Creeping Death is in need of a fix. It should deal piercing damage based off of the initial damage after mitigation, to make it a true 60% damage bonus. Right now, the procs are mitigated or buffed separately, which means it can either hit for very little if the target's mitigation is high, or hit for much more than intended if mitigation is low and the SW is receiving considerable damage boosts.
This leads to two different outcomes: Creeping Death over-performing in PvE, and under-performing in PvP. That makes it a bit of a crutch for the class, similar to some issues that are now being fixed, like Murderous Flames.
It's already capable of melting people in pvp. Giving that much power to SWs with 170%+ ArP will turn into a slaughter and all other classes will be crying for nerfs.
Hm, show me any class that get´s melted by creeping death, having propper PVP gear and Tenacity at 60% upwards. I think you musjudge the effect by far. Run ACT and look at the poor overall damageoutput by CD. I run some ACT´s and last time I did, it was 6% from a well known BIS warlock in DOM.
I'm calling it right now. The SW will end up as another GF in pvp because of it. With all the speed buffs they can easily outrun anyone and let their DoT do everything for them.
No furylock outruns a GWF and even a GF can get in touch with perma ITF plus gapcloser. The only tree that outruns is temptation but misses damage to kill opponent at same level most times. Warlock same level as GF? Lol, there only needs to be one MI sab or one skilled GF-conquerer in the other team and your warlock can watch the radish from below most time , except he avoids these calsses all time. I predict that warlocks will stay stepfatherclass in PVP if nothing will improve significantly. Running a class that can only perform at BIS level and is easily countered by most classes like TR, GF, GWF and can´t kill DC, OP, GF, GWF TR with an adaequat gear and build...same level as GF, very funny. I do not talk about those player who step in PVP with no gear , no clue and no build to get anything done. Pugging, you can chose any class you want and kill the class you want except DC/OP (brainless to some degree). A near BIS warlock may stay untouchable for a pug team with no setup and no clue. This ends immidiately the moment someone enters DOM and knows how to handle that class.
@ghoulz66 I have/had a 170%+ RI Fury SW in PvP and it was a complete laugh against equally geared opponents.
After LM set fix, it became extremely difficult to generate Soul Sparks.
Soul Sparks are based on crit strikes / Essence Deflier. This means you're probably going to need to tickle your opponent with at-wills before you can even begin to consider damaging them.
IF you get enough Soul Sparks, and IF you aren't already dead, and IF you begin to gain an advantage over your opponent, said opponent will often slip away into the Ring of Ambush shadows, causing your SW to leave combat and deplete all Soul Sparks...
Prior to mount insignias, I would give Creeping Death a grade of D+ in terms of damage output. Occassionally you would snag a DoT kill from an enemy attempting to flee, but nothing amazing. Sure, you could melt people with zero or negligible tenacity score, but you could do that without Creeping Death.
Now that we have mount insignias and more developed opponents, I could argue Creeping death does more for your opponent than it does for you, as it provides them with constant defensive procs. Think deflect heal insignia, negation stacks, or any of the benefits GWFs and GFs gain from being hit. The fact is, DoT builds are just plain bad in the current PvP meta. All respectable damage is burst damage.
I see your statement about SW being OP in mod 10 and I'll raise you: SWs will STILL be at the BOTTOM of the PvP barrel after all of the proposed changes thus far:
1) There are no significant upgrades to any PvP-oriented encounters. (Edit: DPS encounters)
2) Soulbinders need to focus on crit for DPS, which is penalized significantly.
3) Hellbringers lack the healing and survivability offered by Soulbinder.
4) An immunity frame once every 4 seconds, which may be much worse than you think considering TRs with Burning set. The Shadow Slip change is geared more towards PvE IMO.
5) Until a fix to SE is made, SWs will have no place in PvP.
(Edit: 6) Warlock's Bargain is a nice encounter most of the time. Sometimes, though, it is the absolute worst as it can kill you if you're under 15% health. It will also strip you of 15% health and return nothing if the enemy dodges or has high damage mitigation. Very poor tradeoff in these scenarios.)
@ghoulz66 I have/had a 170%+ RI Fury SW in PvP and it was a complete laugh against equally geared opponents.
After LM set fix, it became extremely difficult to generate Soul Sparks.
Soul Sparks are based on crit strikes / Essence Deflier. This means you're probably going to need to tickle your opponent with at-wills before you can even begin to consider damaging them.
IF you get enough Soul Sparks, and IF you aren't already dead, and IF you begin to gain an advantage over your opponent, said opponent will often slip away into the Ring of Ambush shadows, causing your SW to leave combat and deplete all Soul Sparks...
Prior to mount insignias, I would give Creeping Death a grade of D+ in terms of damage output. Occassionally you would snag a DoT kill from an enemy attempting to flee, but nothing amazing. Sure, you could melt people with zero or negligible tenacity score, but you could do that without Creeping Death.
Now that we have mount insignias and more developed opponents, I could argue Creeping death does more for your opponent than it does for you, as it provides them with constant defensive procs. Think deflect heal insignia, negation stacks, or any of the benefits GWFs and GFs gain from being hit. The fact is, DoT builds are just plain bad in the current PvP meta. All respectable damage is burst damage.
