8.0 Warlock changes from Beta

[Deleted]

Everyone looking in to see if affliction self healing is nerfed

[Hyrja]

wow dem destro nerfs, hope we get some nice updated animations aswell

[Xanatas]

immolate istant??? i hope

grimoire of sacrifice is back, finally!

Shadowfury istant but 1 min CD

[rullarn]

Some nice changes going on here.

Nice to see drain life going, while I enjoyed the idea, what took it from me was the slow drain animation it had. It felt so wierd, atleast with the "gaps" in the power-drain animation, maybe if the spell would have had a fuller effect and not three streams kind of connecting. But that's just cosmetic stuff anyway

Still waiting to see what happens to demo.

And also getting a good laugh at the "end of the world"-folks cause Demo changes weren't in the FIRST note we get from ALPHA. Good stuff indeed

[Gaidax]

"WTF Blizz no Shadow Bolt as filler?? Aff ruined ded..." A year later: "WTF Blizz Shadow Bolt filler? Aff ruined ded..."

Hilarious.

[Ilir]

The changes to survival are really good. If they do the same thing for demonology, I say we'll be happy

[Thrif]

No changes to Demo yet, but I guess it's still early on. Otherwise it looks good. Our self healing was a bit stupid, so I don't mind they're scaling that back, I think we'll be fine. New Life Tap definitely is interesting, exchange health for more damage?

Seriously hoping for some kind of update of change to the pets, but they seem pretty stubborn when it comes to that unfortunately.

[Kirroth]

WoWhead has BfA Talent Calculators up. It has more in the way of durations and cooldowns that the MMOchamp dump didn't have. Some things I noticed:

On my first reading I thought Deathbolt consumed the DoTs. That doesn't seem to be the case. Does that make it an Afflic nuke on a 25s cooldown, as long as you make sure to refresh your DoTs first? Is it a reason to stack your UA, despite the Contagion effect being baseline? We'll have to see. They claim Afflic will get GrimSac as an option.

On the Destro side, by WoWhead's reading Backdraft is not baseline and remains the third Lvl 15 Tier talent choice. Again, no way to be sure who's right at this point. Also by this info Shadowburn is instant, 12s cooldown, and 2 charges. Its damage and SS generation are more like an instant Incinerate than a second Conflag, much less the powerful execute of expansions past, but as long as you have space for the extra button it might be useful for WQ or Mythic+. There's three empty spots here, and that assumes everything they have is correct, which it might not be. So still plenty of room for new options to be added.

[Biomega]

Noooo.... I play affliction in Legion in large part because of the self healing. Tankiness and ability to minimize impact of non one shot mechanics is what made it special. These changes will severely ruin the class for me. 0.5% shield regen for demon skin talent and a nerf to both - self healing AND shield capacity? Really?

Come now, everyone in their right mind recognizes that Affliction healing is way too good. I fully expected changes in that respect, and I do not mind them at all. A top DPS class shouldn't also passively be their own dedicated healer and be able to just ignore a ton of raid mechanics.

I know it's never fun to give something up once you have it, but ultimately balance is good for everyone.

[Xanatas]

interesting new shadowburn, 2 charge and 12 sec recharge + shard fragment

[Maleific]

Quite happy with the aff/ destruction changes.

Shadowbolt filler for aff w/ Nightfall
Grimoire of Sac is back to a damage buff w/ pet command ability.
Life tap no longer a mana mechanic.
Grimoire of Synergy for destruction?
Infernal generates shards and no more doomguard for destro.

All in all pretty happy with destro/ aff, I hope they go a diff route with demonlogy though.

