[Destruction] It's happening

[Baconeggcheese]

that is exactly my feeling about PTR destro. I'm really disapointed. I thought gameplay experience wouldn't be the same, but indeed nothing really changed. We waited all that long since the "rework" announcement for quite nothing. I don't really feel like "i'm building" my ressource. I think i still need some practise to not overcap my shards in some situations tho.

The generation is smoother and we'll do much better priority damage. It's objectively better than it was.

It just doesn't feel all that different at the end of the day, blizz did a real good job of giving people what they wanted back without completely alienating people who enjoy the current design.

Really all I need is gosac to be a competitive option and I'd be really happy. If they made it so I never had to touch ELT again that'd be amazing as well.

[Walrock]

Making GoSac viable and fixing Life Tap out of our rotation would pretty much make the rework a success .
Only doing the resource change and changing/nerfin havoc would feel like they stopped half way through.

What I'm really missing right know is the communication with the Devs. Where is it?
Every second day I see a post about Monk, Druid or Hunter but nothing on Warlocks since the Effigy announcement.

And more importantly on Destruction, which is one of the three(?) specs they announced heavy changes for.

On days like this I really hate being an EU player, because i can't fucking reach out to the point where my feedback is being heard, even if I'm willing to provide all the feedback in "Dev friendly manners"...

I mean, we already saw posts vom Bacon and Gaidax and many more, perfectly showcasing what the problems are and why they are problems.

But Blizzard is saying nothing, even after they said "Yes, changes are coming". Well now would be the f'ing best time to say what your plans are and maybe say why you don't want to fix/change things like GoSac and ELT.

You know, communication...


On a side note:

Is Eradication not stronger than ELT now? Atleast in ST situations? (PTR)
I can sustain the debuff very long with proper resource managment.
Like starting with full embers(shards), using portals and conflags to sustain the window etc.

[Lucrece]

The generation is smoother and we'll do much better priority damage. It's objectively better than it was.

It just doesn't feel all that different at the end of the day, blizz did a real good job of giving people what they wanted back without completely alienating people who enjoy the current design.

Really all I need is gosac to be a competitive option and I'd be really happy. If they made it so I never had to touch ELT again that'd be amazing as well.

And killing the mastery for good, not with a band aid, obnoxious tier set.

I don't even care about life tap now. I want for my chaosbolts to not swing so damn wildly to a point where a conflagrate can even come close to one low rolling CB.

[Uzkin]

If they gave (in addition to the 7.2.5 fixes)

* GoSac back
* Shadowburn back
* FnB back
* large ember pool back (4 chaos bolts)
* mastery back (no rng)
* havoc back (charges, lower cd)
* burning ember visuals back
* baseline mobility, or at least Demon Skin and Burning Rush located on different talent tiers
* baseline personal cooldown back (dark soul)
* baseline mana regen back (no need to LT / ELT)
* redesigned Eternal Struggle and Devourer of Life traits (atm they constitute 6 talent points that are literally 100% useless for me, something that no other class/spec I've tried in Legion has to suffer from)

... THEN they would have fixed a large part (but not all) of what they broke in Legion and I would enjoy playing destro again. Granted, it's a long list, but only because the amount of things they broke in destro in Legion was so huge. Basically, they broke every single part of destro gameplay and mechanics that was fun before. The above list was even longer at the start of Legion but they have already restored many of the things they broke back to how they were, slooowly, one or two at a time. It's very annoying that it takes the whole expansion for them to fix their stupid changes to a spec that was fun and was working very well before.

[Gaidax]

I just don't give a damn about Mastery, not sure why everyone is so bothered. Heck I actually like it because of DR it gives.

I really hope we will stack Mastery in ToS, extra survivability is a great touch.

[Uzkin]

I just don't give a damn about Mastery, not sure why everyone is so bothered. Heck I actually like it because of DR it gives.

I really hope we will stack Mastery in ToS, extra survivability is a great touch.

Before Legion, if I got an upgrade with lots of mastery or an item with mastery proc I could immediately see a clear difference and be like "WOAH, MY CHAOS BOLT HITS LIKE A TRUCK NOW!"

