[BETA] Destruction Warlock Discussion

[Baconeggcheese]

I think TfB is a pretty poor comparison, because it's not like you're "doing no damage" if you roll a bit low on a couple successive shots. It's also completely uncontrollable, and will theoretically normalize over the duration of an encounter, so in fact it's pretty much nothing like TfB was.

Normalizing over an encounter doesn't help cutting edge mythic progression. When I needed to blow shit up on demand during mythic archie progress last august I didn't have the option to rely on hoping that it normalized over the encounter when I needed to burst specific adds down in seconds or we wiped.

It's pretty much exactly like TFB, if I don't get the high roll then my tiny damage is meaningless and we wipe, if I do get it we kill the target.

[Gaidax]

It's not like you are not going to blow shit up on demand with current setup, back in Alpha I reached 130% Mastery and it did not prevent me from stomping adds when needed.

The point is - you will do damage just fine, even if you roll low numbers you will still burst quite a bit and some of the extra CDs you can dump into it are not affected Mastery anyway like rifts or pets.

Besides, burst consists of quite a few spells rolling In and really what is the chance of multiple Mastery rolls producing shit result?

Finally again, it brings us back to Crit discussion or heck Multistrike for that matter. It's not if I pop my shit and Chaos Bolt my ass off live and don't get multistrikes then I don't do damage?

I'm short I am not worried really, aside from rare freak occurrences it will be just fine and honestly how it is different from live where you can same shit by the grace of trinket procs or multistrikes or lack of them at the moment of need.

[bio347]

It's pretty much exactly like TFB, if I don't get the high roll then my tiny damage is meaningless and we wipe, if I do get it we kill the target.

I dunno man, a low-rolled CB is still not "tiny" damage.

And I mean I guess mythic is super bleeding edge in that manner, but I can't help but think that if your strategy falls apart if you get even slightly unlucky RNG from any one player (a low mastery roll is pretty much exactly the same as someone else not critting, after all) then you should probably reevaluate your strategy.

[Baconeggcheese]

I dunno man, a low-rolled CB is still not "tiny" damage.

And I mean I guess mythic is super bleeding edge in that manner, but I can't help but think that if your strategy falls apart if you get even slightly unlucky RNG from any one player (a low mastery roll is pretty much exactly the same as someone else not critting, after all) then you should probably reevaluate your strategy.

That's the point of peoples complaint though, right now you have that level of consistency that you can lean on a warlock in that way in a lot of situations. If it were something around 60ish% I'd not be worried at all, but we're talking about pushing well past 100% in the first tier.

[Uzkin]

As I said, mastery should be three small rolls added together (perhaps two rolls for filler spells), instead of one big roll. The range of variation would be pretty much the same but the average results would be more common than the extremes. This would feel much better than a simple uniform distribution.

Then perhaps add a talent which would change it back to one big roll again so that bio and Gaidax could still enjoy the true randomness which the majority of destro playerbase so dislikes.

[Gaidax]

Majority of Destro playerbase does not know what the f they are talking about because they are not in Beta and do not experience it first hand.

At best they come up with all kinds of wild theories about how Mastery will screw them over and raid will wipe because Chaos Bolt rolled +11% bonus damage instead of +89%.

[Kirroth]

At best they come up with all kinds of wild theories about how Mastery will screw them over and raid will wipe because Chaos Bolt rolled +11% bonus damage instead of +89%.

Seriously. What's the difference between 50% Crit (on non-Chaos Bolt spells) and 100% Destro Mastery? One is a coin flip between getting exactly 100% extra damage or 0% extra damage, the other is rolling a d100 to get anything between 100% extra damage and 1% extra damage. Over time, the average result is the same. For any single spell, the Mastery is effectively hedging your bets for a less random result because you're almost certainly going to get something less than 100% but more than 0%.

So Destro's actually going to be less "feast or famine" RNG than your typical Crit focused spec. Yes, some spells will have the double roll of both Crit and Mastery, but not Chaos Bolt. And Chaos Bolt is the spell that the spec is focused around, so who cares if your Incinerates can be a little swingy.

Also, the above assumes that getting 50% Crit and 100% Mastery take the same amount of stats on gear. From the sound of it Mastery is significantly cheaper, if people are already hitting 130% in Beta testing gear. So that just makes it even better.

[Deleted]

There is quite a lot of difference between 12.8% and 19%, this gap will grow significantly as we get more stats and also do not forget that mastery offers pretty fat damage reduction.

IMO, Mastery will simply be too good to pass up, not only it is extremely competitive damage-wise, but on top of that damage reduction too. If anything, I can see raiders stacking it through the roof just because of literally free damage reduction.

