I understand that TWW changes to warlocks are not complete yet. We still might see something more coming but judging by the current direction and past experiences; I have a feeling that whoever is responsible for warlock design basically hates this class.
Let’s take season 2 and 3 Destruction tier bonuses as an example. For some reason, you have picked two disliked spells (rifts and CDF) and forced people to play them for entire seasons. For most of the expansion, we are locked into some god-awful, abominable playstyle nobody asked for. It’s as if you literally want to “stick it” to the warlock players for not using those abilities. I am shocked we haven’t seen Shadowburn set (don’t get any ideas). For the entire duration of the expansion Demonology was the only well-rounded spec that didn’t suck. Sure you could make destro work in certain scenarios or even affliction but it was always at a cost of terrible janky and unenjoyable playstyle.
Sticking to the topic of destruction - half of the tree is just useless, most of the talents are not used in any scenario. But what scenarios are there, actually? Destro is decent in three scenarios - single-target patchwerk fights, 2-target havoc fights, and high end M+ with very coordinated groups that can play around destro dmg profile and execute huge pulls. The “RoF Spam” warlock is not viable in 99,9% of the average-joe keys since the packs are not big enough, tanks can’t stand still, and team composition is not perfect, yet you have decided that being good in those 0.1% of keys is too much so you went ahead and gutted it and your explanation literally reads: “many infernals are too much fun, have a mid Shadowlands spell as capstone instead”.
Warlock trees feel very “slapped together”, like you know when your big bro made a cool lego castle that you toppled over but you don’t care so you just put some random pieces together and use duplo parts as roofing and call it a day. Lack of synergies is just baffling as if you wanted to tell us “don’t play this, we don’t want you to play this”.
Warlock community and content creators been giving you recipes for simple changes that would make the class at least remotely enjoyable to play, nothing big, nothing like “give shadowflame 5000% dmg buff”, simple stuff like: move cataclysm higher in the tree, make CDF castable on the move, make tyrant dmg relevant, bring back Haunt spender etc. but it looks like you just hate reasonable feedback and with every consecutive iteration the class gets worse.
So - do you really hate warlocks that much? I’m not an alt person, I have a warlock and a druid for flower picking. That’s it. Never in, I think, 6-7 years I felt so close to dropping warlock and re-rolling literally anything else. So it would be good to know what’s your core philosophy is here. Or can I expect to be continuously punished for playing a class that you would probably want to delete from the game entirely.
P.S. I understand that warlocks deal good damage, however this does not mean it’s fun to play. Warlock is the definition of anti-fun bland spec that for some reason can deal damage if you can curb your frustration for long enough. Honestly, I’d rather be playing mid-of-the-pack damage dealer with solid smooth playstyle (ele shaman for example) than this unintuitive jank.