Since I can post here now, please refer to this thread:
For some feedback that was given during the closed alpha cycle. The OP has links to changes week to week (but was not dynamically updated to keep feedback relevant from week to week).
Feedback for the start of beta (things to look at)
Destruction
- Capstone talents still need to be looked at, particularly Mark of Ruvaraad, the tuning of soul fire vs dimensional rift (rifts are woefully uncompetitive for the 3rd expansion in a row for pve), Destructive rapidity is massively bugged, and lastly, channel demonfire (CDF) just sucks as an “exciting” capstone.
- Hellcaller Tuning still continues to be a sticking point with no deviation between affliction and destruction. Right now there will still be the issue where destruction will compete with affliction if blackened soul continues to massively prop up spread cleave (especially with passive mayhem cleave). It is both easier, to do spread cleave (less cognitive load) and more efficient, as destruction (see manaforge omega demonhunter fight). Not sure how you fix this without shifting a lot of damage nodes for destruction so that their niches don’t overlap as much? Too much of the damage profile is shifted on to wither (blackened soul) and destruction just has more options to keep blackened soul high with a significantly increased soul shard spend and build rate.
- The loss of decimation just doesn’t feel good, and our alternative options now feel worse than what we had. It doesn’t feel great to go from something that was really awesome, had low barrier to entry, and didn’t add complexity to the rotation, to an objective downgrade of having no variance in our rotation anymore. If you are worried about “complexity” you can an add a visual element to decimation like the old molten core proc looked like back in mists of pandaria:
https://imgur.com/a/VukvKLx
Affliction
- There is a new term being thrown around for affliction now (thanks Motoko) called “Haunt Bombing”. Haunt seems incredibly overloaded, and it’s going to be precarious to tune our apex talent around a single ability having so many different damage modifiers associated with it in both aoe and single target. Curious to see where this leads, considering how fun it is.
- Extending dots hasn’t really been touched upon by dev notes up to this point; is this something that is expected to stay? And if so, how does that factor in to trying to push affliction in a direction that was outlined in the first development notes?
- At the moment, extending dots, as well as the gameplay from both of our hero talents pushing a 1m cycle of pooling has diminished this goal significantly since we can’t really get around both 1m pooling and 2m pooling. Since we’re expected to have roughly 7 shards per minute (+/- 1) in single target, this seems to counteract the intended gameplay specificed in the development notes since we will be pooling close to 80% of our total shards at any given time for an optimal rotation (especially now that we get free UA casts through shard instability). Dark harvest and malevolence are the biggest offenders here, and I’m not sure how to make this “feel” better, and to mesh with the design goals, unless the goals themselves are restated.
- Affliction plays nearly identitical on beta as it does on live (with an added emphasis on haunt bombing now), but the playstyle doesn’t change, nor does it reduce complexity. Arguably, affliction is harder to play in the beta than on live because of the ambiguous nature of when to use Unstable Affliction versus Seed of Corruption.
- Seed goes to 3 targets with sow, but is it really the best damage global at 3+ targets when using other damage-increasing effects? This also doesn’t include Soul Harvester having no mention of seed, and Hellcaller prioritizing damage over time increases rather than direct damage sources like seed. It’s very confusing for newer players now with dual spenders and an uneven amount of talent “weight” put on either ability.
Demonology
Class design is usually very subjective, but I think demonology design coming from last week’s rework has been objectively, a big success in refocusing the summoning fantasy without losing out on some form of skill expression. This does leave a few sticking points moving forward:
- Is the skill cap for tyrant “ramping” still an intended part of the gameplay? Right now, tyrant ramping regardless of haste puts us at 9 imps per tyrant ramp + at least a single cast of dreadstalkers to give us a “max” tyrant. There is the posibility of scaling higher if you are able to fit in a ruination cast in that duration which would bump it up to 12 (free hog + 3 imps). In my opinion, I don’t think this is asking too much from the player, but I would refer to my thoughts on tyrant ramps in general here:
Tyrant Changes
I’m happy that the tyrant skill cap is returning. HOWEVER, this design lives and dies on the frustration factor.
