Feedback: Warlocks

In Development Guardians of the Dream PTR
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In this thread, please discuss ongoing changes to the Warlock class in the Guardians of the Dream PTR.

Affliction

  • Grand Warlock’s Design has been redesigned – Summon Darkglare cooldown is reduced by 30 seconds.

Demonology

Demonology’s damage profile is currently too reliant on Nether Portal and Tyrant windows. In Guardians of the Dream, we’re redistributing this power to other parts of Demonology’s rotation and decoupling the synergy between these two cooldowns so that they can stand on their own rather than being dependent on one another. We still want Nether Portal and Demonic Tyrant to be impactful, powerful cooldowns – just not the only source of meaningful output for a Demonology Warlock.

  • Gul’dan’s Ambition has been redesigned – When Nether Portal ends, you summon a Pit Lord that serves you for 10 seconds.
  • Grand Warlock’s Design has been redesigned – Summon Demonic Tyrant cooldown is reduced by 30 seconds.
  • Ner’zhul’s Volition has been redesigned – Demons summoned from your Nether Portal deal 15/30% increased damage.
  • Demonic Knowledge now has a 10% chance of causing Hand of Gul’dan to generate a Demonic Core (was 15%).
  • New Talent: Volatile Fiends – Implosion deals 10% increased damage. Bilescourge Bombers deal 20% increased damage and your spells now have a chance to summon a Bilescourge Bomber.
  • Summon Demonic Tyrant has been redesigned – Summon a Demonic Tyrant to increase the duration of your Dreadstalkers, Vilefiend, Felguard, and up to 10 of your Wild Imps for 15 seconds. Your Demonic Tyrant increases the damage of affected demons by 15% while damaging your target.
  • Reign of Tyranny has been redesigned – Active Wild Imps grant 1 stack of Demonic Servitude and active greater demons grant 3 stacks of Demonic Servitude, up to 15 stacks. Demonic Tyrant deals 10% additional damage for each stack of Demonic Servitude active at the time of his summon.
  • Inner Demons no longer has a chance to summon an additional demon during combat.
  • Demonic Core is no longer baseline.
  • Demonbolt now grants the passive Demonic Core when learned.
  • Shadow Bolt damage increased by 30%.
  • Demonbolt damage increased by 15%.
  • Vilefiend damage increased by 15%.
  • Bloodbound Imps has been removed.

Destruction

  • New Talent: Chaosbringer – Chaos Bolt damage increased by 8/15%. Rain of Fire damage increased by 5/10%. Shadowburn damage increased by 5/10%.
  • Chaos Bolt damage increased by 15%.
  • Grand Warlock’s Design has been redesigned – Summon Infernal cooldown is reduced by 60 seconds.
  • Madness of the Azj’Aqir has been removed.
    • Developers’ note: We’re removing Madness of the Azj’Aqir and introducing a new talent, Chaosbringer, that increases the output of Chaos Bolt, Shadowburn, and Rain of Fire. Additionally we are adding damage to Chaos Bolt baseline. We’re doing this specifically to decrease how penalizing movement can feel as a Destruction Warlock while also making these spells feel more impactful.
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there goes the dream of warlocks being meta for next tier. Give us a reason to keep playing your game blizzard!

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This is a great start. Kudos for the Pit Lord changes. There are still some talent’s that could still use some love and/or tuning. Will Doom and Kazzik’s Curse ever be redesigned or furthered iterated on?
It’s great players can use new terror guard skins but what is the point (gameplay wise) if terror guard are still locked behind a gimmicky spell like Ritual of Doom? I would to see Ritual of Doom abolished or maybe made into a toy in the future.
Grim feast as a capstone talent feels bad. Maybe in niche pvp settings it would be decent. I would love to see the slot devoted to selecting a permanent terror guard or maybe empower our other demons somehow.
Thank for for all the warlock love in the past few patches too.

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Nether Portal

Please readdress the Nether Portal section of the tree in an appropriate way.

The synergy with Tyrant was the only thing that made Nether Portal(NP) feel reasonably exciting. NP is poorly designed by forcing us into a shard dump phase to maximize demon summons, with no increased shard recovery. It’s counterintuitive to how Hand of Gul’dan syncs with other talents that want 3 shard HoG’s as a rule. Wanting Nether Portal to stand on its own, in its current state, is a shortsighted change for the ability and the Demonology tree as a whole.

There seems to be resistance to reworking the ability, so just prune it. The entire Nether Portal section of the tree should be replaced with something that has synergy while not reintroducing the burst issues we are moving away from. It can be cleanly pruned from the tree now with no negative effects on our playstyle.

