What do we need for 7.2.5?

[Bruscha]

A baseline interrupt would be lovely.

[Deleted]

Affliction is pretty good, but I would like to see a little more damage in the dots, even if that means lowering the effect of Malefic Grasp. Unfortunately affliction has a historical tendency to swing between one and the other. It started out as Ok on multidotting, but too weak on ST. Now Malefic Grasp tends to enforce ST tunelling, and that effect is even stronger with the new Rend talent and the tier bonuses, because they enforce Drain Soul use.

It all combines to render almost any build except Malefic Grasp irrelevent. If they can make Priests good multidotters, they can make affliction good as well: we are suposed to be the dot class, and yet a hybrid is better at it.

The on-death mechanics are cool and all, but they are an albatross around our necks. It means wild performance swings between fights with lots of adds and fights with none. We are completely dependent on Reap which is very RNG in any fight (e.g. Krosus) without adds. Without adds, affliction has no reliable way to generate resource. But to rewrite that would be a HUGE task because current affliction's very foundation is the on-death soul stuff.

I would like to be able to use Soul Effigy - I liek the concept, the problem is that the implementation is awful. It was a good idea that is shackled by it being absolute poison to use. If the UI gave a little more help and they could tether it to the caster it would be fine.

Get rid of the Agony ramping mechanic. It has no place in the modern game. Affliction has more than enough ramp anyway. Rework the Writhe talent to that Agony reaches the double stack in the same time, or alternatively, reaches the 10-stack damage in half the time. A dot that takes 20 ticks to reach full potential is silly. Yes, I understand that Blizz want a skill component. I point at the Priest abilities that allow then to apply SW:P and VT with one cat and then maintain them with VB and laugh.

Anothe rpossibility is to have a talent such as "Slash of Agony" which applies a strong initial damage burst, perhaps at the cost of lowering the dot damage. This would give afflocks a little frontloaded "burst"

I don;t play destruction of demo, so I would only comment that it seems to me that destruction is a little too dependent on it's Wreak Havoc talent, and demo, well,that just needs a rewrite because Demonic Empowerment is horrible.

For QOL for the love of god give warlocks an innate speedboost, it is not fun at all to be the catch-up-kid, Burning Rush is a silly talent, you have to slowly kill yourself to keep up with everyone else?

Lastly, let's have some animations for affliction. Vague purple glows and a temporary skull that hasn;t changed for a decade are boring. Graphics capabilities even in laptops are perfectly capable of sustaining more than this. We did not even get the old Malefic Grasp back.

[Irian]

Destruction urgently needs an overhaul. Like, not next expansion, ASAP. Destruction is fundamentally flawed as many said during beta, it is excessively RNG-dependent to a comical extreme and the class is being balanced around the assumptions that the stars will align. Even when they do, the class is still middle-tier at best, or more like still on the lower tier. Even at their specialty, 2 target cleave, they're only decently strong and not really as good as they should be considering their crippling lack of a baseline AoE and horrendous sustained ST.

Demonology t20 set effects need to be made baseline until they can figure out a way to make demo more interesting next expansion. Scrap the Demonic Empowerment idea, it might've sounded good conceptually (how?) but in practice it's boring slog rotation fun-killer. This spec just feels extremely phoned in and boring, with no real "awesome" moments. Even Thal'kiel's Consumption, which should feel like a badass moment in the rotation, feels dull. The fantasy of being a demon commander was missed, and hard.

I may be in the minority here but I think Affliction's okay, minus soul effigy. Soul Effigy can die in a fire. This mechanic is never going to be fun and will simply lead to excessive macro use. I also wouldn't mind if Agony simply dealt a static amount of damage, I see no purpose to the stack mechanic other than to excessively punish new and inexperienced warlock players.

[Deleted]

Unfortunately, one of the simplest answers to

"How would you imporve affliction?"

is this:

"Make it more like Shadow Priest"

- - - Updated - - -

I may be in the minority here but I think Affliction's okay, minus soul effigy. Soul Effigy can die in a fire. This mechanic is never going to be fun and will simply lead to excessive macro use. I also wouldn't mind if Agony simply dealt a static amount of damage, I see no purpose to the stack mechanic other than to excessively punish new and inexperienced warlock players.

I actually like SoulEffigy as a concept, it's the implementation that is dire.

As an idea it's great for affliction: affliction is about dots but they suck if you only have one thing to dot, so you have SoulEffigy to multiply your dots. Dot ST damage will always suck because otherwise it turns wildly overpowered when you can spread them.

