That depends on if their threat aura has been boosted also.
Having overall higher threat would be great, but it would mean 100% of the mobs are attacking the Voidwalker and 0% are attacking the warlock.
With Drain Life healing both of us, the optimal setup will be closer to 50% of the mobs attacking the Voidwalker and 50% attacking the warlock. That’s what I’d love to make possible / practical.
To be honest, I don’t understand why you would prefer this.
The voidwalker/felguard have much more damage mitigation than our cloth-wearing warlocks. We’d suffer spell pushback from getting hit. We’d have to dodge every attack that’s designed to punish ranged players AND the point blank AoEs that challenge melee players.
On top of that, the class fantasy generally points towards having demons on the front line, rather than be some kind of spell casting brawler mix.
I could maybe see them leaning in to having multiple primary pets to split the attention of enemies, though that would be difficult to control. But having enemies melee the warlock sounds more like the old days when we had Metamorphosis and Dark Apotheosis, and not really compatible with the modern design.
1 Like
You wouldn’t want to use it in every situation. But imagine you’re fighting eight mobs at once. Each mob does 2.5K DPS, and your Drain Life heals you and your pet for 10K health per second. You and your voidwalker each have 70K health.
If all eight of them are attacking your voidwalker, that’s 20K DPS on him and 0 DPS on you. You can do 10K HPS, so your voidwalker dies after seven seconds. Same situation if all eight are attacking you and zero are attacking the VW.
If each of you tank four of them, the total incoming DPS is still 20K - but your HPS goes from 10K to 20K - because you can fill both healthbars at the same time. You can now tank those mobs indefinitely, or until you run out of mana. Basically - if either you or your VW are sitting at full health, half of your self-healing potential is completely wasted.
Of course the reality is a bit more complicated. VW has higher mitigation against physical damage, there are cooldowns, etc., but that’s the basic principle. I also just think it’s an interesting (and unique) new gameplay style that would make solo play more engaging. Another layer of optimization to really push how aggressively you can pull.
Wait am I understanding that the reason there’s a talent to buff drain life to heal our pets is because they removed health funnel !!!
Do not tell me they created a problem by removing an ability needed to heal our pet and then went on to create a talent for a problem they caused ??
And can we use drain life on our pet the way health funnel work to effectively heal him.
Welp there goes shadowfury 
. We just keep losing abilities.
1 Like
How so?
Sow is back. Yes, it was nice having MR do it both but MR is also less satisfying at both.
Because UA has a duration? There is a hard-cap just based on the math.
It actually adds some intricate skill showcase with the usage of Dark Glare and Dark Harvest.
This is kind of why I despise the newer talent trees.
Half of it is just giving us back what we used to have baseline.
3 Likes
I think part of the issue is that not only is it the exact skill showcase that affliction had with soul rot + ps + rapture cycles, as well as the exact same interactions with hero talents “mixing it up”, that it doesn’t quite seem to hit their mark of reducing both the complexity and usage of our main single target spender.
Yeah, there is an upper limit on UA stacks at the moment, but it’s also roughly equal to the length of our burn phase using soul rot + ps (roughly 16s of our “dump” phase, with using malefic grasp as our pseudo spender by holding nightfall procs for higher UA stacks).
Arguably, this version of affliction is much more involved than TWW simply because of the interaction that grasp has on our rotation within our burn phases and having to manage both nightfall and UA stack-watching.
As a person that was pretty mid on rapture, but am also pretty mid on UA, I see no difference in playstyle in single target, and frankly, a worse aoe spender that relies on stacked enemies.
Curious to see where it heads as they iron out details (my bet is that some of our extension effects such as cull the weak or darkglare get tweaks, and other effects that muddy our aoe rotation such as cloying power get pruned).
EDIT: I will say that the one distinct thing that UA has over rapture is that you can hit it first on any enemy, regardless of whether that is the “correct” thing to do, so that newer players who try the spec out have an easier onboarding to the spec – ditto with seed spam (the rotation in aoe will be seed → agony → seed → agony (until all agonies up) → seed (until agony refresh)). On the other hand, this does nothing to fix our ramp issues or our general 1m to 2m burst cycles (huge peaks and valley’s as this spec atm)
1 Like
The switch to UA also goes a long way in killing what separates Hellcaller and Soul Harvester for affliction. Currently, Soul Harvester is very spend heavy where you are constantly dumping your shards to keep your queue clear for the shard injection that soul rot gives. With UA, you are stuck with wanting to spend your shards before you use Dark Harvest, meaning Soul Harvester is now in the exact same situation as Hellcaller, where you want a full stack of shards before going into your cooldowns. If their stated goal is that the answer to when to UA is ‘now’ then they’ve actually taken a step backwards from that in regards to Soul Harvester.
