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Official M19: Warlock Feedback
joebot
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 15Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Good day all! This thread is for providing bug reports and feedback on the changes made to the Warlock in Module 19. If you would like to view and post about the changes made to Soulweaver Warlock, please see the Official M19: Healing Adjustments thread.
Along with the changes in the M18 Class Balance Adjustments thread, we continue to make adjustments to improve the performance of our classes. It is important to note that while we continue to tune the function and numbers of powers, what you see on preview can sometimes change before launch. However, you know your class best so we wanted to get your hands on these changes as soon as possible.
Encounters
As always, thank you for taking the time to check things out on preview, we look forward to your feedback!
Type: Bug/Feedback (Please only choose one)
If you are listing a bug please have this text in RED, if you are posting an opinion or feedback please use CYAN. If you are replying to another user's post, asking a question, or just engaging in general discussion, please do not color your posts, general discussion is welcome and we will read all of it, regardless of color! You can use BBCode to color your text:
Examples:
Bug: Infernal Spheres does not summon the spheres when cast.
Feedback: I prefer the old Double Scorch feat.
Along with the changes in the M18 Class Balance Adjustments thread, we continue to make adjustments to improve the performance of our classes. It is important to note that while we continue to tune the function and numbers of powers, what you see on preview can sometimes change before launch. However, you know your class best so we wanted to get your hands on these changes as soon as possible.
Encounters
- Infernal Spheres: Summon six infernal spheres that seek out and cause fire damage to those who attack you. While the spheres are active, activating this power again sends them out to enemies in front of you, dealing damage. Magnitude decreases as the number of targets increases.
- Magnitude: 50 per sphere
- Added Effect: Increases your damage by 5%
- Duration: 10s
- Additional Action: Seeking Spheres
- Magnitude: 350
- Magnitude: 50 per sphere
- Double Scorch: Soul Scorch deals an additional 9 magnitude damage per Soul Spark spent.
- Power of the Nine Hells: Grants your encounters powers without Curse Synergy or Curse Consume the ability to summon a Soul Puppet.
- Creeping Death: Will now be able to deal critical damage.
As always, thank you for taking the time to check things out on preview, we look forward to your feedback!
Formatting Your Feedback and Bugs
For posting feedback and bugs, please follow the following format to ensure your feedback and bugs are seen clearly and processed in a timely manner, thank you!Type: Bug/Feedback (Please only choose one)
If you are listing a bug please have this text in RED, if you are posting an opinion or feedback please use CYAN. If you are replying to another user's post, asking a question, or just engaging in general discussion, please do not color your posts, general discussion is welcome and we will read all of it, regardless of color! You can use BBCode to color your text:
<font color=cyan>This text will display in cyan.</font>
<font color=red>This text will display in red.</font>Examples:
Bug: Infernal Spheres does not summon the spheres when cast.
Feedback: I prefer the old Double Scorch feat.
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Comments
I was test the warlock with bilethorn enchantment and i got these bugs:
-blades of vanquished armies doesn't procs the weapon enchantment (5% damage as poison damage and 40 magnitude of weapon damage).
-Brood of Hadar doesn't procs the 5% bonus damage as poison damage of the bilethorn enchantment.
-Each soul spark give 0,25% increase damage instead 0,15% as shown in the tooltip.
https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1255991/mod-19-hellbringer-changes
Much appreciated the rework of is and power of the nine hells
Why oh why must blades of vanquished armies be a cast on other players too
And 0.25% down to 0.15%? You trying to kill the warlock or something? Bloody ridiculous!
BOVA got a complete rework and its not even mentioned in your list.
FEEDBACK
Infernal Spheres, is an interesting change, but its still a none choice as it currently stands, is it supposed to be an AoE ability, or a single target ability, or a subpar hybrid?
As a single target, its not bad, but with the extremely long CD in relation to other options is mediocre at best. To get the most out of this ability you need some pretty heavy micro management, Delay the secondary effect for as long as possible to keep the 5% buff for maximum uptime, while hoping to take 4-5 hits of small damage for the bonus 50mag per sphere, then triggering the seeker effect for a total magnitude of 550-600.
