Experienced an issue in Master Expeditions on my Hellbringer Warlock. When fighting a crab boss my soul spark generation stopped completely. For most of the fight I generated no sparks at all, and even dying and being revived didn't fix it.
I have to admit that, in the end, Hellbringer turned out pretty well. There may be some opportunity to smooth things out (e.g. the Soul Investiture mechanic is still a pain to deal with, requires slotting specific powers to take advantage of, has a fairly small window for successful maintenance in a single-target rotation, and is still unable to be refreshed once at max stacks)...but overall I am happy to continue as a Hellbringer main.
I don't have much to say about Soulweaver since I've played with it for maybe 20 minutes in total since launch.
Across the board I think the game is too stingy with AP gain; if the original idea was truly for Dailies to represent equally vs. Encounters and At-Wills in terms of % of our total damage output, we're nowhere close. With the magnitude dialed down significantly, maybe we could take another pass on AP gain?
I started running Hellfire Ring, HG and KF and it's a feeling of accomplishment when you see a hit for over 200k with KF. Even if it's a false feeling because the mob/boss was going to die with the next at will or encounter anyway. But at least I can say to my Cleric friends that I can also do 200K+ hits. It's pathetic really that after all of the changes and years of feedback, KF still has that stupid mechanic. As for effectiveness, this isn't a very effective build but it does ok in groups and in single target.
HFR, FB and CB are probably better choices, at least on aoe. One of the guys in our alliance swears by BoVA but he specialises in quirky builds that no one else uses irrespective of performance so I haven't tried it. Single target, HG, HFR and KF are the only real options that I can see.
I started running Hellfire Ring, HG and KF and it's a feeling of accomplishment when you see a hit for over 200k with KF. Even if it's a false feeling because the mob/boss was going to die with the next at will or encounter anyway. But at least I can say to my Cleric friends that I can also do 200K+ hits. It's pathetic really that after all of the changes and years of feedback, KF still has that stupid mechanic. As for effectiveness, this isn't a very effective build but it does ok in groups and in single target.
HFR, FB and CB are probably better choices, at least on aoe. One of the guys in our alliance swears by BoVA but he specialises in quirky builds that no one else uses irrespective of performance so I haven't tried it. Single target, HG, HFR and KF are the only real options that I can see.
Anyone else have any viable builds running atm?
For AoE I've been running CB, HFR, FB; for single-target HG, CB, KF.
The combined magnitude of the two charges of CB is decent, and it synergizes well with the Parting Blasphemy feat. HFR for single-target isn't practical for me because of the lack of burst and the need for the target to remain completely stationary for optimal damage.
The combined magnitude of the two charges of CB is decent, and it synergizes well with the Parting Blasphemy feat. HFR for single-target isn't practical for me because of the lack of burst and the need for the target to remain completely stationary for optimal damage.
Fair enough. On a boss like Drufi or Strahd, yeah thy move a lot. But Orcus and the Arcolith tend to just stay there and it was with them in mind I chose HFR. I'll try CB though.
After doing the campaign, playing a few solo and group Master Expeditions I can honestly say the class is very lacklustre. There just isn't the appeal there anymore. So I was kinda hoping someone had put together a build that would make me change my mind.
Warlock's Bargain does not remove debuffs off the caster.
I can understand why it doesn't heal the caster, that would make its HP cost meaningless, but it definitely needs to remove debuffs off the SW otherwise we have no way to cleanse ourselves.
4
rifter1969Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 516Arc User
I started running Hellfire Ring, HG and KF and it's a feeling of accomplishment when you see a hit for over 200k with KF. Even if it's a false feeling because the mob/boss was going to die with the next at will or encounter anyway. But at least I can say to my Cleric friends that I can also do 200K+ hits. It's pathetic really that after all of the changes and years of feedback, KF still has that stupid mechanic. As for effectiveness, this isn't a very effective build but it does ok in groups and in single target.
HFR, FB and CB are probably better choices, at least on aoe. One of the guys in our alliance swears by BoVA but he specialises in quirky builds that no one else uses irrespective of performance so I haven't tried it. Single target, HG, HFR and KF are the only real options that I can see.
Anyone else have any viable builds running atm?
Thanks for the feedback.
And I agree with @vorphied , I am a little pleasantly surprised, and a little gratified when my KF hits for over 200k.
On my Hellbringer build, I'm using FB as my opening salvo, followed by some Eldtrich blast and Essence Defiler, then HG to spawn a puppet, a little more EB to reapply curses (running with ACC) and then KF.
When I hit with KF I'm seeing big heals on the puppet. Allowing it to stay in the fight longer.
I recently started using Acursed Souls Daily instead of TC... as per another post by @vorphied And that seem to help greatly when mobs tend to surround me in MEs. But still using Brood of Hadar as my main single target daily.
It would be nice if they fix Shadow Slip so we can use it quickly instead of waiting for out At-Wills to finish.
TL:DR Warlock can be made to do good damage now. Its far too difficult and outside the stated goals of Mod 16 to achieve that, so the class needs work. Lots of suggestions in this thread on what to do at various levels of difficulty to implement, now is the time to start reviewing those.
There has been a lot of discussion around the place of the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of Warlocks. In particular the effectiveness of Wizards is brought up as a comparison point.
The key is synergy.
Here is a selection from Wizard:
The synergy of these feats and powers is fairly apparent and how they combine to build effective DPS for the party is fairly clear. I'm not even going to claim this is the best combination of things the Wizard can provide, it just happens to be one that shows clear synergy.
