If you are playing Hellcaller hero talents for Destruction the tooltip for IC should add the following:
[Internal Combustion]
Chaos Bolt consumes up to 5 sec of Wither’s damage over time effect on your target,and up to 5 stacks until one remains,instantly dealing that much damage.
If it were to consume up to 5 stacks of blackened soul it would give a better gameplay loop. If you play internal combustion with hellcaller right now it only consumes the dot portion which goes against the whole philosophy of Wither usage. With a misplay like an extra bolt you can potentially lose a high stacked Wither.
Right now Internal Combustion is never played. But, with a change to how it works with Hellcaller the anti-synergy could be fixed and it would become a fun talent choice node. This hero talent tree could use some love and changing the interaction would make IC a powerful talent for HC builds.
Losing potential uptime on immolate is a minor loss, while losing your Wither with blackened soul stacks is a huge loss. Changing IC to consume stacks would promote the same idea of maintaining wither while allowing you to choose that talent to make chaos bolt more rewarding and meatier. I can see a very fun loop of trying to build stacks and consume them quickly for priority damage. This also wouldn’t effect Diabolist since that node presents the same choice we have had between IC and Reverse Entropy that we have had since bfa. Diabolist also has good modifiers for Chaos Bolt already, and I think Hellcaller could use some love. Let me know what you guys think.
As much as this is a neat idea, this would completely counteract the entire point of having acute wither at 8 stacks, and completely negate blackened soul execute by having your withers be acute sub 20%. The value of blackened soul would inherently decrease with this, and have some other reprecussions of specific break points (in which case you would never chaos bolt at 6 stacks of wither to not incur the penalty of becoming acute and losing IC proccing blackened soul on your next chaos bolt cast).
Typically IC ends up increasing in value once we increase our total stats as the value of immolate / wither is inherently increased, while haste is devalued as a throughput stat the more you gain. At the moment, I think the tuning is fine on it.
OTOH, if you’re worried about skill cap issues, I think having a choice node talent like this one and reverse entropy is alright – not to mention the talent niche is also split. I’m not sure of a solution to the skill cap worries, but I’m not sure this is it.
I appreciate your response. You’ve made some good posts on demonology recently. I’ll respond directly first, and then try to clarify my thoughts.
I’m not trying to change how the acute mechanic functions regardless of your talent choice with that node. Any secondary effects tied to BS should still be activated as if your cb makes it acute instantly and consumes up to 5 of those stacks. In execute you are not spamming chaos bolts as much as relying on shadowburn, so it shouldn’t negate any of that SoTD effect in practice. Having a more interesting decision between bolt and burn is a good thing though.
This is some good insight. However, I disagree that there would ever be a case in normal gameplay. Unless I am misunderstanding, wither becoming acute is a positive thing, aka triggering blackened soul. If you chaos bolt into 6 stacks it would consume down to one stack the same way it would if when it goes acute, just faster and rather frontloaded. Blackened Soul damage would not change and the regular interaction of IC milking extra dot ticks would remain. You will have to elaborate on how you could be in this scenario because I don’t see how it would lead to not wanting to chaos bolt.
The problem is when you are using chaos bolt and IC inside malevolence you can get up past 8 stacks, but losing your dot in that instance feels bad. When you are overcapped and fully hasted/lusted it makes that talent a catastrophe of weaving in a wither every three bolts OR drop wither losing all of your stored up damage. This is quite punishing for an already high maintenance talent point, which can easily lead to a dps loss. With optimal play the choice between RE and IC would not change on paper, but in real world conditions it would not be so brutal to be sitting on a high stacked wither only to internally combust it off yourself, losing all of your BS damage. I’m sure you will agree this scenario is far worse than losing immolate uptime. In the future if IC beats RE & Hellcaller is better than Diabolist it would be a terrible thing to have to play. It is not enjoyable in any way, so it should be addressed.
I think that there should be options to let Chaos Bolt do more burst damage. It is really bad that there’s any broken/useless talents and that’s why we have ended up with cookie cutter specs. Regardless of which option sims better, taking IC with wither presents a huge QoL issue. Currently my Hellcaller RoC and RE talents are both better than the supposed single target options of Crashing Chaos and IC. There really shouldn’t be talents that actively fight against your rotation to the point where they are unplayable.
Yeah… I kinda flubbed this one. I was thinking in my mind about situations where you somehow got to 6-7 stacks in an aoe setting (even though I guess you would never use IC in aoe) and hit rof/cb and it rolled over to 8 but then instantly ate the stacks before going acute. I guess the only situation where this would potentially lose some value is in mass target aoe where you might get extremely lucky with random procs increasing wither stacks.
I see your point about it being essentially a way trigger with to become acute, that makes sense. I’d be curious how the sim would handle it, and where it would consider it not a dps increase (because atm it seems damage neutral on the blackened soul end unless the niche is to be specifically burst oriented).
Ah there it is. Ya, you are right in this sense. I think, if anything, destro needs a bigger look at our resource allocation and how much our spenders hit for – lots of classes atm have issues with spenders being weak and we’re one of them. I wonder if this idea would be a decent stop-gap measure, but I’m not convinced that blizz would do it (even though your post is well thought out).
With this change you could trigger IC to fully realize your stacks in some way so there is potential for sniping out your blackened souls with a chaos bolt.
Simwise, my feels are that this would only be a small optimization, and used when the mob is going to die before stacks get realized. In our execute havoc window I could see us being rewarded for getting more bolts, having a way to essentially dump out stacks built up from fiendish cruelty although it will happen naturally anyway when you spend RoR. You naturally prioritize those free bolts anyway. I honestly hate playing IC but I’m sure there are optimizations it could preform especially since it works weirdly with the calculation on hit instead of cast. In real life situations the main issue is the QoL potentially losing your top damage spell if you take an overly punishing talent combination. And of course it is a skill issue, but on paper this shouldn’t change much since those stacks would eventually tick down. However it’s pretty terrible to lose damage you earned building stacks because you made a small error. Standing at different distances can throw off your IC timing and it’s already a harder talent to play without the potential of losing stacks. It keeps it rewarding to maintain your high stacked wither dot, but with less room for error when you have high stacks but it hasn’t had a chance to collapse.
If the tuning knob is going to be mostly centered around hero talents, helping IC synergize better would allow them to keep it dialed on blackened soul damage. Directly buffing chaos bolt seems to cause a ripple effect, but having it centered around a currently weak option helps the damage profile on the lowest end. I do not like the design of being forced to switch to Diabolist for ST, when HC is still a lot of fun. Realistically Diabolist is stronger for most content, and if you only wanted to play that one you would be fine. Hellcaller is the dream funnel profile, and just suffers from a huge slump when you are only able to wither a single mob. For example in silken court when it’s a single boss, and coincidentally that’s when you need to find a way to keep damage rolling. Once you get to cleave or adds pop up you are immediately swimming in shards and loving life. M+ also has this issue where it feels great until there’s only one target.
The other thing I’m almost scared to mention is that HC destro is the meta pvp pick. Right now there’s no counterplay to having your withers dispelled. Haste is also as powerful as ever in pvp, so revamping IC would bring an interesting decision to deal with your burst. Malevolence into IC bolts is a higher skill ceiling choice than a random but overpowered haste proc like RE.
