Destruction: I dont think the sky is falling

[xskarma]

I tried the changes on PTR for a bit and I am wholly unimpressed. Choosing between Eradication and RE just sucks. We have, as a community, railed against long cast time Chaos Bolt since the start of the Mists revamp that brought it's current iteration and they just keep on trying to drag it back up and introducing it in new and interesting ways, and every time they do the community moans cause long cast times suck in both PvE and PvP.

When your community consistently chooses the option to have a shorter cast time on Chaos Bolt, even when theory crafters and sims prove that they get more damage by choosing the longer cast, it should tell you something about how they feel. The WoW community rarely if ever chooses the option to do less damage, so when we do, it's cause of significant reasons.

[Jonny727272]

As a matter of fact, with tier Shadowburn may be very very powerful. Remember it benefits from everything that affects Conflagrate as its replacement, meaning it will also have ~6-7 sec CD with tier provided you keep reasonable haste.

You are making it sound like shadowburn replaces conflag as a spell? I haven't gotten on the ptr, but is the shadowburn counting as an additional spell or does it totally replace it? And if it replaces it, what becomes of the golden talent that makes our consecutive conflags 100% crit chance?

[Deleted]

I tried the changes on PTR for a bit and I am wholly unimpressed. Choosing between Eradication and RE just sucks. We have, as a community, railed against long cast time Chaos Bolt since the start of the Mists revamp that brought it's current iteration and they just keep on trying to drag it back up and introducing it in new and interesting ways, and every time they do the community moans cause long cast times suck in both PvE and PvP.

When your community consistently chooses the option to have a shorter cast time on Chaos Bolt, even when theory crafters and sims prove that they get more damage by choosing the longer cast, it should tell you something about how they feel. The WoW community rarely if ever chooses the option to do less damage, so when we do, it's cause of significant reasons.

Well said.

[Duckz0rs]

You are making it sound like shadowburn replaces conflag as a spell? I haven't gotten on the ptr, but is the shadowburn counting as an additional spell or does it totally replace it? And if it replaces it, what becomes of the golden talent that makes our consecutive conflags 100% crit chance?

It replaces Conflagrate and should benefit from all the conflagrate-specific traits. There's currently some debate on whether it actually does so fully, but it definitely benefits from CoC to some extent, so the intention is clearly that Shadowburn benefits from those traits.

[Gaidax]

You are making it sound like shadowburn replaces conflag as a spell? I haven't gotten on the ptr, but is the shadowburn counting as an additional spell or does it totally replace it? And if it replaces it, what becomes of the golden talent that makes our consecutive conflags 100% crit chance?

Shadowburn now replaces Conflagrate if you chose it as a talent, all bonuses that affect Conflagrate including Artifact, Haste CD reduction, charges and I imagine tier affect Shadowburn.

[Baconeggcheese]

As a matter of fact, with tier Shadowburn may be very very powerful.

The sniping adds thing existed with its other form (and still wasn't enough for it to see use), it potentially would have been even better with its previous iteration because you could generate as many shards as there were adds before where now its limited to conflag's recharge rate and you're not going to sit on charges much. I'd say the shadowburn change is entirely a nerf as is, and that's before considering that it has negative synergy with the belt since it turns conflag into a shadow spell.

My best guess is that change is entirely directed at pvp and reinforcing them wanting CB to be the main shard spender and focus of the spec. As is without some significant change in either mechanics or overtuning I don't see it ever being used. Especially so if you have the belt.

But in any case, sky is definitely not falling. They sorted out this AoE/ST mixed rows thing, CDF was buffed significantly, we even got very close to having Dark Soul back in Single Target encounters and we even have Mana Tap reworked into something far less annoying and actually viable.

Empowered life tap is likely to either end up completely worthless or dominate the row as is. Pretty confident it isn't usable right now, it needs either a significant duration increase or a significant %dmg buff, either of which making it usable would likely make it completely overshadow the other two talents on the row. Since they halved the duration when they made the change it seems like their heads in the opposite place at least at the time this build was made.

