> @nabu#4746 said: > @lorun2009 ...I have never seen a post beyond mod 10 looking for a warlock to fulfill a “Hdps” position... >
I will say that I once accepted an invitation from a random player who had been looking for “HDPS SW” for CR. I normally decline invitations from players I don’t know, but I was so shocked that I had to know what the deal was.
The run was fine, but I never did find out exactly why they had insisted on SW, especially when I turned out to be the only DPS-capable character in the party. I don’t think I’ve seen HDPS SW ads before or since.
We can't fill the HDPS spot, you as warlock are expected to play as buffer/healer. It's almost offensive to be worst dps than a tank class. My warlock is almost 16k and i run as templock to buff classes worst geared than me, because it's the "balance" for the devs. I see 18k Sw trying to get a run as dps and failing, they need to run as templock to be part of end game dungeons, it's disgusting.
Last time @balanced#2849 was active was the day he created this thread, unfortunately. I wonder whether he'll show up in a reasonable amount of time.
Anyway, I too wanted to express my disagreement with how the class is being treated/tweaked, I mean, sure maybe better than on live but, in the grand scheme of things, still very underwhelming.
We have provided a lot of posts with good feedback and the class is yet to be a competitive striker, sadly Bug of Hadar made many people think the class is better than it really is and, anyway, it's a PVE, mod 12 onwards dungeon/trials only bug. Don't get me wrong, it is good to see Damnation is getting some love, but, when you try to change something, you need to do it in a way that such tweaks actually modify the situation you made those changes for and with sw, that wasn't the case.
Much like I predicted, mod 13 changes forced a large portion of our community to run as Templocks in order to get invited to endgame runs as buff slaves of proper striker classes (read: non SW) and some managed to survive thanks to Bug of Hadar. The overwhelming majority of us created our warlocks to be damage dealers, not other striker classes' buff slaves and, with the current state of the class, @balanced#2849, we are expected to be the latter... so, it is good that templock mains can have a good time being invited to endgame runs as buff slaves, but, you should give us players who want to play the class' main role, damage, the tools to do so and you got plenty of feedback to know what to do.
@balanced#2849 is it possible to see your warlock (if you have one) to see where you come from with your proposed tweaks? Are your tweaks designed considering Bug of Hadar (either its existence or removal)?
Some feedback on your mod 15 changes:
Fury vs Damnation in mod 15 as it currently stands:
Fury: a lot simpler and faster to play, doesn't have to worry about stacking self - buffs quickly nor losing them. Damnation: takes a while to be fully self - buffed, damage bonus from capstone works for encounter powers only.
With this in mind and hopefully you'll consider what I wrote below, the damage output of a damnationlock should consistently outperform that of furylock provided that is played correctly. Think about, it is technically harder and slower to play, if it won't have a noticeable advantage over fury in single target dps then what would be the point of it? Like, if difference will end up being minor (except maybe Orcus fight in t9g) why would anyone in their right mind run as Damnation when you could generate similar dps as Fury with a fraction of the effort?
Damnation capstone:
- Like others mentioned, you cannot refresh stacks once you get to 5 so the buff inevitable falls off. Please address that.
- Even if you get to address the problem of not being able to refresh stacks, getting 5 of them still will be fairly slow, so, you need to provide more ways of gaining stacks (like gaining one per at-will or soul puppet hit) otherwise it will be at least more practical to keep playing as Fury and let Damnation continue to be forgotten about.
- Even if you tweak capstone so we can refresh stacks, 20 seconds uptime for encounters only is very troublesome and underwhelming: Think of certain dungeons or parts of the game where you transition from trash clearning to boss fights, you'll often start the boss fight with zero stacks which will slow down your already SW-slow rotation. A way to counter this, so we can run smoothly as Damnation for both aoe and single target dps situations, is to increase the uptime of it to 45 seconds or so, that should be enough that everyone can get ready for boss fight and you get to start them without losing the buff.
- It affects encounter powers only, therefore, it should grant a greater damage boost to them. Imo, make each stack grant 15% or 20% bonus damage for encounter, up from that shy 10%.
