Originally Posted by
Duckz0rs
Thanks a metric ton! My character is Duckzors on Spinebreaker EU. Would appreciate it if it could be copied to the Destruction Warlock Resource Changes topic on the US forums.
Alright, wall of text incoming:
Hello!
First off, it’s great that the spec is being moved into a more controlled direction. These changes are off to a good start, but I hope there’s more in store than number changes.
Shard Generation:
At first I was a bit worried about the granularity of the generation combined with RNG, but in all honesty the latest build definitely seems to have sort of hit a sweet spot between them. Our on demand has gone down a little and so have the remaining bits of RNG. Incinerate feels rewarding again now that it generates 1/10th of a Chaos Bolt and having crits be a bonus on Immolates generation instead of increasing the chance to give one at all increases the predictability. I’m still a bit doubtful of Soul Conduit’s place in the new Shard system, but I’ll cover that later on with the talents.
This is extremely low on my personal list of requests, but It’d be great to get the engulfed in flames visual back when getting more embers. I’m not too fussed about calling it embers or soul shards, but that visual is something I definitely miss as it thematically fit the chaotic powers of Destruction greatly.
Havoc and Wreak Havoc:
The initial changes to Wreak Havoc are very understandable and I agree with the stated reasons, although I did feel like Wreak Havoc was not forgettable at all, being Destruction’s biggest ace in the hole.
It is definitely nice to have to think about Havoc again and regain some of the old, versatile banking-spending gameplay and skillcap back. It’d be great if Havoc could also get it’s reduced GCD back from pre-legion now that we don’t have 100% uptime anymore. Feels bad to lose the full first second of its 10-second duration and with duration instead of charges pre-casting likely won’t be a thing.
The change to have Wreak Havoc reduce cooldown instead of increase duration was a large step in the right direction. Baseline Havoc still feels very lackluster – 45 second Cooldowns simply don’t really line up with encounters as demonstrated by Cataclysm. In the current situation, it would be very likely that we still take Wreak Havoc on any encounter where Havoc is useful and otherwise leave the spell entirely by the wayside. It feels like a finer balance could be struck between the baseline version and the Wreak talent. This can be risky, because if WH is too little of an improvement it could get out-paced by Channel Demonfire on cleave. On the other hand, Havoc feels quite ideal for the encounters where it should be taken as it is on the PTR.
AoE:
Specifically, RoF as I’ll cover FnB and Cataclysm in the talent section. As a spender, the spell doesn’t feel quite in the right place. In terms of Damage it does its job adequately but it could use some QoL changes. Spending 3 shards with the reduced shard income on our only baseline AoE to then have the tank move the mobs out of it due to mechanics feels very punishing. Invariably it’ll get compared to Frost’s Blizzard, but that is a CD spell and not a resource spender with a high cost. It’d be great to have it adjusted to be more in-line with the dynamic gameplay of today’s raiding/dungeon environment. Increasing the radius or having it function similarly to Affliction’s Phantom Singularity in being tied to a specific mob could do wonders for this spell. The reliability compared to the cost isn’t quite there yet, and I personally feel that’s largely separated from the damage.
ST:
Overall we’re quite solidly middle in the pack which works for me personally. It could probably use a small bump which will affect 2 target cleave as well, which I’ll go into now:
2-Target Cleave:
As stated in the post by Seph, the intention is to have us remain at the top several 2-target specs as our clear niche. With the changes to Havoc this doesn’t seem to be the case in practice. In terms of pure tuning, as it stands we still excel at spread two-target burst cleave when compared to other Warlock Specializations. But at 2-target cleave in general and even more so at sustained cleave we get outshined by most other cleavers including Affliction. The banking-spending cycles in conjunction with Havoc work great for bursting down adds, but in sustained cleave the results are a little lackluster.
Our ST and AoE are roughly middle-of-the-pack now, which personally I’m fine with. This adds up to not much of a complaint, but more a question: As it stands we don’t have a unique niche, but are a rather jack-of-all-trades Specialization. Personally, I find this perfectly acceptable given the tuning is in-line with other classes, but it goes against your previous statement. Even with the adjusted Wreak Havoc it’d be hard to make us excel at 2-Target cleave without significantly raising our ST which would step on the toes of Demo’s niche. Has the goal shifted to Destruction’s niche being on-demand burst instead of 2-target cleave?