In my view SoulEffigy should be there as an option, if people want to use it. But it desperately needs QoL fixes, particularly taking away the fixed position. Moreover, the alternative talents shoudl be equally viable, giving Effigy a slight edge to reflect the skill requirement.

Like I say, Effigy is a great concept and can even be fun to play if you like multidotting, which I do (yes I actually enjoyed using it on Guarm!), it's just that it is poison to actually use because it has glaring faults in the implementation.

It's unfortunate that Effigy multiplies up affliction's ramp - mostly thanks to Agony, plus it is difficult to use thanks to it;s fixed position, it can despawn in a phased fight like Tichondrius. It is also very unfriendly to anyone new to affliction, because the UI does not help at all, to use it efficiently you need macros, the skill requirement can seem daunting again mostly due to Agony's mechanics

Once you have it down it's not hard to use at all. The only thing that screws you then are the QoL problems I note above. I think if Effigy actually moved with the caster a huge amount of the hate for it would never have happened. It was just absolutely awful to use, particularly in Nightmare which had fights that were very unfriendly to Effigy.

Also, the 35% did not feel anywhere near rewarding enough for the effort. It shold have been at least 50% (iirc it was a lot higher in the alpha)

[Aelhaine]

we are suposed to be the dot class, and yet a hybrid is better

Filthy mudbloods!

Jokes aside I'd really enjoy some more emphasis on the dots instead of ua ua and ua. Lately for the sake of it I've been playing the wia effigy build just to get that ol dot feeling that is sorely missing.

[Avikur]

I really hope they do an insight post for warlocks like they did for Rogues, locks are in more need of some changes than Rogues are, to the point it has been discussed on a live Q&A so it surprises me they decided to talk about Rogues first, makes me worry we won't see the changes they talked about in 7.2.5

[Deleted]

I would love for blizzard to actually make cool Demonology spec - I was never a fan of it.

Recent rework, after the introduction of DH, clearly showed us that current design has many mechanical flaws which need to be fixed. For one I very much dislike demonic empowerement. If anything I'd prefer more of a Beast Master way of the spec. Like our spells being also pet spells akin to Kill Command.

Wouldn't mind a 20s duration 1m CD Pit Lord cooldown either.

For destruction I would like for Chaos Bolt to be, again, a freaking nuke, not something we cast 60-70% of the time. I cry a little inside when I see DHs doing with annihilation back to back so much more than my chaos bolt.

Also more ways for shards to be used and preferably our artifact skill being Off GCD. Shadowfury back to 3s stun 20-30s CD and instant cast as well as made baseline. Command Demon available without pet (GoSac) and so on.

[Irian]

I actually like SoulEffigy as a concept, it's the implementation that is dire.

As an idea it's great for affliction: affliction is about dots but they suck if you only have one thing to dot, so you have SoulEffigy to multiply your dots. Dot ST damage will always suck because otherwise it turns wildly overpowered when you can spread them.

In my view SoulEffigy should be there as an option, if people want to use it. But it desperately needs QoL fixes, particularly taking away the fixed position. Moreover, the alternative talents shoudl be equally viable, giving Effigy a slight edge to reflect the skill requirement.

Like I say, Effigy is a great concept and can even be fun to play if you like multidotting, which I do (yes I actually enjoyed using it on Guarm!), it's just that it is poison to actually use because it has glaring faults in the implementation.

It's unfortunate that Effigy multiplies up affliction's ramp - mostly thanks to Agony, plus it is difficult to use thanks to it;s fixed position, it can despawn in a phased fight like Tichondrius. It is also very unfriendly to anyone new to affliction, because the UI does not help at all, to use it efficiently you need macros, the skill requirement can seem daunting again mostly due to Agony's mechanics

Once you have it down it's not hard to use at all. The only thing that screws you then are the QoL problems I note above. I think if Effigy actually moved with the caster a huge amount of the hate for it would never have happened. It was just absolutely awful to use, particularly in Nightmare which had fights that were very unfriendly to Effigy.

Also, the 35% did not feel anywhere near rewarding enough for the effort. It shold have been at least 50% (iirc it was a lot higher in the alpha)

I agree with that and on the official forums early on I suggested stuff along the lines of allowing DoTs to doubly apply to a single target, or the Soul Effigy simply increasing the effect proc rate by 100% and the damage by 35% in place of it. In the end though I think the best solution I could come up with that wasn't so awkward is the idea of simply moving Haunt and replacing it in the first tier, and putting it in with Singularity and Conduit in that tier, and giving it a 100% uptime as it used to be.

