Destro ramp is a combination of things, some of which are temporary:
Rain of Chaos (takes time to get procs)
Spymasters (no burst on-use until 4+ mins)
Ascension (this embellish further favors ramp)
Sacbrood (this also takes awhile to ramp up)
Rain of Fire needs to be stacked in one location to do any meaningful damage
For Diabolist, the demon cycling is slowed in AoE so it takes even longer to get to payoffs like Fel Lord slam or Ruination.
The current embellishment and trinket power heavily leans towards ramping/delayed damage. Even if you look at a fight like Sikran, when you’re lusting on pull, Destro doesn’t typically peak until about 26-28 seconds into the fight. If you look at most other specs, you’ll often see either an 11-12 second peak or a 16-18 second peak.
It’s super dumb that Demonology is supposed to be the master of demons but it has LESS demon utility than the other two specs because you’re railroaded into a Felguard. BM gets a second pet to set it apart from the other 2 specs and I think doing the same thing to demo is the right idea. A second pet is a genius idea, giving us the felguard as a primary pet who’s doing ~10-15% of your overall damage and a 2nd pet that you can change for utility and is only doing ~3% ST similar to the existing pets for aff and destro solves the issue and enhances class/spec fantasy.
The hunter second pet dpesn’t their abilities, if they implement like that with DEMO you would have a felguard and a succubus and not use the succubus ability at all, you would not like that would you? yeah hunters don’t either
His name was Xelnath. But he pissed off all the other developers for calling them out on their BS publicly so they fired him and then did absolutely everything in their power to piss all over his legacy.
IIRC the mage dev is over us now.
That should explain a lot to you.
Also, magni in with the good ideas again. I like that RoF idea.
We’re still paying for dragonflights sins of having all (hyperbole, but a very high amount) of damage tied to our cooldowns. Particularly demo.
They told us that style of peaks and valleys was bad, so they crushed our cooldowns to try and give us a more level damage stream.
Now other classes have been cooldowns that do impactful things to their output - ret bursts literally every 30s - but our cooldowns remain relatively impotent. And its really showing.
That’s a lot of damage? Optimistically you just wrote out a rotation where we do less than 1 million dps with the numbers we’re currently seeing. We don’t see a big spike in our damage from infernal until the shard gen really comes online, shadowbolt/incinerate feels AWFUL to press as it does 1/6-1/8th the damage of Chaos Bolt/Shadowburn, and those two chaos bolts are likely going to be 2-2.5 second cast right out the gate. Lust on pull as a warlock is kind of a nightmare
Our damage doesn’t ramp until we hit that lucky streak of free chaos bolt, diabolic ritual giving us free chaos equivalents/shard gen, and there possibly being multiple infernals + an overfiend up so we can just perma lob chaos bolts.
Destro currently doesn’t really have an insane DPS cooldown. Infernal doesn’t really factor into our damage at all - at least not the AoE from the minion summon itself.
You basically agree with the poster with your sentiment "Yeah, the meta right now is basically “any class with overpowered CDs on a short cooldown that they can use 1-2 times every pull.”
That’s correct, classes WELL DESIGNED for the current content they are pushing are highly valued in that content. Our class is an anachronism relative to many of the reworks other classes have received. We lack the juicy chaos bolts of old. We aren’t allowed to play the turret we’re currently designed to play. We weren’t given any absurd buttons to press with any of our hero talents. It’s almost like we’re stuck in a rock paper scissors mindset where they’re reluctant to just lean into pulling the lever that buffs us because those buffs would need to be enormous to overcome our shortcomings. It would be bad from their perspective for the mushroom class to once again be on top of the meters and meta for all content because of its damage… because that’s literally all we bring into the equation.
An 8% dps buff when you’re bottom tier isn’t enormous btw. I doubt it will move the needle much on class sentiment in the M+ setting. I also doubt raids will be filled with warlocks either.
In the time it takes to cast 6 spells, Aff will have done about 200k dps since you will have just finished stacking your dots and not even begun to Rapture. Demo will have just gotten off a handful of Shadow Bolts and maybe let the dogs out and not be much higher at that point. These are specs with actual ramp up time.
Meanwhile, like you said, Destro is at about 1 million at this point.
Yes, Destro still needs buffs, but 6 spells in, we have still cashed all our checks for their full value so to speak. None of those spells (other than the SF for Immolate and the first Shadowburn will have missed -5% due to lack of Eradication) will be doing more damage later than they did on the spot - Destro is a very low “ramp-up time” spec.
When you compare bad to bad you may come to the conclusion something is good or ok.
My point is that, relative to every other class, that’s not a lot of damage and clearly not the “peak” of the damage curve for destro either. Demo and affliction are both bad at the start and BAD compared to other class performances. Yes, Destro is marginally better than these specs (not even mathematically).
What is your point? It seems like you have none other than to be contrarian… but then agree in the same breath?
You’re also ignoring the literal ramp up I described in my post. Infernal is not an immediate dps cooldown. Demonic ritual is not an immediate thing. Ritual of ruin is not an immediate effect. Lusting on pull is a detriment to destruction implying there is in fact some kind of “ramp up”.
If you think we’re about to be in a “good spot” tomorrow you may also be happy with the application of a Band Aid to a gash.
My point is Destro seems to be continually misdiagnosed as a spec with high ramp up in a thread where we are literally talking about wishing a dev understood warlocks.
It seems clear to me, more than just the Devs don’t really understand warlocks either - yourself most of all.
Yes, buff our overall throughput. That needed love. With tomorrows changes, I think we’re going to be in a pretty good spot. Our “ramp-up” or “upfront damage” is fine though and always has been.
I think this is more you adhering to the belief it isn’t a spec with ramp because you’re comparing it to two other specs from the same class with potentially more ramp up but undoubtedly more ramp than the majority of other specs in the game that have those 30 second cd buttons you were previously talking about? Honestly, as soul harvester in any kind of AoE setting, the ramp is much lower than destro.
Taint, seed, UA (idek if you would?), soul rot, into malefic rapture spam. I think cast time wise, that’s lower than the rotation you described for destro. Also RoF would take us to 0 shards if we’re specced cata, so enjoy those 5-6 incinerates as you work toward your next weak AoE spender? And i wouldn’t even say that 2nd spender would get us close to actually being “ramped up” in the AoE scenario i’m describing. It would easily be another 5-10 seconds before the AoE damage became remotely significant.
The first pull of necrotic wake is a great example of this. Doesn’t matter how hard I game. I am ALWAYS dead last, even behind tanks sometimes, due to how bad our AoE is out the gate. That’s with me using infernal to try and get some kind of momentum there even (which is a bad move). I honestly can’t think of a class that has ever been below me on that first pull.
I don’t know if you don’t multi-class but I think a lot of what you’re arguing for would be remedied by just playing a mage, hunter, FDK, etc. for a few hours.
I don’t see this at all - with Aff, you need Seed + Vile Taint + UA + Soul Rot + Dark Glare, and even then, you won’t see actual damage until you begin Rapturing. Destro, you can just Cata + Infernal + CDF and your meters explode.
I do multiclass and it is stupid how much easier it was to do damage on some of my classes vs. Warlock. No arguement there, but it’s more about how fast cooldowns that do way too much damage come back on other classes vs. Destro being slow out of the gate when all cooldowns are up, all things considered.
That said, tomorrow, Destro is getting a 6-8% buff - I do believe it will be very significant and make our issues sting a whole lot less.
Similar to the Demonology ones. Too many hard casts in a mobility obsessed end-game. You essentially set up your dots and then spam Malefic rapture anywhere from five-ten times depending on your procs. Most of those will be hard casts.
I agree, it will lessen the sting but I don’t suddenly expect to get invited to any 11/12s i’m not hosting myself. I also don’t expect the meter in raid to be upended.
What we need is an honest to god class rework instead of the low effort hero talents with insane numbers to justify their simplicity that we got. It was a lipstick on a pig moment and the first few nerfs just completely removed all the lipstick.
This is always the key to any discussion with buffs and nerfs. If you didn’t see the rediculous exchange I had in the other thread with a couple people, obviously some people disagree with my rather “mild” sentiment on how blizzard handles buffing classes (I was relatively close to how in my prediction of how much they would be us by, but they hit destro slightly more than I thought).
I saw on reddit, I think, where somebody said blizzard buffs with a feather but nerfs with a hammer, I think that’s a valid statement – particularly with tuning patches and not content patches (anything hotfix related).
Otoh, I don’t think this buff will shift the meta, but meta defining classes are so extremely rigid in todays game that unless you’re being brought in the top comps in m+, people see your class as worthless which is just absolutely rediculous. I’m convinced that if they give locks easily accessible curses we’d have slightly more m+ utility, but there’s a 0% chance we’d even still be meta with how enhance and dk are performing right now + utility.
anyway, long story short, these buffs should significantly move the needle for destro and demo and definitely put is close to “very good” in raid which I’m happy with. It won’t make us meta, but lock will never be meta in m+ or have people clamoring to take us unless we have some form of utility.
Oh, and btw, 8% actually is an enormous buff for any spec in any hotfix tuning notes. Even with the 6% buff earlier this tier, destro saw a humungous uplift in participation rates and success in early progression. I’m curious to see how this swings as the raid buff slowly ramps, and progression tapers off for hall of fame. I wouldn’t be shocked if affliction continues to be on their buff radar when they revisit tuning 2 weeks from now.
While I appreciate the buffs, I really would like to have seen Shadowburn and Cataclysm given some direct % buffs as well (even if that meant incinerate and conflag received smaller buffs). There’s a good chance we start using CDF in single target again after tomorrow and it feels like every time we get an instant cast spell for destro, something comes along with tuning and makes it inferior. Dimensional rift is still underwhelming and I’d rather not see Shadowburn slip away. Furthermore, it looks like Crashing Chaos will pull ahead of Rain of Chaos now too, but I’m a bit more indifferent on that. The CB tuning without matching SB tuning made this expected.
Also, for those elated we are getting roughly an 11% AoE buff tomorrow, let’s not forget between the anniversary patch (roughly a 10% AoE nerf for Diabolist) + Flames of Xoroth bugfix (~2%+ AoE nerf for Diabolist), we have lost in the last 2-3 weeks as much as we are regaining here. I’m glad to get improvements but I’m skeptical.
I wish they’d revert the Diabolist change. Their intended goal was to stop players from spamming Rain of Fire in ST situations, but that was already not a thing after the cascade of Soul Shard generation nerfs in previous tuning patches. They also clearly didn’t intend to nerf Destruction AOE or they wouldn’t be emergency buffing Rain of Fire to compensate. But more than that, this just makes Diabolist feel less fun and more watered down for Destruction vs Demonology with the slower cycling of demons, a weaker Infernal Bolt, and a very undertuned talent in Gloom of Nathreza.
I saw someone suggest we should be able to Soulburn curses, making them AoE.
On a first glance it doesn’t sound gamebreaking or overpowered, but then again, Curse of the Satyr is a thing.
What do you think of that idea? Would it need a target cap? I.e Soulburn spreads curses to 4 other targets or whatever. Or would putting tongues and weakness on everything be balanced? Maybe if it had a relatively short duration?