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  1. #1
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    Demonology design just took a nosedive

    So I've been hugely impressed with some of the warlock changes introduced as part of WoWs latest expansion Mists of Pandaria. In particular I note that for the first time in WoWs history, Demonology is a dynamic, fun and interesting spec, which is also viable in pvp. Part of the reason for this was a correct decision to cut the 'junk' from demonolgy, streamline the spec and make it less visually clunky and more easy to control and predict.

    But I am less than impressed with demonolgy on the PTR. So lets go through the changes, so that I can circumscribe what I thing has gone wrong.

    Demonic lash

    1. Demonic lash, which is the auto ranged attack, cast in metamorphosis form is now gone. The animation for this attack used to be a visually impressive shadowbolt. That gave the spec its 'oomph.' Something to let you know you were casting a damaging attack. It has not been replaced such that we only cast touch of chaos in metamorphosis form. Touch of chaos is not visually impressive or appealing in any respect. I would liken it to a crazed badminton player smashing a shuttlecock at his opponent. It looks pathetic, but thats all we have now. The visual effect of metamorphosis has been severely degraded .Dont take my word for it, try it on the PTR.

    In addition to this the extra burst we had is now gone. It was 'compensated' by buffing curse of doom, a spell that is neither visually impressive nor dynamic, nor useful in alot of raid encounters, and is hopeless in leveling situations. It is also apparent that the loss of our demonic lash and buff to curse of doom still represents a dps loss in pve by about 2percent according to my numbers. So why was this changed? To fix a bug with wands, but personally, I would prefer not to be able to use wands than to lose a specialization that I think has reinvented the warlock class.

    2. Aura of enfeblement/elements no longer benefits from mannoroth's fury.

    This is a really draconian nerf. Not only does it reduce the effectivenenss of some of the warlock final point talents, that are already in my view lacklustre, but it hurts the whole point of the spell being an aura. This change tends to damage the leveling and raid experience the most, and is less significant in pvp. I would propably increased the range of these auras to 45 yards to compensate. An 'aura' that has 20 yard radius hardly deserves to be called an aura.

    3. Aura of enfeblement/elements is dispellable.

    This is an example of an idea that is poorly executed. On the PTR the 'aura' is a self buff that is magical. First, let me say I don't think allowing mages to spell steal this aura helps pvp balance in the least. It would be considerably smarter to make the aura apply a 'curse' on all targets, instead of a non-dispellable debuff, say every 6 seconds, over 30 seconds , and allow that to be decursed.

    I would be really interested to hear what other warlocks think about my critique. Thus far everyone I've talked to, especially the seasoned demonology artisans seem to be highly annyoed by the quality of life fall on the PTR.

  2. #2
    I agree with you , though I don't know why the damage from the auto-attack wasn't just added as a % dmg increase to the spammable attacks in the first place, instead of just increasing doom's damage.

    Also this shouldn't come as a surprise to you really, blizzard has no sense of actual balance in general so any changes they do reflects that tbh.

    I fear we'll eventually be pigeonholed into playing affliction later on in the season due to demo falling off as a decent spec , as for destro I do not know if they're even going to implement anything since a lot of things that were supposed to be "coming in 5.1" suddenly disappeared, although we've heard they're being reworked I have this feeling that it will just be a disappointment again (call it pessimism or whatever,at least it's justified pessimism due to our previous history).

    Overall I'd say it's PvP in general that took a nosedive whereas in previous seasons it was just going downhill.
    Last edited by wholol; 2012-11-16 at 12:58 AM.

  3. #3
    I agree wholol 100%

  4. #4
    I agree with pretty much all of this, it's another band aid fix to pvp that hurts pve. I could understand it much more as stated previously if spam'able nuke in meta was buffed instead of doom... perhaps blizz was afraid this would maybe demo even more bursty in pvp?

    It's a shame because it doesn't really give people many options, unless destro pulls WAY ahead with the buff to ember generation. At least they haven't nerfed affliction... yet...

  5. #5
    Looking at current numbers, a 25% buff to Doom is not nearly enough to offset the loss from our melee, at least on a single target. Multi-target, we might actually be pretty OP and might end up better than Affliction, pigeon-holing us, once again, into Demonology (not that I dislike Demo).