I see your statement about SW being OP in mod 10 and I'll raise you: SWs will STILL be at the BOTTOM of the PvP barrel after all of the proposed changes thus far:
1) There are no significant upgrades to any PvP-oriented encounters. (Edit: DPS encounters)
2) Soulbinders need to focus on crit for DPS, which is penalized significantly.
3) Hellbringers lack the healing and survivability offered by Soulbinder.
4) An immunity frame once every 4 seconds, which may be much worse than you think considering TRs with Burning set. The Shadow Slip change is geared more towards PvE IMO.
5) Until a fix to SE is made, SWs will have no place in PvP.
(Edit: 6) Warlock's Bargain is a nice encounter most of the time. Sometimes, though, it is the absolute worst as it can kill you if you're under 15% health. It will also strip you of 15% health and return nothing if the enemy dodges or has high damage mitigation. Very poor tradeoff in these scenarios.)
+1 I am a BIS pvp warlock for some time. Concerning pvp this above quote holds true. DEVS, please oh please, read above statement for pvp. This needs to be addressed and there have been statements placed on how to deal with some of these issues.
Will you consider removing the DoT mechanic from Creeping Death and replace it with piercing burst damage after 6 seconds? (Yes, I am aware you may then have to change the name to "Sudden Death"--hockey fans rejoice.) Once 6 seconds have elapsed and Creeping Death procs, the Creeping Death timer would start over the next time an enemy is attacked. (Maybe even place a short cooldown in between Creeping Death procs if necessary?)
Pros:
1) Fixes a potentially buggy multi-proc interaction with Oathbound Paladin's Aura of Courage. (Here comes the hate mail.)
2) Impements a level of timing-based skill to the Fury tree to maximize DPS efficiency.
3) Piercing damage so the benefit from Creeping Death is not mitigated twice over (PvP). (Edit: amenar gave a detailed explanation showing this does not occur.)
4) Potentially will lead to the beginning of fair DPS for SWs in PvP.
5) Potentially fix buggy a interaction between Fury SWs who use Warlock's Bargain on each other in PvP.
Cons:
1) SWs will have "less" DPS if a mob / critter is eliminated in under 6 seconds. This boosts the comparable damage of other classes. Totally fair in my opinion.
2) Again, to be fair, 6 seconds is better than 8 seconds because one could save up Soul Scorches and pump a bunch of them into an enemy (PvP) before Creeping Death procs.
3) Less ability for Fury SWs to place a heal over time on themselves in dungeons.
4) Developers would need to write more code, but they aren't busy anyway, right? I hear they don't listen to anyone and kick back with their feet on the desk all day. It's not like they're working on releasing the game on another console or dropping a new module. >:)
Hey guys, I've been reading through the thread, thanks for the additional feedback and discussion. Wanted to add some clarification about how Creeping Death works currently.
It actually uses the pre-mitigation damage your power dealt to calculate the 60% additional damage. For example, let's say you're hitting someone with 50% damage resistance, and your Eldritch Blast conveniently deals exactly 1,000 damage. Your combat log should look something like this:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 500 (1000) Fire Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 75 (150) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 75 (150) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 75 (150) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 75 (150) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
4 ticks for 75 = 300 damage, which is 60% of the 500 damage you dealt.
If it was getting double resisted, you would instead see:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 500 (1000) Fire Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 38 (75) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 38 (75) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 38 (75) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 38 (75) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
In theory, I could change the implementation to use post-mitigation damage, and make it piercing, and then it would look like this:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 500 (1000) Fire Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 75 Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 75 Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 75 Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx. Your Creeping Death deals 75 Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Which might look a little nicer in the combat logs, but has other issues (Piercing damage is more difficult to setup and maintain than normal damage), and doesn't actually result in any more damage.
All of these conversations are definitely worth having, but I wanted to make sure we were all discussing what is actually happening, instead of assuming that Creeping Death is being double penalized by resistance. If you're seeing some case where that is actually happening, please let me know, get me screenshots, all that fun stuff.
@amenar I can see you are doing a great job, but we still have one big problem, all those buffs counts on something we don't have, Critical chance, we are a dps class that rely on critical strike and we don't have any support on that other than a heroic feat that gives 3%, we need more 10~15%.
Thanks for the explanation on how Creeping Death interacts with damage mitigation, amenar. If I come across a log showing otherwise I will post it.
In regards to piercing damage, referencing your data, I was thinking Creeping Death could interact like this:
Base attack: 1,000 After 50% damage mitigation: 500
Creeping death piercing damage ignores damage mitigation, so it would take 60% of 1,000 as opposed to 60% of 500. Therefore, assuming 4 ticks of Creeping Death, the combat log would show:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 500 (1,000) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 150 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 150 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 150 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 150 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Total damage = 500 + 600 = 1,100 (instead of 800)
This won't change PvE much as the majority of players have proper resistance ignored to counter critters. However, in PvP against adequate opponents, meaning you're hitting for the minimum 20% of your base attack, the value of Creeping Death ends up hitting for approximately 12% (0.60 * 0.20) over a whopping 8 seconds. That's 1.5% of the base attack per second. Ouchie. Here's an example:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 200 (1,000) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Total damage = 320 *over 8 seconds* Damage per second = 40
This is a gift to anyone you're combating in PvP because you're offering them minimal damage while procing their Negation, feats, Unstoppable, heal over time insignias, etc.
