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Official: M13 Scourge Warlock Changes
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Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 41Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Hey everyone,
While this isn't a complete rework (or really anything close), we thought Scourge Warlocks needed a small boost in effectiveness, especially for Temptation. There are a couple of other changes to Scourge Warlock, through bug fixes and quality of life changes, that have been made during Rocktober and aren't listed here. The changes listed below are specifically ones that did not belong in the Bug Fix thread. As a note, these will be going into M13!
I'm going to start out by explaining the feats that now scale with power/buffs, since that patch note might be a little unclear. There were a number of feats that dealt bonus damage based on your weapon damage but didn't scale at all. An example of this would be Critical Promise which did a flat 50% (at max rank) of your weapon damage on every hit. If you had a fixed damage weapon that did 1000-1000 damage then this feat would always deal 500 damage when it triggered, even if you had 100,000 power and 5 different 10% damage buffs. Now, that 500 damage is going to scale with all of those buffs (and your power)! Critical Promise actually ended up doing far too much damage (for a first point feat) because of this and that's why its damage was lowered. Overall, this should still be a pretty significant gain - and Killing curse is going to be MUCH stronger.
For Temptation, we found that this tree was a bit lackluster. Before M12b, it started to pick up in usage due to the Owlbear Cub's ACB. But, after the Owlbear was given a 1 second ICD, there were a lot of concerns for this playstyle. While we don't want a class relying on a single companion ACB, we think that this one was hit especially hard by that change. A lot of the changes below are meant to make the Temptation tree a more group-oriented support build. To go in depth on some of these changes, let's start with Dark Revelry.
Dark Revelry had a couple of things wrong with the tooltip that made it very confusing. It stated that there was a chance on lifesteal, when in reality that chance was 100% (so I guess technically correct!). It also stated that you were given Revelry as a buff, which buffed nearby allies, but actually just gave all nearby allies (and yourself) this buff. The tooltip has been updated so that it no longer mentions that it has a chance to proc and that the buff it applies is placed onto allies. Hopefully this will clear up some confusions on how this feat works.
For the 4th column of the tree, both of the Auras were a little weaker than we wanted them to be. As a result, these have both had a small boost added to them which will provide more group utility.
After reading around on various forums, including our own, I've seen that a lot of people actually like Eldritch Momentum. While I was hesitant to change it, the amount of stamina gained in rapid-damage situations (such as PvP and DoTs) was far too high. the changes below should make it a much more group-oriented feat while still offering a bit of Stamina recovery. Darkness now provides a bit more damage (for only the SW) when you damage an enemy, this is to provide a small damage boost for the spec as it is (rightfully) lacking in that field.
Finally, Soul Bonding was yet another feat with some confusing wording. The tooltip for this has been updated so that it more clearly explains how it functions. It also grants 10% Life Steal Chance (passively) so that you gain a small kick-start in effectiveness, and we wanted to make sure that this capstone gave you (the SW) at least a minor benefit for solo play. To provide an alternative to Vampiric Embrace, Warlock's Bargain will now heal nearby allies for the same amount that it heals you.
Fury:
Daughter's Promise: The damage dealt from this power now scales with power/buffs
Critical Promise: The damage dealt from this power now scales with power/buffs
Critical Promise: Damage reduced to 4/8/12/16/20% (down from 10/20/30/40/50%)
Killing Curse: The damage dealt from this power now scales with power/buffs
Killing Curse: Damage increased to 5/10/15/20/25% (up from 3/6/9/12/15%)
Killing Curse: Fixed an issue where this feat was dealing less damage than intended
Creeping Death: Damage increased to 75% (up from 60%)
Damnation:
Ghastly Commander: Damage increased to 3/6/9/12/15% (up from 2/4/6/8/10%)
Ghastly Commander: Lifesteal Chance increased to 1/2/3/4/5% (up from 0.4/0.8/1.2/1.6/2.0%)
Power of the Nine Hells: No longer grants 10/20/30/40/50% of Pillar of Power's buff amount to allies
Pillar of Power: Now grants 75% of its buff effect to allies standing in it
Temptation:
Dark Revelry: This buff can now be refreshed while active
Aura of Cruelty: Now also grants 10% Life Steal Severity
Aura of Despair: Now also causes enemies to take 5% increased damage
Darkness: Now causes enemies to take 10% increased damage from you
Darkness: Tooltip updated to mention Harrowstorm (functionality unchanged)
Eldritch Momentum: This feat has been reworked and now triggers when a daily power is used
Eldritch Momentum: Now gives you, and nearby allies, 3/6/9/12/15% of your stamina when a daily is used
Eldritch Momentum: Now gives you, and nearby allies, Combat Advantage for 4/5/6/7/8 seconds
Soul Bonding: Now passively grants 10% Life Steal Chance
Soul Bonding: Now causes Warlock's Bargain to heal nearby allies for the full amount
Soul Bonding: Allies now deal 20% increased damage to targets affected by your Warlock's Curse
While this isn't a complete rework (or really anything close), we thought Scourge Warlocks needed a small boost in effectiveness, especially for Temptation. There are a couple of other changes to Scourge Warlock, through bug fixes and quality of life changes, that have been made during Rocktober and aren't listed here. The changes listed below are specifically ones that did not belong in the Bug Fix thread. As a note, these will be going into M13!
