I’m leveling my destro warlock for pvp and it seems a bit strange. All the guides have us just spamming wither and other instant casts, lol?
I liked the fantasy of throwing giant green blobs of death… if I wanted to spam dots and such I’d play affliction and if I wanted to do nothing but spam instant casts I have a frost mage for that.
Are all the guides wrong, or is this just how destro is now?
Theyre nerfing wither and buffing CN amongst others, so back to basics for destro.
sometimes you have to do your pve rain of fire spam because ten thousand interrupts prevent you from casting one 700k damaging spell. if youre getting trained in a go, which is pretty likely because locks are made of tissue paper, its easier and better for your mobility to spam instants. if theyre getting cleaved, the damage is nothing to sneeze at either. the chaos bolts and soul fires come after that when there’s breathing room.
Edit: Just saw it. 30% damage nerf in PvP. Yikes! Looks like they fixed the issue of the internal cooldown bug we previously had then just slapped a massive damage nerf on it.
I thought this tuning would feel like a buff for destro in arena/shuffle, but I’ve played a few games, tried different talents and it honestly feels like more of a nerf.
While Chaos bolts can do a bit more damage now, it’s not enough for the small window we get to cast whilst still having to maintain constantly dispelled withers to build stacks that just do less damage.
On top of that reducing Soulfire proc cast speed down to 60% feels soo slow and majority of time will get kicked.
Rifts and incin are still trash, 3 globals spent spamming rifts while on the run when we need to be maintaining wither instead feels bad, especially since the wither nerf, all it does is make you spam 3 globals to replace the same amount of damage we had with wither but lost due to the nerf.
Hopefully as we get more gear it might feel better, but idk kinda feels sucky, slowed down the whole play style in a meta of constant cc/interrupts for a hard cast play style that still doesn’t have the reward it should once you get bolts off.
If the reward was there with bolts, it’d be great, but it ain’t.
Do be aware this is ONLY for wither on affliction and not destruction.
We got wither as a bit of an affliction hybrid. It does substantially more damage than diabolist which is why it’s top pick right now, and it makes keeping it (immolate) up on targets much easier. The best interaction it provides is when using cataclysm on a group to apply AOE wither, and popping malevolence which will basically max out its stacks on all of your wither targets, into channel demonfire. (Demonfire just got a nice 40% buff and feels good again unlike rift)
From there you can drop infernal, pop con flags, and enjoy chunking CBs.
If you’re like me and enjoy lobbing fat green orbs and don’t like using shadowburn, feel free to copy my talent tree.
No SB in pvp sounds like you’re playing pve…
Shadowburn was a terrible idea that blizzard should have never added. It’s a bandaid fix attempt for giving us instant cast damage instead of making chaos bolt more castable.
Edit: it has no animation and is just plain boring to use.
It says in destro pvp though.
They increased 3 baseline abilities by 15% for Destro and then reduced wither by 30%.
to be fair you could be refreshing wither with channel demon fire… that also got a 40% damage buff.
I think ultimately hellcaller is still just better to run than diabolist just because of instant cast immolate, curse of the satyr, and the heal on our dark pact. I could be wrong though.
I like shadowburn personally but they have made the talents for it so convoluted. Just make it deal double damage or something if the target is below 20% I dont know why this is so hard for them to balance. Back in the day it was an awesome feeling spell, now it feels foreign.
I do see that now, my apologies and thanks for pointing that out! 
The destro" buffs" were never buffs, just damage reallocation.
Nerfing wither by 30% for destro is bigger than all of the affli nerfs combined.
Wither was the #1 damage for hellcaller destro, that means the other changes only make it barely equal to it’s power prior to the changes.
Though its a net buff for diabolist (still not enough to make it viable).
Edit: in order for hellcaller to deal equal damage it has to hard cast chaos bolts a lot more to compensate.
I’m confused on everything you’re saying.
Wither is STILL your top damage, and your damage comes in forms of proccing havoc through Mayhem and cycling shadowburn + conflags into hopeful fast cast bolts/soul fires in those windows. But none of that will ever outpace wither.
This was how I played arena/shuffle but since the changes, mayhem is losing some value compared to havoc.
Wither is sometimes my top damage but not always now, not saying it’s unviable but can definitely feel the difference in overall pressure since nerf.
Feels like some matchups I have to kite much longer for less spread pressure and when I can get my bolts off they still aren’t as punishing as they should be. But hopefully will scale better with stats overtime I guess.
Again, not saying it’s unviable or that chaos bolt has to do absolutely insane damage, but still feels like it needs some help