More info on Destro in Mists, very interesting

[ComputerNerd]

People can say whatever they want about MoP, but the game is being geared for another type of audience. It's no coincidence. Foolproof talent trees, pillow soft rotations, Pandas, gear slots reduced, pet battles, no big bad. Blizz would never admit to it. But it's fairly obvious.

We can state the truth, but you will continue to repeat that same nonsense.
The current trees are something where the community demands you to simply copy the current cookie-cutter build.
There is no real choice for most of your talents, so to quote what people are calling the MoP talents - an Illusion of Choice which applies just as much to the current ones. MoP is removing what is already pre-determined really.

And how many abilities do most of us have our core rotation/priority ?
Not much more than 4 already, and there should not be the intent to have some classes inherently more difficult to play than others simply to make you feel special.

Pet battles are a tired arguement again and while being called childish, it is those flaming them simply for the sake of it who are the ones being childish.
They are an optional progression, and one you can avoid completely, because you can apparantly via a ui option automatically decline any battle requests.

And what is wrong with the "no big bad".
Each and every expansion was a rehash of the previous with some new big threat manifesting themselves.
Exactly the same as every comicbook movie franchise out there.

What you did was simply state that things were not good enough, but gave no reasons whatsoever as to why.
Basically deciding that because YOU do not like something then it is simply a failure.
You are the failure here.

[Obsidian9]

No, it's called being a dot class. And it looks like we'll be playing "whack a mole" still in MoP. Just with CD's. Look how many cd's we're getting.

Consider that my comment refers entirely to Destruction. Consider also that DoTs are less than half the primary rotation spells that need to be monitored so your comment about being a dot class is a bit of an over simplification. My comment was in reference to having little reason to hold anything back as destruction a spell comes off CD and you cast it again. There is no real resource management and CD stacking is for the most part irrelevant. MoP is attempting to introduce a different kind of management. Sure it might end up too simple but don't you think its a bit early to tell? As to still playing "whack a mole" just with CD's... you did actually read the DESTRUCTION changes there are not that many cds. Note the attempted resource management.

I am not saying it will be good, and I am not saying that destruction will not end up being over simplified. Yes there is inherent risk with the change but there is potential regardless of the number of abilities, and it is too far too early to cry about the sky falling.

I have more keybindings than our subtlety rogue does that make Destruction more complicated or difficult than it? No.

Note I am not just towing blizzards line. Personally I think that the new Warlock talent tree is a complete failure. All I think is it is too early to whine about the new Destruction rotation being too simple. It is likely but not assured.

[HatsHatsHats]

I just realized destro locks are losing corruption too, sad day...

[ComputerNerd]

I just realized destro locks are losing corruption too, sad day...

Neither does soul fire belong in affliction, but we still have it.
Allbeit as primarily a nuke off a shard. Still out of place.

[Radio]

Because Locks have always played with a ton of spells, abilities ( don't bring TBC SB spam on the table ) best example Aff 3.0, Demo 4.0 ( the most awesome ). A lot of buttons, a lot of skills, management required.... It's not about being superior, it's just that all the other classes/spec are BORING. The "Tons of ability" class is our niche. We love that, we don't care about the other 4 IQ classes.

It's never been a warlock niche, old feral, old enhance, subtlet and a number of iterations of spriest come to mind.

And honestly, the cata demo lock playstyle is a joke, I never understood the hype around it. :/

[Obsidian9]

@Obsidian9. Many locks don't like the Melee design for Demo ( I like it ) and now Destro receive a resource similar to the rogue, that's why there is the autowand attack, to close one eye and sleep on your keyboard waiting again and again. Ressources managing is a passive gameplay... be prepared to cast your 8 sec SF...

I don't think that resource management has to be passive game play instead it can be merely based more around timing. You are of course entitled to your own opinion which very well could come to pass. I can only hope that you are wrong and say that (in my eyes at least) it is too soon to judge.

ps. I for one think Melee design for Demo would be good if blizzard would stop making fights that punish groups heavily for too many melee dps (or by proxy not enough ranged)

[ComputerNerd]

Because Locks have always played with a ton of spells, abilities ( don't bring TBC SB spam on the table ) best example Aff 3.0, Demo 4.0 ( the most awesome ). A lot of buttons, a lot of skills, management required.... It's not about being superior, it's just that all the other classes/spec are BORING. The "Tons of ability" class is our niche. We love that, we don't care about the other 4 IQ classes.

