[BETA] Destruction Warlock Discussion

[Baconeggcheese]

it really causes some tough choices.

Which is good, tough choices means they're doing it right.

That combined with understanding that most mobility in the encounters is either sidesteps or movement you can prepare for and I don't see issue.

Personally I have no issue with locks being low mobility, its just a different play style which is why I imagine others complain. It's more fun for the average person to be able to cast and move constantly vs having to plan movement and being a turret.

[bio347]

It's unfortunate that people default to thinking about how overpowered Warlocks were in MoP when talking about that expansion, when mechanically Destruction was one of the most beautifully crafted specs the game has ever had back then. It was just an absolute joy to play: smooth and fluid, unhindered by many clunky mechanics, simple to pick up but hard to master. It's an absolute travesty that the design devolved so much over the course of WoD (and continuing into Legion), when all that was necessary was a degree of tuning and tweaks to make Destruction less powerful in areas it wasn't supposed to be.

I still don't feel like the spec has changed all that much since MoP. Like, what is unintuitive and clunky (buzzwords ahoy!) about it now that wasn't back then?

[Sylar Hao]

It's unfortunate that people default to thinking about how overpowered Warlocks were in MoP when talking about that expansion, when mechanically Destruction was one of the most beautifully crafted specs the game has ever had back then. It was just an absolute joy to play: smooth and fluid, unhindered by many clunky mechanics, simple to pick up but hard to master. It's an absolute travesty that the design devolved so much over the course of WoD (and continuing into Legion), when all that was necessary was a degree of tuning and tweaks to make Destruction less powerful in areas it wasn't supposed to be.

Mobility is one that always comes up, and it's baffling to me the way WoW handles it with a lot of casters. Having no engaging rotation, or sometimes even no buttons to press at all, makes for horribly clunky, frustrating gameplay compared to the alternative. The minigame of managing movement and positioning can still exist in a world where a class has plenty of things to do while moving -- you simply have to make sure that those things result in a severe damage penalty so as to incentivise standing still as much as possible.

I'm incredibly despondent about Destruction going into Legion at present. It feels like the wonderful gameplay the spec had in MoP has been intentionally dismantled piece by piece in favour of something far less mechanically enjoyable, along with losing a ton of the flavour and identity it used to have.

Quoted for truth. I can't explain it better. MoP Destruction was the best designed spec the game has ever had and probably will have. Perfect mechanically and thematically. Legion brings an increadibly clusterfuck based on RNG spec. The spells are more or less the same, they don't work well, they don't interact... it has lost its essence. The spec doesn't look destructive but reactive to procs. You don't decide to destroy anymore, the procs decides wether you destroy or not.

[Gaidax]

I still don't feel like the spec has changed all that much since MoP. Like, what is unintuitive and clunky (buzzwords ahoy!) about it now that wasn't back then?

This basically, what is so bloody different for MoP and WoD Destruction pray tell? Besides being able to spam Incinerate while running around, I fail to detect any meaningful changes that warrant claiming WoD Destruction is somehow more clunky or unintuitive. And yes, these two words certainly smell like bullshit every time they are involved.

MoP Destruction was simply a case of brute force making mistakes in gameplay more forgivable, plus absolutely brain dead mobility, that's all. In SoO it was literally current CR with excellent mobility tacked onto it and broken scaling.

[Wondercrab]

I still don't feel like the spec has changed all that much since MoP. Like, what is unintuitive and clunky (buzzwords ahoy!) about it now that wasn't back then?

I don't think there's anything too unintuitive about it, but clunky (in the gaming context) usually refers to something being cumbersome, unsatisfying, or unnecessarily difficult to utilise. Soul shards, mobility, and AoE are three that stand out to me as having taken a turn for the worse in this regard. And when I say that, I don't mean that they are necessarily awful or broken or unplayably bad, not by any means, simply that they are in a comparatively inferior state to how they worked before. As an example: Soul shards generating randomly makes planning resource usage unpredictable and difficult to manage compared to the previous system. Random effects can work well when they require snap judgements and quick, visceral gameplay in response, but Destruction has not changed enough to distance itself from the slow, methodical, build-and-spend cycle that has defined it for the past several expansions. Slow and strategic gameplay is generally more satisfying when the player has as much control over it as possible, allowing them to plan ahead and optimise their resource usage perfectly. This was exemplified in the strategy of lining up procs and cooldowns for chaos bolt cycles -- it was a slow build up to a critical moment when the master plan was put into action and great benefits were reaped as a result. Classic strategic gameplay, and a masterclass in how to make that slow-burn feel utterly satisfying while also adding a lot of gameplay depth.