In so doing it also shows the problems that the Warlock has in producing DPS, building that level of synergy with Warlock is far harder, and far more difficult to sustain. Let's face it Ray of Frost sustains the feats and powers shown above for Wizard.
Its not that Warlock cannot be tuned to produce good damage, on the contrary I believe it can be, its that the effort and player skill required to do that is orders of magnitude higher than what is needed to get good results out of a Wizard.
This means that Warlock is breaking one of the goals of Mod16, simplifying the feats, powers and boons is supposed to make it harder to end up with a trap build. In order to do this effectively you need simple reliable synergy to exist inside the class, and Warlock lacks this.
Key problems that remain for DPS Warlock:
It is unclear if a number of powers are Fire or Necrotic powers (well Fire powers, all the Necrotic ones are pretty clear). There is only 1 reliable power for triggering Risky Investment, and its cast time is too slow to make that effective in all but the longest encounters. (ie there is a lack of synergy with the feat in the class) Despite having a boosted Recovery Speed, recovery time of encounter powers remains on par with other DPS. (eg I have a 30% recharge rate boost, just to cast spells at the same speed as my wizard with a 10% recovery speed - that's before I consider feats which both classes can access to speed up casting time.) Warlocks lack AP gain. Badly. If encounter damage was substituting for daily damage this would be fine, but it isn't because encounter cast rates are not effectively faster than other DPS classes. A number of powers are simply dead in the tree, due to either lack of synergy (Dreadtheft), targeting bugs (Arms of Hadar) or just being too ineffective to bother with (Infernal Flames). Key elements simply lack sufficient magnitude to produce the expected outcomes for the class (eg Creeping Death, Soul Scorch, Wraith Claw)
Heals has 1 major problem, if it cannot produce Soul Sparks it cannot heal. This is a problem in all dungeons with immunity phases for bosses (Bore Worm is obvious at the moment) or significant use of stuns. Secondary to this, but in the eyes of many players just as important are the lack of a party wide cleanse (we cannot cleanse ourselves) and there are problems with heal magnitudes when healing the 300k+ players or tanks with 500-800k health (see Arcturia's cocoon).
I don't really have much to say on the heals front, I just haven't played it enough in situations where it has mattered to have a strong grasp of its needs.
Many suggestions were made in this thread for improving the class.
Perhaps now is the time to go back and revisit them and re-examine the class to make improvements?
"Simple" suggestions:
Adjust Tooltips of all powers so that the damage type is clear. Make Vampiric Embrace's heal absolutely work and make it Curse Consume to summon a puppet. Remove the Curse Synergy from Dreadtheft. Fix the targeting of Arms of Hadar. Increase the magnitude of single target spells by 50. Make Soul Scorch 15 Magnitude / Shard on the primary target and 5/shard on the secondary targets.
"Complex" suggestions:
Re-order the powers so that there is one AoE power in the first 3 powers. Remove Infernal Spheres and Blades of Vanquished Armies and replace with new powers. As these are limited to DPS spec they should offer appropriate options (a buff/debuff effect, and another pure AoE damage effect). Rework feats to create synergy around Fire and Necrotic power use with Curses.
The goal needs to be to improve the class' internal synergy, and stop it fighting with itself to achieve its ends. The Wizard class is an excellent example of how this should look.
Time for the Warlock to get the same effort and treatment.
Obsidian Moonlight - Paladin Obsidian Oath - Warlock A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.
A few things I would like to see. 1. Soulweaver needs the ability to cleanse them self. 2. Soulweaver needs an ability to cast a direct heal on a party member . Why do you ask because you keep using enemy that are immune to damage. Making this healer class unable to heal at all during those times. 3. General - With the removal of Life Steal from the game and that being the core defense for this class. Along with a direct offensive buff.You need to return Pillar of Power to its former Mod. 15 form and make it an universal encounter power that both Hellbringer and Soulweaver can both use. It was a far better all around power before it was changed into a heal buff. This will greatly benefit the ones leveling up this class as well. 4. Shadow Slip. This power needs to have priority over all other powers. Making it delay just so even an At-Will can cast is silly at best. Causing far to many deaths in general. 5. Cleaning up some game play with are on again off again curse mechanics. Just stop, make all powers apply a curse if one is not already on the target . Make it have a clear standard effect and remove all the other bonus adding and taking away that some powers get. Just a clear and direct effect, one will have when facing off against a Warlock. You can skip the last one if need be, but the other four need to be done tomorrow.
Hello there! Both healer and dps path needed improvement could come from tab mechanics. An additional tab choice on dps path (i.e. a spark generator tab with spark consuming encounters and curse spreading additional effect) could be interesting, but probably hard to implement. A possible fast and effective solution could come from t1 feats: - It's assumed soulweaver can get sparks in combat without a target, mainly because essence drain is dealing focused dmg. Reworking essence of time feat, making it remove the dmg from essence drain or changing it to an AoE, could be a solution to allow casting it without a target. An additional effect, like the chance to move at slower rate while channeling (same as cleric) or x% CC resistance, would be nice. Talking about Boreworm, HoT component is important there, and warlock's lackluster in it and have to add we miss the damage mitigation from warding curse. Some of above mentioned options could be incorporated to a reworked prince of hell too, and i don't speak about missed chance to self-cleanse, as it's clearly a bug. I don't mind how Devs choose to implement that solution, just want a reason to invest AD in building my healer loadout - after soul scorch nerf i feel like warlocks (situationally) miss a tab choice: clunky animation, low dmg, CD reduction skippable choosing other t5 feat. A possible easy solution could pass from reducing casting time and reworking double scorch, allowing it to restore SS pre-nerf single target functionality and magnitude.