    Increasing TOC has all sorts of its own problems, though. Your melee is something you normally have all the time you're in Meta, like Doom should be (at least on bosses). TOC is not something you will use whenever you're in Meta - Soul Fire has its uses, you're spending GCD's on Doom, especially multi-target, AOE situations you might be using Void Ray or a GCD on Immo Aura, et cetera.
    A more intuitive approach would to simply increase the damage on ALL skills in Meta (minus, say, Chaos Wave, and maybe some other AOE's) by x%.

    No "fix" would be perfect. I prefer they just remove wanding completely, at least for Demo.

  6. #6
    Doom damage was increased because the removal of the auto attack would otherwise bring down the haste scaling of metamorphosed locks. the only spells from which a meta'd lock benefits from haste are Doom and auto attack. it's a bad fix for sure though. it hurts leveling and pvp especially, since doom has always been garbage for quick on-demand damage.

    mannoroth's fury nerf blows, the spell was the only one that was halfway creatively usable or interesting at all. the aura is shit and basically reintroduces the concept of the stuck-in-melee caster DPS, not to mention resource cost is already prohibitive due to fury starvation at start of fight. this is more of a complaint about lv 90 talents being totally boring, but i am still sad to see this specific nerf as it limits creative use of AOEs (succubus knockback, shadowfury, etc)

    and for the record, auras should absolutely be dispellable in pvp. it is simply too much power for such little cost (a gcd, a chunk of fury, and a small meta CD if you don't plan on staying in form). now it might be at the other end of the spectrum, where it is too weak to justify its cost, due to fury being fairly precious in arena. i really wish that the auras were a demo glyph instead of mandatory, since even currently i find myself sometimes having to drop meta to reapply CoE, since the aura's range is so bad and the fight prohibits me standing any closer.

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fuqup View Post
    Doom damage was increased because the removal of the auto attack would otherwise bring down the haste scaling of metamorphosed locks. the only spells from which a meta'd lock benefits from haste are Doom and auto attack. it's a bad fix for sure though. it hurts leveling and pvp especially, since doom has always been garbage for quick on-demand damage.

    mannoroth's fury nerf blows, the spell was the only one that was halfway creatively usable or interesting at all. the aura is shit and basically reintroduces the concept of the stuck-in-melee caster DPS, not to mention resource cost is already prohibitive due to fury starvation at start of fight. this is more of a complaint about lv 90 talents being totally boring, but i am still sad to see this specific nerf as it limits creative use of AOEs (succubus knockback, shadowfury, etc)

    and for the record, auras should absolutely be dispellable in pvp. it is simply too much power for such little cost (a gcd, a chunk of fury, and a small meta CD if you don't plan on staying in form). now it might be at the other end of the spectrum, where it is too weak to justify its cost, due to fury being fairly precious in arena. i really wish that the auras were a demo glyph instead of mandatory, since even currently i find myself sometimes having to drop meta to reapply CoE, since the aura's range is so bad and the fight prohibits me standing any closer.
    What is the MF nerf?
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  8. #8
    Blizzard needs to double check their math as well. The buff to Doom still results in a roughly 1.2% overall damage nerf to the spec.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Moctezuma View Post
    This change tends to damage the leveling and raid experience the most, and is less significant in pvp.
    Nonsense. It's just as huge in PvP. A 45 yard range means it will catch casters/healers. A 20 yard range means it will catch only melee and bad casters/healers. It also means you'll have to be in a suicide spot just to get it to even reach their melee most of the time.

    Doom change also hurts PvP. You either cast Doom when you're bursting so it actually deals damage, in which case it won't even tick before your burst is over. Or you pre-cast doom beforehand for a pathetic 8k damage tick. Buffed to 10k, woo!

    Dispellable auras basically means you'll never use it again if there's a mage in range. It costs the warlock too much to put up, 4 globals in total to generate the fury and cast it, to just be spellstolen.

    This aura was a reason to take a demo lock to rated battlegrounds. So long as the other team has a semi-awake mage now, a demo lock will just be gimped by not using the aura, or risk harming his entire team by using one.

    Backwards choice. Backwards design.

  10. #10
    Deleted
    Ok it gets worse than i thought. They actually did make the debuff component of aura of enfeblement/elements dispellable to. The only difference, aside from the spell being 20 yards is that its now a magical debuff. Thats right folks, not a curse like its frikin' supposed to be. Its a magical effect.