If this were converted to burst piercing damage after 6 seconds, it would look something like this:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 200 (1,000) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 600 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
There are other layers of damage mitigation that go beyond this, such as shields, so this idea isn't too extreme. This would be a much needed addition to SWs in PvP, fix some wonky interactions between classes and players, and possibly reduce lag as well.
Either way, thanks for the feedback again!
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treesclimberMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,161Arc User
edited July 2016
Being honest i dont think that after these changes SW has bad burst in pvp/ bad performance i think, it does have bad performance in some cases but that is not related with classes themselves but rather tenacity, negation, feytouched: When level cap was raised also Transcendent Enchantments were introduced, i have no reason to believe there has balance behind them if the classes got in the mess they are today.
Hey guys, I've been reading through the thread, thanks for the additional feedback and discussion. Wanted to add some clarification about how Creeping Death works currently.
All of these conversations are definitely worth having, but I wanted to make sure we were all discussing what is actually happening, instead of assuming that Creeping Death is being double penalized by resistance. If you're seeing some case where that is actually happening, please let me know, get me screenshots, all that fun stuff.
Why we keep this inferior feat at all? if u we want to balance class, and not balance hellbringer furry vs hellbringer damination vs hellbringer temptation. We need balance that we could compete with others classes, not among paragon trees.
Now time for my thoughts about Pillar of Power changes, after trying utilize in action (heroic encounter/normal monster groups etc) I can give feedback by putting all in 1 word, > Cr@p
With pillar of power I get resistance boost + monsters get reduced dmg output. But I lost movement, which is I am more vulnerable. 4 Winter wolfs wiped floor with my warlocks face. They all time just throwing my warlock from one side to other side. Not mention Area effect is so small, that if polar bear just step on corner of circle, u are more like had to step away in order to avoid incoming hit. Or even if u stay, u are kicked out of Pillar of Power effect area anyway.. <
With Pillar of power I get dmg boos, but I give up mobility and possibility to use Combat advantage. Plus negating monsters damage resistance also is bad. U have literally sand right in face of monster and go hand 2 hand melee fight. Which mean hand of blight + flames of empowerment utilization. Plus adding warlock bargain for survivability, plus BoVa and in the end its still proves that warlock is not tank<<< And u hit ground dead.
Over all same nonsense as where before but just packed in different name.
Hellish rebuke, U apply and u move to other encounters, or at wills. Even with current changes, In real combat situation I didn't notice its effectiveness at all. And u guys though it would put even some competition for Soulbinders Essence Defiler. Then u are wrong. Hellish rebuke facing same problems as Creeping death. And even Red Dragon glyphs are doing better than Hellish rebuke. Red dragon glyphs provide 800 arp for 20s + 600 DoT without any reduction. So over all Hellish rebuke can be utilizer only to trigger CD stack and Overload slotted Dragon glyphs.
Falme of empowerment changes also is drawback. In order to utilizer this class feature. < u had firstly hit with at will then cast encounter.. Remind same scenario as we had curse consuming problem.
I know that devs want to encourage players use powers which they didn't use or use very least. But these changes putting hellbringer in hard situation, Flames of empowerment specially for DoT + hand of blight melee on top Pillar of Power.
Its start to feel that u guys(developers) are out of ideas.... Or just want to make cosmetic changes and hope that everything will be OK,<< HB warlock need not adjustment, but rework over all. At least thats whats appear after testing current patch.
======================================================================== “The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. Gustave Le Bon. ==================================================
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treesclimberMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,161Arc User
@treesclimber my opinion is SWs definitely have poor burst damage. The two means of burst damage are Killing Flames and Soul Scorch.
The former has a long cooldown and needs the enemy to be at or below 50% health to be reasonably effective.
The latter requires stacks of Soul Sparks to be generated prior to use and lowers your survivablity once used.
Outside of that, there's not much going on.
On the other hand, take fo example fury/temptation HB after the changes, bug fixed MF isn't as powerfull anymore, i would easly dop it over HG, WB, and WoS, prince of hell rework will have huge impact in endgame pvp, arm pen stat bends as the stat rises, so the SW can reach enough arm pen so the previous version of this class feature and the new version provide about the same damage increase, but now with aditional life steal, to that you can combine npnm and npnm off hand artifact power, assuming you benefit from all the RI you now have avaliable it will be a 55% damage increase over SB(assuming con/char build, all boons, r4 of both powers), and still have 8% feat granted ls bonus + Prince of hell ls (rank based). That will hit like a truck comparing to SB but lack in survival.
Edit: not 70%, 55% i read the new tooltip on RI ignored in PoH wrongly, that makes what i said about arm pen curve not so much truth also, only in absourd amounts of RI.
