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Reap Souls

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Anuï
#1 - March 13, 2017, 10:26 a.m.
Blizzard Post
"Souls are now reset to 0 at the start of an encounter. The buff is also canceled at the start of an encounter.

Reason: Souls are a resource, and we have a rules about resetting your resources/stacks of a buff before an encounter, so that every attempt is standardized. Having souls the first time you fight a raid boss feels good, but it makes every other attempt after that feel worse by comparison."

Please, please, PLEASE do not let this go live. You guys are missing the point of our entire feedback the past few months. Not having Reap Souls on the pull feels horrid, sluggish, and constrains our damage significantly.

A few examples of why this would be bad:
    1. Heroism on pull -> Oh, you spent half of heroism just ramping up to deal as much damage as everyone else? Nice, there goes your opportunity to contribute to the greatest overall "free" uptime of damage in most fights.
    2.Mythic+ dugeons -> Why is this Warlock sitting at low numbers unable to deal reasonable damage to the boss until it's 3/4 of the way dead?


This change does nothing but increase the ramp up on Affliction damage, and unless Rend Soul goes completely un-nerfed (very unlikely) there will continue to be significant variances in damage based on:
-UA crits
-MG uptime (ability to stand still for long periods and use Drain Soul effectively)
-Shard procs off of soul conduit and Shard generation in general
-Soul generation in the first 40s of the fight

I think a lot of Warlocks in the community would be happier if you changed it to just passively generating 2-3 souls out of combat, and allowing us to maintain the souls for the boss, but don't allow us to maintain the buff pre-pull. (I.e., can't game the system so that we can pop reap souls 15 seconds before the pull and have 3 souls again by the time pull starts). This would add consistency and slightly lower variance.

Even without this nerf though, it doesn't change the fact that Affliction damage is, perhaps, the most inconsistent damage in the game due to the reasons mentioned above. It also sucks our entire damage distribution is based around MG uptime with UA, and that the rest of our DoTs are literally just there for flavor.

None of this even takes into account you're pigeonholing us into Malefic Grasp through the t20 set bonuses, and your attempt to make Drain Soul a significant damage dealing spell completely contradicts the nature of both MG, and the fantasy of being a DoT casting class, as we literally will have to sacrifice DoT uptime just to keep those drain soul procs rolling.

Please listen to the feedback of the community and make changes. Warlocks could really use some love with how their design has been this expansion.
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Sigma
Game Designer
#86 - March 16, 2017, 2:39 a.m.
Blizzard Post
This should not affect Mythic Dungeon bosses--only the start of a raid encounter and the start of an entire Mythic Keystone dungeon. Dungeon runs themselves are meant to be a continuous challenge of combat where managing resources before/after a boss is part of the gameplay.

We're going to monitor whether Affliction needs an overall buff to account for this (even in a patch with few class changes). We still believe it's better to not have the variance between the first attempt at a boss with 12 saved souls, and all future attempts where you feel like you've lost your one chance to do your best damage. Avoiding that sort of pressure is a reason we've generally tried to become more standardized about clearing resources at the start of an encounter for all classes. If the encounter follows a consistent set of rules every time, the spec can be tuned around that behavior, including a spec that, for example, has slower rampup.
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Sigma
Game Designer
#187 - March 22, 2017, 10:15 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Thanks for all the feedback. Details will be forthcoming, but we do want to do something to help Tormented Soul generation near the start of encounters (wherever the new resetting takes place). It's still important that the resources at the start of an encounter be somewhat standardized, but we understand that starting at 0 and not being able to use Reap Soul during your opening burst isn't a timing that feels great for that ability.
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Sigma
Game Designer
#262 - March 28, 2017, 12:41 a.m.
Blizzard Post
FYI, the Reap Souls change should be in place on the PTR already.

We do agree that always starting at 0 would not have been a great place to end up, and wanted to put something in at the same time to help address the concerns that have been mentioned. The total result should be that you feel like you can have a more reliable opener with at least 3 Souls.