It's a QoL buff to mana tap with the exact same issues if not more because its tied to your needing to life tap which is something destro doesn't do very often. Dummy testing on the ptr I consistently would go 2~ish minutes before I needed to life tap in ST, and well over 2 minutes on 4 target.

Finally the new legendary there is amazing, IMO.

If you get shadowbolt rifts yeah, if you get CB rifts it fucks you. Don't really enjoy the prospects of that since its already a contentious point of RNG. I imagine it'll also play poorly with dimensional ripper, since it forces you to want to stay at 1 charge all the time to not waste procs which means you can't really pool or space out rifts without risk when it decides to happen.


Overall most of these changes are in a preferred direction as long as they get the numbers right, Though thus far its mostly nerfs.
~Backdraft needs an extra charge per cast to be on par with the current version, otherwise Rb will probably firmly take over. Probably even more so with tier.
~Putting backdraft on charges indirectly nerfs RE a tiny bit since it was buying you those incinerates between CB's
~Shadowburn is a flat out nerf
~CDF was their easiest ST tuning knob for the spec and they just turned it into really awkward aoe, not sure their thought process but it reinforces that they don't want us to have good single target which is fine as long as it stays relatively where it is-ish.
~Empowered life tap needs a serious buff to be usable
~Cataclysm vs FnB is awkward, my knee jerk says cataclysm doesn't see much use and you just go back and forth between FnB and soul harvest. But even then, I could imagine a world where you take cataclysm since our cleave is so powerful that you'd prefer to just spend the 1 cast on cata and then use the shards generated from that to spam havoc'd CB's and then just have aoe down time. Even then though that's not terribly powerful or we'd already be doing that instead of using RE the majority of the time.
~GoSac got a hefty nerf, iono why since its not exactly strong in the first place.
~As is eradication will probably take RE's place in dominating the 30 row, coupled with backdraft nerf means going back to really slow CB casts which doesn't play well into actual encounters.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with the coming builds, since 7.2 is slated to come out in January sometime I don't imagine they'll have the time to do too many builds since they typically only do 1 a week at most. Definitely need to make sure we're getting our feedback to them early.

[Deleted]

-snip -


Overall most of these changes are in a preferred direction as long as they get the numbers right, Though thus far its mostly nerfs.
~Backdraft needs an extra charge per cast to be on par with the current version, otherwise Rb will probably firmly take over. Probably even more so with tier.
~Putting backdraft on charges indirectly nerfs RE a tiny bit since it was buying you those incinerates between CB's
~Shadowburn is a flat out nerf
~CDF was their easiest ST tuning knob for the spec and they just turned it into really awkward aoe, not sure their thought process but it reinforces that they don't want us to have good single target which is fine as long as it stays relatively where it is-ish.
~Empowered life tap needs a serious buff to be usable
~Cataclysm vs FnB is awkward, my knee jerk says cataclysm doesn't see much use and you just go back and forth between FnB and soul harvest. But even then, I could imagine a world where you take cataclysm since our cleave is so powerful that you'd prefer to just spend the 1 cast on cata and then use the shards generated from that to spam havoc'd CB's and then just have aoe down time. Even then though that's not terribly powerful or we'd already be doing that instead of using RE the majority of the time.
~GoSac got a hefty nerf, iono why since its not exactly strong in the first place.
~As is eradication will probably take RE's place in dominating the 30 row, coupled with backdraft nerf means going back to really slow CB casts which doesn't play well into actual encounters.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with the coming builds, since 7.2 is slated to come out in January sometime I don't imagine they'll have the time to do too many builds since they typically only do 1 a week at most. Definitely need to make sure we're getting our feedback to them early.

Very good and reasonable perspective.
The changes, in its current form, are absolutely horrible and make Destro actually less fun.

I bet Blizzard nerfed GoSac just because most people permanently had it. I always use GoSac because for single target encounters I switch to Demonology. Blizzard probably didn't realize people are doing that and think most people are always taking GoSac. You are completely right. GoSac isn't even that strong.

