Conflag changes on top of immolate?

Q u o t e:
I'd love to make a big concise post with full detail but those are no fun.

The reduction to the scaling of conflag *70% down from 100%* was what everyone and their mothers suggested a long time ago. But instead you tried to nerf it via immolate (T8 set bonus and glyph). Which has the (hopefully) undesired effect of lowering the PvE Damage Dealing of specs that do not use conflag but do use immolate (0/41/30 and Deep Demonology). I Decided to post here to ask you to nerf conflag even further to 50% and give immolate back it's bonuses to help the lower PvE specs out a little with their damage dealing.

but... I'd assume you'd thought of this? Please please tell me you thought of this and decided this way was for the best and not just the cheapest way for blizz to cover their lack of foresight (especially when Warlocks themselves were telling you this from day 1..) Are you at least considering this for a more permanent and balanced way to deal with conflag in the future?

I'm not sure if you actually meant "big concise" or not, but concise posts are nice. People are more likely to read them. Mine aren't always as concise as I wish, but it can drive players nuts when they're not sure what we're really trying to say, which tends to lead to more words. So I apologize for not always practicing what we preach there.

We need to see what effect this change (Conflag nerf) really has on PvE. I know players are posting simulation numbers, and those are helpful, but we also need to see what it really means for a raid. You've seen some of the boss encounters now so you know it varies a lot from tons of adds to lots of running around. Different strategies are going to work better for different fights and therefore different specs are going to work better for different fights. We don't want every lock to go Affliction, but we don't want every lock to go Destro either (or hybrid for that matter).

Fire and Brimstone is something we're looking at, as is Molten Core. We don't want to necessarily kill the hybrid spec dead, but if there is going to be a "mandatory" spec, we'd rather it be one that didn't just cherry pick all the best talents from multiple trees. Molten Core is there to make Demo's rotation a little bit more interesting than send in the pet + Shadowbolt. So far it seems like a lot of them may just be using Shadowbolt anyway to benefit from the debuff.

We're also not sure the Conflag glyph has ended up all that great in practice. It's interesting perhaps, but it also works at odds with some of what the talent tree is trying to get you to do.

Hope that explains a little bit about where we're trying to go with the PvE design.

Q u o t e:
If only all GC's posts were like this, instead of "lulz, a castar killed mah pony".

I try to match them to the tenor of the rest of the thread, but it's not always easy. Players tend to jump to the blue posts instead of reading the whole thread, so they don't always see the context of the rest of the comments.

As a few people have pointed out, buffing say Improved Imp or Chaos Bolt (possibly Incinerate) are also possibilities if Destro's PvE damage ends up too low.

Q u o t e:
Why do you tell DW DK's that Hybrid builds that take "the best of each tree without going deep enough for a 51 pointer" ie: 0/32/39 that they are wrong and should not be competitive without taking a 51 pointer, then coddle Warlocks who do the exact same thing?

Game design is rarely that black and white. We want to make the 51-point talents attractive without making them the only way to play the class. Hybrid builds can be cool. The current warlock one isn't terribly offensive because it still feels pretty much like a Destro playstyle. A lot of players even call it "Destro." We'll see if our thoughts have changed on it after a couple of weeks. The DK one by contrast was trying to build a spec that totally subverted how we wanted DKs to play by basing all of the damage around proc'ing big crits and using ranged spells almost exclusively. It's sometimes a subjective call about whether a spec is a creative solution by players and threfore something to embrace, or changing the playstyle into something we don't want that class to do, and therefore something to fix.

Also not sure any warlocks feel particularly "coddled" at the moment.

Q u o t e:
You don't have real number from the pre-conflag hot fix so that just give you an out to say the simcrafts were wrong. (BTW Simcraft has a history of being pretty spot on...but hey you stick to those internal numbers of yours)

Q u o t e:
In my experience, ingame numbers usually express the same relative rankings that simcraft does, but with considerably more space between the specs. In other words, I think deep destro is even worse off in a real single-target bossfight scenario than simcraft represents, and FG/ember is even more powerful than it appears.

I've commented on Simcraft (and any similar tool before) but I'll repeat myself.

1) It's awesome to see players dedicating that much effort to WoW. It really is. They show a passion for the game and dedication to improving both the player's effectiveness and the game in general. It is humbling in a way.

2) Those tools are very difficult to make. I'll give a shout out to Toskk's Feral spreadsheet, which represents an enormous effort and is still being refined constantly. Getting that kind of accuracy and precision for every spec in the game is going to be challenging.

3) As the community continues to offer feedback, refine and grow to accept Simcraft (or any tool), so will we. We aren't going to spend a great deal of our effort to troubleshoot or verify their assumptions. They are third party tools.

4) At the end of the day, the Blizzard designers are going to balance the game. Not the community. Not Simcraft. Not any external tool. If you want to use those numbers as part of your argument, that's awesome. But just posting those numbers and saying "Fix it," isn't going to work. I've said this a lot lately, but you should stop approaching every potential change as "What do we have to do to get you to make this change?" The answer is there is nothing you can do. You can give us information and we will use that information to make informed decisions. But we, not the community and not external tools, are going to make those decisions.

5) Do remember that statements such as "warlocks do 6800 dps" are virtually meaningless. The actual damage you can do on a raid boss varies enormously depending on your skill, gear, lag, luck, the boss encounter and the buffs you have. Estimating a maximum theoretical dps is a very useful piece of data and nothing to be scared of. But that does not mean you will ever see those numbers with any consistency. Do not take them as gospel. Ever.

Q u o t e:
Thanks for the reply. I hope it didn't have too much to do with the "GC answers trolls" comment.

No, I was looking for a thread that actually wanted to discuss the issues instead of vent. I think it's a little telling that the one with actual spell and class discussions is like at 5 pages at the moment while all of the threads that start "We should have been nerfed, but we don't like the way you did it" are the ones with 11 pages of "Yeah!"

The spell did too much damage. Period. That's our fault, not anything the players did. Do we wish we had fixed it in PTR? Of course. If I had to guess, though, this probably isn't the worst problem we're going to have to handle over the next few days.

We don't want to kill Destro for PvP or PvE or warlocks in general. But when that goal is trumped when a spell makes the game less fun for everyone else. If it was the only viable spec warlocks had, then it might not have been trumped. But Affliction does tremendous dps, and even Destruction with this nerf is higher than many other specs in the game. Any warlock that changes classes over this is doing it to make a point not because the class isn't viable.

I do answer trolls sometimes. Sometimes they aren't really trolling (in the sense that they aren't just here to cause mischief) but are just upset. In that case sometimes it doesn't take much explanation to turn them around. Sometimes nothing is going to turn them around.

I think the concerns that "warlocks are now dead in PvP" are probably overstated. If things were balanced on such a razor's edge that a 30% nerf to one spell means the difference between "had a chance" and "waste of time" I'd be surprised. Pleasantly surprised that we got it so close, but surprised.

In our opinion, warlocks did a lot better this season than many locks were originally claiming they would be able to do. If you look at situations without DK - paladin teams (which were overpowered), locks did pretty well. We were wrong about some things (DK - paladin teams), but one thing we think we were right about is that Demonic Circle would be a very potent tool in the hands of good players.