Doom is better now that it is aoe, but i agree that dmg at the end feels very bad. Doom, thematically, should spread, and could even take on a ‘living bomb’ ish sort of mechanic. It would certainly make it more appealing.
I agree that a capstone talent should be substantially stronger than other talents and blizz does a horrible job with this. Ive seen so many lackluster capstone talents and its sad. I love doomguard now that it hits multiple targets. I think it is an excellent capstone talent, but i agree that rng is bad for it. I think it should be a guarentee with doom. I also think its dmg needs scaled up by like 300% so it justifies the use of doom. Lastly, i think doomguard should spread doom with its bolts. Perhaps those dooms dont guarentee doomguards, but it would again promote the use of doom.
I agree that implosion just doesnt fit anymore but i think the talent shouldnt be lost. It feels bad when demons and imps just disappear. I think implosion should be passive. Its effect: whenever an imp/imp boss/demon’s time runs out, it launches itself towards the target, sacrificing itself and exploding, doing aoe dmg like what the current implosion does. This would thematically and rotationally feel great, plus it would not need any tracking.
Lastly, demo’s action bar bloat needs addressed. Wayyyy too many buttons, especially for aoe.
After going through a good amount of the campaign up until at least that last bugged quest that’s been reported, and doing various side quests and activities (delves, dungeons etc) as Destruction, I thought I’d add or reiterate on some observations and possible issues.
The first one I’m not sure if its a bug or not. I’ve reported it, but maybe its a think outside the box instance to get things done when it comes to delves. Pets really don’t hold agro. Now it hasn’t blocked me from completing any at tier 3 yet, but it does force you to get creative on some of the bosses. Maybe that’s by design I dont know, but thought I’d mention it again.
The recent changes to Overfiend seem to have brought it more in line. I have a working version of Details and it was definitely accounting for a majority of my dps and easily doubling or more my own chaos bolt damage. Now it seems a bit more realistic. Weaker sure, but still a good amount of damage coming from it.
With that in mind, I’m not sure Chaos Bolt is where it should be on damage. I see a lot of 300-600k Chaos Bolts at about 45,000 intellect which is basically what it hits for on Retail at the moment with substantially less intellect. That just doesn’t seem to add up when scaling up in a new expansion.
Dimensional Rift I have been playing with recently, because Shadow Burn and Channel Demonfire give me two issues. Not bugs, just flow issues I guess. I never seem to find a good opportune time to fit these abilities in. The faster channel on Channel Demonfire is nice, but usually that time is better spent on an instant or another Chaos Bolt, plus it has some broken interaction with Wither where it becomes uncastable at times, so I skip this.
Shadow Burn fits the instant cast niche pretty well, but again a lot of the time I find myself in a position where Chaos Bolt is better to cast, unless I’m close to capping on shards and want to refresh the debuff quick. Its useable, but I find that when I don’t spec into it I don’t miss it, at least as far as PvE is concerned.
That brings me back to Dimensional Rift, mainly because the talent points have to go somewhere, kind of feels like we’re wasting points a few places in the tree like this but anyway. Its good for generating shards which is the main reason I cast it, because it really does not seem to do all that much damage itself. If it wasn’t for the shard generation, it wouldn’t really be very helpful at all.
So far with the last build my overall dps went down significantly but it was kind of blowing the roof off things before so thats understandable. I do think Chaos Bolt needs a look, something doesn’t seem right about it. Otherwise, my experience isn’t quite as much as some other long time destruction players but this is what I’ve found so far at least for me.
Just because you don’t agree with my feedback doesn’t mean that it is complaining. 
I gave them exactly what they asked for when they said:
Affliction’s my favorite spec. I hate anything about it getting nerfed, but wither is an outlier. It shouldn’t be 50%+ of your damage, and it certainly shouldn’t be hitting on par with you SS spenders. Otherwise there’s 0 point in pushing any button but wither, which is crappy playstyle.
Whither is intuitive, which is why people like it. The same o same o corruption deal has be played out. Plus, not having to refresh it is amazing. Nothing destroys a nice, natural flowing rotation than having to refresh dots in an aoe situation.
In fact, a great suggestion is to have seed refresh all of our dots but have it on a 10 sec cd. That would be amazing!
I have no problem with the ability. I like the functionality and I even prefer the icon over corruption. I was merely pointing out that with all the modifiers that are found in the tree, and how they interact with one another, you can tremendously increase the output of that one ability. If it is intended, cool. if it isn’t intended, needs to be noted.
That said, I’d be perfectly fine with Seed refreshing dots. Personally, and I believe one of my posts in this thread stated this, I think that SOC should always fire 3 seeds: 1 seed applies corruption (or wither), 1 seed applies Agony, and 1 seed applies Unstable Affliction. Since they have this desire to limit UA to one target, this would be a way to “spread UAs”. Let the 3rd seed be the one that applies UA, that way if there are less than 3 targets, it doesn’t apply UA but will apply Corruption/Agony.
It also would then act as a soul shard spend on refreshing everything at once and save us about 200 globals in large trash packs lol.
Doom does OK damage and it is up constantly with resets from Demonbolt or the target dying but you need another 2 talents to get it there.
Doomguard is currently worthless. He does very little damage, does not proc often, and is only single target now.
Guess we should have seen this coming after the roller coaster that was Dragonflight season 2 tier set.
Blizzard needs to clarify what Demo’s AoE is. This week Doomguard was gutted, Doom damage was cut in half, and Charhound damage was cut in half.
I agree completely!
There are alot of modifiers, but i see that as a failure on blizz’s part rather than a methodological issue. There should not be that many modifiers. They should be baked in, or even more so, baked into agony, to provide a more even dmg layout. In the hero tree, the same thing. We should not be seeing passive dmg modifiers at all. We should be seeing exciting and refreshing talents. Nothing is worse than getting new content and seeing half of it being passive dmg modifiers.