Bottom Line: Having a 3 minute cooldown with 4 dedicated talent points, while negatively synergizing with our general rotation concepts will feel terrible to play with. It should be removed from the game.

This is a great change but i believe the CDR should be baselined or in the same node with Soulbound Tyrant so that we can still grab Reign of Tyranny as well. 1 minute tyrant keeps the uninteresting gaps between tyrants much smaller so that the gameplay is more engaging overall.

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read the tier sets for demo. it looks like they are testing a redesign for the doom talents with our tier set for next patch. also the terror guard will likely be the model for the tier set summon

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i disagree. this directly addresses the broken scaling interactions between np and tyrant which was the main issue holding demo back. it also breaks the interaction between the cd’s which means you no longer have to sit on a cooldown and hold it to sync up with your other cd’s in order to do any kind of damage. this free’s these abilities up to be tuned individually without scaling out of control with cd interactions. this is a good thing for demo in the long run.

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I really like the demo changes, but I just tested in PTR, and the numbers just aren’t high enough for single target. Tried a few different builds. Demo will not be a good raider in the current state.

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Scaling and synergy are two different issues. Nether Portal already broke our rotation up in a negative way, which will still exist, but now it has no interaction with any of our other cooldowns or tree talents. That should never be the case with a capstone and 3 minute dps cooldown. The ability needs a hard redesign.

Edit: I am fine with them fixing the scaling, but Nether Portal not receiving any changes to add synergy to the rotation is not a positive.

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i think you have it a little backwardds. np and tyrant was the only capstone interaction we had. guillotine and IH didn’t interact with tyrant or portal. capstones are meant to be powerful on their own, not only when they interact with eachother. this is a tuning design change. blizzard will need to do tuning passes during ptr. and the issue with changing your rotation every 3 minutes to maximize nether portals damage is fine. lots of classes have rotation changing impacts from their cd’s and all it really does it make you cast HoG as soon as possible rather than building shards (which wont matter because they changed tyrant to only buff 10 imps). i would like them to remove soulburn’s interaction with NP but beyond that i think it is fine.

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Im certain i dont. I didnt say interactions with just other capstones, i said that the interaction with Tyrant was the only one that NP had. Tyrant interacts with many many nodes in the tree. Same for IH and Guillotine even if they are just the passive nodes related to felguard. Nether portal negatively affects multiple nodes because of the Hand of Gul’dan usage it forces.

Never said it was problem to have a change in rotation, i said the current iteration is a negative one. Reread my post

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ah, shiiii, here we ago again.

I thought the community was clear in regards to nerfing our core proc generation in 10.1.5, we dont want to cast more shadowbolt, no one asked for it, no one wakes up one day and think “hey, what if warlock cast more shadowbolts, that would be fun and engaging.”

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I did read the tier sets bonuses but thank you anyways. Please reread the portion about the recommendation on summoning a permanent terror guard.

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Affliction 4 part should do Something for seed of corruption too

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the model for the terror guard is probably the demon summoned by the tier set. the tier set is a direct redisgn of the doom talents. you’re upset because they put terror guard skins in teh barber when there is no way to reliably summon a terror guard which is a little bit of a weird feedback to give on a cosmetic addition. replacing a captstone utility talent in the class tree with a damage throughput talent isn’t going to happen as it would either be a demon with just utility and no damage which warlock isn’t lacking for utility, or it would require retuning all the other capstones to be competetive with it damage wise or it would be a required pick.

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Destruction note - having to choose between rain of fire and cataclysm is punishing and makes Cataclysm an almost dead talent. Fixing that would be awesome.

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I will make feedback for Destruction:

  1. Chaos bringer claims to fix problem created by Madness of the Azj’Aqir especially on penalizing movement, but have you forgotten Madness also give cast time reduction to Chaos Bolt? Now enjoy more hard casting of Chaos Bolts!
    Please redesign Chaos Bringer, this is totally creating more problems instead of solving them.
  2. Chaos Bolt baseline damage increased by 15%, ok how about Rain of Fire and Shadowburn? With the new Tier Set that forces us to play Dimensional Rift, which mean Destro is forced to not play Chaos Incarnate, the AoE capabilities is just dead. Rain of Fire damage is so nerfed and Dimension Rift has no AoE damage unless the 4 set bonus proc’d (all hail RNG!). Good luck to Destro in Raid AoE and M+. Oh and not to mention in current M+ AoE build, we don’t even have the 1 spare talent point to put into Chaos Incarnate/Dimensional Rift without removing 1 from GWD or Purple Infernal (Avatar of Destruction). Suggest that some of the bottom talent trees need to be reduced to 1 point talent from existing 2 points talent.
  3. GWD redesigned to reduce Infernal by 60 seconds, yet another nerf to AoE in M+. Not big impact to single target.
  4. Madness removed - see point 1. Need to do something about that cast time reduction portion for Chaos Bolt.
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As a long time demo lock I have conflicting feeling for these changes.