In fact, I am pretty sure that the original ISF could have been great, now, especially for ImpendingDoom and the whole Locks gameplay in general...

And I repeat that the pet swap could have been great, if the LONG summon wasn't this pain in the ass from incompetent devs.

You are not a Warlock, just a disguised troll mage.


@Obsidian9. Many locks don't like the Melee design for Demo ( I like it ) and now Destro receive a resource similar to the rogue, that's why there is the autowand attack, to close one eye and sleep on your keyboard waiting again and again. Ressources managing is a passive gameplay... be prepared to cast your 8 sec SF...

The pet swapping for a dps increase was due to poor design, you could argue it being due to those "incompetent devs".
Better design might have avoided the need for that swapping in the first place, so the length of it proving less relevant.

I get the desire for management, but you wanting to feel special does not mean that your class of choice needs a higher skill cap than others.
The number of core rotational abilities alone do not define your ability to perform.
Arcane mages can be seen as simplistic, but the good ones still stand out above the rest by how they use the tools they have.

It is not about how many buttons you have, but how you use them.

One idea I suggested a while back was just that, in that I said shards should not be limited to affliction.
Adding Drain Soul as a realistic alternative choice of filler so that you can on the cast of a filler choose between damage, survivibility or utility in the form of regaining a shard.
That wouldn't have impacted on the gameplay rotation or priority, but added an extra tool that could be put to good use by those who can.

[Deleted]

It looks very awkward to me.

Basicly it looks like it's going to take a long time to build up an Ember, then you'll expend it immediately. I don't see how they expect us to charge more than 1 Ember at a time, why wouldn't we spend it on Soulfire? It would just be a DPS loss to hold on to them.

Fire & Brimstone cannot be used when you need it, which sucks. You'll have to cast Incinerate 10 times before you can activate it.

Well I dunno you might want to stack up some embers because you know an aoe phase is coming, or because you know there will be some add coming in 30 sec that you will want to use soul fires on, or a big hit is coming your way so you will need ember tap, etc

So many potential reasons to hold of on using that first ember.

[Inukashi]

"As long as the warlock never lets her mana bar fill up and burn her embers, she's maximizing damage."

does this mean the damage increases while I burn? That could be a reason to not use em the moment I got one ember

[Crackleslap]

I don't want to learn warlocks AGAIN! Sounds interesting but sigh!

[xskarma]

Hmm posters seem to think this will simplify the rotation. I thought you guys would be more up in arms about the health loss when stacking embers, being a healer burden that way.

That's my problem with it really, I don't mind resource management, I like rogues and DK's. Still my first love is affliction, so I'm more or less looking at this as "what do I play as a second spec?" since we will probably not be needing the 2nd spec for PvP, since we can simply change a few talents around and hey presto, done.

For now Destro looks very interesting, but I'm leaning towards being Affli/Demo. lol, that is, I'm affli/demo till the minute theorycrafters say either of them is top DPS, cause if it's Destro I'll switch in a heartbeat.

[Kildragon]

There are so many things that just sound awful with this system.

1.) Hunter/Rogue playstyle
Rogues are kinda fun, I'll give them that, but energy works with them because they are a melee class that doesn't have to cast. Hunters are beyond boring at this point, and incredibly frustrating to play sometimes. Need more focus for that AoE? Well, cast yet another steady shot. An energy like resource model for casters is just not engaging at all.

2.) Blizz wanted Destro to build up embers fast, and burn them fast resulting in much faster gameplay compared to the other two specs. Our biggest nuke, SF, won't even be used until we cast 10 Incinerates? People loved Destro at the end of wrath, it was a smooth, fast paced spec with a lot of damage coming out. They wanted to give Destro that burst feel back, but we have to cast for 20 seconds before we can burst?

3.) They really need to stop ignoring PvP when they design specs. If destro is kept this way it will either be insanely OP in PvP or completely useless. If they give us a fast SF cast time, it will essentially come down to building up embers and blowing up a target with 2 back to back guaranteed crits. If they make it a slow cast time, it will be impossible to get SF off in PvP, making Destro worse than ever before.

[Emophia]

Not a single mention of Chaos bolt.

That's disgusting I guess it really is gone.

