For my 666th post , I’m summoning something different.
I’d like to share my thoughts on how i personally think the warlock class could be more fun & enjoyable, not sure what I’ll end up cooking but i hope you’ll enjoy the wall of text below!
1)Fundamental ideology shift /general tree:
demonic gate way has been removed.
( gate as a utility has lost much of it’s previous appeal as a raid wide movement utility since most classes have enough tools to move and many fights are about individual micro adjustments rather than full group movement).
new* dark intent: raid wide buff granting 3% haste and increases all dot/hot crit damage by 4%.
teleport now has 2 charges.
spell lock is now baseline and no longer attached to the felhunter/axe toss only stuns. Felhunter dispel now removes 2 magic effects and heals the warlock as well as itself.
all double nodes were removed, banish is baseline, improved amp curse, imp fel dom, imp burning rush and lifeblood removed.
stamina talents for yourself and pet merged into one, all pet damage talents merged into one.
many new curses added to the tree ( read my other post about curse fantasy and utility options).
spirited away is now the follow up node to burning rush (1min cd 10s speed buff no hp costs).
all pet cast times reduced to 4s baseline.
fel dom cd reduced to 1min baseline, now makes summons instant instead of 0.5.
soul conduit has been removed.
new capstone* kil’jaeden’s cunning: your next 2 spells can be cast while moving (usable while casting),5% current hp cost, 30s cd.
drain life damage increased & now heals for 1% hp per sec (regardless of it’s damage).
New* lifeblood : drain life becomes an instant cast dot that lasts for 15s, 15s cd.
class trees & mechanics changes:
all spenders are now instant cast ( following the ideology of every other class spenders) and main spenders are universally 2 shards cost.
Affliction:
The theme of aff is now more centered around mobility than the other two specs.
shard gen has been slightly increased.
UA is no longer target capped and it’s damage has been slightly reduced.
seed of corruption rework: instant cast, applies UA, corr, agony to target and all surrounding enemies (no longer does damage). 30s cd costs 1 shard.
vile taint and phantom singularity removed, dot and damage increase sub nodes are now multi choice nodes tied to soul rot (aoe vs st).
soul rot cd changes to 30s and instant cast, now also causes sbolt/dsoul to cleave onto affected targets, not just drain life.
-oblivion cd changed to 30s to better sync with other cds.
malefic rapture is now instant, costs 2 shards, damage retuned around added shard cost.
haunt is now a spender, instant cast, costs 2 shards. Only one target can be affected by haunt. Increases damage dealt to target by 10% , stacks up to 3 times lasts 12s. Tuning will be so haunt is the superior spender on 1-2 targets over rapture.
Destruction:
The changes below are meant to make combat feel fluid with less mandatory turret playstyle by allowing the freedom of choosing when to plant cast or dump while moving.
chaos bolt is no longer a spender but back to it’s original cd state. 2s cast baseline, 15s cd, generates 1 shard, now applies immolate.
This change is the only way to make chaos bolt hit hard again, it’s damage will be buffed significantly.
soul fire has been removed, replaced with chaos bolt, all subsequent nodes now work with chaos bolt instead.
immolate is now instant cast by default.
dimensional rifts now cost 2 shards and has no cd/charges, this will be the new spender for st.
rof shard cost is now 2 shards baseline.
havoc is now a perma cleaving 20% damage split on a random enemy within 30y passive , choice node with →
new* singular destruction(passive): all single target direct damage spells deal 10% more damage.
shadowburn is back to being a strong execute , only usable sub 35%, generates 1 shard instead of costing it.
Demonology:
the goal is to make the spec feel less rampy and turrety while polishing the clunkiness of some of it’s kit.
maximum number of imps is now capped at 10.
-implosion now has a passive and active portion:
Passive - imps that expire or are replaced will auto implode dealing damage based on their relative remaining energy ( oldest imps are replaced first as a priority). Active: force all imps to implode doing aoe damage ( more than the passive on aoe), 30s cd.
hand of guldan is now instant cast, shard cost down to 2 (summons max 2 imps), it’s damage has been increased substantially. ( shifting the power slightly away from ramp into frontloaded damage).
-vilefiend and grimoire fg no longer cost shards.
corruption now becomes doom for demo.
-hand of guldan now applies doom to all targets hit instead of demon bolt.
shadow bolt has been removed.
demonbolt now inherits all previous shadowbolt modifiers and shadowbolts cast time (2s), generate 1 shard , deals as much damage as shadowbolt.
demonic core procs makes demon bolt instant, generates 1 additional shard and increases it’s damage to what demon bolt currently does in live. This change is to reduce button bloat, both sbolt and dbolt basically functioned the same way (you can no longer overcap with a 2 shard hog cost).
tyrant is now instant cast. ( same treatment as all other lock cds).
choice node with tyrant* summon pitlord, replaces tyrant with a melee version that charges in and does cleaves, same functionality but for aoe.
guillotine has been removed, replaced with the pvp talent “Call fel lord” , 1min cd. ( a better version of guillotine both thematically and numerically), choice node with →
New* thalkiels consumption: consume up to 15% of your active demons’ hp (capped at 6 demons - prio on biggest hps first), to fuel a power single target spell that hits for X amount+ hp consumed, 2s cast, 1min cd.
Wanted to cover hero talents next , things like more specialized choices for demo, one focusing on stronger but fewer pets while the other on raw quantity. Guess i’ll stop here for now.
Thank you for reading so far, hope you enjoyed it. Please share your thoughts on whether you liked or disagreed on stuff!
I guess but so much of our mobility budget is tied to gateway, plus its always been clunky with many pathing bugs.
As for demo, which part? Numbers can be tuned so i dont see how its op to have some more mobility/fun stuff ( its not like i made the spec full instant cast ^^).