Base damage = 11,245 Damage after mitigation = 8,321 Ratio = 0.74
Based on our expecations of Creeping Death's behavior, we should see:
(Base damage * 0.60 * Ratio) / 4 ticks
This equates to an expectation of 1,248 damage per Creeping Death tick.
However, this is not what we are seeing.
Instead, its more like this:
(Base damage * 0.45 * Ratio) / 4 ticks
This equates to 936 damage per Creeping Death tick, as shown in @macjae's log.
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treesclimberMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,161Arc User
edited July 2016
Bug: Power: Dark spiral aura Sometimes this power fails to cast a spiral if there are none.
Feedback: Artifact class features. Artifact class features dark one's blessings and snuff out are really weak now, dont forget them.
Feedback. Power : Dark spiral aura Decrease cast time.
Feedback: Power: flames of phlegethos Increase flames of phlegethos damage and radius. The coolest way obviously, increasing the skull size ^^, but seriously this power is only compensating when there are very close amount of mobs and even so they will easly spread making acoursed souls and gates of hell (and situationally TT) much superior.
Feedback: Feat: Battlewise Decrease threath from damage 6% and 12% threath from healing.
Feedback: Power: Infernal speres Mantain DR granted by the spheres for a while after they are consumed..
Checking out damnation after the 2nd preview update, and none of the changes to improve soul fire damage appear to have taken place. The puppet does get more damage from warlocks curse, but it was difficult to tell if lesser curse with burning puppets was working(the tooltip wasn't updated), and if it was did it stack with warlocks curse.
The big issue with the feat tree is it's so far behind in dps compared to fury, and it doesn't increase survival ability compared too a fury build as the creeping death procs combined with life steal work incredibly well. If the tree doesn't get some boosts it's likely to become a dead tree.
The puppet is basically a single target dot, and the tree could use some help to make it the single target dps tree or improve the general dps with some large bonuses in spirit fire or improved damage from curses perhaps.
Wraith's Shadow
There's no easy way to tell how long it's been ticking or which phase it's in - did you cast it or did you move before it went off. It also has a very long animation (I occasionally used it before, but usually in the Orcus fight where I wasn't moving that much). Combined with trying to make sure the target is cursed before pressing it again makes it frustrating to use. It doesn't bring enough to the table to be worth it near as I can tell. BoVA and DT both offer good defensive options, and the buff to the soul puppet hardly matters if you're damnation it just means a bit faster increase to get the 5 stacks of investure, but you lost damage by not using a better encounter, and again other encounters offer defense now.
It would help if investiture healed your puppet and gave it a short term boost of some sort. If you didn't want to add a short damage boost to investiture a taunt when solo, and a group buff when partied could be interesting alternatives - taunt when partied could be bad ...
Killing Flames
This power has synergy with damnation(running with this in fury I had a puppet up fairly often), but it's only bonus is in the fury tree. Adding some short term buffs when investiture is given could make this more of a staple for damnation.
Soul Desecration
I didn't notice any speed increase when using the damnation capstone, and the tool tip wasn't updated. Granted it wasn't in the notes either so maybe this isn't getting in or just didn't make the build.
Soul Puppet
Can be difficult to use. Not sure if it would be possible to have some abilities cause it to teleport and attack the corresponding target - I was thinking of hadar's grasp as a good choice since it now has the synergy with soul puppet. It generally went where I hoped, and seemed to stay on target more then my earlier testing. Not sure if I just got lucky or if it's behaves differently if it's able to hit something - I was fighting more ranged stuff which didn't move as much this time I think.
Murderous flames
I didn't notice any MF procs when using KF 4.
Wrathful Souls
Healing from this was 5% so half of the stated 10% for 5 points in it. The healing is terrible regardless as the damage just isn't there.
Shadow Slip
I had a hard time telling if I was going immune. Even when I thought I moved at the right time I still seemed to take some damage - I would also receive an immune message? So I'm not sure if I dodged some attacks and was hit by others or what was going on. I'll try to test again later when I check out HB.
Hellbringer needs some defensive buffs for pvp. SB has lot more healing (borrowed time) and lot more deflection (15% from artifact power). Also old prince of hell was lot better when it buffed stat value, so maybe prince of hell could be like old one+ deflect? Or just some tweaks for artifact powers to compensate squishy nature of hb.
So fury warlock still feels incredibly underpowered next to my CW and TR after playing on test server. Quick idea that I posted elsewhere (not sure if anyone else has, probably though) make Dreadtheft fire and forget like blades of the vanquisged. Have it still require aiming/adjusting to hit desired mobs, but would allow you to get a off few extra at wills or encounters during a fight, and would help every SW spec, although some more than others. Shouldnt require much for numbers tweaking I wouldnt think, just a small bump for the class as a whole.
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ghoulz66Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,748Arc User
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The buff to harrowstorm is hardly noticeable. I don't know what's wrong with this power. It's tooltip damage is more than even bargain, but the damage is so laughable still.
Wraith's Shadow is still such an unappealing clunky power. Maybe it should just auto-apply the secondary effect after a few seconds by itself as it's difficult to keep track of in a heated moment.
Even with Grasp, Wraith's, and curses the soul puppet with damnation deals REALLY terrible damage now.
Playing with hellbringer as well.
