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Official Feedback Thread: Scourge Warlock changes
amenar
Member, NW_CrypticDev Posts: 90 Arc User
Sorry for the delay everyone. For more details on the how and why of the changes, please check out the dev blogs.
Feedback Desired
We’d like you all to focus on playing the class in various content and giving us feedback. There are many changes that are meant to work together as a whole, so we'd appreciate feedback after playing with the changes, more than just reactions to the patch notes themselves.
If you find a bug or have feedback, please follow the guidelines below when posting:
• Respond to this forum post.
• Type: Bug/Feedback (Please only choose one)
• Format: Please use “Bold” face text for the Type & Spec then type your feedback in the body of your post. If you are listing a bug please have this text in RED, if you are posting an opinion or feedback please use BLUE.
• (Bonus: Concise Feedback & Screen Shots are much appreciated)
Examples:
Bug: Power: Arms of Hadar
This power no longer has any visual FX
Here are the patch notes:
Feedback Desired
We’d like you all to focus on playing the class in various content and giving us feedback. There are many changes that are meant to work together as a whole, so we'd appreciate feedback after playing with the changes, more than just reactions to the patch notes themselves.
If you find a bug or have feedback, please follow the guidelines below when posting:
• Respond to this forum post.
• Type: Bug/Feedback (Please only choose one)
• Format: Please use “Bold” face text for the Type & Spec then type your feedback in the body of your post. If you are listing a bug please have this text in RED, if you are posting an opinion or feedback please use BLUE.
• (Bonus: Concise Feedback & Screen Shots are much appreciated)
Examples:
Bug: Power: Arms of Hadar
This power no longer has any visual FX
Here are the patch notes:
- Accursed Souls: Now applies Lesser Curse to all affected targets, in addition to its existing effects.
- Arms of Hadar: Damage increased ~14%.
- Arms of Hadar: Now properly has a target cap of 5, instead of 6.
- Arms of Hadar: Range increased to 35', up from 29'.
- Arms of Hadar: Repositioned the FX so that the hit area and the FX area match up much more accurately. Also tweaked the hit timing to be more in sync with when the FX actually hit the target.
- Blades of Vanquished Armies: Increased radius to 13', up from 11'.
- Blades of Vanquished Armies: No longer locks you in place while you cast the spell.
- Blades of Vanquished Armies: Now increases your Deflection Chance while active. Amount of Deflection increases with each rank up, starting at 10% at rank 1, and reaching 25% at rank 4.
- Blades of Vanquished Armies: The swirling blade FX should start drawing sooner, so you shouldn't see targets taking damage before the FX start drawing.
- Borrowed Time: Added clarification to the tooltip to make it clear that this Class Feature only triggers when Soul Sparks heal you at the end of combat.
- Brood of Hadar: Spawned broodlings now deal additional damage over time, equal to double the initial damage they deal.
- Brood of Hadar: The combat log for this power will now display "Brood of Hadar's Bite" instead of "Melee Attack" when your spawned broodlings deal damage.
- Curse Bite: Damage increased ~33%.
- Curse Bite: Rank 4 of this power now properly reduces the cooldown by 1 second.
- Dark One's Blessing: In addition to its current effect, this power now also increases Life Steal Chance and Life Steal Severity.
- Deadly Curse: Increased the base damage dealt when applying your Warlock's Curse, but reduced the rank up benefits to 10% per rank, down from 12% per rank. Net result at rank 4 is a ~35% damage increase.
- Dreadtheft: No longer consumes Curses. Instead, now has a similar effect as a Curse Synergy. While you are using Dreadtheft, affected Cursed targets take increased damage from all sources, and you gain damage resistance based on the number of Cursed targets hit. Both of these effects stop occuring when you stop maintaining Dreadtheft.
- Dreadtheft: Updated the rank up information to properly state that it increases the Damage Resistance Debuff by 5% per rank, not 3% as previously stated.
- Eldritch Blast: Reduced the activation time of the second attack to 0.6s, down from 0.78s. Reduced the activation time of the third attack to 1s, down from 1.2s. This has increased the overall DPS of the combo by ~23%.
- Eldritch Blast: The AoE damage applied by the third strike of this power no longer has twice as much damage variance as the rest of this power. In addition, the AoE damage and hit reacts are no longer delayed slightly.
- Essence Defiler: Increased activation time of the first strike slightly, but decreased overall activation time for the combo to 1.8s, down from 2.2s. This has increased the overall DPS of the combo by ~22%.
- Feat: Aura of Cruelty: Radius increased to 50', up from 20'. Now only affects teammates, including companions and other summoned pets, such as Soul Puppets and Immolation Spirits.
- Feat: Aura of Despair: Radius increased to 50', up from 20'.