This is A LOT of work, and needs everything to go perfectly every time for it to be a viable encounter choice as single target.
As AOE, its garbage, 350 magnitude split between only 5 targets, is 70 magnitude each, this is Arms of Hadar level of bad AOE, but with 6 times the CD
Power of the Nine Hells.
By itself, this is a ok change, but all it does is help increase the speed of getting stacks, it doesnt effect damage at all, or prevent stacks falling off during phase changes, or while getting frozen in Ice in ToMM.
Risky investment is, about a 10% damage increase at 5 stacks. so while getting the stacks faster is nice, its not great, since the only viable encounter now to use during Single target is Killing flames, so instead of 50-60 seconds to stack, its now only going to be 25-30seconds.
During AoE/trash its much more efficient to just slot Dark Prayers instead, which doesnt need a respec, and does the job alot better.
So in short, we now have the option to build up to a 10% damage increase in half the time, (30seconds), but still lose them at every transition.
OR
take Double Scorch, which is effectively a 9-10% damage increase, is passive, so ALWAYS available, AND still take risky investment a gain a potential 10% with the current drawbacks on live.
Essentially its another "None choice"
Double Scorch - great change, dont HAMSTER it up now
Creeping Death - great change - dont HAMSTER it up now
When things get boiled down, all the changes dont do anything to change/rival the current endgame warlock build, in fact they just cement them even further.
killing flames, BOVA, and Hadars Grasp, are the only real viable options as encounters, while on live, you could substitute BOVA for either hellfire Ring or Vampiric Embrace, on preview, BOVA is now vastly superior to both options.
Double Scorch, Warlocks Curse, Risky Investment are all significantly better than their counterpart feats.
Creeping Death/Executioners are in a decent spot, Creeping death being better for single target
Wrathful souls/soul spark recovery are both viable, though i prefer SSR because of having more control over it.
Parting Blasphemy is only good in 1 very specific circumstance.- burst AOE where you have a 20 second break in between then next pack to allow both charges of Curse Bite to recharge, it also ties you into curse bite.
Hadars Grasp needs an increase.
Fiery Bolt needs the AoE penalty removed.
Hellfire ring needs the Area of effect radius increased a few feet.
Dreadtheft is just so bad, I die a little inside when I see people use it
Curse bites charges need looking at, the fact that each charge will take 10seconds to come back, and the second charge will only start its 10second CD once the first charge is back, really limits this encounter. It is also still very slow and the charges can be lost/consumed while not doing damage, because the enemies are already dead by the time the Castime/annimation is over.
Essentially, when you have feats/powers etc that work best by a large margin in 95% of all situations, you get 1 viable build, and everything else is a none choice
Theres so much more i could talk about/disect/discuss/suggest. but frankly im not the "make a YT vid kinda guy" and making long forum posts that largely get ignored and never get any Dev back and forth makes me feel like im having a one sided discussion with myself
At the very least it should give 1 AP per spark spent.... its an action, I spend a lot of time doing it
Infernal Spheres - Not working properly with Power of the Nine Hells
Feedback - Right now you are holding onto spheres for the intial 5% damage increase. Would it be possible to have an initial hit when first activating this ability ?
If we do not get hit during the 10 second duration we are not utilizing any of the 5% damage increase for the generated orbs. We would simply have to count and wait until 1 second to release the orbs.
I would rather utilize higher magnitude encounters during this time period.
for example activate spheres --> 10 second timer starts --> orb hit --> 6 spheres now available.-->use other encounters --> timer ends
Feat to feat comparison
Double Scorch/Power of the Nine Hells
Double Scorch - Directly increases the initial hit of soul scorch by 100%, had no effect on the DoT, increases Soul Scorch damage by 50% overall. ( roughly a 5% overall increase to total DPS, i over estimated this on first tests)
VS
Power of the Nine Hells - speeds up the stacking of soul investiture providing you use specific Encounter powers. Realistically the only encounter being used against bosses that this applies to is Killing flames, roughly doubling the speed to get 5 stacks of Investiture.
Has Zero net gain on total DPS.
Indirectly speeds up the stacking of Risky Investment, but since this is a separate feat you can just take Double Scorch which is a guaranteed 5% increase, and a "potential" 10% overall increase from risky investment.