As a reminder, we still need tweaks/rework for some poor feat/spells (Creeping Death, Dreadtheft, Arms of Hadar, Gates of Hell, Flames of Phlegethos, Prince of Hell on top of all), some idea to add the previous ones i posted: - Hadar's Grasp is not providing sparks on crit DoTs anymore, so warlock needs a single target spark generator to replace Hellfire Ring during boss fights. Dreadtheft could take this place, with a significant CD reduction (I'd suggest same as Blade of Vanquished Armies), doubling spark gain as curse synergy effect and reducing target cap to 1-3 as a compensation. - replace Gates of Hell with Forcecage and move it to heal spec, swapping with Immolation Spirits spot: Forcecage should be a damage mitigation area, with an HoT effect and a spark generation additional bonus.
Most of fixes had come, time to work for ingame improvements now
Please do something about Soulweaver. The path is rediculessly underpowered and bugged. Most core abilities like cleanse-Warlock's Bargain- are bugged and underpowered inflicting more damage than healing over the run. Pillar of power 20 mag heals? I mean those micro heals are nice but completely <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> running content with one hit mobs. The class has exactly one healing spell that is 2-3 times weaker than DC's or Paladins spells. The daily is about 4 times weaker than DC's and drains up to 80% of max HP due to bugs. The feat Life Bind kills you consistently and together with Soul Pact and Warlock's Bargain Soulweaver is top paingiver in many runs due to self-inflicted damage, being top as unmoveable object over the tank. Healing abilities are underwhelming compared to other classes, inable to recover sparks when no target available. Where my Oathkeeper can chain 500 mag+500 to 1000 barrier effects without stopping due to CoP, my warlock can only ask teammates to pot.
About Hellbringer, not much to say. No top no flop. CW and TR are doing the race, no matter what I try, but it could be worse.
There is obviously the general agreement, that warlock has to inflict damage to heal or support the party, without compensation in terms of better healing over other classes but 4 times weaker power. I would like to question the concept.
First of, if my warlock is paingiver, dealing 50% of dps by selfinflicted damage (the ammount can go higher, but yout end to die too much), I want at least some compensation for it. Oathkeeper shields for huge ammounts and has 2-3 more efective spells in terms of healing+ shielding. So warlock should have anything to compensate this gap.
->Shatter Spark should do 500mag heal and put a HOT on a teammember like: "Puts a HOT on a target equal to the ammount of hitpoints healed"
->Warocks Bargain deals more damage towards me than healing my teammember, in my last run I healed for 15% of the selfinflicted damage. The power was allways an annoyance in PVP same as PVE, but in times of endless selfheals there was no point to care about it. But actually you killed selfheal, the core ability of a warlock. Deal with it and come over with anything else than massive selfkilling abilities please. No matter how much HP you run, 20% is a lot, nothing to recover with a healing ability that tics for 5k heals in FBI and seems to either not work as intended (200mag heals?) or needs a complete overhaul. Warlock Bargain : " You make a Dark Bargain sacrificing a piece of your soul. You sacrifice 20% of your ACTUAL HP and heal allies withinin '80 for 5 seconds, 250mag over time (HOT->5 tics x 50mag). After 5 seconds you gain 5% temporary Hitpoint for each member healed in range to recover from efforts.
->Wraith Shadow That spell looks like underperfoming significant. At first, a 12 second lasting DOT/HOT ? Noone needs a 12 seconds lasting DOT, where trash drops dead in 3 seconds and you can refresh that DOT/HOT in 1 second, not stacking. Big Fail. Actually the ehaling is about the same an Insignia bonus does per character or even worse. If this is ment to be a DOT/HOT to use at boss encounter, improvements are needed desperately. In case you want to make this DOT/HOT working you need to: 1. make it tick over 5 seconds. 1200-2000 heals are a laugh, where player get near oneshooted by 100-150 k hits Wraith Shadow should tick over 5 seconds and needs to be a strong HOT, I don´t care about that redicules ammount of damage. 2. Wraith Shadow instatnly heals for 250 mag and ticks for at least 100mag/sec over 5 seconds, you spend 3 sparks. 750 mag healing is nothing, where my Oathkeeper can spamm 500mag+500 barrier per second 20 times in a row on the group. Tbh it´s still underwhelming compared to that class because 750mag over 5 seconds <<< 1500-2500 mag + barrier, Reapplying that power on the same target does a burst heal for 500 mag and slows all foes. Make it a slow effect like before, that would at least be far more interesting, than giving my warlock a "lowy damage spell" with no heals from impact.
-> Soul Pact This daily is bugged leeching 60-80% of you max HP over time, not to mitigate by anything and sometimes it breaks and simly drains your AP without doing anything. 500 mag and 10% DR over 10 seconds. 1. All my toons at lev 80 are DR capped, who needs a 10% DR buff? This needs to go and better be turned into a 20 % max HP buff for the group. 2. 500mag per player, a daily? DC: Guardian of life: 800 mag burst+ 500 HOT and on top persistant ANgel heals for 5x 500 mag over 45 seconds for anyone who needs a helping hand (passive) That´s 1800 mag per player and a no brainer for the player Same does Annoited Army 1800mag on demand. This needs a fix and a buff honestly. 10% DR is wasted.
