7.1.5 Ptr Changes

[Shandalar]

Next week will be fun when new ptr notes will be up and have 0 buffs to demon.

And all stuff about Sinergy is bullshit. Sinergy werent op; just the other 2 talents were total trash. They should buff them, instead nerfing the only good one. Now we have 3 garbage talents, too much fun!

[Sunlighthell]

Just to note, in case people are following Icy Veins pretty blindly, that's already arguably the case. Haste and Crit do a lot of back and forthing and even overtake Mastery at times.

Affliction scales nicely with all of its stats, besides maybe Vers, and your stat weights change nonstop, especially based on how much Mastery you have.

I'm not following Icy veins (they listed bought of corruption as a bis trinket for affliction when it simply not worked with affliction, lol). Mastery seems important for me tho.

[Valkaneer]

Malefic grasp is good on single target fights with adds that dont live long to agony ramp up. And seriously malefic grasp buff is so fucking big that affliction single target is on par with shadow priest, before that affliction single target were one of the worst.

I didn't see any new patch notes yet. Did they buff MG? Cuz the last build writhe + SE easily ahead of it.

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Ok I found it.

Is any one not worried about how OP MG will be at 80%. I really don't feel like becoming OP so we get beat with the Nerf hammer back down to the bottom all over again.

[pvw1075]

I didn't see any new patch notes yet. Did they buff MG? Cuz the last build writhe + SE easily ahead of it.

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Ok I found it.

Is any one not worried about how OP MG will be at 80%. I really don't feel like becoming OP so we get beat with the Nerf hammer back down to the bottom all over again.

Does now 80%+ more dmg.

[Deleted]

Next week will be fun when new ptr notes will be up and have 0 buffs to demon.

And all stuff about Sinergy is bullshit. Sinergy werent op; just the other 2 talents were total trash. They should buff them, instead nerfing the only good one. Now we have 3 garbage talents, too much fun!

When this happens they invariably nerf the good one, not buff the "bad" ones

I think it;s more that Synergy is too much a default choice, that it produces sometimes wild results with TKC and they want more damage from you rminions, which is the whoel idea for demo

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I didn't see any new patch notes yet. Did they buff MG? Cuz the last build writhe + SE easily ahead of it.

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Ok I found it.

Is any one not worried about how OP MG will be at 80%. I really don't feel like becoming OP so we get beat with the Nerf hammer back down to the bottom all over again.

It's not quite as OP as it first looks. Target dummy damage is misleading. It's reliant on channeling Drain Soul, so movement borks it. You also have to give up Writhe and Soul Effigy makes no sense without Writhe, or combined with Grasp. So that 80% is actually less on Agony than Writhe and Soul Effigy, and Agony is our strongest dot. Moreover, Soul Effigy Agony procs more shards, Malefic Grasp doesn't.

Its not as crazy as it looks. It might be too high, but it will have to be high to be a choice peopel will want, if not, they will all stick with Writhe, making MG pointless.

I'd guess that once you go over one single target Writhe will still win out over Grasp. Movement fights Effigy probably wins, IF you can get around the range problem.

[Bullettime]

Technically even at 80% Writhe is still better than Malefic Grasp, with or without Soul Effigy, on single target simulations still. It's just a 1% gap or less in the talent combinations so fuck Soul Effigy and good riddance. I'll take the hit to be rid of Effigy outside of niche encounters where it would shine.

[Deleted]

MG probably needs to be 50-60% as an absolute minimum to make it even worth considering over Writhe, let alone Writhe+Effigy.

Repeat, training dummies can be deceptive. Think how often movement will screw channeling Drain Soul. If you're not doing that, MG does nothing. It's an active buff, Writhe is passive. Writhe synergises with Effigy...Malefic Grasp actively competes with it. I'm positive they do not forsee people taking both.

[Jessicka]

MG probably needs to be 50-60% as an absolute minimum to make it even worth considering over Writhe, let alone Writhe+Effigy.

Repeat, training dummies can be deceptive. Think how often movement will screw channeling Drain Soul. If you're not doing that, MG does nothing. It's an active buff, Writhe is passive. Writhe synergises with Effigy...Malefic Grasp actively competes with it. I'm positive they do not forsee people taking both.

Things have to live nearly 2 full Agony durations to see the benefit of Writhe, that basically means raid bosses and not much else. Even long lived adds won't give you that, in that respect it's fairly niche, as much as you lose channel time from multi dotting, those extra dots will seldom give you Writhe time.

[Valkaneer]

Technically even at 80% Writhe is still better than Malefic Grasp, with or without Soul Effigy, on single target simulations still. It's just a 1% gap or less in the talent combinations so fuck Soul Effigy and good riddance. I'll take the hit to be rid of Effigy outside of niche encounters where it would shine.

