Basically the title. I understand not wanting to incentivize a pet class to play without a pet but if it is so underpowered that it doesn’t compete with just a pet’s autoattack…?
Or is my information wrong? I want to believe it is, because I can’t believe they wouldn’t buff it or rework it. Is it ridiculously underpowered or is it like a 100-200 dps loss?
It does compete with a pet’s autoattack, it’s https://bloodmallet.com/chart/warlock/affliction/talents/castingpatchwerk 2.5% dps gain in relation to no talent for affliction and 1.9% for destruction.
the issue here is that it’s weaker than the other talents.
It is also a problem of the demon been so weak that it dies super fast in both pvp or pve.
I miss Pandaria, all Grimoire talents were a blast to use =/
Glad to know the auto attack bit was wrong. I think it underperforms by 10% for the Destro row, and a whole order of magnitude is nothing to sneeze at.
It would be nice if they could at least tune it to within 5%, but they really need to add some synergy or an additional effect.
Sadly due to the nature of the talent, it has to do a pets auto damage and then some, to be considered at all. The other two talent need only bump dps by a bit as they are not competing with pet autos. Either the talents competing with grimoire need to be so weak they barely make a difference, or grimoire so strong that a pet class losing its identity. For aff it competes with Haunt, and that’s a laughable attempt at “choice”.
Hunters (MM) devs learned it wasn’t a healthy or really balanceable talent at all and instead is just made it a passive. You can either play with a pet or without it, doing pretty close to the same damage. Perhaps affliction and demo should just get it baseline and its power nerfed a bit to keep dps either way very similar to one another, and add a different talent in its place.
The thing I liked about the old Grimiore of Sacrifice was the damage you gained as a trade off for no pet. It was a noticable gain and you didn’t have to deal with pet AI. I miss when it acted more like Lonely Winter and Lone Wolf. Boring % increases are sometimes just better than random procs of tiny damage for the feel of the game in my book.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of Lonely Winter immediately. Did the old Grimoire also confer the command demon ability?
I could see us getting some worst possible compromise where they make GoS a dps gain but then remove the CD ability part.
They could make Grimoire situationally useful, for example, by having it do damage to nearby enemies when it procs, to make it a viable choice in aoe. That way it wouldn’t really have to compete with Haunt.
And thats exactly what the talent does, if it only did the same as pet damage it would show here https://bloodmallet.com/chart/warlock/affliction/talents/castingpatchwerk as a 0% gain, but it shows as a 2% gain.
But Shadow Embrace and Haunt give a whole lot more than just a 2% gain, while Haunt and Shadow Embrace give 7,9~8% Haunt is only a 2% gain in relation to talentless[with a pet] so going Grimoire of Sacrifice is a dps loss in relation to the other 2 options.
Honestly, i would just remove that talent.
Every time it was “the choice” blizzard nerfed it, either as it was on MOP who increased % damage of some spells or as WOD/Legion where the proc also did aoe damage, they always nerf it to make it weaker than the other options.
PS: there is no class devs, its a single team responsible to balance all classes/specs.
Now i do agree that its odd that Hunters who in lore have a bigger appreciation for their pets (and this reflect in gameplay with them needing to tame and being able to name them) managed to have a spec with a passive of lonewolf (Who is dps neutral too…) while warlock who couldn’t rly care for their pets as a tightly bond…are stuck with it .
From MoP-WoD it gave a base damage increase to Incinerate, Conflagrate, Shadowburn and Fel Flame. It also dealt 15% of your Chaos Bolt damage over 3s after it hits along with giving you a 20% HP increase + 2% of your HP back every 5 seconds. It was a heafty talent and overpowered by today’s standards but the damage increase was much more noticable when you used it than what we get now.
I second what Bordello said. I miss the old row of Grimoire talents as a whole. At least if we’re going to be considered a pet class give us options to change the gameplay up a bit. Bigger demons, more demons or no demons played pretty well when it was a thing. Sad.
It’s actually pretty good for affliction, but it does have it’s limitations. In 1v1 a pet is almost always going to be a better choice however as you have more and more targets, Grimoire of Sacrifice becomes a better choice.
I like how I no longer have to worry about a pet, and with Fel Synergy you can summon one any time for a temporary ally and then sac it when it’s low health.
