Tuning suggestions

PVP Arenas
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no tournaments on this patch with this meta/tuning so sort of irrelevant unless you’re curious about how it functionally plays or it’s history ig

think there’s only 2x lsd3 has been played in tournaments

2016 blizzcon splyce vs method NA (finals iirc)

any variant of l$d has typically been a pve dampener which elemental is just always better/safer at doing that

that season though lust/doomwinds were off global and haste buffed fel-lord would just crush people in the go (iirc thakiel’s consumption also BANGED)

iirc saucerboy played it to r1 in legion s2?

DFS1 awc jaime’s team brought it out as an attempt to stop rmp (?) or demo mlx (?)
i don’t remember which but it would do good into either
they ended up losing though

that same season askronnie played it with preservation to r1
the 2 strengths that stand out to me

1> demo while filling a similar role to arms warrior with axetoss + ms incentivized most teams to spend their damage/resources shutting it down opening the squishy but numarically overtuned lash enhancement to PUMPing

2> tyrant was an obscenely strong cooldown that was countered by simply walking away which static field would not only prevent but could also be used to grip people on top of eachother
(fire breath klepto in static felt and still feels really strong)

as of this season they reworked demo to play a bit more like bm hunter where you have a lot more sustained damage and aren’t forced into relying almost exclusively on thakiel’s or tyrant to be your only meaningful contribution to most games

demo/enh right now pves most things for mana bar but you have a lot of strong damage windows with enh 4pc giving you primwave almost every axetoss and static field gripping+locking things down for demos big 2 minute window

yeah

hpal has such insane synergy with destro/melee

you play destro/melee (ww assa feral typically) more “go” oriented than you’d typically play something like mage/lock where rdruid excels at doing basically nothing except extremely low risk offensive pushes for bash/clone under extreme cover or on over extension

hpal’s cds support offensive pushes really well and rep/fear don’t dr
you can realistically push in and get a free rep every double coil or offensive stun window from your team which is typically extremely lethal

destro/fdk/hpal was probably the best comp in the game all of legion s6/s7
destro/assa/hpal was probably the best comp in the game in bfas4

extremely good

and healer matters there’s just several good options

mw and hpriest are probably the best overall specifically because those 2 specs remove most of your counterplay options when fighting the comp

dk/dragon plays to dump all of their resources in short engages every 1 minute then do everything they can to disengage until their next brief window 1 minute later

most effective counterplay to fdk/x is to spread out so they can only get 2 people in the grip sleet giving the third player a small window to disrupt their go

mw and hpriest uniquely can instantly incap from far away giving them instant cover on the third target with minimal requirement/risk essentially removing all non-premptive counterplay

hpriest does more damage than mw + has pi/lifegrip/purge
BUT that doesn’t really matter, fdk and dev are so damage overloaded they’ll never fail to kill in a go
they’ll only lose when they fail to live between goes
peaceweave and life coco are significantly better than gs at getting to the next go making it an easy choice

worse options but
preservation - does the most damage but offers less effective defensive tools

disc - offers the best external defensive tools to ensure you get several “goes” but offers virtually no cc and mediocre damage in the important windows

frost offensively is absurd pillar kills almost anything through wall
you’re just “forced” into doing literally nothing between pillars and you’re pretty fragile when you are forced to engage

no i’m suggesting that enhancement/feral have never been more fragile as long as i’ve played this game and they’re a worse partner option for any of their best partners than most other specs in the game

but when playing very specific comps in very specific ways despite being bad they can achieve high rating but i don’t believe that’s valid justification for their current drawbacks

frost needs an entire rework tho
2h should not be a playable option it’s too hard to give it sustained damage when pillar turns on and it suddenly ignores armor and has 100% crit

3 Likes
63

How do you tune a 25 yard caster with hard channels.

