Arena warlocks vs melees

PVP Arenas
1

Warlock is unplayable vs melees in arena especially solo shuffle where nobody is helping the warlock everyone just spams damage and stuns …There is literally 0 balance and it’s simply unfair and ugly.

Lets just do a simple comparison

Warlock’s mobility:
Teleport on circle - (30 seconds CD, also have to cast it first somewhere)
Gateway - (90 SECONDS CD)
The End.

Melees mobility:
(permanent sprint, remove slow, freedoms, charge 10sec cd, fly across the map 10sec cd, jump across the map 10sec cd, dk grips 5 times for 10 seconds, cat forms, paladin mount in combat, rogue shadowstep nonstop + sprint nonstop… the list goes ON forever)

I guess the obvious winner in mobility are the melees…

Warlock’s loss of control:
Shadowfury ( 1.4 seconds cast time 3 sec stun… 1 min cd)
Coil (45 sec cd 3sec duration on one target)
Fear (1.6 sec cast most likely interrupted or dispelled or reflected etc)
The end

Melees loss of control:
(instant press one button 5 second stun base minimum + short cd less than 1 minute all melee classes have 4 or 5 different ways to stun you disorient you push you + one big disorient type like blind, asphyxiate, storm bolt from distance, kidney, leg sweep, sigils, the list goes on and on + tons of microstuns slows etc)

Easy win for melees any day any time on here too.

Warlock’s damage:
Heavily relies on being able to cast spells. Need to ramp up summon demons or spread dots on players etc tons of casts needed to even start doing damage exposed to interrupts and stuns resulting in very low damage output

Melee’s damage:
Press 1 button instant pop of cooldown then spam instant ton of consistent damage non stop no way to interrupt them or escape them just damage upon damage

Warlock’s survivability:

  • CLOTH wearer meaning you take extra extra extra damage from melee classes
    Dark pact (gets melted away in 1 sec when facing 2 melees)
    Unending resolve (3min cd 8 sec duration just to reduce damage taken by 40%… every melee have similar defensive on top of everything else they have)

Melee’s survivability:
Just the shear amounts of stuns and interrupts should be enough to keep them alive, but on top of that they have spells like divine shield (completely immune to taking damage for 8 sec) or paladins can also prevent magic damage, dk’s have anti magic shield, rogues have cloak of shadows, warriors spell reflect, etc Monks have karma, rogues can vanish + smoke bomb + other tricks, on top of that they all have defensives to reduce damage taken overall…

So seriously asking is there any fairness in all this at all ???

BALANCE THE **** GAME ?!

You simply cannot be playing warlock because you’re always the target of all the melees in the game and they simply have much much much more utilities and spells and stuff they can do to you and they can always reach you and stun you and interrupt you. It’s insane ! 90% of the the entire arena I’m sitting in a stun or interrupted, silenced slowed and just running around with my long cd portal to try and survive…

2 Likes
2

Nice bait you got there mate, is your fishing maxed out already?

1 Like
3

What about melee in casters lobby?

If you dont like random format of arena lobbys you can go regular rated 3s :slight_smile:

4

you can just grip and kill easy I dont see the issue there ?! try caster in a melee lobby pls

5

Guy here complaining about dk in the year of 2024 post nerf xD

6

Circle is less than 30 seconds brother, everyone using impish instincts for melee lobby. As Demo you have fel lord talent as well ,huge DMG and stuns in area. Hs 1 min cd dark pact, resolve, and of course precog. I played a bit demo this season was fun actually.

1 Like
7

Last time fel lord did that was when it was first introduced in legion back when it was played in AWC.

Anyone who has working eyes can weave in and out of the m+5 fel lord mechanic lol

1 Like
8

It’s not unplayable, but you definitely play a certain type of game with the warlock. Other classes like melee appear to play Hack & Slash, and several casters appear to play shoot em up.

It is certainly much more stressful than other classes, having excessively dated gameplay and that fantastic Blizzard mania for giving spells to half a second of cast or non-instant proc unlike everything else in the game

9

You’re doing things wrong. Record your games and send them to Jazggz to analize them and he will tell you what to do differently to win games. If you’re struggling against dks you’re not using your tools correctly.

