The upcoming changes are the most tone deaf updates to warlock since blizzard gutted demo in wod.
We lack the necessary mobility for traversing boss arenas and need others to play around us. Gateway on a 90 second cooldown isn’t enough and demonic circle can’t be used reactively. We need some sort of blink or launch forward. Any minor adjustment can completely ruin your rain of fire and cataclysm spooks most tanks into moving out of it because it looks like a swirly.
Shadowburn becoming a filler spell just feels awful and feels like spamming fel flame back in the day but with bigger numbers. Take it off the GCD, and it’s now best to weave it between other casts giving warlock a very fun and high APM feel in the execute phase rather than feel like its grinding to a halt. This also fixes the problem of pressing it on cooldown leading to very clunky feeling gameplay.
I would also recommend allowing us to soulburn our curses to make them AOE, and having the curses apply a 5% damage taken debuff to the enemy. Especially with the incoming nerfs, warlock really needs a dps buff. This would provide the DPS buff, and make these abilities not just not a dps loss but also semi-mandatory leading to warlocks providing these as group utility and being recognized for this as group utility.
We also need a baseline interrupt, the felhunter is too finicky and you have to micromanage it like crazy leading to a level of inconvenience zero other classes have to deal with to do something as basic as interrupt. The solution to felhunter interrupt being part of the class identity? Give it a 15 second cd interrupt, give warlocks a 24 second cd interrupt. They share a cooldown.
Give warlocks some dps cooldowns back, something to make us a bit more burstier and really hammer in windows for keys. The fact that affliction is now a burst spec and destruction now does consistent damage is insane.
We have all these issues right now, and its nearly impossible for us to find groups, and you thought it appropriate to apply nerfs?
100% mandatory. A 5% damage debuff would be the single strongest “raid buff” in the game by a wide margin. It’s just super Chaos Brand.
The upcoming Diabolist nerfs are really baffling. The optimist in me says that this just a precursor to some kind of AoE rework for Destro, but the realist in me knows that’s just copium and Blizzard have just lost it.
What all the top M+ dps specs have in common is that they have short cooldowns that they can use on every pull. Sometimes twice if they are large enough.
Giving Warlocks even more dps cooldowns would have the opposite effect and just turn us into SL Ret paladins. Which was a spec with many very powerful cooldowns and no consistent damage. And it was the one of the worst performing dps spec in the history of M+. Only becoming “okay” (still ended up in the bottom 5) in S3 and S4 when their tier set bonus automatically activated one of their cooldown every ~15 seconds or so.
Maybe they can rework Rift into something actually useful for once. Maybe have it spawn 3 or 4 portals all at once. Then give just 1 charge on 45 sec cooldown rather than 3.
Then buff Soulfire to be the “consistent” damage option.
So you’d go Rift for burst and Soulfire for sustained dps.
Destro does have high burst. It’s just that its burst window last for so long it feels like “consistent” damage. I mean, it’s 45 seconds if you are playing Diabolist. That is coincidentally as long as the cooldown of some other specs dps cooldowns.
Save for mandatory brings (lust, a brez, etc) classes designed around this will always be the strongest in keys.
Affliction can keep up with “the best of them” during their soul rot windows if the pull is big, but destro literally just sandbags packs until infernal is up.
What’s worse though, is you can’t even really keep up with rets, FDK’s, sin rogues even with infernal, when they’re gliding pack to pack with CD’s up.
I’ve actually been playing a pseudo home brew of demo in keys, and it’s been performing quite well (opting for the bottom right side of the demo tree over doom). I forget the name of it, but the ability where your doom guard throws the glaive, gets 50% attack speed, and AoE’s is actually crazy damage on only a 45 second cd.
It doesn’t keep up with the likes of the meta classes, and never pulls the crazy 6 mil+ dps on big pulls, but it puts out very strong numbers throughout the dungeon, as opposed to aff that goes insane every minute, and is mediocre otherwise.
I also love that Demo’s AoE profile more or less cannot be “whiffed,” like destro and aff.
I love aff, but there is nothing more feels bad man than when you taint>soul rot, and then the tank grabs another pack.
I think this is correct, but it’s a lot more nuanced than this:
Parity for cooldowns is nearly impossible, and classes that have short cooldowns are just simply overtuned. Both ret paladin and frost DK, which are the best short cd specs in the game for m+ currently, have extremely overtuned short cds in wake of ashes + reaper’s mark. Enhance shaman is an interesting case in which tempest is straight up a ludicrous button that should never have been this overtuned, where it’s value as a non-cd is so over and above comparable cds that it starts to belie any common sense in tuning targets.
Longer cds should, at the very least, be on par with the output comparison of classes with short cds. In essence, infernal should hold 4x the value of wake of ashes, to make up for the fact that wake of ashes is so low of a cd; this isn’t the case with warlock, where each of our 2m cds (infernal + darkglare) do not amount to the same damage at all of 4 wake of ashes, even if damage was constant.
The entire “design” of having short cds is that it allows for players to have more agency in their decisions on which pulls to make in pve content: If you have longer cds, you’ll take things more easily, but then pull larger every 2 minutes. If you have shorter cds, you can do more frequent smaller pulls, but should do worse in the overall large pull.
The design intent is for there to be give-and-take with how cds are multiplied within group settings. The issue is like I’ve stated above, this breaks apart when the longer cds no longer amount to X number of value above the short ones. Infernal and darkglare are just exceedingly poor buttons compared to short cds, and are monumentally worse compared to other 2m cds such as incarn/arcane surge/call of the wild etc. Usually, longer cds, particularly with any type of cdr, end up being over and away the best type of cds in m+ but this season the short cd classes are just extremely overtuned.