Devastation and Marks have their own flavor of tuning

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64

Feral is strong in the sense that it has the capability of completely carrying in some games because of the kit feral has (cyclone + wild attunement + stuns) but it’s just such a volatile play style

Some matchups you can absolutely 1v3 the other team and then there’s matchups where you’re just playing turnip punching bag simulator

Because of what feral is capable of it doesn’t feel right to say it’s anything less than A tier for overall performance but if we were talking about a class design tier list I’d put feral on F tier right now, wild attunement is just terrible gameplay and was an effort to shift ferals away from being what they were in season 1 (pve damage bots who weren’t even talenting into clone) but they shifted feral way too far in the opposite direction to the point that it feels like you’re forced to cast clones to do equal damage to other specs

and then obviously self healing/off healing is a complete joke on feral atm

6 Likes
65

I hope you plan to hand Devo some utility buffs after you nerf it’s hyper beam -n-

Also, Ele still has most busted burst in the game. Something needs to be done with it’s peak capabilities

Volcanic Surge is too strong and standard RNGesus meatball lottery damage is too strong

66

I believe I posted this two or three times, not everywhere.
Well, I don’t know if I’m unlucky, but most of the games I participate in have one or two warriors. Fears, disarms, stuns…a lot can be done to “stop” a DK.

Am I saying DKs are weak? No. I agree that dk is between A+ and S. But I don’t agree that dk is that unstoppable killing machine that you talk about so much. For me, this place today, today, belongs to the rogues.

Rogues do have methods of killing a target in seconds, while controlling everything around them, with damage that can be incurable.

As a DK, for example, I can put pressure on a…let’s say, a hunter, (a GOOD hunter), but I need to focus the deseases, wounds, pet, apoclp, assault, etc…on him. After his defensive carapace, I need to wait a while to have apocalyp. again and finally, depending on how things go, get a kill. It’s all continuous work to be able to do what I want.

Is it difficult ? Once you get used to it, it’s not so much…keeping some things in a target, especially now that DKs can do most things from afar, ends up being something…easy. This has been happening to me at least, since season 1, I haven’t found DK to be that bad to play, regardless of the buffs and nerfs.

BUT, there are at least two much easier classes nowadays, which I already mentioned… that can provide windows of massive damage in a very short time that DK doesn’t have.

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Now do it for melee specs :+1:

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I wanted to circle back to this and unpack my thoughts on the list more when I had more time.

So part of this is very likely an “s tier vs a tier” arbitration, but imo the only class that needs nerfs for sure is rogue. The combination of cc and damage, especially in a world where CC has been pruned is just pretty obscene. That coupled with the fact that a good rogue will never die just makes them straight up able to force trades in their favor and win in the short and long-term.

I think disc and rdruid are probably relatively okay now, but shaman and pres need buffs to either mana or sustained throughput because their cds are so bad into so many comps they need to trade inefficiently with either mana or multiple cds.

Id like to see cyclone looked at still as a general rule, and I’d say monitor moonkin damage after the mastery change, but im not sure how much the spec is propped up by dh/rogue. Ele/boomy is also obviously very good, but still loses in dampening to rdruid lock teams and anything with a rogue so it’s hard to evaluate the classes actual strength with the outlier that is rogue.

I personally feel that destro is too tanky OR has too much instant cast damage, but i think if you target both in a half-measure nothing changes and if you hit either one too hard then the class will just get runover by melee cleaves (unless you play with a rogue… there’s a pattern).

DH and DK are both on the higher ends of damage and may need some of their ranged damage nerfed (death coil and throw glaive + soul scar) so that if/when you get away, even for brief periods, it can allow the healer some respite. However, outside of blur and ibf, both classes get smashed disproportionately to other melee.

I think outside of those specs, everything seems pretty competetive from a class/comp perspective imo.

3 Likes
69

Making a class immune to cc over and over is dumb as hell.

They play a different game than the rest of us

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They also need to hardcast almost all of their damage and have 25 yard range. Class has insane mobility, good defensives, and solid sustained and burst, but outside of those windows (and they WILL run out of stuff), the class explodes and contributes little. There are definitely pros and cons to the spec, but it feels pretty limited in longer games and in general struggles greatly into most wizards.

This is true of every spec, though, and dk is far less impacted by fear (lichborne) and disarms (every ability thats not apoc/festering strike)
Than those other classes.

