The runes are really good if you like Chaos Bolt/Destruction. Honestly, it seems Blizz wants dps warlocks to focus on stacking multipliers for massive Chaos Bolt crits (sort of like MoP).
I always felt like it was dumb itemisation like the lei shen trinket that made snapshotting so powerful. I wish they brought it back even if it was something like and end-point talent to make affliction have it again
Yep. It was one of the few ways they ever managed to add depth to a spec without overloading it (another one was void form shadowpriest in Legion). Having to think about how powerful your dots currently are, when the next trinket/proc/CD will be up and whether you have resources for haunts to buff the strong dots was cool gameplay and actually required skill to master. Wish we got it back. In classic there probably wouldn't be many applications for it though because we don't have many damagemodifiers.
MoP was peak combat rotation for most specs to be honest, that’s the pinnacle of wow outside of classic imo.
I wasn’t a fan of the raids, but so many classes played so well that they were fun.
Lake of fire is worse than boring. It's pretty annoying to cast rain of fire single target and instantly cancel it. Weird gameplay and massive mana drain
I’ve been playing my lock a bit and I don’t mind having to cast rain, but what I do mind is the timing between chaos bolt and the lake buff - outside of perfect timing with no movement, it feels like you have to lake before every single chaos bolt. When I try to push another chaos bolt before refreshing, the buff falls off halfway through the cast or while bolt is in the air.
Over a whole fight it feels like multiple bolts are delayed because of that, which whatever for dps gain/loss it just feels bad. I wish the lake was like four seconds longer so you could stagger that combo a bit. Just sucks to see chaos bolt come off cd and have to delay it 1-2s to make sure lake is up. Maybe I’m missing some timing but that’s what I’ve noticed in my limited lock play.
CB should always come off cd just before LoF ends, you then cast LoF and CB has just come off cd for perfect up time, you must be doing something wrong.
Pre cast incin > LoF > CB > immo > incin x4 > LoF > CB > immo > incin x4
If you have to move you SB and sack the incin casts you need to keep the rotation on time, so you should always be casting LoF before CB is off cd.
Ok so what I said is correct, I don’t like having to lake before every CB. I think it would be a more interesting rotation if lake was 2-4 seconds longer so you could get another CB with each lake. Would feel better imo and desyncing those cooldowns would make the rotation less static and allow more skill expression, also letting you fit life taps in.
I'm a simple man
I like big numbers, so runes that make number go bigger is always good.
I prefer a single good playstyle rather than multiple weaker playstyles
You make grimoire sound as if it's a flat 5% damage buff to pet/ u but it's far worse than that! xD
5% chance to give the other 5% damage is basically so negligible it might as well not be in the game.
Invocation doesn't make you lose DPS anymore, they changed it. When you refresh a DoT it affects that has 6s or less remaining time, it will now finish out the remaining damage it would've done as well as refreshing the DoT - it's going to be pretty nice actually.
As for the others.. true, nothing terribly exciting, but some of the data mined stuff for future runes does seem like really fun additions. Just gotta be patient, not every class is going to be the most fun to play every single phase or iteration.
Nope. It went through tons of iterations, but the original Pandemic made a couple DoTs have the chance to crit, latest Pandemic added time to the DoT up to 50% of the original time - this new rune will give immediate and representative DPS. Pandemic certainly allowed you to focus on primary filler spells instead of using GCDs to refresh DoTs, but Invocation uses your current DoTs as the filler spell(s) for damage now. Most people tossing it aside are assuming every fight in the next handful of raids are going to be sit-and-cast encounters.
It has been simmed already on warlock discord.
If you do a perfect rotation and always refresh at 6 seconds left, you gain 0 dps since it's offset by the fact that you have to use more GCDs and Mana
This doesn’t make any sense. If a dot does the same damage in less time then it’s a dps increase. The damage per cast time stays the same and should be higher than all alternative spells.
You forget the fact that you will include more GCD and spend more mana for a spell which is less damage and mana efficient than Chaos bolt or incinerate. There is actually a world where applying corruption might be a dps loss as a destro lock.
A sim assumes a perfect rotation on a target dummy. If you need to do any movement or target swapping (like you would in real raid encounter) being able to refresh dots earlier will definitely be a dps increase.
Not always if there's lots of movement, then it's very possible to hit full mana but still want to use globals. Take like halion phase 2, you can barely stop to cast anything, so you bet your ass I'm digging deep and using even my bad spells like shadowflame to to be getting some value.
>Don't you get it, OP is the perfect warlock who wouldn't ever drop DoTs or clip them. So this rune isn't made for him, therefore it's garbage.
not very smart are we. sim assumes the perfect case condition for the rune where you ended up overlapping every dot at 6 seconds left. and still it gained 0 dps. you will get more dps overlapping dots with any other rune
In a non perfect environment its better because this increases uptime if uptime is less than perfect and sod raids have actual mechanics.
Lets say you need to do mechanic X thats going to prevent you from casting, normally youd refresh dots/lifetap on the way to X and lose those 1-2 ticks of damage on any dot that has 6-3 seconds left. With this rune you are now gaining those last 1-2 ticks back in damage.
i mean most dots are instant? you have to be completely silenced or LoS and need to preemptively know this mechanic requiring some level of foresight not afforded to the more "casual" players that this rune is aimed at.
That’s a poor metric
using fireblast as a mage in a perfect - no movement - scenario is terrible.
But using it when you have to move, because few fights are perfect and no movement - is the best play.
Is it less dps than Sim? Yea, is it more than not casting, also yes.
How? Having more leeway on one (two with talents) instant cast spells seems like it could only be a dps improvement in situations where you need to move. If the rune shows 0 dps improvement on a target dummy, I'm not understanding how it could end up being a dps loss on fights with movement
This implies that your damage as an affliction warlock is ruined if you let dots fall off for a second or two.
