This was a problem for a long time, but now in 8.3 with corruption gear problem has became even worse.
It is not a secret that current class design is a pile of tauren crap…and this is has been putted lightly.
I say this as demonology warlock, and i acknowledge that demo lookin OK from visual point of view. But visuals or number side of class design is irrelevant when gameplay itself is bad.
Since legion, warlocks was pruned heavier than any other class, maybe exept for the shamans.
Old demonology was took from Demo-warlocks and Meta was given to the Demon hunters, while Metamorphosis gameplay was sligthly altered and given to the shadowpriests.
And if you start this crapfest that “Meta was DH thing” then i must stop you andpoint that Meta was in the warlock lore since Cataclysm, and many major lore warlocks like Kanrethad used it.
Jubeka’s Journal day 36:
Remarkable! My first attempt to summon a higher order member of the legion failed as spectacularly as planned. The shivarra broke free almost instantly after Kanrethad completed the ritual.I expected the frail human to be struck down while I banished the creature. Instead, in the instant that the shivarra’s razor-sharp blades sliced through the air, Kanrethad’s form shifted and the blades bounced as if striking stone.
Unlike the typical form of metamorphosis, he did not complete the demonic transformation… perhaps his research has been more successful than I expected.
Demo was absolutely striped down from most of it’s iconic spells and abilities, and was given puppeteer style of gameplay…witch i’m not againts, if such gameplay is implemented well enough, but in Legion and BFA it is broken in every gameplay design level possible.
And not only demo, but also warlocks in general lost most of their abilities like mortal coil, demonic circle…both are now are talents, but we will return to that later. And these spells took a place of MoP/WoD talents that in most cases was pretty good for warlocks, and now these talents are lost for us.
And in the light of such warlock changes, mages and rogues was almost not pruned, but also gained some additional abilities in order to add some spells that these classes didn’t had in the past - like Crimson vial, an incredably good healing spell for rogues that has short CD, usable in stealth and has a talent in outlaw spec that improves not only healing from Crimson vial, but also healing from healing potions and other items like this. And this is a change for a class, that was designed for ages to be good damage dealer with awesome bust capabilities, mobility (that was even improved shadowstep is now a baseline spell), the most competitive CC (and that CC was even improved for outlaw) toolkit in the game and unparalleled ability to escape any combat scenario. The only downside of rogues was, that they didn’t had their dedicated healing ability on the use, outside of leeching poisons.
In comparison to the rogues, warlocks lost their healing talents (dark regeneration, harvest) but also lost some CC like shadowfury (was a talent in legion), mortal coil (talent now), howl of terror (removed), Succubus seduction was nerfed and put on CD. Not to mention that Demo was completely striped away from any DoT effects (and now in 8.3 it ruins demonology, but later about that). Mobility that was never a high point of warlocks was also pruned - Demonic cirle now became a talent.
Do you see the paralel? while one class is on the verge of constant reworks, and loss of its identity, one class was overdesigned over the course of it’s history.
And while people are whine that "Destro took down people on BGS or Arenas with over 9000k crit of CB, they don’t see that destro, outside of CB damage and conflagrate roots is not a serious competition, when you fight destro the only thing you care is how to prevent him/her from ramp up damage or interupt CB. While when you play against any other pure DPS spec you have to concider their overral toolkit. And i agree with people, that Destro damage is broken, it is OP as hell, but destro doesn’t have anything outside of that damage - no interesting gameplay, no good mechanics. But what about Demo or Affli, both of this specs is outsiders in any compedetive PvP and PvE scene. Demo is the least played spec in the arenas for numbers of reasons.
And now, when blizzard has announced “Shadowlands” and that they bring back our core abilities, they(blizz) said that warlocks will get back our curses, and on the preview, they showed - curse of tongues, curse of weaknes and doom…and i have a question, where is curse of elementals? Oh wait, you have it to the demonhunters…oh great, now they apply 5% of additional magical damage with every attack…great it is better variation of Curse of elemets that warlocks had…nice job Blizzard…nice job. Tell me, what you will took away from warlocks next? Soulshards? Or maybe our demons?..By the way - Demons.
When warlocks will recieve a new demons, or at least new skins for their demons…i will remind you that Shivarra, fel imp, observer still has a TBC skins.
And hunters recieve a new pets at the start of every Xpac, and in some patch in the middle of Xpac… Blizzard we - warlocks has only 5 demon’s archetypes - imp, void, succubus, felhunter and felguard. And each of these demons has one glyph that changes their appearence…well succubus has 3 glyphs to be honest, so overral we have 12 options to play, that is serapated by 5 archetypes. Do i need to remind you how many “cats” or “wolves” hunter can tame? Additionaly, you took away doomguard from the warlocks, and put it behind some flawor text in doom TALENT…do you know that no warlock has seen doomguard since 8.1.0? I saw it once in BGS, and it was instakilled with some aoe… i didn’t even had a chance to look how much HP did this poor thing had, or how much damage it dealt.
Alright, let’s take a look at 8.3 and it’s major feature - the corruptions. You know why demonology is struggle with these corruptions? Because we can activete these corruptions with only 4 spells - shadowbolt, demonbolt, implosion and hand of Gul’Dan. The rest of our damage spells is our demons, and they cannot activate any our corruption at ALL. And because of that Demo is far behind of any other spec in game that can activate corruptions/azerite effects/essences with DoTs, auto attacks. Demo spells has overall cast time about 2 secons (without haste) and sice it doesn’t have any DoT our proc rate is about 1 proc per 2 seconds.
Blizzard, several months ago, when Q&A was a thing, your representatives said that it is extremely hard to find any constructive feedback when community is full of toxic players. Now here is my constructve feed back. It is not put in the nice and friendly way, because we are not friends, but even then if despise you as a gameplay designer, i was willing to put yet another post so you could see my feedback as a player. I didn’t fell to the pure insults, but god know i wanted so badly.
And if you are willing to read this and interesting in more, here is another post that describes current situation (warlocks mainly).
P.S. Have a nice day.