CW and TR are allways better, Hunter also but not that much compared to those other classes imo, and there is no way to be competetive on a same level. Even though I think the gap can be closed easyly with smaller tweaks, but looking at Soulweaver it pretty much demonstrates that there is no will to fix or adjust urgent stuff at all. I mean, they should have recognized allready that there is not one demand for the third healer class in Lomm, noone even considers a warlock to be from any choice, wich displays the redicules state that path actually is in.
TR 1.5-1.9 mio hit by Shocking warlock 1/2 damage with it´s focus daily. CD is a non issue, you can work arround with gear and several boons same as feature.
All classes: Protege restoration shirt Quick trunarround Blessed Advantage from your healer Artificer persuation
@noworries#8859 aanswered one of several warlock specific questions last night with the following:
"We will continue to look at all classes as well as game wide balance and make adjustments as needed. Now that the balance is in an overall better place the changes will come at a slower pace to allow fine tuning without overshooting one way or another."
Which sounds a lot like when scaling was "in a good place". Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well, there's other games to be played.
Now that the balance is in an overall better place the changes will come at a slower pace to allow fine tuning without overshooting one way or another."
Good luck from my side, Soulweaver is a Constructionside and Hellbringer is still not exactly where it should be.
3
pyrosorcererMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 137Arc User
What I'd love to see is some more synergy between tab for instance on Hellbringer. You slotted old Soul Scorch into it, you keep wanting curse removing and re-applying to be a thing, but why did you then make new soul scorch NOT remove curses? This would be a great synergy with other current functions of the class.
There could also imo be more options to summon a puppet than it is now. What if a fully charged tab (soul scorch) summoned a puppet?
pvp on warlock is a joke, only 1 control skill thats 2 sec (3 if u get to curse it), 15 sec cooldown, no guard skills like many other classes, highly predictable escape with shadow slip, only 1 hard hitting encounter (also dependant on the other player remaining hp). I mean we must like pain to keep playing warlock. "We will continue to look at all classes as well as game wide balance and make adjustments as needed. Now that the balance is in an overall better place the changes will come at a slower pace to allow fine tuning without overshooting one way or another." dude @noworries#8859 if you hated warlocks you could have at least told us
If you get it to work for you, its fine, if you don't its terrible.
Mostly true. In solo content I can run powers I want to, in group content, I can't. The combat now almost feels turn based and there really are no choices if you want to be even remotely effective. That isn't fun even when you do get it working.
Warlock still needs a major rework, because that wasn't done during the beta when we were saying it did.
This is very true. The class is not in a good state. Of my pre Mod 16 friends that play Warlock, only one still runs it as a main. The rest have either quit or main something else.
I am pleased to see that at least someone on the beta team said something about the class. I always wondered if anyone even played it on beta.
Meanwhile, BG3 is coming. And for all D&D fans, with the amazing array of choices BG has to offer, I think that will be the death knell for NW.
While I will certainly play BG3, its not an MMO. These days I play NW for the social aspect almost more than anything else, so BG3 wont change that, but the fact that Warlocks like Angels are leaving left and right.... That just might be a reason to leave..
Sure, I still see enough Warlocks being played, but so few of them play it as their main, let alone play one well. And I cannot blame them, the play-style is clunky and getting decent (forget about good) DPS out of the class is a lot of work..
We can wish , but I doubt the devs will ever let us know the reasons behind them deciding we as a class are fine so we could maybe figure out the problems, be they on our or their side. It would require communication and transparency and both of those seem to not be an important part of their process where the Warlock class is concerned.
And yeah I am totally aware of the amount of passive aggressiveness I am projecting towards the mythical "devs" here. I would love for that to go away, but that too would require communication. Its frustrating to shout into the wind..
If you press "o" in protector's enclave, you will see many beginner warlocks levelling up... Then they all vanish once they are going up to level 80. When they realize they can't be competitive (even if viable as dps), especially even more for the healer path in endgame. The other day, I was counting the number of warlocks in Lomm instances: 3 (with one of them soulweaver but with op in group); whereas I counted 20 wizards, 11 barbies, 10 HRs, 5 arbiters, 9 rogues (for this latter, I am not sure of recalling the exact number but it was significant) ..... Only GF was doing worse (there were not many even as tanks).
The warlock did not turn out pretty well. Whoever is responsible for it needs to do a better job.
You took a class that was a freewheeling delight to zip around with and turned it into a klutz in concrete boots.
I'm not sure which one's worse, the paladin or the warlock, but the paladin at least has its core mechanic. Soul Scorch is so incredibly useless, I don't even bother using it. If I could reassign that button to use Invocation Blessings instead or chuck water balloons, it would be an improvement.
I wish the people responsible for the Rogue and Wizard would sit down with whoever's in charge of the Warlock and offer some pointers on creating a smooth flow. And whoever was responsible for the Arbiter could offer some advice on assigning appropriate magnitudes for each power.
Also, more specifically, I'd like to see Hand of Blight get its melee bonus back to make it a decent alternative to Hellish Rebuke.
This is very true. The class is not in a good state. Of my pre Mod 16 friends that play Warlock, only one still runs it as a main. The rest have either quit or main something else.
I am pleased to see that at least someone on the beta team said something about the class. I always wondered if anyone even played it on beta.