While I agree that Demo needs a power shift away from burst windows but buffing SB & DB isn’t the answer, not when these 2 abilities make up less than 15% of our damage profile.

  • Demonic Knowledge now has a 10% chance of causing Hand of Gul’dan to generate a Demonic Core (was 15%).

I don’t understand why this needed to be nerfed, especially with the removal of bloodborne imps. I want to churn out imps and demonic core generation feels pretty good right now.

Everything Nether Portal

I wish I could say this is a step in the right direction , but it’s not. As long as the baseline functionality remains untouched NP will always feel bad to play. Decoupling the synergy between Tyrant and NP will probably also exacerbate the feeling as we go through the motions of weaving SBs, HoGs, Soul Burn with less of a payoff. The community has hated the playstyle of NP since its introduction back in BfA. A pit lord is just a cherry on top of a pile of garbage. I don’t understand the aversion to reworking NP but it’s desperately needed to improve demo.

  • New Talent: Volatile Fiends – Implosion deals 10% increased damage. Bilescourge Bombers deal 20% increased damage and your spells now have a chance to summon a Bilescourge Bomber.

It’s a shame to see Bloodborne Imps go but I do like this new talent. Can’t wait to try it in keys.

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These are some of, if not the worst design choices for demo I’ve ever seen.

You’ve nerfed the burst, the synergy, the shard gen, and slapped on a 30% shadowbolt buff.

What even is this? Scrap it all, seriously.

Nobody wants to spam shadowbolt in your stupid overly movement heavy fights, especially when even if we can stand still we will be doing next to no damage doing so.

It’s every patch, you assign devs who have no idea how the spec functions, how it’s profile works or develops, and every time we need to sit here and tell you that you guys are making the worst possible choices in design, put somebody who actually plays the spec on it, not your janitors.

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Affliction needs more than these changes for PvP, its current design just simply does not work

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I mainly play aff but play the other two spec from time to time. Here are just my first impressions to the patch notes.

Affliction

Talent changes

The GWD change feels a bit out of the blue as DG is not an impactful CD compared to rock boy or tyrant daddy. In AOE, Grim Reach is too powerful. Maybe there is an argument in ST where you want 90 sec burst windows, and it could potentially be good in pvp with the other pvp changes.

Tier set
While SR is not my favorite ability, I get the idea of wanting to switch up our playstyle from season to season with tier sets. The glaring issue with 2pc and 4pc is once again, forcing to play MR over Seed in AoE.
I think it would be better if 4pc affect either MR or Seed. That way there is clear choice of MR less than 2 targets and seed 3+
Also, please make crescendo affect seed as well. The 1.5 sec seed cast was a great QoL change. Just need a little more push.

Demonology

Talent changes
Reducing tyrant duration, being specific about what demons it affects, and capping the amount of stacks RoT can have is a start to limiting tryant power. I think all the changes to the NP side requires tuning.
GWD turning tryant into a flat 1 min CD can be impactful on its own.
They need more tuning on the rest of the talents to address the tank dmg issue outside of NP and Tyrant. I still think taking away 3rd dog and nerfing dog was a the wrong move. They also need to buff immutable hatred as an alternative to a more sustained ST profile if it is to compete with NP.
Also, please don’t make us cast shadowbolt…

Tier set
Looks interesting. As someone above already said, looks like testing out waters for a new version of Doom.
However, it this current form, this set bonus is going to be very frustrating if the target dies before brand expires. I suggest adding an on death effect if target dies before brand expires in the 2pc, which would then work with 4pc.

Destruction

Talent changes
Like Blood DK, we just keep getting aura buffs for CB. Honestly, seeing madness gone is sad because it was an iconic tier set turned talent but at the same time, missing that buff does feel extremely bad to play.
This CB change could be very broken for PvP with the new talent.
Destro is the big winner from GWD being a flat 30 sec CDR. 2 min Destro is just a better version of destro.
But also, I beg, please make cata baseline…

Tier set
Same sentiment as aff, I understand tier sets wanting to switch up playstyle and giving underplayed talents a chance to shine. If they want us to take rift over chaos incarnate, rift needs some buffs in PvE setting.

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