The whole changing does nothing for me. The talents are way too awkward now.

I really hoped they would atleast make 1-2 things baseline like Reverse Entropy, but nothing. And I am pretty sure there won't be many big changes with future iterations of the PTR 7.1.5 patch. Maybe number tuning. And by the looks of it Destruction needs a lot of number tuning to make destruction, with the new changes included, good.

All casts are too long and it simply doesn't work in 2016 anymore. This is not vanilla. It's not fun casting a 3 second Chaos Bolt that hits for 370K

[bio347]

It'll be interesting to see what they do with the coming builds, since 7.2 is slated to come out in January sometime I don't imagine they'll have the time to do too many builds since they typically only do 1 a week at most. Definitely need to make sure we're getting our feedback to them early.

7.2 isn't due out in January, Nighthold is. And Nighthold is already in the game files, it's just not turned on yet. Since 7.2 contains the Tomb of Sargeras (a new raid tier when we haven't even fully opened the current one), I'd expect it to be more April-ish.

[Gratlim]

It replaces Conflagrate and should benefit from all the conflagrate-specific traits. There's currently some debate on whether it actually does so fully, but it definitely benefits from CoC to some extent, so the intention is clearly that Shadowburn benefits from those traits.

Does that mean SB get conflagration CD as well? My pvp SB spamming is dead? If it's true it really sucks. Enough for me not to bother pvping in BG as lock anymore, unless affli dots get a huge damage bonus.

[Baconeggcheese]

The changes, in its current form, are absolutely horrible and make Destro actually less fun.

I don't think the changes are "absolutely horrible", mechanically they're perfectly fine and mostly need small tweaks in numbers or what have you. I don't see this changing a whole lot at the end of the day, if you enjoy destro right now you should still enjoy destro with these changes once number tweaks come in.

7.2 isn't due out in January, Nighthold is. And Nighthold is already in the game files, it's just not turned on yet. Since 7.2 contains the Tomb of Sargeras (a new raid tier when we haven't even fully opened the current one), I'd expect it to be more April-ish.

IIRC they've already said 7.2 will come with night hold in january-~ish and that tomb of sargeras's files will be in there but the raid won't be launched until later much like night hold. I may just be crazy though.

Either way we're almost guaranteed to see more tuning tweaks going into nighthold, which is not exactly far out so there's not a ton of time for 7.1.5 to happen especially with the holidays coming up. Which was what you were supposed to take away from that.

[bio347]

IIRC they've already said 7.2 will come with night hold in january-~ish and that tomb of sargeras's files will be in there but the raid won't be launched until later much like night hold. I may just be crazy though.

Just for posterity, this is what the Q&A said about it:

Nighthold is targeted to open in mid to late January.
Patch 7.2 and the Tomb of Sargeras will come later.
When Patch 7.2 comes out players will still be progressing through Nighthold, but probably ready for all of the other new outdoor content.
Tomb of Sargeras will not open when Patch 7.2 goes live. Part of the story leads you to the Tomb of Sargeras.
Hellfire Citadel was released too soon.

So perhaps my estimate is a bit off, if we're still intended to be "progressing", but it definitely doesn't sound like 7.2 in January. Either way...

Either way we're almost guaranteed to see more tuning tweaks going into nighthold, which is not exactly far out so there's not a ton of time for 7.1.5 to happen especially with the holidays coming up. Which was what you were supposed to take away from that.

...if they do intend to have 7.1.5 out by Nighthold, ~two months isn't particularly long, no. One would hope for a little more early-alpha-rapidity in terms of builds.

[Deleted]

what about the fact that destruction right now is a super dull spec, has no room to play around mechanics with skill(see shadow priest to understand what I mean), and will forever be doomed to ever only shine in cleave fights thanks to Havoc being utterly broken? will they really fix all this in the next patch? can I really put down my pitch forks already?

[FertsBlert]

I love your dog, but I won't pet him I know you shouldn't touch service dogs.

