3 Shard Out of Combat is live

[temple1337]

Better than nothing, but this change really only lets locks do what every other classes already can do at the start of a fight, aka, pop our cooldowns.

Not sure why they have Soul shards costs though. Seems like a band aid on a gunshot wound at this point.

Kinds of defeats the purpose of the beta when all these issues (low shard generation, massive ramp up, terrible target swapping) were brought up countless times and yet still allowed to go live. There is reason warlocks are not happy and the Q&A thread was littered with warlocks. Feedback was ignored and discarded and it blew up in their faces, justifiably so.

This reminds me of early WoD. Warlocks were not in a good place going into Highmaul but eventually became really good as the expansion wore on. I don't bring this up as an excuse or to say "well it's okay to be below average now because we might be good later", because it isn't. I bring it up to illustrate the fact that in both WoD and Legion beta, there were mountains upon mountains of constructive feedback on Warlock issues that were ignored and caused the class to suffer in the launch window. I honestly feel bad grouping up with my guild to do mythics, like they're taking me a long to be nice but they really wish I was a DH or a Rogue or pretty much any other DPS class. And that's not to say that my DPS is BAD perse, but to say that other classes do everything so much better that I don't feel like I belong. I don't mind not being a top DPS class, what I mind is being wholly inferior to most other classes and requiring extensive addon help with a clunky spec just to compete on SOME fights. For the first time since I started playing WoW (late Vanilla) I feel as though I am in danger of not having a raid spot. Why take me when you can take another Mage instead?

[Gohzerlock]

I would still like an interrupt as destruction... and some light tuning. Don't get me started on demo or affliction. The 3 shard out of combat is a QoL change for people who don't think to bank shards on a pull by pull basis.

[Brightamethyst]

Not sure why they have Soul shards costs though. Seems like a band aid on a gunshot wound at this point.

Seriously. Why do Service and Doomguard/Infernal even cost shards to begin with?

[Lucrece]

They should also hotfix grimoire of service and doomguard/infernal to not consume soul shards.

[Inshabel]

It's a good start, but I would really like the following stuff

1) Harvester not having 2/3 gold traits designed around an ability we no longer have, it needs some single target love or a more consistent way of getting souls on a ST fight, how about stacks building on Drain Soul?
2) Demo's summons should be a litttle longer, ANY movement wether voluntary or forced (knockbacks argh) completely resets your ramp up, it's terrible to play on dungeon bosses

These are my biggest gripes at the moment.

[Deleted]

It's a good start, but I would really like the following stuff

1) Harvester not having 2/3 gold traits designed around an ability we no longer have, it needs some single target love or a more consistent way of getting souls on a ST fight, how about stacks building on Drain Soul?
2) Demo's summons should be a litttle longer, ANY movement wether voluntary or forced (knockbacks argh) completely resets your ramp up, it's terrible to play on dungeon bosses

These are my biggest gripes at the moment.

#1 especially. You cango into a fight with maxed souls but if the ST fight lasts longer than 60 seconds like say, a boss,there's no way to keep up with other classes. Not to mention agony still takes half the fight to tick up to full and a single mis-step on it costs us dearly.

I also hope they've fixed the soul shards regenerating ooc so that it doesn't randomly "regenerate" from 5 shards to 1 or now 3 after the hotfix. It sucks running around for a while saving shards for something and then noticing that you don't have any despite not using UA at all.

[Deleted]

alot of issues raised with Warlocks is due to player skill.

i have no issues dominating charts as affli or destro. with 3 shards it makes little difference because if you play properly especially in dungeons you should leave yourself with 3+ shards at the end of a trash pack and they will be there on the next pack.

when you know a boss is up next make a point to finish the last pack before with 5 shards, you arent waiting that long to pull the next boss apart from HoV . so shards is a non issue.

Yes, I must remember to order that group of people I don;t know to not wait for anything because if they do my shards will degenerate. If you're dominating charts you're with ranged dps who don;t know what they are doing. Which might explain why the groups are taking a lock, if they knew better they'd take oen of the 27 mages in the queue.

Or do you mean "dominating" as in "speccing everything into AOE and cheesing meters on trash"? Because no one has argued that affliction isn;t good on trash, trouble is, you have to throw away it's already garbage single target to do so

[Morgan Pain]

What warlocks needs is plain and simple more damage from the dots. they are greatly undertuned.
A dot that last 16 sec should do more total damage then standard meleeabillities you can spam every 2 second.
Our dots are just a tickle and can just be totally ignored, atleast in pvp.
The easy and obviuos fix to make warlocks viable in both pvp and pve is to increase the total damage from corruption and agony.
fixed.

[Inshabel]

What warlocks needs is plain and simple more damage from the dots. they are greatly undertuned.
A dot that last 16 sec should do more total damage then standard meleeabillities you can spam every 2 second.
Our dots are just a tickle and can just be totally ignored, atleast in pvp.
The easy and obviuos fix to make warlocks viable in both pvp and pve is to increase the total damage from corruption and agony.
fixed.

And then multidotting becomes too strong.

[Deleted]

I can tell you allready without even testing it that its going to be a noticeable improvement at least in PVP. For demo, the difference of having a fellord out with melee all over you while you are trying to build shards and not having one is like night and day. Also its nice to have in raids/dungeons when ppl arent speedpulling. Dungeons maybe not so much but if you think that when raids open and ppl are learning the encounters that you wont have time to regen shards..well you are mistaken.

[Mehrunes]

They should also hotfix grimoire of service and doomguard/infernal to not consume soul shards.

At this point they should hotfix the entire Warlock design team out of existence altogether.