- Even if we got a way to heal the puppet, you should get the cooldown to automatically summon one when dealing damage back to mod 13 level, aka 10 seconds, down from 15.
Puppet and spirits:
- What @bellkazi found out and said, address their CA issue and check out about Immolation Spirits now lower damage. - Puppet should benefit from player buffs (Fray, Break the Spirit, Soul Bonding, etc) otherwise it will remain hilariously underpowered. - Make our ghostly friend update its critical chance constantly. - Make it cc immune at least in pve, it gets so cc'ed sometimes that it barely can get a few hits in, it's rather laughable.
Gastly Commander:
Increase the damage given from it to 25%, up from 15%.
Wrathful Souls:
If you disagree about letting the puppet scale with buffs then please consider making this feat x3 - 4 times as effective, that way the puppet will actually deal meaningful or at least not so terrible damage.
DoT powers:
Reducing ticks is good in the sense that makes them effectively take less time to deal full damage (I assume you tried that with Hadar's Graps and Dreadteft), however, in order for that to work so you don't end up nerfing the power (like you did with Hadar's Grasp), you need to consider that you need to increase the damage each tick does by a generous amount to make up for the lower amount of hits and for the interaction they have with feats or enchantments: In Hadar's Grasp case, as you didn't increase its damage enough, the lower amount of ticks (which in turn mean less Aura of Courage, Killing Curse and fey weapon hits) ended up decreasing the damage the power does. For HG, you should either give it Dreadteft min and max damage values or at least please get it back to mod 14 version so we don't get that power nerfed once mod 15 goes live.
@kreatyve or @nitocris83, do you know if we are going to get a developer reply at all? Like from balanced, @noworries#8859 or @terramak ? It has been over a week since this thread was created and we are yet to get a single response, not even an acknowledgement that they're going to do anything with our feedback.
Playing as warlock or any other non-gwf-gf class haven't sense in this game, they made all for them for years and they always nerfs a class when can compete with gwf as main dps class. They made Tenser's disk (with a buff for CON-STR-DEX (GWF's main ability scores) Orcus set (CON-STR) they proc a lot of buffs better than SW, for mod 14 they have Prominence weapon enchantment (that only works great on GWF) I play a GWF i'm not saying that they need a nerf, but it's not fair that other dps classes are always getting a brutal nerf, a bad called "balance" that turn the class into nothing for end game parties. I play as main character my warlock i don't want to play as support, it's good to have an alternative but there's no choice when nobody wants your class as damage dealer, nevermind your item level or playstyle, i'm lucky to run some end game dungeons as support, but never as dps, because other classes can do it a lot better than warlocks.
I am currently consisently topping the dps leader board in dungeons, often against other dps classes with higher item levels with my rotation in which killing flames was the finishing move. So I'm actually concerned that this boost to initial damage and nerf to hit point based damage will make the power much less viable for me. It says in the main article on mod 15's upcoming changes that this was done to appease people who complained that the initial damage to high hit point targets wasn't good enough. My question is why were people using killing flames on high health targets? If your rotation was set up to utilize killing flames as a finishing move which in my opinion it seems it was designed to be. You should be using it to finish after your first two encounters, daily and curse(s) dropped the target below the 25% hit points and finished it off with the bonus damage. By the time everything procced I was doing insane damage this way and killed everything other than bosses in one rotation. In my personal opinion I often didn't even switch it out during boss fights because in a party you're not the only dps. You just bide your time while your other party members whittle the boss down and when it's finally under 25% you shine with huge hits. I see many others who've posted ahead of me disagree with me but personally this power and my rotation works beautifully for me and I for one am apprehensive about the change.
