EU warlock feedback thread

What I dislike about my warlock currently is that it's but a hollow shell of what it used to be.

It's not fun with rng resource generation outside of conflags.
It's not fun to spam demonic empowerment.
It's not fun that the talent tree is all kinds of messed up.
It's not fun to have a ramp up time during which I can go make coffee, get back and then press drain life three times before being at optimal capacity.
It's not fun to have to make a macro to get DC to work properly.
It's not fun to not have any proper cc in dungeons (missing instant shadowfury and glyphed fear).
It's not fun to have to deal with absolutely gimped pet and guardian ai, seriously, did you send the lot of them off to lobotomy?
It's not fun to have really clunky aoe abilities for two out of three spec.
It's not fun to spend our primary dps rescource to resummon our pets and pretend that it's not punishing enough to have quite a cast time to summon them during combat.
It's not fun to get absolutely smashed to the ground by rabid melee dpsers in pvp without having any real chance of escaping them, perhaps it's just me being bad but jesus christ do I feel like I'm an underdog.

I'll reiterate: It simply feels like a hollow shell of it's former self.

I've said it before, number wise we're okay, but the general feeling of the class is just an absolute bloody mess. Everything feels clunky. And you've had the same issues being brough up to you from the alpha, throughout the beta and during live, yet you seem incapable or unwilling to understand what's being said to you.

You've managed to make an absolute !@#$ job with this class for legion, but hey, at least we know you're spending time and money on forging swords, making bikes and marketing cook books. Glad that you seem to care about your playerbase and its wants and needs.
Yeah, that talent swap will most probably go through.
I'm checking the US PTR forums every day and the ONLY SINGLE THREAD about the warlock talent swap has 79 posts and they're not even that active.
The warlock playerbase is just too small and doesnt care.

I surrender.

You win Ion. You reduced warlock to trash. You tried so hard to ruin Xelnath's legacy. You succeed. I reroll.

I've been playing warlock since TBC. When cataclysm hit, I tried to reroll on a shadowpriest. But I couldnt play it longer than 2 weeks. Even with the complete rework warlock got, I still couldnt abandon my main class. At least it felt like a change, something new, progress. I enjoyed casual pvp and pve. With casual I mean heroic raiding and queuing with friends for fun arena games, not caring about rating. The class we got now feels like it got ripped off all the good spells and some put back as talents/pvp talents because of the lack of ideas they have. And now after the buffs, making Destro/Demo viable for raiding, they try to reduce warlock to a less mobile mage with less def cooldowns and less damage. Warlock has nothing left that makes it unique.

I'll level up my Druid and try boomkin. If I dont enjoy it... *sigh* there goes another expansion I wasted my money on.
I kinda agree with everything being said already, i feel demology is in a fine spot (maybe a bit demonic empowerment spammy) but they are far superior then the other warlock specs...

I like the artifact weapon and ability for destruction warlocks. I feel it fits the nieche of doing massive damage in a short time...that was really MoP/WoD styled destro, but why did you remove the dark soul cd then? would be nice to see all destro warlocks lining up their dark souls with 3 rifts and 4 chaos bolts flying away.

I like the asthetic of affliction warlock, the reaping souls is fun and coool in theory...however, you aint killing !@#$ with that artifact during raid ancounters, so 2/3 perks are useless... besides that, the healing gain from affliction is something you should be using for damage. something like blade flurry for rogues, a on/off ability that converts all healing into damage..what is the usage in everyone healing you fof 25% when they use your healthstones when you are already max health due to siphon soul/drain life anywyas...and with the heal to damage conversion we would get a 60k dps increase...which is still decent, considering the fact i am always 200k below demology. Also the choice for sow the seeds and siphon life is a %^-*!@...one is completely aoe, the other completely single target...either your aoe is good and single target is #$%^, or the other way round

I mainly play affliction and it's sad that i can't get into mythic +6 or higher or even in a heroic TEN group anymore...i am 7/7 hc but dont get invited cuz affli....
Class Play Style

I thought a bit about how all 3 specialisations have changed in terms of play style and where the developers want to be. I'll include my thoughts in this and any changes that I would make.

Destruction:
The direction for this specialisation, is to make it chaotic. Destruction magic focuses on damaging spells, which uses Fel magic which is corrupting by nature.
The spec does currently play somewhat chaotic, but not necessarily in a good way.