I'm not sure how much DR or DR debuff along with damage Pillar of Power gives, but the damage is nothing but a tickle. The radius is horrible. Only viable with the T2 damnation feat to allow the buff to stay on you for 5 seconds after exiting atm.
Hellish rebuke remains unimpressive. It fails to be good at anything. The repulse damage is low, the dot is low. I didn't even notice mobs hurting themselves from it by attacking me back. It should be a bread and butter DoT and punish.
Flames of Empowerment is just about useless besides a lone boss. There would be some synergy is Hand of Blight's melee was a cone AoE similar to Cleave so you could play a high risk/reward play style in melee range combo'd with the Pillar of Power buff and blades.
We know warlock class relies on buffs for broken mechanics so far, soloing with this class is a worse experience compared to most classes, since we have no compareable selfbuff mechanics like other classes got. All we got is damage, so a 33% damagelift for firy blast or a 40% damageincrease for Harrow storm can´t deal with buffs that rises your damage x6 and instant kills a hole mobgroup by an "at will". The poor experience in PVE matches with poor experience in PVP missing burst , selfbuffs or at least powerfull debuffs.
Can you confirm that it is a) generating AP at all b) generating an appropriate amount
I can hit 8 targets and not even see the AP bar move atm.
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treesclimberMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,161Arc User
OK, rewrote the sadowsip feedback, was almost sleeping when last wrote it: Shadowslip is woking in a way very hard to control, the imuntity canot be reactivated with little shifts. After thinking about the cons and pros of the last sugestion i gave about changing it, here's my final sugestion.
Feedback: Power: shadowslip 1. Activating shadowslip will consume 30% of your stamina, during the next 3 seconds you mitigate 30% of all damage sources, have 30% increased control resistance and gain a 20% increase in your move speed, this effect can only be triggered once every 6 seconds. 2. Shadowslip now has a base 40% DR unchanged by time. 3. And what probably is too much but definitivelly would be the best: rework all powers so they all can be activated from shadowslip, appart from DT that would cancel shadowslip.
Asociated to this:
Feedback: Feat: Eldricht momentum Eldritch momentum grants 5% stamina on all ranks, eldricht momentum has a cooldown of 2/1,7/1,4/1,1/0,8 seconds.
Based on our expecations of Creeping Death's behavior, we should see:
(Base damage * 0.60 * Ratio) / 4 ticks
This equates to an expectation of 1,248 damage per Creeping Death tick.
However, this is not what we are seeing.
Instead, its more like this:
(Base damage * 0.45 * Ratio) / 4 ticks
This equates to 936 damage per Creeping Death tick, as shown in @macjae's log.
@amenar@macjae You are doing the wrong math, let me explain how it works. Base damage: 11.245 Damage: 8.321 Now you need to calc the difference between base damage(11.245) to real damage(8.321) to see the target mitigation. So: (damage/base damage*100)-100: (8321/11245*100)= 73,99733214762116-100= 26,00266785237884 (total target mitigation) So we got 26,00266785237884 base mitigation Now Creeping death works Damage-mitigation*CD base damage Damage:8.321 Mitigation(%): 26,002.667.8523.7884 Creeping death base damage: 60% Maths 8321-26,002.667.8523.7884%=6157,318008003557*0,60 Creeping death damage: 3694,390804802134/4 ticks of 923,5977012005336
Note that neverwinter use a rounding table, that's why we see 936 final damage and not 923,5977012005336 Also you can see that creeping death get twice mitigated as i have told a million of times already!
Comments
Warlock same level as GF? Lol, there only needs to be one MI sab or one skilled GF-conquerer in the other team and your warlock can watch the radish from below most time , except he avoids these calsses all time.
I predict that warlocks will stay stepfatherclass in PVP if nothing will improve significantly.
Running a class that can only perform at BIS level and is easily countered by most classes like TR, GF, GWF and can´t kill DC, OP, GF, GWF TR with an adaequat gear and build...same level as GF, very funny.
I do not talk about those player who step in PVP with no gear , no clue and no build to get anything done.
Pugging, you can chose any class you want and kill the class you want except DC/OP (brainless to some degree).
A near BIS warlock may stay untouchable for a pug team with no setup and no clue. This ends immidiately the moment someone enters DOM and knows how to handle that class.
After LM set fix, it became extremely difficult to generate Soul Sparks.
Soul Sparks are based on crit strikes / Essence Deflier. This means you're probably going to need to tickle your opponent with at-wills before you can even begin to consider damaging them.
IF you get enough Soul Sparks, and IF you aren't already dead, and IF you begin to gain an advantage over your opponent, said opponent will often slip away into the Ring of Ambush shadows, causing your SW to leave combat and deplete all Soul Sparks...
Prior to mount insignias, I would give Creeping Death a grade of D+ in terms of damage output. Occassionally you would snag a DoT kill from an enemy attempting to flee, but nothing amazing. Sure, you could melt people with zero or negligible tenacity score, but you could do that without Creeping Death.