Mastery:
I fully agree with Baconmuffin here; what more is there to be said? It’s universally disliked by all Destruction players. Particularly with the changes to shard generation it just doesn’t feel right. Taking time to build up to a CB and then having it do as much damage as your previous Conflag because the Conflag rolled high, and the CB rolled low just feels punishing even though the intent was for high rolls to feel rewarding.
The new 4p tries to band-aid this, but doesn’t achieve its goal. Instead it intrudes on the banking-spending gameplay. Instead of smoothing out Mastery rolls, it forces us to choose between playing to our tier set or playing to our actual new gameplay.
I’d honestly hoped to see Mastery reworked entirely along with our resource rework, as a reduction of CB casts only increases the punishing feeling when Mastery rolls low.
Talents:
I’ll take these row-by-row and where applicable dedicate a small section to individual talents.
Lvl 15:
The only problematic talent in this row is Shadowburn in its latest incarnation. I’m personally not a fan of Roaring Blaze, but other people seem to like it and it gets used. Shadowburn, however, is simply not competitive at the moment. It was already a fairly niche talent throughout Legion, but having it be an adjustment on Conflagrate has made this talent fall off completely. The damage increase it gives to Conflagrate simply doesn’t hold up to BD and RB (I’m also not entirely sure if this already got fixed, but it seems SB is unaffected by the Flames of Sargeras trait, weakening the talent further).
Especially when combined with the resource change I feel it would be a good moment to revert the spell to its Execute niche, or even the version from the release of Legion. Having it be a stand-alone spell would add further depth to Havoc windows by granting the opportunity to grant shards without interfering with the Conflag CD and usage. With those changes, it should fill a niche of burst cleave fights quite nicely. It was quite integral to proper Havoc play due to the charges, but it could still fill that function with the duration-based Havoc.
Lvl 30:
The recent change to RE is a great step in the right direction for this tier. Its damage increase could probably be bumped up a bit more to be competitive, but I (and I think a lot of other Warlocks) would love it if this was a competitive talent! It fills in one of the last missing pieces of the MoP playstyle; naturally restoring mana.
This tiers current biggest problem is that RE and Eradication simply cannot compete with ELT. The changes to our resource system only pushes Erad further down when compared to ELT, as its uptime is decreased. The slight buff it has gotten does little to change this. Erad also loses value as it needs a cast to activate, which reduces its capabilities in burst scenarios. This feels like a hard problem to deal with due to the very nature of ELT. ELT is simply too strong because it can always be up, and thus always will be kept up as a maintenance buff. I personally feel forced into this talent despite my disdain for it. Let’s go a bit more in-depth into ELT.
Empowered Life Tap:
The short version is I’d really love to see this talent removed completely. I have three main gripes with it. I’ll admit there are probably some people that like it, but this is a maintenance buff of the worst type.
Throughout the past expansions they’ve come and, after almost unanimous complaining, been removed again. It brings along with it the same problems as the previous incarnations such as Empowered Soul Fire: it’s either tuned to be strong, in which case it’ll always be taken because of 100% uptime, or it’s too weak and hardly anyone takes it because most people don’t like it. Both of these scenarios have already played out; the original version in Legion took 2 globals, thus was weak and nobody took it. The new incarnation takes 1 global and thus eclipses the other choices on the tier, leading virtually everyone to take ELT whether they like it or not.
My biggest gripe with ELT is the severe effect that it has on our tankiness. Without ELT Destro needs to tap roughly once every 1-2 minutes, which is still not great but at least acceptable. ELT requires us to tap every 20 seconds, a very steep increase in the number of taps and thus damage taken. In almost every scenario, be they raids or M+ or regular dungeons Life Tap is invariably my largest source of damage taken by a very large margin.
