Dragonflight Warlock Class Talent Tree Feedback

Classes Warlock
1

Hey! I have been playing Warlock since 2008 and its always been my favourite class. In recent years I have been really disappointed with the direction Blizz has taken the class, but I was cautiously optimistic about Dragonflight after seeing some of the other classes and their respective talent trees. That said, lets get into it:

I have to say its a mess. Why is Demon Skin and Fel Armor just a couple of sad passive points now? I miss those two. Fel armor was dope. Soul leech is boring compared to them.

I really dislike how they keep moving iconic pet abilities into the base class. Are we supposed to be a pet class or not? Imp lost blood pact, Voidwalker lost its niche in pvp with dark pact and now Felhunter is losing Spell Lock for some reason. Are pets supposed to be meaningful or just a cosmetic choice?

Speaking of pets, I can’t believe Grimoire of Sacrifice is not in the class tree itself. It seems like the perfect candidate for a talent choice in the class tree choosing between opting into demons vs not doing so.

The final tier of the class tree leaves a lot to be desired. Are they removing Dark Soul: XX btw? I love that spell, especially as affliction. Its a fun button to press, but its getting replaced with
dimensional rift and decimating bolt or something? Summon Jailer sounds okay.

The rest looks “fine”, although very boring. I honestly can’t say I find anything in this tree exciting at all; I get that its mostly stuff we already have, but they could atleast give us something! Soul link is cool I guess.

6 Likes
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Pretty much all classes get the old recycled stuff combined into talents. Its not just warlock.

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Well yes, but some classes (Like Shaman) got several cool old toys back. I would like for us warlocks to get something too. I especially miss Demon/Fel Armor and more pet identity.

It would be neat if I could spec into my favourite pet and improve them. Instead its all very bland.

2 Likes
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For the affliction talent tree. I love a lot of the ideas. I love the new stuff, especially the new vile taint, affliction was in desperate need of a tool to spread agony more efficiently. A lot of cool old stuff like soulflame and Soul Swap is back. However the tree needs quite a few adjustments.

Xavian teachings. This talent shouldn’t be a talent, it should be baseline. Spending a point in this feels bad. Drain Soul should be moved here.

Pandemic Invocation. This talent is an old azerite trait that nobody played, because it’s a very bothersome and complicated talent to benefit from. It has a lot of anti-synergies with all the dot extension mechanics affliction has, which makes the bulk of the bottom part of the tree. Also real pandemic windows for DoTs are earlier than 5 s remaining, it’s around 7/8 s, so it’s just a poorly designed effect.
This talent is too complicated to play around, it should be removed. It should be replaced by the other azerite trait, wracking brillance. When agony generates shards, we get an intelligence boost for a few seconds.

Agonizing Corruption. I like the idea but two points for this is too expensive. With writhe in agony going baseline, seed of corruption having a 2.5 s cast + sow the seeds, by the time you’ll cast your second seeds, all your agonies will be near 18 stacks already with just one point in this.

Drain Soul. It should be moved in the first part of the tree where Xavian Teachings is.

Grimoire of Sacrifice. This talent being here, in the middle of the tree is a big design mistake. This talent is a dps loss, meant to be used in PvP or extreme niche situations. This talent should be moved to the side of the tree, it has nothing do to here.
If there is to be a talent in the middle here, it’s summon Darkglare.

Soul Swap. I hope this talent will also apply siphon life if talented into it.

Soul Swap and Sacrolash being the only path to Darkglare is a problem. None of those talents are useful for every fights, whereas you’ll probably always want darkglare. Moving Darkglare where Grimoire of Sacrifice currently is would partially solve this.

Shadow’s Embrace. This being back with haunt means an extra layer of set up for affliction that the spec doesn’t need. This should be removed, I’d prefer a boring generic increased damages to UA for example instead. Or Haunt could be moved here instead, and be replaced by something else.

The bottom part of the tree has good ideas but it’s a mess right now.

Deathbolt and its following talents. This looks fine, an old stuff updated, we’ll have to see if this is tuned so that you should always get a free instant deathbolt or not. I think it should, and the % chance might need to be increased.

Malefic Wrath. This legendary power, now talent is a problem. Affliction Single Target since 9.1 has been tuned around this and it’s bad. This talent is very hard to benefit from. It only works in pure single target fights where there is close to no movements and having a spec ST damages tuned around that is horrible. The duration is too short, and the cost in shards too expensive. It should be much longer or there should be only one stack of the buff, not 3.

Malefic Wrath + Deathbolt + Nightfall + withering bolt + execute creates yet again a pile up of damage amplifiers to drain soul that the blue post said they want to avoid. It’s extremely annoying to play around. I wish Malefic Wrath was just removed from the game, or made much longer, 20 s.
Affliction already has a lot of things to do in ST, maintaining a 10 s buff on top of it is too much. It’s not until late into an expansion that we’ll actually generate shards fast enough to actually maintain this.
Affliction warlocks already play Shadow’s embrace instead of haunt with Malefic Wrath in SL because you just want to drain, nothing else. Having to manage haunt in DF will make this even more painful to play with.