You are able to create strong openers, throwing Chaos Bolts, one after another because you constantly get soul shards. There are also droughts, where you are required to use Incenerate, one after another, until you get your streak back.
This part of the spec I have grown to like.

I think the dev team attempted to make mastery fit this chaotic nature, but because we are hitting for less, we feel weaker. Mastery should fill the same as role "crit" or multistrike. We already have crit, so why not use multistrike rather thank our current mastery?

If there is a reason for it not being used, then why not design a new one?
Overflowing Power:
You sometimes get overloaded with Fel energies, which cannot be contained in one spell. The x shards split off and deals y damage per shard .
It has a set percentage chance, to proc, and the number of shards are increased with mastery.

Missing ability?
I hate not picking Channel Demonfire. It offers a different damaging ability, to make the toolkit feel more complete.
It's another buttom which you can press every now and again, and it requires timing.
It adds that extra strategic play, which should be baseline.
It doesn't need to be Channel Demonfire, but Warlocks do desperately need another button baseline, to make the rotation feel more complete.

Demonology
This is the control spec, you are disciplined which is a requirement to control powerful demons.
I don't have much to say about this spec, I just don't like DE, not sure why they decided to go with it. Why can't my demons be strong when I summoned them? I already have a link with the demon, it's my power holding him here. If I die, he goes back to the twisting nether, why can't this link be the source of his power, and not a extra spell?

Affliction
I like the idea behind the spec, but I dislike the Play style it's adopting.
Affliction is the most interesting spec for me. I love the idea of siphoning the life out of my enemies, withering away at their health, deterioratingot their bodies.

The play style however, is not that interesting. You keep your dots up, and you spam your filler. There's no excitement, no baseline haunt which boosts your dots or nightfall procs for those fun moments, where you know you have a strong bursty attack to throw at some mobs that spawns. It feels more engaging.
Soul Swap is another example of an engaging ability. With this you could quickly swap targets, throw a haunt to boost, and continue your dps on the new target.

The play style's main issue, is with single target at the moment. Aoe is very fun on Affliction, you get constant souls for your relic, and the spec begins to wake up. You become empowered and you begin to shine.

I think the artifact weapon should change, for starters, you must not just get a buff from it when using it.
The Scythe could create phantoms with the stolen life energy of your enemies, creating ghosts with the energy which attacks your target for a duration.
This change will allow you to use your scythe on single target, it needs life force, not lives.

I would use the random component from the life force generation to replace souls shards. Make UA baseline, and use the souls (dot with a cool attackimg soul visual) the new UA.

Shadow Bolt.
I need to come back to this topic, I long for this playstyle. Add this as a talent, place it in the same row as drain soul and balance it around the same level in power.
Some people prefer the drain playstyle, and they still have it. This only allows some players to enjoy the class which in the same way they did previously.

Soul effigy.
I always come back to this one, but it's busy work, it's not a compelling spell at all.

General
Warlocks had a great toolkit, they were able to empower themselves, heal themselves, empower abilities for a more potent effect and more.
It was really interesting playing a warlock, just because of Soul Burn, it added variety.
Class Play Style

(...)

I think the artifact weapon should change, for starters, you must not just get a buff from it when using it.
The Scythe could create phantoms with the stolen life energy of your enemies, creating ghosts with the energy which attacks your target for a duration.
This change will allow you to use your scythe on single target, it needs life force, not lives.

I would use the random component from the life force generation to replace souls shards. Make agony baseline, and use the souls (dot with a cool attackimg soul visual) the new agony.

Shadow Bolt.
I need to come back to this topic, I long for this playstyle. Add this as a talent, place it in the same row as drain soul and balance it around the same level in power.
Some people prefer the drain playstyle, and they still have it. This only allows some players to enjoy the class which in the same way they did previously.
(...)

This sounds fun. I wanna play THIS spec.
I really like how they have the audacity to blame us for unstructured feedback and whinyness, when they designed the artifact with ghosts that were supposed to die and trigger our two golden traits(?) and then dont change them. And then they don't understand why we're unhappy?
We're unhappy because you designed something THAT WERE NEVER FINISHED!
But you had a deadline for launch, so just push it out and play innocent.
What kind of effing cr*p is that? Did you all just have brain tumor or did you just decide to fire any DECENT designers you had?
This is why we're ENRAGED, this is why we CURSE. And you sit and do nothing, offering zero insight, whatsoever. This is why we're all bitter as all hell and people make posts that are just "reroll" or "unsubbing". Because we got !@#$ED IN THE %^-!