[varbar3]

[QUOTE=Netherspark;48760922]

• Soul Fire is back for destruction, but we don't know in what context.
• Infernal is heavily buffed for Destruction, and it looks like they no longer have Doomguard.
• Some inkling Destro may get an ability from the Dimensional Rifts (artifact ability).
• Soul Leech is nerfed.
• Affliction gets "Death Bolt".
• Dark Pact is now always based on your own health
• Grimoire of Sacrifice reverted to the WoD version

[/QUOTESoul


Fire is back for destruction, but we don't know in what context here is the context Soul Fire (New) Burns the enemy's soul, dealing a critical strike for [280% of Spell Power] Fire damage. Damage is further increased by your critical strike chance. Destruction Warlock - Level 15 Talent. 10 Soul Shard. 40 yd range. 4 sec cast. 45 sec cooldown.

[Kirroth]

Oh, one other thing I just realized. Look at the Afflic Lvl 15 talent row. Notice anything?

Old school Haunt, where it's a maintenance debuff limited to a single target. Old school Shadow's Embrace, where it's a maintenance debuff effectively limited to a single target. Deathbolt, which is a cooldown nuke that doesn't scale with multiple targets.

Seems the Devs are retreating from the "Let Afflic be good at spread damage" idea a little, now that we've proven it makes us insane god-kings not to have any throttle on target scaling for council fights. Which I can't really blame them for. On council fights like Hounds or Coven my DPS just blows everyone else in the raid away. Having those three as a talent row is obviously meant to curb the target scaling a bit. Plus they put Writhe and AC on the same row so you can't double up on them, so that's another target scaling brake.

Which is not to say BfA Afflic will suck at council fights. I'm sure it'll still be strong on them. Just a bit less insanely super strong, I expect is the plan.

[Ibanism]

I've always been on the Drain Train too. Prefered it over Shadowbolt.

But if they are going this way, then fine. Just make it fun to play and I don't care enough to bitch about it. Which is basically the same thing as when they changed it to Draining instead of casting.


Wild theory: Maybe they are removing shadowbolt from Demo and since they didn;t want to lose the ability, they gave it back to Affliction, along with the old shadowbolt related talents and abilities.

We'll see if this has any truth to it when the Demo changes come through more completely.

Why not both? 4.1 drain+nightfall build was my all time favorite Aff time, not even broken damage+mobility Aff of MoP can top that.

I'm so happy after reading the alpha note, MG is gone, Old haunt is back, Nightfall is back, shadow embrace is back tho you have to choose between it and haunt, deathbolt.

[Nevrex]

I didn't like shadowbolt as a filler back in cata. Drain life always felt better to me, both visually and gamplay wise. I just hope they give us some other heals if it gets nerfed. You can't keep abilities that drain our health, but remove our healing.

Also to those that keep saying "alpha is alpha" and the same for beta, we have reasons to be worried. This is a cycle that repeats itself each expansion. Blizz comes up with dumb decisions and they stick to them, no matter how much feedback they get. They either keep the change or break the abilty, just for the sake of changing it (shadowburn for example).

Look at Destruction in legion. They changed shards to be the new resource and the way to gather it was by rng. No matter how much feedback they got during the alpha/beta. Of course it was changed a few patches after the release, since it was a horrible idea. Another example is demo, Look how it turned out.

I hope we at least get our new casting animations (like all the others) in this expansion.

[Mashnakh]

Guys I think they removed Doomguard and Infernal from affliction and Demo. Only Destru kept the Infernal. Maybe they thinking of giving one 3 min CD for each specc? Like Infernal for Destru, Doomguard for Mh good question which Spec fits it more? And what else do you wanna bring up?

[Ibanism]

Oh, one other thing I just realized. Look at the Afflic Lvl 15 talent row. Notice anything?

Old school Haunt, where it's a maintenance debuff limited to a single target. Old school Shadow's Embrace, where it's a maintenance debuff effectively limited to a single target. Deathbolt, which is a cooldown nuke that doesn't scale with multiple targets.

Seems the Devs are retreating from the "Let Afflic be good at spread damage" idea a little, now that we've proven it makes us insane god-kings not to have any throttle on target scaling for council fights. Which I can't really blame them for. On council fights like Hounds or Coven my DPS just blows everyone else in the raid away. Having those three as a talent row is obviously meant to curb the target scaling a bit. Plus they put Writhe and AC on the same row so you can't double up on them, so that's another target scaling brake.