I was consisently topping the dps leader board in dungeons, often against other dps classes with higher item levels with my rotation in which killing flames was the finishing move. So I'm actually concerned that this boost to initial damage and nerf to hit point based damage will make the power much less viable. It says in the main article on mod 15's upcoming changes that this was done to appease people who complained that the initial damage to high hit point targets wasn't good enough. My question is why were people using killing flames on high health targets? If your rotation was set up properly you should be using it to finish after your first two encounters, daily and curse(s) dropped the target below the 25% hit points and finished it off with the bonus damage. So in my opinion it seems like this change will benefit people who weren't using killing flames properly and penalize those who were. I don't think the devs consider sometimes that complaints aren't automatically legitimate. Sometimes it's the player's ineffective utilization of the power and not the power itself that's the problem.
The complaint about KF's damage to higher health targets isn't because of people not understanding how the power works nearly as much as it is about people not wanting the power to be unnecessarily weak against those targets.
Also, we aren't really talking about rotations on trash mobs, here. KF doesn't belong in an AoE rotation, so it's not quite as simple as players not using their first two encounters to bring a target low before casting KF as a finisher; it's more that it doesn't make sense for KF to have such a wide variance in damage where it's somewhat bad against a higher HP target and extremely powerful against one that is nearly dead, which makes for annoying interactions in epic boss fights.
Finally, I would not use public DPS leaderboards to draw any conclusions about game balance. Many, many players are so "casual" that they don't even make it as far as reading these forums, much less trying to put together advantageous builds and rotations.
I am currently consisently topping the dps leader board in dungeons, often against other dps classes with higher item levels with my rotation in which killing flames was the finishing move.
So can a lot of us, but that isn't the issue. In pug groups and random dungeons that isn't that hard if you can time KF with buffs. But just because you top DPS a CN doesn't mean you will get invited to CR as main DPS.
My question is why were people using killing flames on high health targets?
We aren't, and this is the point. Within seconds a GWF is able to use IBS and hit insanely high numbers, a GF within seconds is able to hit a boss, after his insane self buffs, for even more insane damage with Griffons Wrath. I don't know much about CWs and TRs, I don't play them. But, SWs can not do that. We have to wait until the boss is nearly dead before we get those high numbers. And to be fair, my KF will usually be the hardest hitting attack on a boss, but when I look at the logs, there's my KF at the top but the next 7 down are IBS or disintegrate or Griffons, etc. That's the point being made about Killing Flames.
*deleted waiting for a fair dialogue and feedback on companies side to solve open issues, until then no more support from my side.
Post edited by schietindebux on
4
espasbadfistMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 39Arc User
I could only support the points that @schietindebux made.
On top of that comes that certain things don't seem to work for warlocks as they do for GWF like the damage boost from certain weapon enchantments or interaction with AoC from paladins. It is annyoing seeing anytime a GWF doing more damage from prominence enchantment than my SW does with the first hit (or even later ones) of Killing Flames. There are situations where my hardest hitting ecounter deals less damage than his at-will. I think this is really ridicoulus.
After all i don't think that the SW is weak by itself - i still enjoy playing it and i am looking gladly to the changes that are up to come. But in comparison with the other top-dps the SW IS too weak or the others are too strong.
I still think that it would be best for the game as a whole to bring down the damage from those stupidly overpowered classes to the level of the SW but i fear that this could not be done because of economical reasons. I have no evidence but just the feeling that the pay-to-win people do not really bother about playing a warlock.
Now as the soul puppet can crit i recommend that Murderous Flames should be able to crit (again?) too. Even if i had been wrong with that feeling that it does not really add to damage (thx for the statements to this) it still feels like more of a Murderous Joke. I think it was able to crit in the past (really not sure because that must be mod 5 or before where i just started the game) the only reason i could think of to nerf it was probably the interaction and damage looping with the old Tyrannical Threat on 3 targets. As i said really not sure but maybe a long time SW could give a statement to this.
> "Stepchild-encounter" in PVE like: > Infernal Spheres are from higher interest in PVP. > Wraiths Shadow might get a role in Damnationbuilds, to buff up Investiture stacks faster in mod 15. > Vampric embrance and Harrow Storm are the only encounter beside Cursed Bites I never use (mabye better in mod 15 that Cursed Bite) >
Slight side note, but I’d swap BoVA with Curse Bite on the stepchild list. Even as Templock, BoVA is kind of pointless, while Curse Bite is surprisingly useful in high-DPS parties where mobs don’t gather as neatly and don’t live long enough for repeated Hadar smacks. AoH will of course win in DPS in the ideal situation, but missing even a few mobs gives the advantage to CB.