Creeping Death. This talent should be removed from the game and replaced. It’s a dead talent, it has massive anti-synergies with how affliction works, we don’t want to refresh our DoTs more often at all. It’s a bit like Pandemic Invocation, it doesn’t work with the spec mechanics. It should be replaced by the old Death’s Embrace talent, a passive execute baked into our DoTs.

Death’s embrace wouldn’t make sense below Soul Rot, so it would need to be moved. Or instead of Creeping Death, there could be another talent that further improves Soul Rot, by increasing the number of targets and or its duration/decaying soul satchel duration, just like in Torghast.

Death’s embrace talent from Legion could replace Malefic Wrath in the tree, I’d prefer that. Passive execute baked into our DoTs.

Deliberate Malice. I wish this would also extend siphon life if talented into it.

Calamitous Crescendo. This effect from the tier set is nice, but it has a lot of anti-synergies with other part of the kit. With Decimating Bolt and Nightfall, we’ll want to fully channel our drain souls. However if we have a proc of Calamitous Crescendo during a buffed drain soul. We have to make a choice that feels bad between rapture as not to waste a proc or finishing our channel.
This talent should be updated so that the free rapture can be cast WHILE channeling drain soul. It’s also a weak talent on its own, the free rapture could/should also have a damage amp on it. Idk if it should to also affect seed of corruption, I don’t have a strong opinion on this.

Deliberate Malice and Calamitous Crescendo. The first, Deliberate Malice, has made the spec so much better to play with, I think it would be better to move it up the tree, and be in the same line as Harvester of Souls, Sacrolash and Withering Bolt. It would give us more choice in the middle section of the tree. The second, Calamitous Crescendo, is not powerful enough to be a capstone and could/should be moved even further up the tree, to be a node following Drain Soul.

Seized Vitality. This is extremely weak. The damage amp to haunt should be 100/200%. Haunt hits like a wet noodle, even a 200% buff wouldn’t make it a small nuke (of course the healing could be adjusted). The following talent, haunted soul, seems very good though, but this double point talent before is way too expensive for what it does.

Antoran Plating. This is extremely weak. Darkglare hits like a wet noodle even when you have 20/30+ dots out. Extended duration on Darkglare also doesn’t matter at all. This talent needs a redesign. It could make Darkglare do cleave damages on targets affected by our dots and/or it could give additional dot extension when using darkglare. A combination of this would be very strong and appealing.

Death Dealer, Decaying Soul Satchel, Seized Vitality and Antoran Plating could also all just be one point talents. Those are all wery weak talents at the moment that need tweaking/redesigning. This would also allow more diversity in builds, get 3 capstones out of 4, more cool stuff. Moving Deliberate Malice and Calamitous Crescendo up the tree would achieve something similar.

Wilfred. Because Antoran Plating is so weak, and because of how affliction generate shards we’d never pick it. To make wilfred appealing, affliction would need to be able to lower its cooldown to 1 min, to align it with Soul Rot, which requires spending 30 shards a minute, it’s impossible. Either Affliction needs another talent somewhere to lower the duration of Darkglare. Or the cooldown reduction needs to be much bigger.

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I don’t think it should be moved, it would fit wozh Soul Rot. The haste/crit buff grim the legendary effect and then getting an execute is nice.
But pls blizzard give us Death’s Embrace instead of Creeping Death.

Or add “all dmg done to the target” for the heal effect. Then it would be better.

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I wanted this post to be (atleast mostly) about the class tree itself and not the specs since there are other topics about that already!

Nonetheless, I hope soul swap actually goes back to its previous iteration where it takes all the dots from a target and then you reuse it to put it into another target. Its way more flavourful and fits the name to a t, and its also more skill expressive. To compensate it should have a lower cooldown, if any at all.

Your other ideas I mostly agree with.

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Haha my bad
I have a few things to say about the general tree, I’ll post them later.

As for soul swap I understand where you’re coming from. However from a gameplay standpoint, if we had to again copy dots from the target then apply it to the new one, this would cost us 2 Gcds, to apply 3 dots, so just one gcd saved. If it applies also siphon life if talented into it, you’d save 2 Gcds.

Now with the version they’re offering, we only have to spend 1 gcd to apply 3 if not 4 dots, so 2/3 Gcds saved. So it’s “better”. This version also allows us to apply all our dots instantly on pull if need be. With soul tap I expect affliction to be able to pull raid bosses with 5 shards. So spending a shard on pull to apply our 3/4 main dots could become the play.

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What’s complicated about it? It’s extremely basic and straightforward. It’s just free damage from just playing the spec in a standard way.