Additionally, both hero trees have methods of tacking aoe damage onto UA, making seed a less clear go-to for AoE. Are we going to have to figure out when it’s better to just spam seed vs. when it’s better for Soul Harvester to fish for Miser+UA death refunds to get more succulent souls to get more demonic soul damage out of your UAs and Cloying Power? The more I think about it, the more seed seems like it’s just being shoved in for nostalgia value instead of it integrating well with the rest of our kit.
Having uncapped UAs to stack also sounds cool at first, but when you have two cooldowns that both add +100% of the base duration, it really runs the risk of non-extended UAs being extremely watered down when you can juice them to do +200% damage per cast every two minutes, and even +100% every one minute. I think extending is really running the risk of UA losing a lot of potency just so it doesn’t get out of hand. How strong can it really be if that much damage is potentially on the table?
2 Likes
It’s not consistent. For raid and M+ it heals a LOT when soul burn during AoE pulses…. Enough to bring health to full and gives a lil breathing room. Some mobs with low health… it does nothing in open world.
This seems great at first, but history has shown us they tend to nerf our sustain if it is too strong. Having it tied to pet healing too leads to potential issues if it is nerfed later on.
Also, this might be pvp specific but with malefic rapture gone, we’ve lost our double spellschool safety net. I wonder if they could make UA or drain life shadowflame to give us the option of doing something if locked out on shadow.
2 Likes
Oh… they went with uncapped UA stacking? What a nightmare for playing with and balancing. Especially given their goal in all this was to make the choice of rather or not to hit your shard spender be “Now”.
At 5 stacks I was still feeling like it wasn’t intuitive on how many stacks I should be maintaining on what targets and when. Leading to a feeling, that I remember from Legion, of never knowing when to actually hit the button aside from when Darkglare was ready. Now that’s been exacerbated infinitely.
How do you balance a DoT that can stack like that? There’s no way it can feel satisfying to hit at 1 stack… 2 or maybe even 3? Leading me to think that the spell is going to need to be incredibly weak unless we can pump like 6-8 into a target. Mix that in with judging how many UA stacks you should use for MG procs. Ughh it’s gonna feel TERRIBLE to play.
This is the exact opposite solution I was hoping for from them. Let’s hope this iteration is short lived.
I feel like just warlock pet issues alone is worth it’s own separate, extensive and detailed thread, but here i’ll just focus on our tanking pets ( i’ll clarify below ) for on topic relativity.
Before i even start, i’d like to clarify this : the most basic/fundamental requirement of what makes a great tank, are 2 (TWO) things:
a, the ability to take damage, and
b, the ability to hold aggro/maintain threat on the target
Both are equally important, as missing either one would seriously affect the tank’s effectiveness in performing their role.
Both of our tanking pets - Voidwalker and Felguard (since Felguard is ‘intended’ to be the defacto demo pet, it makes sense that it serves a similar role in tanking for demo as well) are doing great on the ‘taking damage’ part. They have built in passives to reduce damage taken, talents to boost those aspect as well (for Felguard), and we as the master has our own tools to keep them alive. So all good and solid on the ‘damage reduction’ part.
In my opinion, here’s the problem with our tanking pets: They both lacked a different but important piece of toolkit in their ability to ‘hold aggro/maintain threat’.
At at the most fundamental level, a tank needs both
a, an adequate single target (ST) skill and
b, an ‘ok enough’ area of effect (AoE) skill
to maintain aggro/threat over their single/multiple targets. Any experience playing a tank in this game would teach one simple fact: one skill can’t replace the other for their intended purposes. This can’t be fixed by simply adding more % on the threat aura - if threat aura is the multiplier, the ST/AoE skill is the basis of how the whole thing works. Even if you have a 1000% multiplier on threat aura, if you starts at 0, you’ll still be getting 0.
So, here’s my opinion on what crucial tool that our tanking pets are missing:
1, Voidwalker - An adequate single target attack. In the Legion expansion, they replaced the original single target attack Torment with Consuming Shadows, an aoe attack. This resulted in a huge reduction in the ability to maintain aggro, as AoE skills are, by design, have a much lower aggro generation compared to ST skills.
I’m not saying giving Voidwalker an AoE skill is wrong - i’m saying Consuming Shadows should have been a partner, an addition to voidwalker’s toolkit, not as a replacement for Torment, the only single target attack skill Voidwalker has.
Right now, Voidwalker has only 2 ways to generate aggro -
a, A ‘weak’ AoE that, by design, generates much lower aggro and
b, Autoattack.