Now that we have mount insignias and more developed opponents, I could argue Creeping death does more for your opponent than it does for you, as it provides them with constant defensive procs. Think deflect heal insignia, negation stacks, or any of the benefits GWFs and GFs gain from being hit. The fact is, DoT builds are just plain bad in the current PvP meta. All respectable damage is burst damage.
I see your statement about SW being OP in mod 10 and I'll raise you: SWs will STILL be at the BOTTOM of the PvP barrel after all of the proposed changes thus far:
1) There are no significant upgrades to any PvP-oriented encounters. (Edit: DPS encounters)
2) Soulbinders need to focus on crit for DPS, which is penalized significantly.
3) Hellbringers lack the healing and survivability offered by Soulbinder.
4) An immunity frame once every 4 seconds, which may be much worse than you think considering TRs with Burning set. The Shadow Slip change is geared more towards PvE IMO.
5) Until a fix to SE is made, SWs will have no place in PvP.
(Edit: 6) Warlock's Bargain is a nice encounter most of the time. Sometimes, though, it is the absolute worst as it can kill you if you're under 15% health. It will also strip you of 15% health and return nothing if the enemy dodges or has high damage mitigation. Very poor tradeoff in these scenarios.)
I am a BIS pvp warlock for some time. Concerning pvp this above quote holds true. DEVS, please oh please, read above statement for pvp. This needs to be addressed and there have been statements placed on how to deal with some of these issues.
Will you consider removing the DoT mechanic from Creeping Death and replace it with piercing burst damage after 6 seconds? (Yes, I am aware you may then have to change the name to "Sudden Death"--hockey fans rejoice.) Once 6 seconds have elapsed and Creeping Death procs, the Creeping Death timer would start over the next time an enemy is attacked. (Maybe even place a short cooldown in between Creeping Death procs if necessary?)
Pros:
1) Fixes a potentially buggy multi-proc interaction with Oathbound Paladin's Aura of Courage. (Here comes the hate mail.)
2) Impements a level of timing-based skill to the Fury tree to maximize DPS efficiency.
3) Piercing damage so the benefit from Creeping Death is not mitigated twice over (PvP). (Edit: amenar gave a detailed explanation showing this does not occur.)
4) Potentially will lead to the beginning of fair DPS for SWs in PvP.
5) Potentially fix buggy a interaction between Fury SWs who use Warlock's Bargain on each other in PvP.
Cons:
1) SWs will have "less" DPS if a mob / critter is eliminated in under 6 seconds. This boosts the comparable damage of other classes. Totally fair in my opinion.
2) Again, to be fair, 6 seconds is better than 8 seconds because one could save up Soul Scorches and pump a bunch of them into an enemy (PvP) before Creeping Death procs.
3) Less ability for Fury SWs to place a heal over time on themselves in dungeons.
4) Developers would need to write more code, but they aren't busy anyway, right? I hear they don't listen to anyone and kick back with their feet on the desk all day. It's not like they're working on releasing the game on another console or dropping a new module. >:)
It actually uses the pre-mitigation damage your power dealt to calculate the 60% additional damage. For example, let's say you're hitting someone with 50% damage resistance, and your Eldritch Blast conveniently deals exactly 1,000 damage. Your combat log should look something like this:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 500 (1000) Fire Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 75 (150) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 75 (150) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 75 (150) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 75 (150) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
4 ticks for 75 = 300 damage, which is 60% of the 500 damage you dealt.
If it was getting double resisted, you would instead see:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 500 (1000) Fire Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 38 (75) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 38 (75) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 38 (75) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 38 (75) Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
In theory, I could change the implementation to use post-mitigation damage, and make it piercing, and then it would look like this:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 500 (1000) Fire Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 75 Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 75 Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 75 Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Your Creeping Death deals 75 Necrotic Damage to xXBadManXx.
Which might look a little nicer in the combat logs, but has other issues (Piercing damage is more difficult to setup and maintain than normal damage), and doesn't actually result in any more damage.
All of these conversations are definitely worth having, but I wanted to make sure we were all discussing what is actually happening, instead of assuming that Creeping Death is being double penalized by resistance. If you're seeing some case where that is actually happening, please let me know, get me screenshots, all that fun stuff.
In regards to piercing damage, referencing your data, I was thinking Creeping Death could interact like this:
Base attack: 1,000
After 50% damage mitigation: 500
Creeping death piercing damage ignores damage mitigation, so it would take 60% of 1,000 as opposed to 60% of 500. Therefore, assuming 4 ticks of Creeping Death, the combat log would show:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 500 (1,000) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 150 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 150 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 150 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 150 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Total damage = 500 + 600 = 1,100 (instead of 800)
This won't change PvE much as the majority of players have proper resistance ignored to counter critters. However, in PvP against adequate opponents, meaning you're hitting for the minimum 20% of your base attack, the value of Creeping Death ends up hitting for approximately 12% (0.60 * 0.20) over a whopping 8 seconds. That's 1.5% of the base attack per second. Ouchie. Here's an example:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 200 (1,000) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 15 (25) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Total damage = 320 *over 8 seconds*
Damage per second = 40
This is a gift to anyone you're combating in PvP because you're offering them minimal damage while procing their Negation, feats, Unstoppable, heal over time insignias, etc.
