to agree that SH’s baseline package is rather bland for Demo. It think it largely stems from the fact that is function similarly to Diabloist in being largely centered on empowering HoG but fall short visually.

1 Like
33

Genuinely baffled why a talent like Mark of Ruvaraad is even in the Destruction tree, let alone as a capstone. Increasing pet damage is more thematically fitting for Demonology.

4 Likes
34

That Diabolist change for demo is pretty bad, the current expansion tier set being more aoe damage, and the fact that the tier set is using your soul shard glyph mog so you cant see it when it procs due to them allocating to that model slot.

Also can demo get something worthwhile, instead of that boring tier set for diabolist…

35

The Eye-flinging tier-set effect is so underwhelming.

And choosing the Soulkeeper to be the demon who follows us around is such a letdown.

I’ll definitely be skipping most of the Apex stuff for Demo, other than the Greater Dog.

36

Why can’t the model of soulkeeper be changed to the inquisitors that we see in legion shore area, actually why can’t most of those demon models be uploaded to the transmog options.

Seeing the dual wielding wrathguards with fel fire on their swords in the legion remix brings me sadness that ours was stripped of the duel wielding and what it could have been…

Also now that wild imps last so long can we finally trangsmog the wilds imps??

3 Likes
37

As much as I’d love updates to Afflictions visuals… that’s like pulling teeth with Blizzard. Drain Soul and Haunt are STILL the same animations from WotLK.

Either way, like I detailed earlier in the thread I think giving UA an easier to manage/understand 3 stack (low/mid/high dmg) and making UA a slow ticking, hard hitting, DoT that always crits (have damage scale with crit chance just like CB). Would do wonders for the feedback and feel of the spell. Duration at that point could be 12 seconds and have it tick every 3 seconds or something. Maybe even 9 seconds if 12 is too long. In this case when UA has stacks it wouldn’t be 3 instances of UA running. Each stack just increases the Damage of UA with a refresh to duration.

To further address when to use UA in AoE vs SoC. I think returning Death Blossom and Dread Touch could be great. Have Death Blossom cause an explosion off a UA target, and only effect one UA per explosion, when hit by SoC. To show you only need one UA out for more benefit from SoC. Dread Touch can have UA interact with itself by doing the classic:

  • When UA has 3 stacks, if UA is refreshed below X seconds the target erupts in Fel causing them to take X damage.

Or something to that effect anyways.

I’m also an advocate of removing DoT extension in favor of something else for both Darkglare and Harvest. Nothing comes to mind exactly on what they could do but extension isn’t as necessary without Rapture. It’s a similar boat that Demonology is in now with Tyrant demon extension not feeling useful anymore.

4 Likes
38

Dropping my initial Midnight Alpha feedback here due to not having alpha access, and hence no replying rights to the official Blizzard Midnight Alpha Warlock Feedback thread.

As always, thanks Magni for giving us so much food for thought early into this development cycle. Some of my feedback will draw from your ideas, while other ideas will be my own or adapted from the broader community’s.

Know that all of this feedback comes from a place of pure passion towards WoW and Warlock. Looking forward to the next rounds of class changes! Cheers.

