Are Warlocks designed out of spite?

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.

7 Likes

I don’t want to offend anyone and I would like, even though the EU forum doesn’t have the sounding board of the US one, they would tend to listen more to player feedback to increase the fun. It doesn’t mean taking it 100% and setting up a totally out of control class specialized in everything and with no apparent weaknesses (any reference to DHs is purely intentional), but it just means making it as enjoyable and fun as possible.

I often read developers with the various “we want that” and “our intention is to”. But we players pay you for a video game, and a game must entertain and not frustrate, nor do we want to become trade unionists to defend “our rights”. In any case, unfortunately it is also very embarrassing for me to even have to think about writing certain things, but I can understand that they insert a questionable spell or a cumbersome interaction. It’s normal, there are billions of variables in the game and it’s not possible to make everything “perfect”.

The problem arises from the fact that they really lack logic when for example they say that they don’t want Avatar of destruction (taking money from us, when we who pay for fun want it!) so that the infernal becomes better.
Eliminating one fun and thematic skill doesn’t automatically make another fun and performative, and by that I mean I’m embarrassed to even have to point this out. Among other things, by inserting a spell shadow, with cast time, which further emphasizes the incinerate and which to be taken I have to put points in “ritual of ruin” which allows me to cast a chaos bolt faster when it appears quite clear that the chaos bolt it will be thrown into the dust again.
Furthermore, I would like to understand the logic of stating that a spell that stuns AOE for 2 seconds doing damage is not good, and that it is obtained by taking different talents and having to spend time (especially casting chaos bolt) while the Demon Hunters have the “chaos nova” which is practically the same thing but which they can use on CD without having to build resources and without taking talent points.

Also the absolutely incredible fact that they decided, at our expense in every sense, to make the demonology a shadowbolt shooting turret (in 2024, with boring gameplay that hasn’t worked for twenty years) because for them it’s good that the demonic core are just “a moment”. And why don’t they also look for this “moment”, for example, with the elemental shaman for lava burst procs and tell him to cast lighting bolt from a standstill to infinity and beyond? Elemental is fun, as soon as you put on a dot the screen lights up like a Christmas tree in New York and you can press random buttons and kill.

I hope they retrace their steps and above all follow a minimum of the free feedback we give them for fun.

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By season 3, I wrote a HUGE post on how to change destro and what I, as a player, would like to see. It’s a shame to see how developers ignore their community, that from now on I don’t even want to leave any feedbacks for them. Instead of separating Inferno and Cataclysm, they explicitly state that they want to create even greater competition between talents, while killing Inferno. Everyone’s favorite Avatar of Destruction is being deleted, which is fun and interesting to play with. They explain the latest change by saying that Avatar of Destruction is too cool, and Summon Infernal pales against its background. But tell me, adequate people, isn’t this clowning? A very cool approach to class design: kill the funny talents so that the boring ones become more used. Just great, standing ovation for you, warlock class designer (Sarcasm). And if anyone didn’t understand, this is exactly the same approach they used for the Season 2 and 3 kits, forcing us to play with something that players usually ignore. I advise everyone to upgrade a new character, for example, mage. The developers are watching him: it was only last summer that we saw a cool mage rework, and now (less than a year has passed) they are making a full-fledged rework again, and not like destro - they broke a couple of talents and abandoned them. A warlock could only dream of a design like mage.

3 Likes

Best we can do is add another shop store mount.

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More than a shame that they don’t listen to our feedback, if not rarely, it’s simply a disadvantage for everyone. We have a less fun product (and some just walk away, it’s happened to me a few times in the past), and they waste money and time finding solutions.

Many never think about it, but we are Blizzard’s stakeholders. It is clear that in a game where there are various interested parties it is not possible to give everyone the best, but it is also not intelligent to bypass requests or not understand any frustrations.

I understand the fact that it is more appropriate for them to emphasize the Infernal CD, but I want to point out that it wasn’t us who conceived and put Avatar of Destruction live but them. I don’t develop games, I do other things in life, but to have the classic “two birds with one stone” you could simply move Avatar or Destruction to the left side of the talents, so as to call it “World on fire” and making sure that each shard spent can summon an Infernal for a few seconds.

Additionally to emphasize the Infernal itself you could give it 2 minute CD, shorter duration (20 sec?), and once active the warlock gets a critical bonus similar to dark soul. On the right side of the talents, for example, Soulfire could be inserted as a capstone on the “fire” side, but making it instant with a proc based on the shards used, maybe. It currently makes no sense to insert a spell shadow with cast time under “Ritual of Ruin” to emphasize the incinerates (also because by doing so, the chaos bolt will go into the drawer to gather dust as sometimes happens).

Anyway I’m very disheartened, I had a lot of hype towards War Within especially after seeing the first Hero Talent, the Diabolist. Afterwards I basically only had disappointments and anger.

3 Likes

The thing that leaves me even more incredulous is the fact that they had previously written that they wanted to make the Capstones more intriguing and powerful warlock’s talents. I didn’t expect them to give me the possibility to choose between Mannoroth’s Fury and Kil’jaeden’s Cunning…

but neither did I expect them to give me Capstones that take talents located just above and moreover NERFED (for example Soul Conduit and Chaos Incarnate, which is really comical as situations considering that at 70% efficiency for a simple mathematical discussion the talent becomes a DPS loss…)

2 Likes

crazy how malefic rapture is still a button.

buff the dots and remove rapture would be nice.

1 Like

Malefic Rapture is objectively something decidedly inexplicable. Reading the various comments on the official forums and on discord etc., the vast majority of warlocks hate her right from the first appearance.

Here too: if 90% of affliction warlocks have been giving very negative feedback on this ability for years, it is not clear why not eliminate it or at least try to limit its use. Even more inexplicable is the fact that the developers themselves clearly said that their intention was to make this ability less central, however with each alpha release the centrality of the malefic rapture incredibly increased, so much so as to make it queen to the detriment of other abilities such as the seed of corruption in the dungeons.

Even more incredible is the fact that in Soul Harvester the predominance of malefic rapture is, if possible, even more obsessive.

to increase the damage of the DOT in an intelligent way, for me it would be necessary to eliminate Oblivion (a spell which, by consuming two shards and having a channel not influenced by the haste, is very counterproductive in PvP and in the PvE context in case of need to move to avoid damage) and like Capstone insert a big DOT boost when channeling Drain Soul, or tick speed exactly like the old malefic grasp

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All i can say to the lock devs at this point is.

Bruh. ??

Well speak for yourself i like season 3 set tbh. The changes to destruction i am curious how thats going to be, we will see.

it was okey for raid,gave something for mobility which was much need’d,cant say same for m+

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