Including this video as it mirrors much of what I have written about for a while. One thing to note, Kalamazi does make a good point: if cataclysm is buffed to a degree in which it is actually worth it in burst aoe (as the damage is strong, but not enough to overcome the base issues with rain of fire and inferno) it might have some play and improve destro’s mechanical aoe issues.
In other feedback, fel flame won’t be a useful spell to return due to the interactions incinerate has with the spec – casting incinerate on the move continues to be the best choice (or somehow making flashover/triple conflag a thing again). As an example, explosive potential could be triple conflag + cd reduction since roaring blaze is just a permanent pick in all content (because AGAIN buffs to incinerate continue to happen making roaring blaze more important).
I appreciate that people think Nether Portal sucks to play, but i would much prefer it change the rotation rather than just be another button we press in the buildup to Tyrant. 3 minute cooldowns should have a meaningful impact on the rotation, in my opinion.
The problem is that the shard dump phase of Nether Portal is poorly implemented as it stunts Hand of Gul’dan, which in turn reduces the effectiveness of several other nodes throughout the tree. Some additional functionality just needs to be built into the ability, whether that be through passive shard generation, max power Hand of Gul’dans regardless of shards spent, or additional shard gen through Demonbolt and Shadowbolt during the ability.
There are plenty of ways to make the ability feel more engaging and powerful without gutting our imp generation and Hand of Gul’dan interactions. Changing it simply to summon demons for every shard you spend would not be a very good implementation, imo.
That would be a good option in my opinion and I posted a similar suggestion in the ptr section earlier this week. This change at a minimum fixes all the synergy problems with the imp nodes in the tree.
The ultimate win in addition to that would be to make Hand instant during Nether Portal. That would allow us to react more easily to shard procs and not be so heavily impacted by movement. That could go into another node like stolen power or Nerzhuls volition or something.
There really is just not a lot of options for damage specific capstone traits. It’s kind of frustrating. Our specs all function so differently so we really can’t have an in depth talent. Mannoroth’s Fury is a great catch-all AoE talent but we need a comparable ST talent. Blizz doesn’t want us to have Dark Soul because their vision is for us to have a powerful demon as our cooldown and not ourselves, and moving GWD is potentially a dead talent in certain setups which they want to avoid.
I wanted to suggest Grimoire of Servitude but unfortunately since Demo has Grimoire: Felguard in their spec tree and Grimoire of Sacrifice in the Destro and Aff trees and because GrimSac can’t be in the class tree because of Demo, Servitude ultimately has to go back into the spec trees. So it’s not an option.
I think our best choice is Summon: Doomguard. It was historically a cooldown back when all 3 specs could summon a Doomguard for Single Target and Infernal for AoE. It has class flavor and the Doomguard is also currently not utilized by any specific spec and is a gimmick spell that can still remain separate (If they have an issue with us being able to summon two then just make Summon: Doomguard replace Ritual of Doom when selected). And most importantly for Blizzard, it appeases their new rule that the cooldown is not attached to us but is a separate and powerful demon.
Edit: I meant Grimoire of Service instead of Servitude. Service lets us a summon a second temp Imp/Void/Felhunter/Succ/Felguard. Servitude was a permanent Doomguard/Infernal.
I think summon: doomguard is good, and something to be looked at, but it still lacks that oomph of a capstone that interacts with some of our abilities. Doomguard would just be inquisitors gaze, but shoved into the minute or so he would be around.
On the other hand, you are on to something in the vein of grimoire of supremacy that would somehow empower our demons (as much as it pains me, since demon damage is usually not too relevant in high-end content) which would give it some flavour.
I think this is why blizzard is so hesistant to change the ability, 3 minute cooldowns are usually impactful and force the player to change their rotation (to some extent). Perhaps it’s the strict skill-check of pitlord that people are more upset about? Irregardless of the debate of it being a “skill-check” and more of a movement/did I get a mechanic check, trying to fit as many shards into the cast to create a large pitlord is the real problem – netherportal by itself would be relatively ok.
I wonder if anyone has any suggestions as to how to remedy the problem that pitlord causes for netherportal?
Only other thing I can think of is like a new Curse. Something like, Curse of Power: Applies a curse to the target, causing all of your direct spells to replicate onto the same target for 10 seconds. 2 min Cooldown.
Literally Havoc but single target for all specs. It kinda goes back to our class’ roots but
my only issue with it is that it doesn’t really work with Demo since it’s primarily a pet class. At least Aff can use it with an MR dump, but Demo can’t spam demonbolt in a way that doesn’t make the curse feel like an afterthought.
I think it’s nether portal in general that is the issue. Pit lord just causes it to be more egregious because of how much throughput it contributes. I am not sure of the math but i’d imagine that nether portal by itself would demand the player to cast 1 or 2 shard Hands to maximize demon summons at the expense of imp summons.
With that said, dumping shards for pit lord isn’t a skill issue. The issues is that it requires the player to drop the mindset to always cast full power hands in rotation. It also creates a 15 second block where movement is extremely punishing and the inability to react to shard regens has a large impact. The tier set, granting instant hands is a QoL to the NP window, but it isn’t guaranteed.
Ultimately, if they could find a way to fix these 2 issues through additional clauses in base nether portal or by restructuring connecting nodes, the perceived issues with Nether Portal would be resolved while maintaining the changeup in rotation they are after.
Problem 1: Nether Portal stunts the primary spender of the class, Hand of Gul’dan, and all associated nodes.
Fix: Hand of Gul’dan is always cast at max power during Nether Portal, regardless of shards spent.
