8.0 Warlock changes from Beta

[Baconeggcheese]

I think replacing rain of fire with infernals would be a little much, it'd reduce the impact of summoning them thematically.

It was an off the cuff idea, though their thematic impact was trivialized a long time ago. They're commonplace throwaway enemies and we both can summon a single permanent one or summon a few minfernals to go with the main one. Theyre not exactly impactful thematically.

I think instead the destro shoulder effect should have been the baseline function with rifts.

i didnt mind the effect, i hated that it was tied to the rifts. Before the shoulders the rifts could be used as a tool for movement or dumped at the same time. With the shoulders it turned them into yet another thing you space out to flatten out your burst into more sustained-ish dmg.

In general for destro I'm not happy with all the rng they put into the spec for legion.

whats funny is destro seems to get all the rng credit but aff is soooo much worse about its rng.

But yeah, some amount of rng is good / necessary but how destro has rng feels terrible. Its that your rng is just dmg thats out of your control with things like mastery and portals.

[Nazmina]

It was an off the cuff idea, though their thematic impact was trivialized a long time ago. They're commonplace throwaway enemies and we both can summon a single permanent one or summon a few minfernals to go with the main one. Theyre not exactly impactful thematically.

Compared to the rest of our spells, since we can only summon one permanent imp or felhunter when we've seen zounds of them flooding forth from portals. Still, having destro spawn several dozen infernals in an aoe fight would tread to much on the summoner idea of Demo locks. I still think having them be a big aoe cd like cataclysm but less dumb would be cool.

As for rain of fire, Id rather the old fire and brimstone be our main aoe. We've had rain of fire since vanilla, but its never been impressive in sounds, look, feel, or usefulness. If they are going to keep it, it should be much shorter and focus less on spamming it. Like say 4 big ticks spread over 2 seconds.

Or maybe work on giving it a sorta ignite treatment, say you cast rain of fire on something then cast it again, It just makes a new ground effect and adds any remaining dmg from the old one to the new one. This way they can make it more visual without cltuttering and let us move our aoe with our target without losing as much dmg.

i didnt mind the effect, i hated that it was tied to the rifts. Before the shoulders the rifts could be used as a tool for movement or dumped at the same time. With the shoulders it turned them into yet another thing you space out to flatten out your burst into more sustained-ish dmg.

Part of that is rift resets, which contributes also contributes to the rng of the spec. Although maybe if they kept a rift dmg boost or some other charge based dmg boost ablitiy they could make it stack but not refresh duration. giving you the choice of stacking dmg or spreading it out depending on fight.

As for movement, I do sorta wish we had fel flame back, or something similar.

whats funny is destro seems to get all the rng credit but aff is soooo much worse about its rng.

But yeah, some amount of rng is good / necessary but how destro has rng feels terrible. Its that your rng is just dmg thats out of your control with things like mastery and portals.

Aff had rng from its rebirth in MoP though, compared to the basically rngless destro at the time. But I do agree that aff had excessive rng. It looks like tormented souls arent staying next xpac which is unfortunate because I think they had potential.

Something I think could have helped a lot with Aff rng and boringness on single target would be to give it a shard and torment soul generator on a moderate cd that does not in any scale with number of enemies. (no resets) This way they could get a little bit better balance between shard and torment soul starvation on single target and massive overflow in add swarm fights. Though I guess getting Tormented souls from anything that dies is the big issue. Maybe make it so tormented souls only come from drain soul deaths like shards then balance normal generation around that plus a shard and torment generator. They could even use haunt for the generator or our old soul harvest animation from cata.

[brutallord]

I don't know if this was mentioned here but in wowhead bfa model viewer we have what looks like new warlock casting animations

[Kiradyn]

Affliction is getting so much death-themed abilities... had to check three times whether I was reading Warlock changes or Death Knight changes

Yeah, that's an interesting change.

[Craaazyyy]

When it had more depth yes, not necessarily more spells.

Destruction has more spells now than it had the last 2 xpacs, but its far less fun for me (and it seems many others). They almost systematically removed all the specs depth and what's left is pretty damned dull.

its not true about destro having more spells than in mop.. no shadowburn(useless talent and it replaces conflag), no baseline dark soul, no toggable aoe, no curses, no fel flame, no baseline port, no ember tap

and for all that u gained 1 ability = artifact one..

[Xanatas]

its not true about destro having more spells than in mop.. no shadowburn(useless talent and it replaces conflag), no baseline dark soul, no toggable aoe, no curses, no fel flame, no baseline port, no ember tap

and for all that u gained 1 ability = artifact one..

and no howl of terror

ahhhh destro MOP...

[Dastey]

Newest round of destruction changes:
- Unending Resolve now has 3 minutes cooldown up from 90 seconds (60 seconds in Legion)
- New lvl 100 talent called Dark Soul - Increases crit chance by 30% for 20 seconds
- Soul Harvest removed
- Hellfire replaces Soul Harvest. Costs soul shard fragments per second. Now a complete AoE row.
- GoSaC back to the AoE version again instead of flat damage increase
- GoSyn appears to be only Demonology again
- Life tap talent removed
- Roaring Blaze changed to flat conflag damage over time
- Dark Pact nerfed from 400% to 250% shield
- FnB shard regen from secondary targets reduced to always be 1 rather than 2
- Edit: There appears to be a new imp ability that increases our stamina by 5%

Overall I feel like this build is very bad for Destruction. The GoSaC change is exactly what we don't want and we are seing heavy nerfs to our survivability through Dark Pact and Unending Resolve.
On top of that Dark Soul will be our talented cooldown, however it will be on the same row as our strongest talents, which mean we can't have it all anymore.