Crit does more then just add damage, besides crit works on everything, mastery just on personal spells (CB/Inc/Imm mostly). If these spells are only 80% of our damage (can't find logs), mastery only adds 15.2% extra average damage. Immolate crits having a 30% chance for a shard should add a few % overal damage aswell making the stats almost equal with napkinmath, but with less RNG if you so desire. SimC will find out what the optimal ratio is.

[Uzkin]

In case of crit none of your spells randomly do LESS damage than what you'd expect. Instead, sometimes they do DOUBLE damage; feels nice. Destro mastery, on the other hand, makes you do less damage than what you'd expect 50% of the time. Awful. Besides, destro already has crit to provide rng AND destro has for a long time been about controlled output in the form of CB, and the class has undoubtedly attracted players who like such a playstyle. The legion redesign of destro theme betrays that.

[Deleted]

In case of crit none of your spells randomly do LESS damage than what you'd expect. Instead, sometimes they do DOUBLE damage; feels nice. Destro mastery, on the other hand, makes you do less damage than what you'd expect 50% of the time. Awful. Besides, destro already has crit to provide rng AND destro has for a long time been about controlled output in the form of CB, and the class has undoubtedly attracted players who like such a playstyle. The legion redesign of destro theme betrays that.

Tooltip damage is probably without any Mastery. I don't see any LESS damage as every % of mastery is a bonus on top of tooltip dmg. Sure we want the max Mastery roll all the time, but then I want to crit all the time aswell so they are pretty equal. Especially for CB which always crits.

[Uzkin]

Tooltip damage is probably without any Mastery. I don't see any LESS damage as every % of mastery is a bonus on top of tooltip dmg. Sure we want the max Mastery roll all the time, but then I want to crit all the time aswell so they are pretty equal. Especially for CB which always crits.

Nobody expects the max roll all the time; you failed to understand what I meant. Rather, the average roll would be satisfactory but the uniformly distributed rng mastery gives rolls less than that 50% of time, which is disappointing. Crit, on the other hand, is a sufficiently rare occurrence for casters so that when it *does* occur it is a high point rather than when it *doesn't* occur being a low point.

[Kirroth]

Nobody expects the max roll all the time; you failed to understand what I meant. Rather, the average roll would be satisfactory but the uniformly distributed rng mastery gives rolls less than that 50% of time, which is disappointing. Crit, on the other hand, is a sufficiently rare occurrence for casters so that when it *does* occur it is a high point rather than when it *doesn't* occur being a low point.

Now you're just quibbling about expectations. "Crit feels like a bonus because you don't get it the majority of the time, but you're always getting the Mastery benefit so you feel shortchanged when you don't get enough of it"? That's a silly reason to change a perfectly mechanically sound game mechanic. Expectations are easily adjusted once people start to play and get used to the thing being what it actually is instead of what they might have wished it was.

[Uzkin]

Majority of Destro playerbase does not know what the f they are talking about because they are not in Beta and do not experience it first hand.

At best they come up with all kinds of wild theories about how Mastery will screw them over and raid will wipe because Chaos Bolt rolled +11% bonus damage instead of +89%.

It is quite arrogant of you to assume that you know the best and the majority of playerbase, which seems to disagree with you, "doesn't know what the f they are talking about". It is enough if it FEELS bad, and to many it does.

Even Blizzard devs themselves apparently were aware, while designing the new mastery, that a totally uniformly random distribution is a bad idea -- which is why AT THE SAME TIME they introduced an artifact talent to remedy it. Unfortunately, they failed at the design of the artifact talent and, as they usually do, consequently just removed the offending feature from the equation entirely instead of trying to fix it. Thus we are now left to suffer from the poorly redesigned mastery which even Blizzard didn't intend to impose on us in the first place (for end-game content).

My suggestion would somewhat fix the excessive randomness in the mastery stat while still keeping the range the same. And for you few who like the total randomness there could be the talent I mentioned; heck, make it a glyph even. Everyone wins, and the majority isn't force-fed a stat which they dislike.

[Duckz0rs]

Nobody expects the max roll all the time;

That's literally my only fear for this Mastery. That in some complete statistical freak occurrence someone who's parsing manages to get an insane number of high rolls, skewing the rankings and causing Blizzard to nerfbat the specs base damage to compensate. Then again, it's simply highly unlikely to ever happen. It'd be a freak occurrence of collected freak occurrences.

[Uzkin]

Now you're just quibbling about expectations. "Crit feels like a bonus because you don't get it the majority of the time, but you're always getting the Mastery benefit so you feel shortchanged when you don't get enough of it"? That's a silly reason to change a perfectly mechanically sound game mechanic. Expectations are easily adjusted once people start to play and get used to the thing being what it actually is instead of what they might have wished it was.