It was my favorite warlock spell by far, even when it wasn't very effective.

An abandoned Chaos bolt is an abandoned Warlock for me.

[ComputerNerd]

So your entire reason for wanting a larger set of rotational abilities is simply personal and you can't offer any reason other than just "wanting" it.
Do not start lecturing me because I choose to disagree with you, and at least I tried to justify my view.
You decided that someone else is wrong simply because it is not what YOU want.
Take a look around, because there is more than just you here.

[Hardeen]

Preaching the unique SPEC feeling philosophy with a whole homogenisation act, is a LIE.

So do me a favor and tell me what other spec/class will be like destruction come MOP. Everything I read about it makes it a whole new way to play caster. Now that doesn't mean you have to like it, but just because you don't like it doesn't mean you should rehash every argument you think bashes wow.
Here's a fact for you, there is no other current caster spec like the new destro is planned to be, here's your evidence, it employs an autowand ability among other unique abilities, now logically from that fact based on evidence you could say it's a unique spec. If you can supply a logical argument to counter that we would probably be willing to listen to you, but if not, just say that you don't like it. However, that doesn't justify you to call everyone out who does support it disgusting, I'm sure more of us would agree that it is your attitude that is "disgusting here, especially here"

[Verash]

"As long as the warlock never lets her mana bar fill up and burn her embers, she's maximizing damage."

does this mean the damage increases while I burn? That could be a reason to not use em the moment I got one ember

i think its because u will have more mana regeneration then normal and soulfire will require 1 ember so u wanna manage to not go completely oom but also not stack too many embers is the way i see it

[Phoenexis]

I knew I wasn't making this shit up

Where did you get it from then...? No really. Where the hell are you people getting this info from?! A week ago some new poster gave a shitload of information which matches exactly what the blue has said...

About the design that they're aiming for... EXTREMELY disappointing... Was expecting something like mass spellchains and then when we couldn't handle embers anymore we would dump them because of the mass health loss.

[Nfariessence]

I like the idea a lot, I've always thought the idea of a caster with something more like an energy bar would be cool. o.o
The only potential problem is if we end up with nothing to cast at times, although I'm fairly sure they'll give us some sort of filler spell that costs little to no mana for those situations.

You won't have an energy bar. You'll have something more like Combo Points. Except that as your CP go up, so will the damage that you take from your BE DoT (that's new and exciting right! every class secretly yearns for something that can make them kill themselves - note: this probably will be too overpowered with regards to CC's in PvP, and mages will complain so it will not break Poly/Sap/Wyvern). In addition, instead of your CP letting you execute a new move (or choice of moves), all it does is let you cast a spell that you could normally cast, but now it doesn't cost mana, and now it hits 10% harder!!! (Emberstorm is 2.64% more damage to Soul Fire + 0.33% per point of Mastery. I have 17.26 Mastery in ilvl 401 gear with everything over the Hit cap reforged to Mastery). Even if you have banked 10 Burning Embers (which incidently means you cast 100 Incinerates on Immolated targets... which would take a little over 3 minutes), and used them all at once for one Soul Fire, you'd finally hit a DPET of 1,171 (before +dmg)... which is exactly the same DPET of Incinerate - your filler nuke - and that's assuming you only have the 4 second cast Soul Fire instead of the 8 second cast one - so why the heck would you bother casting Soul Fire in the first place?

Oh, and while you're busy doing the same rotation for 3 minutes so you can accumulate 10 Burning Embers for your wimpy SF, you're also taking a 5k dps DoT that will kill you within 30 seconds if you don't have a dedicated healer - and over those 3 minutes you've taken more than half a million damage. Oh, and you've also spent 100k mana on your 100 Incins and had to Life Tap 3 times and done another 75k damage to yourself to replenish it.