I completely agree with soc. It needs a significant adjustment. I absolutely LOVE the burst the seeds provide, but nothing is worse that tab targeting 5000 times in a dungeon to refresh dots. With that being said, i think your idea is great. Each seed should apply each dot to every target the explosion hits but the seed does 10% less dmg and has a 10 sec cd. Also make it so soc HAS to hit 3 targets for the seed to apply dots. That way its not affecting ST. I think that would be a great compromise, plus, its not like soc does any dmg the way it is now, so 10% is appropriate.
This talent could follow another talent that states “whither/corruption/agony/AU has a 10% chance and MR/shadowbolt have a 5% chance to make soc instance and does 10% more dmg. 20 cd internal cd”
Then for the hero talents, instead of whither passive dmg modifier, bake that dmg in and instead put "when soc applies dots (so must hit 3 targets,) soc also applies 2 stacks of whither. At least that would help with soc influence.
Can we please change the Overfiend model to a fitting Legion demon? Why are warlocks using a fire elemental model from the Firelands?
This is a downgrade visually from the Avatar of Destruction infernal.
At least make us summon a Soulkeeper, Inquisitor, Tyrant, or some such powerful Legion demon model more in keeping with the warlock theme.
Bit of a long post here, but I wanted to provide feedback for warlock on the Beta in The War Within.
My background includes Cutting Edge, Gladiator, and Keystone Hero in multiple various seasons/expansions. I’m not the world’s greatest warlock, but I have a well rounded background in all forms of content.
I want to start off with giving the devs some props on making improvements the trees and adding some really cool new flavor and visuals to Warlock.
Let’s jump on in!
CLASS TREE:
Interrupt – A hot point of contention. There are good arguments for and against this in many forms of content. Here’s the solution: Choice Node. Choice 1 is Spell Lock as a Warlock interrupt. Choice 2 is to give the Felhunter the interrupt. This can go right where Demonic Cirlce is (and circle can go back to being baseline). The choice node here gives people options. For example, in Mythic+, many players enjoy having their pet interrupt for them while they continue casting. In PVP, warlocks wish to have the choice of using other pets for their utility as well as sacrificing them for additional benefits. The choice node would make everyone happy and bring another level of utility to the warlock class.
- There are still a TON of two point nodes which frankly should be 1 point nodes or be more impactful for a second rank. (Demon Skin, Fel Armor, etc. basically every 2 point node). Nodes that get reduced to 1 point should retain their 2 node point value due to how weak they already are.
- Soulburn is probably the only really impactful and interactive node in the entire tree. The rest are entirely passives that enhance base effects or provide talents we’re used to having.
- There is a feeling of lacking party utility in M+ and PVP. Soulstone is a good brez that has party wipe utility and Healthstone is also valuable, but usable only once per fight for non-warlocks. Gateway has very niche uses in certain keystones and frankly lags SIGNIFICANTLY behind in the mobility arms race in pvp with a long cooldown that often makes using your gateway ineffectual without meticulous understanding and tracking of enemy movement cooldowns. The only real utility people found useful in M+ was the avatar of destruction infernal stun, which has now been removed. In PVP, your do have good control abilities, but no real “play of the game” utility to use outside of patches where our damage is broken. You’re here to press fear, stun, coil, and parse while other classes truly shine in the utility department.
Last but not least….pet summon times. 6 second summons and Fel Domination make getting your pet back out in some content untenable. In PVP, you can often divebomb the warlock’s pet twice after he uses Fel Domination and then enjoy interrupting his every cast trying to get his pet back until you win the match. In a Raid or M+ environment, if you used Fel Dom and then died, good luck every getting your pet back while also keeping up with the party/raid and avoiding mechanics. Losing your pet SHOULD be impactful, but it shouldn’t mean you auto lose the match or at a significant detriment for the next 3 minutes while Fel Domination comes back off cooldown. Pet Summoning needs to be reduced period.
I’ll list out some further thoughts on individual talents/interactions here:
- Demon Skin – A must have talent, but needs to be trimmed to 1 point at 2 point value.
- Fel Armor - Incredibly weak/undertuned 2 point node. Many other classes have stronger damage reductions for only one point. I’d rather have this be a simple 3% reduction with no absorb component for one point.
- Fiendish Stride - Consider reverting the change and making it 2 points for the original values or 1 point. This was such an amazing change for Burning Rush without making it entirely overpowered.
- Mortal Coil/Howl of Terror - Might be too OP for warlocks to get both of these talents, but there are some classes who get ALL their CC and some who have to choose. Of course I’m biased towards getting both. This is an especially unfortunate choice because of how good Annihilan’s Bellow is in the Diabolist tree.
- Abyss Walker - This probably should be buffed in some way or changed. The idea behind port and gate are to allow for movement/repositioning and to avoid damage entirely. The damage reduction on this talent is nice, but I’d rather have talents like Impish Instincts or Gateway Mastery for shorter/better port/gateways.
- Lifeblood, Sweet Souls, Pact of Gluttony - Place these together, lifeblood might actually be a decent pick if it were a 1 point node considering Pact of Gluttony will scale the usability of Lifeblood.
- Accrued Vitality / Drain Life - Drain Life needs a major buff or rework. The loss of Seized Vitality and Inevitable Demise make non-buffed Drain Life an awful self heal. An amazing class fantasy of Affliction was literally draining the life of your enemies and restoring your own. Without talents to buff it, Drain Life will probably never be used again. Consider baking in some of these core talents so that all specs can utilize Drain Life. I’m sad to see AOE Drain Life go away for affliction especially in PVP as it did damage, healed you, shielded you with soul burn, and extended your dots with Rot and Decay. Please consider reworking Drain Life to a usable state. If not, just remove accrued vitality.
- Unending Resolve / Strength of Will, Dark Accord, Resolute Barrier - Old UR in past expansions was a really solid defensive albeit on a long cooldown. Many other specs have seen talents added to reduce long defensives or baked in baseline. The talent point investment to get UR at max value and lowest cooldown is too much. I would consider making UR 40% baseline and adding a talent to simply reduce it down to 2 minutes or buffing Resolute Barrier by get it down below 2 minutes the way conduits worked in Shadowlands.