- Feat: Creeping Death: Can now proc when hitting a target affected by any of your Curses, instead of just Warlock's Curse and Tyrannical Curse. This means Lesser Curses and Warlock's Bargain will now enable Creeping Death.
- Feat: Creeping Death: Instead of triggering off any necrotic damage dealt by you, this Feat now triggers off of any damage dealt by your At-Will, Encounter, and Daily powers. This means more powers now work with this (powers that deal Fire damage, such as Hellish Rebuke, Killing Flames, and Immolation Spirits), but certain triggers from Class Features and other Feats will no longer proc small amounts of damage (for example, it no longer procs from Deadly Curse, Critical Promise, or Executioner's Gift).
- Feat: Creeping Death: The damage dealt by this power is now properly considered a Damage over Time (DoT) effect.
- Feat: Critical Promise: Damage increased to 10% per rank, up from 2% per rank.
- Feat: Daughter's Promises: Having this Feat will no longer place an additional debuff icon on Cursed targets.
- Feat: Daughter's Promises: Now hits up to 3 targets, and the radius has been increased to 25', up from 15'.
- Feat: Executioner's Gift: No longer procs a second damage effect. Instead, directly increases the damage of your At-Will and Encounter powers when a target is missing health.
- Feat: Hope Stealer: On crit, now grants 1% Life Steal Chance and 1% Life Steal Severity per rank, instead of just an amount of Life Steal Rating.
- Feat: Killing Curse: Damage increased to 3% per rank, up from 1%.
- Feat: Killing Curse: No longer causes an additional proc for 0 damage when used in conjunction with Creeping Death.
- Feat: Mocking Spirit: Now also causes your Soul Puppet to gain an additional 10% of your max HP per rank.
- Feat: Offering to the Prisoner: Having this Feat will no longer place an additional debuff icon on Cursed targets.
- Feat: Parting Blasphemy: Damage increased to 10% per rank, up from 1.2%.
- Feat: Parting Blasphemy: Fixed an issue where sometimes the caster would take damage from this Feat.
- Feat: Reletnless Curse: Redesigned. Now has a 20% chance per rank to apply Lesser Curse to a target when you remove your Warlock's Curse from that target.
- Feat: Soul Bonding: When using Vampiric Embrace on a target that is affected by a Curse, the AoE heal component of the Vampiric Embrace will now trigger properly.
- Feat: Soul Reaping: Now grants 1% Life Steal Chance per rank, instead of an amount of Life Steal Rating.
- Feat: Sparkbinder: Now also causes your Immolation Spirits to gain an additional 5% of your max HP per rank.
- Feat: Spiritfire: The damage dealt by this Feat is now Fire damage, instead of Physical damage.
- Feat: Spiritfire: The damage dealt by this Feat was previously dealing a percentage of your weapon damage plus a base damage value, which lead to the Feat description being innacurate. The base damage has been removed, and the weapon damage dealt has been increased to 15% per rank. This result is a buff for all weapons above Common quality.
- Feat: Syphoning Curse: Now a heal over time. Provides the same amount of healing as it used to every second for 3 seconds. This means it now heals for 3 times as much total.
- Feat: Wrathful Souls: Previously, the amount of healing you received from the damage dealt by your Soul Puppet was much lower than the tooltip stated. This has been fixed. However, the amount stated in the tooltip has also been reduced to 2% per rank, down from 3% per rank. The net change is still a large increase in the amount of healing provided by this Feat.
- Fiery Bolt: No longer causes a cast bar to appear for part of the powers activation.
- Fiery Bolt: Reduced base recharge time to 13s, down from 14s.
- Fiery Bolt: Reduced the total activation time of this power to 1.1s, down from 1.75s.
- Fiery Bolt: The Curse Consume effect has been replaced with a Curse Synergy effect. Curse Synergy now causes secondary targets to take full damage.
- Gates of Hell: Now Knocks targets down as well.
- Gates of Hell: Reduced the total time between starting this power and damage being dealt to 2.9s, down from 5.35s. Also improved the syncing of the actual damage application and FX beam.
- Hadar's Grasp: Previously, the Curse Consume behavior stated that it doubled the duration of the lift. However, this is not what it did. Instead, it increased the duration by 50% and applied a stacking debuff that would lower the targets damage resistance from armor by 3% for every stack. For players that did not have enough Armor Penetration to fully negate all damage resistance from armor, this could be fairly powerful. For anyone that had enough Armor Penetration, this debuff would do nothing. As such, we have changed the behavior and updated the tooltip accordingly. The new behavior for the Warlock's Curse Consume is: Increases the duration of the lift by 50%, and causes the target to take 15% more damage from Curses and Soul Puppets. This effect does not stack.
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Comments
There is a lot to digest and test!