Problem 2: Movement and the need to react to shard regens through conduit or meteor procs heavily impacts the number of demons summoned and Pit Lord strength.
Fix: Hand of Gul’dan is instant cast during Nether Portal.
After thinking for a little bit as well, what if affliction had a similar mechanic to necrotic plague in WoD?
Creeping death seems to fit the theme to some extent, where whenever agony gains a stack it jumps to a nearby target (8 yds or 10yd). Might help alleviate globals in aoe to some extent? Would also make vile taint much better in large packs.
Nether Portal’s primary problem is that it messes up the warlock’s rotation because you have to cast Hand of Gul’dan after every shard generated instead of for every shard generated. If that was changed then Nether Portal would be a lot more player friendly.
Not sure as I haven’t played it in a while, but I’m pretty sure moving cancels out NP anyway.
Changing a rotation is not a problem in general. Plenty of two to three minute cooldowns change how a spec is played for a brief period and that is healthy in a rotation. The problem with Nether Portal is that it fails to support the change that it forces. Think of the internal for destro. You are chaining more chaos bolts which requires more resource generation, so the infernal resolves that by passively generating soul shards.
Nether Portal forces the demo lock into a shard dump phase which inherently guts our primary spender. The shard dump concept is fine, it’s the anti synergy with hand of Gul’dan that creates the problem.
I am very much in favor of the rotation change that nether portal initiates, but it needs a mechanic to compensate for how hand of guldan functions.
Movement cancels most casts. Thats not really a problem as it’s the period after nether portal is cast where movement is restricted for maximizing pit lord.
I think HoG giving full value during NP dump phases is a feasible solution, however, it’s also intuitive in the sense that nether portal wants you to press HoG every global to dump shards, and assumes that the pets summoned by your cast make up for the loss in imp damage. On the other hand, to re-emphasize my original post: blizzard is keen on tuning base damage modifiers on our kit, and have made imps an extremely high portion of our damage now. That means that there are also tuning implications now that imps make up such a large portion of our damage, losing out on those imps is a serious issue.
Since the ability forces the player to lose out on imps while gaining other minions, it would make sense to have every HoG cast also give us max imps (although this would also give NP a huge buff). At this point, it’s hard to even justify changing the talent as its incredibly difficult to tune the individual demons summoned from the portal, and those are already imbalanced in the first place.
It’s hard to judge, but I still think the spell needs a serious rework in any sense.
Also, it’s I find it ironic that when imps get buffed, nether portal loses value because of us losing out in imps.
Number of Imps summoned would have no impact on Nether Portal, Nerzhuls Volition or pit lord unless some interaction has changed that i am not aware of . The increase would be felt by Reign of tyranny but that talent has multiple easy tuning knobs. Obviously you would be getting some more Imp damage as well.
A complete rework into something else would be welcome too. The ability needs a serious look.
it’s not about NP, it is the loss you get from not having 3 imps every time you cast HoG in the NP window right.
If I’m getting 3 imps per cast typically from my traditional rotation, and in NP I’m only getting 1 imp (on average barring having 2 core procs from power siphon), then you lose out on a large number of imps in the NP window. In that case, with imps being buffed by a large margin in the coming patch, there is some value lost in the imps not being summoned to accomodate the NP rotation. The demon spawned by NP needs to make up for 2 imps lost + 2 shadowbolts.
Another way you could try and solve this factor, is by having NP effect the next X number of hand of gul’dan casts instead of forcing you into a different rotation for that 15s period.
I do understand you are losing some Imp value but you are still getting 2 Imps for a lot of hands, whether through ps in the first np or just having an abundance or core procs for any np windows that follow.
Yea, even if it just buffed a few hands it would be better than nothing. After Tyrant is cast at 5s remaining we are getting a full hand or two with a lucky proc anyway. Needing to react to shard procs after a cast time ability is a problematic interaction as well, in or out of nether portal.
Nether Portal is a good idea for a talent, ripping open a portal and summoning a small army every 3 min is fun. It does need a rework though. Long term I have no clue what they can do to it, but in the short term I would say make the next talent Ner’zhul’s Volition at least a 25%/50% chance so you get more demons and the Pit Lord is stronger and maybe a really large damage shield or reduction so you can plant thru some mechanics and keep casting because movement hurts this talent HARD.
I think tuning NP at this stage would just reinforce its strength. If anything, I’m glad that immutable hatred will see some play in consistent single target damage.
I’m interested to see any/if there are any lock changes in 10.1!
I also thought of something that might make destro aoe a little bit more intuitive:
What if rof was a targetable toggle button? So you’d place it down and it consumed X number of shard bits every second instead of 3 for the full cast.
Still trying to figure out how you would be able to stack multiple rofs if it were changed to this. Is there tech in place to have multiple toggleable abilities up at the same time (or could it just add a stack to an active rof and double the damage)?
Do people care that rof is not the best aoe spender on 3 targets outside of inferno?
EDIT
Does spending 3 shards actually feel impactful once there is mass aoe and you spam rof?
Does rof overtaking the entire rotation in specific mass aoe scenarios feel bad?
Tbh Destro just needs some snap damage to use between infernal cycles, I think that older fire and brimestone (I think it was called that still) where you toggle on and off an aoe conflag / incinerate, would work.
Just remove the current FnB talent, replace with a 2 pt that’s 50% / 100% damage done to surrounding targets in a radius, which applies to conflagrate, incinerate, and shadowburn, with maybe a 30 second CD, lasting maybe 6 seconds, or a 1min CD, lasting 10 seconds.