Affliction
  • First, I think it is really cool that you guys are trying out a more dot-oriented design once again. I think the gameplay of Aff in TWW was very good, with only a few things to polish to be in a near-perfect state, but I am excited to try this dot-oriented playstyle as I never played Legion or earlier.
  • This version of Aff will require probably more cognitive load as other specs in the game, which is fine, but you guys need to listen very closely to the community feedback related to UI changes. DOT maintenance is very fun, but requires a bit more information on nameplates and boss frames than your typical wow spec.
  • One of Aff’s outstanding issues has been target switching. I believe this new design may help every so slightly, but there are things that may be further improved on this front. The next two points address this in some capacity.
  • It would be great to have a version of Soul Swap added back into the talent tree. SS has incredible flavour, very cool gameplay (feels great to prepare for and press the button). And it would majorly address issues with target switching.
  • The 8-second duration on Unstable Affliction could be lowered. This would improve Aff in many ways, including target switching.
  • Related to UA duration is a major issue with the current proposed Aff design: the 5-UA cap combined with DOT extensions from Darkglare and Dark Harvest. In this state, in probably every major cooldown windows we would face the issue of having to sit on shards or Shard Instability stacks (free instant UAs). This would arise from having your oldest UA last for a very long time, making you unable to further apply any new UAs to your target. The player will be left frustrated pressing their filler spell in what is arguably the most fun window of a dps spec.
    • This will be even worse with the Soul Harvester hero tree, where DH gives 3 free empowered UAs via Succulent Souls. In fact, the added complexity of maybe wanting to cast DH before darkglare to gain the 3 empowered UAs and have darkglare extend those instead, is quite convoluted. This will lead to cases where you are again holding shards (and likely overcap as a result) ahead of your major Cooldown just to not cap out on the UA applications.
    • A few solutions are possible to the UA cap issue, although each come with their own set of issues: (a) simply remove the 5-UA cap; (b) decreasing UA duration to 4-5 seconds; (c) remove UA from benefitting from DOT extensions and replace this with a tick rate bonus instead; (d) make any additional UA beyond the cap of 5 add their damage on top of refreshing the most recent application.
  • UA tracking needs to be improved in the base UI by separating each application to better track each individual duration. It is near impossible currently to know the status of UA application with the proposed stacking buff.
  • Malefic Grasp would benefit from having its own button. Usually there are windows where you are spamming your filler spell, and if by mistake you interrupt Grasp with a new cast of that filler, this would feel extremely bad. Moreover, having its own button would simply feel great to press. This issue is especially the case with Shadow Bolt, less so with Drain Soul.
  • Related to the above, I think Aff could live with just Drain Soul as its filler. This is probably not a major concern, apart from the issue stated just above, but DS just fits Aff’s flavour much better.
  • Seeds of Destruction and Relinquished should swap places in the tree. Relinquished is not needed in AoE (which is obviously the focus in that region of the tree). This would make Sacrolash slightly more enticing as a single target talent for some Hellcaller builds focused around Wither.
  • Seed of Corruption, regardless of Sow the Seeds existing, needs its explosion radius increased at least two-fold. It has been a major issue when pre-casting a Seed onto a boss as adds spawn nearby where the Seed would not hit the spawning adds, thus not applying corruption. See Rashanan in Nerubar Palace for a recent example.
  • A few talents need clarification in their tooltip: (a) does Malefic Grasp benefit from the same talents and effects as Shadow Bolt and Drain Soul?; (b) Does Cascading Calamity stack? or refresh itself? or extends itself?; (c) Does Nocturnal Yield make Seed of Corruption consume Nightfall or are they 2 separate buffs?
  • Hellcaller’s Blackened Soul could see a slight modification to make it do its damage faster or to explode/trigger on death with its outstanding damage (similar to Arcane Mage’s Touch of the Magi). TWW-S3 tier set bonus has shown how much of an issue it can be to not have time to fully consume Blackened Soul stacks. With the new added column of Hero talents for Hellcaller, which might incentivize taking Bleakheart Tactics to generate more stacks, this is looking to continue being an issue in Midnight.