Haunt is great but doesn't compete well with Malefic Grasp in that tier, as MG and Haunt serve the same mechanical purpose for affliction: to give you more targeted damage at the cost of more spread damage in Writhe in Agony. Haunt in its current implementation serves as not only a strong nuke to deal with small quickly-killed adds a little better but is also a single target debuff on a cooldown. It's not fancy or mechanically complicated but it gets the job done and I wish it wasn't stuck where it is in the talent list where it can only really find value in lower M+ farm.

[Deleted]

It wold be nice if Phantom Singularity was actually worth taking. It just isn't. You can get more out of Soul Conduit and spamming Sow the Seeds powered SoC's and they don;t have that damn 25 yard radius or a 1 minute cooldown either. Can't think of any raid encounter where PS is useful, except possibly Spellblade IF your raid is short on AOE. And they never are.

I'd also like to be able to use the Succubus, which IMHO actually fits with affliction better than the dog. Killing your enemies slowly whilst she makes them enjoy it with Lash of Pain lol

Dunno why they bothered reskinning the Succubus. She is entirely useless, at least in PVE.

[Deleted]

Tbh, I hope they make T19 and T20 bonuses baseline at some point. The moment I got T19 4p there's such a big QOL improvement...

[Irian]

Disclaimer: This is all personal opinion

I think they completely missed the point of a demonologist's class fantasy.
A demonologist does not summon hordes of demons. That's what a necromancer does with undead (and Unholy does it decently). A demonology exalts in control over powerful demons. Summoning swarms of imps is not exciting. Summoning dogs ridden by imps is only slightly more exciting.
I wish they let you develop the class in two ways through talents; on one side you'd focus on summoning imp after imp. On the other side they'd focus on binding something truly powerful (maybe with enslave demon) and focusing all your power in keeping it under control. By powerful I mean something like a fel lord, nathrezim or pit lord.

I agree with this strongly. This "class fantasy" they've given demo feels more at place in a necromancer or hell even something like an unholy death knight.

To me personally demonology, not even pre-meta BC and classic, has never felt like a commander, general or simple summoner of demons. There has always been aspects of demonology that focused on embracing the power of demons and imbuing yourself. Take old succubus sac specs, or even the less popular full demonology with felguard specs, and take Wrath and onwards' metamorphosis as proof, demonology has always been about interacting with and being empowered by demons, not simply commanding swarms of what are ignorable small mobs and creatures that are not discernible from hunter pets.

But if we're going to summon something as our big bruiser it should be something like a true demonic lord like a Nathrezim, not a floating eyeball, some dogs and a few imps. I want my one demon to be hitting like twenty trucks, so I can micromanage it personally as a one-pet army that makes a beast mastery hunter pet cry, not a shitty equivalent. With the new demo, the warlock themselves are basically a limp noodle of a caster with no power of their own, which leads you to rely on faulty guardian pet AI and crappy poorly-thought out mechanics that try and fail to interact with your army of demonic mongrels and bottom-feeders. Even the Felguard is shown these days as little more than the footman of the Legion, I'd want something that feels badass to control.

[Ilir]

nah demo is fine.

Tho I agree that we should have a powerful demon to summon.

ALSO we need a way to make the succubus viable dps wise (or just a cosmetic glyph that turns the dreadstalker into succubi).

[Count Zero]

Disclaimer: This is all personal opinion

I think they completely missed the point of a demonologist's class fantasy.
A demonologist does not summon hordes of demons. That's what a necromancer does with undead (and Unholy does it decently). A demonology exalts in control over powerful demons. Summoning swarms of imps is not exciting. Summoning dogs ridden by imps is only slightly more exciting.
I wish they let you develop the class in two ways through talents; on one side you'd focus on summoning imp after imp. On the other side they'd focus on binding something truly powerful (maybe with enslave demon) and focusing all your power in keeping it under control. By powerful I mean something like a fel lord, nathrezim or pit lord.

idk, I wish they would let both Demo and Unholy sub-spec into focusing either on one or two very powerful minions or swarms of weak ones. Pact with another intelligent being (powerful demon) or a Dr. Frankenstein situation, or exerting will over scores of mindless (or essentially mindless) minions / zombies .

[Lucrece]

Empowered Life Tap needs to go die in a fire for destro -- or destro needs to gain leech self healing, 10-15% spell damage done.

Fire and Brimstone baseline.