I'm going to start out by explaining the feats that now scale with power/buffs, since that patch note might be a little unclear. There were a number of feats that dealt bonus damage based on your weapon damage but didn't scale at all. An example of this would be Critical Promise which did a flat 50% (at max rank) of your weapon damage on every hit. If you had a fixed damage weapon that did 1000-1000 damage then this feat would always deal 500 damage when it triggered, even if you had 100,000 power and 5 different 10% damage buffs. Now, that 500 damage is going to scale with all of those buffs (and your power)! Critical Promise actually ended up doing far too much damage (for a first point feat) because of this and that's why its damage was lowered. Overall, this should still be a pretty significant gain - and Killing curse is going to be MUCH stronger.
For Temptation, we found that this tree was a bit lackluster. Before M12b, it started to pick up in usage due to the Owlbear Cub's ACB. But, after the Owlbear was given a 1 second ICD, there were a lot of concerns for this playstyle. While we don't want a class relying on a single companion ACB, we think that this one was hit especially hard by that change. A lot of the changes below are meant to make the Temptation tree a more group-oriented support build. To go in depth on some of these changes, let's start with Dark Revelry.
Dark Revelry had a couple of things wrong with the tooltip that made it very confusing. It stated that there was a chance on lifesteal, when in reality that chance was 100% (so I guess technically correct!). It also stated that you were given Revelry as a buff, which buffed nearby allies, but actually just gave all nearby allies (and yourself) this buff. The tooltip has been updated so that it no longer mentions that it has a chance to proc and that the buff it applies is placed onto allies. Hopefully this will clear up some confusions on how this feat works.
For the 4th column of the tree, both of the Auras were a little weaker than we wanted them to be. As a result, these have both had a small boost added to them which will provide more group utility.
After reading around on various forums, including our own, I've seen that a lot of people actually like Eldritch Momentum. While I was hesitant to change it, the amount of stamina gained in rapid-damage situations (such as PvP and DoTs) was far too high. the changes below should make it a much more group-oriented feat while still offering a bit of Stamina recovery. Darkness now provides a bit more damage (for only the SW) when you damage an enemy, this is to provide a small damage boost for the spec as it is (rightfully) lacking in that field.
Finally, Soul Bonding was yet another feat with some confusing wording. The tooltip for this has been updated so that it more clearly explains how it functions. It also grants 10% Life Steal Chance (passively) so that you gain a small kick-start in effectiveness, and we wanted to make sure that this capstone gave you (the SW) at least a minor benefit for solo play. To provide an alternative to Vampiric Embrace, Warlock's Bargain will now heal nearby allies for the same amount that it heals you.
Fury:
Daughter's Promise: The damage dealt from this power now scales with power/buffs
Critical Promise: The damage dealt from this power now scales with power/buffs
Critical Promise: Damage reduced to 4/8/12/16/20% (down from 10/20/30/40/50%)
Killing Curse: The damage dealt from this power now scales with power/buffs
Killing Curse: Damage increased to 5/10/15/20/25% (up from 3/6/9/12/15%)
Killing Curse: Fixed an issue where this feat was dealing less damage than intended
Creeping Death: Damage increased to 75% (up from 60%)
Damnation:
Ghastly Commander: Damage increased to 3/6/9/12/15% (up from 2/4/6/8/10%)
Ghastly Commander: Lifesteal Chance increased to 1/2/3/4/5% (up from 0.4/0.8/1.2/1.6/2.0%)
Power of the Nine Hells: No longer grants 10/20/30/40/50% of Pillar of Power's buff amount to allies
Pillar of Power: Now grants 75% of its buff effect to allies standing in it
Temptation:
Dark Revelry: This buff can now be refreshed while active
Aura of Cruelty: Now also grants 10% Life Steal Severity
Aura of Despair: Now also causes enemies to take 5% increased damage
Darkness: Now causes enemies to take 10% increased damage from you
Darkness: Tooltip updated to mention Harrowstorm (functionality unchanged)
Eldritch Momentum: This feat has been reworked and now triggers when a daily power is used
Eldritch Momentum: Now gives you, and nearby allies, 3/6/9/12/15% of your stamina when a daily is used
Eldritch Momentum: Now gives you, and nearby allies, Combat Advantage for 4/5/6/7/8 seconds
Soul Bonding: Now passively grants 10% Life Steal Chance
Soul Bonding: Now causes Warlock's Bargain to heal nearby allies for the full amount
Soul Bonding: Allies now deal 20% increased damage to targets affected by your Warlock's Curse
Post edited by asterdahl on
29
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
[The Legendary Outlaws] (Guildhall 20)
The current behavior makes CA sources lackluster, CA companions avoided, and not sought after ability score and feats.