I'm one of those who still run it as main, mainly bc I don't want to redo all the campaings on another toon. I spent a whole bunch of retraining tokens and hours of gear grinding to make it a less mediocre dps (healing is out of the discussion, I have no healer loadout). The runs I get on the top of paingiver is simply bc the other 2 dpsers are still trusting in high ilvl=better gear. I do still have to depend on doohickey and envenomed journal to a big part of my dps. On the test group I do think someone played it, but judging by how we were treated here he pretty much would have been ignored as well
I'm not sure which one's worse, the paladin or the warlock, but the paladin at least has its core mechanic. Soul Scorch is so incredibly useless, I don't even bother using it. If I could reassign that button to use Invocation Blessings instead or chuck water balloons, it would be an improvement.
I think that pally is in a good shape, it does its job well in both tanking and healings specs, and pvp is a walk in the park. I invite anyone who complains about their class to try a warlock. Then they would realize that their class is great in comparison. Then you see a person like @noworries#8859 saying that class balance is in a good shape, he who has been responsible (or at least the front face) of this disaster
@nitocris83 I love that you played a warlock on the weekend event. I encourage you to take it to 80 and try endgame content. I would personally invite you to some lomm runs, you can go as healer (which would end up in a wipe) or as a dps, i can give you a nice build for that. Then you can see that our dps depends on a rarely charged daily, or our only hard hitting encounter kf (not that hard even 600 mag when the mob is almost dead) and a doohickey
Been spending a lot of time with the warlock over the past weeks. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I've kind of gotten a kick out of playing the healock in group content. Even though it's a bit drab. Sometimes I find myself basically holding down one button the majority of the time.
The warlock just isn't enjoyable as is. The most annoying thing for me at this point is the reliance on Cursed Bite. There's really nothing about that encounter that I like - not the sound, not the impact. I'm missing the explosiveness of the class. Playing the Barbarian, some of those attacks really feel like they've got some weight to them, and some of the encounters the Rogue has make you feel like you're really sinking that dagger into the foe. That's what the warlock's missing. Everything feels like a hiss, a shrill, or a whish. It needs some BOOM, and something other than Cursed Bite to build upon.
Been spending a lot of time with the warlock over the past weeks. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I've kind of gotten a kick out of playing the healock in group content. Even though it's a bit drab. Sometimes I find myself basically holding down one button the majority of the time.
The warlock just isn't enjoyable as is. The most annoying thing for me at this point is the reliance on Cursed Bite. There's really nothing about that encounter that I like - not the sound, not the impact. I'm missing the explosiveness of the class. Playing the Barbarian, some of those attacks really feel like they've got some weight to them, and some of the encounters the Rogue has make you feel like you're really sinking that dagger into the foe. That's what the warlock's missing. Everything feels like a hiss, a shrill, or a whish. It needs some BOOM, and something other than Cursed Bite to build upon.
Totally agree with that. No fluidity, no synergie. Me want to "Unleash rain of fire until the heat overwhelms the mother HAMSTER and burns their helms as their caustic singeing searing scorching sizzling smoking smoldering skin has them begging for death."
Comments
I don't have much to say about Soulweaver since I've played with it for maybe 20 minutes in total since launch.
Across the board I think the game is too stingy with AP gain; if the original idea was truly for Dailies to represent equally vs. Encounters and At-Wills in terms of % of our total damage output, we're nowhere close. With the magnitude dialed down significantly, maybe we could take another pass on AP gain?
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
I started running Hellfire Ring, HG and KF and it's a feeling of accomplishment when you see a hit for over 200k with KF. Even if it's a false feeling because the mob/boss was going to die with the next at will or encounter anyway. But at least I can say to my Cleric friends that I can also do 200K+ hits. It's pathetic really that after all of the changes and years of feedback, KF still has that stupid mechanic. As for effectiveness, this isn't a very effective build but it does ok in groups and in single target.
HFR, FB and CB are probably better choices, at least on aoe. One of the guys in our alliance swears by BoVA but he specialises in quirky builds that no one else uses irrespective of performance so I haven't tried it. Single target, HG, HFR and KF are the only real options that I can see.
Anyone else have any viable builds running atm?
Guild: Ruathym Corsairs
The combined magnitude of the two charges of CB is decent, and it synergizes well with the Parting Blasphemy feat. HFR for single-target isn't practical for me because of the lack of burst and the need for the target to remain completely stationary for optimal damage.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
After doing the campaign, playing a few solo and group Master Expeditions I can honestly say the class is very lacklustre. There just isn't the appeal there anymore. So I was kinda hoping someone had put together a build that would make me change my mind.
Guild: Ruathym Corsairs
I can understand why it doesn't heal the caster, that would make its HP cost meaningless, but it definitely needs to remove debuffs off the SW otherwise we have no way to cleanse ourselves.
And I agree with @vorphied , I am a little pleasantly surprised, and a little gratified when my KF hits for over 200k.
On my Hellbringer build, I'm using FB as my opening salvo, followed by some Eldtrich blast and Essence Defiler, then HG to spawn a puppet, a little more EB to reapply curses (running with ACC) and then KF.
When I hit with KF I'm seeing big heals on the puppet. Allowing it to stay in the fight longer.
I recently started using Acursed Souls Daily instead of TC... as per another post by @vorphied
And that seem to help greatly when mobs tend to surround me in MEs.
But still using Brood of Hadar as my main single target daily.
It would be nice if they fix Shadow Slip so we can use it quickly instead of waiting for out At-Wills to finish.
TL:DR
Warlock can be made to do good damage now.