- Shadowfury - Just make this instant cast. It is already a minute long cooldown.
- Darkfury / Shadowflame - If I can’t have shadowfury instant baseline, just make darkfury do it here. I do like the larger area of effect and reduced cooldown of Darkfury though. Shadowflame is almost never taken, but it could be if it were more accessible or baseline. It is a neat effect for an aoe slow, but is overshadowed by curse of exhaustion for single target.
- Demonic Tactics - Stat buffs are fine when they interact with the spec in an interesting way. Destro is the only spec that gets any real value out of this as immolate and incinerate can generate more shards when then crit. I’m fine with keeping it, but it isn’t a very interesting throughput node.
- Teachings of the Black Harvest - Needs a significant buff or rework to ever take it. I’m a fan of simply making this change your demon into something stronger that does more damage and has better spell effects. This is only ever taken as demo in pvp to access Demonic Resilience.
- Demonic Resilience - a pay the price node that is never taken outside PVP. Likely should be a 1 point node or removed/reworked.
- Swift Artifice - Just bake this effect into soul burn for soulstone. The reduction on healthstone is still really cool, but it just seems so obvious to bake the soulstone piece as an instant cast version into soul burn.
- Fel Synergy/Soul Link - I’d really like to see these two nodes merged as a 2 point node. Fel Syn is really never worth taking for 2 point investment. The loss of Profane Bargain also hurts a bit since it interacted further with Grimoire of Sacrifice. I’d like to see Profane Bargain come back again but maybe rework the damage reduction to apply at all times while your pet is out and not just below 35%.
- Soul Conduit - Needs to be 10% baseline. Not worth taking at 5%.
- Pact of Gluttony - Mentioning this again because I LOVE THIS TALENT. Works in every form of content. Unsure if it affects soulwell, but for the warlock alone this synergizes so well with our survivability and soul burn. Please never remove this talent. Consider making hearthstone work like this baseline. make it baseline.
Affliction
I already talked a bit about Drain Life so I won’t mention it or the talents that affected it here. Same with 2 point nodes. My biggest problem here is the simple damage buff talents and very little interaction changes. Nightfall, Tormented Crescendo, and Volatile Agony seem to be the only talents that do that. I do like that several talents bake in faster cast rates for Unstable Affliction and Malefic Rapture. This helps a lot for getting casts out quickly in all forms of content, especially for PVP. From the PVP lens I’m happy that we now have a second spell school for raptures, but the loss of drain life and Soul Swap may be devastating for staying alive and getting damage out as affliction.
Hellcaller Affliction
I’m concerned that Hellcaller, WIther, and the many damage amps to corruption may make affliction a “press wither and win” spec in pvp. The current damage profile seems to lean that way as Wither is your top damage by miles and Unstable Affliction and Agony fall to the wayside. Hellcaller also seems to have issues with the amount of procs and endless shard generation for affliction. I seem to be nearly unable to run out of shards to spend during Malevolence and darkglare and I nearly always have a proc of nightfall to spend (Seeds of their demise) or a crescendo proc. Combine these constant procs and need to spend shards with low haste levels and juggling multiple dots on 1-3 targets, aff feels like it literally can not press its buttons in a way that makes sense or feels impactful. It feels more important to just keep wither up than to use your procs and shards effectively. There seems to also be a bug where you can infinitely stack blackened soul stacks past 8, which may be caused by the reworked mark of Perotharn. Talentwise, I’m okay with most of the tree except for the utility/defensive choice nodes. Zevrim’s is a comically undertuned choice that further loses value because you lose it as soon as dark pact gets removed from damage. Illhoofs is also an unusable node outside the first few seconds of combat. Affliction can’t deal enough damage during encounters in any form of content to ever cap the shield. Both of these nodes need reworked. Zevrim’s could get a utility buff to instead apply Dark Pact to yourself and one or more allies when cast, or it could change the way it works by getting increased value as you get lower in health. Illhoof could change to some other form of buff to soul leech, perhaps proccing every 30 seconds for a large amount of soul leech. Curse of the Satyr and Aura of Enfeeblement are also counterintuitive nodes. CotS is truly only valuable in PVP when using amplify curse against other casters to both slow their casting speed and make it impossible to crit. Further, CotS does not replace curse of weakness and will not allow you to also apply exhaustion. Enfeeblement sounds good at first as a defensive, but the weakness applied doesn’t make an impctful difference against melee mobs or players in any form of content as you either aren’t the one taking or you aren’t applying the amplified curse to prevent crits. It also promotes an awkward playstyle of using a defensive cooldown as utility in M+ to apply an aoe curse effect.
Soul Harvester Affliction
This actually feels more manageable and impactful as a spec. I’m not overly flooded with shards and procs despite the free raptures from demonic soul and pressing rapture feels powerul alongside demonic soul procs. Drain Soul also feels very powerful here. I think it may be because there are fewer nightfall procs form seeds of their demise. The utility and defensive choice nodes here are significantly better from Hellcaller. Friends in dark places is a great choice, but seems to be bugged and not working. The other choice Gorebound fortitude is decent because of the Synergy with Pact of Gluttony. Not a bad choice to make. Spirited Away is a VERY cool and impactful utility node that I could see being played in all content to include taking Burning Rush in PVP for the first time ever. It may not be the “meta” pick but it is an exciting take on how to modify utility spells. Eternal Servitude however is a bit boring and promotes a couple of degenerate tactics in PVP. The first is for affliction, where you effectively use Fel Pact, Eternal Servitude, and Grimoire of Sacrifice to double kick (grim sac kick, fel dom, kick again) every 30 seconds. As Demo, it also means that killing the felguard after a Fel Domination (already difficulty to do 2x in a row), utterly pointless and he’ll just get it back soon after. Finally, Mantle of the Harvester makes Haunt feel required.