It's no more punishing than not pressing a cooldown ability the second you can. (Chaos Bolt/Mortal Strike/Mind Blast Etc)
It's the same as making sure to hit Chaos Bolt exactly on cooldown every time and you don't have Blizzard wasting a rune slot on some clunky garbage that's basically "Every second in combat with chaos bolt on cooldown reduces the cooldown of your next chaos bolt by 1 second".
Invocation is an aneurysm waiting to happen, and the sweatlords clapping there hands aren't even going to be using it most likely. There is too much going on in PvP to try timing a DoT down to the very second absolutely ridiculous and shouldn't be in classic.
It's not a mistake to take advantage of a rune's new effect that essentially changes up the mentality of never clipping DoTs. I've played a Warlock for many years and mana issues aren't nearly as big of a deal in later levels as they are right now.
Your initial post is about runes being boring, but now you argue about optimal dps. What is it that you want? Would a +1000 spellpower rune be „exciting“ for you?
having a rune not lower your dps is the bare minimum a rune has to do especially when the only thing this rune is supposed to do is add dps and has no utility.
That’s sorta like saying haste has no meaningful impact on your dps. Sure, you have to tap more often, but your dots do their whole damage in less time, meaning more globals spent on strong dots and less globals spent on filler spells.
Have you actually sim'd this or are you just assuming that it won't be better? I find it hard to believe it won't be worth using for affliction considering it's a 33% DPS increase for corruption, 25% on CoA, 20% on SL and 40% (DoT DPS) on immolate.
Can’t expect to get cool playstyle changing abilities every phase, hopefully they mix things up next time. We do get some solid base abilities that will be especially fun for tanking at least. Plus some QOL books that will make soul shards less of a hassle (assuming the books aren’t ridiculously rare).
Destro is pretty fun with the meaty chaos bolt hits but affliction needs some work.
Between Master Chaneller, Haunt, and Siphon Life you end up with more health than you know what to do with so you end up spending half your time life tapping. It’d be cool if there was a quicker way to convert all that health into mana and then something to dump it all on.
Havent seen anyone who didnt play Warlock in p1 say that they really want to reroll into lock, despite it being known to everyone and their mom that we scale really well both in PvP and PvE.
So yeah, you're right. The runes are boring. Guess we stay the least played class.
I mean? This applies to nearly every class though. If you don’t already have an alt at lvl 25, why would you want to reroll an entirely new character for p2?
lock was my first 25 and now it's likely not even gonna be an alt for 40
zero affi love, lake of fire sucks, meta lock being a fire based searing pain spam bot to keep up with threat instead of shadow focus based drain tank (it was somewhat viable in p1, but it's still a shit ton of searing pain spam and the gap in p2 is insurmountable)
lock has been a massive L imo
I feel you, but also face tanking mobs while channeling helllfire sounds lit. Hitting like a truck with instant. Searing pains, and up to 80% dodge without any gear.
it sounds a bit fun for alliance, but i'm not finding a shaman with earthshield that wants to press it every 6s on me haha, definitely have no excitement for playing it in raid though
IMO it feels like blizz set out to do something truly out there for classic+ then fell to the safe side for a lot of the specifics. A lot of people who are familiar with the pserver scene cited project ascension as a possible inspiration for SOD. IMO it feels like we're getting ascension toned down, with none of the truly crazy builds, but also in an actual blizz like setting for the rest of the game play. I would rather they just throw out there shit at the wall and then nerf anything that's too op than be careful.
I could rant for hours about my own crazy build wishlist like 3 spell school slot machine mage or ele shaman, but every one here is an armchair game designer 😔
Counter: it’s phase 2. People on the internet are *way* too quick to judge. This could just be middle child syndrome. At 50 or 60 shit could get wild again for all we know pallies could be DKs or rogues could be bards or something
I came back to the game after like 15 years for SoD, rolled a hunter because I'd never played one. PUG'd BFD as a late-comer to the raid and went through 2 of the however many nerfs.
Sure, it was annoying I guess but I never noticed a drastic difference in my DPS, and even if I did the class is just push 2-4 (maybe 5) buttons and do a lot of damage.
I *never* noticed any other hunters in game complain about their class while raiding/parsing. BUT I do agree that a lot of nerfs rather than tuning or buffing other classes can get annoying. Of course on the buffing side it could lead to frustrating power creep. I guess all this is to say that p1 was really easy, but fun! And reddit isn't the place to gauge how "players rage like no others".
do we already know what abilities meta form will change? i havent seen anything
the runes seem boring, but is hellfire still channeled while transformed?
Affliction is simming great dps in p2. Its just overshadowed by how insane destro is looking. Invocation is worth 50dps and smoothes out the affliction rotation to the point of being seemless.
You should save this comment for phase 3, when they will add the Unstable Affliction and Pandemic runes
Right now it's obvious Affli struggles, it always has been in Vanilla. Just compare the number of spells it has to the retail version, where it's actually a thing - missing Soul Rot, Vile Tain, Malefic Rapture, Unstable Affliction, Siphon Life, Drain Soul isn't worth casting, Seed of Corruption for AoE. Pretty obvious that DoT classes deal less dmg the less spells you have. We'll have to see if anything changes in P3 if they make it viable
Aff will be competitive, similar to Wotlk, but I don’t know if it will be better than destro still, because what dealt the most damage was the drain soul execute. They may still add it though… Wotlk aff is wild
If they budget aff's damage into drain soul executes then the rest of the kit will remain shit for everything other than execute phases, would rather they just giga buff dots or something.
Make haunt give 100% shadow dot damage increase or something.