[HatsHatsHats]

1. Immolate the target
2. Conflagrate to trigger emberstorm
3. Incinerate to generate embers
4. Continue until you are low on mana

What I don't understand is 2, emberstorm is our mastery that boosts damage of ember consuming abilities, so how would conflag trigger it

[Kildragon]

You won't have an energy bar. You'll have something more like Combo Points. Except that as your CP go up, so will the damage that you take from your BE DoT (that's new and exciting right! every class secretly yearns for something that can make them kill themselves - note: this probably will be too overpowered with regards to CC's in PvP, and mages will complain so it will not break Poly/Sap/Wyvern). In addition, instead of your CP letting you execute a new move (or choice of moves), all it does is let you cast a spell that you could normally cast, but now it doesn't cost mana, and now it hits 10% harder!!! (Emberstorm is 2.64% more damage to Soul Fire + 0.33% per point of Mastery. I have 17.26 Mastery in ilvl 401 gear with everything over the Hit cap reforged to Mastery). Even if you have banked 10 Burning Embers (which incidently means you cast 100 Incinerates on Immolated targets... which would take a little over 3 minutes), and used them all at once for one Soul Fire, you'd finally hit a DPET of 1,171 (before +dmg)... which is exactly the same DPET of Incinerate - your filler nuke - and that's assuming you only have the 4 second cast Soul Fire instead of the 8 second cast one - so why the heck would you bother casting Soul Fire in the first place?

Oh, and while you're busy doing the same rotation for 3 minutes so you can accumulate 10 Burning Embers for your wimpy SF, you're also taking a 5k dps DoT that will kill you within 30 seconds if you don't have a dedicated healer - and over those 3 minutes you've taken more than half a million damage. Oh, and you've also spent 100k mana on your 100 Incins and had to Life Tap 3 times and done another 75k damage to yourself to replenish it.

You're right. They are going to let us keep our current damage coefficients in MoP, while taking away BoD, Corrup, Chaos Bolt, Burning Embers DoT, and Shadowflame. Incinerate, Soul Fire, Immolate and Conflag damage will stay exactly the same, causing us to drop by about 10k DPS. They are not going to care though, because everyone knows that Blizzard hates Warlocks. They are instead spending resources developing a new spec that is the most broken spec in the history of WoW, simply for one reason...to spite YOU.

In case you can't tell the sarcasm, they are obviously going to redistribute our damage output to match the new Warlock design. Considering how we will now have 4 damaging abilities (Immolate, Incin, Conflag, SF) minus all the other garbage we had this expansion, expect a huge shift towards SF and Conflag. Incin and Immo will also hit harder, but our main nukes will be the other two. Conflag will have a 2.0 SP coefficient, which is just absolute insanity, and SF will have a 100% crit chance AND our crit chance will make it crit for more. This info is obviously not shown in the talent calculator at this point, so looking at the current version and applying it to what we just found out will give you a lot of headaches with no real answers.

I have a bunch of question I want them to answer, but I'm not going to start the QQ until we know more. Right now I am concerned, sure, but we simply do not have enough info to make a good judgment call.

---------- Post added 2012-02-22 at 01:06 PM ----------

1. Immolate the target
2. Conflagrate to trigger Backdraft
3. Incinerate to generate embers
4. Continue until you are low on mana

Fixed it for you. It's meant to say Backdraft and was simply a typo.

---------- Post added 2012-02-22 at 01:32 PM ----------

While I find this new system interesting I have a couple of serious concerns.

1.) The idea of a non-gdc locked caster just makes me cringe. In order to EVER have a caster that is not chain casting, which every single caster has been doing since Blizz thought balancing classes is a good idea (vanilla doesn't count), we need to have something like auto attack (in this case auto wand). Casters are not supposed to have something like auto attack, it just doesn't feel right. It feels weird enough with hunters to have them auto shot while charging up a bigger shot (never made sense to me), but this would absolutely break Warlocks in terms of how they feel. Even hunters, which have a system very similar to energy have to constantly cast to maximize DPS. Standing there, not casting, waiting for mana and auto wanding would make me never want to play Destro again.

2.) They want to experiment with a resource driven system rather than a time-limited system. This. Does. Not. Work. With. Casters. You can certainly have casters use a resource driven system, as has been shown by Arcane Mages, Ele Shamans (managing LS stacks), Boomkins (managing eclipses) and even the new Demo design (managing Demonic Fury). The second part of this sentence does not work however, since resource driven and time-limited are not mutually exclusive, which Blizz is obviously assuming. A caster has to always cast to do damage or they feel boring, and the only way to not have a caster cast is to have them wait for mana. This is not interesting, it is frustrating.

Blizz seems to think that they can design a way to have a caster feel engaging, without constantly casting. I'm just hoping they will make it so Destro can always cast, they just have to choose what to cast based on their available resources.