wow Affliction Warlock Beta Class Feedback: Jun 5

[Stan 5,022]

Blizzard outlined Affliction Warlock talent swaps coming in this week's Battle for Azeroth Beta build. Changes mainly affect level 15 / 90 talent rows; Haunt will swap places with Deathbolt to incentivize Nightfall + Haunt or Drain Soul + Haunt builds.

Current Talents Rows as of Beta Build 26734:

• Level 15 Row: Nightfall + Drain Soul + Haunt
• Level 90 Row: Shadow Embrace + Deathbolt + Grimoire of Sacrifice

New Talent Rows (coming later this week on Beta):

• Level 15 Row: Nightfall + Drain Soul + Deathbolt (↑90)
• Level 90 Row: Shadow Embrace + Haunt (↓15) + Grimoire of Sacrifice

Blizzard (Source)

We're going to swap Haunt (was lvl 15, now lvl 90) with Deathbolt (was lvl 90, now lvl 15) in the talent tree in the next build. This fulfills a desire (mentioned several times here) to be able to play a Nightfall + Haunt or Drain Soul + Haunt build, which a lot of players think is fun (and is fair feedback).

The reason we made the last round of talent swaps, which saw Nightfall and Drain Soul move to level 15, and Shadow Embrace and Haunt move to level 90, was to satisfy a different desire (as players mentioned even in this thread) to allow Drain Soul and Grimoire of Sacrifice to be taken together, as both are identity, feel, and greatly gameplay changing. That also seemed reasonable.

Separately, that also had the benefit of allowing Nightfall and Drain Soul to be acquirable earlier at lvl 15, since they are both great leveling talents and good to have early.

To make room for Nightfall and Drain Soul on the lvl 15 row, we chose to move Shadow Embrace and Deathbolt together (as opposed to Shadow Embrace and Haunt) because Shadow Embrace and Haunt are pretty similar - they both provide a damage taken debuff with or near 100% uptime. That's still true, but it seems better overall to live with that, look for opportunities to improve/replace Shadow Embrace in the future, and support a Nightfall + Haunt build.

So the new layout looks like:

Row 15: Nightfall, Drain Soul, Deathbolt
Row 90: Shadow Embrace, Haunt, Grimoire of Sacrifice

On the topic of talent tree layouts in general for all specs - it's always a list of competing, sometimes contradictory desires, all of which are valid to some varying degrees:

• "All talents on a row should be equal"
• "Some talents should better in some situations"
• "Talents on the same row shouldn't clearly be better in single target or AOE vs other talents on the same row"
• "Difficult to use talents should be a little more rewarding than easy to use talents"
• "Talents shouldn't be too similar to each other"
• "Players should be allowed to pick whatever talent they find the most fun"
• "The strongest talent should probably be the most fun one"

And so on. It’s often not possible to satisfy all requirements, so it becomes sort of finding the best configuration that satisfies as many desires as possible, and iterating on improvements for the future.

As usual, we're always open to feedback.

[PatrickHenry 293]

On 6/5/2018 at 5:50 PM, Stan said:

• "All talents on a row should be equal"
• "Some talents should better in some situations"
• "Talents on the same row shouldn't clearly be better in single target or AOE vs other talents on the same row"
• "Difficult to use talents should be a little more rewarding than easy to use talents"
• "Talents shouldn't be too similar to each other"
• "Players should be allowed to pick whatever talent they find the most fun"
• "The strongest talent should probably be the most fun one"

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why it is a literal impossibility to please everyone.