FEEDBACK: Warlocks (Midnight)

[Magniwl-zuljin]

@Linxy

WARLOCK

• Hero Talents
  • Developers’ notes: Please note that these new Hero Talents are not yet implemented but will be in a future Alpha build. We’re adding these as tooltips for now to get early feedback, let us know your thoughts!
  • Diabolist
    • New Talent: Diabolic Oculi – You summon a Diabolic Oculus, up to 3, each time the duration of Diabolic Ritual is reduced by one of your spells. Diabolic Oculi explode when consuming Demonic Art, dealing Fire damage to all enemies within 8 yards of the target. Damage reduced beyond 8 targets.
    • New Talent: Looks That Kill – Your Diabolic Oculi now cast Diabolic Gaze at your primary’s target every 1 second while active.
    • New Talent: Mind’s Eyes – Your Diabolic Oculi observe the battlefield and collect information that is imparted to you upon being exploded, each Diabolic Oculi increasing your Intellect by 2% for 10 seconds.
  • Hellcaller
    • New Talent: Wrath of the Wildshaper – Increases the damage of Unstable Affliction by 4% and Seed of Corruption by 4%. This effect is doubled while Malevolence is active.
    • New Talent: Devil Fruit – Periodic damage dealt by Wither has a chance to grant Malevolence for 8 seconds.
    • New Talent: Thorngrin’s Iniquity – Malevolence grants an additional 4% Haste and when cast increases the stack count of active Withers by an additional 2 stacks.
  • Soul Harvester
    • New Talent: Manifested Avarice – Each Succulent Soul consumed has an increasing chance to unleash the Demonic Soul within you, enabling it to assault your enemies for 9 seconds.
    • New Talent: Soul Swipe – Strikes nearby enemies with a malevolent claw, dealing Shadow damage to its target and Shadow damage to other enemies in 10 yards.
    • New Talent: Shared Vessel – Increases your Mastery by 4%. This effect is doubled while the demonic entity is aiding you in combat.
    • New Talent: Eternal Hunger – Increases the duration of Manifested Avarice by 5 seconds and increases the damage of Soul Swipe by 10%.
    • Affliction
      • Demonic Soul has been redesigned – A demonic entity now inhabits your soul, allowing you to detect if a Soul Shard has a Succulent Soul when it’s generated. A Succulent Soul empowers your next Unstable Affliction, causing the target to take 5% increased damage from your Unstable Affliction for 8 seconds and unleashing your demonic soul to deal Shadow damage to each target suffering from your Corruption.
      • Shadow of Death has been redesigned – Your Dark Harvest spell is empowered by the demonic entity within you, causing it to grant 1 Soul Shard that each contain a Succulent Soul every 1 second while channeled.

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

Initial impressions:

Hellcaller:

Good.

1. Depends on how exactly the proc functions in regard to the rest of the kit synergy. If this is hasted ppm, it will feel good. If it is not hasted ppm, and is not based on an ICD, it will be an RNG fest. I’m not sure how to make this feel impactful without fully explaining the RNG system you guys will be implementing to avoid us having any issues with there being significant pull variance. My biggest worry is that this will be like the problems with enhance and ele having a major CD (Malev is major) have a random proc. This could also swing us to be more like current hunter (which is overly reliant on “casino” RNG).
2. Destruction needs serious iteration with Hellcaller still, since the problem with blackened soul having any differentiation between the two specs has caused it to be an overbearing part of destruction’s kit.
3. Seeds of their demise has not been changed to adjust for new affliction. It still procs tormented crescendo (which is gone). This tree is still half-functional for affliction and is missing key components.

Diabolist:

Good and Bad. It was already good this tier, curious to see how they tune this to be less impactful

1. These talents cause a lot of issues, particularly with destruction becoming very complex to get the most DPS out of your rotation. Right now, the highest performers in Manaforge Omega can “clip” the end of demonic art, triggering a new demonic art while also proccing the tier set, allowing you to have more uptime on the intellect buff, and also having much more uptime on demonic art in general. This turns into an incredibly high skill-capped minigame that doesn’t mesh with design goals.

• EDIT: Somebody in discord also mentioned this could be fixed if you allow for diabolic ritual to “rollover” when you use an ability that would reduce the timer on diabolic ritual (in essence if you were to cast chaos bolt with 1s left on the ritual, it would activate your next spender to summon a demon, while also starting the cycle for your next demon instantly instead of only activating your next demon spawn). This would eliminate the ability to allow people to “clip” the end of your diabolic ritual (if your cast hits as close to 0 it does the function mentioned above). For instance, you could have the buff to spawn a pitlord up, while also having a ritual ticking down for your next felguard.

2. Solution: I think this just needs to be dumbed down to not be a trackable buff and just activate at X value whenever you spend a demonic art, so that there is less friction. The pressure put on the player to keep 3 stacks is high, and is directly related to movement in combat. There also needs to be some debugging and work done to not allow players to clip demonic art cycles.
3. Eye beams are kinda cool I guess?

Soul Harvester:

Bad. Affliction in general, in relation to hero talents, is a mess on the alpha at the moment, but it has good potential.

1. Affliction is still completely unplayable with Soul Harvester, particularly with the issue where our shard spender has a hard cap and we can generate significantly more shards than the cap in our burst windows. This problem just got exacerbated with these additions to soul harvester. More resource generation is not what we need. If soul harvester wants to go the route of pseudo-summoner / buffing our spenders, there needs to be more emphasis on buffing our shard spenders and less on increasing the amount of spenders we use.
2. Affliction still has a ton of issues with determining when to hit seed of corruption, vs when to spread unstable affliction to multiple enemies. With Soul Harvester having no links to seed of corruption, this is incredibly difficult to determine now with the AOE component of Soul Swipe.
3. Affliction still has major resource issues in general, and dark harvest directly impacts the likelihood that we cannot spend past our cap of 5 unstable affliction stacks.
4. There are 0 improvements to demonology, and this hero tree still is incredibly bland, unimpactful, and frankly disappointing as a demonology warlock – see my first point. I Would much rather a complete overhaul than the current design direction.