Unless I’m missing something with BoVA, it’s not a debuffing power except when used with Darkness feat, which debuffs only for the SW, not the party.
Also, with the incoming improved animation lock on Dreadtheft, that power will become even worse on trash. It will still be a must for Temping on bosses, but it’s a pass for me for trash. In my Temping experience, running full AoE DPS powers like AoH or CB with PoP and FB improves trash clear more than spending time channeling and aiming DT.
Perfect idea to rework all classes at the same time!
Great things to work on animation and casting!
Good job (ex)terminating bugs!
Praiseworthy idea to improve Soulbinder and to revive Damnation
Sadly, just by reading, it will fall short: There is no clearly stated GOAL for Soulbinder nor Damnation.
It's more usefull to finish one job than start many and let them unfinished
Give SW meta-DPS (or better if over-time)
Enough (self) buff.
At least one good damaging power.
(If over-time choice): Add an increase of DPS over time/over damage (through Buffs, DoT, stacking Lesser Curses, ...).
Make Temptation consistent and competitive (legit "Healer"/"Support")
Consistency & Competitive (Protection & Buff)
Feat: Darkness: Make it shared.
Power: Vampiric Embrace: Reduce it's cooldown duration (-25/50%) to be able to react to emergencies.
Power: Warlock Bargain: Increase shared HealOverTime (to avoid spaming powers for heals continuity) (maybe not the self part if problematic to PvP).
Globally: Make SW's heals recognized as LEGIT HEALS for Boons, ...
Competitive (Protection & Buff)
Passive: Warding Curse: Make it shared.
Power: Wraiths Shadow: Improve visibility to know when recasting in order to keep the debuff on foes DPS (it's already a pain not to recast Warlock Curse on affected target).
Consistency
(Optional as it's useless) Power: Infernal Sphere: Make healing part shared.
Done some VERY fast testing:
WTF BUG: I got 2 Paranoïd Delusion companions
One not dimissable but still giving the bonding buff.
The other one is the normal companion that can be changed (so I got 2 invoked companion yeah!).
Needed to dimiss the normal one and change map to make the undimissable one to disapear.
Curse Bite: This power now has 2 charges. --> Good dps buff!
From character interface showed numbers it's the 3rd hardest hitting encouter and 1rst multi-target one (some pratical tests seems needed).
(Not checked if each charge call Weapon Enchant correctly.)
Globally those are GOOD changes (except some nerfs), SW still going in the good direction! But it's so slowly improving, that I expect to die of old age before SW reach legit meta...
Comments
> @lorun2009 ...I have never seen a post beyond mod 10 looking for a warlock to fulfill a “Hdps” position...
>
I will say that I once accepted an invitation from a random player who had been looking for “HDPS SW” for CR. I normally decline invitations from players I don’t know, but I was so shocked that I had to know what the deal was.
The run was fine, but I never did find out exactly why they had insisted on SW, especially when I turned out to be the only DPS-capable character in the party. I don’t think I’ve seen HDPS SW ads before or since.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
waiting for a fair dialogue and feedback on companies side to solve open issues, until then no more support from my side.
Last time @balanced#2849 was active was the day he created this thread, unfortunately. I wonder whether he'll show up in a reasonable amount of time.
Anyway, I too wanted to express my disagreement with how the class is being treated/tweaked, I mean, sure maybe better than on live but, in the grand scheme of things, still very underwhelming.
We have provided a lot of posts with good feedback and the class is yet to be a competitive striker, sadly Bug of Hadar made many people think the class is better than it really is and, anyway, it's a PVE, mod 12 onwards dungeon/trials only bug. Don't get me wrong, it is good to see Damnation is getting some love, but, when you try to change something, you need to do it in a way that such tweaks actually modify the situation you made those changes for and with sw, that wasn't the case.