[Gaidax]

~Backdraft needs an extra charge per cast to be on par with the current version, otherwise Rb will probably firmly take over. Probably even more so with tier.

Agreed, RB will be unfortunate but then it can always be tuned.

~Shadowburn is a flat out nerf

Disagree, as of now Shadowburn is a dead talent in PvE. Turning it into a more powerful generator with option for bonus shards gives hope to see it in actual play, at worst it will end up being same thing as now - not taken. PvP - it is a nerf, yes.

~CDF was their easiest ST tuning knob for the spec and they just turned it into really awkward aoe, not sure their thought process but it reinforces that they don't want us to have good single target which is fine as long as it stays relatively where it is-ish.

I think CDF got a good improvement that opens up a whole bunch of new options for us, starting with Cata/Havoc/CDF being great AoE and ending with possibility of CDF actually having potential as alternative to WH in M+. I think Destruction ST is passable and new legendary gives destruction actual legendary that increases ST as well. Destruction never was ST powerhouse anyway in any recent expansions and as long as things don't go too bad there, it will be ok, IMO.

~Empowered life tap needs a serious buff to be usable

Maybe, as I see it again, same thing as Shadowburn - previously you did not take it, now it has potential to be taken, provided it is competitive with other options there either by tuning or otherwise.

~Cataclysm vs FnB is awkward, my knee jerk says cataclysm doesn't see much use and you just go back and forth between FnB and soul harvest. But even then, I could imagine a world where you take cataclysm since our cleave is so powerful that you'd prefer to just spend the 1 cast on cata and then use the shards generated from that to spam havoc'd CB's and then just have aoe down time. Even then though that's not terribly powerful or we'd already be doing that instead of using RE the majority of the time.

As a matter of fact, I think Cata is plain superior choice there to F&B simply because it has element in ST/Cleave and AoE, while F&B is basically AoE fallback when you don't have shards, Cata gives a lot of shards and a lot of RoF, which is superior to F&B, unless you have constant waves of fast dying trash coming (Skorpyron).

~GoSac got a hefty nerf, iono why since its not exactly strong in the first place.

This one change I do not undestand. Maybe they want to ensure you don't take GoSac for anything but heavy AoE/Cleave, but really - I'd rather make them turn GoSac into a viable alternative to pets at all times. I do not think opting out of pet is such a terrible thing to allow to people, especially considering we did so for such a long time in PvE anyway.

~As is eradication will probably take RE's place in dominating the 30 row, coupled with backdraft nerf means going back to really slow CB casts which doesn't play well into actual encounters.

Do not know, do keep in mind that we have tier bonus coming that decreases subsequent CB cast times. Eradication probably will be the choice with that, but I don't think our CB will be that slow overall if we pace them correctly.

----

Basically my take is that we have following positives going on here:

There is finally an improvement of situation of AoE and ST rows mix - Cataclysm represents a good choice overall (and I historically wanted to be able to take Cataclysm baseline, this is close for that), several talents have potential of coming back from the dead in PvE: Shadowburn; Mana Tap; CDF; Soul Harvest.

The bad parts are Backdraft and GoSac, I am not thrilled about potential of RB becoming go to talent there and I really don't like Blizzard to forcing pet down our throats after all these years we could play without pet and the world/lore not imploding because of it.

The disappointment - Chaos Bolt still remains 3 seconds cast baseline, IMO it's just too long nowadays. IMO, they should have dropped it to 2.5s baseline and then removed Reverse Entropy and put something there instead... how about Life Tap getting a let's say 8s cooldown, but restoring more mana and dealing damage to target enemy equal to 10% of your HP, instead of taking it from you? Who said you have to tap into your life?

[Deleted]

Does that mean SB get conflagration CD as well? My pvp SB spamming is dead? If it's true it really sucks. Enough for me not to bother pvping in BG as lock anymore, unless affli dots get a huge damage bonus.

