PVE General Warlock Feedback

Classes Warlock
1

Final PVE Feedback Post of this Beta Cycle

This is a cross-post from the beta forums.

General Feedback

  1. Our class tree feels really restrictive still, and soul conduit isn’t exactly a super rewarding or “feel good node” as a capstone. Similarly, drain life sucks straight up, and should never be used atm, any talents attached to that spell feel horrible (Accrued vitality). There are too many absolutely mandatory nodes. On the other hand, pathing is actually really good, and makes sense.
  2. Movement still absolutely blows. Having Drain Soul be so tied to Soul Harvester makes me just want to be able to cast it while moving. Destruction just feels terrible in its current movement economy. It’s not even close to comparable to any other spec in the game and it shows.
  3. Our defensive situation seems incredible as soul harvester, but really average elsewhere. Gorebound fortitude and friends in dark places are absurd compared to any other node in any of our trees.
  4. There are too many useful nodes in the class tree that are being gated behind mandatory defensive nodes such as HP increases.

Affliction

  1. Playing affliction now on live feels fantastic. Great job, you guys knocked it out of the park, especially with soul harvester. The rotation feels really smooth, and almost like I’m getting barely too many nightfalls.

  2. Hellcaller has a great split target niche, although I think it’s a bit dissapointing it most likely won’t see play on single target unless there are fights where you can abuse absolute corruption.

Destruction

  1. Destruction is extremely hit or miss to me. I hate how reliant it is on being still, and how reliant it is in aoe on tanks being super diligent with their movement. It’s one, if not the only spec I play where my aoe isn’t necessarily in my control, and the tank is 50% of whether my damage is great (rain of fire placement).

  2. Movement for destruction is its bane, even with the buff to shadowburn. It feels horrible having to move from anything, and not being able to do any meaningful damage on the move.

  3. Havoc still feels undercooked, and the entire rift row feels completely useless. Havoc in particular is bad when our spenders aren’t hitting extremely hard, and so far, that’s the case.

4. The two hero talents are balanced with one another, but hellcaller still feels a bit “off” I guess for destruction to me, I’m not entirely sure what’s missing, but I think it has to do with spenders being so prevalent as destruction, that chaos bolt feels better as diabolist.

5. Tuning is always flexible, but destruction is extremely below par both in between classes and within class. It’s so far below our other warlock specs that you would simply never play the spec in any meaningful content, or you feel pretty worthless. It has also lost it’s mass target aoe niche to affliction, further diluting its balance between warlock specs. At the moment, pre-buffs or tuning, destruction imo is the worst single spec in the entire game, and it will not be close in raid.

Demonology

1. Same with destruction, it feels incredibly tied to tanks to do decent aoe, while also suffering significantly from movement.

  1. Diabolist is fantastic and extremely thematic, and soul harvester has an incredibly strong base that’s fun to play. Hero talents are a huge win here.

  2. The Doom row still feels undercooked, especially “Doom Eternal” which is essentially never worth taking at the moment. The “passive” side of the last gate (immutable hatred) is also just completely worthless for any player that expects to do decent damage in high-end content. Currently, vilefiend is completely mandatory, and it adds another element to track for newer players and also impacts our movement capability.

  3. Grimoire Felgaurd is just terrible now, and demonic strength is now a DPS loss in a single target due to our tier set, which is counterintuitive.

EDIT: 9/28/2024

  • Just added some strikethroughs for points that were taken care of or have changed since I originally posted this feedback.
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Thanks for your time and effort in this post. I just started my path as a destro lock in TWW. So I can only say that I hope some aspects clear up as content is released.

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I’m surprised you didn’t mention how much the nerf to Fiendish Stride makes Burning Rush really hurt.

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Yeah. Demo has a lot of casting going on currently. I would of felt that at least with all this casting we should be trucking when we get those cast off but it sorta feels like a different form of a sustainable dots now.

Honestly it feels like either vilefiend or maybe tyrant need a shorter cast time. Especially that no we are being tuned with getting shadowbolt cast off during the damage high sustain part.

I do love the visual fantasy behind Diabolist though.

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Good point!

I think this is an interesting one, particularly with the 50% DR from Dragonflight being a little too good. I’m not sure TWW version is the best solution, but it does feel pretty bad, especially with many of the slow classes (paladin + dk) getting huge movement boosts in their hero trees.

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This too. It feels like really trying to make everything for us to slow down our speed but we’re not getting any great benefits out of it. Actually everything for warlocks feels slow mobility and casting alike in dungeons.

Also blizz gives us back the ability to have full soul shards when casting tyrant. Trying to build back up after we set it up feels really damn aggravating.