If this were converted to burst piercing damage after 6 seconds, it would look something like this:
Your Eldritch Blast deals 200 (1,000) Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
Your Creeping Death deals 600 Necrotic Damage to xXamenarXx
There are other layers of damage mitigation that go beyond this, such as shields, so this idea isn't too extreme. This would be a much needed addition to SWs in PvP, fix some wonky interactions between classes and players, and possibly reduce lag as well.
Either way, thanks for the feedback again!
The former has a long cooldown and needs the enemy to be at or below 50% health to be reasonably effective.
The latter requires stacks of Soul Sparks to be generated prior to use and lowers your survivablity once used.
Outside of that, there's not much going on.
We need balance that we could compete with others classes, not among paragon trees.
Now time for my thoughts about Pillar of Power changes, after trying utilize in action (heroic encounter/normal monster groups etc)
I can give feedback by putting all in 1 word, > Cr@p
With pillar of power I get resistance boost + monsters get reduced dmg output. But I lost movement, which is I am more vulnerable.
4 Winter wolfs wiped floor with my warlocks face. They all time just throwing my warlock from one side to other side. Not mention Area effect is so small, that if polar bear just step on corner of circle, u are more like had to step away in order to avoid incoming hit. Or even if u stay, u are kicked out of Pillar of Power effect area anyway.. <
With Pillar of power I get dmg boos, but I give up mobility and possibility to use Combat advantage.
Plus negating monsters damage resistance also is bad. U have literally sand right in face of monster and go hand 2 hand melee fight. Which mean hand of blight + flames of empowerment utilization. Plus adding warlock bargain for survivability, plus BoVa and in the end its still proves that warlock is not tank<<< And u hit ground dead.
Over all same nonsense as where before but just packed in different name.
Hellish rebuke, U apply and u move to other encounters, or at wills. Even with current changes, In real combat situation I didn't notice its effectiveness at all. And u guys though it would put even some competition for Soulbinders Essence Defiler. Then u are wrong. Hellish rebuke facing same problems as Creeping death. And even Red Dragon glyphs are doing better than Hellish rebuke. Red dragon glyphs provide 800 arp for 20s + 600 DoT without any reduction.
So over all Hellish rebuke can be utilizer only to trigger CD stack and Overload slotted Dragon glyphs.
Falme of empowerment changes also is drawback. In order to utilizer this class feature. < u had firstly hit with at will then cast encounter.. Remind same scenario as we had curse consuming problem.
I know that devs want to encourage players use powers which they didn't use or use very least. But these changes putting hellbringer in hard situation, Flames of empowerment specially for DoT + hand of blight melee on top Pillar of Power.
Its start to feel that u guys(developers) are out of ideas.... Or just want to make cosmetic changes and hope that everything will be OK,<< HB warlock need not adjustment, but rework over all. At least thats whats appear after testing current patch.
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
Gustave Le Bon.
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Edit: not 70%, 55% i read the new tooltip on RI ignored in PoH wrongly, that makes what i said about arm pen curve not so much truth also, only in absourd amounts of RI.
Base damage = 11,245
Damage after mitigation = 8,321
Ratio = 0.74
Based on our expecations of Creeping Death's behavior, we should see:
(Base damage * 0.60 * Ratio) / 4 ticks
This equates to an expectation of 1,248 damage per Creeping Death tick.
However, this is not what we are seeing.
Instead, its more like this:
(Base damage * 0.45 * Ratio) / 4 ticks
This equates to 936 damage per Creeping Death tick, as shown in @macjae's log.
Sometimes this power fails to cast a spiral if there are none.
Feedback: Artifact class features.
Artifact class features dark one's blessings and snuff out are really weak now, dont forget them.
Feedback. Power : Dark spiral aura
Decrease cast time.
Feedback: Power: flames of phlegethos
Increase flames of phlegethos damage and radius.
The coolest way obviously, increasing the skull size ^^, but seriously this power is only compensating when there are very close amount of mobs and even so they will easly spread making acoursed souls and gates of hell (and situationally TT) much superior.
Feedback: Feat: Battlewise
Decrease threath from damage 6% and 12% threath from healing.
Feedback: Power: Infernal speres
Mantain DR granted by the spheres for a while after they are consumed..
Damnation
Checking out damnation after the 2nd preview update, and none of the changes to improve soul fire damage appear to have taken place. The puppet does get more damage from warlocks curse, but it was difficult to tell if lesser curse with burning puppets was working(the tooltip wasn't updated), and if it was did it stack with warlocks curse.
The big issue with the feat tree is it's so far behind in dps compared to fury, and it doesn't increase survival ability compared too a fury build as the creeping death procs combined with life steal work incredibly well. If the tree doesn't get some boosts it's likely to become a dead tree.
The puppet is basically a single target dot, and the tree could use some help to make it the single target dps tree or improve the general dps with some large bonuses in spirit fire or improved damage from curses perhaps.
