Blizzard
Hi Affliction Warlocks. Thanks for the posts and feedback so far. I'd like to talk a bit about the change to
Гибельная хватка. In general, we agree that communication is warranted since we changed/nerfed a widely taken talent.
Гибельная хватка is very powerful on live. With the current state of
Колдовство, the talent is taken on virtually every situation in Nighthold, from single-target to sustained multi-target boss fights. There are things about
Колдовство that we're not entirely happy with, many of which the community has echoed, and the current feel of
Колдовство being a single-target spec that focuses its damage into one target rather than spreads its damage out over many targets more evenly, is generally one of them.
Гибельная хватка at a high tuning value is a heavy contributor to that. It's not ideal that even on a sustained multi-target fight right now,
Гибельная хватка wins out over Writhe in Agony on the same row, when at first glance Writhe in
Агония looks like it should be the go-to talent for sustained multi-target since its benefit scales up uniformly per additional target whereas
Гибельная хватка reads as a single-target talent.
Separately, we want to allow Haunt to be a viable
Soul Shard spender talent. We've heard this from players and also want a
Soul Shard spender other than
Нестабильное колдовство in single-target situations. Ways to make
Блуждающий дух as a
Soul Shard spender competitive with a
Гибельная хватка at the live value of 70% include dramatically increasing its instant nuke damage, drastically increasing its damage bonus %, or reducing its cooldown further – none of which would feel right on
Колдовство for a variety of reasons.
Lastly, Affliction's first talent tier is a really high-power talent tier compared to most talent tiers we have, with
Гибельная хватка being over a 20% DPS increase as a single talent. Generally, we aim for talent tiers to be more in the 5-10% range. Very high values can both have distortive effects on the spec and make it hard to balance other talents on the same tier.
That all said, in the next PTR patch, changes you should see are:
- All Affliction damage done increased by 15%
- Гибельная хватка will go down to a +25% damage increase (down from +70% on live)
- Writhe in Агония will be reduced to increase Агония's max stacks by +5 (down from +10 on live)
- Блуждающий дух will stay as it currently is on PTR
Based on our numbers, 1) this 15% damage buff negates the 70%->25% reduction to
Гибельная хватка, coming out as neutral change DPS-wise for Affliction Warlocks using
Гибельная хватка going from 7.2->7.2.5 and 2) brings the relative balance of the Level 15 talent tier much closer to each other. As usual, the numbers may change during PTR according to further playtesting and feedback.
As a footnote, the most recent PTR patch with the current reduction to
Гибельная хватка from 70%->40% that came with no other explanation or indication that further changes (compensatory buffs to the baseline spec, further relevant talent adjustments) were coming wasn't ideal and we'll try to be more mindful of that in future PTR cycles.