Its far too difficult and outside the stated goals of Mod 16 to achieve that, so the class needs work.
Lots of suggestions in this thread on what to do at various levels of difficulty to implement, now is the time to start reviewing those.
There has been a lot of discussion around the place of the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of Warlocks. In particular the effectiveness of Wizards is brought up as a comparison point.
The key is synergy.
Here is a selection from Wizard:
The synergy of these feats and powers is fairly apparent and how they combine to build effective DPS for the party is fairly clear. I'm not even going to claim this is the best combination of things the Wizard can provide, it just happens to be one that shows clear synergy.
In so doing it also shows the problems that the Warlock has in producing DPS, building that level of synergy with Warlock is far harder, and far more difficult to sustain. Let's face it Ray of Frost sustains the feats and powers shown above for Wizard.
Its not that Warlock cannot be tuned to produce good damage, on the contrary I believe it can be, its that the effort and player skill required to do that is orders of magnitude higher than what is needed to get good results out of a Wizard.
This means that Warlock is breaking one of the goals of Mod16, simplifying the feats, powers and boons is supposed to make it harder to end up with a trap build. In order to do this effectively you need simple reliable synergy to exist inside the class, and Warlock lacks this.
Key problems that remain for DPS Warlock:
It is unclear if a number of powers are Fire or Necrotic powers (well Fire powers, all the Necrotic ones are pretty clear).
There is only 1 reliable power for triggering Risky Investment, and its cast time is too slow to make that effective in all but the longest encounters. (ie there is a lack of synergy with the feat in the class)
Despite having a boosted Recovery Speed, recovery time of encounter powers remains on par with other DPS. (eg I have a 30% recharge rate boost, just to cast spells at the same speed as my wizard with a 10% recovery speed - that's before I consider feats which both classes can access to speed up casting time.)
Warlocks lack AP gain. Badly. If encounter damage was substituting for daily damage this would be fine, but it isn't because encounter cast rates are not effectively faster than other DPS classes.
A number of powers are simply dead in the tree, due to either lack of synergy (Dreadtheft), targeting bugs (Arms of Hadar) or just being too ineffective to bother with (Infernal Flames).
Key elements simply lack sufficient magnitude to produce the expected outcomes for the class (eg Creeping Death, Soul Scorch, Wraith Claw)
Heals has 1 major problem, if it cannot produce Soul Sparks it cannot heal. This is a problem in all dungeons with immunity phases for bosses (Bore Worm is obvious at the moment) or significant use of stuns. Secondary to this, but in the eyes of many players just as important are the lack of a party wide cleanse (we cannot cleanse ourselves) and there are problems with heal magnitudes when healing the 300k+ players or tanks with 500-800k health (see Arcturia's cocoon).
I don't really have much to say on the heals front, I just haven't played it enough in situations where it has mattered to have a strong grasp of its needs.
Many suggestions were made in this thread for improving the class.
Perhaps now is the time to go back and revisit them and re-examine the class to make improvements?
"Simple" suggestions:
Adjust Tooltips of all powers so that the damage type is clear.
Make Vampiric Embrace's heal absolutely work and make it Curse Consume to summon a puppet.
Remove the Curse Synergy from Dreadtheft.
Fix the targeting of Arms of Hadar.
Increase the magnitude of single target spells by 50.
Make Soul Scorch 15 Magnitude / Shard on the primary target and 5/shard on the secondary targets.
"Complex" suggestions:
Re-order the powers so that there is one AoE power in the first 3 powers.
Remove Infernal Spheres and Blades of Vanquished Armies and replace with new powers. As these are limited to DPS spec they should offer appropriate options (a buff/debuff effect, and another pure AoE damage effect).
Rework feats to create synergy around Fire and Necrotic power use with Curses.
The goal needs to be to improve the class' internal synergy, and stop it fighting with itself to achieve its ends. The Wizard class is an excellent example of how this should look.
Time for the Warlock to get the same effort and treatment.
Obsidian Oath - Warlock
A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.
1. Soulweaver needs the ability to cleanse them self.
2. Soulweaver needs an ability to cast a direct heal on a party member . Why do you ask because you keep using enemy that are immune to damage. Making this healer class unable to heal at all during those times.
3. General - With the removal of Life Steal from the game and that being the core defense for this class. Along with a direct offensive buff.You need to return Pillar of Power to its former Mod. 15 form and make it an universal encounter power that both Hellbringer and Soulweaver can both use. It was a far better all around power before it was changed into a heal buff. This will greatly benefit the ones leveling up this class as well.
4. Shadow Slip. This power needs to have priority over all other powers. Making it delay just so even an At-Will can cast is silly at best. Causing far to many deaths in general.
5. Cleaning up some game play with are on again off again curse mechanics. Just stop, make all powers apply a curse if one is not already on the target . Make it have a clear standard effect and remove all the other bonus adding and taking away that some powers get. Just a clear and direct effect, one will have when facing off against a Warlock.
You can skip the last one if need be, but the other four need to be done tomorrow.