In Legion, I can be like "WOAH, MY CHAOS BOLT HITS SOMEWHAT HARDER NOW ON THE AVERAGE!" ... but it's not the same.

[Gaidax]

On the other hand when you get item with Haste, Crit or Versatility you don't end up weeping and spreading ash over your head. That is one of the genuine good things about Destruction in Legion, all stats work as opposed to having to stack one and fuck all rest.

Mastery really is not an issue, with all the CBs we throw around I could not give a damn about individual ones being occasionally weaker or stronger, it's simply not a factor.

- - - Updated - - -

And in before someone pops up and makes up a teary story how raids can wipe because your Chaos Bolt rolled low on add, just don't lol, if that is what wipes your raid - then your raid has a fundamental issue with executing the encounter, that is if that will be an actual thing really.

- - - Updated - - -

That said the meminess of Mastery is evident with spells hitting for anything between X and 2+X depending on how much you stack Mastery, it's definitely not the brightest of Blizzard's ideas, still it's not what I designate as a pressing issue at the moment.

[Uzkin]

@Gaidax
You were unsure why many destro locks dislike the Legion mastery, so I just provided you with one of the reasons why *I* dislike it. You don't get to dictate what people should like or dislike; tastes differ. The fact is, lots and LOTS of destro locks hate the current mastery, hate that it was changed in Legion, and would much prefer the previous one.

RNG mastery constitutes about 9% of my earlier list of Legion destro issues, and I hardly consider it to be the most serious one atm. But it still *is* one of them. It is one of the many reasons that contribute to Legion destruction being such a bad, poor design (compared to its MoP and WoD iterations). Undoing rng mastery via tier bonus will be at least something, even though fixing fundamental issues with tier bonuses is a cop-out. (Pretty much all of the Legion changes to destruction were utter failures, and now they have spent the rest of the expac trying to undo them, as they should... but they are just too damn slow about it. All these failed changes should have been reverted already back in alpha/beta.)

And if you are worried about stat-balance, the removal of Charred Remains alone would already have brought down the value of mastery to appropriate levels. Crit and haste for ember generation and mastery for ember consumer damage would balance each other pretty perfectly (once the over-inflated ember generation from CR is no longer an issue).

[Esinar]

To me the most fundamental issues currently with Destruction on live are raw single target damage output and the massive RNG swings on soul shard generation. From a raiding perspective, all this minor stuff like RNG-mastery, old GoSac and burning embers visual can take a back seat as far as I'm concerned. I want the performance issues fixed first, and from my testing on the PTR and from seeing other people's results at least Destruction is moving in a positive direction.

I'm annoyed about the bizarrely designed small-chance-big-reward aspects of Feretory/Soul Conduit/Soul Snatcher still causing big RNG swings on shard regen. They smoothed out shard regen with the fragment implementation, then double-backed by adding more RNG with these small chances for you to gain a whole shard, rather than a higher chance to gain a fragment. Blows my mind. RNG4eva I guess...

[Gaidax]

*snip*

Basically poster above explained my line of thought there.

[Lucrece]

To me the most fundamental issues currently with Destruction on live are raw single target damage output and the massive RNG swings on soul shard generation. From a raiding perspective, all this minor stuff like RNG-mastery, old GoSac and burning embers visual can take a back seat as far as I'm concerned. I want the performance issues fixed first, and from my testing on the PTR and from seeing other people's results at least Destruction is moving in a positive direction.

I'm annoyed about the bizarrely designed small-chance-big-reward aspects of Feretory/Soul Conduit/Soul Snatcher still causing big RNG swings on shard regen. They smoothed out shard regen with the fragment implementation, then double-backed by adding more RNG with these small chances for you to gain a whole shard, rather than a higher chance to gain a fragment. Blows my mind. RNG4eva I guess...

They love RNG.


Demonhunter in a nutshell:

- RNG fury generation.
- RNG fury refund from their spender.
- RNG trait crit damage bonus on crit
- RNG extra 10% for that spender to do a second spender
- Legendary ring RNG fury generation

Unholy Death Knight:

- RNG wound count generation
- RNG wound pop talent that's bis
- RNG weapon abomination proc
- RNG Double Doom proc

As I said somewhere before, RNG is only good when you can react to it like frost mage, fire mage, or frost DK procs. RNG like destro mastery or soul conduit procs or feretory procs is not something you really react to other than "don't overcap shards" which basically applies to any class with a resource mechanic.