The OP already queues as Tank or Healer based on Paragon Path choice. Can SW *please* be made to queue as DPS or Healer based on presence or non-presence of the Temptation Capstone Feat?
Potential abuse: Queue as Healer for slot in Random Queue for "queue needs healers" AD bonus, swap loadout at first campfire. Fix: "changing to non-Healer voids queue bonus" or "screwit, whatever, if you finish the run with no healer you get your bonus AD, go you" or "because you're not the role you queued for any more, you're leaving the queue, leaver penalty for you".
To be fair, same issue currently exists for OP and doesn't appear to be a problem?
The Temptation changes are terrible. A 5% debuff and more excessive amounts of healing that don't do anything useful does not make Temptation a viable support class. It does not make Temptation compete with Devoted Clerics or Paladins nor does it give us any reason to take a Temptation as another support in place of another DPS.
Temptation already heals far more than we could ever need in this game. It heals tens of millions of HP trivially. Temptation heals several times more HP than any DC build possibly can, and nobody cares. Giving Templocks more healing is completely useless. Stop. Give them more party buffs for preventing damage and enemy debuffs to help deal more damage.
Why do we need life steal severity? We already heal more than our own HP every time we lifesteal because of the raw damage we do.
And how exactly does this help Templocks deal with situations where they need to heal or block damage and there is nothing they can damage because the boss is invulnerable?
Edit: Please don't misunderstand my anger. I am happy you're announcing that you are doing something. Just please consider that the class has a blanket lack of anything to offer over other DPS, other buffers, and other healers. I really wish to see them doing well and compete for some slot in a party. Right now they simply cannot, period.
It can't heal if it can't deal damage, making it useless in the following situations
- Out of Combat Healing
- A player gets hit by Hati's poisons and Hati flies away (Just don't stand in red and you'll be ok)
- A player is affected by Ras Nsi Dot while he channels Cry of the Atropial and there's no add (not common)
- A player is cursed in the Nostura fight when she becomes invulnerable at ~20% (Very troublesome, since it's can be difficult to coordinate so no one is cursed)
Currently the only workaround I know is bringing Pinatas. But since those have LIMITED availability (if i'm not mistaken), unprepared Templocks need the assistance of a secondary healer when doing MSP
Would it be possible to find away around it ? (making Pinata more available / Making SW able to summon a pinata-like monster / find another way)
since they do not want to balance the classes really, delete sw of the game, when we log it will be to choose the new class with all our items saved in this new character.who wants to be buff create a healer, want to be dps create a gwf, best way to solve the insane chase they are doing with us
Sure, they're not good enough to run FBI or MSP, but that's a future fix. Right now, they're only getting into queues when they're either NOT REQUIRED or REQUIRED BUT FAILING TO MEET THE MINIMUM. So let's fix that first, then worry about them meeting T3 requirements.
Original feat description:
Aura of Despair- Enemies within 20ft of you deal 5% less damage(this description was taken from nwcalc.com)
and they will add the folowing:
"Aura of Despair: Now also causes enemies to take 5% increased damage"
Interesting changes, here's some feedback as, even though it is good to see a few tweaks are being made, SW will most likely continue to be the little sibling of the bigger damage dealers.
The stapple powers of Hellbringer and Soulbinder need a few buffs to bring the SW closer to the other damage dealers regardless of paragon, here are a few suggestions, hopefully you'll consider them:
Edit: Given the state of the class and that it will most likely continue to underperform with your proposed tweaks for mod 13, I believe you should set Critical Promise back at 50% of weapon damage and let it benefit from the things you already explained, if SW was overperforming or one of the top damage dealers it would be understandable that you needed to lower that to 20% however that's not the case, it is the weakest class in the game so that Critical Promise is a tier 1 paragon feat shouldn't matter, it should benefit from buffs etc based on 50% weapon damage so the class stops being left behind by the other damage dealers and supports, everything SW does other classes do much better, consider that, please.
Executioner's gift is far too underpowered, please take a look at this and keep in mind fury SW is mostly DoT damage, setting EG at 30%+ bonus damage as target's health diminishes would help a lot. I was suprised to see you left this feat, Hellish Rebuke and Soulscorch untouched as they're so important for any fury spec, they need tweaks as well.