On to the talents:
- Siphon Life / Absolute Corruption - I LOVE the change to Siphon Life. Kalamazi brought up a good point though that siphon life should have a clearer single target identity, possibly buffing other dots while AC massively buffs corruption alone.
- Soul Swap - RIP. Many people wanted to see this reworked to a version where soul burn let SS apply all dots and normal swap had no cooldown, but allowed you to copy/paste these dots around. I really want to see this return and made into part of aff’s toolkit, especially for pvp. Aff was already a glass cannon in PVP that could crank damage but floundered under constant pressure. Without Soul Swap and the low levels of haste in Season 1, I think aff may fall either further down the ladder.
- Summoner’s Embrace / Grimoire of Sacrifice - an uninspired choice node. Summoner’s Embrace may become mandatory ifd it outperforms sacrifice.
- Oblivion - I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. It has become strong in pvp and its cool to see it as an option in the spec tree, but I dislike how many of aff’s talents don’t sync up such as Phantom Singularity, Soul Rot, Vile Taint, and Darkglare. There are times when you have to sit on a cooldown to get max value out of it and that really never feels good.
- Haunt - Would be nice to see this become instant cast. Improved Haunt offers lots of improvement, some of which used to be baseline.
- Death’s Embrace - Needs to be buffed substantially and the drain life component is nearly useless with the loss of other Drain Life talents.
- Soul Rot - I really would like to see some cooldown reduction or shadowlands conduits come back to this talent buffing the AOE range and damage. Feels weak on its own and further enabled Drain Life.
- In general there are so many talents that buff Malefic Rapture but offer no other real flavor to casting rapture. It just isn’t exciting to take 6 different talents that essentially just buff the damage it does with no other interaction than light dot extension every one minute with Omen.
Destruction
I spent a lot of time talking about affliction, but I’m going to change my tune here. I really like the destro re-work. The real issue here is resource flooding and button bloat. I’ll talk more about the resources when I get to the Hero Trees. The button bloat/proc flooding comes with the amount of spells you can take in the new tree. There are times when many spells are coming off cooldown like soulfire (or decimation proc), cataclysm, channel demonfire, dimensional rift, conflagrate, and shadowburn…all while being capped at 5 shards. Even when you dump shards with chaosbolt and shadowburn, you still have a large influx of other spells to cast in an optimal way. Obviously you can choose to take less of these talents, but with the condensed tree it will be unavoidable to pick only a few. The plus side is that you almost never have to cast Immolate since you can keep it up with CFC, cata, and soulfire.
Diabolist Destruction
Frankly this just feels really good to play. Touch of Rancora adds to the fast paced casting alongside decimation and ritual of ruin. Ruination hits like a truck. It just feels fluid and fun to play if you can stand and freecast. The issue may come inside of PVP where you have far less freedom to stand and cast chaos bolts. This may end up promoting a rain of fire playstyle with Inferno. The real issue here is the resource flooding that happens when proccing rancora and avatar while at 5 shards and not effectively dumping your shards with also having other buttons come off cooldown at the same time. The other issues are just with a few talents such as Gloom of Nathreza being very mediocre for havoc, but also implying you now use havoc in single target, making the talent a requirement. The utility and defensive choice nodes aren’t very exciting either. Annihilan’s bellow is actually really good, but you almost never take howl of terror, especially as destroy since you can havoc coil two targets to greater effect. Infernal Bulwark is a decent pick, however Infernal Vitality can be a bit odd as you usually want to use your defensive at high health to mitigate damage as much as possible. If you used your major defensive at low health, you’re probably dead anyway and not even this talent would save you over 10 seconds. ]
Hellcaller Destruction
Again, a bit of resource flooding here as seeds will proc alongside avatar and keep you at 5 shards without a good way to dump them fast enough. I don’t want these procs to go away however, because fast bolting as destruction is one of the most fun thing you can do. The main thing I like here is that you can just instant cast wither as destroy on the move. Generally I’m happy with this tree, but I still feel like it misses out on a bit of Destruction theming as a Hero talent tree.
Moving on to talents.
- Backdraft – Bake Flashover back into this talent or replace explosive potential with it. Flashover giving 2 charges felt so integral to the spec especially for shard dumping during cooldowns and in havoc windows. Further, Decimation procs can “eat” your backdraft charges and leave you “hard-casting” chaos bolt with no backdraft empowerment. The gameplay loop should be that you have enough conflag and backdraft charges to always empower chaos bolt and soulfire when playing well.
- Rolling Havoc feels like it needs to be at its 2 point value for it to feel impactful the way it used to. Destro excels at 2 tgt cleave and this talent drastically empowers that and funneling.
- Flashpoint also feels unimpactful at its 1 rank value. Further, it is nerfed in pvp and gives 3% haste. With the incredibly low haste values in season 1, this talent needs to be unerfed in pvp and increased to its old 2 rank value.
- Raging demonfire again needs its 2 point value to feel really impactful for extending immolates, especially in multi target scenarios. Demonfire Mastery really makes this button feel good to press, but you have to pay the raging demonfire tax to get to it.
- Dimensional Rift – Feels very weak and adds to button bloat and resource flooding. Flame rift and cleave rifts really need to be added baseline or as talents.
- Dimension Ripper – very low proc chance and essentially unusable in M+ AOE. Put that back to proccing on immolate at rates concurrent with our tier set. I rarely have to even cast incinerate in single target as it is.
- Power Overwhelming – this was already almost never taken even at its 2 point value. Find a way to rework this or let it “overlap” without being a maintenance buff.
- Chaos Incarnate – currently a dps loss to take. Just return to it’s original value.
Something I wish would return to destroy is the defensive portion of mastery. The warlock theme seems to be returning to a less mobile, stand and cast, type of playstyle that offered a tanky feel with powerful casts at the cost of mobility. Affliction losing big drain life returns in this expansion and destro losing mastery defensiveness last expansion hurts that theme.