  11. #11
    Deleted
    Yeah the range will hit hard. Making it dispellable and spellstealable is just rediculous.
    About the auto attacks... I would prefer the damage increase would go to coruption or soulfire... soulfire really needs a damage buff to distinguish from touch of chaos in meta form.

    Hell the only reason why demon is so viable in arena is because the aura can actually town down warrior/hunter/ret burst so your healer can survive it after using all his cd's... Dk still pressure a bit to much.
    Last edited by mmoc79582ce235; 2012-11-16 at 09:13 AM.

  12. #12
    The Unstoppable Force Jessicka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Moctezuma View Post
    So I've been hugely impressed with some of the warlock changes introduced as part of WoWs latest expansion Mists of Pandaria. In particular I note that for the first time in WoWs history, Demonology is a dynamic, fun and interesting spec, which is also viable in pvp. Part of the reason for this was a correct decision to cut the 'junk' from demonolgy, streamline the spec and make it less visually clunky and more easy to control and predict.

    But I am less than impressed with demonolgy on the PTR. So lets go through the changes, so that I can circumscribe what I thing has gone wrong.

    Demonic lash

    1. Demonic lash, which is the auto ranged attack, cast in metamorphosis form is now gone. The animation for this attack used to be a visually impressive shadowbolt. That gave the spec its 'oomph.' Something to let you know you were casting a damaging attack. It has not been replaced such that we only cast touch of chaos in metamorphosis form. Touch of chaos is not visually impressive or appealing in any respect. I would liken it to a crazed badminton player smashing a shuttlecock at his opponent. It looks pathetic, but thats all we have now. The visual effect of metamorphosis has been severely degraded .Dont take my word for it, try it on the PTR.

    In addition to this the extra burst we had is now gone. It was 'compensated' by buffing curse of doom, a spell that is neither visually impressive nor dynamic, nor useful in alot of raid encounters, and is hopeless in leveling situations. It is also apparent that the loss of our demonic lash and buff to curse of doom still represents a dps loss in pve by about 2percent according to my numbers. So why was this changed? To fix a bug with wands, but personally, I would prefer not to be able to use wands than to lose a specialization that I think has reinvented the warlock class.
    I hate the autoattack mechanic, so good riddance to be honest. Sure, the Touch of Chaos animation could be prettier but that's not reason to keep a horrible mechanic, which aside from bugging with wands also caused problems with ninja pulling.

    I'll also pick up on the bolded: It's very useful in all raid encounters, and actually represents a significant DPS buff on multi-target fights. A 1.5% DPS loss on single targets isn't that big a deal - of course I'd prefer not to suffer it - but I feel the spec is strong enough to take it.

    2. Aura of enfeblement/elements no longer benefits from mannoroth's fury.

    This is a really draconian nerf. Not only does it reduce the effectivenenss of some of the warlock final point talents, that are already in my view lacklustre, but it hurts the whole point of the spell being an aura. This change tends to damage the leveling and raid experience the most, and is less significant in pvp. I would propably increased the range of these auras to 45 yards to compensate. An 'aura' that has 20 yard radius hardly deserves to be called an aura.

    3. Aura of enfeblement/elements is dispellable.

    This is an example of an idea that is poorly executed. On the PTR the 'aura' is a self buff that is magical. First, let me say I don't think allowing mages to spell steal this aura helps pvp balance in the least. It would be considerably smarter to make the aura apply a 'curse' on all targets, instead of a non-dispellable debuff, say every 6 seconds, over 30 seconds , and allow that to be decursed.

    I would be really interested to hear what other warlocks think about my critique. Thus far everyone I've talked to, especially the seasoned demonology artisans seem to be highly annyoed by the quality of life fall on the PTR.
    Totally agree, one nerf or the other is I think kinda necessary, but both is going overboard. At that point you may as well remove the auras altogether and have us just hard cast the Curses; because we're just going to end up hard-casting them in caster form anyway instead; especially given it seems the debuff can be dispelled as Magic rather than a Curse as the hard casted application.

    Quote Originally Posted by wholol View Post
    I agree with you , though I don't know why the damage from the auto-attack wasn't just added as a % dmg increase to the spammable attacks in the first place, instead of just increasing doom's damage.

    Also this shouldn't come as a surprise to you really, blizzard has no sense of actual balance in general so any changes they do reflects that tbh.