Much like I predicted, mod 13 changes forced a large portion of our community to run as Templocks in order to get invited to endgame runs as buff slaves of proper striker classes (read: non SW) and some managed to survive thanks to Bug of Hadar. The overwhelming majority of us created our warlocks to be damage dealers, not other striker classes' buff slaves and, with the current state of the class, @balanced#2849, we are expected to be the latter... so, it is good that templock mains can have a good time being invited to endgame runs as buff slaves, but, you should give us players who want to play the class' main role, damage, the tools to do so and you got plenty of feedback to know what to do.
@balanced#2849 is it possible to see your warlock (if you have one) to see where you come from with your proposed tweaks?
Are your tweaks designed considering Bug of Hadar (either its existence or removal)?
Some feedback on your mod 15 changes:
Fury vs Damnation in mod 15 as it currently stands:
Fury: a lot simpler and faster to play, doesn't have to worry about stacking self - buffs quickly nor losing them.
Damnation: takes a while to be fully self - buffed, damage bonus from capstone works for encounter powers only.
With this in mind and hopefully you'll consider what I wrote below, the damage output of a damnationlock should consistently outperform that of furylock provided that is played correctly. Think about, it is technically harder and slower to play, if it won't have a noticeable advantage over fury in single target dps then what would be the point of it? Like, if difference will end up being minor (except maybe Orcus fight in t9g) why would anyone in their right mind run as Damnation when you could generate similar dps as Fury with a fraction of the effort?
Damnation capstone:
- Like others mentioned, you cannot refresh stacks once you get to 5 so the buff inevitable falls off. Please address that.
- Even if you get to address the problem of not being able to refresh stacks, getting 5 of them still will be fairly slow, so, you need to provide more ways of gaining stacks (like gaining one per at-will or soul puppet hit) otherwise it will be at least more practical to keep playing as Fury and let Damnation continue to be forgotten about.
- Even if you tweak capstone so we can refresh stacks, 20 seconds uptime for encounters only is very troublesome and underwhelming: Think of certain dungeons or parts of the game where you transition from trash clearning to boss fights, you'll often start the boss fight with zero stacks which will slow down your already SW-slow rotation. A way to counter this, so we can run smoothly as Damnation for both aoe and single target dps situations, is to increase the uptime of it to 45 seconds or so, that should be enough that everyone can get ready for boss fight and you get to start them without losing the buff.
- It affects encounter powers only, therefore, it should grant a greater damage boost to them. Imo, make each stack grant 15% or 20% bonus damage for encounter, up from that shy 10%.
- Even if we got a way to heal the puppet, you should get the cooldown to automatically summon one when dealing damage back to mod 13 level, aka 10 seconds, down from 15.
Puppet and spirits:
- What @bellkazi found out and said, address their CA issue and check out about Immolation Spirits now lower damage.
- Puppet should benefit from player buffs (Fray, Break the Spirit, Soul Bonding, etc) otherwise it will remain hilariously underpowered.
- Make our ghostly friend update its critical chance constantly.
- Make it cc immune at least in pve, it gets so cc'ed sometimes that it barely can get a few hits in, it's rather laughable.
Gastly Commander:
Increase the damage given from it to 25%, up from 15%.
Wrathful Souls:
If you disagree about letting the puppet scale with buffs then please consider making this feat x3 - 4 times as effective, that way the puppet will actually deal meaningful or at least not so terrible damage.
DoT powers:
Reducing ticks is good in the sense that makes them effectively take less time to deal full damage (I assume you tried that with Hadar's Graps and Dreadteft), however, in order for that to work so you don't end up nerfing the power (like you did with Hadar's Grasp), you need to consider that you need to increase the damage each tick does by a generous amount to make up for the lower amount of hits and for the interaction they have with feats or enchantments: In Hadar's Grasp case, as you didn't increase its damage enough, the lower amount of ticks (which in turn mean less Aura of Courage, Killing Curse and fey weapon hits) ended up decreasing the damage the power does. For HG, you should either give it Dreadteft min and max damage values or at least please get it back to mod 14 version so we don't get that power nerfed once mod 15 goes live.