Demonology
Wrapping it up with Demo, again a wonderful rework to this talent tree. My only real issue here is the core economy. Shadowbolt memes aside, I think dreadstalkers need to go back to 100% chance. This guaranteed core economy fed into a predictable gameplay loop for implosion cycling and tyrant prep. When they don’t proc the core at all, it feels terrible. And unfun. Shadowbolt ended up being my 4th highest damage over things like Tyrant and Gloomhound. I don’t think there should be a world where our generator/filler beats out major cooldowns by a vast margin. Immutable Hatred also feels dead in the water without a stable core economy.
I don’t really have a lot of feedback on the talents as many of them feel good to take. Sacrificed souls feels undertuned. Pact of the Imp Mother isn’t as accessible as it should be. Umbral blaze, also feels undertuned and Improved Demonic Tactics and Demonic Brutality don’t seem that great without high crit chance. Again, I’m overall pretty happy with this rework. Really my last concern here is Tyrant not getting good value out of Reign of Tyranny due to shards economy and also feeling inferior to the Diabolist tree with Abyssal Dominion.
Diabolist Demo
Like Destro, this just feels fluid and overall a fun tree. My one issue as mentioned above is that Abyssal Domion feels like it really makes Tyrant the cooldown it should be and you don’t access to this talent anywhere else.
Soul Harvester Demo
The shard savings here is something you can feel when it procs, but when you compare this with just how fun Diabolist is, I’d probably still take Diabolist even if Soul Harvester offered better DPS.
For the love of all that is good, revert the Doom changes, tune damage sure but leave the Doomguards, I finally felt like I was a commander of a Demon army and now with this RNG its terrible.
Agreed hands down, there are so many good Legion Demon models going unused. Also when will we get some new base demons to use?
I feel like AFF has enough going on to just make permanent corruption baseline
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Currently Demonic Arts: Mother of Chaos and Demonic Arts: Pit Lord are both being auto-consumed with auto-attacks, this is quite annoying in the sense that sometimes this mean you lose procs of Touch of Rancora when stacked together with the melee.
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Infernal Bolt currently have no GCD and a sub 1 second cast time, both generate quite an awkward “feeling” when casting it, specially for players with higher latency.
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Affliction suffers an issue with Both Sataiel’s Ambition and Quietus due to the “moment” Nightfall is consumed not matching the ones for this skills, meaning Nightfalls at single stacks do not proc those effects.
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What is the reasoning behind Mark of Xavius buffing Agony for affliction, while it buffs Wither for Destruction in the talent tree who objective is to buff Wither
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Hatefury Rituals only buff the damage over time effect of Wither, but Blackheart tactics buff both the damage over time and the cast damage, this makes Hatefury Ritual a rather prohibitive choice for Destruction.
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Doomguards removal of the cleave effect to doombolt is understandable, but at the same time, does lowers its value in m+, i wonder if some compromise could be obtained where it still cleave but hitting secondary targets for less damage or maybe casting a doombolt volley inbetween doombolts?
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Improved Demonic Tactics does not seem to be working, testing at 30% critical chance on my character should result in my felguard being at around 39-40%, but its critical strike chances still floated between 27% and 32%.
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Demonic Brutality also did not seem to be working, as far as i could notice the damage of each crit was still only 200%, but to add to this, this talent is incredibly undertuned at 204% unless your pets would be having Absurd amount of critical strike chances.
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Immutable Hatred is also fairly undertuned given it retains a tunning from a version of the game where you had a whole lot more Demonic Core Generation.
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Umbral Blaze does not seems to fit with the remaining Demonology talents and its position as the only way to acess Pact of Imp Mother feels very annoying.
*Fiendish Oblation is another talent who i feel like its not very exciting, flavorless even.
----------------------- About the Class Tree ---------------------------------
I understand that the current main focus is towards the Hero Talents, ironing out its bugs, quirks and making them overall good additions without confusing effects or must have effects.
But truth be told, i believe the Class Tree needs to be reviewed, to show how bad this situation is, two of talents you have in the tree LITERALLY do nothing as a 2nd point upgrade.
Fel Synergy and Soul Link are both talents who offer the same value if you have 1 or 2 points invested, and let me be honest, neither of those effects was particularly strong at 1 point cost, forcing them to be 2 points for the same effect is not a direction i would be happy to see.
One of the points early blue posts for TWW promised was the reduction of throughput talents to the tree, yet, you introduced Demonic Tactics while still maintaining Socrethar’s Guile, Sargerei Technique, Demonic Inspiration and Wrathfull Minion.
To make things worse, DREAMED utility for the class like AOE curses is limited to only affliction and destruction, with affliction already having a previous way to apply aoe curses with Vile Taint.
And the Class tree still have effects who are, at best, questionable in its userfullness like Teaching of the Black Harvest (Cool name, terrible effects) and Demonic Resilience.
What harm could it be to remove soul conduit and introduce some Cooldown or Pseudo-cooldown where every 60s your next curse is AOE? Even Curse of Enfeeblement is something i feel like should exist for all 3 specs (and once in a long time it existed).
Maybe even a reverse Sweet Souls, where the Warlock Healthstone shares the any Overheal to Allies in your group as Shield.
Truth be told, as far as group utility in this game, warlock is one with the most limited types of it since the removal of effects like Dark Intent/Dark Pact even if our Raid utility is very powerfull.
About Affliction
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The Previous insane/problematic shard generation was an issue that existed on Mark of Pero’tharn from Hellcaller, now that said talent got reworked and this issue is no longer of concern reintroducing the shard generation in the Improved Unstable Affliction could be a good idea to help affliction feels less “feast or famine” without adding extra shard gen in aoe.
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Alternatively, Relinquished got nerfed from 1.25 to 1.1 at a time where the main culprit was Mark of Pero’tharn, i would like to see some experimentation with the values of a partial reversal of the nerf, maybe 1.15 or 1.2 ?
Affliction
The tree feels pretty good after playing with it for a few hours. The overlaps between single target, cleave, and AoE builds are reasonable. The Tier 1 and Tier 3 talents allow for build variety without over-specializing.