This still exists, of course, but the methodical precision and the consistent results have been undermined by the randomness of the spec and how it generates resources. It very much feels as though the design goals of the "chaotic, wild, unpredictable" class fantasy are at odds with the core gameplay loop Destruction still retains, resulting in jarring gameplay that feels lacking in control, smoothness, and polish compared to what came before.

The devil is really in the details when it comes to Destruction. The core gameplay is honestly very similar, but the nuances of it have been designed in a bizarre way that clashes with the greatest strengths of the spec rather than continuing to refine and iterate.

[Deleted]

you're just describing the act of picking up CR as talent live
Things that changed from mop were RoF becoming useless in WoD, MF nerfed and not affecting F&B and the relative power difference from the second half of MoP trinkets compared to WoD ones

In beta destro was pruned like every other specs but also given all the necessary tools to do its job, only as talents so you have to make tradeoffs.

MoP warlocks were totally retarded mechanic wise, they literally had every possible tool you would dream of for any given encounter (beside maybe the old alter time)

[Wondercrab]

MoP warlocks were totally retarded mechanic wise, they literally had every possible tool you would dream of for any given encounter (beside maybe the old alter time)

Important to reiterate that this wasn't a problem with mechanics, but with balance and tuning. There's nothing wrong with a class having a diverse toolkit (in fact, it tends to result in much more involved gameplay and a higher skill cap), the problem is when everything in that toolkit is good. MoP Warlocks had great mechanics, but poor tuning. They shouldn't have had great survivability, great mobility, and great utility on top of being good DPS. But you don't need to remove or completely change mechanics for the worse in order to accomplish that, you can simply alter numbers and make minor functionality tweaks. This is the major problem with the direction the spec took after MoP.

[garonne]

Some of you need better vocabulary words. What you described isn't a cluncky mechanic, the incremental increase of ember bits to the current design is just a change in design. When immolate crits in wod you get emberbits, when it crits in legion, you have a % chance to gain a full shard. then you gain a full shard with conflag. you may not like the new design, or the changes but its NOT clunky.

now, the mastery could be described as clunky because the delta for the damage is a wide gap and all over the place, however mathematically its fine. a flat damage increase is better but less "exciting".

im not a fan of rng, borderline hate it but for now its a necessary component. crit is a rng stat that very few ppl have a problem with but ppl love when they see big numbers. there's still strategic gameplay to be made with the current system just have to learn to adapt.

[Slashkill]

Any actual testers out there playing destruction in Mythics? Or is the spec unplayable till we get the legendary belt with shard generation?

IMO spec got gutted hard, on the rise of alternate resources (shaman, shadow priest etc) we got reduced to mana and unreliable (every spec but demo) secondary resource. Dunno what was wrong with "chaotic energy" destruction warlock, when we used mana as energy due to high spellcost-high manaregen and ember banking. Random damage source generation is just... dull.

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Some of you need better vocabulary words. What you described isn't a cluncky mechanic, the incremental increase of ember bits to the current design is just a change in design. When immolate crits in wod you get emberbits, when it crits in legion, you have a % chance to gain a full shard. then you gain a full shard with conflag. you may not like the new design, or the changes but its NOT clunky.

now, the mastery could be described as clunky because the delta for the damage is a wide gap and all over the place, however mathematically its fine. a flat damage increase is better but less "exciting".

im not a fan of rng, borderline hate it but for now its a necessary component. crit is a rng stat that very few ppl have a problem with but ppl love when they see big numbers. there's still strategic gameplay to be made with the current system just have to learn to adapt.

We control our ember generation and we plan ahead when we can burst with CB on live, we don't have that in Legion. It's completely different

[Gaidax]

There is definitely less control over generation, but we can plan for burst just fine, generating 5 shards in Legion isn't a big deal and Rifts with their charges are great addition as well when it comes to burst.

Basically I don't see much difference between what we have there and live, you can happily hover around 4 shards and 2 rift charges for absolutely the same effect as keeping 3 Embers ready live is. I'd say that in Legion we actually have more burst simply by the grace of the fact that rifts are such a high DPET spell and 2 Conflags resulting in another Chaos Bolt.

The only pickle is lack of Dark Soul, but one could argue that it simply got baked in into Chaos Bolt simply with the damage buff it got compared to live and Eradication.