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Yeah this version is definitely less clunky and smoother to play with, but I personally value flavour and thematic a lot more than balance and how the rotation feels. Just me though :slight_smile:

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Still wracking brilliance is better and would be better.

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It’s not there, though.

12

No and i don’t think they will bring it. That’s just a stat increase like Dark Soul

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I don’t think it rewards us to play the correct or standard way actually. I understand wanting to reward optimal dot refresh but this doesn’t hit the mark.

The thing is, this talent needs you to refresh when there’s 5 s or less remaining on your dot. The actual real pandemic window (when refreshing your dots is the most optimal in terms of extending them) for our dots is around 7/8 s left on them. There are years of muscle memory for affliction warlocks that comes from this, and this forces us to change that.

On top of that affliction has a ton of dot extensiong mechanics, darkglare, deliberate malice and deathbolt now. Those are very powerful effect that work opposite of pandemic invocation, because it means you refresh your dots less often.

Also, there are tons of situations on all manners of fights, where you don’t refresh your dots exclusively in pandemic window, because adds are coming, you’re moving, etc.
So this reduces again the usefulness and actual potential use of this talent.

Finally, this talent is mainly for ST. You just don’t have the attention to monitor so closely the time remaining on your dots as soon as a second target is up. Affliction single target with malefic wrath has A LOT of things to monitor : 6/7 debuffs, decimating bolt windows, nightfall procs, malefic wrath (which should last way longer imo), inevitable demise (probably), haunt and shadow embrace. And now on top of that we’d need to monitor our dots super closely for pandemic invocation ?
There is a reason people didn’t play this before in bfa, it’s too bothersome and complicated in the grand scheme of the spec.

I think affliction is already quite a complex spec, multidotting is hard, it requires practice. I don’t think the spec needs a lot more complexity. Wracking brillance instead is straightforward, good all the time, and better as more targets are out.

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Fair enough

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For the warlock class tree, overall I think it’s a very good tree for us, tons of options, we can have fel rush and our defensive options. I wished every spec would get soul link and we did. There are only a few minor things that I think should change but overall I’m very happy with it.

Accrued vitality. This is a very weak talent, for all 3 specs. It costs two points and that’s the only path to demonic circle. I think those two talents should swap places. It’s too expensive to get to demonic circle. This is a no brainer imo.

Greater Banish. This should be merged with banish. Spending a point for this feels weird.

Teachings of the Black Harvest. I understand wanting to grand additional utility to our pets, but this missed the mark. In 99% of cases, the bonuses granted are useless, and for Seduction i’d even argue that it’s a nerf, because it makes using Seduction to skip packs even harder. The effects are too weak except for the felhunter but still very very niche. The DR for the imp dispell makes no sense, you don’t need DR once you’ve removed the dangerous debuff. The CD reduction on the felguard is insignificant. I’d argue the same for the CD reduction for the voidwalker. This needs redesigning. It’s tricky because it needs to maintain the balance between pets.
This talent is also a problem because right now it’s the only path toward Pact of the imp mother, a throughput talent demonology really wants (the other specs less so).

Inquisitor Gaze. This looks like a flavor talent. It bothers me because it seems like it’s a new thing warlocks have to click on before pulling. Healthstones, soulstone, summoning portal, demon, circle, gate, and now also an eye. This feels like clutter to me.

I don’t particularly like Decimating Bolt, but I don’t think it’s correct or incorrect that it’s there. Can’t wait to test the Summon Jailer thing. I like the interrupt going baseline, gives us more freedom with pets in general and an interrupt in solo content. I love that soulburn is back with all the utility it brings. Yeah I’m pretty happy and excited.

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What if they change GoSAC to give X% mastery + some GCD reduce or will be to OP
And i think will be better if Haunt and Soul Rot switch places.

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They won’t give GoSac a mastery increase. They removed Dark Soul just because it is a stat increase

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This is another s**t idea. Now we can’t interrupt whilst casting. If the felhunter doesn’t have the spell when you don’t take that talent, I’ll be pissed off.

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Although I am not a fan of making the interrupt baseline either, I think a good compromise would be to have it on Felhunter as default, and being able to talent it to yourself as a choice for players that dislike the pet management. That way we all win I guess.

But then please move the point to the side to the tree so its not something you are forced to path into!

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At this point people should’ve worked out when to use each pet
 Even as demo, once you’ve done your DeCon tyrant, you might need to swap your pet for a dispel, later.

It’s not good. Imagine now having to interrupt whilst you’re building a tyrant
 F

Not sure if it’s been removed for the Felguard, because I don’t have access to the alpha. You’re gonna be quite annoyed having to interrupt a Chaosbolt or Drain Soul to interrupt
I’m not too sure if the Felguard keeps the interrupt baked into its Axe Toss.