Everyone will agree with you on that, but saying a class is less broken than rogue is like saying the sun is hot.

How is this different from every single other class in the game, though? Just because you’re not wrong doesn’t mean that youre right either. Youre not considering how your class works relative to others which is super important when discussing balance.

Dk can kill basically every minute pretty reliably between apoc, asphyx, strang and ghoul. Dk with sp, hunter, lock, war, and dh are all S tier comps that can kill basically every other dr and pressure/kite enough to live in between without much trouble.

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71

Any spec that NEEDS to be immune to cc to function is a half baked spec.

72

Casters aren’t… doing bad.

@_@

I’m sure they are annoying to play on the lower end, but most of my lobbies lately have been ele, demo, boomi, frost mage. Last night I saw a bunch of shadow and dev to.

:man_shrugging:

73

i’d say that rogue being the only thing you would classify as unfair in most senses is a fair take

for me every spec in that tier performs substantially better than most of the specs below them numerically with minimal if any tradeoffs

you could make it a conversation about pacing philosophy and pull a bunch of the lower ranked specs up instead of pulling the handful of overperforming specs at the top down

it’s completely subjective but i don’t personally enjoy when every game/comp feels the way dhdk or unholybm does offensively
which defo adds a level of bias to this list beyond the factual take that rogue isn’t fair right now in either scenario

i could agree with this, at the moment you’re still either just playing with a disc or an rdruid unless you’re doing something niche or you’re playing at a disadvantage

hpal is pulling up but i could see it being dramatically unhealthy if it gets any better because of how insane it’s mana is this season

i’d personally REALLY like to see them reduce the effectiveness of dream breath in favor of increasing all of the other things prevoker does

it feels really weird when dreambreath shows up so hard and skews the healing profile because the prevoker will have an immense amount of healing done but it’s healing profile still makes you feel way too dead for half the game

based take that i think gives justification to making rogue changes (and pres/rsham buffs) before touching any of the other specs

for me personally hitting the instant cast damage + impish instincts + soulburn ports freedom duration would probably be completely reasonable

depending on what direction they want to go with unholy IMO
sudden doom + unholy assault are probably the biggest culprits

it seems like they want unholy to have real teeth, something that hasn’t really been true for. . . basically ever?
since maybe in mop? when exclusively gargoyle felt like demonic tyrant?

  • apoc is functionally NS chaost bolt that instantly applies a pseudo sharpen
  • sudden doom is functionally prenerf ascendance proc in terms of damage profile/randomness
  • unholy assauly is functionally untemplated ret wings (previous UA was weaker but earned a 50% template nerf that the new stronger version got rid of ???)

the amount of insane swingy damage unholy has access to right now is by design
but it doesn’t feel like it matches up at all with their modern day philosophies targeting burst damage smoothing out peaks in favor of sustained

if they want to keep unholy functioning the way it does (against all their more recent design philosophies for some reason ???) then the alternative could be reducing the amount of healing absorb associated with necrotic wounds

i think that would probably be a much worse change because it goes against the identity of the spec, a unique tool, and again their recent design philosophies
but i am so completely bored of just being throttled through cds and healing by bm/unholy dh/unholy tsg demo/dk for no reason

i feel this way about dk but i don’t honestly feel this way about demon hunter anymore

i’ve played a LOT of warrior cleaves and hunter shaman this season and if demon hunter lives the stun it feels significantly worse to allocate ambient damage to than dk,boomkin,spriest or any of the specs it typically plays with
which is . . . very different than the last few seasons/expansions but i can’t really identify exactly why that is

i think elemental with good rng feels very off and i’m sure they could smooth out the edges

and i think devastation needs to be fleshed out more as a spec rather than existing as a random time bomb

but otherwise i feel that i agree with all of your takes and that you addressed basically every spec i have concerns about personally

2 Likes
74

Yeah they play with shorter range and less defensives.

They’re a complete glass cannon.

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75

i think the pace at which threatening damage radiates out of a dh is higher than usual right now, so trading ambient damage feels a lot worse than it has since the end of gushing wound

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76

You first.

