Have you seen the sims? JEEEEESUS

[Deleted]

I feel the pain, but conversely people like playing different spec playstyles... they wouldn't allow one spec to be the lowest of our 3 specs the whole expac just so people didn't have to worry about power changes, those who preferred the 3rd in line spec playstyle would be fucked the whole expac... and that's simply not good. As a pure DPS class, I expect to play all 3 of my specs as a main spec over the course of an expansion as these tunings come each tier.. though sometimes it does mean I am maining a spec I don't prefer. :/ AP and Legendaries certainly is putting a tax on this ....

To be fair, AP is not so much the issue. It's actually quite easy to farm anyway. Even while working 10-ish hours a day, I manage to get a new paragon point in the offspec weapons every day.

Legendaries are quite a different story. But the irony was noticable when I started to get envious of people having prydaz while having destro belt / bracers myself

[Baconeggcheese]

I also agree with most here: Destruction feels much more hectic and less fluid than before. In addition, you have to work much much harder than in the other specs and still don't fully compete. Affliction buffs were nice and needed, but now you have the situation where you still have the insane sustained & burst AoE but now, even Single Target and - to a degree - 2-target cleave dps competes easily with Destruction. Why would anyone want to still play destruction when you put out equal numbers in ST or even 2-target cleave but then you lack the same AoE capabilities?

Personally, I'm also starting to switch to Affliction for now (if nothing changes), but I'm pissed like hell because I'm going from 2 BIS Legendaries & a 54-trait weapon to no good legendaries and a 38-trait weapon. That after the official blue post of "we plan on keeping the relative sequence of specs as it is, so you don't waste you AP".

Our specs relative to each other haven't really changed. Aff and destro got ST bumps, demo is still technically the top ST spec but its issues with movement will likely make aff competitive with it. Outside of that nothing else has changed in relation to each other, destro stomps aff in 2 target, aff needs 3 targets to do destro's 2 target dmg. Aff is still our strongest sustained aoe spec, demo burst aoe, destro meh aoe.

I feel very comfortable having put my points into my destro weapon. Apparently most of the top 10 world warlocks did as well skimming wowprogress, though its totally possible to have 54 points in 2 weapons right now though so we'll see if people start dual speccing a bit more.

[Deleted]

Our specs relative to each other haven't really changed. Aff and destro got ST bumps, demo is still technically the top ST spec but its issues with movement will likely make aff competitive with it. Outside of that nothing else has changed in relation to each other, destro stomps aff in 2 target, aff needs 3 targets to do destro's 2 target dmg. Aff is still our strongest sustained aoe spec, demo burst aoe, destro meh aoe.

I feel very comfortable having put my points into my destro weapon. Apparently most of the top 10 world warlocks did as well skimming wowprogress, though its totally possible to have 54 points in 2 weapons right now though so we'll see if people start dual speccing a bit more.

My problem is that it might not have changed in numbers (which to be honest I doubt a little, because if you look at Odyn M logs - the fight that could be described as THE destro fight, there are almost equally as many affli as destro specs in the Top 100). It's that it has gotten much more convoluted to produce those numbers.

CDF, ELT and SH added to the rotation, cast time of the main nuke increased, and CDF highly susceptible to unlucky stuff (need to move after you started the channel? Sorry, good luck next time because its now on CD). And this weird SH that increases in time the more adds are around. It has become much much more complex to play destro and only if you play close to perfection can you compete with an affliction lock that has to place a couple of dots and watch 2 resources. (edit: exaggerating for effect here.)

Anyway, I'm not complaining, I will continue trying destro as long as it is viable in progress and put points into affli for when it is not.

[Deleted]

I feel the pain, but conversely people like playing different spec playstyles... they wouldn't allow one spec to be the lowest of our 3 specs the whole expac just so people didn't have to worry about power changes, those who preferred the 3rd in line spec playstyle would be fucked the whole expac... and that's simply not good. As a pure DPS class, I expect to play all 3 of my specs as a main spec over the course of an expansion as these tunings come each tier.. though sometimes it does mean I am maining a spec I don't prefer. :/ AP and Legendaries certainly is putting a tax on this ....

I think that just points out the problems with the system more than the problems with buffs - if the second affliction starts doing competent ST dps instead of bottom of the barrel you're causing huge problems for the playerbase, then something is obviously wrong.

Going into the expansion I was focused on how much I disliked the idea of AP, but getting each one to 35ish hasn't felt like a problem and the additional traits % is small enough that I can live with it. It's legendaries that really drive me mad, they really should have been more of an effort to make them functional across specs, at least for pures. I don't know if this should have been done by making it so there was a singular legendary cloak that did something different for all 3 specs, or whether we should have just had more cross-spec legendaries like the legs but with actual dps increases instead of utility - the demo bracers actually dropping for every spec being a perfect example, but it feels dreadful as is.

Still attempting to get my first good destro legendary after the bracer nerfs, let alone trying to build up an affliction and / or demo set.