Reverse Entropy baseline.

Erase Wreak Havoc or simply change it to limited duration but higher spell copy.

That way destro's ST DPS isn't total garbage because of it.

Change Rain of Fire to have the radius of Starfall with Stellar Drift.

[Irian]

Empowered Life Tap needs to go die in a fire for destro

Oh man, and I didn't touch on this because my stance on destruction was just "start over"....but seriously, Empowered Life Tap feels like the definition of buff babysitting bullshit that for some reason they insist on shoving onto warlock specs in the least fun way possible.

Why does destruction even have Life Tap? or better yet, a question I've been wondering for a few expansions now is why do warlocks even have life tap? In a time where running your foe out of MP was a way to achieve victory against certain classes, being an unlimited fountain of it was cool and unique, now it's so irrelevant that you can't even see the bar on most DPS casters. And since they couldn't find a way to fit into the class without feeling tied to it or punished by it, they instead put in a talent that attempts to justify its existence. If it's going to be relegated to a shitty talent nobody likes, then I think it's time to put it down already.

[Lucrece]

Oh man, and I didn't touch on this because my stance on destruction was just "start over"....but seriously, Empowered Life Tap feels like the definition of buff babysitting bullshit that for some reason they insist on shoving onto warlock specs in the least fun way possible.

Why does destruction even have Life Tap? or better yet, a question I've been wondering for a few expansions now is why do warlocks even have life tap? In a time where running your foe out of MP was a way to achieve victory against certain classes, being an unlimited fountain of it was cool and unique, now it's so irrelevant that you can't even see the bar on most DPS casters. And since they couldn't find a way to fit into the class without feeling tied to it or punished by it, they instead put in a talent that attempts to justify its existence. If it's going to be relegated to a shitty talent nobody likes, then I think it's time to put it down already.

My biggest gripe is that shit actually comes close to getting you killed. You take way more damage from it in any encounter than anything else. It's absurd. Warlocks are supposd to be durable and have strong self healing. With Empowered Life Tap, it only makes the gap between destro and demo/aff even worse.

Going out into world quests I actually have to swap to eradication because I don't have healers to babysit my health and using drain life just decimates your mana as well so you'll be life tapping sooner.

Let's see what we get with 7.2.5 because warlock specs are a total shit show.

People playing affliction are starting to forget because they got inflated numbers to distract them from the real flaws of the spec, but as soon as affliction numbers nosedive for one reason or another, the same mechanical flaws that also plague demo and destro will start stinking again.

[bloodravn]

Oh man, and I didn't touch on this because my stance on destruction was just "start over"....but seriously, Empowered Life Tap feels like the definition of buff babysitting bullshit that for some reason they insist on shoving onto warlock specs in the least fun way possible.

Why does destruction even have Life Tap? or better yet, a question I've been wondering for a few expansions now is why do warlocks even have life tap? In a time where running your foe out of MP was a way to achieve victory against certain classes, being an unlimited fountain of it was cool and unique, now it's so irrelevant that you can't even see the bar on most DPS casters. And since they couldn't find a way to fit into the class without feeling tied to it or punished by it, they instead put in a talent that attempts to justify its existence. If it's going to be relegated to a shitty talent nobody likes, then I think it's time to put it down already.

Empowered life tap should generate a resource that we actually care about... health for a soul shard?

[Deleted]

Why does destruction even have Life Tap? or better yet, a question I've been wondering for a few expansions now is why do warlocks even have life tap? In a time where running your foe out of MP was a way to achieve victory against certain classes, being an unlimited fountain of it was cool and unique, now it's so irrelevant that you can't even see the bar on most DPS casters. And since they couldn't find a way to fit into the class without feeling tied to it or punished by it, they instead put in a talent that attempts to justify its existence. If it's going to be relegated to a shitty talent nobody likes, then I think it's time to put it down already.

Exactly this. Back when everyone had to manage mana properly, Warlocks didn't. And taking a strength from the past and turning it into a weakness is a spit in the face, really.

And a similar problem lies with destro mastery: Back then all spells, attacks and heals had min-max values - gambling something from between. So if this was such an amazing and exciting mechanic, why was it removed from everybody else in the first place?

[Deleted]

Obviously you need a buff to cataclysm damage. 20% would be about right.

[Deleted]

Suggestions for Destro:

Reverse Entropy baseline. New talent could be Improved RoF: Increased radius, reduced cost, more damage perhaps?
It would atleast fit well to the row.

Would also be about time for locks to get a baseline interrupt.