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literally the post above yours. imagine if you had a shred of ability to go with that mountain of obstinate contrarianism

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78

about fear, it depends - an experienced player will notice when I use lichborne and will respond in more effective ways, like…use a fear, wait and use another cc or wait for someone else to use fear, wait for me to defend myself and then apply another fear afterwards when lich born ends (based on the premise that there are 2 specs with fear in the arena).

From my own experience, whenever I use lichborne, when the effect ends, I receive another CC. This is normal. So I always need to use AMS first to avoid a cc in the middle of an attack or…accept the cc and wait for another chance (or trinket). There are a lot of “or”s there.

About disarm: I disagree. Every class with disarm uses this in key moments when I could self-heal, this always costs a game…so I need to play too defensively in these scenarios…even more so if it’s against warrior+monk ← they both counter a DK.

I say it again - DK is not broken, he is just good in many scenarios. Rogues are broken.

I don’t know if I ended up explaining it badly, because English is not my native language, but the objective was to explain that EVERYTHING a DK does needs to be well thought out, because a wrong CD costs a GO and I could end up not causing any danger.

For a rogue, it’s different, they can reset N times if they make a mistake. And the danger imposed is 99% of the time fatal…and fatal in seconds.

I agree that every minute~minute and a half, we have a new chance to do something…but this depends a lot because it is the average time for other defenses to be available as well as other classes also have their CDs returning…so That’s not much different.

And finally: it’s better to fix classes (rogue) with sometimes incurable damage, and improve other classes outside the META to have better defenses THAN taking what’s GOOD now and destroying it. I would say for example that enhance shamans need an improvement in their defenses… and a simplification in rotation. Why mess with a DK when the problem is something else?

It doesn’t make sense to take a STRONG class like unholy DK and want it to become weak. Will every strong class (but not a GOD class) need to become weak because your class is bad? To me this doesn’t make sense.

IF DK had some incurable damage, in an extremely short window of time where it was impossible to do any peel, ok I would understand.

for example - I understood when abom. limb had its effect reduced, because when used it pulled everyone every X seconds and now it only pulls once. I don’t even complain about that because I understood that it was a very appealing skill.

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so…24% reduction in healing, compared to 25% that a warrior can apply all the time without much effort and 50% with the sharpen blade…and that’s counting that we need to burst 6 wounds to get to that much, which doesn’t renews and ends up costing TIME for us to apply.

Unholy Assault bursts 4 wounds at once, 4x4% = 16%. Then we need to be lucky enough to have the death coil effect to be able to pop 2 more and take advantage of the damage, or use 2 more scourge strikes to have the full effect, which costs time, and can be avoided by experienced players who will run away from it. or use disarms, stuns, etc…

It’s like I’ve been saying > compared to a rogue, DK is strong but calm down, DK isn’t a God.

80

You are arguing points to disagree and not understanding the premise. The point is that you are not as punished by fear or disarm as several other classes. You made the claim that DK damage can be stopped by either of those. What happens if a feral or ret or ww or rogue gets feared? They dont have lichborne. If you are disarmed, you can still apply chains, refresh dots, stun/silence/grip, and send deathcoils which are SIGNIFICANT damage still. If a warrior gets disarmed he just cries. If a rogue gets disarmed he just throws knives.

Yes, counterplay obviously exists, but you can’t ignore the fact that you’re less punished by stops/cc on your damage than almost any other class.

Your explanation is fine, but it’s disingenuous because even if your go is “peeled” (and it is very easy to ameliorate or prevent peel between ibf, ams, and lichborne), a fair bit of your damage is still pets/dots and almost entirely ranged. If i disarm a warrior or rogue on their go, the go is over. Full stop. If you disarm a dk, you are still taking 80% of the damage. If i clone a ww on his serenity + tiger palm, the go is over. DK is less punished than many other specs.

No one is saying dk is broken like rogue or saying the spec has super toxic gameplay. But it’s also really silly to act like dk isnt topping damage by relatively large margins through damage that’s hard to stop, especially on their go.

3 Likes
81

You really think Devastation is that good right now? Seems like opinions vary a lot depending who you ask. Their damage is super crazy to me.