Tier 2 still has issues. For multi-target builds, Malediction is a pathing obstacle if it’s tuned weakly, forcing you to take Improved Haunt even in AoE (this is how it is right now) - but if it’s tuned strongly, it’s too expensive to take alongside the other mandatory-for-AoE 2-point nodes on that row.
Improved Haunt is awkward. It almost lets you skip the Shadow Embrace talent in single target, but Shadow Embrace lasts 16 seconds and Haunt is a 15-second CD. The timing is annoyingly tight if you want to maintain 2 stacks of SE with Haunt alone, as you have to play around your GCD and keep the projectile travel distance consistent. Something needs to change here.
I hope Soul Rot gets a new icon to match the spell visual. The new Wither and Malevolence icons are excellent.
Death’s Embrace and Perpetual Unstability are very weak and could use another tuning pass.
Hellcaller
Hellcaller Affliction plays really well in both ST and AoE. It feels great to have a DoT that does meaningful damage, and I hope that Wither remains near the top of the spec’s damage breakdown after tuning. Malevolence is impactful and fun to press, and it helps solidify the 1-minute CD window as the highlight of your rotation. High marks for Hellcaller overall.
Soul Harvester
The tree has a good theme but feels noticeably weaker than Hellcaller. Chaining together a bunch of Malefic Raptures during the Shadow of Death window feels fun, but the actual damage of the demonic soul in cleave and AoE isn’t as impactful as it looks like it should be. Quietus alone doesn’t do enough to make Nightfall procs feel good in multi-target.
In single target, Soul Harvester has annoying anti-synergy with Oblivion. Shadow of Death asks you to bank soul shards for your Soul Rot window, but shard generation is so low and random in ST that spending even two of them on Oblivion can cause you to go into your next window short on shards. If Oblivion comes off of CD just before or during Soul Rot, there’s no good time to press it - shards and GCDs both have a high opportunity cost in that window, and Oblivion depletes you of both. Oblivion needs to somehow benefit from the same bonuses that Rapture does.
Spirited Away is a fun idea. I think its graphic should be made different from that of regular Burning Rush.
Just bubbling this up as I couldn’t have said it better. I’ll also add that along with shard generation being slow and random, getting the Demonic Soul proc itself is a chance on SS generation.
This tree has arguably the coolest theme, but the only real use for Affliction is exactly as OP said: Don’t take Oblivion (impossible if you PvP btw), don’t cast any Ruptures for a minute or two, then cast Soul Rot and get some extra burst.
Would really like to see Soul Harvester have a higher proc chance, or at least have the Demonic Soul Rupture proc not consume a SS so this tree feels less clunky
ABOUT SOUL HARVESTER
- Nightfall based effects
From what i have gathered from testing, effects from Soul Harvester who proc based on Nightfall are currently bugged due to one single factor.
They are based to proc and check for nightfall consumption on the hit of shadowbolt, the problem is that nightfall have been coded to be consumed upon the cast of shadowbolt.
Weirdly enough, in TWW the Nightfall buff is being consumed in both moments if you have 2 stacks of Nightfall, one consumed on cast of shadowbolt and one consumed when it hits.
In this situation of having 2 stacks of Nightfall the effects of Soul Harvester tied to it will actually work on the second Nightfall stack consuption (on hit) but not on the first one (on cast consumption)
- Succulent Souls tracking
Succulent Souls visual indicators on the screen are very lacking in the sense that you only are able to perceive them on the Buffs that pop the top-right corner of your screen.
Of course, this will be an issue solved with Weak Auras but i do believe this is no excuse for the total lack of better UI elements to it.
I understand that Succulents Soul buff isn’t actually an real soul shard and maybe adopting in in that part of the UI isn’t the best idea, but maybe some UI element around the center of the screen (like Demonbolt and other have)
- About Succulent Souls Stacks
Currently, Succulent Souls can stack and you can consume more than 1 stack at once with a cast of Soul Shard spender.
But what i don’t understand is what benefit you receive from this, as it clearly does not offer extra damage from demon soul, more shard discount or additional wild imps.
- Feast of Souls
I am very convinced that the Feast of Souls Hero Talent straight out does not work, i have attempting triggering it from quietus on demonology , triggering it from killing enemies and none have managed to work.
About Critical Strike Chance effects.
In one of my initial posts, alongside some bug reports i had reported certain Talents in Destruction and Affliction Talent Trees who are meant to increase Critical Strike Chance apparently did not work.
Some Correction must be made, they, in fact, do work but not in the way i believed to, in some cases this might be intended as if we are to believe the Talent descriptions, in others, i believe its not the case.
Talents like Xalan’s Cruelty and Malediction tooltip does point towards this effect, they are not flat increases to % critical strike chance, but instead, they increase the effectiveness of your current critical strike chance by the given %.
In essence, if you have 20% critical strike chance, a 10% increase in critical strike from all sources will provide you with an additional 2% critical strike increase (a 10% increase from your 20%) and not a an additional 10%.
I think such an effect is fine as is on the Hero Tree in the case of Xalan’s Cruelty, but i have concerns in relation towards the value of such effect on Malediction.
Truth be told i believe Malediction might be too weak of an effect for most part of the expansion where you have a more limited amount of % critical chance, at 2 point invested, with a 20% critical strike chance you would only be receiving a 2% critical strike chance increase to agony, corruption and unstable affliction, even at something like 30% or 40% thats only 3% to 4% additional critical strike chance on 3 of your dots.
But the issue grows worse, armed with this source of knowledge i decided to investigate other critical strike increasing spells who before, i believed to be completely bugged.
Devastation also have this behavior, even tough in its tooltip it implies a flat “5% critical strike chance increase”, the same is also true on the talent Indiscriminate Flame who says your backdraft increase the critical strike chance of the next soul fire or incinerate by 35%.
This means in both effects, a 20% critical strike chance would be providing only 1% and 7% respectively, while the tooltip gives the idea of being a much larger effect.