First off, from a theory crafting perspective, The player is always able to fit at least 11 imps into a tyrant cycle (without locked hand of gul’dan at 3 shards) and at 0% haste. There will always be a “goal” of how many imps a player will want to have in their tyrant windows if you design tyrant the way it is now, and how it was in the past. If you were to stand at a dummy, or stand still for 12s prior to casting tyrant, this is always the case, no exceptions. This will change with locked hand of gul’dan though, which might shift it to 12 (unlikely) but might be 9 (TBD).
If you want the player to focus on peaks and valleys once again, it must be always possible to reach that peak. To make an analogy out of this, it can be difficult to reach the top, but I should always get some sort of “payoff” of hitting that peak, and not be close to the top and slide all the way to the bottom of the valley. Previous feedback has pointed this out as “ramp cycles” or “ramping damage” but that skill cap should always persist; the real crux of the issue is whether I am able to empower my tyrant (as in cast it) after my ramping cycle. If I do my ramp, but then am unable to cast my tyrant because of a situation out of my control (poor fight timings, or ability timings in m+) then I should not be extremely punished. This has nothing to do with “planning” my movement, when abilities like this affect us in bleeding-edge content.
There is a pretty obvious way to solve this problem:
- Make tyrant instant cast in pve (or master summoner makes it instant cast and we can choose to alleviate this issue).
This would just allow us to focus the difficulty and skill cap on the “ramp” rather than whether I can hit my tyrant based on external factors.
TLDR: I’d rather have a terrible ramp cycle with some payoff (tyrant at the end), then a fantastic ramp cycle and getting walled from casting tyrant by an external factor that forces me to move (no tyrant cast).
- Our apex talent is clashing with our tyrant ramp, and it’s not exactly clear at this moment if the intended target for us to spawn is 1 or 2 demons. Currently, you’ll only really be able to summon a single greater demon, which imo feels a little underwhelming. I would rather tune the demon spawns to get us to at least two summons so that we get that payoff. Here is my feedback on that:
Apex talent
Kind of a weird talent. It’s contradictory with the rest of what the spec expects the player to do:
- We use all of our demonic core procs to do our tyrant ramp
- We have less resources and cooldowns to facilitate an “after/post” ramp once our tyrant is cast.
- It hyper focuses on us hitting at least 2 greater demon summons to feel good. That would mean with all apex talents talent, that at the bare minimum 1/4 of our globals are hand of gul’dan (6 hand of gul’dans) in 25 seconds. This seems completely unreasonable when accounting for haste values and having a 3 shard hard cap on hand of gul’dan
It doesn’t feel particularly cool to have an apex talent be such a high skill cap talent when our tyrant is already super high skill cap. It makes our rotation super stressful, for nearly 30s (our pre ramp for tyrant, then our “post” ramp for dominion of argus, when the stress should be focused on us building our Tyrant solely.
Couples solutions
- Reduce the amount of hand of gul’dan’s needed to summon greater demons
- Make it summon 2 greater demons baseline passively as a huge payoff for summoning tyrant
- Try to make the apex talent more conducive to a huge payoff for tyrant and refocus the design elsewhere.
- Hero talent balance is particularly poor at the moment where diabolist is just far superior (once again) than soul harvester. There are a couple different main offenders: Tyrant ramping is back which incentivises any increases to tyrant or increasing tyrant’s ability to buff demons (which are a large portion of damage now, specifically dreadstalkers), imp damage coming down with having less imps in tyrant just making the imp bonuses in the soul harvester tree poor, implosion becoming a cd which also disproportionaly impacts soul harvester with implosion-based nodes.
- Finally, soul harvester just feels thematically weak, and honestly really dissapointing for a demonology warlock at the moment. It doesn’t do anything differently than diabolist (same damage profile) and doesn’t really bring a visual flare that is cooler than diabolist – Why would I want to pick this hero talent if it’s nearly worse in every regard? There needs to be some thought put-in to how you can make this differentiate from diabolist, particularly in the damage breakdown department.