TLDR: CD parity sucks this tier for a multitude of reasons, namely that hero talents have a gigantic shake-up with outlining too much strength in to some cds, and too little into others. Warlock is rock bottom in this regard.
As somebody that’s done a lot of TC work on this, I will guaruntee you, unless you find doom frustrating or too difficult to play, this is a severe downgrade to your total throughput.
Doom as a button is so halariously overloaded compared to anything else in the demo tree, that it’s a must pick talent in all situations. What should really be happening is that they need to increase the throughput of several demo talents to actually be on par with the overloaded ones (think reign of tyranny, which is a ludicrous 10%+ increase, vs something like blood invocation, which is in the same talent gate that is a 0.2% increase).
The tooltip says it does some 175k or so AoE when it expires, so what makes it sim so well? (I’m genuinely asking, not arguing). A 175k hit seems very meh when you have to kill through a mob/let it expire to even proc.
Also if you wouldn’t mind answering, what makes it hard to play? Do you not just spam your rotation/demon bolt on one target to make it proc faster?
The doom row in particular just has extremely high spell power ratios compared to anything else in the demo tree (if you were to do a straight comparison, 1 doom proccing a doomguard is roughly equivalent to 2x the entire spell power ratio of guillotine in an aoe setting).
There’s a slight skill cap with doom being able to be tab-targetted onto multiple enemies, with usually 5 being the soft-cap. But if you think about it, if you have 5 dooms exploding on a pack, even without doomguard being procced, you’re doing almost the equivalent of 7-8x more damage than guillotine on a specific pack of enemies. This scales even faster as you get more imps from doom, then more implosions, and more potential demonbolt procs.
Doom is the one talent you should never unspec as demo atm (same with tyrant + reign of tyranny/charhound in aoe obviously).
EDIT: I’ll try and do some math for you later, if possible, but I don’t trust myself with the exact spell power coeffiecients for felguard melee ratios.
Good to know. The tooltip just made it seem insanely underwhelming (like I said, 626 item level and it deals like 170k damage in AoE).
For comparison, a single tick of rain of fire crits for like 120k, so it seemed extremely low being that doom only comes out off of procs, and takes 20 seconds (or a kill) to proc.
This is a common trap to fall into: spell power-to-damage ratios aren’t apples to apples in most scenarios. In this case, you’re comparing a spender to a builder. Usually spenders would have higher ratios and damage profiles in general, but blizzard has seemed to introduce more power into our builders for some odd reason this expansion, which makes these comparisons even worse (and why rain of fire in single target, which I helped TC at the time, became so relevant – hence the nerf to destruction from my feedback this patch).
If you think of it, doom is essentially a flat buff to any demonbolt cast you send in m+ scaling upward linearly per target cast. This is why doom is weaker in single target (as each demonbolt cast is not individually applying doom on a single target) versus in multiple targets.
Nuts and bolts of it are: doom adds a flat multiplier of a guarunteed 268% spell power to your demonbolt, plus an addeed 50% proc rate of a doomguard (if you’re talented into it). That would mean that on average (if running doomguard) each demonbolt cast is the equivalent of 268 + (doomguard chance X doomguard damage)% spell power extra added to your demonbolt if you are able to hit a new target each time. In a 5 target setting, that’s a lot of spell power added to each demonbolt cast.
If you stack that multiple times, it’s ends up being a fairly large number, especially since the exponential target cap for doom is 8 targets atm.
EDIT: just removed specific math calculations since I cba trying to figure out the actually upper limit thresholds, which other people that actually have a strong point in math can do.
Additionally can we finally get rid of the cast times on setting demonic port and the buff from fel domination, make them instant already.
It’s 2024, game’s the messiest is ever been with mechanics/instant AOE ccs and for some reason those abilities still have some inane .30 secs cast time on them why???
I know you’re more pvp focused, but honestly, from a pve perspective it’s completely fine.
I personally think the core situation is significantly overblown, since the actual stats for how much we cast demonbolt isn’t actually as bad as people make it out to be; even more surprising is we’re significantly up in the amount of shards we generate compared to previously considering hero talents and rune of shadows.
The other talents you mentioned, can be continuously tweaked so that the overall damage contribution of “rolling high” on imp gang bosses etc. can be lowered by increasing the proc rate but lowering the ceiling of damage throughput. I think the talent is fine, but the implementation is rather weak.
The rest is relatively unimportant or passively interacts with your kit so it doesn’t feel bad if you get it or not. If those random rng elements, like doomguard or dreadbite actually did something with our kit, then I’d be more willing to lump them in as a “problem”.
My biggest gripe is not listing proc rates for capstone talents in their tooltips. It’s an egregious oversight by blizzard to not have advanced tooltip mode so that we can see the damage formulas (think doom proc or rift proc). As an “experienced player” I should be able to determine my talent usage without using third party software or relying on third party data mining to see spell data.
the cast time for demonic port is irrelevant from a pve perspective since it’s a half gcd, you would actually lose gcd if they made it instant and didn’t have it incur a half gcd.
I do think tying instant pet summon to soulburn should be the next step otoh. Fel domination can still exist as a free pet summon in which you wouldn’t lose a shard (would actually make sense in a world where shards matter, but they don’t atm).