Sadly you are right, as it is now SB spec is completely unplayable in pvp. I cant understand why they dont make it like it was before? It wasnt ever a real execute, as in you didnt use it instead of CB on single target when boss was <20%. It would also solve the problem of just spamming it. oh well..

I bet Blizzard nerfed GoSac just because most people permanently had it. I always use GoSac because for single target encounters I switch to Demonology. Blizzard probably didn't realize people are doing that and think most people are always taking GoSac. You are completely right. GoSac isn't even that strong.

The way i see it is that they trying to bake the current aoe we have from sac into sac+DF. So that you have the option to get a more ST spec without losing "all" your aoe. Like for m+ you could take BD/Erad/Cata/Service/CD essencially giving up cleave (WH) isntead of ST to get more aoe. I like better the idea to having to choose between cleave or aoe while maintaining ST than then haveing to choose to give ST for aoe (like it is now). I am not sure if these changes though are the right way to do it.

Like with the formentioned "build" in trash you would cast Cata and spend your shards on RoF and also fitting DF. In single target you have the service cd and also eradication which buffs CD (allready a good talent for ST) making life a bit easier without RE castime reduction. Though i can see the situation in ST that if you have feretory the combination of longer CB+CD will overflow you in shards.

Edit: The BD is nerf on charges ie on encounters without movement, its a buff on movement fights though since you can keep the charges and cast Conflag on the move without thinking "oh shit i have to stand and cast now". The opposite goes for the new leggy where you cant spend charges just for having to move, because you ll want to get advantage of the dmg buff as much as possible.

Does the BD buff stack? like can you conflag twice and have 4 charges? or you have to spend them first?

[Inshabel]

Meh, I'll probably still pick RE and F&B, which makes you strong in both ST and AoE situations, the only difference is I can't swap F&B to Eradication on pure ST fights anymore , so for me this change is actually a step back.

[Deleted]

Meh, I'll probably still pick RE and F&B, which makes you strong in both ST and AoE situations, the only difference is I can't swap F&B to Eradication on pure ST fights anymore , so for me this change is actually a step back.

I 've seen this many times, i havent done the math to see if its better or not, but why do people forget they will soul harvest for ST now? My guess is that for ST only, eradication will be paired with CD and RE with SC. How strong our st will be its just a matter of tuning numbers, they can easily bring it up if they want to

[Deleted]

Destruction's main "weakness" is being too weak without talents while the talents themselves are way too strong. Many are niche picks so potent, they become mandatory to have when usable. Nerfing the possible builds and buffing up the baseline is a smart thing to do - Let's hope the second part of that equation is still to come.

They could have been a bit smarter with the rollouts at least, considering that they don't have much trust left.

[Deleted]

[I]
~GoSac got a hefty nerf, iono why since its not exactly strong in the first place.

This one change I do not undestand. Maybe they want to ensure you don't take GoSac for anything but heavy AoE/Cleave, but really - I'd rather make them turn GoSac into a viable alternative to pets at all times. I do not think opting out of pet is such a terrible thing to allow to people, especially considering we did so for such a long time in PvE anyway.

Assuming hopefully aoe dmg will be equall or better if you have both sac and CD than it is now on live with having sacr, it makes the grimoire tier much more intresting for content like m+ where you need more "all around builds". For example it might solve the problem of not having an interrupt. Because if you can get service and maintain good aoe with CD you can just get a felhunter out for certain trashpacks that need interrupting at the cost of some st dmg (while also having the imp cd for burst). and after that you just get imp again out. Atm the cost of getting felhunter out when you spec sac, while possible, its pretty big dmg loss in aoe.

[Inshabel]

I 've seen this many times, i havent done the math to see if its better or not, but why do people forget they will soul harvest for ST now? My guess is that for ST only, eradication will be paired with CD and RE with SC. How strong our st will be its just a matter of tuning numbers, they can easily bring it up if they want to

I doubt Soul Harvest will be better than either RE or Eradication for ST

- - - Updated - - -

Still hoping for a baseline interupt, it's about damn time. Also lose the casttime on Soulstones. We're the only one with a Brez that isn't instant.