I wish to challenge basically everything of this. I’ve already provided feedback ingame, but 255 characters are only so much.
Let’s go over this line by line:
Correct. Each Bombardment grants cooldown reduction, so having as many up as possible, commonly 1 or 2, naturally yields most cooldown reduction.
The internal cooldown is currently 2 seconds and grants 3 seconds of cooldown reduction at 3 targets, meaning the default duration grants up to 6s guaranteed reduction without extensions from Extended Battle.
A lot to unpack here. Why is unintuitive? Tab targeting to spread dots is common gameplay for some specs. Why in isolation? The comment doesn’t elaborate further, we’re left guessing.
Devastation has not been clipping Disintegrate for over an expansion now. To my knowledge, the last tier it was still situationally recommended was Amirdrassil. So that part is unfortunately completely made up - even worse, Wingleader never was relevant for clipping in the first place because hero talents didn’t exist at the time.
Pooling being called unhealthy behaviour is confusing, as the changes do not address it. Extending Bombardments as long as possible will continue to be optimal even with these changes because it just means more damage from Bombardments. So that goal is neither achieved, nor do I consider it reasonable. The interaction is not Wingleader in isolation, but Accretion, Wingleader, Extended Battle and to a bit even Might of the Black Dragonflight.
These changes are welcome, but were needed regardless. Command Squadron always did so little damage, it was a net loss to fly the full duration of Breath variants, feedback that was provided during the 12.0 Alpha and Beta. Melt Armor (the actual ability inflicting damage from Maneuverability) is in a similar fashion, an afterthought you never cared about.
These changes are not enough to offset the significant nerf the Wingleader change comes with. Napkin math puts it at a cooldown reduction loss of 65% on AoE and 75-80% on single target.
It’s also ignoring:
- essence economy problems Devastation already suffers from before these changes because it heavily relies on Imminent Destruction
- significant damage loss for Augmentation on all fronts:
- obviously less Breath of Eons, so less Duplicate uptime, less Command Squadron and Melt Armor damage
- less Imminent Destruction also applies to Aug
- less Bombardments uptime from less Imminent Destruction
Devastation already has multiple feedback posts so I’ll just continue to focus on Aug here. In the current season, Aug does only competitive damage because of Wingleader enabling triple and even quadruple Duplicates. It also has a niche on 2-3t scenarios because of it. That niche now gets obliterated and as it stands, competitive damage is impossible.
Now a couple suggestions of how to instead address the problem instead:
- cap active Bombardments at two targets
- reduce the Mass Eruption buff duration to 8-12 seconds
- if multiple duplicates are the problem, prevent a second from spawning or adjust its base duration
- if you want to avoid Devastation to fly across the area every ~25s, then address Strafing Run
- cap Wingleader extensions at 4s per Bombardment
We have moved from Breath of Eons being the big “sync with your party” cooldown in Mythic+ from Dragonflight to “press on cooldown” ever since the introduction of hero trees. Now we’re moving back to “sync with your party” despite previous developer notes stating the goal is to be less dependant on them.
All of these changes are at best disappointing, worst case uninformed, bluntly put. They feel like knee-jerk solutions to a self-created problem with the new tier set reducing the Upheaval cooldown.
Please do better, put more thought into things, please continue to communicate, please continue to iterate.