2 Likes
10

It’s good practice to play a class that are under a lot of pressure.

It will force you to learn how to defend yourself and be aware of your surroundings.

You have no other choice than to learn or you will die like a sack of potato.

11

I mean in DMG breakdown it showed around 2.5-3 mil DMG for couple swings on 2 targets with no pets

12

Blizzard’s way of doing casters vs melees is to boost their favorite child to heavens and then try to melee match the children, but then fail anyway. The fav child is a frost Mage.

Give one more use of teleport. Make shadowfury instant. Bring back Searing Pain and make it cast while moving. Give us disarm. Rework talents so we dont have to put points to teleport/gate which should be basic spells for a class. Choose something bcs warlock is still fun, can be played on high level, but is the most outdated of all.

1 Like
13

it would be enough for them to bring back a quarter of the destruction of MOP for it to be more than decent as a spec. It’s been established for years now that the warlock MUST be a tanky caster, without considering that in the beginning destruction was one of the most fragile specs in the game.

In MOP you could choose between soul leech and dark pact, you didn’t have the additional armour, you didn’t have the enhanced HS and yet between shadowfury instant, fel flame, KJC and ember tap the spec was fantastic. But we are still talking about a class that currently has in the spellbook the corruption a cast time and ritual of doom recently nerfed by 90%, in addition to the drain life which you can spam for twenty minutes and recover perhaps 5% of life.

Among other things, even if defenses such as absorption and damage reduction were increased, you would still make the class fragile against melee and too strong compared to casters. It’s something I’ve been repeating all my life

1 Like
14

Personally i dont think destro locks are that bad. It might not be the most 1v9 class ever however imo the design is actually fun and the best since atleast wod.

15

dh usually goes 6-0 if he’s in the caster lobby, same goes for rogues (each spec)
warriors are 50/50, depends on the classes(eg double lock+mage is 6-0 for the war, yet ele/mage/boomy is 0-6)
dks usually are 6-0 because they cant be slowed and ranged usually rely on slows to kite people
surv hunter isnt really a melee its more like a ranged with 2 melee abilities(one of them being a melee cd kick(13s)) depending on the classes usually does pretty well as well
ww? unkillable unless there is a hpal in the lobby to counter at least karma
ret? depends on the classes, last ele/frostmage/aff/ret lobby he went 5-1
feral? this guy usually 6-0s every caster lobby because he cant be kited and has a clone

im talking about people who actually know their classes (2.5+ mmr shuffle rn)
did i forget anyone

2 Likes
16

maybe because you haven’t tried frost mage XD, or you don’t remember destruction in MOP well. However, jokes aside, he looks too bad compared to the other casters in several things. It’s a spec that has too much cast in nukes (which don’t do enough damage among other things) and that has to stay still to cast them, without the possibility of rooting a target.

Plus the procs are all cast time except backlash which doesn’t let you win. Every class has instant proc, the warlock does not. Soulfire does little damage and need a proc with low chance, it’s not clear why they raised the decimation cast time instead of making it instant. Shadowfury with LONG cast time, unique ability of its kind to be cast time for unknown reasons…

Destruction “died” after MOP, when they eliminated Fel Flame, KJC and then eliminated Ember Tap, Shadowfury at cast time…

Without considering that, personal opinion, the diabolist has nothing to do with the spec as the evocation of greaters demons is from demonology (especially the pit lord), and hellcaller is more of a dot spec with emphasis on curses and satyr rituals . It honestly needs an extensive rework