@kreatyve or @nitocris83, do you know if we are going to get a developer reply at all? Like from balanced, @noworries#8859 or @terramak ? It has been over a week since this thread was created and we are yet to get a single response, not even an acknowledgement that they're going to do anything with our feedback.
Also, we aren't really talking about rotations on trash mobs, here. KF doesn't belong in an AoE rotation, so it's not quite as simple as players not using their first two encounters to bring a target low before casting KF as a finisher; it's more that it doesn't make sense for KF to have such a wide variance in damage where it's somewhat bad against a higher HP target and extremely powerful against one that is nearly dead, which makes for annoying interactions in epic boss fights.
Finally, I would not use public DPS leaderboards to draw any conclusions about game balance. Many, many players are so "casual" that they don't even make it as far as reading these forums, much less trying to put together advantageous builds and rotations.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
waiting for a fair dialogue and feedback on companies side to solve open issues, until then no more support from my side.
waiting for a fair dialogue and feedback on companies side to solve open issues, until then no more support from my side.
waiting for a fair dialogue and feedback on companies side to solve open issues, until then no more support from my side.
Guild: Ruathym Corsairs
waiting for a fair dialogue and feedback on companies side to solve open issues, until then no more support from my side.
On top of that comes that certain things don't seem to work for warlocks as they do for GWF like the damage boost from certain weapon enchantments or interaction with AoC from paladins. It is annyoing seeing anytime a GWF doing more damage from prominence enchantment than my SW does with the first hit (or even later ones) of Killing Flames. There are situations where my hardest hitting ecounter deals less damage than his at-will. I think this is really ridicoulus.
After all i don't think that the SW is weak by itself - i still enjoy playing it and i am looking gladly to the changes that are up to come. But in comparison with the other top-dps the SW IS too weak or the others are too strong.
I still think that it would be best for the game as a whole to bring down the damage from those stupidly overpowered classes to the level of the SW but i fear that this could not be done because of economical reasons. I have no evidence but just the feeling that the pay-to-win people do not really bother about playing a warlock.
Now as the soul puppet can crit i recommend that Murderous Flames should be able to crit (again?) too. Even if i had been wrong with that feeling that it does not really add to damage (thx for the statements to this) it still feels like more of a Murderous Joke. I think it was able to crit in the past (really not sure because that must be mod 5 or before where i just started the game) the only reason i could think of to nerf it was probably the interaction and damage looping with the old Tyrannical Threat on 3 targets. As i said really not sure but maybe a long time SW could give a statement to this.
waiting for a fair dialogue and feedback on companies side to solve open issues, until then no more support from my side.
> "Stepchild-encounter" in PVE like:
> Infernal Spheres are from higher interest in PVP.
> Wraiths Shadow might get a role in Damnationbuilds, to buff up Investiture stacks faster in mod 15.
> Vampric embrance and Harrow Storm are the only encounter beside Cursed Bites I never use (mabye better in mod 15 that Cursed Bite)
>
Slight side note, but I’d swap BoVA with Curse Bite on the stepchild list. Even as Templock, BoVA is kind of pointless, while Curse Bite is surprisingly useful in high-DPS parties where mobs don’t gather as neatly and don’t live long enough for repeated Hadar smacks. AoH will of course win in DPS in the ideal situation, but missing even a few mobs gives the advantage to CB.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
waiting for a fair dialogue and feedback on companies side to solve open issues, until then no more support from my side.
Also, with the incoming improved animation lock on Dreadtheft, that power will become even worse on trash. It will still be a must for Temping on bosses, but it’s a pass for me for trash. In my Temping experience, running full AoE DPS powers like AoH or CB with PoP and FB improves trash clear more than spending time channeling and aiming DT.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
Done some VERY fast testing:
Globally those are GOOD changes (except some nerfs), SW still going in the good direction!
But it's so slowly improving, that I expect to die of old age before SW reach legit meta...
waiting for a fair dialogue and feedback on companies side to solve open issues, until then no more support from my side.