We'll see what further changes they trot out, hopefully for talents and traits like Eternal Struggle.

[Gaidax]

It's absolutely fine in the examples you offered, because when you have so many frequent sources of RNG resource generation then it is effectively not RNG at all, as you simply average out very fast, but on the other hand it encourages dynamic gameplay reacting to resource not being set in stone at any given time, as opposed to press "2" 3 times, then press "3" rinse and repeat. Basically you get eventual consistency on one hand and dynamic gameplay on the other, it's a good thing really.

Problem with Destruction and why it had to be adjusted is that the bar was too short and you literally capped way too fast and the whole pooling resources for burst part was lost.

IMO, as a whole Blizz made a mistake with having only 5 "complete" soul shards, instead of shard bits. I am pretty sure eventually they will move other specs to partial shard bits generation as well.

[Baconeggcheese]

From a raiding perspective, all this minor stuff like RNG-mastery, old GoSac and burning embers visual can take a back seat as far as I'm concerned. I want the performance issues fixed first

Its funny you say that, because I feel like mastery / old gosac are two examples of things that have a fairly large impact on performance issues.

You simply can't do things like carry doomfire / infernal damage like we did on mythic archimonde when your CB can do 800k or 1.6 mil. Gosac also feeds into said priority damage issue because instead of you hitting that much harder with CB / conflag your damage is being spread out via the imp (which also needs immolate on the target to do dmg). Those two things can have a massive impact on your performance during progression.

The mastery worries me less because of the tier bonus bandaid, its not ideal but it'll do the job. Having old gosac would be an amazing increase to our performance, on a much more important level than single target dps or shard rng since it doesn't much affect banking for a priority moment.

[Avikur]

I'm really hoping the buff to RE puts it top in that row, it makes the spec feel more like the MOP/WOD version not having to worry about mana.

Fragment generation still seems a bit high (even without the belt), i wish they'd take generation away from rifts.

[Deleted]

Huge destro news in the new ptr build

[Gaidax]

I'm really hoping the buff to RE puts it top in that row, it makes the spec feel more like the MOP/WOD version not having to worry about mana.

Not even close, basically it's a bit less terrible, but still the worst there.

[Dastey]

Quick summary of latest changes to destruction on PTR.

Mastery:
Changes from random amount up to 24% to 8% static and additional random amount up to 8%

Set bonuses:
T19 4pc: Reduces cooldown of Conflagrate by 2 seconds, down from 3.
T20 2pc: 100% chance to generate 1 additional Soul Shard Fragment
T20 4pc: No direct change, but change in mastery

Spells:
Conflagrate generates 5 Soul Shard Fragments, up from 4
Soul Conduit is 15%, up from 12% last PTR build, and down from 20% live.

Talents:
Reverse entropy increases damage of RoF and CB by 8%, up from 5%. Changes from reduced cast time on live

All in all pretty good changes, with small buffs around the board. The change to mastery is welcome as it gives less RNG. Ofcourse it will be a nerf for the 4pc bonus, but this should prevent mastery from being worth almost twice the amount of DPS as all other stats.
Reverse Entropy change is welcome and will bring it closer to Eradication and ELT, but I don't think it is quite there yet. But it gives an alternative for people who don't care about those last 2-3 % (numbers not confirmed).

[Avikur]

Not even close, basically it's a bit less terrible, but still the worst there.

in that case then fingers crossed for Eradication being the go to talent ... anything other than ELT!!!

[Bjarkan]

So, they added a floor to the mastery, eh? This, and the little buff on RE are very nice to me.

[dwightyo39]

I'm really hoping the buff to RE puts it top in that row, it makes the spec feel more like the MOP/WOD version not having to worry about mana.

Fragment generation still seems a bit high (even without the belt), i wish they'd take generation away from rifts.

Why would you want worse gerneration?