Other than what I listed there are small insignifcant changes, that are mostly number tuning

[Kirroth]

New Battle build and WoWhead has class changes. No Demo rebuild yet, but some iterations on the Afflic and Destro talents. Some highlights: Life Tap and Empowered Healthstone are gone, Grim of Sac is a damage proc instead of a percentage buff, Channel Demonfire is gone and replaced by Dark Soul, Hellfire is a talent option for Destro, new Roaring Blaze ditches the complicated mechanic for a simple post-Conflag 6s DoT.

[bio347]

I'm nominally in favour of the "damage proc" GoSac design, so long as they don't do the silly AoE thing of Legion, simply because it has the best chance of being Actually Somewhat Balanced.

I'm cool with Sac as a choice, but sometimes I want to hang out with my demons and not feel like I'm really sub-optimal because of it.

[Kirroth]

Now the mmoChamp version is up too. New things of note that weren't in the WoWhead version are that Unending Breath is back and the Succubus's Whiplash ability has been changed to a 50% snare on a 10s cooldown. So that's a vital bit of utility we'll finally have again.

ETA: Imp has Blood Pact back, this time as 5% Stamina for you and it only. Voidwalker's durability might be going up, looks like it has a new "40% physical damage resist" with constant uptime and no changes. Felstorm deals more damage and on a 30s cooldown. So they seem to be trying to buff the pets a bit as a general rule.

[Gaidax]

They finally did what had to be done all along - a pure AoE options row.

Survivability, I am not bothered simply because Dark Pact is strong and usable option in BfA no longer being tied to pet.

Sacrifice though, I don't like this change, I would much rather get harder hitting spells instead of some weakass proc. I imagine they may be concerned Sac would out-scale other options being %. I hope they will commit to petless option being actually viable this time around.

Dark Soul seems to be a stronger version of Soul Harvest that will also boost shard generation while it is up. It would be very nice if it would have charges somehow to make it both more unique and like it was previously. It could be placeholder though.

[Baconeggcheese]

Think dark soul as a talent is a lot like backdraft as a talent, its just something that should be baseline and unless they over tune the other options / under tune dark soul then it'll just dominate the row.

I am happy if they're bringing back dark soul in place of soul harvest though as I'm not at all a fan of soul harvest.

Gosac revert is extremely disappointing if that stays.

Rest seems interesting, hate this waiting phase where we have no idea if any of this was just things being futzed about with or if things are actually sticking.

[Shandalar]

No demonology changes. Again.

[Deleted]

Hellfire burning shards and health and having to go into melee range ....it's going to have to hit like a truck. They also struggle to make cataclysm ever appealing, so they seem to be going down the road of making f n b super watered down aswell.

[Maleific]

Gosac revert is extremely disappointing if that stays.

So disappointed they went with this, atleast we keep command demon?

For now.

God I hope they revert it, or atleast make it viable this time around.

When it comes to MM/ Frost, they have no problem with them being petless, but for locks, since mop, it keeps being made worse and worse for some reason.

Instead of a flat damage buff, make it buff Immolate, Conflag, incinerate, chaosbolt, shadowburn etc.

On Demonology, Doom is now a talent?????

[Deleted]

Demonic Empowerment looks unchanged, so that's not great.

That was EXACTLy what i thought when i saw it.
Die in a fire

[Shandalar]

Blizzards behaviour with Demon is insulting. Like spitting on the face of all the people who like the spec.

[Lucrece]

Think dark soul as a talent is a lot like backdraft as a talent, its just something that should be baseline and unless they over tune the other options / under tune dark soul then it'll just dominate the row.

I am happy if they're bringing back dark soul in place of soul harvest though as I'm not at all a fan of soul harvest.

Gosac revert is extremely disappointing if that stays.

Rest seems interesting, hate this waiting phase where we have no idea if any of this was just things being futzed about with or if things are actually sticking.

Not happy about hellfire doing damage to yourself on a damn spec with no passive self healing options unlike demo/aff....

If they're not going to bring up destro sustain up to demo/aff levels, then it should not be a spec that chunks itself for damage.

All these nerfs to warlock tankiness are so ridiculous when top guilds are stacking mages and rogues anyways since immunity>>>>>partial mitigation/self healing.

I don't even want to imagine how bad it will be in warlock pvp with the mongoloid melee riding you 24/7 to the ground with their interrupt cooldowns not even touched, and only increases to stun cd's but not crap like gouge or other soft disables they still use to interrupt on top of their countless immunities.

The whole point of my warlock tankiness was that I could stand on damaging crap in some circumstances to compensate for the fact that unlike a mage I can't blink twice on a 15 sec cd.

[Nhiosis]

Darkfury - reduces the cooldown of shadowfury by 15 seconds.

So it appears we're getting baseline shadowfury again, woo!

[AwkwardSquirtle]

No demonology changes. Again.

Minor change. Doom's no longer baseline, but also becomes a maintenance buff every 30 seconds. This also implies changes to Soul Harvest are coming.