Blizzard are you out of our mind!&

Classes Warlock
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Warlock Class and Specialization Changes

General Changes

All Warlocks will be able to afflict their foes with Curse of Tongues , Curse of Recklessness, Curse of Weakness, and Curse of Doom. In addition, Warlocks can manipulate space with Demonic Circle. Tongue Tied is a new Talent that empowers spells lobbed at targets suffering from Curse of Tongues, causing them to seal the victim from receiving healing effects, forcing them to succumb to all incoming damage for a moderate amount of time

Affliction

Unstable Affliction sacrifices its stacking effect to torture its victim longer, and all without consuming a Soul Shard. Soul Wrack is a new channeled ability that ravages the foe’s spirit, empowering Warlocks’ periodic spells to deal a significant amount of bonus damage to an enemy afflicted by this dark magic. Affliction Warlocks can exacerbate the malaise they sow with Malefic Rapture , a new ability that causes their periodic spells to tick significantly faster while the victim is suffering from the malady.New Talents will be available for Affliction Warlocks to more effectively drain away the life from their victims. Sow the Seeds will now embed two additional seeds into nearby enemies which—combined with the new Malefic Rupture ability—can make for explosive results. Finally, Doom is now available for Affliction Warlocks to use, and deals more damage with a shorter damage-over-time duration. If Doom kills the target, there is a slight chance the Warlock will summon a Doomguard to fight for them for a period of time.

Demonology

Dark Pact will now scale with Spell Power to deal more damage than ever before. Demonology Warlocks will also discover that the Dark Fury Talent has a new effect—in addition to the cooldown reduction it provides, it empowers Shadowfury by increasing its area of effect as the spell crashes down on in the battlefield.

Destruction

Fire and Brimstone is getting an upgrade in Shadowlands, as it now generates 2 Soul Shard Fragments for each additional enemy struck by the Warlock’s empowered Incinerate.

Finally, Doom is now available for Affliction Warlocks to use, and deals more damage with a shorter damage-over-time duration. If Doom kills the target, there is a slight chance the Warlock will summon a Doomguard to fight for them for a period of time.

Is this out of season april’s joke? Doom was a staple in demonology for years before you butchered that ability in BFA and made it a useless talent. And now it is a AFFLI spell?

So no changes to the pet AI, mechanics of controlling demons?

Spec-wise, we’re making relatively minimal changes to Demonology and Destruction, as we feel their core rotations and talent options fit well with our goals for Shadowlands .

This is the most stupid thing that i heard…Demo need a rework, in just a broken mess, a testemony of your lack of undrstanding of demonology/a desing process/your game engine/server side software We don’t need our demons to be stronger, we need a quality of control over them, a good toolkit - demic circle is not enougn, we need a good self-healing mechanics - healthstone is broken and unreliable, drainlife is nerfed to the ground… we need a dark regeneration back. We don’t need shields from soul-leech, we need our good old self healing spells in their power and glory. I don’t care that this is APLHA build or something, this is clearly indicates that you guys are not working well, you don’t understand what warlocks need.

Magus of the Dead will also fight by a Death Knights’ side when they cast Apocalypse , which also benefits from a cooldown reduction whenever Death Coil and Epidemic are cast.

All Unholy Death Knights will be able to use Summon Gargoyle (previously a Talent) to bring these flying terrors to their side.

So gargoyle is now baseline Where is doomguard, infernal for demo? What the fel is this?
Frost DK and Monks will be able to wield two handed weapons, so you figured out a way to balance diffirent weapon damage… so give back second weapon for wrathguard and second pairs of swords to Shivarra.

Ok cool, but where is same treatment for Tyrant? Where is baseline Baleful Invocation? Where any news that some of our azerite talents would be baseline?

