So I dusted off the ol’ lock yesterday and the spec talent tree has me scratching my head. I should say I haven’t really played him much since BfA and totally skipped SL, just came back during the elemental storm events to lvl to 60.
The class tree is kinda all over the place but at least it offers decent survivability and there are clear paths to take, it still does nothing to address the long standing problem with mobility but what’s new. The spec tree however is a hot mess.
It feels terrible to have to put 2 points in an objectively bad talent like Flashpoint just because it’s blocking literally everything down the middle of the tree. And there is the whole bottom right side of the tree with Blasphemy. I understand that it was the tier set bonus from the end of SL which explains why it was copy and pasted into the talent tree as a capstone (it’s like that for virtually all specs in the game, sadly) but it does the exact same thing as the bottom left side i.e. Infernal of the tree. The Blasphemy is even a reskinned Infernal except it visually clashes with the rest of spec’s color palette and aesthetic because it’s purple, especially when you have green fire turned on like I do. They really couldn’t come up with a mechanic that wasn’t: spend shards to drop infernals x2?
The one thing I like about the spec tree is Havoc being passive or altogether optional because I never liked it.
Aside from the talent tree mess the spec feels downright terrible to play in ST scenarios without massive amounts of haste, like having a pocket priest or 5 to constantly PI you massive. They need to just reduce the cast time of Chaos Bolt at this point or give us an actually decent haste talent not stuff like Flashpoint or Reverse Entropy.
Again, I arrived at these conclusions after less than an hour of seriously looking at the spec. I don’t understand how a whole development team whose sole job it is to design and balance these specs missed these glaring issues over months and years of work…
Not liking Havoc? Flashpoint being objectively bad? Disliking blasphemy? Reverse Entropy being bad?
This stuff was brought back because of consistent positive feedback.
Sure, Flashpoint feels worse in raid if you can’t get value from it on adds, but I think it’s fine. Maybe make it a >=80% or <= 20% deal so it’s valuable early and late.
Also, the bottom left and bottom right side of the tree do not do the same thing lol I’m not saying the tree is great, as I think Improved Immolate and Scalding Flames need to be looked at. Cataclysm is completely eclipsed now that RoF was buffed while Cata was untouched. CDF needs to be usable while moving.
Our problem is overwhelmingly mobility. I think it’s long overdue to give us a rehash of KJC in the lock class talent tree. Even the WoD version was something like 8 seconds of casting on the move on a 1-min CD.
Yeah, lots of people don’t. I am surprised this is a revelation.
I don’t mind it. Like I said my main issue is that it’s purple and not green, lol. Also it’s redundant because Rain of Chaos does the same thing albeit less reliably.
Flashpoint is absolutely terrible when fighting a boss. It’s fine in an M+ trash setting or fights where you can consistently cheese it with new waves of adds (of which they’re aren’t any besides Eranog and the little spiders on Senn which are already some of the easiest fights in the raid). Reverse Entropy is fine but it’s RNG and not reliable particularly during the biggest pain point of the spec: spamming CBs during the Infernal burst window. The obvious solution there is for CB to get a cast time reduction while your infernal is up or for Conflagrate to have more charges or a lower cooldown.
How is it not the same thing? On the Infernal side Rain of Chaos has a chance to summon an Infernal every time you spend shards. On the Blasphemy side Avatar of Destruction summons a Blasphemy every time you trigger Ritual of Ruin which is done by: spending shards. It’s literally the same thing. If you pick Grand Warlock’s Design it also essentially boils down to the same thing, lowers the cooldown on infernal for every shard spent, so more shards spend more infernals.
It’s an across the board problem with casters and I for one have a hot take on it. Remove the archaic restriction and make all spells castable on the move. Most other MMOs have already reached that same conclusion years ago. In PvE it would be a major QoL improvement and in PvP it would even the odds against melee which have half a dozen gap closers each now.