[Baconeggcheese]

My problem is that it might not have changed in numbers (which to be honest I doubt a little, because if you look at Odyn M logs - the fight that could be described as THE destro fight, there are almost equally as many affli as destro specs in the Top 100). It's that it has gotten much more convoluted to produce those numbers

I wouldn't call odyn THE destro fight at all. The entirety of p1 and p2 have waves of adds that die, drastically increasing reap soul up time which is what affliction lives and dies on. The fight also has to spread the bosses out meaning that magistrikes can't proc which was one of destro's strongest legendaries. The fight then goes into a pure ST last phase, which aff is now better at. I think the competition you see between aff and destro on that fight is completely appropriate all things considered.

THE destro fight would be something that is pure 2 target sustained for the entire fight, think twin ogron.

I agree that the spec has become more "convoluted", though less so in 2 target. It's mostly patchwerk or aoe where the spec is a mess imo.

[Deleted]

I wouldn't call odyn THE destro fight at all. The entirety of p1 and p2 have waves of adds that die, drastically increasing reap soul up time which is what affliction lives and dies on. The fight also has to spread the bosses out meaning that magistrikes can't proc which was one of destro's strongest legendaries. The fight then goes into a pure ST last phase, which aff is now better at. I think the competition you see between aff and destro on that fight is completely appropriate all things considered.

THE destro fight would be something that is pure 2 target sustained for the entire fight, think twin ogron.

I agree that the spec has become more "convoluted", though less so in 2 target. It's mostly patchwerk or aoe where the spec is a mess imo.

Didn't you get memo? Restraints are basically worthless now, before patch they were pretty decent even on Odyn. Also, I feel like Odyn is the closest to "the destro fight" as it can get (at least in terms of overall dps, they are still pretty much useless there).

[Baconeggcheese]

Didn't you get memo? Restraints are basically worthless now, before patch they were pretty decent even on Odyn. Also, I feel like Odyn is the closest to "the destro fight" as it can get (at least in terms of overall dps, they are still pretty much useless there).

They still do 3-4% of your dmg when they work, which isn't nothing.

If you read the whole post, the point isn't that destro is bad at that fight its that the fight is also designed really well for affliction.

[Turturin the Warlock]

Didn't you get memo? Restraints are basically worthless now, before patch they were pretty decent even on Odyn. Also, I feel like Odyn is the closest to "the destro fight" as it can get (at least in terms of overall dps, they are still pretty much useless there).

no, they were never decent on Odyn. the 5 little add locations are 40 yds apart. bosses need to be tanked more than 30 yds apart. The only procs you could get from magistrike was the occasional proc from a boss to a little add, and during progress as ranged you were likely assigned to the adds away from the bosses so that melee didn't have to run as far.

[Baconeggcheese]

no, they were never decent on Odyn. the 5 little add locations are 40 yds apart. bosses need to be tanked more than 30 yds apart. The only procs you could get from magistrike was the occasional proc from a boss to a little add, and during progress as ranged you were likely assigned to the adds away from the bosses so that melee didn't have to run as far.

Nah the one boss was always standing on the blue marker and I'd get bounces to the yellow add.

It'd still do a decent bit of dmg, nothing spectacular but definitely better than what I'm getting out of them now when I have 90% cleave time.

[Turturin the Warlock]

Nah the one boss was always standing on the blue marker and I'd get bounces to the yellow add.

It'd still do a decent bit of dmg, nothing spectacular but definitely better than what I'm getting out of them now when I have 90% cleave time.

Right, I said that procs were possible from a boss to a little add. But I also said that many guilds including mine had ranged swap to two adds furthest from bosses. In that scenario, you were moving havoc to an add out of boss range and dpsing another add out of boss range. Literally 0 procs.

Sure when it went on farm a few boss procs were available. Still a laughable amount for fight where you cleave 100% of the time in p1 and 2

[Lucrece]

Legendaries are an atrocious system, I don't know of anyone but the most naive people who trusted Blizzard to balance legendaries properly when they're like 3-4 spec specific ones when Blizzard can't even balance individual specs.

They just wanted to import the system from Diablo because the casino style loot systems from Diablo and F2P games are far more Pavlovian for keeping people chasing the carrot and subbed.

[Gaidax]

Legendaries are a great idea, the only problem is that they should have never introduced pure throughput ones or at least found a way to not mix them.

[Baconeggcheese]

Imo they should have never had effects, would've been fine if they were just high ilvl pieces that had really cool / unique models or fancy aesthetic effects. Hell they could've even given us a way to choose our secondary budget on them and that would've gotten people super excited but wouldn't have been game breaking.

Even if they didn't introduce throughput ones, it would've caused the same issue with utility ones where ones utility is significantly more useful / practical than another and everyone would be pissy about it.

[Count Zero]

I've barely played the past few weeks and with all my AP in Destro and it looking to be much clunkier than when I was playing ... ugh ... maybe my first full raid break (I've had interruptions but nothing like this) since Wrath will turn into an official rather than unofficial one.

[Deleted]

Legendaries are a great idea, the only problem is that they should have never introduced pure throughput ones or at least found a way to not mix them.

Imo they should have never had effects, would've been fine if they were just high ilvl pieces that had really cool / unique models or fancy aesthetic effects. Hell they could've even given us a way to choose our secondary budget on them and that would've gotten people super excited but wouldn't have been game breaking.