Terryn was only behind 10% with mg vs se + writhe when mg was 20%. You do realize UA is going to tick for 80% more with mg right? I would guess UA alone will be the same damage as writhe.

[Shandalar]

So Blizzard had talked.

"Shadow is more important than warlocks, so we havent worked on them. Get more luck in the next try guys"

[Ryreilan]

"Warlocks have a few issues that hinder each spec. Affliction got some mechanical and numerical improvements in 7.1.5.
Demonic Empowerment is a source of frustration, you spend a lot of time building resources and ramping up, you feel like you are juggling a lot of things. This is a larger problem that can't be fixed with tweaking some numbers. The team needs to think about how the rotation flows, make changes, and continue to iterate.
Patches like 7.1.5 and 7.2.5 are targeted to come out around 10 weeks after the last major patch, containing whatever can get finished by that time. Shadow Priests and a few other classes got a lot of attention this time around. Warlock issues will get fixed during the expansion, but the team didn't feel like they could get the changes done in time for this patch.
Destruction lost something with being unable to generate partial Embers. The team wants to try to let Destro Soul Shards behave like Embers, allowing you to generate partial Embers."


From the currently live Q&A

I do agree that Shadow needed an immediate bandaid, but after all the feedback since the alpha and to now, its very dissapointing that they didnt realize that we needed a fix as well.

[Jessicka]

So Blizzard had talked.

"Shadow is more important than warlocks, so we havent worked on them. Get more luck in the next try guys"

In defence of Shadow, StM is probably the most bullshit talent Blizzard have ever come up with. How it made it to Live is truly astonishing; I'm going to go with 'someones baby' as per Soul Effigy. Warlocks don't have the monopoly on being crapped on, basically all the caster specs have been horribly handled by the design team this expansion.

[Lucrece]

Incredible that they said they would get around to warlocks next patch while also completely destabilizing Destruction with those talent changes and nerfing demo.

What's worse, because they don't address mechanical issues, what they'll do is band aid number tuning to cover it up, which only leads to more problems as they then can either stall mechanical changes beneath the facade of right numbers; or when they finally get to mechanical changes, number tuning needs to be done yet again so the class feels like a rollercoaster.

There was absolutely ZERO reason to nerf demonology or take away Destruction's quality of life talent setup. Don't just push in half assed changes, if you won't do proper changes, revert those talent swaps for destro and wait till you do a proper patch to implement them.

I don't care what problems shadow priests were having, they were still the fotm class you were bringing to +15 keystone realm firsts and they were the top raid class. Their complaints were about playstyle preference, but not a mechanic that actively hindered in performance like massive ramp up and having to talent/spec swap for basic aoe/ST capability in mythic+ where you can't even do that.

[Gihelle]

Well, that was as much of a waste of time as I imagined it would be.

[Deleted]

Terryn was only behind 10% with mg vs se + writhe when mg was 20%. You do realize UA is going to tick for 80% more with mg right? I would guess UA alone will be the same damage as writhe.

That's pure single target. If you watch Terryn's videos he notes that as soon as you can multidot Writhe really takes off. Example, Trial of Valor...Writhe woul dbe the go-to for Odyn, Grasp for Guarm

They specifically stated that Malefic Grasp (though they calle dit a "new 15 talent replacing Drain Soul") is a single target talent.

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Well, that was as much of a waste of time as I imagined it would be.

Oh, I dunno: it was worth it for the belly-laugh at the hunter complaining about lack of mobility.

[Drakile]

No time to fix locks, only time to nerf them. -Blizzard 2016

[KrazyK923]

I mean, are we supposed to be happy that their response was basically:

"We couldn't fix it for launch, it'll get there eventually."

Like...the fuck? They say this for several class and specs.

[Kirroth]

No time to fix locks, only time to nerf them. -Blizzard 2016

If getting some small band-aid tweaks in 7.1.5 and having to wait till 7.2 for substantive changes means we get good, thorough changes instead of some quick half-assed "fixes" then I'm willing to go with that. It feels like forever now, but this is going to be a long expansion not some quick two-tier thing like Warlords.

I mean, what's not to celebrate? Destro is getting Embers back! Just, not yet.

[KrazyK923]

Yeah that only directly flies in the face of them just recently saying they can't fix Destro "just by making Soul Shards work like Embers."

I'm almost positive there's no actual Warlock developer anymore.

[Deezlar]

So they ignored us all through Alpha when we were pointing out the glaring issues.

Ignored us all through Beta when they went full retard and introduced even more issues.

During the first months of live basically said "Lol, keep crying. Your "Feedback" isn't helpful enough"

And now "Sorry we're too busy to do anything with your class. Too busy fixing Shadow Priests"


Cancelled my 3 accounts a couple of weeks back. This just proved it was absolutely the right decision.
Better luck next xpac fellow Warlocks!