All abilities do like 4-5% more damage. Just so we have at least 1 of our 3 specs not in the bottom half.
Affliction
Vile Taint no longer has a cooldown.
Phantom Singularity is now baseline. (I am just sick and tired between switching between 2 identical specs just to flip this one talent depending on what I’m doing)
Destruction
Cataclysm is now baseline, deals 50-75% reduced damage, and now costs 1 shard but no longer has a cooldown. (There’s too many gauntlet/lots of tiny creature packs to have your AoE bound to a 30 second cooldown - why is this a thing for some classes when Fury exists?)
Demo will be trash tier for all of season 1. There are no changes to it in 11.0.2 that fixed the stand there and cast and wait for demon animation to start and complete and at the end of 6-8 seconds, your pet can miss or restart its attack. There are no changes at all for Demo in 11.05. The spec is 100% a blizzard fraud, to get players interested in Beta, then destroy the class on launch, thus making it useless in pvp, raids, mythics (talking competitive here not Mythics_ 2 key and everyone can tell littel johnny that he did so good last night and pat his little 6yo head). I have no hope for blizzard to do anything except to introduce high mobility classes, nerf demo into non existence or simple ignore that its part of the game. The War Within served afflcition well, then destruction, but now is nerfing those too so everyone can play monk, dk, dh, pally, and furries.
Yeah, was thinking we could have just one (or two max) rift type to reduce the rng factor.
My thought process behind it is to shift spenders to instant cast which frees up some space for mobility and detaches chaos bolt from the “weak spender” policy they’ve taken recently.
There is no need to remove gateway. If anything it should be removed from the tree and be baseline, as most other raid utility is, imo
We already bring a good amount of raid utility with gateway + stones, I dont think we need to bring in another raid buff. Not to mention haste + dot damage is an incredibly busted buff
I made a post to discuss the issues with our class tree a few days ago, and I also brought up all the 2 point nodes we have too. They are horrible and just gatekeep many niche talents that have a few uses but will never be picked because we just dont have the talent points to spare. This really needs to be fixed
KjC would be nice to have
Demo
Merging SB and DB together isn’t neccessarily a good thing. There are times when you want to conserve your DB procs, such as not to overcap on shards or to pool for Tyrant ramps. Being forced to spend procs doesnt sound like a good idea to me
I wouldnt mind seeing Guillotine get removed. Its clunky and doesnt sync up with the rest of our kit
I’m not sure about HoG becoming instant, I think it will break the flow that demo has right now, but yea Tyrant really should be instant
I don’t think we’ll TC return. Back in Shadowlands part of the reason why Demo was so powerful was because of the strength of Demonic Consumption - the spiritual successor of TC. It turns out giving DPS an ability that scales with both common damage effects and health is difficult to balance, hence why they removed it going into Dragonflight.
Still better to be able to stockpile and use Core procs whenever you want to. Even with HoG as the only spender and at 2 shards max, you might want to save those Core procs for an upcoming burst damage window, or for when we need to move. It’s also just plain smoother for rotational purposes. You can control when you get those instant cast moments. If Demonbolt just plain replaced Shadowbolt and kept its Demonic Core functionality, a random Core proc in the middle of filler spamming can very easily throw off the feel of your rotation while also potentially overcapping your shards if you were currently building shards up and only had one shard left to fill.
You had a number of interesting ideas, but replacing Shadowbolt with Demonbolt just to reduce button bloat with otherwise no real redesign in Demonbolt and Demonic Cores is not as good an idea as you think it is. If you did this, you’d need to redesign it entirely.
The damage is offset by rapture costing 2 shards instead of 1.
Worst case lower the damage a tad but UA being uncapped is /has been thematic for aff for as long as i can remember.
It’s no longer a spender so i see no reason to keep it bound to st especially when it has synergy with rapture.
UA’s damage will obviously have to be reduced , probably around corruption levels of damage. At least our damage will come more from dots than rapture on aoe , which is fine since haunt is succeeding rapture on st dumps.
I would never trade UA being able to multidot for rapture costing 2. Not really a fan of your proposed affliction changes in your first post, might fun/cool for you and others but I’d probably consider swapping specs if the design went in that direction. Besides it removes the ability to setup short major damage windows when those are needed and makes affliction less able to burst down on priority quickly, and you’re talking juggling dots and multi stacks of haunt and probably shadows embrace on several targets in a council or two target fight (such as silken council), which just sounds like a headache. I’d prefer to see something more like the following:
A simpler and probably more well received set of changes for aoe would be removing seed’s shard cost since it’s no longer an AOE damage spell, but aoe setup. Then heavily reducing or removing taints CD, since while it is also aoe setup, it applies the dot that generates shards, and also slows targets, I think that’s worth a shard.
To go further I’d cut volatile agony and replace it with relinquished. Relinquished is undertuned for how deep in the tree it is, but further up it might be more worth it.
And if we really want to get crazy, bake improved haunt into haunt, and make all the 2 point nodes in that same row 1 point nodes. Frees up a couple of talent points for use elsewhere.
Also be nice to see old deaths embrace back, but I doubt that happens.
Yeah, I have to say that I kinda hate those demo changes, starting from the very beginning and just getting more annoyed as I got. Having 30+ imps summoned is a spark of joy that gives wow life for me, but besides that, 10 is way too small, unless you were planning on gutting practically all the others sources of imps and cores. 4 cores = 8 shards = 4 instant casts db and instant hogs. You could rub against that cap quite easily. It would feel bad. What’s more, merging sb and db means you couldn’t stop yourself from doing that, or pooling resources for your next tyrant.
I feel all these changes could have been was: Demonic Tyrant is instant cast and consuming Demonic Core makes your next Soul Shard spender cast instantly.