Wraith's Shadow
There's no easy way to tell how long it's been ticking or which phase it's in - did you cast it or did you move before it went off. It also has a very long animation (I occasionally used it before, but usually in the Orcus fight where I wasn't moving that much). Combined with trying to make sure the target is cursed before pressing it again makes it frustrating to use. It doesn't bring enough to the table to be worth it near as I can tell. BoVA and DT both offer good defensive options, and the buff to the soul puppet hardly matters if you're damnation it just means a bit faster increase to get the 5 stacks of investure, but you lost damage by not using a better encounter, and again other encounters offer defense now.
It would help if investiture healed your puppet and gave it a short term boost of some sort. If you didn't want to add a short damage boost to investiture a taunt when solo, and a group buff when partied could be interesting alternatives - taunt when partied could be bad ...
Killing Flames
This power has synergy with damnation(running with this in fury I had a puppet up fairly often), but it's only bonus is in the fury tree. Adding some short term buffs when investiture is given could make this more of a staple for damnation.
Soul Desecration
I didn't notice any speed increase when using the damnation capstone, and the tool tip wasn't updated. Granted it wasn't in the notes either so maybe this isn't getting in or just didn't make the build.
Soul Puppet
Can be difficult to use. Not sure if it would be possible to have some abilities cause it to teleport and attack the corresponding target - I was thinking of hadar's grasp as a good choice since it now has the synergy with soul puppet. It generally went where I hoped, and seemed to stay on target more then my earlier testing. Not sure if I just got lucky or if it's behaves differently if it's able to hit something - I was fighting more ranged stuff which didn't move as much this time I think.
Murderous flames
I didn't notice any MF procs when using KF 4.
Wrathful Souls
Healing from this was 5% so half of the stated 10% for 5 points in it. The healing is terrible regardless as the damage just isn't there.
Shadow Slip
I had a hard time telling if I was going immune. Even when I thought I moved at the right time I still seemed to take some damage - I would also receive an immune message? So I'm not sure if I dodged some attacks and was hit by others or what was going on. I'll try to test again later when I check out HB.
The buff to harrowstorm is hardly noticeable. I don't know what's wrong with this power. It's tooltip damage is more than even bargain, but the damage is so laughable still.
Wraith's Shadow is still such an unappealing clunky power. Maybe it should just auto-apply the secondary effect after a few seconds by itself as it's difficult to keep track of in a heated moment.
Even with Grasp, Wraith's, and curses the soul puppet with damnation deals REALLY terrible damage now.
Playing with hellbringer as well.
I'm not sure how much DR or DR debuff along with damage Pillar of Power gives, but the damage is nothing but a tickle. The radius is horrible. Only viable with the T2 damnation feat to allow the buff to stay on you for 5 seconds after exiting atm.
Hellish rebuke remains unimpressive. It fails to be good at anything. The repulse damage is low, the dot is low. I didn't even notice mobs hurting themselves from it by attacking me back. It should be a bread and butter DoT and punish.
Flames of Empowerment is just about useless besides a lone boss. There would be some synergy is Hand of Blight's melee was a cone AoE similar to Cleave so you could play a high risk/reward play style in melee range combo'd with the Pillar of Power buff and blades.
All we got is damage, so a 33% damagelift for firy blast or a 40% damageincrease for Harrow storm can´t deal with buffs that rises your damage x6 and instant kills a hole mobgroup by an "at will".
The poor experience in PVE matches with poor experience in PVP missing burst , selfbuffs or at least powerfull debuffs.
Curse Bite
Can you confirm that it is
a) generating AP at all
b) generating an appropriate amount
I can hit 8 targets and not even see the AP bar move atm.
Shadowslip is woking in a way very hard to control, the imuntity canot be reactivated with little shifts. After thinking about the cons and pros of the last sugestion i gave about changing it, here's my final sugestion.
Feedback: Power: shadowslip
1. Activating shadowslip will consume 30% of your stamina, during the next 3 seconds you mitigate 30% of all damage sources, have 30% increased control resistance and gain a 20% increase in your move speed, this effect can only be triggered once every 6 seconds.
2. Shadowslip now has a base 40% DR unchanged by time.
3. And what probably is too much but definitivelly would be the best: rework all powers so they all can be activated from shadowslip, appart from DT that would cancel shadowslip.
Asociated to this:
Feedback: Feat: Eldricht momentum
Eldritch momentum grants 5% stamina on all ranks, eldricht momentum has a cooldown of 2/1,7/1,4/1,1/0,8 seconds.
You are doing the wrong math, let me explain how it works.
Base damage: 11.245
Damage: 8.321
Now you need to calc the difference between base damage(11.245) to real damage(8.321) to see the target mitigation.
So: (damage/base damage*100)-100: (8321/11245*100)= 73,99733214762116-100= 26,00266785237884 (total target mitigation)
So we got 26,00266785237884 base mitigation
Now Creeping death works
Damage-mitigation*CD base damage
Damage:8.321
Mitigation(%): 26,002.667.8523.7884
Creeping death base damage: 60%
Maths
8321-26,002.667.8523.7884%=6157,318008003557*0,60
Creeping death damage: 3694,390804802134/4 ticks of 923,5977012005336
Note that neverwinter use a rounding table, that's why we see 936 final damage and not 923,5977012005336
Also you can see that creeping death get twice mitigated as i have told a million of times already!