Edit:
I'd like to add that dps isn't an issue (we seem to be doing alright according to logs), and I wish people would stop talking about DPS as an issue.
It's all the broken and flawed mechanics (Aff artifact, RNG, pruning, awful talents, boring/awful rotations and so forth as mentioned by a lot of other people).
19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard
abilitys

- agony reduces the physical damage dealt the enemy by 1% per stack

- corruption increases the casttime of the enemy by 1% stacks up to 20



Too OP..not realistic..physcal dmg dealt or casting time debuff already exist as honor talent. choose one

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard
- siphon life reduces the maximum health of the enemy by 1% stacks up to 20


just buff dmg a bit dont need that debuff

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard
- unstable affliction reduces the movementspeed by 1% stacks up to 50
(u rly dont want that on u for long)

very good idea. +rep stacks to 50 is too high but 20-30 stack is ok. good job on that

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

ultaleshs !@#$ty soul eating ability is replaced by ( bring the pain )
- bring the pain stacks all youre dots to maximum and resets its durations
1 minute cooldown


+rep. will be a good design

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

health stone heals more than a potion now

+rep. you are right on that

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

haunt gets it old 30% dmg increase back

+rep. you are right on that

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

mana tap is replaced by curse of elements ( increase all magic damage on the target by 8% from all casters )

nah dont need that. we are ok without it

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

demon skin stays in 45

that is a must + rep

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

sow the seeds now apply all dots but not unstable affliction on explosion
( good with bring the pain eliminates rampup every minute )

too OP

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

- demonic circle is replaced by demonic gateway
demonic circle goes baseline and will be 2 abilitys again becouse we hate rightclicking a buff to set a new circle....
eye of killrog can now create a demonic circle for us

just make it " no path avaliable " thingy removed.. we are able to open gateaways and portals to an other dimension but couldnt open one on a 2 ft high rock!!!!

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

burning rush use mana now. if you go oom it starts to consume youre health.
you can not slowed more than normal run speed if burning rush is active.

+rep and base spell not talent

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

grimoire of supermacy replace enslave demon and let u enslave demons forever ( like hunter pets )

supermacy is ok.. it is a farming-pve aoe grimoire. close infernal's taunt and use it in pve aoe.. I dont agree with you enslave demon forever thing.. enslave a demon is a long powerfull and expensive and more of them dangerous rituel for a warlock. too many controlled demon makes your will weaker and you may loose your controll aganist them. that is why keep less your permanent pets and when needed more use temporary summoning spells. a warlock really cant have that much time-power-resource for this nor so stupid to weaken his will ( class fantasy )

19/10/2016 11:59Posted by Rukard

soul effigy now gets only 50% damage but transerfs 100% of it.
( no more lies in the dmg meter )

no idea never use effigy
bring back old demo
What i want to know is why are blizzrd balancing affliction pvp via the pve talent tree, its the only reason i can think of for the demonskin and circle swap. When 7.1 goes live im simply not selecting a 45 skill.

Old circle was something i didnt use, was to easy for the first circle to get covered in junk, in pvp it just gave warriors the ability to charge you. Mortal coil and howling terror dont work in raiding, and the places where it does i shouldnt have an add on me or be dragging adds to me away from the tank, last thing i should do is fear the thing half way across a room and aggro everything.

So i really want to know what blizzard are doing, are you purposly trying to push ppl away from warlocks. You took embers from destro and forced them onto an rng system, you turned demo into afflic with visual dots and you are dismantling flic as best you can.

You were meant to have fixed these issues by putting in a pvp talent tree, but obviously your still trying to fix pvp through the pve skills and trashing what were comperable specs against other classes.

You said that you wanted locks tobe tanky dps, your are doing the opposite, your turning locks into glass canons who fire pea shooters. And worst of all, you took baseline skills and tried to force us to retake them through the talent tree, why was that, are you so out of ideas that you couldnt create good talents for us.
Demonbolt
Replaces Shadowbolt as baseline for Demonology, remove the talent. Give Shadowbolt to Affliction.

