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A Few Points About warlocks
tempus86
Member Posts: 165 Arc User
Magnitudes
all the Magnitudes shown on every ability is wrong in the tooltips if you play Hellbringer. This is because of the paragon feature down at the bottom call "Hellfire Expertise" which increases all fire and necrotic damage done by 25% ( which is everything ) but it does not reflect that in the tooltips.
So killing flames in reality does 500-750 magnitude + power + buffs etc, not the stated 400-600 in the tooltip
Vampiric Embrace does 250 magnitude, not the stated 200. etc etc etc
Soul Puppets and Soul investiture
Soul puppets scaling is weird. They scale with power and weapon damage, as close as I can tell its default is 25 magnitude per hit. They do not have any Critical Severity, ( even though the tooltip says they have 50%) and they do not get combat advantage.
Soul Investiture gets even weirder. The tooltip says each stack increases the puppets damage by 20% and stacks 5 times. In reality each stack increases base damage ( I.E. the damage of an attack at 0 stacks) by closer to 100%. My own puppet does 4000-5000 roughly at 0 stacks, and up to 30,000 at 5 stacks.
Recharge Speed and cooldown reduction
These stats are very different and should not be confused as "basically the same thing", because they are not. They interact very differently with different spells.
On a lot of encounters they work as follows, Encounter has "X" cooldown, Recharge speed reduces "X" by a certain percentage giving a new Cooldown of "Y" and Cooldown reduction reduces "Y" by a fixed amount to give "Z"
However, this does not work the same for encounters such as Dreadtheft, Curse Bite or Blade of the Vanquished Armies.
Curse bite has a "recharge speed" which is reduced by recharge speed, but it does not have a "cooldown" so cooldown reduction feats and gear features have no effect.
Dreadtheft and Blades both have Active duration periods of 6 seconds, and their Cooldowns do not start until the 6 seconds is up, OR they are interrupted, meaning for those 6 seconds, Cooldown reductions have NO EFFECT
Hadar's Grasp
This encounter is doing a lot more damage than 175 magnitude if used correctly ( and I also think its bugged)
Firstly - there is the 25% buff from hellfire expertise paragon feature meaning its default magnitude is actually 218.75 ( probably rounded up to 219)
Secondly - Its effect by default lasts for 2 seconds dealing damage every 0.5 seconds as well as an initial hit, for a total of 5 ticks each doing 43-44 magnitude each.
Thirdly - IF YOU ARE USING THIS CORRECTLY you will be consuming a curse. The curse consume adds an extra 1 second to the duration, and TWO MORE TICKS of the dot each doing 43-44 magnitude each tick for a total of 7 ticks for a total of between 306-310 magnitude
And finally the bit that may be bugged, I don't know. the total damage is actually doing roughly 25% more damage ON TOP of all this. don't believe me? go to a training dummy, stick a training weapon on 100-100 damage, and use vampiric embrace ( preferably a non crit to make it simpler)
then use hadars grasp WITHOUT curse consume, add the 5 ticks up and the total will be bigger than the vampiric embrace hit.
I suspect Hadars is double dipping the hellfire expertise buff somehow, or maybe its getting bonus damage from Control Power bonus's I don't know which
Brood of Hadar
550 magnitude initial hit, and a maximum of 6 bites from the Brood Beasts doing 100 magnitude each for a total of 1150 magnitude ( +25% from hellfire expertise) for a REAL total of 1437 magnitude...…. However.
The initial hit and the bites are separate, meaning that unlike most dot type attacks, each hit and bite does a separate critical hit roll. so the 1st hit could be a crit, but only 2 of the bites could crit etc etc.
Also you may not always get 6 bites from the beasts, as they do not last that long, they can be stunned/knocked back etc
all the Magnitudes shown on every ability is wrong in the tooltips if you play Hellbringer. This is because of the paragon feature down at the bottom call "Hellfire Expertise" which increases all fire and necrotic damage done by 25% ( which is everything ) but it does not reflect that in the tooltips.
So killing flames in reality does 500-750 magnitude + power + buffs etc, not the stated 400-600 in the tooltip
Vampiric Embrace does 250 magnitude, not the stated 200. etc etc etc
Soul Puppets and Soul investiture
Soul puppets scaling is weird. They scale with power and weapon damage, as close as I can tell its default is 25 magnitude per hit. They do not have any Critical Severity, ( even though the tooltip says they have 50%) and they do not get combat advantage.
Soul Investiture gets even weirder. The tooltip says each stack increases the puppets damage by 20% and stacks 5 times. In reality each stack increases base damage ( I.E. the damage of an attack at 0 stacks) by closer to 100%. My own puppet does 4000-5000 roughly at 0 stacks, and up to 30,000 at 5 stacks.
Recharge Speed and cooldown reduction
These stats are very different and should not be confused as "basically the same thing", because they are not. They interact very differently with different spells.
On a lot of encounters they work as follows, Encounter has "X" cooldown, Recharge speed reduces "X" by a certain percentage giving a new Cooldown of "Y" and Cooldown reduction reduces "Y" by a fixed amount to give "Z"
However, this does not work the same for encounters such as Dreadtheft, Curse Bite or Blade of the Vanquished Armies.
Curse bite has a "recharge speed" which is reduced by recharge speed, but it does not have a "cooldown" so cooldown reduction feats and gear features have no effect.
Dreadtheft and Blades both have Active duration periods of 6 seconds, and their Cooldowns do not start until the 6 seconds is up, OR they are interrupted, meaning for those 6 seconds, Cooldown reductions have NO EFFECT
Hadar's Grasp
This encounter is doing a lot more damage than 175 magnitude if used correctly ( and I also think its bugged)
Firstly - there is the 25% buff from hellfire expertise paragon feature meaning its default magnitude is actually 218.75 ( probably rounded up to 219)
Secondly - Its effect by default lasts for 2 seconds dealing damage every 0.5 seconds as well as an initial hit, for a total of 5 ticks each doing 43-44 magnitude each.