Even if they didn't introduce throughput ones, it would've caused the same issue with utility ones where ones utility is significantly more useful / practical than another and everyone would be pissy about it.

There are a dozen ways they could have done them that would have made them work imo.

a) Purely throughput, though even then you're going to have painful disparities - probably not much of an improvement

b) Purely utility, still bound to get some that are better than others, but I know I find things like the corruption slow ring both the most interesting and least desirable. Wouldn't be balanced, but would probably be more interesting and allow you to find niches for your unique, player utility as opposed to feeling you're an arbitrary % behind people because of crap legendary drops. Being an affliction warlock that has essentially got Curse of Exhaustion back probably feel a lot better / more impactful than a hat that makes agony do more, but when there's output v utility you know which one you want.

c) Cosmetic - this is what I'd thought legendaries should have been for years now. When I got the Firelands staff I was just glad I'd finally got the 10% damage I felt I was docked before I got it and the dragon transform was probably more interesting than the effect. I think the green fire quest was a fantastic template for future legendaries, cosmetic items or spell effects that don't break performance, but look and feel far better than a set of bracers that trigger a buff.

d) The current system, but with less of a fractured pool for pure dpsers - having legendaries work across all three dps specs would be a Godsend - either through making them cross-spec effects like the demonology bracers or by making the effect change like tier bonuses do when you swap specs.

Instead we seem to have ended up in a pretty unsavory world where you're left fishing for legendaries from a pool tainted by zero-dps increases or massive disparities, where you're lucky if they function in most circumstances for your mainspec, let alone any other spec you'd like / need to play as balance changes or content dictates.

[Count Zero]

Tuning hotfixes are in

Warlock

• Affliction
  
  • Agony now has its full chance to generate a Soul Shard on Soul Effigy (up from a 55% of normal chance).
  • Malefic Grasp now increases the damage of damage over time effects by 70% (down from 80%).
• Demonology
  
  • Shadowbolt damage increased by 42%.
  • Demonbolt damage increased by 42%, but its damage is now increased by 10% per active demon (down from 18%).

Err information on them is in, fixes themselves are pending

[Gaidax]

So that's like small Aff nerf and non-demonbolt builds buff for Demo.

OK, I guess.

[Count Zero]

So that's like small Aff nerf and non-demonbolt builds buff for Demo.

OK, I guess.

I'm just glad someone else didn't link them here while I was figuring out how to do the sub-bullets inside the blizz quote (the way that eventually worked is the first thing I tried and it didn't work that first time, I must've left a slash out somewhere or something like that).

But in all seriousness, I expect more changes before mythic goes live. I'm actually a bit surprised they announced these (the actual numbers I mean) before getting that normal/heroic data when it's a pretty safe bet things will change even further from that. Maybe at most I would have expected something like, "(x, y) will get a small buff, (n, z) will get a small nerf. We'll look at everyone else again too, and will have a final hotfix announcement after we can scan Nighthold parses". That would have been enough, imo, and would keep them from potentially looking foolish when after that data they have to possibly revert some of these announced changes.

[Lucrece]

Nerf aff, leave combat/arms/ret alone. Seems legit.

Combat rogue trashes warlock on aoe and on ST too. So dumb....

[Deleted]

Legendaries are a great idea, the only problem is that they should have never introduced pure throughput ones or at least found a way to not mix them.

They're a bad idea, what, have super-powerful drop randomly from any content level, including emissary chests and Blingtron packagaes?

They have to be powerful or they wouldn't feel "legendary". Powerful to most people means damage. If you had all utility ones you'd still end up with good and bad ones, and you'd still get very significant ilevel upgrades from random drops that would be totally unrelated to the level of difficulty they dropped from - as in you will be able to get a 940 level item from a normal dungeon. Yes, the chances rise as the difficulty rises, but it's still possible.

Th eirony is that all of the issues with legendaries were predicted the moment the devs announced them and how the system would work, the only real issue is that it took three or four months of all that proving right for the devs to finally admit the players had got it dead to rights in the first place.

- - - Updated - - -

So that's like small Aff nerf and non-demonbolt builds buff for Demo.

OK, I guess.

What it will do:

It will push people right back into using Soul Effigy, which will now be significantly higher damage but only because Agony on Soul Effigy not only procs slightly more shards you get the 35% Agony "buff" as well.

It has reduced affliction's single target in any build other than a Soul Effigy one and has actually buffed Soul Effigy builds

So we're right back to where we were, Soul Effigy will feel mor eor less mandatory because the penalty for using Soul Conduit instead is now much larger, whereas before it was only 3% at most.

So basically, they know that a majority of the affliction base hate Soul Effigy, they come up with a good way to allow people to avoid using it, allow that to stand through weeks and weeks of testing and then produce a hotfix that puts us right back to square one as far as Effigy is concerned

What 7.1.5 is going to do is not reduce Soul Effigy use: it is going to reduce the use of Writhe in Agony...lol

As for the "balancing", well, they are nerfing affliction's single target damage but leaving the single target damage of fury, arms, ret totally untouched, and giving a small nudge to assassination but leaving combat rogues also untouched