Edit - Initial Thoughts : Overall a lot of positive changes. Only a few things stand out as not so good...
Shadow Slip works differently, and the DR from it decreases over time. Need to see how that ends up affecting game play.
Tyrannical Threat (now called Tyrannical Curse) is a shadow of its former self, which honestly should have been reviewed a long time ago and thus it being reviewed/downgraded is not a surprise.
That being said lots of positives... Cast time decreases, solid bugs fixed, damage increased in many places, and the super winner butt kicking wise (IMO) is now Creeping Death (the Fury Capstone Feat) is no longer limited to just Necrotic Damage powers. That's pretty darn awesome.
So ya, overall some good/positive changes and we will have a LOT of testing to do...
We need more DPS from powers, not defensive mechanics to delay the inevitable.
Vamp embrace, it's still not enough. People don't use it because it's a god awful single target spell. You get better healing as a templock using soul scorch or something.
Curse bite will remain annoying until it's actually worth using to make up for the annoying mechanic that everything must first be cursed.
Was hoping you'd turn fiery bolt's curse effect into an AoE DoT on the ground or something. It's not terribly efficient. Not bad DPS, but not good enough for it's CD.
Dread theft at least needs a small buff to it's damage, for being such a lengthy channeling power you cannot do anything else while using it. It becomes mostly just party support and an AoE power out of desperation.
Here is a link to what we tested on preview;
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1218386/sw-and-hr-interactions
I think you meant this to state Dust to Dust instead of Borrowed Time.
@amenar
Please consider having Vampiric Embrace provide temp HP to allies in the SW's party. This would additively stack with the Temptation tree's feat Compounding Soul. Vampiric Embrace is rarely used as it does not do enough damage relative to other single target encounters to justify using. This minor damage results in minor healing. A nice temp HP gain will make it useful to use during boss encounters / strong monsters.
The +% DR gained from Infernal Spheres is nice, but the effectiveness will be negligible as the spheres will be cast within a few short seconds considering a 0.5s between sphere cast time. I think this DR is better served with Dreadtheft as it allows players, especially lower geared ones, the opportunity to gain DR while moving / evading monsters. I understand this combination could be excessive when used in conjunction with the Borrowed Time and the proposed upgrade to Blades of Vanquished Armies +% deflect chance, so a moderate +% DR with Dreadtheft should be fair. Improving Dreadtheft DR% will also please PvPers.
Not sure what to think about TT ("TC") at this time, other than ouch!
Edit: Pillar of Power (Hellbringer) could be reworked to provide significant (50%+?) damage bonus to the SW, with party members receiving only 10-25% of the buff itself (5%-12.5%). The circle could also not evaporate if a monster moves into it, because that eliminates its effectiveness. The damage boost from Pillar of Power will have to be worth losing Soul Scorch. The Hellbringer SW will sacrifice mobility and survivability for a nice % damage buff that may also expand to party members. In addition, one of Hellbringer class features may also need to be reworked to compete with Soulbinder's Dust to Dust.
Very nice work. Thank you for the transparency and communication.
Just on quick notes:
- Creeping Death proccing every attack - mega cool, nice buff (still you could reduce the time from 8 seconds to promised 4 seconds
- Executioner's Gift 'buffing' encounters - same as above, combining this, with Killing Flames and Creeping Death procs - \o/
I will test all this stuff on preview during the weekend and post my insights here then.
Mod 10:
[Combat (Self)] Critical Hit! Your Killing Flames deals 16636893 (1009292) Fire Damage to Ethraniev Marrowslake.
Mod 9:
[Combat (Self)] Your Murderous Flames deals 376274433 (18876929) Fire Damage to Red Tiamat Head.
Btw, reading the patch notes looks like perma SS is going to be extremely easy to do...
There's a lot of potential here and it requires a lot of testing. However, I really expect that the damage comes from actually playing the character and not simply abusing bugs or broken mechanics, which is extremely boring imo.
Soul Scorch is really the bread and butter of SW DPS. (At least is was before MF bug.) It is the highest DPS encounter, has zero cooldown, and sparks appear to be plentiful in the new patch (which is great btw).
Hellbringer needs something to compete, which means it needs either another high DPS encounter to either replace Pillar of Power (not likely) or simply buff it.
As stated above, Pillar of Power needs a significant personal and party buff. It may also need to reduce SW cooldowns if an encounter is cast within the Pillar, because I imagine Hellbringer SWs would be left with Killing Flames + Firey Bolt/Hadar's Grasp for DPS if the third encounter slot is occupied by Pillar of Power.
Just make it's DoT to be the same as Brand's, but have flat damage applied to it similar to at-will damage each time you're struck, but remove the CD refresh.