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That’s what I don’t understand. They def. buff mobility for other specs but requires us to be slow and have to cast so much where the benefits to all of this because it for sure doesn’t warrant this.

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I would hard disagree about destruction, I play destruction, diabilsit and it’s amazing honestly, I never not been the top single target dps, and if we have a good tank, I can pull some sick numbers.

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I’m sure your dungeon run is enough data to compare to magni’s (and everyone else’s) extensive beta endgame testing.

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This may have been my fault, but I’ll clarify in the response here:

I play at the top 40+ world rankings on mythic, so my view point is super narrow on what I would consider “viable” or “terrible”.

It makes sense during heroic dungeons etc. that all specs feel relatively good from the anecdotal experience of the vast majority of players playing the spec. I think the destruction retooling has been great so far, and the increase in talent points we’re able to allocate has been much better.

However,

Destruction/fire mage/devestation evoker are demonstrably poor in their tuning currently. In all honesty, destruction suffers even more due to the fact that tuning often relies on overall throughput outside of real-life circumstances, without movement taken into consideration. As the most affected ranged in the game with movement, I would not be surprised if you see multiple tuning passes that hit destruction in the next few weeks because of how bad it will be for mythic raiding this coming season.

Unsurprisingly, the first buff was announced today. Ironically enough, this is the 4th expansion in a row where destruction has seen a buff in the first tuning pass. My assumption is that the next 2 tuning passes will have destruction buffs at the least to bring it up to par.

as I’ve said for months in the beta forums, Destruction has been the most feast and famine spec in the game for about a decade now, and has severe issues with the tuning of its spenders in contrast to its builders. This will not be different in TWW. You will either be overpowered, or underpowered, while being tied to extremely niche dps scenarios. Gone are the days of destruction being an easy jack-of-all-trades spec.

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See this is my point, everyone plays your spec due to you saying oh I am in a 1%< raiding guild and blah blah(no hate at all, you are good don’t get me wrong and I’m sure you have a ton of data to back this up) but as a heroic and mythic+ person dps feels fine, nothing lives long enough to matter. I wish others would play what they enjoy vs what the 1% says is better. Honestly honored you replied to my thread! I would love to see you in action in a mythic plus to test my might against ya. I hope you have a good Labor Day weekend! Enjoy

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(sorry novel incoming)

Yep, you’re right to some extent. The difference nowadays is that there is significant data to back up the meta while also having multiple players who play the game a lot, understand the fundamental mechanics of each spec, and can give a lot of feedback on it.

Playing what you want to play is fine for the vast majority of people. But you can’t complain that destruction sucks, or the ret paladin/xyz class blows you out of the water in dungeons, and then also have affliction/demo as options that beat your destruction damage and get you closer to par. Similarly, the people who end up being most adversely affected are the players in the sub +10 category who are subject to meta-game toxicity and people only inviting meta classes. The downside, is that the only place to turn to blame when you get declined as an “off-meta” spec, are the people that determine the meta.

This isn’t pointed at you but at the feedback process in general, especially the huge split between the 0.1% and the rest of the player base.

Back on the topic of destruction, I think it’s not particularly helpful to say, “I play what I want, and from my experience, destruction performs fine,” when in reality, when skill level is equal the difference is clearly noticeable. In groups that end up having extreme skill variance (low-level pugs/heroic raiding guilds in general), damage is most likely a factor of skill. I guarantee you, you could play the worst dps spec in the game in a group with high skill variance but are a relatively skilled player, you will end up finding that the “bad spec” is somehow good in a particular group. This is where Blizzard has a tough job of finding a balance between pure numbers and ease of access, etc.

Obviously, this is a game, so nothing is taken too seriously, but as somebody who’s done multiple dozens of hours of testing on beta and has played this game for a while at the bleeding edge, it’s rather frustrating when people give anecdotal experience or blame the 1% for creating the meta when it’s usually evidence-based feedback. Again, this is purely based on numerical tuning from a perspective of “there always needs to be somebody at the bottom”. I will admit, there are more bad actors at the 0.1% that don’t understand game design than there are people able to give decent feedback, but I’m still unsure of whether this truly impacts anything as much as people think.

My issue is that destruction has notoriously been the worst lock spec numerically for the past decade starting an expansion. This isn’t conjecture, there are literally hard facts to back this up, with dozens of hotfix tuning history that highlights the poor tuning for destruction. I understand developer and design turnover, but c’mon, guys, at least learn from past mistakes and shake up the meta a bit. I’m at least happy that I won’t have to play Demonology from a purely numerical standpoint for the fifth tier in a row.

