What is this design philosophy?

Classes Warlock
1

Hello, fellow locks. I’ve been playing this game for over a decade now, and have mained this character the entire time. However, a lot of the recent changes being pushed to alpha are so bad that I’m actually considering playing something else, and a lot of this comes down to poor design philosophy.

The devs are hellbent on taking away Demo’s core economy and movement, but fail to realize that lack of cores will stunt every single aspect of the damage profile as well. The recent change to dogs will utterly obliterate any sort of reliable and consistent profile for tyrant setups (if we even play it), implosion cycles, etc. and will turn the spec into a turret. I understand that this is Alpha and that things will be rough while they are being workshopped, but the fact that they even think this could be a good idea is worrisome, as it leads me to believe that they simply don’t understand the ramifications.

“We want Shadow Bolt to feel good to cast.”

Here’s the thing: you can’t. It’s a filler spell. By defition, a filler spell is what you cast when you can’t cast anything else, hence it being filler. If a spell is your lowest priority, then it never really feels good to cast at all.

The recent changes to Destro are even more proof that changes are being made with the wrong philosophy. Removing Avatar, a thematically strong ability that provided consistency in both single target and AoE with another casted, single-targeted ability that does nothing to aid Destro’s single target turret playstyle is not the move.

Still having to choose between Cataclysm and Inferno feels awful when every single other dot spec in the game has easy dot spreading available in their relevant build.

Chaos Incarnate’s current PTR form is now a dps loss versus not taking it at all. Frankly, that’s embarrassing, especially after their stated desire to make capstones feel more rewarding. Again, it’s not the idea of changing it that is the problem, but the illuminated lack of understanding that even led to the devs thinking it was a good idea in the first place.

What it comes down to is that it almost seems as if Blizzard is so worried about talents potentially becoming overpowered that they would rather completely redesign or remove them, regardless of how much fun they are to play. The talents should be fun, not boring “X% crit damage increase to spells y and z.” We’ve had a bunch of those talents before. It was in Vanilla, when generic ideas were implemented because they hadn’t had 20 years of iterative experience to come up with anything better.

Please Blizzard, do not leave our talent trees in shambles that hero talents are meant to duct tape together.

5 Likes
2

They don’t want shadow bolt to feel good to cast. If they did we would be seeing more talents to interact with SB. Rune of Shadows is a decent QoL talent for SB but it doesn’t make it feel better to press.

The stated goal is to reduce core proc economy and make DB feel “like a moment”. The big problem with their approach so far (imo) is that they remove this or nerf that without adding any new flavor to fill the gaps. If the endgame is to reduce our shard economy then make our demons more impactful to compensate. Demo is THE builder-spender spec with the largest variety of spenders. Instead we get more passive filler nodes to buff DB and SB.

Clearly someone on the dev team decided they really want Demo to go back to the days of Legion. I think they forgot how obnoxious Demo could be spamming SB all night long.

3 Likes
3

They did this with chaos bolt and it felt like crap.

They really can’t leave well enough alone can they?

Demo has an extremely good playstyle right now. Good flow, very smooth rotation, nothing janky or wonky, just very well polished. But in typical blizzard fashion they have to mess it up

6 Likes
4

I hope the idea isn’t to take Demo back to Legion. If so, the person behind it needs to be replaced because the spec felt terrible to play back then lol.

I am okay with demonbolt being made more impactful, but it’s not even close to a "moment now and unless something big changes, I doubt it will be going forward. It’s simply a better, instant SB. I also think they underestimate the negative impact that having extremely limited cores will have on our gameplay loop in all scenarios.

3 Likes
5

Legion demo had way too many buttons to do similar things, and a bunch of them were generally terrible. Who else remembers Demonwrath?

6

I’m not because their whole philosophy to make it feel good is to nerf it.

They think casting it less makes it feel better. It does not.

Let’s also not forget demon bolt is demonology’s main source of mobility. So we’re getting a mobility nerf by proxy if they don’t address the loss of instant casts

5 Likes
7

Double nerfed, nerfed the fun, and the performance due to loss of mobility.

But if you think you know better developers, go right ahead… So far no one is buying your bs.

There hasn’t been a single person i encountered that was like: yea man, these changes are the bomb!

Not a single one.

And ultimately you’re designing a game for us to play. Not for yourself, so you better get your stuff together.

Even people i disagreed a lot in the past with think these changes are bad, that’s how terrible they are, let that sink in.

A literal monkey punching down numbers could have done a better job just by chance and repetition. It’s like you’re purposefully trying to ruin demo and destro.

2 Likes
8

What I meant is that I’m potentially okay with DB being cast less if we get some other buff/ability to compensate. What’s saddening is that nothing in that vein has been announced.

9

I just have a feeling they won’t do anything to compensate for it. I feel like they’re going to nerf demon bolt and then try to tell us all how fun it is

2 Likes
10

Which is massive on its own, because a nerf to mobility is a nerf to the entire kit and all things equal makes it more difficult to perform on the same level as before.
Working harder to reach the same point you did previously with less effort is garbage.

And that’s not even mentioning things like Shadow’s Bite, Immutable Hatred and the reworked Doom, the effectiveness of which rely entirely upon consistent Core generation.

2 Likes
11

I’ve been looking at the other class changes and noticed a term popping up over and over: Resource Flooding. I think that their new goal is for everyone to be scraping by on resources to be balanced. This sucks for everyone, but it’s also why Demo bites the hardest. The whole spec is quick math on resource spending.

12

That’s because they refuse to say what the actual goal is. The absence of a plan isn’t evidence of incompetence, it’s just evidence of an agenda they don’t want to be held accountable for. All of the recent changes support this.

You can see it yourself: the dev notes attached with each wave of changes are usually a few paragraphs, but very little is actually communicated. They absolutely refuse to contextualize any of these changes.

1 Like
13

It’s like reading anything from a politician

1 Like
14

I am absolutely flabbergasted at this new build that came out.

Decimation Bolt! Ok cool but why on the last node and removing the avatar…

Good choice with making CB baseline I would say put Decimation Bolt at the bottom of the tree.

15

There is no goal, there is no philosophy. There is something wrong behind the scenes and we obviously will never know what or why. Warlock has been a mess in Dragonflight and it’s possible it gets better in War Within but they just want to talk about stuff that has never been received well for Demo. Who knows, maybe communication isn’t their forte but game design largely isn’t either.

1 Like
16

Also with changing dread talker to giving a 33% chance on demon completely brakes all our talents that interact with demon bolt.

We have like 4 to 5 talents that are dependant on how often demon cores gets used or demon bolt itself.

Like shadow bites is useless if dreadtalker is on an rng chance to give cores also the immutable hatred when they change that one to be only when we use cores which now ok starting to believe this is the long planning on that change. Immutable better hit for burst damage if they want that as a capstone stone.

Problem is our dev group working on demo gives some of the worst weak /underwhelming capstones. If you look at the other dps spec some of the things we get as capstones others get as 1 point nodes on the middle of their spec trees and are infinitely better than what we get as capstones.

Never mind all the garbage of the passive increase damage to blank ability.

7 Likes
17

There isn’t.

Just watch the streamers, outside of Kalamazi and Maldiva the rest are not fans Locks.

In PVE they do fine and shine in some small windows of major patches but get tuned quickly. In pvp they are all over and we dont see near the representation of many others.

In my opinion it is a class closely monitored to ensure it doesnt over perform.

1 Like