Both healer and dps path needed improvement could come from tab mechanics. An additional tab choice on dps path (i.e. a spark generator tab with spark consuming encounters and curse spreading additional effect) could be interesting, but probably hard to implement. A possible fast and effective solution could come from t1 feats:
- It's assumed soulweaver can get sparks in combat without a target, mainly because essence drain is dealing focused dmg. Reworking essence of time feat, making it remove the dmg from essence drain or changing it to an AoE, could be a solution to allow casting it without a target. An additional effect, like the chance to move at slower rate while channeling (same as cleric) or x% CC resistance, would be nice. Talking about Boreworm, HoT component is important there, and warlock's lackluster in it and have to add we miss the damage mitigation from warding curse. Some of above mentioned options could be incorporated to a reworked prince of hell too, and i don't speak about missed chance to self-cleanse, as it's clearly a bug. I don't mind how Devs choose to implement that solution, just want a reason to invest AD in building my healer loadout
- after soul scorch nerf i feel like warlocks (situationally) miss a tab choice: clunky animation, low dmg, CD reduction skippable choosing other t5 feat. A possible easy solution could pass from reducing casting time and reworking double scorch, allowing it to restore SS pre-nerf single target functionality and magnitude.
As a reminder, we still need tweaks/rework for some poor feat/spells (Creeping Death, Dreadtheft, Arms of Hadar, Gates of Hell, Flames of Phlegethos, Prince of Hell on top of all), some idea to add the previous ones i posted:
- Hadar's Grasp is not providing sparks on crit DoTs anymore, so warlock needs a single target spark generator to replace Hellfire Ring during boss fights. Dreadtheft could take this place, with a significant CD reduction (I'd suggest same as Blade of Vanquished Armies), doubling spark gain as curse synergy effect and reducing target cap to 1-3 as a compensation.
- replace Gates of Hell with Forcecage and move it to heal spec, swapping with Immolation Spirits spot: Forcecage should be a damage mitigation area, with an HoT effect and a spark generation additional bonus.
Most of fixes had come, time to work for ingame improvements now
Pillar of power 20 mag heals? I mean those micro heals are nice but completely <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> running content with one hit mobs.
The class has exactly one healing spell that is 2-3 times weaker than DC's or Paladins spells.
The daily is about 4 times weaker than DC's and drains up to 80% of max HP due to bugs.
The feat Life Bind kills you consistently and together with Soul Pact and Warlock's Bargain Soulweaver is top paingiver in many runs due to self-inflicted damage, being top as unmoveable object over the tank.
Healing abilities are underwhelming compared to other classes, inable to recover sparks when no target available. Where my Oathkeeper can chain 500 mag+500 to 1000 barrier effects without stopping due to CoP, my warlock can only ask teammates to pot.
About Hellbringer, not much to say. No top no flop. CW and TR are doing the race, no matter what I try, but it could be worse.
First of, if my warlock is paingiver, dealing 50% of dps by selfinflicted damage (the ammount can go higher, but yout end to die too much), I want at least some compensation for it.
Oathkeeper shields for huge ammounts and has 2-3 more efective spells in terms of healing+ shielding.
So warlock should have anything to compensate this gap.
->Shatter Spark should do 500mag heal and put a HOT on a teammember like: "Puts a HOT on a target equal to the ammount of hitpoints healed"
->Warocks Bargain deals more damage towards me than healing my teammember, in my last run I healed for 15% of the selfinflicted damage.
The power was allways an annoyance in PVP same as PVE, but in times of endless selfheals there was no point to care about it. But actually you killed selfheal, the core ability of a warlock.
Deal with it and come over with anything else than massive selfkilling abilities please. No matter how much HP you run, 20% is a lot, nothing to recover with a healing ability that tics for 5k heals in FBI and seems to either not work as intended (200mag heals?) or needs a complete overhaul.
Warlock Bargain : " You make a Dark Bargain sacrificing a piece of your soul. You sacrifice 20% of your ACTUAL HP and heal allies withinin '80 for 5 seconds, 250mag over time (HOT->5 tics x 50mag).
After 5 seconds you gain 5% temporary Hitpoint for each member healed in range to recover from efforts.
->Wraith Shadow
That spell looks like underperfoming significant. At first, a 12 second lasting DOT/HOT ?
Noone needs a 12 seconds lasting DOT, where trash drops dead in 3 seconds and you can refresh that DOT/HOT in 1 second, not stacking. Big Fail. Actually the ehaling is about the same an Insignia bonus does per character or even worse.
If this is ment to be a DOT/HOT to use at boss encounter, improvements are needed desperately.
In case you want to make this DOT/HOT working you need to:
1. make it tick over 5 seconds. 1200-2000 heals are a laugh, where player get near oneshooted by 100-150 k hits
Wraith Shadow should tick over 5 seconds and needs to be a strong HOT, I don´t care about that redicules ammount of damage.
2. Wraith Shadow instatnly heals for 250 mag and ticks for at least 100mag/sec over 5 seconds, you spend 3 sparks.
750 mag healing is nothing, where my Oathkeeper can spamm 500mag+500 barrier per second 20 times in a row on the group. Tbh it´s still underwhelming compared to that class because 750mag over 5 seconds <<< 1500-2500 mag + barrier,
Reapplying that power on the same target does a burst heal for 500 mag and slows all foes. Make it a slow effect like before, that would at least be far more interesting, than giving my warlock a "lowy damage spell" with no heals from impact.
-> Soul Pact
This daily is bugged leeching 60-80% of you max HP over time, not to mitigate by anything and sometimes it breaks and simly drains your AP without doing anything.
500 mag and 10% DR over 10 seconds.
1. All my toons at lev 80 are DR capped, who needs a 10% DR buff? This needs to go and better be turned into a 20 % max HP buff for the group.
2. 500mag per player, a daily?