Unrelated, but destruction is also one of a handful of specs that hasn’t been fundamentally changed in the past 10-15 years. I recently played Cataclysm Classic, and it literally plays the same way. If you’re not going to update class or spec mechanics, it better be a fully functioning jack-of-all-trades spec that can perform dead on average with little skill required (see Frost mage + BM Hunter). Destruction is a huge trap for noobs since it’s one of the more difficult lock specs to perform well with, at least outside of pure aoe.

If Destro was built like frost mage/bm

  1. Rain of fire would be a debuff applied to a target that slowly drained your soul shards, but followed your target around instead of being a placed ability.
  2. Cataclysm would have a lower cooldown, and serve as purely an aoe immolate.
  3. Fire and Brimstone would be a lot more of your passive cleave damage. Think hitting multi-shot/splitting ice
  4. You wouldn’t have to choose between chaos bolting in single target vs rof in multi-target.
  5. Havoc would be your main multi-target “cd” where you do significant burst to multiple targets when it is up.
  6. Less button bloat (rift is no longer a used ability, and is passively procced for instance)
  7. Movement is not as crippling (multiple ways to do this).
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Wouldn’t this tier be the 6th Demo tier in a row if you’re talking starting TWW?
SoD, Sepulcher (Destro scaled super well but was not the prog spec), Voti, Aberrus, and Amir. Idk if you skipped a tier though.

Feels like Destruction is constantly on the backburner tier after tier and only really shows its face sometimes in mass AoE mythic plus. Even the old 2-target niche we had has been beaten into the dirt over and over. 12 second Havoc on a 30 second cooldown that only mirrors 60% damage and doesn’t even interact with things like Ruination or Infernal Bolt. We lost our Mastery DR going into Dragonflight as well.

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I think all your feedback is spot on. I’d definitely kill for a reduced Cataclysm CD for hellcaller – was definitely disappointed that the talent for Hellcaller interacting with Cata was removed.

I do think an underrated design quandary which Destro has is the existence of Havoc itself. As long as it exists on a relatively short CD (anything with greater than 10-15% uptime), it will practically always neuter Destro’s single target as a balancing consequence. After all, if Destro’s ST is even remotely competitive it becomes overwhelmingly powerful on 2-3 targets. Frost Mage suffered with that problem via splitting ice for a long time until they shifted the damage window away from ice lance (though now it’s slightly shifted back with Splinterstorm IL spam). I’d say nixxing Havoc is a key part of modernizing Destro, especially as you can then lean into more thematically appealing avenues like F&B anyway.

Though I personally disagree with button bloat being an issue – for most of DF it was, what, 4? it’s in a better range now as far as active rotation is concerned – that’s just subjective taste. Everything else is spot for modernization goals.

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Good catch! I decided not to raid in Amirdrassil.

Yep! I think for me, the big thing is that a lot of the extra buttons that destruction has just feel pretty poor or have some underlying Achilles heel to their use that bugs me.

  • Rift feels like something is missing and has a strange case where the three different rifts have different total % damage contributions, which is just bizarre. They could keep the visual differences but at least balance the damage contributions. I played a bit with the s3 tierset in DF, but it still felt like something was off with me actually pressing the button; it might have to do with me feeling like I’m missing something if I’m not hitting chaos bolt.
  • Channel demonfire is a cool ability, but just feels out of place if you were to ever use it in single target. Aberrus really exposed how poor it was to play this on heavy movement fights as well. It should really do much more burst damage than it does at the moment (although I know some TC’s will point out to me that CDF’s DPET is actually good).
  • Soulfire was atrocious forever and finally after like 4 years made into a good ability
  • Shadowburn is the same as the above.

If they were to do a pass on the playability of these abilities, I would be fine with keeping them as button presses.

I think my feeling is somewhere in the mix of destruction and not having something that motivates me or gives me any type of feel-good/dopamine for hitting buttons. When I play my ret alt, so many buttons or on-screen indicators make the class feel like I’m doing something worthwhile with my time. I even went out of my way to have a decimation weakaura that restores the old molten core animation on screen so that I can feel the soul fire proc.

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  • Destruction

    • Diabolic Ritual has been updated – Chaos Bolt, Rain of Fire, and Shadowburn grant Diabolic Ritual for 20 seconds. If Diabolic Ritual is already active, its duration is reduced by 1 second instead. When Diabolic Ritual expires you gain Demonic Art, causing your next Chaos Bolt, Rain of Fire, or Shadowburn to summon an Overlord, Mother of Chaos, or Pit Lord that unleashes a devastating attack against your enemies.