Nope, this is mostly the same reason why they removed the original mastery "reroll" artifact talent. With the new mastery, especially with that talent, you do experience low points. With crit, you only experience the mode values and an occasional high point. Besides, we don't need that much additional randomness in addition to crit. This betrays what destro is about; it's a 180 degree turn in spec design and offends those who like the current playstyle and have gravitated towards the spec for that reason.

[Kirroth]

the majority of playerbase, which seems to disagree with you

they failed at the design of the artifact talent and, as they usually do, consequently just removed the offending feature from the equation entirely instead of trying to fix it.

Citation needed, assumes facts not in evidence.

You have no grounds for claiming to speak for a majority of players. The vast majority of players don't pay any attention to detailed Beta information, much less have Beta invites to get first hand experience with it. You have even less grounds for claiming the Devs couldn't program a talent so simple I could probably have a shot at doing it with my 20 year old skills with BASIC, rather than that they decided it was a bad idea that threw off stat weights and scrapped it for balance reasons.

In short, you're spewing lies and misinformation pulled out of your ass. I wish you'd stop. It's annoying.

[Uzkin]

That's literally my only fear for this Mastery. That in some complete statistical freak occurrence someone who's parsing manages to get an insane number of high rolls, skewing the rankings and causing Blizzard to nerfbat the specs base damage to compensate. Then again, it's simply highly unlikely to ever happen. It'd be a freak occurrence of collected freak occurrences.

Well. The lucky streaks DO accumulate in the top parse listings. The lucky streaks DO cause QQ on the pvp forums. And what will happen? If Blizzard sees it as a problem they'll just break the mastery skill, undertune the CB damage and/or nerf the damage of the entire spec. Because that's how it often goes: they introduce a poor design --> they get objections from community --> they get suggestions for how to fix it from the community --> they introduce the new design as is anyway --> they notice it won't work --> they break it and call it a day. Such as WoD rain of fire or demonology. And this new shadowburn (pve) pretty much too. Examples are plenty.

[Duckz0rs]

Well. The lucky streaks DO accumulate in the top parse listings. The lucky streaks DO cause QQ on the pvp forums. And what will happen? If Blizzard sees it as a problem they'll just break the mastery skill, undertune the CB damage and/or nerf the damage of the entire spec. Because that's how it often goes: they introduce a poor design --> they get objections from community --> they get suggestions for how to fix it from the community --> they introduce the new design as is anyway --> they notice it won't work --> they break it and call it a day. Such as WoD rain of fire or demonology. And this new shadowburn (pve) pretty much too. Examples are plenty.

Well, that pulled what I said quite a bit out of proportion, but I suppose that's roughly what I meant. I wasn't trying to doom-say that they'll follow the same erroneous patterns for fixing as in WoD, just that it might cause an across-the-board nerf (minor or major) to our base damage instead of tweaking the mastery itself.

The lucky streaks will definitely dominate the parses for a good bit, but I meant a complete freak occurrence that would absolutely skew the data. Something along the lines of 70% of spells cast rolling within the top 95+% of possible mastery. That would be -extremely- unlikely, but I wonder where they consider damage high enough to have skewed data.

PvP is a complete non-issue that needn't be mentioned for PvE tuning. They seperated the stats. If it's an issue only in PvP they can lower the amount of mastery the PvP sheets have instead of nerfing the base damage of the entire spec or even the mastery itself.

[Uzkin]

Citation needed, assumes facts not in evidence.

You have no grounds for claiming to speak for a majority of players. The vast majority of players don't pay any attention to detailed Beta information, much less have Beta invites to get first hand experience with it. You have even less grounds for claiming the Devs couldn't program a talent so simple I could probably have a shot at doing it with my 20 year old skills with BASIC, rather than that they decided it was a bad idea that threw off stat weights and scrapped it for balance reasons.

In short, you're spewing lies and misinformation pulled out of your ass. I wish you'd stop. It's annoying.

You just have to learn to read, I guess. I said "seems" because that is what the posts on the forums *seem* to imply. It is an indication, a sample of playerbase. Pretty much all statistical studies are performed on samples instead of going through the entire population. Indeed, most of the time, that would be impossible.

Also, Blizzard does have the tendency of breaking offending talents/abilities/features to the ground and leaving it for later such as the next expansion, just like they did with Rain of Fire. It's hardly the only example.

[Deleted]

In short, you're spewing lies and misinformation pulled out of your ass. I wish you'd stop. It's annoying.

did you even read what he was quoting? if Uzkin is spouting lies and misinformation, then most assuredly Gaidax is too and should stop as well.

on topic: my problem with destro mastery is that you can easily get the high rolls on trash and low rolls on boss fights, it will still be the same average but just so much less useful, i feel like they need to add a button cap of like 25% of the mastery, so at say 100% mastery it would roll between 25-100%.