They can't make all the massive changes people want in a week, they can hotfix this pretty easily. We need to be patient for bigger changes. People complained a lot about ramp up time. This offsets that somewhat because it doesn't take demo 2 lengthy casts to be able to press a worthwhile button. They're answering an issue which they said they would address, and then look at some other issues. It's progress.

Or they could have listened to feedback during Alpha and Beta instead of ignoring the shit out of it and delivering this steaming pile of garbage they call class design. This is WoD redux. One would imagine a gaming developer would make conclusions from earlier patches and expansions, but Blizzard seems to be incapable of doing so and keeps repeating the same mistakes.

They had that time.
Maybe I'm barmy, but I expect the game to be designed before release, not having huge design decisions and changes having to be implemented when the users are trying to use the thing they've bought.

Blasphemer!

[Deleted]

My 818 ilvl dps went from 80k to 105k, while on my 816 hunter does 200k

[Mehrunes]

Sums up about every forum class discussion there is. Shadow priest wanting to be top AOE and top single target, warlocks wanting to be gods at everything+mobility (yeah like that was ever the case rofl), mages feeling not op enough, same for rogues,etc...

Players have no sense of balance and its a good thing that Blizzard ignores most of this whining which is very far from being informative or constructive

It's been pointed out to you that this is wrong by multiple people in the last thread you made this remark. At this point you're just deliberately spreading lies. And yeah, Warlocks complaining about being weak, which they are, is no sense of balance, sure.

[Deleted]

What warlocks needs is plain and simple more damage from the dots. they are greatly undertuned.
A dot that last 16 sec should do more total damage then standard meleeabillities you can spam every 2 second.
Our dots are just a tickle and can just be totally ignored, atleast in pvp.
The easy and obviuos fix to make warlocks viable in both pvp and pve is to increase the total damage from corruption and agony.
fixed.

They can't, because if you made dots on their own perform competetively on single target they'd absolutely wreck everyone on any fight with more than one.

We've had this dilemma ever since vanilla, and Blizz have swung from strong-dots-weak-multiplier to weak-dots-strong-multiplier over and over.

The "solution" has always been to have decent dots which you can boost with something that you can only have on one target - like Drain Soul. This iteration we got the crappiest, most unfun version yet called Soul Effigy. Plus a kinda-one in the form of the felhunter and Shadow Bite, which also ramps up if you have dots on the target.

At least all the previous ones helped a bit swith swapping, Soul Effigy is even worse for that than Haunt and Drain Soul. And as for the "lols watch it run" fel hunter which dies all too often...

[ezgeze]

Destro:

Dps
I had no issues at all and the 3 shard change was nice. It allowed me to ramp up dps quite quickly on both trash and bosses and finish #1 or #2 consistently. Also, with shard generation only getting better with gear, expect more shards/chaos bolts. I find dps on the move to be ok for the most part but requires some planning, ie keeping 1-2 charges on your weapon available. This will improve as I get Dimension Ripper trait unlocked. AOE is pretty decent for trash and bosses with single target talents but requires planning.

Survivability
Not an issue. As long as you are paying even a sliver of attention you will or can take minimal damage passively or straight up ignore certain mechanics (at least in Mythics) if you blow a def. cool down.

Mobility
I haven't really found this to be an issue really, although it would have been nice to get burning rush as a baseline.

Utility
Cookies are nice and generally welcomed in any group/raid setting. Seems to get a lot of use. The Gate is essentially a gimmick except on a couple fights, even then it might only get used once per person if that. Summoning......is dead. I wish they would allow us to summon people within an instanced again. Also, I miss having an interrupt available, I hate the idea of having to gimp personal dps in order to get it.

What I would fix.
Burning Rush baseline.
I would change how the pets casting works. Currently the imp and doomguard have a casting time for their spells. I would change this to an instant cast with a cd that would be shortened with haste. This will essentially "fix" ranged pet dps for the most part and will make switching targets much easier.
Shorten the cooldown for the Gateway so that it would be able to be used twice on a Mythic encounter.

[Deleted]

live in EU now.

feels good for questing and running around.

doesn't change much for single target fights that last longer than a minute.

I welcome it, but it doesn't help warlocks out of the rot they are in

[Sunlighthell]

So as expected zero changes to affliction low dps with huge ramp up times before raids and probably won't happen until 7.1 or 7.2 as well. Yesterday I googled some information about affliction changes on alpha/beta and it shocked me dearly that there's ton of feedback about golden traits/traits that simply not working(sweet souls)/broken artifact in general (surprise: your ulthalesh not doubling EVERY trait as it stated in tooltip)/non existant shard generation even with 30% haste/no baseline interrupt and dps issues from APRIL and yet it go live as is without zero fixes. Blizzard continue to ignore all feedback regarding shards and low damage in affliction with huge ramp up god, they even nerfed warlocks damage in pvp by 23% so now every melee can outheal dot ticks and yet some people come with "they will fix it", "sky isn't falling", "it's only alpha/beta/pre-patch/pre-raid" these people also like to point you to simcrafts made with patchwerk fights as reason that warlock can compete. Wondering what these people will say after september 21/28.

[xpose]

My 818 ilvl dps went from 80k to 105k, while on my 816 hunter does 200k

My 812 warlock (affliction) does less damage than my 780 moonkin even with the change.

[Deleted]

Destro is literally fine in both mythic dungeons and raids, you cannot expect all 3 specs to be equally strong LUL

[Polyamorous]

Destro is literally fine in both mythic dungeons and raids, you cannot expect all 3 specs to be equally strong LUL

Not equally strong, but we should be able to expect all specs to be viable, given that large time investment people have made with artifact power. Currently affliction is not really viable for anything other than AoE when fully specced for it.