This feat is still significantly weaker than Double Scorch
Possible additions - Increases the Magnitude of Flames of Phlegethos by 1000, and Gates of Hell by 635.
Flames of Phlegethos deals around 4-5% overall damage, doubling its magnitude would increase overall DPS by 4-5% Bringing Double Scorch and Power of the Nine Hells on par with each other, in addition to making these 2 daily powers better, 2 birds 1 stone.
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Warlocks Curse/Parting Blasphemy
Warlocks Curse
pretty self explanatory increases damage by 12% against cursed targets. Roughly a 12% increase
Parting Blasphemy.
essentially this increases Curse bite, Hadars Grasp and Vampiric Embrace by 85 magnitude.
Deals 85magnitude damage when curse naturally falls off ( this happens extremely rarely )
against a boss, this is increasing the damage of hadars grasp by 25% and Cursebite/Vampiric Embrace by 33% roughly.
Hadars does about 8% total damage, netting 2% overall increase
Cursebite/Vampiric also does about 8% total damage, netting 3% overall increase.
you could slot all 3, but that would require dropping Killing Flames, which would be beyond foolish.
So a 5% damage increase overall from encounters, and lets be generous and add in another 1% from curse falling off naturally. thats still only a 6% potential damage increase, VS a 12% damage increase with nearly 100% uptime.
Sure you will do decent AoE damage with Curse Bite, but as I tried to explain before, this advantage vanishes on fights that last longer than a few seconds, or when the time in between each stage of combat is less than the 20seconds it takes to get both charges of Cursebite back.
Possible changes - Increases the magnitude of Hadars Grasp, Vampiric Embrace, and CurseBite by 100 magnitude
added effect - Deal an additional 75magnitude over 5 seconds when curse is removed, this would bring the overall increase against bosses up to about a 10% increase overall, weaker than Warlocks Curse, but still providing that extra AoE potentional.
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Risky Investment/Soul Desecration
Risky Investment - Increases Encounter based damage by 4% per stack of Soul Investiture, maximum bonus 20%. Encounters deal roughly 45-50% of our total damage, making this feat give a potential overall damage increase of 9-10%
Soul Desecration - gives us a free soul puppet, and increases its base damage by 10%.
This is flat out garbage. Soul puppet, at best deals about 5% of our total damage, so the 10% increase to the puppets damage is, at BEST, a 0.5%
so a potential 10% damage increase, VS a potential 0.5% damage increase.....
Possible changes - Increases the warlocks damage by 5% while a soul puppet is active, in addition increases the Soul puppets base damage by 20% per stack of soul investiture ( up from 10%).
This would be a flat 5% bonus + a potential extra 2.5% overall damage VS a potential 10% damage increase. a decent compromise.
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Creeping Death/Executioners Gift
These are both fine now that CD can deal critical hits, nicely balanced with each other for different situations, while remaining close enough in overall effectiveness. hooray.
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Soul Spark Recovery/ Wrathful Souls
These two are at least closer together in usefulness, with Soul Spark Recovery being arguably better because you have complete control over the effect, where as the soul puppet does its own thing most of the time, getting stuck/dying/ needless travel time.
not really much can be done about this without a rework of the Soul Puppet itself, which is a whole different topic.
So in summary, the Warlock feats, as they stand are massively imbalanced with each other, with the exception of creeping death/executioners gift. not a good thing when we only have 10 feats to chose from in the first place, and this Feat Rework is nearly 18 months old.
None of the above suggestions will actually increase the overall damage of the warlock, just raise the balance/usefulness of each feat to be a reasonable choice against its current stronger counterpart
I think a class feature that determines or enhances the behavior of powers like Spheres and BoVA would be welcome. It could replace Dust to Dust.
And while this class is under the knife, can we please talk about Dust to Dust? I cannot express how much I resent, resent, resent this feature. That +5% should be a part of the class. Instead, it reduces the number of available class feature slots to one. It's literally a non-choice that denies us a choice.
And while we're talking about class features, can we please exchange class features that boost capped stats for features that actually serve to enhance playstyle? For example, I enjoy utilizing the control aspects of the various classes such as the prone effect of Arms - anything that enhances those effects or makes them actually viable against boss or lieutenant types would be very welcome.