If you are a Necrolord, the void sac buff is pretty good to apply before Fleshcraft. With Demon Armor, my shield holds for 40k damage and without the void sac it’s only 31k. Best part is both spells are on 2min cooldown so they are great to pair together.
As for the spell damage from Grimoire of Sacrifice, it needs a specific build to make it optimal and IMO is more for BG’s where you can cast dots on many many targets. Especially in Epic BG’s pets are almost instantly dead whereas using Grimoire you can get that extra damage on a lot of people.
It also helps to have Siphon Life as the more spells you have ticking at one time, the more chances you have to proc Grimoire, but again this is more for if you have several targets that have large health pools (or healers) to give your dots enough time to tick on everyone.
The spell is pretty cool, I think it needs more experimenting with to unlock it’s true potential.
And was nerfed patch after patch for it being busted, also the increase HP only existed if you had Soul Link Talented.
But the creme of the top was, at the time, GCrawler game dev at the time and basicaly the bridge between Company and Game said: https://www.wowhead.com/spell=108503/grimoire-of-sacrifice#comments:id=1814688
If you hate pets, take
Grimoire of Sacrifice (though I also have to challenge a little bit why you picked a pet class to play in the first place). What we don’t want is for warlocks to take
Quite a unhappy comment in my opinion, and i do thin to this day that opinion still exists even after he left, because patch after patch, whenever the talent is used as the default choice…it gets nerfed.
The Legion version who did aoe damage on proc? is single target damage now and because its ppm that also mean it don’t scale with targets.
obs: i find it funny hunters get lonewolf baseline at not cost…
Striking a good balance in the talents with all 3 was probably hell. The choice alone was great for gameplay but nightmare for Blizzard I imagine. Ghostcrawler was right but arguing that it’s not okay for a talent to be superior because it kills an aesthetic of a class seems weird when Blizzard okay’d the talent for MoP to begin with.
I’ll never understand how GoSac being such an outlier for balance remains (albeit a shadow of it’s former self) but the other 2 Grimiores no longer exist. It’s very strange how Blizzard operates these days with what is changed and retained patch to expansion considering feedback and popularity.
Assuming his opinion is true, the implication is then that Hunters are not a pet class the same way Warlocks are a pet class.
Moreover, if they nerfed sacrifice so much in order to incentivize us to keep using our pets then why make them so fragile that die so easily both in pve and pvp?
I struggle keeping my voidwalker alive while just questing in Korthia. In pvp it’s almost mandatory to use sacrifice or just let my pet die because the other talents are much better.
i would say Hunters are even more of a pet class than warlocks, in lore we don’t care for our demons, demonology literally explode imps for more damage.
while hunters care for their pets, name them, they are family…
Ghostcrawler’s opinions were his own and Blizzard doesn’t really follow his footsteps at all based off what we’ve seen since WoD. I don’t believe there is much incentive to use sacrifice at least in PvE with how weak it’s seemingly been for 3 expansions. Honestly I think it’s just another case of a gutted talent that’ll end up removed because no one really used it due to Blizzard’s own fault. Just my pessimistic view.
Yeah I’ll never understand why our pets have to be so fragile now especially the voidwalker. Grimiore of Supremacy would’ve at least helped with that issue for outdoor/PvP content. Hell, even Soul Link. But here we are strugging since BFA to keep our pets alive (and ourselves at that).
I just started maining as demo pretty much since all my stats have gotten a lot better and questing in Korthia is just oodles of fun because of that. Not just the PVP talents but being able to have a bunch of stuns and interrupts and summoning a horde of demons helps a lot when you get randomly jumped by alliance and then they get scared off because there’s too many demons attacking them and they don’t know what to do lol.
Felguard also it’s a beast in doing damage and surviving and while he does kind of get ripped up with more than 7 to 8 targets keeping him alive and healed is not too bad with all the other pets.
It’s a placeholder talent. When it was first introduced, it was quite powerful and everyone jumped on the GrimSac bandwagon. (I think this was MoP.) At some point, they beat it to an utter pulp with the nerf bat and the poor talent has never recovered.
The only reason I don’t think it’s gone entirely is they haven’t come up with anything better, so they just leave it as this talent that “might compete in some rare edge cases”… sometimes.