    I fear we'll eventually be pigeonholed into playing affliction later on in the season due to demo falling off as a decent spec , as for destro I do not know if they're even going to implement anything since a lot of things that were supposed to be "coming in 5.1" suddenly disappeared, although we've heard they're being reworked I have this feeling that it will just be a disappointment again (call it pessimism or whatever,at least it's justified pessimism due to our previous history).

    Overall I'd say it's PvP in general that took a nosedive whereas in previous seasons it was just going downhill.
    In regards to Destruction, it seems the stun from Rain of Fire is going for certain but with nothing new on Cataclysm it seems the spec will be short on CC and survivability relative to anyone else at least until 5.2. 5.1 PTR is already a release candidate and it seems pretty certain to be live before the end of the month so there simply wont be time for any kind of testing.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Jessicka View Post
    5.1 PTR is already a release candidate and it seems pretty certain to be live before the end of the month so there simply wont be time for any kind of testing.
    Doubt they'd leave rogues in this abysmal state, and nerf the penultimate-worst arena class with everything that made it viable in arena/rbgs.

  14. #14
    The Unstoppable Force Jessicka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tya View Post
    Doubt they'd leave rogues in this abysmal state, and nerf the penultimate-worst arena class with everything that made it viable in arena/rbgs.
    I dunno, take a look at Warriors last expansion after they nerfed Collosus Smash - that too was a stupid gimmick that was the only thing that held the spec together in PvP. Are we not in a similar boat now? As for Rogues "They just need gear"

  15. #15
    Deleted
    Pretty Worrying, im loving Demo more and more in its current form
    Last edited by mmoc1c93c8e808; 2012-11-16 at 01:16 PM.

  16. #16
    Stood in the Fire NPSlow's Avatar
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    Just a few examples of the theory that warlocks are going to take some serious nerfs since our warlockbro at blizzard got fired.

    That cataclysm spell he worked so hard for..

    Demo nerfs and this "wand fix" to our auto attack.. it's atrocious.

    At least if your aura gets spell stolen hopefully you'll range it.

    Also this aura "fix" seems to be the final nail in the coffin for Mannoroths Fury and me. I guess it's just spell reflect all the time
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  17. #17
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    It could just be a quick fix so the Demo wand users aren't continuing to be at a disadvantage, and the real fix (which may take longer to work out) will be done a little later on. They won't want to delay a patch for this issue alone.

  18. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by NPSlow View Post
    Just a few examples of the theory that warlocks are going to take some serious nerfs since our warlockbro at blizzard got fired.
    Which is worrying, since didn't Xelnath's response to the majority of the warlock playerbase's pvp concerns generally tend to be "best to undershoot on launch and buff later on, than be OP on launch and be nerfed down" and how he wasn't going to buff anything until he'd seen the season play out?

    And we're getting nerfs?

    I really can't understand the logic behind letting the aura be spell stealable. Dispellable, sure, but spell stolen? It's now both expensive, removable AND can be a huge liability if stolen and used against your team.

  19. #19
    Are you freaking kidding me? "Design" for mean means visual appeal? When did that happen?

    1) Doom is amazing. The ONLY time its not a great spell is when the target dies in less then 15 seconds. Which means while questing. Aka, its always usefull in situations that matter. Damage being shifted to Doom is in fact a PvE buff, as it increases multidotting damage, a niche we are already very strong at.
    2) If you are using Fury to cast Auras in raids in anything but a trash/aoe phase, you are bad. Fury is for damage, if you only have 1 or 2 targets, you use the mana-costing curse.

    These were essentially PvP nerfs. Now I'll agree we should not be seeing any of those right now, but to say it is taking a nosedive for those reasons is melodramatic at best.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Nikijih View Post
    These were essentially PvP nerfs. Now I'll agree we should not be seeing any of those right now, but to say it is taking a nosedive for those reasons is melodramatic at best.
    If you haven't noticed, this thread is only about PvP. Obviously, in PvE your auras won't be dispelled whether dispellable or not, let alone stolen. Obviously, in PvE you can just pre-aura before the pull (and you would have other warlocks/master poisoner also).

    And the point of the thread is that an already horrible PvP class just got nerfed further.

    Hint: when you hardly have anything to begin with, even a "small" nerf of nothing will be, percentage-wise, a nosedive.

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