New level 100 talent for Demonology:
Demonic Ritual
Instant Cast
1 Soul Shard
Puts down a fel Demonic ritual circle at your feet that greatly enhances your connection to the Twisting Nether allowing you to pull demons into the world to serve you.
Each spell cast has a chance to summon random demons to temporarily fight for the caster lasting about 10-15 seconds each.
Minions gain +X% damage dealt while the caster stands in the circle
Caster gains +X% haste to demon summoning skills
Caster takes X% less damage while inside the circle
Adds a second button tied to the skill called "Demonic Bulwark", can be activated once every 45 secs to shield the caster for 100% of his health for 2 seconds.
This would play into the class fantasy of the warlock of being less mobile but more tanky, as well as demonology being the master of demons, summoning them from the Dark Beyond in an unholy ritual to do the fighting for him. The enemy will have to cut through an army of demons to reach the caster to try to remove him from the demonic circle before they get overwhelmed.
Could have a cool effect on the warlock that makes him/her levitate while in the circle with shadowy/fel fog swirling around the feet and being absorbed into the warlock.
It could add a secondary resource unique to this one talent which would be called "Fel" that is built up as you cast spells and summon demons, once you reach max Fel you can put down the demonic circle which empowers the caster as described above but drains Fel while active. Kind of a twist of the old metamorphosis Demonology used to have but now something that fits the class fantasy more.

Mastery: Master Demonologist
Passive
Demonic Empowerment also increases the damage of your demons by X%. Every ability you cast has a 50%-75% chance to summon a wild imp to your side. Mastery increases % chance and time before minions expire. This will allow the caster to continue to use wild imps in combat but making them the lesser demons that they are instead of being part of active skills, Implosion wont need to be changed.

Hand of Gul'dan
1-4 Soul Shards
X sec cast - cast time reduced for each soul shard, instant cast at 5 shards
Calls down a demonic meteor full of minions which burst forth to attack the target for 12 sec. The type of demon is random but would be Dreadstalkers, succubus, voidwalkers(non-taunt) etc. This means all minions except the Wild Imps from Master Demonologist would be melee, meaning Demonwrath would get more efficency since majority of minions will be in melee range.

Call Dreadstalkers -> Call of the Legion
2 Soul Shards
X sec cast - cast time reduced for each soul shard, instant cast at 5 shards
Summons 2 ravaging Felguards that charge forward and attacks the target for 12 sec.

Improved Dreadstalkers -> We are Legion(Talent)
Passive
Call of the Legion now summons 2 additional felguards.

Grimoire of Thal'kiel - Demonology Unique Talent, replaces Grimoire of Synergy
Passive AND Toggled
Passive Effect: Same as current, chance for either master or minion to gain +40% damage for 15 seconds
Toggled Effect: The caster emits a Fel aura that continually empowers the summoned demons but drains 3% mana every second while toggled. Replaces Demonic Empowerment and removes it as a casted ability regardless if this ability is toggled or not. When toggled on the effect would be a mix of fel green and shadow runes/energy swirling around the character. And perhaps a hovering tome on the character's left hand like the wizard in diablo 3.

Remove all lesser demon summons from Demonology and instead have only one summon skill:

Summon Fel Lords
Summons 2 Fel Lords from Dreadscar Rift to protect the Netherlord in combat as powerful melee combatants.
Wouldn't be much stronger than a normal Felguard, just visually would add a TON of coolness.

Could even take it one step further and have it so that we are able to set a spec for each of the fel lords. One having a tank and a support(buffing, minor healing?) spec, the other having a melee dps or caster dps. Just an idea to add some more flavour to Demonology.
My main concern lies with the destruction warlock.
Destro-lock has been my favourite spec since Wrath of the Lich King, however the damage now just seems ridiculously low. Whether it be in PVP or PVE. Hardcasting a chaos bolt in pvp is somewhat hard, if it is that hard it should be rewarding. But it just hits slightly harder than incinerate.

Now focused chaos fixes this problem for pvp. But what about pve? In my opinion incinerate and chaos bolt (basically the old destro locks bread and butter) need damage buffs.
I feel that if they just removed the rng from chaos bolt ( mastery ) so that it always hits at max capacity things would look better for us.

I can live with the rest of the rng. Just that one spell at max % all the time would be a decent dps increase if u ask me.
Honestly shouldn't demo have like a nuke ability?