Which is not to say BfA Afflic will suck at council fights. I'm sure it'll still be strong on them. Just a bit less insanely super strong, I expect is the plan.

I think aff would still be insane at multidotting, we just going back to pre MoP aff where the only thing making DoTs on a priority target stronger than the rest is haunt (well technically it used to be haunt+shadow embrace), so ie if you take haunt you lose out just 10%ish DoT damage on other targets, and you are still free to do what everr you want for 10 seconds, while back in MoP and WoD that was the real spread damage nerf, your DoTs ticked like mosquitoes bite with out MG double ticking them.

[Mehrunes]

I guess spec fantasy is no longer a thing. Aff's self healing is gutted, bajillion throttles to multidotting are back, filler no longer a channeled spell but a normal cast nuke, even shared with Demo. Splendid ideas. And while Aff's channels had better spell effects in the past, it's still a nice looking (especially if taking MG) spell effect gone for one the most basic of spells out there. And not only do we get Shadow Bolt back, we also get the utter atrocious cancer that's Shadow Embrace right with it. Because that's certainly the best part of Shadow Bolt that we had or something.

I mean, Nightfall was fun, especially when you could glyph it for double the proc chance. But look at Deathbolt. It's not a replacement for Shadowbolt like Malefic Grasp is for Drain Soul, since it has a hefty CD. It could have easily been a base spell (I mean, they even talked about Artifact abilities leaving a gap in the rotation so it could have fit right there) and Nightfall could work with that instead.

But nope, it's Demo filler time, with Aff's fantasy lying in a ditch after its legs were ripped off.

RIP Drain Life/Soul. Seems like most in here hated it but I loved it.

Same here. Them reverting Aff's development 6 years back, even including the single worst part of SB rotation because they are creatively bankrupt and couldn't think of a different Talent than a copy-paste of the old one, making it more similar to the other two specs is just stupid.

[Scroff]

Come now, everyone in their right mind recognizes that Affliction healing is way too good. I fully expected changes in that respect, and I do not mind them at all. A top DPS class shouldn't also passively be their own dedicated healer and be able to just ignore a ton of raid mechanics.

I know it's never fun to give something up once you have it, but ultimately balance is good for everyone.

I agree, looking at my logs and seeing that my external healing required is a fraction of everyone else's (or some fights where I'm not even on the list) clearly shows that it's imbalanced. But Blizz are doing their see-saw thing again, everything to nothing, when a better approach might be to tune it. Healing is currently 200% of damage done so they do have a tuning knob to turn.

(OT I do wonder why they haven't tuned it on live since it's clearly OP...)

[Mehrunes]

So the lesson is, don't trust in first reactions and don't seize on single isolated elements. It's almost impossible to predict how a spec will feel to play from reading a list of class changes. You need to get some hands on trials to really discover what the complete effect will be. Even just hitting some training dummies will reveal worlds more than reading a list of numbers. I thought I might roll with the new Demo in Legion, or if not fall back into my old Destro habits, and it wasn't until I hit the Open Beta to try them for myself that I discovered that Afflic was the hot shit of the expac.

Don't rage or panic over incomplete information. Have patience for actual play trials with a play-ready spec. We're still at least five months from launch, and the testing process hasn't even officially begun.

It's not like they are rediscovering the wheel where it comes to Aff here. It's pretty much Cata iteration of Aff that has no drain execute (but has access to some of the new talented spells instead).

"WTF Blizz no Shadow Bolt as filler?? Aff ruined ded..." A year later: "WTF Blizz Shadow Bolt filler? Aff ruined ded..."

Hilarious.

Except the "year" is actually six years and almost half of the game's lifespan. Also, community isn't a monolith. In this very thread, despite not being even full 5 pages long, you had people both in favor and against SB filler.

Complicated.

I mean, it's really not, but it's criticism of Blizzard so you have to shitpost pretending like it is, because in your world Blizzard is infallible and every criticism of them triggers an automatic "rush to their defense" response in you.