No tank in the game can hold aggro on any target by just using autoattacks and spamming their weak aoe. That logic applies to Voidwalker as well.
2, Felguard - A taunt skill. This is a relatively no brainer. No tanks can live without a taunt, which is as essential tool in threat management.
And if the new changes on Felguard is to, in their words - ‘smooth out early leveling’ - giving Felguard a taunt skill, hence allowing Felguard to do their tanking properly, would definitely smooth out early leveling, even remain useful well into end-game content/solo play.
If somehow ‘giving Felguard a taunt is too much’ - something similar akin to Mocking Blow should suffice.
(Mocking Blow - A mocking attack that causes X damage, a moderate amount of threat and forces the target to focus attacks on you for Y sec.)
On a relative note to pet tanking issue, can someone clarify/get information on this?
Void Reflexes - Life in the twisting nether has made this demon particularly agile, increasing its chance to dodge and parry by 10%.
Why is this passive not given to Voidwalker? Or it is on Voidwalker, but its somehow hidden?
1 Like
The other issue is pets now do so little damage compared to its master, even when VW taunts, a DoT tick rip mob off, because we are still higher on the threat table.
Look at our logs. Pet feels more like flavour than part of the warlock.
2 Likes
Just checked the new alpha midnight warlock class tree it looks much more organized now. I like it now there’s a few little things here and there but overall structured better.
Though can we please do something about black harvest, just changed it to something worthwhile, idk pet utility in it. The skills in it for each demon seem like a waste.
Or just bring in the supremacy ideas into it and make it empowered demons. Those abilities in there just seem very very underwhelming.
The demons from older wow were much more powerful and with their own abilities that complimented Warlocks, now a days is just bring felhunter just for an interrupt. Even Felguard is starting to lose its identity with how weak it appears in Midnight. As a matter of fact can the interrupt now be added to the class tree.
1 Like
Was going to open a new thread, but figured i’d keep the midnight discussion here.
I’m not sure if anyone is aware of our new curse functionality through the class tree. I’ve had the displeasure of seeing it in action and i think it is a massive mistake.
For context, choosing tongues or exhaustion now provides you with a stance bar. Yes you heard this right, a stance bar like warriors have.
If you enabled this stance bar your weakness becomes whichever curse you’re “in”.
It’s like shapeshifting forms but for curses, and if you pick both curse options you get two stances.
The issue is, they’re on the gcd and it feels clunky /unnecessary.
We spend more gcds applying curses than not. This might not be a problem in pve maybe, but in pvp we apply all 3 curses to different targets all the time. Having to spend more gcds swapping forms to curse feels HORRIBLE.
Please blizzard, instead of having 3 keybinds for each curse and pressing the button we want, we now still have 3 keybinds but have to press 2 buttons per curse swap. This is so backwards in flow, i don’t understand this change.
5 Likes
If Curses are a stance, does that mean we automatically apply them (on a single target) when we attack?
I’ve been trying to point this out… Blizz is trying to stretch the extra points from 10 new levels out to give us less actual impact, and while removing multiple abilities/spells from each class and spec… so things are being moved to the trees from the baseline, existing effects that were one talent are becoming multiple talents, and so on.
It’s a giant con job that they expect gamers to eat up, all exciting about more levels and more points…
1 Like
Yup that’s what I noticed. They removed health funnel and then created like several talents for drain life, one specifically for it.
I was like wait you take away health funnel when we still need it, and then add it back in as a talent…
Corruption is gone and we have no idea why that is. Lost the ability to have all curses when you pick one talent and not have to talent into them individually. Frankly it seems they didn’t want to come up with new ideas and just said w.e taken some of these out and out them back in as talents.
Health funnel NEEDS to come back baseline, I have no idea what they were thinking with this one. And they need to reduced the amount of talents needed for drain life. Should be at max 2.
Also having curses as stances?? Anyone have any info on this cause this kinda sounds bad.
3 Likes
Curse of weakness is still the ability you have to press, it just changes to whichever stance you are in.
Edit: so for example, let’s say you want to apply tongues on a caster, you now have to enter tongues stance to convert weakness into tongues then press tongues. If you happen to want to exhaustion another target u have to swap to the exhaustion stance to convert weakness into exhaustion and then press it, and of course toggle off a stance to revert to weakness.
That’s 2 buttons for every curse application if you want to use different curses in combat.
Not sure how this passed conceptual stage tbh.
5 Likes
As if there wasn’t a massively low return on the time spent casting the curses in most cases already. And we can’t just skip by them in the talent tree, because they’re blocking nodes and Blizz considers them “core Warlock content”.
2 Likes