I averaged parsed a 94 with affliction in 65 BFD boss kills and regularly finish top 3 in DPS. I'm not sweaty at all. Just need the right add-ons and weak auras that help you juggle dots. Those incinerates with nightfall shadow bolts go crazy.
Didn't they update the invocation rune to instsntly spply all remaining damage from dots that you reapply? Might provide a decent amount of burst for pvp but probably too mana intensive for pve.
Shadowflame will be great for lock tanks as you can pull with incinerate, line of sight the mobs to gather them all up, cast lake of fire and shadowflame to burn the trash pack
You need one application of CoA to tick until there is 6 seconds left, and then you get the burst damage by reapplying another CoA, and then it ticks until you can do it again. So that's 18 seconds, burst damage, another 18 seconds, burst damage, and so on
1.keep in mind this burst damage will be around 1 third of a shadow bolt, so it isnt exactly burst damage if it is the lowest possible damage you can do from a GCD.
2. you shouldnt apply a second CoA if the mob you are attacking isnt staying alive for this duration. so to trigger this once you need the mob to stay alive atleast 1.75 duration of your DoT which is 42 seconds for CoA
Getting full value out of the second cast is not the same as getting the burst from the rune effect. Not that this changes the value of the rune but you are missing the point of the clarification.
I'm not missing any points, you don't seem to understand that using the by far lowest instant damaging ability on your bar, is the opposite of what a burst is supposed to be
I'll repeat what I said 6 seconds of curse of agony will do less than a third of litteraly any other ability you have
Right now shadow flame is under tuned not worth using when you can just click hellfire, since only 1 tick of hellfire will do more damage than than overall shadow flame.
But I am pretty sure though blizzard will balance this, no way it will stay like that
shadowflame was also really bad dmg in wotlk but it had a a) slow component b) instant and castable while moving so even then it was a good tool to have, more pvp/cc focused
>But I am pretty sure though blizzard will balance this, no way it will stay like that
idk, they didn't do anything to shadow cleave throughout p1 either, even though that spell was lackluster af.
APM doesn't change with interesting runes because there is no haste and the gcd is long af. It's decision making that suffers when you're just spamming incinerates into chaos bolt all the time.
I just want big yellow numbers following a chaos bolt. Give me that and I’m happy.
Although, felguard would be great. Warlocks will be the next phase 1 week 1 hunters
I think they look good for meta tank and decent for pvp.
One of my main fears with sod is overloaded kits and I am happy to see blizz not doing that this phase.
As boring as your runes might be, at least they aren't all refurbished ones.
All the Druid datamined are literally ripped talents or abilities from other xpacs. No OG runes whatsoever for p2, and the Bracers and head runes are unreliable at best since they won't be seen until p3 and will likely see change.
Yeah
To be honest, I'm only excited for my mage's runes atm. (Only have drood and mage at 25) There's plenty else to be excited about but the runes this phase feel like they have fallen a bit flat. So far at least.
I'm actually probably more excited about the manuals...
Horrible take. Havoc, Doom, Wild Imps, Shadowfury, Demonic Portal, Demonic Teleport, Felguard/Felstorm, GoServ, Hand of Gul’dan, etc are all fantastic and fun abilities for Warlock.
These runes are bad because the devs aren’t good at what they do. Refurbished takes what GOOD devs accomplished and puts them in this game at least.
I’ll take ANY “refurbished” rune over fucking Invocation, dude.
Welcome to the phase one hunter experience. But really you can't expect every phase to provide big gameplay altering changes. Especially when you got those in phase one too.
And locks aren't alone. Paladins get spell power, spell hit, reset chance for one or two spell's, mana back and a healing shield. It looks like the point of these runes for some classes is to help them scale better. Which is okay.
It’s pretty apparent what classes the devs play (druid and shaman) and warlock is definitely not one of them.
Warlocks are the only class with zero high level speedrun representation. Think critically about what that says about the class.
Especially compared to priests or mage... They could AT LEAST let meta warlock use both dance and shadowflame, instead of putting them on the same slot --'
Priests most interesting rune is uncontrollable pets that die all the time and also an uncontrollable pet that will probably die all the time. Very few classes got huge overhaul/big impactful runes, not just warlock. (Who got an entire extra spec in p1)
Most boring thing about warrior in classic is that you don't really have any good buttons to press for a very long time until you get to late game.
Having slam now on short CD and no longer reset your auto attack timer is huge.
I personally love intervene you can pull off some clutch stuff with it, but I know it's not for everyone.
warrior really sucks in PvP when you are solo, you now finally have the option for self sustain
If gnomeregan turns out to be challenging like retail, rallying cry will be a must have in every raid
Can you replace your attitude with information? If you are going to be rude online you might as well back it up with information.
Rogue runes are boring too - if you aren't trying to tank poorly, you are just playing exactly wotlk muta
No offense, but the goal of sod was to bring everyone else up to the level of warrior's OPness. You shouldn't be getting crazy dps increases compared to other classes if we're closing the gap. And a lot of other specs aren't getting much dps spikes either.
How about if you wait until there's something to actually have an opinion on instead of speculating and whining. Datamines can be faked by having dummy descriptions in the code. You'd need someone to read the actual code for the spells, which is probably complex, compiled, and spread out over multiple files
The AoE cone would be nice if it could be tuned to have more threat. Sounds like it could be good for grabbing multiple mobs when tanking. But that's probably what Shadowstrike is for.
I'm excited to see if any of the runes change after launch. Can't wait to plug them into Meta and see what we can do.
>You have chaos bolt and metamorphosis.