If you are going to unprune warlocks and gave us our spells back, then i have list of abilities that we would like to see

  1. Life tap - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Life_Tap
  2. Howl of terror - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Howl_of_Terror
  3. Twilight ward - https://wow.gamepedia.com/Twilight_Ward
  4. Hellfire - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Hellfire
  5. Fel flame - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Fel_Flame
  6. Curse of Enfeeblement - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Curse_of_Enfeeblement
  7. Curse of the Elements - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Curse_of_the_Elements
  8. Soul fire - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Soul_Fire
  9. Dark intent - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Intent
  10. Soulburn - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Soulburn
  11. Summon doomguard - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Summon_Doomguard
  12. Shadowflame - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Shadowflame
  13. Demonic circle - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Demonic_Circle
  14. Dark soul: knowledge | Misery | Instability
    https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Soul:_Knowledge
    https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Soul:_Misery
    https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Soul:_Instability

Demonology specific spells that was pruned:

  1. Metamorphosis - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Metamorphosis_(warlock)
  2. Demonic Leap - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Demonic_Leap
  3. Touch of Chaos - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Touch_of_Chaos_(warlock_ability)
  4. Doom - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Doom
  5. Immolation Aura - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Immolation_Aura
  6. Chaos Wave - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Chaos_Wave
  7. Carrion Swarm - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Carrion_Swarm

Pet specifiec spells that was pruned:
Disarm (voidwalker) - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Disarm_(voidwalker)
Whiplash (knock back) - https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Whiplash

Blizzard has announced that the Hunter Stable size will be significantly increased.

And where is our new demons?

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First off: I agree that this bodes badly for warlocks, and I agree on most points.

The affliction changes look good, seeing as it feels like a weird “burst” specc at the moment instead of the ever draining, out-healing specialisation that it should be.

Destruction should have more changes than they have currently stated. It is not in a terrible spot at the moment, but it could be so much more. For example, they could make chaosbolt less of a spammy ability and return it to it’s old high damage dealing capabilities. It is currently in the same weird/bad position as the UA stacking of affliction locks.

Then there is demonology… Oh you poor thing. I understand that there is no mention of improved AI in this post as it is more about the return of abilities and changes to classes than it is about technical improvements.
With that said however, how in the bloody fel fire of Gul’dans burning wrath is Demonology considered “OK” atm?!?! The only thing that I’ve found to be of any fun to do/play with is the AoE rotation. And even then only if Soul Conduit, Demonic Meteor, and the Lucid Dreams essence are taken!
Our build-up is simply a dramatic anti-climax that takes too long to set up with too little payoff! And this goes for both ST as well as AoE situations! Let alone that our fantasy is currently all over the place. With BfA, the idea was that we truly became MASTERS OF DEMONS. We are primarily imp mothers and little else! And not just that, we also consume/use our summoned imps constantly, causing our “army” to diminish before it can actually BECOME and army! Sure we can enhance our Dreadstalkers, but those talents are not just undertuned, they also lack any addition to the fantasy of the Master Summoner concept. Meanwhile, our demonic tyrant hits like a wet noodle and requires a build up AND follow up in order to utilize it properly.
That leaves us with Vilefiend, grimoire felguard, and technically Bilescourge Bombers, of which the last can’t be considered part of “an army”. It does help with the “summoning” bit.
And can the rest of our talents truly be considered “fine”? Other classes/speccs have apparently gotten an updates. Why, for fel’s sake, is our talent tree not getting ANY changes?!
Here, let’s make a list of talents that are just outright terrible or do nothing in particular with the master summoner fantasy:

  • Dreadlash (undertuned and weird in general)
  • Demonic Strength (Felstorm 2.0)
  • Power Siphon (More ways to sacrifice imps…)
  • Doom (This should honestly be baseline and grant shards)
  • From the Shadows (Affects literally two spells, on one target, no other demon interaction)
  • Sacrificed Souls (I thought the idea was that the damage came FROM OUR DEMONS! You could simply change this to make every additional demon empower our felguard instead of us!)
  • Demonic Consumption (too much build up, too little payoff, too frequently, reduces your “army” significantly)
  • Nether Portal (Terrible gameplay loop of single shard Hand of Gul’dan casts, followed up by the horrendous gameplay that the Demonic Tyrant requires)

For the love of my favorit specc and class: Please FIX demonology’s baffling weaknesses in both design and choice! There are plenty of threads with ideas for either redesigns, partial redesigns, and simple additions/QoL changes that would the specc a hundred times better than it currently is!

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I am not even dissapointed at them,i kind a expected this s hit .

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I can only endorse this thread, seriously.

This whole ordeal makes me so worried and I can’t stop thinking about it, either. It actually ruined the release of tonights HS expansion I was looking forward to for weeks now. It irks me. It makes me angry and sad at the same time.