Further investigation also have pointed me that this is also the case for the [2]p bonus of Affliction and Destruction Tiersets for TWW, even tough, again, the tooltip of them does not imply this " increase in critical strike chance effectiveness" but indicate a more direct flat increase of 10%/20% respectivelly.
While i believe this behavior is intended for the spells with the tooltip description saying “increased critical strike chance from all sources” either the effect is incorrect in the others or the tooltip lacks the required clarification towards this effects.
And in some cases, effects like Devastation and Malediction, if intended to work in said behavior are much weaker and undeserving of the points/position they require and exist within the respective talent trees.
TLDR: I believe the effects of certaint talents/tierset effects who increase critical strike chance are working in a unusual way/incorrect way.
Or the wings from Dark Apotheosis with the horns you’d grow when you reached a certain amount of Demonic Fury.
I want to start this post with saying my main focus of all of this feedback is M+ since that’s been a struggle point for affliction for all of Dragonflight & is the main thing I do with the spec.
I spent every day this week testing as many keys as I could on stream. I played both Hellcaller & Soul Harvester. There are some things I really like with each spec, however there are several bugs that seem to be affecting Soul Harvester that in conjunction with the nerfs this week made it feel really bad outside of Soul Rot. A lot of the main synergy of Soul Harvester doesn’t seem to function at all right now.
I would like to start by saying I think a lot of the changes to the main spec & tree are great. Finally deciding a path for the spec between rapture & seed is great in my opinion. I know people don’t all like rapture as a spender for Affliction but I’m glad we have a clear rotation now. All of Dragonflight we had to decide between Rapture or Seed from pull to pull I think made the spec worse and led to a lot of confusion. The location for most talents, like dark glare being centralized, pet sacrifice being a choice node, no longer having to make a choice between a huge loss in Single target or AoE. All of these are massive in helping affliction, which has been in my opinion without a clear direction since the launch of Dragonflight.
Here are a few thoughts about some of the new talents
- Malevolent Visionary (finally something to make Darkglare feel a bit more like a cooldown, still may be a bit weak but still very welcome)
- Making Shadow Bolt an option again is something I really like as well. I think with as many casts as we already have, being able to proc instant cast Shadow Bolts when having to move feels great. hopefully this stays a competitive choice against drain soul.
- Cunning Cruelty (shadow bolt volley is awesome & feels great)
- Ravenous Afflictions seems like a really awesome talent especially for Soul Harvester but seems to have a really low proc rate to be a meaningful capstone.
- Oblivion making its way into the tree is awesome, however I feel like it’s a bit confusing to play around for me right now but I think that is an interesting option.
However I do have some feedback on the spec as a whole as well as Hellcaller & Soul Harvester.
Overall Affliction Issues
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The setup still feels a bit bloated with casts right now, this may just be an issue with haste & scaling on the beta but in a timed environment like M+ this all adds up. However seed either way seems to be just a spell out of place now. It’s nice to have something to apply corruption to everything especially for hellcaller but when looking at the AoE setup now its something like this
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Seed of Corruption (1.7s cast), Vile Taint (1.3s cast), Haunt (.94s cast), Unstable Affliction (1.3s cast), Soul Rot (1.1s cast), Malevolence (if hellcaller), Then finally start rapturing (1.1s cast) Its so many casts for a setup. I think either some of these should be looked at or considered especially when Vile Taint still has the 13s gap of having to reapply agony before Vile Taint is back off cooldown.
Considering Vile Taint costs a shard, has a cast, over writes curses AND doesn’t even allow us to easily manage agony in a larger pull. It’s a bit ridiculous when something like Shadow Crash exists with low cooldown, instant cast & generates resources for Shadow Priests. I think Seed of Corruption & Vile Taint should be looked at for future pain points of afflictions issues. Seed feels great for applying corruption but seems a bit of an awkward spell now that its not a spender.
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Potentially making Vile Taint instant or increasing Agonys duration when applied by vile taint might really help with this issue. Then the cooldown doesn’t have to be lowered since it does apply an extra dot & 30sec makes it line up better with soul rot.
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Shard generation still feels a bit bad right now, not as bad as retail but still a bit awkward at times after the change to Perpetual Unstability, removal of the 40% agony talent for hellcaller & the nerf to relinquished. I would like to maybe see a bit of an adjustment to relinquished. It doesn’t feel like it has any real impact on shard generation considering its location in the tree now. As well as maybe bringing back the shard generation part of Perpetual Unstabilty.
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Target Swap, now that Soul Swap is gone entirely & with as many casts as we have now, we may be in an even worse spot than before for any type of damage checks similar to totem on last boss of Brackenhide Hallow which is already a problem even with Soul Swap. I would really like to see some option to help with this scenario. Maybe make Soul Swap baseline or something similar to help if those issues happen in this expansion.
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Some of the 2pt talent nodes (malediction,contagion, cull the week) don’t really feel great to take, especially after the change to malediction. It does open us up to take more options in that row but that talent seems a bit dead now.
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I had an issue of some Seeds of Corruption falling off of mobs without detonating, i was only able to see this for sure happen once on stream but I think it happened several times. (https://www.twitch.tv/arsyn/clip/DirtyExpensivePineappleRalpherZ-YbFhkCbMPcUNNTfR)
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Death’s Embrace feels extremely weak for a capstone talent & I personally don’t think it is worth taking at all right now in a M+ scenario especially when compared to some of the other talents you can pick up with that point.
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This is just a bug Drain Soul + Cunning Cruelty makes drain soul reset its cast while channeling & doesn’t proc a shadow bolt volley. I was able to keep a single drain soul cast going for 2:20 on a target dummy.
Soul Harvester is definitely struggling after the nerfs & has some issues that I noticed over the week.
- Quietus doesn’t seem to work at all when nightfall is consumed & playing Feast of Souls, which should be a great help of the spec outside of soul rot cooldowns.
- Nightfall Procs are also being double consumed at 2 stacks & don’t seem to get any bonuses from Soul Harvester talents when using a single stack of nightfall.
