A Look Back at Destruction Warlock in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Destruction Warlock Writer, Loozy, offers a retrospective highlighting Destruction’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Destruction Retrospective & War Within Wishlist

Recently we published a similar article looking back at Destruction Warlock in Dragonflight, but it was clear some people felt some relevant topics went untouched that should have been brought up. Because of that, we here present a new iteration of the same article, including a few more topics and finally some thoughts on what changes Destruction could use in The War Within.

Destruction has for a big portion of Dragonflight not seen a lot of gameplay and it’s safe to say Destruction has generally been at the lower end of popularity in both raiding and dungeons. During the later stages of Dragonflight however, we have seen some Destruction Warlocks present especially in the high-end Mythic+ scene more specifically in the MDI scene. In this article, I will cover why that is.

Destruction Warlock Gameplay

Destruction is one of those specs where, if you’ve played it once, you can probably pick it up again very quickly. It’s a simple spec with its own unique resource system, that revolves around generating and spending soul shards. If we look at it historically, Destruction has not received very many changes in a good long while, meaning the identity and damage profile of Destruction has remained the same for a long time.

Destruction in Raids
The appeal of Destruction in raids has always been the ability to store up damage in the form of soul shards, to then deal large portions of damage to a priority target with Chaos Bolt casts. Another strong point is the damage output through Havoc. For a very long time, we spoke about Havoc being one of the reasons Destruction couldn’t be a good single-target spec, because it would then be too strong on cleave. Since then, we have seen a change to Havoc only replicating x% damage, meaning Destruction has been able to receive proper tuning for single-target. This has been clear in Dragonflight especially, where Destruction was a contender for being one of the strongest single-target Warlock specs in early raid progression. A good example of this is during the season 2 raid Aberrus. Demonology was the strongest single-target spec during this, but it required specific gear such as the Neltharion’s Call to Dominance trinket and Power Infusion to be this strong. Destruction was a good alternative for the people who didn’t have both of these for their raids. This was the case on fights like Rashok and Magmorax.

Destruction in Dungeons
Since Shadowlands, people have been very aware of Destruction’s ability in Mythic+. During the final seasons of Shadowlands, we saw Destruction Warlocks be the go-to damage dealer for high-end Mythic+ content, due to how Rain of Fire+Inferno+Avatar of Destruction interacted with each other. This changed radically when we left Shadowlands and went to Dragonflight, where Warlocks were few and far apart in the high-end Mythic+ content. Lately, this seems to have changed, however, with Destruction being in pretty much every single group during the time trials. The issue with Destruction in Mythic+ has always been a large portion of your damage coming from Rain of Fire, and if mobs move out of this you deal no damage to them. The build people are playing in the MDI setups now look something like:

With some variation as to Crashing Chaos and Burn to Ashes over Power Overwhelming/Diabolic Embers. This talent setup doesn’t rely as much on landing Rain of Fire, but a lot of the damage comes from Dimensional Rift resets through the season 3 tier set bonuses.

This setup is by no means as overpowered as the final seasons of Shadowlands Destruction, but it’s a very strong contender that brings good utility and is incredibly tanky. Another reason this spec is so relevant in Mythic+, is that we sacrifice very little single target damage, to go about the AoE route in our talent tree. Meaning, even though we are focusing largely on picking up AoE talents, our single-target for bosses and solo mob packs is quite strong.

Destruction Warlock Talent Tree

It’s very clear the Destruction talent tree has some glaring issues that can be improved on for future expansions. During testing before Dragonflight launched, it was very clear that one of the intentions behind the Destruction specialization tree was to allow the player to take control of what types of damage they wanted to deal. The way of doing this was to make more or less everything a talent, such as Rain of Fire leading into talents that further go in the same damage profile direction like Pyrogenics and Inferno. This idea however did result in some issues with the layout of the talent tree that left people wasting points in dead talents when pathing further down the tree.

Pathing in the Destruction Tree
If you want to make a single-target talent setup in the Destruction tree, you start by picking up the available talents that contribute to your single target damage, but then very quickly end up being short a few points in order to progress further. You then end up having to put 2 points into talents that aren’t going to be doing anything for you.

We could go through Channel Demonfire, but even then you would end up being a talent point short, which you would have to put into either Havoc or Rain of Fire. If you did this, you wouldn’t be able to pick up Backlash and Scalding Flames. What happens is you pick up Havoc -> Pandemonium allowing you to then pick up Backlash and Scalding Flames. That brings along with it the next problem, being you have to put 3 talent points somewhere to path further down the tree, and there aren’t a lot of options on what to pick up that can help you on single target.

What happens then is you pick up Shadowburn into 2 points in Conflagration of Chaos. At this point, we have placed a total of 5 talent points into talents that effectively have 0 impact on our damage or gameplay in any way. The only reason we do this is because the layout of our tree doesn’t allow us to do anything else. If this were to be solved, it would require either an addition of choice notes that offered alternatives to cleave or AoE-based talents or a restructure of the talent tree. In the past, we have had talents and effects that could be potential candidates for this. A good example of this would be Flashover. In the pre-Dragonflight talent tree, Flashover used to be on the same row as Eradication and Soul Fire, but has since been lost.

Dead Talents

Soul Fire wants to be a combination of Incinerate and Immolate, but sadly has way too long of a cast time, and doesn’t deal enough damage to make it worth picking up. If the cast time and/or damage of Soul Fire was higher, Decimation would also be a much much stronger talent. It’s not very appealing to pick up talents that require you to commit to standing still for this long, this often.

Fire and Brimstone used to be a key baseline ability in the Destruction spellbook and playstyle, but has for a few expansions now been demoted to a talent that has gotten progressively less and less interesting. In the current state of Fire and Brimstone, it’s rarely something that is being picked up for its effect. Fire and Brimstone wants to be a heavy AoE damage talent, and right now there are two AoE talent setups, and neither of them involves much of your damage or shard generation coming from Incinerate. Either you play Cataclysm with the season 3 set bonus, and spend your time on AoE casting Dimensional Rift and Rain of Fire, or you go the Rain of Fire heavy build with Inferno. In neither of these setups would you want to spend talent points on picking up Fire and Brimstone. A potential solution to this could be going back to how Fire and Brimstone used to work before, being a toggle-based ability. This could potentially open up for more abilities being affected by the effect, such as Immolate and maybe even Chaos Bolt like when the WoD talent “Charred Remains” altered the synergy of the Destruction playstyle. Another solution could be potentially making Fire and Brimstone a choice note with Channel Demonfire since you rarely play the two together. This could also open up a follow-up talent that empowered the Fire and Brimstone effect in some way, making Fire and Brimstone a more attractive choice.

Shadowburn is currently in more or less every cleave and single-target talent setup, but is never really actually being pressed. The only situation where you would press Shadowburn is if the boss is right about to die, and you have no other time to cast anything else. That is not what an ability you actively decided to pick up in your talent tree should feel like. For Shadowburn to be more attractive, it would have to deal significantly more damage, putting it in line with over half a Chaos Bolt, as you spend 2x the amount of globals casting Shadowburn as you would Chaos Bolt.

Summon Infernal is of course not a dead talent and it is picked in pretty much every single talent setup, but it is by no means an interesting cooldown. Summon Infernal becomes more interesting when you pair it with Crashing Chaos or Rain of Chaos, but on its own, it is pretty much just an extra soul shard generator. The damage from Summon Infernal isn’t great on its own. During Legion, we had Lord of Flames through our artifact weapon, which turned Summon Infernal into a much much higher impact cooldown on a longer cooldown. This alone was enough to make Summon Infernal a more interesting button to press. For a long time, we also had the old Destruction version of Grimoire of Supremacy, which turned your Summon Infernal into a cooldown that made you deal increasingly more and more Chaos Bolt damage the more shards you spent during Summon Infernal.

Destruction Tier Sets

Season 1
The season 1 set bonus was a flat damage increase to our current kit. It didn’t require any change in talents, and the only special interaction was with the permanent extra damage to Chaos Bolt through its crit scaling:

• 2-Set – Consuming Soul Shards has a chance to grant you Chaos Maelstrom, increasing your critical strike chance by 10% for 10 sec.
• 4-Set – Your critical strikes deal 208% damage instead of the usual 200%.

This set bonus was a good pickup for any Destruction Warlock and performed relatively well in both raids and Mythic+ content. We did not have to change talents or playstyle, but got a decent damage boost. That being said, this was an incredibly boring set bonus that did not feel rewarding at all to pick up.

Season 2
The season 2-set bonus introduced a new talent option to our kit, Channel Demonfire.

• 2-Set – Channel Demonfire bolts, Immolate, and Incinerate have a chance to fire an additional Demonfire bolt. These bolts deal 50% increased damage to their main target.
• 4-Set – Demonfire bolts increase your Fire damage by 1% for 13 sec, stacking up to 8 times. Gaining a stack does not refresh the duration. Casting Channel Demonfire resets this effect.

This set bonus changed our playstyle and made Destruction probably the strongest it’s been in Dragonflight raids. We were strong on single-target in raids and had both good AoE and single-target damage in dungeons.

Season 3
The season 3-set bonus yet again changed up our talent build; we now had to pick up Dimensional Rift.

• 2-Set – Bolts from Dimensional Rift now deal 25% of damage dealt to nearby enemies. Immolate periodic damage has a chance to grant a charge of Dimensional Rift.
• 4-Set – Dimensional Rift can now summon a powerful Flame Rift which blasts 20 Searing Bolts.

This set bonus has sparked a bit more controversy; Dimensional Rift shares a talent node with Chaos Incarnate which was one of our stronger talents. The bonus had to go through a lot of tuning and minor changes because, for a while, it looked like we might not even play Dimensional Rift in AoE situations. To make sure this situation didn’t make it to live, Dimensional Rift was changed to also deal a portion of its damage as an AoE effect. This was a great change, that eventually resulted in the Cataclysm based AoE build that we now see in high-end Mythic+ and the MDI.

Final Thoughts
2 out of 3 of the Destruction tier set bonuses forced us to stray away from the “cookie cutter build” Destruction has notoriously been known to default to. This way of going about designing tier-set bonuses is the easiest way to promote gameplay diversity from tier to tier. If we had seen 3 seasons of generic tier set bonuses like the season 1 bonus, it’s unlikely we would have picked up a talent like Dimensional Rift, and it would have also been very unlikely we would have seen any Destruction warlocks present in high-end content at any point during this expansion. As long as the development team is open to making little changes to our talents, such as the AoE effect of Dimensional Rift I have no problem with them making more talent-based tier-sets in the future, as long as they also take a look at the talent tree pathing issues.

Destruction Changes
Madness of the Azj’Aqir being removed had a big impact on the gameplay aspect of Destruction. Having Madness of the Azj’Aqir gave Destruction a clear gameplay purpose, you wanted to chain Chaos Bolt to benefit from as much of Madness of the Azj’Aqir as possible. The added haste application from Madness of the Azj’Aqir helped make Destruction feel more fast-paced, whereas Chaosbringer only has an impact on the damage output of the spec. Without Madness of the Azj’Aqir, the only damage buff we have to really be aware of is Eradication. Eradication used to work much like Madness of the Azj’Aqir, but again without the haste bonus to Chaos Bolt. The purpose of the Destruction rotation is to chain Chaos Bolt casts in order to benefit from a damage buff, but since then Eradication has changed quite a bit, meaning it’s now a much longer debuff that is much easier to maintain a good uptime on. This is, of course, a good thing because if we were unable to chain Chaos Bolt into the Eradication debuff, we would just be getting damage buffs on our filler abilities and soul shard generators like Immolate, Incinerate and Conflagrate. I think a lot of people would agree that the loss of Madness of the Azj’Aqir leaves them with an ambivalent feeling. You’re not going to miss dropping Madness of the Azj’Aqir buffed casts because you have to reposition, but it’s also never going to feel like you’re dealing that extra amount of damage you get when you chain cast Chaos Bolt with Madness of the Azj’Aqir. Madness of the Azj’Aqir used to also affect Rain of Fire, meaning you lose out on a few % on the damage increase between Madness of the Azj’Aqir and Chaosbringer. This is not as significant when you factor in initial casts and such.

Grand Warlock’s Design was changed from reducing the cooldown of Summon Infernal when you spend soul shards, to being a flat 60-second cooldown reduction. This change makes Grand Warlock’s Design a good potential talent for raiding, but in some scenarios worse for Mythic+ than the previous iteration of the same talent. You used to be able to pick up Grand Warlock’s Design and then through Rain of Fire+Inferno reduce the cooldown of Summon Infernal even more than 60 seconds, and sometimes a lot more than that. This also means the gap between that Mythic+ build, and the current season 3 Cataclysm+Dimensional Rift build is even higher. In the past, having a 2-minute based Summon Infernal could have been quite a significant change as we have had Dark Soul: Instability on a 2-minute cooldown.

Going Forward with Destruction

Warlock has been at a good point for a very long time. For so long in fact, it’s become a bit of a joke when Warlocks say they aren’t going to be viable. The odds are, that you will always be wanting to bring at least 1 Warlock to your raid, and sometimes also to your dungeon group. Now, if that Warlock is going to be a Destruction Warlock is a different story. We have been at a healthy point for a very very long time in WoW, but would always welcome some changes to the spec which would make our spec identity and damage profile more interesting. Destruction has only gotten minor tweaks and changes over a very long period of time, so it would be great to see some reworks to our kit, and maybe how our cooldowns or resources work.

The Destruction Warlock Identity
Affliction applies dots and diseases, rotting down their target. Demonology commands around demons making them deal its damage. But what does Destruction do? Destruction deals its own damage, through large fire and chaos-based abilities. Gameplay-wise we generate soul shards, which we then spend dealing our damage in large portions on either individual targets or many targets at the same time. We have progressively moved slightly further away from that concept, and now we summon that one demon to help us gain more of the resource we need to deal our damage. Suggestions for how this could be helped are:

• Re-think interaction with demons for the spec. Destruction used to have special interactions for when we sacrificed a demon, making our own abilities stronger, and adding additional effects to core spells like Chaos Bolt.
• Shared hero talent tree with Demonology could revolve around bringing demons into your kit, allowing you to adapt your own kit based on their abilities and becoming stronger.

Quality of Life

• We are very limited in movement. Having something other than Conflagrate to cast on the move would be welcome. Potentially making Channel Demonfire castable while moving would give Channel Demonfire a place in the Destruction setup, while helping combat one of our gameplay weaknesses.
• Restructure of our talent tree – Allowing for better pathing that doesn’t leave us wasting points as much as we are right now.
• Revisit older talents that could fit into our talent tree, potentially opening up for meaningful choice notes.
• A look at what abilities we have baseline. With more or less everything being a talent, we use up a large portion of our talent points picking up abilities that have always been Destruction’s core abilities. If we revisit what should be a talent, and what is baseline, it would open up for more interesting tweaks to our talent kit while not forcing you to spend 30-40% of your points the same place all the time.

About the Author
This guide is written and maintained by Loozy who plays a Warlock in the guild FatSharkYes on Kazzak EU. I began playing Warlock during Siege of Orgrimmar and have been raiding actively ever since. I became involved in guide writing during Legion where I took part in starting the website Lock One Stop Shop a website by Warlocks for Warlocks (currently outdated). You can catch me on my Twitter @LoozyWoW or on my Stream below:

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