[Uzkin]

I disagree, I am simply going by basic things...(snip)
... when my Incinerate does about 3 times the damage it does live with Charred Remains... (snip)
... Same with Sacrifice, I guess you are merely ignoring how stupendously powerful it is in cleave and AoE, heck I'd say it would be default choice for just about anything minus pure single target...(snip)
... And there is one more cool thing about it - Chaos Bolt is no longer pretty much the only spell that is doing damage for us... (snip)

My point of comparison, as I told you, is WoD's GoSac/Cata not GoSac/CR. I'm comparing the new legion mechanics/toolkit to those of WoD GoSac/Cata; i.e. to something that we already had. I agree that, gameplay-wise, CR is pretty much as bad as the legion design and I have also criticized CR from the moment it was introduced. But if we look at WoD's GoSac/Cata, then...

* Incinerate already did respectable damage. (and generated embers, something it no longer does in legion)
* Sacrifice already was amazing for cleave, AoE, AND pure single target. (whereas Sac is poor for single target in legion)
* Sacrifice also provided a much-needed utility spell from the sacrificed pet and it fitted AMAZINGLY to the theme of the spec, providing much bigger numbers on CB & SB hits (both of these aspects have been removed in legion)
* Chaos Bolt already wasn't the only spell doing damage. For example, Shadowburn was often a major contributer as well but in legion this iconic spell has been neutered, both DPC- and especially DPCT-wise (because of the removal of 1 sec GDC)

Of course, the castration of Shadowburn was something I immediately knew would happen when I first read about the legion change. This is also why I heavily objected to the change much earlier in this thread, while the others were still cheering about how awesome it'll be to be able to use SB all the time. But once you know how Blizzard operates, you'd see that it had "Soulfire" written all over it. "Hey warlocks, this long-cast-time massive damage spell Soulfire of yours can now be cast instantly!!! Isn't that awesome??!!! Oh btw, we also reduced its damage to almost below that of Incinerate. Trololoolo."

Edit to point 2: sac itself didn't apply to FnB but sac/cata spec was very good for aoe due to cataclysm and how mastery and shadowburn worked.

[Gaidax]

Sacrifice in WoD has 0 contribution to AoE, it only increases your single target damage, it does not work in AoE. If anything going by your words - Sacrifice is superior in Legion because it indeed works for everything unlike live.

Shadowburn was not reduced in power in Legion in any way, in fact it was buffed to high heaven not being execute. Chaos Bolt is superior simply because it got fat buff, but it also costs twice the shards.

Also in Legion GCD seems to be 1 second still for Destruction, at the very least my GCD is over before Banish is cast for example. But that I am not sure of as I don't have the tools to correctly measure it.

And yes in WoD Chaos Bolt is only spell doing damage, Shadowburn is execute that is both unavailable most of the time and when it is available it is lackluster unless cleaved or generates embers. Heck talking about cleave - in Legion if cleaved target dies you get shards too, another buff there.

As for Incinerate - it got buffed by ~35% from Live even besides elimination of CR and it is further buffed 15% damage and 15% cast time reduction by artifact, it IS quite a bit more powerful than live, about 50% more in fact in total.

[Deleted]

Important to reiterate that this wasn't a problem with mechanics, but with balance and tuning. There's nothing wrong with a class having a diverse toolkit (in fact, it tends to result in much more involved gameplay and a higher skill cap), the problem is when everything in that toolkit is good. MoP Warlocks had great mechanics, but poor tuning. They shouldn't have had great survivability, great mobility, and great utility on top of being good DPS. But you don't need to remove or completely change mechanics for the worse in order to accomplish that, you can simply alter numbers and make minor functionality tweaks. This is the major problem with the direction the spec took after MoP.

MoP locks had the best on demand burst, best aoe, best cleave, best council dps and by the end of the expansion the best ST tied with fire.
On top of that they also had the best mobility (perma kjc), silence immunity, the best survivability among all caster and unparalleled utility.

It was not a tuning issue, it was a class having everything better than everyone else, which is wrong by definition, and if you made it only average in dps you would have still stacked the hell out of it just for bypassing encounter mechanics

[Deleted]

Sacrifice in WoD has 0 contribution to AoE, it only increases your single target damage, it does not work in AoE. If anything going by your words - Sacrifice is superior in Legion because it indeed works for everything unlike live.

Shadowburn was not reduced in power in Legion in any way, in fact it was buffed to high heaven not being execute. Chaos Bolt is superior simply because it got fat buff, but it also costs twice the shards.

Also in Legion GCD seems to be 1 second still for Destruction, at the very least my GCD is over before Banish is cast for example. But that I am not sure of as I don't have the tools to correctly measure it.

