Apparently this was written in Discord: If Curse of Darkness performance hit was enough of a problem to nerf it to a three-second internal cooldown, this change would have happened sometime in the past 18 years. So what's changed to warrant the nerf now? The answer is the cat's out of the bag on Bard exploitation of Curse of Darkness. Spam those nigh-instant debuff songs, which count as spells for Curse of Darkness' purpose, and you can vomit an absurd amount of damage via Curse alone - more, even, than the Warlock itself (in T5, at least). More and more raids learn and exploit this trick to meet DPS checks, accelerate HP sponge fights, or simply pad meters for funsies. This puts strain on the server (apparently) and fills logs with messages about Curse of Darkness. So Curse of Darkness gets nerfed with a three-second internal cooldown, gutting a class-defining ability and grossly reducing their viability (for reference, Curse now does 1/8th of what it used to on the average Warlock encounter-heavy parse). Meanwhile your root cause isn't fixed: Bard can still spam songs. Those songs can still proc other effects. Your servers will still be put under undue pressure when Bard players want to have fun padding meters via Ice Lash et al. Despite what your logs say, Curse of Darkness was not your root cause. Bard song spam is. You've "fixed" a server-lagging exploit by trashing the vehicle of the exploit (and ruined a crucial ability for another class in the process), but haven't resolved the problem. There are more zero-cooldown procs, and Bard songs are ready and waiting to exploit them. I urge you to address the actual root cause of your problem - Bard songs - and then roll back this Curse of Darkness nerf. Aside from the general drop in viability of the Warlock, with this nerf a fun aspect of the class that added a little extra element of skill has been lost.
If anything, they will just nerf Bards too. Which is apparently what you want? Why nerf CoD now? Well, they just upgraded to 64 bit (not cheap!), and the servers still lag. Now they're chasing down why. When the devs see Curse of Darkness coming up 10298347 times while data mining, and the servers still lag after upgrading to 64 bit, of course they're going to stop Curse of Darkness from killing server performance. If they see Bard spamming coming up at a very high rate too, they'll nerf that as well, especially if 64 bit server lag still hasn't improved enough.
Yes sweetheart, I’d like the actual problem to be fixed and the crippling Curse of Darkness nerf to be rolled back. CoD performance has been fine for 18 years. I’m extremely skeptical it magically became a problem when transitioning to 64-bit. Combined with the stealth nature of the change, it’s far more likely this was a knee-jerk nerf by someone who saw an 8k Troub parse screenshot and pushed the change without understanding the problem and without making a pull request (aka peer review and approval). Nothing was supposed to change on Tuesday, but it did. A critical internal Quality Control process failed, and failed in a major way. The end result is a class that was already struggling is now dead in the water while the actual exploit remains unresolved, but everybody’s acting like it was a totally intended change because otherwise they’d need to admit they dropped the ball in a major way. Not due to balance in a video game - more in the “your credit card and identity” kind of way. If changes can be pushed without approval, it’s an internal security risk.
I don't know if it's fair to say, "the cat is out of the bag," bards using togglable debuffs to trigger procs has been happening for many, many years. I'm going to give DBG the benefit of the doubt that this was done truly because of performance reasons. As to what could be done to address warlock grievances: If this is a change because of performance issues: if the system that applies damage to enemies is aware of the target encounter size, apply CoD damage once to each enemy in the target encounter scaled by target encounter size. This reduces an exponential problem to a linear problem and effectively keeps the damage the same as it had been previously. The cooldown can then probably be dropped and the ability keeps it's unique flavor. If this is a change because bard behavior was deemed to be exploitative: make CoD and other similar damage procs trigger on spell damage and not "hostile spell cast."
I don't see another way to explain why it wasn't a problem for 18 years and now suddenly is unless usage dramatically increased. Server performance: I was already under the impression Curse grew linearly - basically that it just cast one encounter nuke when a hostile spell (regardless of that spell being encounter or single target) landed on an encounter. So a Dark Nebula that hit 5 targets would not proc once for each target (resulting in 5^2 calculations) but rather once, and hit five targets (resulting in 5 calculations). Since it was already linear (AFAIK), the only avenue of performance hit that made sense was song flickering since it can occur faster than anything else. On Spell Damage: I actually suspect this proc type would cause the ability to go into exponential growth, lol.
CoD absolutely has been N^2 in number of damage calculations. A blue or green encounter hostile spell would create a target encounter proc per enemy.
This is how you know the post is non-sense. Nothing we have is spammable. The debuff spells are maintained. 2sec reuse time and then another 1sec global CD for it to become castable after toggling it off then another .5s for actual casting. At best every 3.5s a spell can be cast. Sure you could try to stack some ability reuse and get it a little faster but if its only good with CoD whats the point in taking getting rid of all the the other stats you want/need for the times that spell is up. Also if you are doing that and ignoring all your other important debuffs then you are just a bad bard. There are bigger fish to fry then adding another second or two to the recasts. We need the devs focused on itemization of DoF and getting it properly ready. It's not like bards are out there winning parses regularly doing this where it is considered broken. If they are the rest of your DPS is really bad.
The way this ability worked was OP and has been for years. One ability should not trivialize a large portion of content. I will agree they used too big of a nerf bat, but to say it didn't need nerfed is just wrong. We all know it but no one wants to say it cause it's fun. Ice lash is by no means even remotely close to curse. This doesn't "destroy" a class, it just takes one of their easy mode fun buttons away. Personally, I like that I don't see people almost crash when this is used anymore. Now it will take 20 seconds instead of 10 seconds to kill trash... ohh the horror. To say curse added another skill factor to a class is laughable at best. Cast curse, face roll keyboard and top parse. Yep major skill needed to use it.
Your argument makes it sound like "taking 20 seconds instead of 10 seconds to kill trash" is "trivializing a large portion of content" As far as taking away a "fun button," what is a game supposed to be other than fun?
It definitely causes lag. I have no reason to doubt the devs' reasoning on that point. However, I do take exception to the fact that they've labeled it an "exploit" (seriously, an exploit, when it's been known about and left in the game for over a decade?), and the "fix" which is basically to neuter a class into effective irrelevancy. There were far more elegant solutions to the problem than to simply kneecap the ability. Hopefully they will figure one out because these kind of nerfs just make life so much worse for everyone, not just the specific class involved.
I agree with the OP; however, CoD was never in line with Fae Fire or Frigid Gift, so I am hopeful it actually becomes a better spell than it was before after they look more into it without the 'exploit'. Yeah.
lol yup, the ramblings of a clueless warlock who was probably the one who initiated all of this by spamming reports to DBG that troubies were "spamming debuffs" and beating them on the parse... omfg, its classic... the whiners get their own class nerfed and then whine some more about their own doings! /popcorn
Pretty unnecessary change all together. This ability hardly trivialized any content. Any mention of skill with this ability is humorous. It did add some "fun" to gameplay, as it allowed you to change your rotation slightly on encounter on specific classes to cast abilities that don't do any damage. Ice lash was already outperforming, or doing as much damage as curse on long encounter fights in the later expansions. Ice lash was also 2-3x what curse was on the zonewides in anything past DOF. This nerf feels like it was too heavy handed. As far as lag is concerned, this ability does add some lag; yes. It's fine though because you cast this then 1 shot the 60 pack coming at you in poets palace then move on and smile as the troub parses 60k in DOF. As it currently stands now i'd still have a hard time removing a warlock from a raidsetup, they bring too much to the table in terms of damage and debuffs. It's more of a question of why are abilities nerfed like this instead of focusing on real class balance issues currently in game. $0.02
