Hello Locks,
Just wanted to post the “upcoming” lock changes for 10.5
The highlight for me is the Inquisitors Gaze.
Fun fact, it was actually operating on this design on the very initial DF Warlock class data mining. I guess it wasn’t ready for launch so they swiftly swapped it for the boring perma pet we have right now.
I am happy to see them swap back to the idea of us summoning an Eye.
I’d also love to see the animation changed to the classic inquisitors eye’s purple swirly.
Additionally. Hell yes for old school Soul Swap. More set up but super satisfying to use.
Finally, good bye Soul Tap. Personally I wont miss it.
Warlock
Classes
Soulkeeper has been redesigned – Summons a Soulkeeper that consumes all Tormented Souls you’ve collected, blasting nearby enemies for Chaos damage per soul consumed over 8 seconds. You collect Tormented Souls from each target you kill and occasionally escaped souls you previously collected.
Inquisitor’s Gaze is now passive and has been redesigned – Your spells and abilities have a chance to summon an Inquisitor’s Eye that deals Chaos damage over time.
Developers’ note: Soulkeeper scaling its duration based on souls consumed has felt a bit awkward to use so we’re revising the spell to scale its damage instead. Inquisitor’s Gaze being active all the time lends itself to having lower throughput than we’d like. We’re redesigning it to be a frequent proc that deals considerable damage instead of a buff that you click and forget.
Affliction
Soul Tap has been removed.
Pandemic Invocation has been moved to row 6 and is now a 1 rank talent.
New Talent: Focused Malignancy – Malefic Rapture deals 15/30% increased damage to targets suffering from Unstable Affliction.
Soul Swap has been redesigned – Copies your damage over time effects from the target, preserving their duration. Your next use of Soul Swap within 10 seconds will exhale a copy of the effects onto a new target.
Developers’ note: With regards to Affliction, its rotational global cooldown (GCD) traffic has been a bit higher than we’d like. Soul Tap in particular we’re cutting to help lessen GCD traffic and its heavy reliance on addons to tell when it’s available for use. In its place we’re adding Focused Malignancy, a favored conduit from Shadowlands, that helps Affliction’s single target profile. Lastly, Soul Swap’s current iteration hasn’t been as desirable as we’d like. To address this, we’re testing an older iteration of Soul Swap that should help with Affliction’s ramp.
Sounds like the net result of the Eye changes is a buff, which I’m cool with. I also didn’t really like having to track it either. Still hoping for some sort of Destro-specific tuning, like a Rain of Fire buff.
But my issues with Aff in casual play never related to “man I need a Soul Shard right now…”. In fact, I have a ton of Soul Shards.
It’s more often, “uh ok how do I survive 7 more seconds”. A GCD + shield sacrifice doesn’t help me there.
I also agree with the dev notes about it being hard to track without an addon.
With that said.
I’m sure good players use it really well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come back as a PVP talent.
Actual question: in what situation will this ever be more useful compared to what we have now? Maybe if I’m dumb and missed my Soul Rot cleave? And okay maybe if i can potentially use it to extend the uptime on Vile Taint and PSingularity?
But generally the current iteration facilitates multidotting so much better. They think affliction is GCD starved now? I now have to cast Soul Swap twice and the dots won’t even be at max duration due to how long it takes to get them all up in the first place. Sorry, are you all playing the same class as me?
I and many others do not welcome this change. It shows yet another disconnect with the devs and the playerbase. It should have never been an affliction-only talent in the first place, no clue why they can’t just put it in the main tree in place of Abyss Walker or make it baseline. The most warlock-y spell we’ve gotten in a while too, what a shame.
Very very few situations if it can grab Phantom Singularity and Soul Rot. If it can’t, this is actually just a massive nerf. Which is wild because Affliction is trash at everything in the game right now.
Mythics: trash unless the other DPS are horrible.
Raids: Parsing 60… The literal lowest DPS in the game for a DPS. Tanks beat them on some fights.
Arena: with how many people thought Affliction was going to be OP and thought it was a good idea to play Affliction but are now hard stuck 1700. Then there’s some multiglads doing okay. Most of the time you’ll get your Dark Glare dots removed and won’t kill anything. You’ll just be there to pad damage.
RBG: Pad damage, MW/Priest laugh you.
PvP in general, they’re just annoying to bad healers.
if this is what i understand to be that means this will be the same soul swap as the wod version which means you can just dot one target and instantly dot the other two in 3s
it all comes down to rather or not it will have a cooldown or not
soulswap saved me from having to case my 3 main dots…it just seems like Galedron maybe a shill trying to hype up these terrible changes. previous soulswap was not as good as current soulswap. I personally never used soul as much but man the soulswap plus pvp haste buff made it actually sting. It seems blizzard wants to starve warlocks.
Soul Swap change seems bad. I was really glad they brought it back because it was a spell I was really missing, but you are essentially taking away a tool to get dots up easy and quickly in a situation you want to deploy them in one global and not three. Additionally, you will really want to use it when you have all dots rolling. I think what affliction needs is dots to last longer without them dealing less DPS and a filler that adds duration to some of the dots. Should be able to keep UA/Corr/CoA on three targets, use PS and Soul Rot, and afterwards cast a few filler spells before you need to refresh the dots for uptime. Right now, you can keep them on two targets and by the time you are placing them on a third they are falling off the first one, so you never have time to use filler spells.
Also, in hindsight, the leech nerfs were good for demo, but they were harmful to affliction who are more dependent upon them. Some of that should be brought into Harvester of the Souls.
Another thing is at some point the choice node between endless corruption and siphon life should be examined. Siphon life is a great spell for affliction and very iconic for the spec, but with how global starved affliction is you will never choose it. Perhaps a direction would be to make it so anything you cast corruption on you also cast the siphon life by default. This could also be an approach to tackle my previous point, especially if demo’s leech needs additional tuning down.
i very much understand the ability. the reason it was so powerful in mists was because of dot snapshotting. because dots now automatically adjust based on procs its significantly weaker. it might be stronger to get your dots out in arena against a melee cleave if you’re getting trained hard, but current soul swap already does that and precog makes it easier to get your casts out if you can juke.
so with that change, you’re choosing to spread your dots with a lower duration but no change to damage because snapshotting no longer exists for afflock. i guess its good if you cant juke very well
for pve, soul swap is utterly pointless considering agony and corruption are both instant cast dots, can be spread easily using vile taint and seed of corruption and UA has a target cap of 1
this is actually false, it might be true back in mop but in the current meta the reason why aff locks have been subtier in 3s since wod/legion is solely due to their gcd issues which completely hinder their ramp up time
especially since the introduction of the garbage ability malefic rupture locks now have to spend 2 globals just to put instant dots up then spend 1-3 globals fake casting to put uas up just on one target and then they have to repeat those globals for 2 other targets in 3s while dealing with the enemy healer sitting behind a pillar and spam dispelling; having old soulswap back with zero cooldown literally solves that issue completely: now you can only focus on dotting one target while easily putting your dots on their healer standing 60 meters away being a pillar LOSing you 99% of the time
gcd efficiency + faster ramp up time are the reasons why soulswap without cd is going to be infinitely better
yeah, i get that, its why i said idk if itd be as good as it is now. i do like soul swap and hope the change is a net positive, dont get me wrong, just personally on the fence about it atm
We just have to wait and see more information about SS and see how they make it work, its all speculative atm and still subject to change prior to patch launch.
Having the option to talent in to FM is great for st.