- Succulent Soul procs seem to be very low to have any meaningful impact on the spec outside of cooldowns which I think is partially because of the nightfall issues and shard generation.
- Succulent Soul’s are also being double consumed on a single rapture cast in the same way that nightfall is. I don’t think it happened every time but it was very frequent.
- Soul Anathema’s damage after the nerfs feels really low for a hero talent & main focus after the nerfs, granted it’s hard to tell if this would be okay if the rest of the talents were working correctly with nightfall.
- I think other than the better Dark Pact soul harvester utility seems a bit low compared to hellcallers curse of the satyr & dark pact healing. Might be interesting to add something similar to Impending Catastrophe from Shadowlands that applies smart curses when soul rotting may be a bit strong but another utility unique to Soul Harvester would be great.
- Overall Soul Harvester felt extremely weak outside of cooldowns in all keys & just okay in cooldowns after the nerfs. This is probably a combination of the tuning changes & the bugs that seem to be a major issue for the spec. But even despite all of that I really like the feel of this spec & the spell effects. If things were working correctly, I feel like it could be a very solid version of affliction in M+ especially on Tyrannical weeks with it having a bit more flavor around Shadow Bolt / Drain Soul.
Hellcaller is a very fun spec to play right now & I think feels really nice for affliction & has a very smooth playstyle outside of the main issues with base Affliction. Hellcaller actually feels more streamlined into Affliction but with an extra cooldown. It actually seems a bit better to play around since your setup starts faster with Wither doing damage while getting the setup off. And with Absolute Corruption which I feel like is a much more enjoyable playstyle for the spec. The spec also seems to do very solid both single target & AoE without really changing the playstyle. Overall I really enjoyed Hellcaller in keys.
Lastly I want to say I think what the team has already done with Affliction is a great step towards making it much better than it’s been for all of Dragonflight. I hope that we continue to see some more changes before launch of The War Within.
CLASS
It’s concerning that Warlock continues to have some mobility issues in comparison to other ranged classes and specs after some of the talent changes to several other ranged classes in the war within. Although movement is less of a problem in TWW than currently, considering for some odd reason we use spenders even more in TWW than in Dragonflight for destruction and affliction, warlock still has much less movement options than almost every other ranged spec, without any of the benefits of being a slow “tanky” caster.
If the goal is to have everyone have an enormous amount of defensive cooldowns as ranged it eliminates the “niche” that Warlock has had over the years as being a tanky caster that doesn’t need to move out of some mechanics to continue casting (which has been completely irrelevant in higher-end content for years now).
Just rip off the bandaid and give warlock Kil’jaeden’s cunning back in its 5.4 form and allow us to cast filler spells (incinerate, drainsoul/shadowbolt) on the move. It will still give us less mobility than some other ranged specs considering how the tuning for the shard economy has become high for some specs, as well as the design decision to move us away from using fillers as much as we did in the past. At least try to test some new mobility options, instead of always telling us “We can’t do that because of the niche we’ve given warlocks”. Rift is an extremely poor substitute for ranged mobility for destruction. Maybe adding Kil’Jaeden’s Cunning as a capstone in the place of the poorly tuned soul conduit would be a trade-off worth taking.
EDIT: I don’t want to be that guy, but I’ll be him anyway – just look at frostfire mage for how ludicrous any mobility balancing or some modicum of consistency with thematics is out of whack with what feels properly balanced
HERO TALENTS
Hellcaller is so unbelievably a permanent choice for both destruction and affliction that it completely dilutes the possibility of having a decent choice in regard to hero talents for both specs.
Aff
Hellcaller is going to have some incredibly goofy combinations with absolute corruption on multiple raid fights that might need any type of add/boss split cleave. Wither is tuned to the point that makes soul harvester useless in spread cleave, which is the design intent, but makes it harder to use or justify Soul Harvester. Since affliction has mostly failed to live up to its niche of spread cleave for several expansions now, you might have to stack warlocks on fights that are designed with splitting the raid in mind. On the other hand, burst damage will need to be tuned exceptionally high to even compete, especially considering that mass target split cleave (which only boomy/shadow priest can do, and much weaker than wither considering our funnel capability now with cull the weak) and permanent infinite split cleave (only affliction can do this at the moment) is almost an insurmountable niche.
- For example, the penultimate boss on Mythic will have the raid split in two, you can stack aff locks and have absolute corruption on both targets, contributing to funnel damage using cull the weak, while overcoming the mechanic of moving between both groups. Not to mention the number of hero talents that straight-up buff wither’s funnelling capability toward one target.
- Similarly, for pugging, consistent damage is by far the best type of damage in mythic+ considering how tanking and group coordination can vastly change from group to group. Soul Harvester just seems harder to use than Hellcaller, which just hits seed of corruption and does consistent damage, rather than hoping you’re not overlapping cooldowns on packs with your teammates or praying that the tank pulls big with your soul rot window.
- Soul Harvester having no consistent damage equivalent to Hellcaller, while Hellcaller seemingly competes with Soul Harvester’s strong 1m burst profile (Malevolance vs Soul Rot), makes no sense to me. Extra shadowbolts and the amount of succulent souls (which should compete with seeds of demise but actually still loses out on this) do not equal the amount of utility and damage wither provides in the long run. The soul rot burst windows are arguably worse than Malevolance burst windows, even with the previous tuning taken into consideration.
Destruction
Hellcaller having consistent ritual of ruin procs, exceedingly higher shard generation in aoe and multi-target than diabolist, and a 1 minute multiplicative haste amp on top of everything, is insane. It’s a bit absurd to think diabolist in its current form could ever catch up with this type of utility aside from hitting ruination (which we can’t explicitly control) on a large pack in aoe. The only saving grace is to make diabolist have some form of consistent damage to work on par with wither, while also making the class “feel better” through some sort of metric.
- Wither feels incredibly good as an instant cast immolate, especially without needing to face the target you’re casting on. Diabolist aside from the great visuals, has almost nothing of the same calibre, while also requiring more mental bandwidth to play around specific procs.