I know exactly how this statement feels. Reading it just screams to me that this is yet another expansion where our feedback and our struggles will only be ignored once again.

Especially because people that don’t know the details and that only see the moments where we’re strong immediately dismiss everything we complain about, bEcAuSe dEsTRuCtIOn Is oP rIgHt nOW…

Further opinions from me can be read here… https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/shadowlands-compiled-feedback-thread/488534/16?u=archigadh-malorne

I’m too lazy to copy paste the whole text again.

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Also felguard’s mortal strike effect got pruned to 20 or 25% down to 10%.

Observer health is ridiculous and can be os.

Fel lord also got pruned so hard we can’t even play with, during legion we could survive melee cleave with and do insane go.

I agree with you, doom is a demo lock spell wth…

And this spec based on a stupid ai is just stupide and unplayable in pvp.

I hope they will do something to buff other talent like sacrificed souls otherwise demonology will be dead for 1 more xpac :confused:

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Too little pay off? It also takes no time at all to build up. That’s one of the silliest things that I’ve ever heard about this talent. It’s incredibly powerful if you can use it to max effect.

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Over 30% of our talent choises both PvE and PvP are extremely bad, and demonology will be a burning mess without at least baseline baleful trait. And how in the world can the class be in an ok state for PvP, zero improvements on pet AI and how hard can it be to give us a command pet ability for our tyrant, I am tired of not being able to control my biggest dmg cooldown properly resulting in wrong targets and wasting precious casting time on his demonfire.
We function well in PvE solely based on our borrowes BFA powers and without them life will be horrible for demo warlocks again.

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I should have pointed out that I meant this without azerite traits. Why without traits? Because the OP is about Shadowlands which means that said traits are, according to the post, not coming with us. Yes, yes, there is still balancing to be done. But this is about the current ptr cycle/patch notes.

For the build up: If we do it from a standstil, it takes 2x Shadow Bolt, Dreadstalkers, 2x Shadow Bolt, Hand of Gul’dan, Soulstrike, Hand of Gul’dan, Felstorm/trinket, Tyrant.
That is about 15 seconds of build up for our 15 second “burst” through Demonic Consumption. And let’s not forget that the Tyrant not only has a cast time to summon, but also needs to cast himself to deal damage. Which is another 3 seconds added on top of the build up. If we add in some refunds, it becomes anywhere between 16 to 19 seconds.
After the pull we get to do it the molten core way, resulting in a build up of: Get to 5 shards (anywhere from 0 to 8 seconds, so let’s ignore this), Hand of Gul’dan, Demonbolt, Hand of Gul’dan, Demonbolt, Hand of Gul’dan, Trinket/Felstorm/Hand of Gul’dan, Tyrant. Adding all that up results in a 9 to 10 seconds of build up.
Oh and let’s not forget that we can’t change the target of our tyrant, which means our final spell(s) need to hit whatever priority add/boss. That means that we need to target swap, face the right direction (adds rarely spawn where the boss is), and be in range of both the add and the boss to pull it off! And any movement/interrupt severely punishes you, especially with the this talent.

So yes, it may have some potential but without the traits and some serious tweaking to pet AI, I find this spell to be both cumbersome and inefficient. Especially because it barely changes our rotation before and after it’s use. The fact that we deal 15% increased damage for 15 seconds after summoning him even forces us to cast and summon as many spells and demons as possible lest we lose “precious” buff uptime.

I don’t need a button that instantly makes me do awesome damage, but the current Tyrant design is just awful and annoying.

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And the fact that one CC during preparation phase and tyrant will not be maxed, or that because of his trupid AI he wastes from 1-3 seconds of his lifespan just to staying, or that we litteraly cannot change his target if we need. Dude you can love current demo as long as you like, but spec has very serious problems on every game design level possible, and the fact that 1-4% of warlocks love demo doesn’t mean that spec is ok. Demo one of the least played specs in pvp pre 8.3 and post i don’t think that situation changed in our favor.

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I agree so much. Burning Rush, Internal Combustion, Soulfire and especially Inferno. Like why would a pick this garbage talent which only give me a chance to generate 1/10 of my Shard plus in a same tier with Cataclysm.

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Let’s all be honest, we were not really expecting much and we didn’t get much. It seems other classes are getting some good spells back. It’s the perfect time to switch classes.