Originally all three specs of our class had some form of native self-healing, but Destro doesn’t at the moment. Obviously, healers can deal with this, but the problem is it makes us FEEL extremely squishy. Previously I had no issue being one of the first in line to soak mechanics, but now I have to think twice. What little baseline defensives we have (UR, Soul Leech, the artifact traits), despite being great defensives otherwise, don’t really do anything to remedy this either. Life Tap even bypasses our native shield entirely. Sure, we still have DL on our bars, but this is such a massive damage loss for fairly slow healing (even with the artifact trait) that it just doesn’t feel worth it. Back to talents!
Lvl 60:
The changes to FnB are great, having it be a shard regen tool to work in conjunction with RoF should work out quite well. It’s clearly sustained AoE which doesn’t happen too often in raids, but even without more RoF FnB serves a purpose. Those shards can always be pumped back into CBs.
Soul Harvest is still great to have when we don’t need AoE. It’s simply nice to have a CD that influences the caster damage, particularly when we get to combine it with spending cycles again. Thematically (just in name, really) it feels like it should belong to Aff what with the soul-stealing and all, but this really doesn’t matter at all.
Cataclysm:
This talent seems at odds with itself. It’s supposed to be the big burst AoE option, yet it doesn’t really achieve that. A large part of Cataclysm’s damage comes from spreading Immolates fast, which is very clearly sustained damage. It tries to do both burst and sustain, and doesn’t really do either well as a result.
I’m not entirely sure what the intent is for this talent as a result. The sustained roll clearly belongs to FnB, yet Cata tries to take a piece of that as well. It does burst, but not nearly enough on its own due to the damage from immolates.
When focused squarely on burst it could work well with CDF, which in turn gives the immolates a purpose as CDF targets them. It is a bit odd however to have to combine two talents, neither of which synergize with our baseline skills, in order to do burst AoE. Cata should do enough burst AoE to stand on its own and not require CDF to actually have the full package.
Lvl 90:
I absolutely love the change to GoServ. Removing the Shard cost makes the talent feel absolutely great, particularly now that our shard income has gone down. I’d love to see the same change on Doomguard and Infernal.
GoSac is a bit of a different beast. I’d love this talent to be viable again, as currently it sees very little use. Ideally, it’d work like Lone Wolf or Lonely Winter and present the option to Destro Locks to play the spec pet-less. It doesn’t have to be as overpowered as it was back then, but not as underpowered as it is now. I’d love to see it completely reverted to WoD, where it gives us an extra ability and most of all further helps make our spells feel powerful again.
Playing without a pet has been a major draw for people towards the spec and although I wasn’t one of them originally, I’ve grown to love it over the course of MoP and WoD. In all honesty, yes, we’re a pet class, but if hunters can get the option to play without one we should be able to as well.
Lvl100:
Wreak Havoc was already covered, so this is mostly between SC and CDF. As it stands on Live SC already has a hard time keeping up with CDF in its ideal scenario; ST. Between the reduction of shard gen and the direct nerf to SC it’ll very likely drop off entirely. The reasons for the change are understandable, but right now it’s too weak.
CDF is in a peculiar place, but this mostly comes down to tuning. It fits well in all scenarios; ST, Cleave and AoE (when combined with Cata). If tuning is done right, there’s no issue, but if it’s tuned too strong it’ll eclipse the other two options. It seems to only beat out SC, but that’s mostly due to SC’s own tuning.
Artifact Traits:
Cry Havoc: This trait seems to go directly against the design of Havoc by doing clumped damage, but isn’t really problematic due to tuning. Feels very weak overall.
Eternal Struggle: This talent doesn’t really help with anything. It’s not bad as a filler talent, but it would be great if it could reduce the damage taken by Life Tap instead of reducing damage taken afterwards. Would help with Destro feeling squishy.
Legendaries:
Magistrike Restraints: This one is honestly just very undertuned, especially for an already niche Legendary. It could work to increase its procrate or making it less niche by adjusting CB somehow.
The same goes for Odr and Alythess, both feel extremely lackluster for niche legendaries. It’s not so much that Feretory and Lessons are strong but more that the other specific Legendaries feel very weak.
Thanks for making it to the end!
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