Destruction
  • Rifts don’t feel good to press right now. Need to make them be a lot more significant. For example: keep only one type of rift, and make that rift always proc overfiend. Put maybe an intermediate node where the single rift type becomes a massive flame rift to empower it and do AoE like a previous tier set bonus we had.
  • Contrary to a lot of feedback, I’m open to trying out builds where you hard cast Soul Fire; the skill expression becomes uptime/able to finish cast + saving Backdraft for it. But it needs to be extremely powerful. Maybe worth 2 Chaos Bolts, maybe consume a Crashing Chaos stack, and then summoning overfiend is a nice reward. Would make it extremely strong in new extended havoc window and feel very good.
  • Rain of fire spam is a dangerous slippery slope, due to historically how it works with diabolic rituals. I think we should make the new Destructive Rapidity talent make RoF do its damage over less time (say 4 seconds) instead of increasing tick rate over same duration. This would partly solve the issue of RoF being notoriously annoying for tanks to deal with.
  • Channel Demonfire needs the talent to make it extend Immolate/Wither. This button does nothing without it. Its damage per execution time value is probably worse than incinerate in both aoe and single target. If that’s your way of making Immolate maintenance more a core mechanic of Destro, that’s fine (although debuff uptime seems to be against current vision for gameplay in terms of addons/cognitive load requirements). If that’s the case, make it just extremely powerful. If you do make CDF a very strong ability, please add a channel while moving clause to it, as Destro in midnight is looking very immobile with removal of decimation and the new Shadowburn design.
  • I don’t know about adding Shadowburn as a consumer of Crashing Chaos stacks, as others have suggested. I think although it feels strange to be casting chaos bolt in execute instead of Shadowburn, it’s also somewhat a skill expression to be able to balance both, and plays into the strength of Diabolists’ Chaos Bolts.
  • Connected to the above but not necessarily analogous, we need to be very careful with Shadowburn tuning. For Diabolist, much of the cognitive load is to track Rituals to make sure we don’t consume it with Shadowburn instead of Chaos Bolt. At the rate we currently get rituals, this is a major thing to track. So Shadowburn could be tuned to be the correct Ritual “activator” in execute.
  • Need to clarify how Blistering Atrophy will work with Conflagration of Chaos for Shadowburn. The former makes crit chance become 100% so is CoC only a damage increase for Shadowburn then?
  • Internal combustion has never really been picked, even when it had an edge over Reverse Entropy in DF-S4. This talent is simply not fun. At least maybe if it came with a large increase in Immolate damage and duration, or an additional damage event when consuming it (maybe when it finishes it blows up into a small aoe?) would be more fun. This would give a different flavour to Immolate specifically for Diabolist (obviously Hellcallers would not pick this because you never want Wither to drop).
  • The new pet talent Mark of Ruvaraad has cool flavor but this might be better off in the class tree. Absolutely zero impact on gameplay. Very odd to have this as a capstone. Probably won’t ever be picked unless incredibly over tuned.
  • Is your plan really to let us have a 66% uptime on Havoc with the Improved Havoc talent? I like the longer window especially in a world where we may need to hard cast Soul Fire. But it seems inadvertently too strong… I’m scared this will hurt our pure single target tuning. If I had to choose, I’d choose to keep it as it is now in TWW since we have good frequency of usage relative to historical pacing of encounter mechanics, and it still feels very impactful at current tuning.
Demonology
  • The gameplay loop of optimizing globals ahead of Tyrant however is mostly gone. That’s fine. There was too much RNG around a 1 min CD (mechanics targeting you, imp core generation, free dreadstalker procs, imp mother procs, etc.).
    • The CD window now feels empty. There is nothing before it and nothing after it. Could benefit from a short CD that you wanna combo with Tyrant to boost pet damage or something. Kind of like new Dark Harvest for Aff is great!
    • Maybe a long channeled nether portal that passively summons demons ahead of Tyrant and those can be extended?
    • Or maybe during Tyrant you pop a Portal and have to spend as many shards as possible during it? No extension shenanigans but still rewards a bit of planning and good uptime?
    • Or during Tyrant you give in to your demonic nature and go beserk, making Eye of Guldan becomes a fat empowered eye beam? Demon Hunters stole Metamorphosis from us, so maybe we can borrow Eye Beam from them in return… :slight_smile:
    • Ramp feels especially empty for Soul Harvester hero tree. This spec has literally nothing going on, apart from cool visuals. At least Diabolist has Ritual cycling to keep itself somewhat engaged.
  • Removing Vilefiend as a standalone button is fine: now that the gameplay loop of Tyrant ramping is gone, that button was AT MOST just a shard spending event every half minute. It’s cool that they kept it as a passive with dreadstalkers and kept talents to modify and empower it.
  • We really need something outside of cooldowns to play around with too. Maybe a new ability or an empower proc on Shadow Bolt or HoG to reward uptime.
  • Ritual cycling still requires tracking and playing around it—not sure if that passes the test for combat simplicity/lighter cognitive load that you are aiming for.
  • Removing Bilescourge Bombers and Demonic Strength is odd. We have no ramp, very few buttons, and now we lose an ability that had cool visuals and a nice boost in snap AoE, which is demo’s niche relative to Aff and Destro.
  • I like that Soul Strike is gone. This spell was happening behind the scenes and needed a WA to track in order to avoid over-capping on shards, it made us turn off Felstorm in ST, etc. Glad this is gone.
  • The Implosion / Doom Guard loop is cool, but might introduce tuning issues where you now want to implode in ST if Implosion and Doom Volley are too strong and/or imps too weak.
  • I’m scared that without being able to track imp duration there might be infrequent but still present scenarios where imps expire just before you hit tyrant, with zero counterplay. The only way to always systematically avoid this is to implode ahead of your “ramp”, which I don’t believe is the intended gameplay. The impact of this might be negligible, but it’s counter intuitive to the seemingly intended gameplay of having imps to extend ahead of Tyrant.
  • The idea of adding a self-dispel to Axe Toss was a fun idea, but it will feel clunky where you might hold your interrupt for an upcoming dispel (feels bad and selfish towards group), or you may unwillingly stun a far mob outside the clump just to dispel yourself, hindering the tank’s work. Things like that. And a button that does two very distinct utility things seem to go against the current vision for combat gameplay simplicity.
Class Talent Tree
  • I like that we can now broadly pick all of the PvE utility we want, where the flex talents can be used on very niche abilities such as Banish, or other talents that are helpful in Delves or PvP.
  • I love the attempt at making curses a more integral part of Warlocks’ utility kit. I do have a few suggestions for improvements:
    • The typical gameplay around curses is either: you maintain a single Weakness on a raid boss, or tag a caster spawning caster add with Tongues as part of a raid fight, or in M+ you apply your curses as the tank is gathering up the mobs. As a result, the new talent aimed at reducing the amount of GCDs spent on applying curses is a nice idea, but not the correct implementation in my opinion.
    • The issue will be more prevalent in M+: Foul Mouth will not let you cast for example Weakness on a couple of hard-hitting melee mobs if they’re next to a few casters on which you have already cast Tongues.
    • My solution is to make Foul Mouth a toggled ability or very short cooldown. This gives you the freedom of choosing whether you want the AoE application or not.
    • Moreover, the new talent Blight of Weakness should not remove the application of curses already present on targets, otherwise it will make the Warlock have to re-apply curses mid-combat instead of pressing damage abilities. This would effectively break the current gameplay loop of applying curses as the tank gathers mobs around, which is fun and efficient.
  • I still think Teachings of the Black Harvest is a missed opportunity to make something even cooler and stronger with pet utility. This will remain a last pick with flex points unless it is reworked a bit, which is a shame because it is a capstone and has amazing flavour. I think we could explore giving the Warlock a selected pet utility from the list, while keeping the utility spell from the active pet on the pet itself: e.g. the Warlock could freely use Singe Magic as the ability given by Teachings, on top of having the interrupt from the Felhunter if that’s the pet currently summoned.
    • Alternatively, this could come with a choice node where the second talent is the one currently implemented in the Destruction tree, which gives your pet damage that scales with Mastery (Mark of Ruvaraad). At least this talent would see a bit of value in PvE for all specs. The downside would only really be present in PvP and solo play where some of the current features of Teachings can have a bit of utility value.
7 Likes
39

