It's virtually a pyroblast clone, I don't think it will go live as is. People would be justifiably pissed. It doesn't even have the new red/black demonfire tints that all our fire spells have.
It will never be balanced, abandon this pipedream of yours.
Lone Wolf will always dominate for the simple fact that it applies to all your spells, including cleave and aoe, so if lone wolf option is putting as much single target out as the pet option, it will vastly outperform it in cleave and aoe since the pet doesn't cleave at all.
Then there's the issue of scaling, since the pet does not benefit from mastery while lone wolf does, as the mastery increases the pet becomes irrelevant.
If they are remotely tuned to be similar, lone wolf will reign for the simple fact it amplifies burst instead of being a dot delivery mechanism.
The pet option would need to be noticeably ahead of lone wolf in sustained damage to justify losing the burst, cleave, and aoe benefits of lone wolf.
It's why affliction and demo need to do significantly more sustained damage than destruction to begin with, otherwise what's the point of playing any of those specs when you got one that sustains as well and does far better priority target damage.
Last edited by Lucrece; 2018-02-18 at 08:08 PM.
Not entirely true, you could keep a pool and burn them for movement, in which case you'd save time, which means it opens up gameplay decisions. Moment to moment gameplay decisions is what keeps a rotation from feeling stale. Having instant cast options for movement are a huge deal.
What are you willing to sacrifice?
But you don't actually save time. Like, it's still 1.5s of "cast time" whether you're moving or not. If there is little to no movement to leverage the instant status, there is literally zero DPS gain from taking the talent as it stands.
And even on fights with fair amounts of movement, it'd have to be determined whether filling those otherwise empty GCDs (would they even be empty?) is more damage than one of the others on the row would offer.
Yes, if we'd take Demonic Strength (combined with the T15 version) our felguard will deal allot of damage. 50% + 100% + 4 extra attacks/20sec while just doing our basic SB/SF casting. With the current talents, overload would be a dps loss for making SF instant.
Also don't forget, we get 4MC, but we only want to cast 2 SF max before we need to use HoG, stoping our movement temporarily.
overload does have the current PT/SI vibe to it if that rotation does work, but it does sound a little worthless compared to the other talents.
Those were the days, when chaos bolt was improved incinerate and went under the gcd cap with backdraft....
I didn't mind empowered imp procs though... But wouldn't want them back, I would just rather use the demon I wanted, or what utility is required (interrupt/ purge/ dispel) without the damage hit. Or just sac and use them anyway lol.
On a side note do we get our last stand back with voidwalker sacrifice?
Precisely. I was responding to a post that claimed that affliction was perfectly fine because it's a strong raiding spec.
Was just pointing out that for probably a majority of players - this is irrelevent, since they do not play raids outside of LFR, which is not really raiding at all.
There have also been silly comments about aff having strong multitarget damage so it shoudl be bottom on single target. This of course would be extremely damaging given that council fights or long-lived add type fights are virtually exclusive to raiding - if you make aff rock bottom single target then it woul dbe an extremely unattractive proposition for BfA since there is a heavier emphasis on dungeons
Which is no suprise, since a lot of guilds have burnt out by raiding, and raiding - despite being the 'end game' - has become a smaller and smalle rpart of played content for many players.
Certainly on my realm you just do not see the numbers of people in raiding tier sets that you once would have. And they are even removing one of the biggest raiding incentives there.
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Yes. Both need 'compensation' in return for the penalty they pay in the form of ramp and low on-demand burst.
If they have the same sustained damage as burst classes, they beome very unattractive
So how are we looking boys and girls? everyone happy so far??
I'm glad Shadowbolt and Nightfall are back for Affliction - makes my Lock feel like it's old TBC self again, LOVING that. what I'm worrying about is how our selfhealing will be, as let's face it that's majority of our survival in raids/dungeons/soloing. Will it be only from talenting Siphon Life and/or channeling the occasional Drain Life?
Spent majority of BfA playing a Hunter after ditching Lock in MoP for Monk, changing to Hunter in Legion... I'd REALLY like to go back to Lock as my "only class played"
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effectively means not having to rely on a pet and it's terrible pathing/poor reliability.
Where does this "heavier emphasis on dungeon content" idea come from? I've seen nothing that supports this theory, we're getting Mythic+ and raids in BfA just like we had in Legion, there is no more focus on one or the other in the current development for BfA.
If anything, the watercooler post a few weeks back indicated blizzard are trying to shape specs for different purposes so you don't have 1/2/3 specs doing the same thing in a different style but rather you have a different spec for different goals (ie. burst/sustain/aoe/ST/cleave etc.)