    • Touch of Rancora has been updated – Demonic Art increases the damage of your next Chaos Bolt, Rain of Fire, or Shadowburn by 100% and reduces its cast time by 50%. Chaos Bolt reduces the duration of Diabolic Ritual by 1 additional second.

      • Developer’s note: We’re adjusting Diabolic Ritual to avoid a situation where constantly casting Rain of Fire, due to its instant cast time, provides the best output for Diabolist. To avoid adding to Diabolic Ritual’s already lengthy tooltip, we’re adding functionality to Touch of Rancora to add further value to casting Chaos Bolt so that its cast time doesn’t hinder its usefulness to Diabolist warlocks.

Upcoming change to Diabolist/Destruction on the PTR. With Rain of Fire spam being addressed, can we revert the Ritual of Ruin nerf and/or get Diabolic Ritual back down to 14 seconds for Destruction?

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I would assume this is the first of a few changes to come for destro. These changes are just flat nerfs atm to diabolist, specifically in aoe, so I’m pretty sure they’ll load up some changes or buffs to compensate.

I’m not convinced. I still think shard gen is a tad too high. They really need to think through that process. If I had something else to press other than immolate/rof in aoe I’d be happy.

If it’s the case that shard gen is low for weaker players but extremely high for advanced players, they need to rethink how shards are generated as destruction (this is just a thought that I was having as to why shard gen is such a weird subject).

I do think this patch is a good opportunity to review our class tree since that was left a bit too late in the beta cycle.

EDIT:
I also think they’re probably waiting to see how this raid tier goes for Warlock. Our movement situation is at DEFCON 5 atm. Destruction looks incredibly bad coming into this raid tier, and I’ve been yelling about it from the rooftops for months.

The problem is that it’s a combination of tuning and class design. You cannot have destro be the worst single target spec ever for warlock, it just will never be on par with the other specs unless it’s significantly ahead. The logs will be excessively skewed toward the other specs because every top ranking warlock will also decide not to play it, forcing it down the spec rankings.

It has no niche; it’s not good at anything. It’s not even mediocre at everything either, its just bad at ST, bad at 2 target, worse than affliction in cleave, worse than affliction in burst aoe, and can’t move.

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Destr being worse than affliction on BURST aoe is crazy by definition.
I like how they changed aff though. I wasn’t excited about this rework at all.
Double dipping on mr looked awfull to me - I hate this ability and absolutely despised playing warlock for last few expansions. I found really surprising how good mr feels to press now and how enjoyable and strong aff feels.
Mobility is the only complain. Revert burning rush nerf, I beg you. All I want is to be able to catch up the group out of combat without loosing 80% of hp between packs.
At the same time destr feels awful - I agree with everything you say about it.

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I’ve played lock almost exclusively since BC, and with a break for Cata and Mists, I largely played Demo and Aff until Wrath. Then Demo in WoD and Destro since until now.

I got scouted for Mythic raid teams a number of times but just kept quiting halfway through each expansion because either the game or something was just bad. I think they’re gone cuz the logs got removed somehow but I usually had orange and purple parses in Legion till I RQ. Idk how all that works.

I didnt care for Demo and Aff cuz they felt awful to play, and I was salty about Ion robbing us of a ton of visuals and other things we had in the name of “class fantasy” for DH and Mages.

I know Destro pretty dang well. It’s all I’ve done. Research and gameplay wise. Only played it cuz i hated the other specs. Even after they kept gutting it.

Destro sucks right now. I could tell that immediately. Even more so than it usually does at this point. I haven’t really played Demo or Aff for a decade, and i could immediately blow my Destro throughput out the water in any situation.

Destro needs a redesign, or something at least. Preferably recapture the vision at least that it had in the past, the whinging of other classes be damned.

Aff and Demo at least feel more fun to play now than they did before. Aff damage being great is just icing.

I loved Destro in WoD. God that spec was so fun then. RIP Xelnath. Looking at the Tier bonuses just made me finalize my commitment to finally playing Aff in an expansion. Chaos Bolt is the fun button press Blizzard. I’m not asking for WoD or Legion strength CB,. But Jesus.

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Not too sure why you guys nerfed hellcaller this much in an undocumented change, pretty insane for a class that in general is below average on all of its specs.

The change: Blackened Soul has an ICD (internal cooldown) of 5 seconds now. So you can only gain a stack of wither every 5s, instead of after every soul shard every time.

Massive nerf to hellcaller affliction in multi-target settings and hits destruction, which is already looking to be a bottom 3 spec in general.

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