Feedback: Brood of hadar increases damage for 1000 magnitude in the first hit and continue the same damage in description after
Bug: Each soul spark give 0,25% increase damage instead 0,15% as shown in the tooltip
Bug: Blades of vanquished armies not generate soul sparks
The difference is now blades only ticks 3 times, instead if 11 ( 13 against cursed targets ) and if the first tick is a crit, they all are. where as on live, each individual tick has a separate crit roll.
How blades works in live, 25mag per blade, lasts 6 seconds, damage starts after 0.5seconds for 11 ticks. 275magnitude total.
Curse synergy, throws a blade out at cursed targets every 3 seconds, 2 addition blades, for 325 magnitude total.
How it works on preview, 100 magnitude per blade, lasts 6 seconds, damage starts immediately, and ticks every 3 seconds. 300 magnitude total. Curse synergy increases damage by 50%, for 450magnitude total.
So in reality the extra damage is coming entirely from the new curse synergy, the blade damage is the same, If it was reverted back to 0.5 seconds per blade, but it still started immediately, there would be 12 ticks, and blade damage would remain at 25magnitude each.
As long as the curse synergy stays the same as a 50% increase, I don't care what the tick rate is personally.
Feedback: Brood of Hadar increases damage for 1000 magnitude in the first hit and continue the same damage in description after.
Bug: Each soul spark give 0,25% increase damage instead 0,15% as shown in the tooltip.
Bug: Blades of vanquished armies not generate soul sparks.
After marking a player, holding down the TAB mechanic causes the spark pet to randomly switch from healing the target to healing the warlock itself.
Soulweaver FEEDBACK
Viperion - DragonTribe guild.
Playing Ranger/Paladin/Bard/Fighter.
Killing flames should summon soul puppet on use not after killing a target.
Action point gain on the warlock needs to be addressed, most classes can get their dailies back in 30-35seconds it takes us 1:10s at the fastest to get ours back, it’s just way too slow.
Power of the nine hells is a nice addition for aoe loadouts but doesn’t really impact single target.
And finally please rework dust to dust it’s just completely unviable.
Anytime the warlock gets pulled into the garage for repairs, I start feeling anxious.
FEEDBACK:Please make Blades of VA proc atleast every 1 second or we lose alot of bilethorn damage as in mod 18 it procs every 0.5 seconds,3 procs only during 6 seconds makes it VERY HARD to use in AoE situations and we lose some damage due to not proccing bilethorn enchant which is important
Krammit the Frog hates you now.
Changes wishlist
1) Soul Scorch needs to generate AP, 1AP per spark spent will make a big difference, and is the same as it would give as a 1 second cast time encounter
2) Remove the split AoE penalty from Fiery Bolt, and increase to 250 magnitude, this encounter is still a joke right now. its a glorified Curse stacker
3) Either fix the Split damage on Tyrannical Curse, or remove it and make this a pure single target daily by upping the magnitude. we already got 4 other dailies that deal AOE. Sure the split damage is iconic... but it doesn't work properly anyway and hasn't for 18 months
4) Increase the diameter of Hellfire Ring by 5' and up its damage to 150 initial, 240 DoT
5) remove the 2 charges from Curse Bite, give it a proper cooldown we can reduce with SSR/WS, and up its damage to 325 to compensate a bit. This will work out much better for the majority of fights.
6) Increase Hadars Grasp to 250magnitude and reduce the CD by 3 seconds
7) Increase the DoT damage from hellish rebuke to 15magnitude, and increase the damage bonus of No Pity No Mercy to 33% to match
8) Give BovA faster ticks, keep the new design the same.
9) Look at Power of the Nine Hells, Parting Blasphemy and Soul Desecration again. I think I did a pretty good job in a previous post highlighting just how poor they are in relation to their counter Feats right now.
They don't have to be the same damage output, but they have to be an appealing choice and close enough in performance to each other. and that doesn't mean GIMMICKY.
dreadtheft and arms of hadar need a total rework, they are both extremely bad, its better to just use at wills, which is sad, I don't expect this to be done any time soon but it has to be done eventually.