When you play a class that has only 1 dps spec, you need to be able to do a bit of everything and be balanced at it. But for pure classes, you have 3 specs that often fit they same role(range/melee) you need to have specs that do different things or you'll always just end up with 1 spec being numerically superior.
Shaman for example has a range and melee dps spec, so they have 2 roles. Regardless of balance, you need to pick a role and fill it.
While Locks and Mages have 3 ranged specs, if all 3 are capable of burst/sustain/cleave/ST/aoe then the spec that does more dummy parse numbers is the only "viable" spec in the eyes of the masses. But if affl is the council/high movement fight king, destro is the burst/2 target king and demo is the AoE/ST king (for example!) then you have a reason to play all 3 specs.
This is healthy for the game, especially in an Xpac that has removed all the shit that locked us into 1 spec like Legion did.
Last edited by Khrux; 2018-02-19 at 04:20 PM.
People whining about m+ balance compose pointless whine anyways. Raids is where balance occurs, and if you don't raid and only do m+, then you shouldn't worry about pushing keys for gearing purposes because honestly you're not going to use that ilv for content that actually requires it; it goes to waste.
Should aoe and CC be more reasonably distributed? Sure. But it's perfectly fine that some classes are just better at aoe and ST, what's important is that people can still bring some semblance of aoe or ST and not be boned on either even if they're doing less of it by some degree.
that is a gross simplification tho as it does more than just that, it also significantly increase your shard generation, almost doubling it and dont try to downplay the importance of mobility for a spec like demo, not to mention that it isnt just 1,5 sec vs gcd but it is also gcd vs 4 secs as you need to cast twice the amount of shadow bolts to generate the same amount of shards as a single soulfire, ofc you do have a point that if you look at only the gains of an instant cast soulfire vs a hardcast molten core soulfire but when you then add the fact that you'll completely remove shadow bolt from your rotation, then it becomes a different matter entirely but getting more and better mobility is HUGE for demo and the potential synergy with demonic comsumption and nether portal/inner demons makes this particular combo quite potent.
It's not fine when the differences are in the order of 50-60%. Aff warlocks and Mistweaver monks are doing 4m+ AOE dps in high M+ keys, while other specs are around 2.6m. That's way too much of a difference to be fair and it's only out of pure laziness that they can't balance it better than that.
What he means is that without the talent, a MCSF = 1.5sec cast time, the same as the GCD so when standing still, Overloading is a dps loss. You should take Demonic Strength if you want more dps, combined with T15 Demonic Strength for more AoE. Power Siphon is the real DPS increase that would make ditching Shadowbolt a possibility with the current information we have. Overloading does make a nice "helter-skelter" talent, 2GCD movement 1 GCD casting HoG.
All artifact abilities are gone except for those turned into talents.
It's their shit ass pruning all over again. I can't believe they took shadow priest's void torrent and balance druid's moon spells, since those spells were even more integral to the gameplay of those specs.
A lot of incorrect assumptions here.
1. I'm not expecting perfect balance. I'm hoping for relative balance so that one doesn't dramatically break the other. As mentioned frost mages are a good example, because the pet alternative is only slightly behind lonely winter. Lone wolf completely dominates the others.
2. The fact that lone wolf eliminates the pet is irrelevant as to whether or not it's an increase in AOE damage. Whether or not it's an increase depends on whether the other talents increase AOE damage
3. Scaling is fair, but it's more of an issue as to how well the talent scales vs other talents, not how well the talent scales vs the pet.
In general you are comparing the talent to the pet, when it's important to also consider the other talents. The other talents are kind of bad and that's the primary issue as to why lone wolf is so good. Fix that problem and the rest will fix itself.
yeah, from that point of view i get your point bcoz you could spam soulfires all day by simply taking power siphon alone atleast on fights with low movement as demonic strength in that row should make up for the loss of dps while moving, but there will definately be situations where overloaded or even the scourge bombers will be the best option.
my only problem with demo on alpha atm is that there isnt a go-to ability for aoe, as crappy as demonwrath was, it was still a nice thing to have as something is still better than nothing, but i guess HoG is suppose to solve that since it hits for a ton and is the only option outside of our 45-90 sec cds, i do like the idea of demonic consumption with power siphon+nether portal/inner demons as it allows for a ton of imps to be summoned(8-16ish) and then be sacced for your demon commander for massive aoe(ofc depends on how big a buff the commander gets pr imp), altho i think the cd is a bit too long atm, i feel like they could add something like reducing the cd of the commander by 1 sec pr. demon sacrificed when taking demonic consumption.