Thirdly - IF YOU ARE USING THIS CORRECTLY you will be consuming a curse. The curse consume adds an extra 1 second to the duration, and TWO MORE TICKS of the dot each doing 43-44 magnitude each tick for a total of 7 ticks for a total of between 306-310 magnitude
And finally the bit that may be bugged, I don't know. the total damage is actually doing roughly 25% more damage ON TOP of all this. don't believe me? go to a training dummy, stick a training weapon on 100-100 damage, and use vampiric embrace ( preferably a non crit to make it simpler)
then use hadars grasp WITHOUT curse consume, add the 5 ticks up and the total will be bigger than the vampiric embrace hit.
I suspect Hadars is double dipping the hellfire expertise buff somehow, or maybe its getting bonus damage from Control Power bonus's I don't know which
Brood of Hadar
550 magnitude initial hit, and a maximum of 6 bites from the Brood Beasts doing 100 magnitude each for a total of 1150 magnitude ( +25% from hellfire expertise) for a REAL total of 1437 magnitude...…. However.
The initial hit and the bites are separate, meaning that unlike most dot type attacks, each hit and bite does a separate critical hit roll. so the 1st hit could be a crit, but only 2 of the bites could crit etc etc.
Also you may not always get 6 bites from the beasts, as they do not last that long, they can be stunned/knocked back etc
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Comments
Maybe someone wants to check it, idk.
Still a large performance gap when running with a end game cw, hr, tr. In a 25min run I'm still only able to put up 70mil dmg vs cw putting out 84mil if I swap loadouts and weapon enchants between bosses. But put a second cw in and damage gap is almost doubled. Unfortunately put another warlock in and my damage drops an additional 10 to 20mil and takes longer. Weapon enchant lightning vorpal swapping gives me about 10mil more damage in aoe at the end of a lomm run than without. So far its the only way I found to increase overall damage, but honestly if the cw was to weapon enchant swap then damage disparity would be much greater with cw lightning procs compared to warlock since only 3 procs per rotation and no proc off sparks in aoe. I also use sorbet, elixir and potion to get crit sev to 124 and power to 218k while cw I test with has 190k base without using consumables and doesnt swap loadouts or or even powers from single target setup in testing.
Ri stacks working somewhat better and not dropping completely off after 5 stacks for me but dropping to 1 and peak kf increased from 760k to 820k on crit with ca with max stacks.
Using wooden weapon my atwills and base encounters were the same with no change from before update. My atwill with ca and cursed target takes average 368 base and 599 crit hit. Kf 4021 base and 6691 crit hit. With alabaster average atwill 34k crit still and still first ri stack kf 380k crit average
Creeping death still broken, gets stuck on really low proc, less than 200 dmg even after 600k+ killing flames in a rotation,seems as if it gets stuck then after 5 to 10 procs it just stops for a few rotations and pops back up really low again.
I stopped using curse consume mechanics in aoe and single target mainly due to spark cooldown reduction not affecting curse bite and both cb and hg proc of parting blasphemy doesnt scale well with higher power compared to 15% damage from applied curse and dtd with ri stacking occurring in aoe or a reliable rl stacking using acc in single target. My kf don't exceed mid 600k hits with parting blasphemy. Parring blasphemy only nets me 80k first rotation with cb, then 40k per rotation on consecutive rotations or with hg. Extra 3k per at will, 20k per hfr, 30k on hg and upwards of 200k on kf has a higher return utilizing curse synergy and forgoing curse consume feat all together.
I really wish fb would perform better but magnitude make it a subpar performer aoe range isn't great and both hfr and fb have an extremely slow activation compared to other class encounters. Hfr and fb activate like a cw fireball cast time, but fireball performs better than both utilizing smoulder mechanics and feats, magnitude and range.
I use fb, hfr, kf in aoe to apply curses and kf kills grant ri stacks with npnm and dtd. If adds are smaller cb curse consume build is better in aoe, but prolonged encounters with stronger adds it doesnt perform well without the ability to reduce cb cast time. Single target I now run npnm and acc for reliable ri stacks. Start rotation with 2 or 3 atwills for ca and curse, hg, hfr, atwill untill hg cooldown at 13 seconds, kf, tab tab atwill tab, atwill ,hg off cooldown repeat rotation from hg. Sparks usually at 30 for kf in rotation for highest hit. I throw in dsa at 3 orbs in rotations as available. Best rotation I could find since all core mechanics and feats rely of sacrificing damage to improve damage and old damnation clunky ri mechanic just isn't a great mechanic to build around, just working... and dots have been diminished and don't compete well with burst classes in general.
Warlocks shouldn't have to work this hard to still have such a gap in performance. Without consumables, higher power, and weapon swapping the performance gap between other classes is even worse. Once the new ca range is implemented the damage disparity will increase further since npnm was our crutch to even try and keep pace with other classes.
Warlocks are hard pressed to even compete with ray or frost alone with 500 to 280 magnitude per second excluding additional chill stacks etc. Other class mechanics and feats are synergistic while ours are contradictary and self defeating after mod 16 implementation.
If warlocks were in a great place there wouldn't be such a large consensus about issues with the class. Such a large disparity of warlocks that perform well or have builds out to test and implement for players that are as competitive as with other classes. I've seen dev interactions with the player base by large magnitudes in every other class during preview and after. Warlock is neglected in contrast.
I don't even need to go into how bad the soulweaver spec is in contrast to any other heal class. That's a big bag of fubar on it's own.