And yes in WoD Chaos Bolt is only spell doing damage, Shadowburn is execute that is both unavailable most of the time and when it is available it is lackluster unless cleaved or generates embers. Heck talking about cleave - in Legion if cleaved target dies you get shards too, another buff there.

As for Incinerate - it got buffed by ~35% from Live even besides elimination of CR and it is further buffed 15% damage and 15% cast time reduction by artifact, it IS quite a bit more powerful than live, about 50% more in fact in total.

problem is the current mastery vs old mastery but i guess it evens out over time with legion mastery affecting all spells and not just spenders.

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MoP locks had the best on demand burst, best aoe, best cleave, best council dps and by the end of the expansion the best ST tied with fire.
On top of that they also had the best mobility (perma kjc), silence immunity, the best survivability among all caster and unparalleled utility.

It was not a tuning issue, it was a class having everything better than everyone else, which is wrong by definition, and if you made it only average in dps you would have still stacked the hell out of it just for bypassing encounter mechanics

to be fair, i think that you, like so many others, are forgetting that an xpac consists of more than 1 tier of raiding, and prior to SoO locks werent anything special and mages were hopelessly OP, ppl like to say MoP locks were OP, and i agree but only in SoO but that also lasted for an obscene amount of time.

[Uzkin]

problem is the current mastery vs old mastery but i guess it evens out over time with legion mastery affecting all spells and not just spenders.

The old mastery affected Immolate, Incinerate, and Conflagrate too, in addition to spenders. The one thing it didn't affect was Cataclysm, and that's what certain ppl used to justify the mastery change. So, I wonder, does the new mastery at least affect Cataclysm?

[Gaidax]

I checked it in Alpha build many moons ago and it did not affect Cataclysm.

New Mastery is a love and hate for me, I remember I got to some silly amounts of Mastery in Alpha back when Jewelcrafting stuff gave ridiculous ratings and it was hilarious, I think I had like up to 126% Mastery at some point which also gives up to 26% damage reduction. With that I had things like Incinerates occasionally critting for more than Shadowburns and Chaos Bolts going anywhere between monstrous to pitiful.

[Deleted]

problem is the current mastery vs old mastery but i guess it evens out over time with legion mastery affecting all spells and not just spenders.

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to be fair, i think that you, like so many others, are forgetting that an xpac consists of more than 1 tier of raiding, and prior to SoO locks werent anything special and mages were hopelessly OP, ppl like to say MoP locks were OP, and i agree but only in SoO but that also lasted for an obscene amount of time.

Then you think wrong
ToT was the peak for locks, and locks were competing with mages anyway, but you would stack locks more than mages

[Wondercrab]

MoP locks had the best on demand burst, best aoe, best cleave, best council dps and by the end of the expansion the best ST tied with fire.
On top of that they also had the best mobility (perma kjc), silence immunity, the best survivability among all caster and unparalleled utility.

It was not a tuning issue, it was a class having everything better than everyone else, which is wrong by definition, and if you made it only average in dps you would have still stacked the hell out of it just for bypassing encounter mechanics

It was very much a tuning issue. All that was necessary was to reduce the effectiveness of their toolkit by moving numbers around and making some tweaks to functionality. All of the DPS-related strengths were clearly solveable by simply reducing the damage of certain abilities and effects, whereas the other strengths could have had their magnitude diminished. Putting a long cooldown on people using Demonic Gateway, for example, was a good way of keeping a cool mechanic intact while dramatically reducing its power in group content. Something as simple as keeping Fel Flame around (and making its damage absolute garbage) would've at the very least made movement as a Destruction Warlock slightly more enjoyable and interactive than it is now, while significantly reducing the ability to do damage on the move. Survivability can (and has) simply been a case of reducing the strength of passive effects, which have little if any impact on the core gameplay in the first place.

[Deleted]

Then you think wrong
ToT was the peak for locks, and locks were competing with mages anyway, but you would stack locks more than mages

that had much less to do with dmg and a whole lot more to do with survivability tho, locks in term of dmg only overtook mage with the release of SoO when they got rather ridiculous buff allround.

and ToT locks doing well was solely bcoz of the crit trink not bcoz of overall tuning but generally they still did worse than mages. in ToT firemages reigned supreme. SoO was the peak for locks, certainly not ToT.

[Deleted]

before leishen trinket locks were much more important during progress than mages for almost every boss mechanics.
UVoLS just made demo incredibly strong in every situation beside ra-den where you would still stack the fuck out of destro locks in order to make Essence Animas a non issue