DC: Guardian of life: 800 mag burst+ 500 HOT and on top persistant ANgel heals for 5x 500 mag over 45 seconds for anyone who needs a helping hand (passive)
That´s 1800 mag per player and a no brainer for the player
Same does Annoited Army 1800mag on demand.
This needs a fix and a buff honestly. 10% DR is wasted.
> About Hellbringer, not much to say.
Hellbringer good.
If your the group is bad.
Hellbringer bad.
If your the group is good.
HR is always better.
Even though I think the gap can be closed easyly with smaller tweaks, but looking at Soulweaver it pretty much demonstrates that there is no will to fix or adjust urgent stuff at all. I mean, they should have recognized allready that there is not one demand for the third healer class in Lomm, noone even considers a warlock to be from any choice, wich displays the redicules state that path actually is in.
TR 1.5-1.9 mio hit by Shocking warlock 1/2 damage with it´s focus daily.
CD is a non issue, you can work arround with gear and several boons same as feature.
All classes:
Protege restoration shirt
Quick trunarround
Blessed Advantage from your healer
Artificer persuation
"We will continue to look at all classes as well as game wide balance and make adjustments as needed. Now that the balance is in an overall better place the changes will come at a slower pace to allow fine tuning without overshooting one way or another."
Which sounds a lot like when scaling was "in a good place". Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well, there's other games to be played.
Soulweaver is a Constructionside and Hellbringer is still not exactly where it should be.
There could also imo be more options to summon a puppet than it is now. What if a fully charged tab (soul scorch) summoned a puppet?
"We will continue to look at all classes as well as game wide balance and make adjustments as needed. Now that the balance is in an overall better place the changes will come at a slower pace to allow fine tuning without overshooting one way or another." dude @noworries#8859 if you hated warlocks you could have at least told us
There is no point to run with a warlock into PVP, stick with Pladin (both path), GF or GWF, tank rules NWO PVP.
The actual state of 2. path (Soulweaver) tells a lot about balance and about the time they spend on this class, embarrassing
https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1249692/undermountain-preview-patch-notes-nw-110-20190519a-25
Warlock is like playing NW in Hard Mode.
If you get it to work for you, its fine, if you don't its terrible.
That's not a good place for a class to be in.
Warlock still needs a major rework, because that wasn't done during the beta when we were saying it did.
Obsidian Oath - Warlock
A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.
I am pleased to see that at least someone on the beta team said something about the class. I always wondered if anyone even played it on beta.
Meanwhile, BG3 is coming. And for all D&D fans, with the amazing array of choices BG has to offer, I think that will be the death knell for NW.
Guild: Ruathym Corsairs
Sure, I still see enough Warlocks being played, but so few of them play it as their main, let alone play one well. And I cannot blame them, the play-style is clunky and getting decent (forget about good) DPS out of the class is a lot of work..
We can wish , but I doubt the devs will ever let us know the reasons behind them deciding we as a class are fine so we could maybe figure out the problems, be they on our or their side. It would require communication and transparency and both of those seem to not be an important part of their process where the Warlock class is concerned.
And yeah I am totally aware of the amount of passive aggressiveness I am projecting towards the mythical "devs" here. I would love for that to go away, but that too would require communication. Its frustrating to shout into the wind..
The other day, I was counting the number of warlocks in Lomm instances: 3 (with one of them soulweaver but with op in group); whereas I counted 20 wizards, 11 barbies, 10 HRs, 5 arbiters, 9 rogues (for this latter, I am not sure of recalling the exact number but it was significant) ..... Only GF was doing worse (there were not many even as tanks).
Whoever is responsible for it needs to do a better job.
You took a class that was a freewheeling delight to zip around with and turned it into a klutz in concrete boots.
I'm not sure which one's worse, the paladin or the warlock, but the paladin at least has its core mechanic. Soul Scorch is so incredibly useless, I don't even bother using it. If I could reassign that button to use Invocation Blessings instead or chuck water balloons, it would be an improvement.
- not happy -
Also, more specifically, I'd like to see Hand of Blight get its melee bonus back to make it a decent alternative to Hellish Rebuke.
On the test group I do think someone played it, but judging by how we were treated here he pretty much would have been ignored as well
I think that pally is in a good shape, it does its job well in both tanking and healings specs, and pvp is a walk in the park. I invite anyone who complains about their class to try a warlock. Then they would realize that their class is great in comparison. Then you see a person like @noworries#8859 saying that class balance is in a good shape, he who has been responsible (or at least the front face) of this disaster
@nitocris83 I love that you played a warlock on the weekend event. I encourage you to take it to 80 and try endgame content. I would personally invite you to some lomm runs, you can go as healer (which would end up in a wipe) or as a dps, i can give you a nice build for that. Then you can see that our dps depends on a rarely charged daily, or our only hard hitting encounter kf (not that hard even 600 mag when the mob is almost dead) and a doohickey
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I've kind of gotten a kick out of playing the healock in group content. Even though it's a bit drab. Sometimes I find myself basically holding down one button the majority of the time.
The warlock just isn't enjoyable as is. The most annoying thing for me at this point is the reliance on Cursed Bite. There's really nothing about that encounter that I like - not the sound, not the impact. I'm missing the explosiveness of the class. Playing the Barbarian, some of those attacks really feel like they've got some weight to them, and some of the encounters the Rogue has make you feel like you're really sinking that dagger into the foe. That's what the warlock's missing. Everything feels like a hiss, a shrill, or a whish. It needs some BOOM, and something other than Cursed Bite to build upon.
Obsidian Oath - Warlock
A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.