17
  • The worst three classes/specs right now are Frost and Unholy Death Knights, Havoc Demon Hunters, and Windwalker Monks. They’re all melee specs, which might be just a coincidence, but it’s noticeable.
  • Some other specs are considered “bad,” like Fire Mages, but since Mages have three DPS specs, players can just choose the best-performing spec if another one isn’t as strong. The same goes for Destruction Warlocks.
  • Warlocks are designed to tank damage. They have tons of extra HP and abilities like Unending Resolve, Soul Leech, and Dark Pact. If these were given to, say, Hunters, they’d be practically impossible to kill. So I don’t get why you’d want to become as untouchable as Frost Mages.
  • Melees like Windwalker Monk and Fury Warrior are considered counters to Warlocks (high uptime on low armor target with full physical damage), so facing them as a Warlock is the worst-case scenario. But other classes also have strong counters. Do you know what counters Windwalker or Fury Warrior right now? About 90% of casters, plus specs like Retribution Paladin, which can run around spamming ranged abilities and avoid all damage. It’s like having a permanent bubble throughout the game, which feels frustrating to play against.
18

but we have known the cart/scissors discussion, we don’t claim to be “the best”, the point is in fact the gameplay itself which is not satisfying and is very frustrating in several cases, appearing extremely old compared to everything else of the game.

The fact that the warlock is designed to “tank damage” doesn’t mean that you basically have to make the class a sort of punching bag to do satisfaction at melee who can’t deal damage on a mage frost. It’s an absurd contradiction to have an immobile class that “tank damage” but which under pressure doesn’t have much chance of doing so because it doesn’t have important instant procs or roots or damage on primary spells of a certain type.

A frost mage has very strong continuous roots and instants, has much stronger escapes than a warlock and “tank damage” much, much better than a warlock. The contradiction is precisely that: if you make an immobile class that doesn’t root, you can’t give it continuous cast times and low mobility while you give instants, mobility, immunity and very high damage to one that roots.

To clarify: the PvP snowdrift talent, considering the gameplay of a frost mage and a destruction warlock, which class would it have been more correct to give it to? Among other things, it was the talent that Xelnath was giving to destruction, Cataclysm, which had to knock out a nearby target after a while of stack and then stun it

19

Yeah, Frost Mage is a perfect example of how classes shouldn’t be designed. But let’s look at another case: Shadow Priests. This spec, like Warlocks, wears cloth armor, but unlike Warlocks, it has zero mobility and has to cast much more. It usually struggles when melee specs tunnel it, with Windwalker Monks, for example, often being a hard counter.

What about now? Well, you guessed it—Shadow Priest is S-tier on every single tier list and one of the first specs likely to get nerfed. It stands there in the middle, laughing at specs like Windwalker that can’t do anything to them because Blizzard overbuffed their survivability.

This same thing has happened to Warlocks countless times before. It’s one of the most frustrating experiences in the game when, as a melee, your main goal is to maintain uptime on an opponent and deal respectable damage, but you either can’t connect at all or, if you do, your target just tanks you effortlessly while doing twice your pressure back. Having to run away from a caster the whole game or being unable to connect at all as a melee isn’t how the game is supposed to feel.

Also I wouldn’t say that warlocks cannot maintain distance at all, you do have tools.
In case of doubts watch this video:
Venruki’s video

20

With all the above in mind, I’d like to ask a simple question.

If you were a developer with access to the game data and could make unbiased decisions, knowing that melee specs are generally weaker than casters in 3v3 and Solo Shuffle—even if some random dudes on the forums say that they “always destroy casters with zero counterplay”—and recognizing that melee specs are nearly useless in the new Battleground Blitz mode, what would you do?

  • Would you make Warlocks as tanky as Shadow Priests, making them nearly unkillable by melee, eliminating the only lose condition they have and making them S+++ tier?
  • Would you rework Warlocks to give them even more mobility, making them untouchable further disadvantaging melee classes?
  • Revert Warrior damage buffs, pushing them back to C tier? Or perhaps apply blanket damage/mobility nerfs to all melee specs, leaving most of them in the D-F tier while Rogues and Druids remain OKish due to their extensive crowd control?
  • Maybe rework both casters and melee (with a few exceptions) to reduce their mobility and escape options? This will indirectly favor warlocks. Do you think this would even be feasible at this point?
  • Or, should Warlocks accept that they may lose to certain less popular specs if they don’t manage their mobility carefully (unlike Mages, who can often press buttons randomly and still come out on top) or don’t get adequate support from their teammates?