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Some people move on. But not us…

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I honestly have little hope for our class. Especially demonology.

I will remain both sceptical, cynical, and vocal until blizzard changes their tune towards us.
If this doesn’t change significantly, then I will probably main a different class next expansion (for the first time ever) or I simply won’t play the game.

I am very much stuck with nostalgic feelings for the character I have mained for 10+ years (restarted on a different server once), so this will simply be a major blow for me.

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Weird no one talks about Backlash, Ember tap and Shadowburn.
Drain life dont even fit destro lock to begin with i am not sure why its even here in our spell book. As i am going to be a standing pillar with melee on me 24/7 really could use backlash honestly. Old shadowburn for execute. No one wanted for this one shot chaos bolt build its blizz own fantasy. We want all of our spell to do something not just 1 chaos bolt. The gameplay is really boring and not fun like this. It can be a very top ladder spec now but its not really fun to play at all. I was really wishing that shadowland will bring back something but after watching the destro changelog i lost all hope and this " Spec-wise, we’re making relatively minimal changes to Demonology and Destruction, as we feel their core rotations and talent options fit well with our goals for Shadowlands " made me feel bad for even buying shadowland LOL

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Wauw… and i thought Rogue players were toxic :sweat_smile: all these forum threads on the Warlock section are full of posts that sounds like immature angry teens wrote them. 50% constructive feedback and 50% toxicity…

Can someone —>CAMLY<— and shortly summarize to a “non-longtime Lock player” why people are so pissed?

Shadowlands is still in alpha so there might still be major changes. If not then there has to be an idea behind it.

“Blizz doesn’t care about locks”

Well if we take a step back from being emotional and angry, I’m sure Warlock will be fine. Sure some classes will need buffs and nerfs, but things need to balance themselves out.

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Ion said in an interview today that the changes list they published was the bulk of it. No major stuff is expected on that front, which is sad.

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Hello and welcome to the fel side of the forums!

The warlock community has been quite vocal with their feedback in regards to several aspects of the warlock class. This feedback has been largely, or even completely, been ignored.
For example, demon AI has been borked since ages past. This wasn’t too much of a problem until legion when demonology became dependant on the AI to work properly. Unfortunately, blizzard has yet to implement any changes to it. The fact that the AI on DKs and Hunters their pets is better than ours also doesn’t help the general mood and trust.

Another thing that has bothered a part of the community, which includes me, is that demonology has been majorly overhauled in a bad way. The current iteration of demonology is a continuation of their legion attempt at making us a pet class. This would be fine if the specc didn’t have so many problems. These problems have been voiced over and again since legion, yet we are getting no response. Now that shadowlands alpha is out and blizzard has posted their class-changes blog, it has become glaringly obvious that they do nothing with the feedback given to them.

Finally, to reply to your final sentence, we aren’t unhappy with the numbers that we can pull but with the mechanics of our class. They did finally change affliction to no longer stack UA’s in order to do their burst rotation, but this has taken them literally 3+ years. Even though people have been asking/screaming at/demanded blizzard to change the UA mechanic in a myriad of different ways. The easiest of which they now have implemented on the Shadowlands alpha.

In short: there are multiple facets about the warlocks specialisations that have had plenty of feedback but had nothing done to them in literal years despite said feedback. So yes, we are angry.

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Thank you for the explanations :slight_smile:

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You are most welcome.

I do agree that there can be a lot of tempertantrum-like posts on our forum. Usually these contain legitimate reasons for the displayed anger, but lack the constructive feedback, or potential solutions/changes people would like to see.
That of course is on a per poster basis and should be taken with a grain of salt.

If you agree with one such poster it can be quite useful to, essentially, reword their post and put your own solutions/ideas into it.
This does not always help as some people will just say “I agree /10char” and call it a day. In those situations you just have to be the better person and let it go.

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Incinerate castable while moving is something that has been suggested quite a lot and it made me think “How do you balance it?”
Considering that incinerate did this snake like movement when you cast it, why not make it a skillshot in the same trend as Twilight Devestation? Perhaps the AoE talent for it could simply increase the size of incinerate and pierce through enemies.

Just a thought. I don’t play destro myself and I do realise that making it a skillshot would make it hard to attack priority targets.