By reducing the the target cap from 5 to 6, you are effectively reducing its damage by 20% in any group larger than 5, which is a larger nerf than the 14% damage buff. Considering I am sure your data will agree with me that this encounter power is already pretty much never used, nerfing its damage by 6% is not a good way to go.
Thanks for the feedback, we're looking into it.
As for Murderous Flames - I found the bug. You should a fix in an upcoming preview build.
Kymos, looking down at the crowd,
Warlock population, "WARLOCKS, WARLOCKS, WARLOCKS!"
-Kymos
-Kymos
Sorry for my bad english
The real healing for PvP SWs come from borrowed time, warlock's bargain, incoming healing bonuses, insignias, and the drowned weapon set. In my opinion, the only exclusive benefit SWs have over other classes when it comes to healing is borrowed time. I strongly doubt the proposed increased life steal chance and severity will impact the SW class enough to make it competitive in PvP without a significant (burst) damage boost. (Alternatively, other classes with burst damage benefit significantly from life steal.) Life steal and deflect will get you nowhere against a TR abusing Shocking Execution on a dodgeless SW. Lastly, with the proposed reduced benefit to Shadow Slip, the SW may be a sitting duck in PvP. Shadow Slip is truly the only real survival mechanism SWs have when they are constantly overmatched (no dodge, no stealth, and no shield).
Its a very difficult task to balance the game for all classes while also taking PvP into consideration.
I agree with you in regards to the defensive gain that these changes have given, but we really do need a good burst mechanic as a striker class.
I think, to be honest, this will benefit a lot of the lower end/level SW players up and coming, I still can't see these changes being a benefit for what we have really been asking for (Although the shared stats with Puppet is a really good start).
-Kymos
-Aura of cruelty and aura of despair were not showing on allies/enemies yesterday, not on the player bar or on the player stats.
Feedback: Temptation overall
-Temptation still represents a weak addition to the party since all in battles in general faster cleaning is safer than temptation heals, a buff to soul breaker and make it work in bosses like lostmauth and pvp would help but still some party buff is necessary, specially in single target where Dread theft will be unprefered and damnation/fury have a big edge over temptation.
In addition to this, i know Paladin has not been fixed yet but devotion paladins and temptation warlocks sort of have almost the same function in a party.
Feedback: Feat: soul bonding
This feat is very unreliable for starter players that have not yet achieve a good amount off life steal, on the opposite end endgame player focusing in single target can entirely heal the party in many dungeons.
My sugestion:
-Single target powers used by the SW will heal allied players by 150% of your life steal and 50% on aoe's, this value cannot exceed 35%(12%in aoe's) additionally;
-When this power fails to heal one of your allies your allies gain Hellbound this will grant:
+5% the power of the ally you failed to heal to all your party;
+5% the recovery of the ally you failed to heal to all your party;
+10% the regeneration of the ally you failed to heal to all your party;
+10% the deflection of the ally you failed to heal to all your party;
50' range;
Can trigger in up to 3 allies;
Will ignore any kind of exterior buffs, companion augments, bonding runestone, will only be applied to equipment and boons;
10 second duration.
-Additionally when a ally nearby is revived will drain 5% of the nearby ally currently with more hit points as shield hit points for himself and 50% deflect chance for 2 seconds.
Cooldown 10 seconds;
50' range;
No more than 10 000 hitpoints;
Will affect all kinds of HP, temp, shields;
If all the allies within 50' are bellow 50% health this power will drain 3% of the ally with more hp but grant 5 times more to the resurected player.
If all the allies within 50' are bellow 30% health this power will drain 2% of the ally with more hp but grant 10 times more to the resurected player.
These shield hitpoints would drain after 4 seconds if not consumed.
So for example, i fall in battle, i will steal my ally wich is at 200k hp now 10k and get 50% deflect chance for 2 seconds.
If he was at 30% hp, i would steal 1200 but still get resurected with 10k shield hit points.
It's more or less a oathbound paladin synergy, and also something that would caracterize temptation since dark revelry can be achieved from fury and most of parties dont need heals this could actually put temptation back on the track, a cool animation like dark green warlock bargain flying from the hellbound to all 4 team members would be awesome xD.
Feedback: Power:imulation spirits and blades of vanquished armies
-Production of sparks from imulation spirits, Blades of vanquished armies is too high, continuous use of soul scorch makes fury much better for dps than the other trees by TT damage spread, i agree but it's a bit too much beside it will be very hard for a hellbringer to beat Imulation spirits with brood of hadar/flames of phelghetos.
Feedback: Power: Curse bite
-Curse Bite is still very impractical to use for the damage we can achieve with it.
@amenar these are just mine sugestions, if none of these seems good to you, please add some kind of damage buff to temptation or it will still be unprefered.