Pillar of Power:
It deals sub at-will damage, it should either get a substantial base damage increase so it is on encounter level or get its personal and group dps boost improved by around 10% for each, this means that, taking power of the nine hells damantion feat, PoP should buff the caster's damage by 34% and teammates' by 28%
Hellish Rebuke:
Let its dot be able to be stacked or increase damage by around 25%
Soulscorch:
Increase its damage by around 30%
That covers stapple powers, now let's move on to stuff common for both paragons
Executioner's gift:
Increase its damage bonus from 15% to 25% or 30% as target's health diminishes. Current value of 15% is way too low.
Murderous Flames:
- Extra hit procced off 50% of Killing Flames buffed damage. This would partially address Killing Flames issue of having a huge disparity in min and max damage on top of slow casting time.
Brutal Curse:
- The damage bonus from this feat should be changed to 20%.
Creeping Death:
- As a massive chunck of our damage comes from dots and we don't have the burst of other classes, please make it so our DoT damage will get bosses so scared of us they will defeat themselves out of panic. Joking aside, please consider buffing Creeping Death to 80% or 100% of damage dealt, it will still be a dot so it will be meh at best for trash clearing but it would be a noticeable QoL change for both HB and SB fury warlocks, if we are meh at mobs we should be crazy good at boss killing
Damnation:
Double the damage dealt by the Soulpuppet or let it benefit from party buffs and debuffs. As the glitch that made it benefit from buffs tomdungeon enemies is supposed to have been fixed already, this change shouldn't make it broken overpowered but still a force to be reckoned.
Gastly commander:
Damage increased to 20% or 30%
The reason these 2 things are suggested to be buffed by that much is damnation has weak feats overall,
puppet is reported to not even benefit properly from combat advantage.
- Universal. Hadar's Grasp cooldown and damage ratio:
So an encounter power that has a very long cooldown doesn't even deal that much damage, cd should be reduced by about 5 seconds and damage increased by 30% - 50% Or keeping the long cooldown and making it hit lulz brain dead super duper hard would be a fair thing as well
Opinion on temptation:
The changes you are trying are welcome but templocks will continue to be inferior to other specs and classes, this path (and the class in general) desperately needs some love in mod 13 or 13.5 in the form of making SW able to buff damage of teammates by good amount, for this a rework is needed.
Passive powers (both universal and paragon-exclusive)
They are horribly underpowered at best or flat out worthless, once you have time for a complete rework,
this, casting speed and cooldown times (good grief, Hadar's Grasp cooldown is off the charts for the meh damage it does) should be priority.
As for bugs, already reported on october bug fix thread but with no answer so far:
TC is broken in chult, please try using it vs either t-rex variant and see how it doesn't work, people have reported it doesn't work against King of Spines and a presumably a few of T9G bosses.
Gates of Hell not benefitting properly from SW debuffs on target, given same debuffs and as @etelgrin proved with ACT logs on the bug thread, GoH barely reached 120% effectiveness whereas other powers hit 150%. It wouldn't be asurprise if it is not benefitting properly from DR debuffs of other classes as well.
Blades of the Vanquished Armies gets toggled off if you are stunned or dazed. This shouldn't be happening anymore since mod 10 rework but it just keeps happening, very easy to test, activate BoVA and let a stun/daze power hit you and say bye bye to BoVA as it gets toggled off and goes on cooldown.
Hindsight is a wonderful, thing, I wish I hadn't spent the RP & AD to gear this character up, but unfortunately it's a sunk expense, and at least I've learned enough to stop now before I waste any more.
The buffs certainly are a nice start, though as other said we don't believe it will bring Temptation into the meta in any desirable party comp. Of course, it needs to see play on the test shard, but as it stands Temptation won't be able to dent the 'Support' role it intended for without being able to contribute to a party in a meaningful way besides simply healing... Which probably means more Feats need to give more party wide buff/utility, like how Dark Revelry is desirable.
The change to Eldritch Momentum is pretty 'meh' in this proposed incarnation.... 15% Stamina when a daily is used? Meh. CA when a Daily is used for 8 seconds? Well that's not bad per say, but other classes/features simply do it better IMO, which means it's really lackluster in a Temp build, IMO. We need to offer something more to the entire party. Could I be wrong? Sure, but it doesn't jump out at me as anything special.
The other changes are solid, though Damnation is still WAY behind... Maybe extend it's Aura's distance might help?
Once again though, thank you very much for taking the time and effort to improve SW! We hope we can all continue to work together to bring SW to a point where they are desired to be in a party for normal and end-game content w/o being OP.
Place a feat in the temptation three that lets allies benefit from warlocks curses.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured