The Destruction Warlock set bonuses in The War Within season 2 are both essentially passive damage increases, that come in different forms. We might see some changes in how we go about setting up our Destruction Warlock season 2 depending on the effect and final tuning, and I will cover what that is going to mean in this segment. The season 2 Destruction Warlock 2-set bonus is a 1 proc per minute + haste proc that triggers demonfire bolts at increased effectiveness. This effect is always triggered when you cast
Summon Infernal. The 4-set adds a layer to this, increasing mastery and making us always benefit 100% from our mastery
Mastery: Chaotic Energies. The way this plays out is essentially that a little more often than once a minute, we're going to get a 10 second duration flat damage proc and a buff that increases the base damage of our abilities. We don't have a ton of ways to play around this, meaning it essentially becomes more of a passive damage increase.
The strength of the Destruction 2-set bonus will vary a little bit, depending on wether or not it interacts with the talents that buff demonfire, such as
Raging Demonfire and
Demonfire Mastery. If these effects do work, we're going to see a slight buff to the effectiveness of this bonus, both through the flat out damage, but also through increased passive
Immolate duration. Although
Immolate isn't a big issue for us with
Soul Fire also applying this.
Our 4-set might have a slight effect on how we end up gearing, moving our stat priorities around making mastery more attractive over crit and possibly a bit of haste. This is all going to come down to tuning and the amount of uptime we have on our 4-set. With the current tuning and up-time, we can expect something like 15 seconds uptime every minute, or 30 seconds every 2 minutes on average. That means 30% of the time we benefit for 100% of our mastery. The other 70% of the time we're benefitting for about 75% of our mastery. This averages out at a performance of mastery around 82.5%, making our mastery slightly better but not a whole lot. We might end up moving talents around a little bit picking up
Chaos Incarnate and then gearing more towards mastery in general, but that's all yet to be figured out. Keep in mind, these numbers are estimates and will depend a lot on gear and stat levels.
Gameplaywise these bonuses aren't going to have a very big influence on our gameplay. When spending your soul shards conservatively, you might end up getting a few more
Chaos Bolt casts off at 100% mastery, but outside of that not much changes. If they were to become more interesting, the mastery buff duration would have to be longer than 10 seconds, because you can barely fit in big damage bursts in this window. It feels like tier sets thematically don't make a lot of sense either. The 2-piece wants to play around demonfire bolts such as
Channel Demonfire, but then the 4-set is something completely different that doesn't thematically relate to the 2-piece at all. If the 4-set bonus would have built on top of the 2-set, this might have been a different story. All in all, not two very inspiring set bonuses and I personally had hoped for more.