My response is purely about affliction:

Given that we have two versions of alpha out, I think most of us get a sense of the good and bad with the changes.

The good:

  • Ramp has been reduced considerably, instead of large set up for rapture spending. spending should happen within a few gcds in st and once agonies are applied in aoe.
  • With grasp as a proc, this is bonus damage that can be amplified during dot extension windows, not necessarily a guaranteed payoff. Hopefully this allows for the spender (UA) to be tuned well.
  • I much prefer shared agony as the method of agony spread over VT
  • Instant seeds tied to nightfall is a great change.
  • Each capstone row has significant value meaning there are hard choices to make in talenting depending on situation
  • The apex talents are strong and I expect that players can utilize this empowered haunt in target swapping to better effect than we had in TWW.

The bad:

  • The way stacking UAs apparently works needs to be addressed, as comments above have discussed. If you spend 5 shards on UA, extend them and can only cast filler or procs, this is horrendous gameplay.
  • I think a talent like cloying power has a chance to encourage manually spreading UAs in aoe. If players hated tab targeting agony, an instant cast, in aoe, they are going to absolutely hate multidotting with UA in aoe. I understand the concept of the talent, as it would reward keeping UA up in a council setting. But I think this talent is a mistake.
  • I don’t think cull the weak works as a talent (suggestion below on fixes). I am fine with having a 1min aoe/ST nuke in Dark Harvest. But I’d rather leave the dot extension to darkglare.
  • Talent point allocation to maximize sow the seeds is very steep. This is primarily because of the position of relinquished in the tree. This is a point tax and in my opinion, an unnecessary one because in aoe with proper agony spread, we are already going to be flooded with resources for seeds or UA spending with the instant seed talent.
  • As spec apparently works with 5 capped UA and two dot extensions, soul harvester just does not work as a hero tree. I think this can easily be remedied, as I’ll describe below.

I have a number of ideas on how to address the concerns above. Normally, I try not to be too prescriptive in my posts but I think that it is appropriate in this setting.

How to address the BAD:

  • I think that the 5 cap on UA should remain in effect. However, each additional UA should add its duration to the lowest duration UA on the target. This preserves the power of each shard cast while containing the power of darkglare dot extension and forced tics from malefic grasp procs. If the duration of UA needs to be adjusted to accommodate this change, do whatever is appropriate.
  • I don’t think that cull the weak should extend dots, but instead it should function similarly to a combination of the dark harvest we had in TWW and destruction’s crashing chaos. Specifically, each tic of dark harvest grants a resource that we can spend for a stacking haste/crit buff. I would apply resource to casts of seed and UA.
  • I think that cloying power should be removed as well as Soul miser. This type of gameplay is going to be much too hectic and annoying for players, in my opinion. The funnel power of cloying has ridiculous potential, particularly with multiple dot extensions. And soul miser will just feed UA spam casting.
  • If I were to redesign the left capstone branch, I would put cascading calamity in the place of cloying power and reintroduce the s2 jackpot effect of spread UA as the capstone talent. This would provide a similar effect to aid in aoe and council settings but with very little impact to ST damage. All four capstone rows and the apex talents would be extremely strong and competitive depending on the situation which to me is ideal design.
  • To fix the talent point tax to getting sow the seeds, I would swap relinquished with seeds of destruction. I don’t think that relinquished is even needed at all. Proper gameplay provides enough shards and we will have plenty of nightfall procs for grasp in ST/prio or seed in aoe. Seeds of destruction as the 2pt entry to get Patient zero and Sow would make that very powerful row for aoe and worth the point investment.

As a final aside, I think that the proposed changes above would accomplish two things. First, it would fully support the soul harvester hero tree. There is nothing conflicting with a standard spend resource gameplay and the benefits of the soul harvester hero tree in the above scenario. And second, it would eliminate any concern about holding shards outside hellcaller during the 2min window.

Affliction can still be fun and strong in TWW. It just needs tweaks to the initial design.

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They named the new hellcaller ability ‘Devil Fruit’