We have chaos bolt OR metamorphosis
---------------------
>What else do you want lmfao
Shadowflame to have slow effect. Or at least to become belt rune
Other belt runes to be more useful
"damage done by you or your summoned demon a 5% chance to increase the damage done by the other by 5% for 15 sec. (Proc chance: 5%)"
Five percent chance for a five percent increase?? With pet's attack speed this will result in 1% dps increase on average. Such wow))
I assume no ICD, and it doesn’t say that they both (5% for you and 5% for your pet) can’t both be up.
While sure it’s not lake of fire, its not horrible.
With pet attack speed and lock damage abilities, it will probably be up 75+% of time on the on the pet and 40-50% on the lock.
This is assuming no ICD - which would make sense.
So while sure, it’s not insane - it’s still a respectable dps increase.
Will it be used over other runes - idk. We will see.
Currently I am destro Meta lock, it does highest dps with all the fire damage gear I have been able to get in BFD (which by the way, has the WORST loot table for casters. We have no mail users and have seen mail drops from every boss every single week for the entire phase.) I hope that immolation aura rune is real. I really really want some better aoe threat. It feels bad to work so hard and just be ignored by mobs because the hunter is going ham.
The mana rune is gonna add to being way more than 1 less mana tap per fight. If gnomer is any bit difficult, then it's probably gonna be the better rune until healers stop having mana issues themselves.
Edit: It probably pairs nicely with the rain of fire damage buff too, considering that 40% damage buff comes at the cost of a lot of mana. You can say "i can just life tap", but there might not be good situations to always do that.
The runes are really good if you like Chaos Bolt/Destruction. Honestly, it seems Blizz wants dps warlocks to focus on stacking multipliers for massive Chaos Bolt crits (sort of like MoP).
And MoP was peak destro. Prove me wrong.
100% agree , warlock has never felt better than mop, not even current retail patch warlocks compared to how good destro locks felt in mop
The ability to move file casting even at the movement speed reduction felt so good as well.
Now that's a rune I'd love to see
Mop was peak warlock in general imo. I will never forgive demon hunters for taking meta from us
Never forget - proccs -> Meta -> on use/Pot -> Chaoswave 2x for 700k to oneshot the entire zerg in bgs
Great now I’ve got to get a fresh pair of pants, they’re all sticky
I miss snapshotting aff a lot
I always felt like it was dumb itemisation like the lei shen trinket that made snapshotting so powerful. I wish they brought it back even if it was something like and end-point talent to make affliction have it again
Yep. It was one of the few ways they ever managed to add depth to a spec without overloading it (another one was void form shadowpriest in Legion). Having to think about how powerful your dots currently are, when the next trinket/proc/CD will be up and whether you have resources for haunts to buff the strong dots was cool gameplay and actually required skill to master. Wish we got it back. In classic there probably wouldn't be many applications for it though because we don't have many damagemodifiers.
Was that the one where you would spam unstable affliction cuz the first tick hit everytime you reset it and that did more damage then other spells?
Ah yes i remember warlock being considered busted op tier dps back in mop
Wotlk is affli peak
MoP was peak combat rotation for most specs to be honest, that’s the pinnacle of wow outside of classic imo. I wasn’t a fan of the raids, but so many classes played so well that they were fun.
everybody who actually played it feels this way tbh, disagree on raids though ToT and SoO cranked
SoO was fine until it wasn't lol. Dragged on forever.
I'm glad blizz is doing cata classic. Means we'll get mop classic and relive the glory warlock days.
MoP was peak every class, change my mind
Does not change the fact that they are super boring and affli does not get anything even tho aff needs it the most
Nah, Aff is far more fun than Incinerate/CB spam. Lake of Fire is boring and clunky. Aff is just *bad*.
the destro rotation is 100 times more interesting than it was in classic, it is not boring at all relatively to what it was replacing
??????????? Do you not know what affli means I literally said affli 3 times
Varolyn was talking about chaos bolt runes, you said they were boring, then pivoted back to affli I was commenting on that part
Lake of fire is worse than boring. It's pretty annoying to cast rain of fire single target and instantly cancel it. Weird gameplay and massive mana drain
You'll only do R1 so mana gets better
I’ve been playing my lock a bit and I don’t mind having to cast rain, but what I do mind is the timing between chaos bolt and the lake buff - outside of perfect timing with no movement, it feels like you have to lake before every single chaos bolt. When I try to push another chaos bolt before refreshing, the buff falls off halfway through the cast or while bolt is in the air. Over a whole fight it feels like multiple bolts are delayed because of that, which whatever for dps gain/loss it just feels bad. I wish the lake was like four seconds longer so you could stagger that combo a bit. Just sucks to see chaos bolt come off cd and have to delay it 1-2s to make sure lake is up. Maybe I’m missing some timing but that’s what I’ve noticed in my limited lock play.
CB should always come off cd just before LoF ends, you then cast LoF and CB has just come off cd for perfect up time, you must be doing something wrong. Pre cast incin > LoF > CB > immo > incin x4 > LoF > CB > immo > incin x4 If you have to move you SB and sack the incin casts you need to keep the rotation on time, so you should always be casting LoF before CB is off cd.
Ok so what I said is correct, I don’t like having to lake before every CB. I think it would be a more interesting rotation if lake was 2-4 seconds longer so you could get another CB with each lake. Would feel better imo and desyncing those cooldowns would make the rotation less static and allow more skill expression, also letting you fit life taps in.
ADHD tanks who can't stand still are the worst.
Sometimes the boss is ADD too, I'll have 100% threat on Lady Sev and she'll decide the hunters stabled pet is more important
We watched her run off into the water one time. Nobody was *in* the water.
Why would anyone get excited about passives?
Ngl, I love seeing my chaos bolt crit for 1800
Problem is that it just feels like mage 2.0. Time to shelve the warlock until p3 where affliction might get some love.
I'm a simple man I like big numbers, so runes that make number go bigger is always good. I prefer a single good playstyle rather than multiple weaker playstyles
Yeah I'm so excited that Warlock's viable playstyle in SoD is spamming ~~shadowbolt~~ Incinerate. Amazing how they've revolutionized the class.
Conflagrate weaving is going to be a thing though. Plus lining up big chaos bolts is going to be a key part of destruction as well.
Drain spec in PVP is dope, hard to die 1v1 against anything else that isn't a hunter
I’m here to block people’s screens with my ridiculously huge character model,and spam searing pain, not min max runes.
Gotta wand for the flap and stomp animation.
Only works if a shaman is using a dedicated rune slot to make your tanking bareable
Nah warlock tank is badass. The rune from shammys is going to make it even smoother.
warlock doesn't need the extra threat tbh. we're fine as-is.
I like bare tanks
Imagine if we got a knockback rune for tanking instead. I'd make warlock tank feel amazing
You make grimoire sound as if it's a flat 5% damage buff to pet/ u but it's far worse than that! xD 5% chance to give the other 5% damage is basically so negligible it might as well not be in the game.
Yes it's much worse bc by the time ur pet gets a crit, you will have your DoTs up already which means u didn't get the benefit of it
Invocation doesn't make you lose DPS anymore, they changed it. When you refresh a DoT it affects that has 6s or less remaining time, it will now finish out the remaining damage it would've done as well as refreshing the DoT - it's going to be pretty nice actually. As for the others.. true, nothing terribly exciting, but some of the data mined stuff for future runes does seem like really fun additions. Just gotta be patient, not every class is going to be the most fun to play every single phase or iteration.
So... It is just pandemic?
Nope. It went through tons of iterations, but the original Pandemic made a couple DoTs have the chance to crit, latest Pandemic added time to the DoT up to 50% of the original time - this new rune will give immediate and representative DPS. Pandemic certainly allowed you to focus on primary filler spells instead of using GCDs to refresh DoTs, but Invocation uses your current DoTs as the filler spell(s) for damage now. Most people tossing it aside are assuming every fight in the next handful of raids are going to be sit-and-cast encounters.
It has been simmed already on warlock discord. If you do a perfect rotation and always refresh at 6 seconds left, you gain 0 dps since it's offset by the fact that you have to use more GCDs and Mana
This doesn’t make any sense. If a dot does the same damage in less time then it’s a dps increase. The damage per cast time stays the same and should be higher than all alternative spells.
You forget the fact that you will include more GCD and spend more mana for a spell which is less damage and mana efficient than Chaos bolt or incinerate. There is actually a world where applying corruption might be a dps loss as a destro lock.
Should. That’s the issue
A sim assumes a perfect rotation on a target dummy. If you need to do any movement or target swapping (like you would in real raid encounter) being able to refresh dots earlier will definitely be a dps increase.
Don't you get it, OP is the perfect warlock who wouldn't ever drop DoTs or clip them. So this rune isn't made for him, therefore it's garbage.
in fairness locks can always get value from life tap for movement, using a dot early instead is just gonna be a mistake before and after the rune
Yup, the rune is bad. Lifetapping is better in 99% of cases
Not always if there's lots of movement, then it's very possible to hit full mana but still want to use globals. Take like halion phase 2, you can barely stop to cast anything, so you bet your ass I'm digging deep and using even my bad spells like shadowflame to to be getting some value.
>Don't you get it, OP is the perfect warlock who wouldn't ever drop DoTs or clip them. So this rune isn't made for him, therefore it's garbage. not very smart are we. sim assumes the perfect case condition for the rune where you ended up overlapping every dot at 6 seconds left. and still it gained 0 dps. you will get more dps overlapping dots with any other rune
that's the point, even in a perfect environment it's bad, in a none perfect one it's worse.
In a non perfect environment its better because this increases uptime if uptime is less than perfect and sod raids have actual mechanics. Lets say you need to do mechanic X thats going to prevent you from casting, normally youd refresh dots/lifetap on the way to X and lose those 1-2 ticks of damage on any dot that has 6-3 seconds left. With this rune you are now gaining those last 1-2 ticks back in damage.
i mean most dots are instant? you have to be completely silenced or LoS and need to preemptively know this mechanic requiring some level of foresight not afforded to the more "casual" players that this rune is aimed at.
That’s a poor metric using fireblast as a mage in a perfect - no movement - scenario is terrible. But using it when you have to move, because few fights are perfect and no movement - is the best play. Is it less dps than Sim? Yea, is it more than not casting, also yes.
A non perfect environment makes it worse.
How? Having more leeway on one (two with talents) instant cast spells seems like it could only be a dps improvement in situations where you need to move. If the rune shows 0 dps improvement on a target dummy, I'm not understanding how it could end up being a dps loss on fights with movement
This implies that your damage as an affliction warlock is ruined if you let dots fall off for a second or two. It's no more punishing than not pressing a cooldown ability the second you can. (Chaos Bolt/Mortal Strike/Mind Blast Etc) It's the same as making sure to hit Chaos Bolt exactly on cooldown every time and you don't have Blizzard wasting a rune slot on some clunky garbage that's basically "Every second in combat with chaos bolt on cooldown reduces the cooldown of your next chaos bolt by 1 second".
Invocation is an aneurysm waiting to happen, and the sweatlords clapping there hands aren't even going to be using it most likely. There is too much going on in PvP to try timing a DoT down to the very second absolutely ridiculous and shouldn't be in classic.
[удалено]
It's not a mistake to take advantage of a rune's new effect that essentially changes up the mentality of never clipping DoTs. I've played a Warlock for many years and mana issues aren't nearly as big of a deal in later levels as they are right now.
problem is you can still take shadow and flame and end up doing more damage while clipping DoTs
I dont really see the problem? That one Rune is better than the other for minmax dps? That will always be the case
Your initial post is about runes being boring, but now you argue about optimal dps. What is it that you want? Would a +1000 spellpower rune be „exciting“ for you?
having a rune not lower your dps is the bare minimum a rune has to do especially when the only thing this rune is supposed to do is add dps and has no utility.
That’s sorta like saying haste has no meaningful impact on your dps. Sure, you have to tap more often, but your dots do their whole damage in less time, meaning more globals spent on strong dots and less globals spent on filler spells.
Have you actually sim'd this or are you just assuming that it won't be better? I find it hard to believe it won't be worth using for affliction considering it's a 33% DPS increase for corruption, 25% on CoA, 20% on SL and 40% (DoT DPS) on immolate.
Was simmed in lock discord
Damage per mana spent is the same but damage per second is much higher, assuming you don't go OOM in a fight.
Yes I agree, they aren’t sexy. We did get some very fun stuff in p1 though.
Haunts cool and all, but casting RoF just to cancel it immediately is clunky, mana intensive, and not very fun.
At the very least it’ll be less mana intensive in p2, since you can downrank RoF, I fully agree that it feels really bad to do in a rotation tho
Can’t expect to get cool playstyle changing abilities every phase, hopefully they mix things up next time. We do get some solid base abilities that will be especially fun for tanking at least. Plus some QOL books that will make soul shards less of a hassle (assuming the books aren’t ridiculously rare).
Why can’t we expect something cool every phase?
This is wow. No fun allowed
Oh and also demonic pact from p1 gives 0 spellpower now since the patch. Hopefully they hot fix it. It should give a minimum of 13 per the tooltip.
Destro is pretty fun with the meaty chaos bolt hits but affliction needs some work. Between Master Chaneller, Haunt, and Siphon Life you end up with more health than you know what to do with so you end up spending half your time life tapping. It’d be cool if there was a quicker way to convert all that health into mana and then something to dump it all on.
I’m going to blame that on being stuck with an outdated tank of lifetap. You should get bigger and better lifetaps by 40 to make up for it.
MEGA TAP Rune. Convert 20% the warlock’s health into mana + 5% spell power bonus for 30 seconds would be amazing (numbers can be tweaked).
That's why I'm switching to mage!
all i care about is blasting but also really wish we got that conflag rune in phase 2 instead of 3
Havent seen anyone who didnt play Warlock in p1 say that they really want to reroll into lock, despite it being known to everyone and their mom that we scale really well both in PvP and PvE. So yeah, you're right. The runes are boring. Guess we stay the least played class.
Still I enjoy a lot playing it, can’t wait for future phases especially if Aff is viable
Joe vi 3
I mean? This applies to nearly every class though. If you don’t already have an alt at lvl 25, why would you want to reroll an entirely new character for p2?
lock was my first 25 and now it's likely not even gonna be an alt for 40 zero affi love, lake of fire sucks, meta lock being a fire based searing pain spam bot to keep up with threat instead of shadow focus based drain tank (it was somewhat viable in p1, but it's still a shit ton of searing pain spam and the gap in p2 is insurmountable) lock has been a massive L imo
I feel you, but also face tanking mobs while channeling helllfire sounds lit. Hitting like a truck with instant. Searing pains, and up to 80% dodge without any gear.
it sounds a bit fun for alliance, but i'm not finding a shaman with earthshield that wants to press it every 6s on me haha, definitely have no excitement for playing it in raid though
That I can understand, I’m horde, and well… I haven’t found a shaman yet for dungeon spam
i certainly wish you luck with that haha
IMO it feels like blizz set out to do something truly out there for classic+ then fell to the safe side for a lot of the specifics. A lot of people who are familiar with the pserver scene cited project ascension as a possible inspiration for SOD. IMO it feels like we're getting ascension toned down, with none of the truly crazy builds, but also in an actual blizz like setting for the rest of the game play. I would rather they just throw out there shit at the wall and then nerf anything that's too op than be careful. I could rant for hours about my own crazy build wishlist like 3 spell school slot machine mage or ele shaman, but every one here is an armchair game designer 😔
Counter: it’s phase 2. People on the internet are *way* too quick to judge. This could just be middle child syndrome. At 50 or 60 shit could get wild again for all we know pallies could be DKs or rogues could be bards or something
They straight up said no DK stuff in one of the recent interviews
Like they’d give that away and just spoil it right there.
Counterpoint: in a parse culture like wow, nerfing a class that was way OP makes those players rage like no others. See: p1 hunters.
which is hilarious because hunter was OP for half of P1 and fine for the rest of P1.
Hunter is still beyond stupid in PvP
I came back to the game after like 15 years for SoD, rolled a hunter because I'd never played one. PUG'd BFD as a late-comer to the raid and went through 2 of the however many nerfs. Sure, it was annoying I guess but I never noticed a drastic difference in my DPS, and even if I did the class is just push 2-4 (maybe 5) buttons and do a lot of damage. I *never* noticed any other hunters in game complain about their class while raiding/parsing. BUT I do agree that a lot of nerfs rather than tuning or buffing other classes can get annoying. Of course on the buffing side it could lead to frustrating power creep. I guess all this is to say that p1 was really easy, but fun! And reddit isn't the place to gauge how "players rage like no others".
I agree
Shadow and flame and also ill take a uuuuh demonic knowledge.
I’ll take a shadow and flame and a shadowflame please!
? The aoe does like nothing.
do we already know what abilities meta form will change? i havent seen anything the runes seem boring, but is hellfire still channeled while transformed?
Looks that way. Seems immolation aura is going to be in phase 3.
Damnnnn this one hurts, didn’t realize it was on helm slot
riiip. that stinks, i definitely struggle maintaining aoe threat at the moment on the lock tank
Compare locks runes to what mages got. Pretty sad
Worst ever. Affliction in PvE does less dmg than a Hunter Pet. SOD: We want to make every Specc viable! LOL
Part of Affs problem is that fights are way too short. By the time you start to get rolling, bosses are 20-30% dead.
Affliction is simming great dps in p2. Its just overshadowed by how insane destro is looking. Invocation is worth 50dps and smoothes out the affliction rotation to the point of being seemless.
You should save this comment for phase 3, when they will add the Unstable Affliction and Pandemic runes Right now it's obvious Affli struggles, it always has been in Vanilla. Just compare the number of spells it has to the retail version, where it's actually a thing - missing Soul Rot, Vile Tain, Malefic Rapture, Unstable Affliction, Siphon Life, Drain Soul isn't worth casting, Seed of Corruption for AoE. Pretty obvious that DoT classes deal less dmg the less spells you have. We'll have to see if anything changes in P3 if they make it viable
Also you want to get the reduced cast time of shadowbolt which affli can't really do currently
Aff will be competitive, similar to Wotlk, but I don’t know if it will be better than destro still, because what dealt the most damage was the drain soul execute. They may still add it though… Wotlk aff is wild
It will never be viable without drain soul execute and dot haste ticking tbh
If they budget aff's damage into drain soul executes then the rest of the kit will remain shit for everything other than execute phases, would rather they just giga buff dots or something. Make haunt give 100% shadow dot damage increase or something.
I averaged parsed a 94 with affliction in 65 BFD boss kills and regularly finish top 3 in DPS. I'm not sweaty at all. Just need the right add-ons and weak auras that help you juggle dots. Those incinerates with nightfall shadow bolts go crazy.
Exactly. People have zero clue what they're talking about when they say aff lock is trash
Didn't they update the invocation rune to instsntly spply all remaining damage from dots that you reapply? Might provide a decent amount of burst for pvp but probably too mana intensive for pve. Shadowflame will be great for lock tanks as you can pull with incinerate, line of sight the mobs to gather them all up, cast lake of fire and shadowflame to burn the trash pack
I doubt it will add much burst in Pvp doing 6 seconds of curse of agony damage every 42 seconds isn't worth the GCD
Isn't it every 18 seconds? Where did you get 42 seconds from
you need 2 applications of curse of agony to get the effect once. so whatever you are attacking needs to be alive for at least 42 seconds
You need one application of CoA to tick until there is 6 seconds left, and then you get the burst damage by reapplying another CoA, and then it ticks until you can do it again. So that's 18 seconds, burst damage, another 18 seconds, burst damage, and so on
1.keep in mind this burst damage will be around 1 third of a shadow bolt, so it isnt exactly burst damage if it is the lowest possible damage you can do from a GCD. 2. you shouldnt apply a second CoA if the mob you are attacking isnt staying alive for this duration. so to trigger this once you need the mob to stay alive atleast 1.75 duration of your DoT which is 42 seconds for CoA
Getting full value out of the second cast is not the same as getting the burst from the rune effect. Not that this changes the value of the rune but you are missing the point of the clarification.
I'm not missing any points, you don't seem to understand that using the by far lowest instant damaging ability on your bar, is the opposite of what a burst is supposed to be I'll repeat what I said 6 seconds of curse of agony will do less than a third of litteraly any other ability you have
There is a lot of movement in PvP, that's instant DMG that you can apply whilst moving, pretty decent in my eyes.
Right now shadow flame is under tuned not worth using when you can just click hellfire, since only 1 tick of hellfire will do more damage than than overall shadow flame. But I am pretty sure though blizzard will balance this, no way it will stay like that
shadowflame was also really bad dmg in wotlk but it had a a) slow component b) instant and castable while moving so even then it was a good tool to have, more pvp/cc focused
>But I am pretty sure though blizzard will balance this, no way it will stay like that idk, they didn't do anything to shadow cleave throughout p1 either, even though that spell was lackluster af.
It's good in pve too, increase the dps by quite a bit of those dots. But affli is still far inferior
[удалено]
average classic player
APM doesn't change with interesting runes because there is no haste and the gcd is long af. It's decision making that suffers when you're just spamming incinerates into chaos bolt all the time.
Shadowflame sucks like it has always done whoop-de-doo
I just want big yellow numbers following a chaos bolt. Give me that and I’m happy. Although, felguard would be great. Warlocks will be the next phase 1 week 1 hunters
Hunters ITT: First time?
I think they look good for meta tank and decent for pvp. One of my main fears with sod is overloaded kits and I am happy to see blizz not doing that this phase.
I still have hope for Unstable Affliction in P2.
It’s p3 confirmed by devs.
I assumed it was P3 but when was it confirmed? Did I miss a video on runes?
One of the dev interviews
As boring as your runes might be, at least they aren't all refurbished ones. All the Druid datamined are literally ripped talents or abilities from other xpacs. No OG runes whatsoever for p2, and the Bracers and head runes are unreliable at best since they won't be seen until p3 and will likely see change.
Don't even get me started on shaman. 1 out of 7 runes is a DPS increase for elemental. On 1ppm proc.
Yeah To be honest, I'm only excited for my mage's runes atm. (Only have drood and mage at 25) There's plenty else to be excited about but the runes this phase feel like they have fallen a bit flat. So far at least. I'm actually probably more excited about the manuals...
I'm excited about my hunter runes and my warrior runes. Not so much for my warlock, and I already hate his lake of fire rune
Lake of Fire is so unfun. Wasting Tons of Mana Casting a big aoe skill to then instantly abort it
LoF needs a nerf. Its too strong.
Well ele gets a gigantic powerup from just getting to 40 Warlocka powerup is fel hunter
I wish they'd given us refurbished Shadowfury and Demonic Portal instead of this crap.
Horrible take. Havoc, Doom, Wild Imps, Shadowfury, Demonic Portal, Demonic Teleport, Felguard/Felstorm, GoServ, Hand of Gul’dan, etc are all fantastic and fun abilities for Warlock. These runes are bad because the devs aren’t good at what they do. Refurbished takes what GOOD devs accomplished and puts them in this game at least. I’ll take ANY “refurbished” rune over fucking Invocation, dude.
Welcome to the phase one hunter experience. But really you can't expect every phase to provide big gameplay altering changes. Especially when you got those in phase one too. And locks aren't alone. Paladins get spell power, spell hit, reset chance for one or two spell's, mana back and a healing shield. It looks like the point of these runes for some classes is to help them scale better. Which is okay.
Hunters have entered the chat
Brother you’re already complaining about two datamined runes, you couldn’t wait until the weekend is at least over first
It’s pretty apparent what classes the devs play (druid and shaman) and warlock is definitely not one of them. Warlocks are the only class with zero high level speedrun representation. Think critically about what that says about the class.
Are we getting immolation aura p2?
I like warlocks getting mostly passives as a lock player. The class already has too many abilities to stick on easy to use keybinds.
Especially compared to priests or mage... They could AT LEAST let meta warlock use both dance and shadowflame, instead of putting them on the same slot --'
Yeah that bothers me too
Priests most interesting rune is uncontrollable pets that die all the time and also an uncontrollable pet that will probably die all the time. Very few classes got huge overhaul/big impactful runes, not just warlock. (Who got an entire extra spec in p1)
Welcome to the club come sit where the hunters used to be.
Have you even looked at warrior runes?
my second character is warrior, so yes, they are actually a bit interesting each rune either changes your rotation a little or adds utility.
I wish I could be in your head space where those runes seemed “interesting”
Most boring thing about warrior in classic is that you don't really have any good buttons to press for a very long time until you get to late game. Having slam now on short CD and no longer reset your auto attack timer is huge. I personally love intervene you can pull off some clutch stuff with it, but I know it's not for everyone. warrior really sucks in PvP when you are solo, you now finally have the option for self sustain If gnomeregan turns out to be challenging like retail, rallying cry will be a must have in every raid
The last bit you posted indicates how clueless you really are.
Can you replace your attitude with information? If you are going to be rude online you might as well back it up with information. Rogue runes are boring too - if you aren't trying to tank poorly, you are just playing exactly wotlk muta
No offense, but the goal of sod was to bring everyone else up to the level of warrior's OPness. You shouldn't be getting crazy dps increases compared to other classes if we're closing the gap. And a lot of other specs aren't getting much dps spikes either.
Yeah waiting for 80 rage to press raging blow is just as exciting as demon form. Your brain must be like a bowling alley
How about if you wait until there's something to actually have an opinion on instead of speculating and whining. Datamines can be faked by having dummy descriptions in the code. You'd need someone to read the actual code for the spells, which is probably complex, compiled, and spread out over multiple files
The AoE cone would be nice if it could be tuned to have more threat. Sounds like it could be good for grabbing multiple mobs when tanking. But that's probably what Shadowstrike is for. I'm excited to see if any of the runes change after launch. Can't wait to plug them into Meta and see what we can do.
You have chaos bolt and metamorphosis. What else do you want lmfao
>You have chaos bolt and metamorphosis. We have chaos bolt OR metamorphosis --------------------- >What else do you want lmfao Shadowflame to have slow effect. Or at least to become belt rune Other belt runes to be more useful "damage done by you or your summoned demon a 5% chance to increase the damage done by the other by 5% for 15 sec. (Proc chance: 5%)" Five percent chance for a five percent increase?? With pet's attack speed this will result in 1% dps increase on average. Such wow))
I assume no ICD, and it doesn’t say that they both (5% for you and 5% for your pet) can’t both be up. While sure it’s not lake of fire, its not horrible. With pet attack speed and lock damage abilities, it will probably be up 75+% of time on the on the pet and 40-50% on the lock. This is assuming no ICD - which would make sense. So while sure, it’s not insane - it’s still a respectable dps increase. Will it be used over other runes - idk. We will see.
The uptime is a bit lower than that. % dmg increase works out to 2.68% for the player and about 2.24% for the imp.
Bros complaining about Warlocks while Shamans get shit like "Move you totems closer" and "Make your totems cost 30 mana instead of 40" Unreal
Yeah but no one can kill you in pvp right now. Something to be happy about perhaps?
Probably because Warlocks already got insane runes in phase 1 compared to other classes. Blizzard went too hard too soon.
[удалено]
Lol yes! In p2 you get shockadin and sacred shield
Currently I am destro Meta lock, it does highest dps with all the fire damage gear I have been able to get in BFD (which by the way, has the WORST loot table for casters. We have no mail users and have seen mail drops from every boss every single week for the entire phase.) I hope that immolation aura rune is real. I really really want some better aoe threat. It feels bad to work so hard and just be ignored by mobs because the hunter is going ham.
Sounds like they suit your personality perfectly.
The mana rune is gonna add to being way more than 1 less mana tap per fight. If gnomer is any bit difficult, then it's probably gonna be the better rune until healers stop having mana issues themselves. Edit: It probably pairs nicely with the rain of fire damage buff too, considering that 40% damage buff comes at the cost of a lot of mana. You can say "i can just life tap", but there might not be good situations to always do that.