Where you summon all the demons at once
My main spec destro, going into mythic EN ilvl 869, pulling on bosses ST aroun 250/290k depending on the boss, stats Crit 23.45% Haste 34.76% Mastery 44.84%
Anybody know the soft caps or the tight stats so something ticks together, cos i found allot of different stuff mastery>crit...etc Haste>crit....>no mastery... so much different stuff. And in 7.1 no buffs when all of my guild members lower ilvl doing more dps then me :( and im trying my hardest
no need any of these warlocks are just too op atm just give us some nerfs instead! and take back those buffs which you gave us while ago those were too good compare to what ret paladin got
I'm doubt this post will ever be laid eyes upon by a dev or CM but here it goes.
Even though the masses out there are screaming their tongues, out crying for warlock buffs, we're are not that bad. Sure we are not the best, but definitely not "unviable". I think the suggestions and changes below make alot of sence, and would act as a small buff to some of the aspects where warlocks are currently falling behind.

One of my biggest issues right now is how vulnerable warlocks are to movement. Our DPS straight up nosedives if we need to move during a boss fight and it feels so incredible frustrating. Here are my suggestions on how to fix this.

Backdraft DURATION scales with haste (mentioned nowhere) because devs wanted backdraft to always affect a maximum of 3 spellcasts, no matter how much haste/gear you have. Casting conflag, only to get targeted my a debuff which requires you to move feels so !@#$%^- annoying. I just completely wasted this talent, i might as well never have picked it in the first place.

Solution: Bring backdraft back to a 3 charge system and increase its duration slightly, like in the old days. This would solve the movement during backdraft issue, and still only limit it to 3 casts.

In respect to the backdraft change I think giving Roaring Blaze a slight buff would be at its place. Roaring blaze went from 60% during beta and gutted all the way down to 25% on live. Warlock singletarget burst is currently one of worst (across all 3 specs) amongst everyother DPS class out there, and a buff to Roaring Blaze would make sence in its current situation.

7.1 talent-swap I must say it completely baffles me how this change went through. Saying our T3 talents are too one-sided (Blueposted on US forum) and then placing Demonic Portal amongst 2 other talents useless for PvE....whaaat? Okay fair enough, atleast i get to play with demonic portal again!

But now our only "tanky caster" talents are on on the same row, TOGETHER with our only real movement talent. Why are you doing this to us? :( Sure we now get to use demonic portal once every 30 seconds, but placing our only movement talent in the same row as our "tanky" talents.... its rough.

Solution: Demonic portal baseline, like it should have been from the start. Possibly revert the talent swap, and come up with a new talent in our T3 row. If not, make Burning Rush baseline, together with demonic portal. We still have to choose between Soul Leech/Darkpact, but no longer have to give up our only movement talent.

Lastly, our golden artifact traits. Currently we have close to 0 interaction with our golden artifact traits. Our conflag trait is a straight up damage increase with 0 interaction, you could just have added a baseline % dmg increase instead and saved yourselves a few sentences ;) Lord of Flames, eh okay.. we now press summon infernal instead of doomguard, very interesting. Dimensional Ripper, okay fair enough but really? I'm pretty sure you could come up with something a little more interesting than this.
Wow what I see is 17 Pages of wall of text that no one bothers to look at. Meanwhile the "devs" continue to create changes out of their !@# and make this class LESS FUN. Will let my sub expire untill some real changes.
Im so disapointed... I want to stop playing this all toghether.. i need to be banned so i dont have the urge to come back and try things and then get so much dissapointed and frustrated......... I'v had enough with warlocks,i don't know why i come back everytime and get in their trap all over again. I have to realize that the OP locks in TBC was so badass that they still we pay the toll of being imba for how many years now 10? R.I.P Warlocks..... ( Warlocks died back in 2006-07 and now the final hope for ressurection... Byeee)
Well i am incredibly dissapointed, this patch is just...

The ninja nerfs that are not even listed in the patch notes.
Casting circle now reduces the duration of silences and interrupts by 70%,
The enslave demon nerf which is magically fixed now.
The doom nerf in PVE not only PVP, my doom does 200k dmg now, before it was like 380-400k, for a 20sec "Dot" it's a joke, Not to mention PVP talents are activating during PVE like everytime so we got the whole PVP dmg nerf during PVE
Pets are now even squishier than us. The health nerf with DE not only affected demons but Dark Pacts too.
Thalkiels consumption now is like a wet noodle.
I can't even describe how much this frustrates me. The mechanic was already the clunkiest,boring,slowest,hard casting the most monotonous spec ever.
Yet im will keep playing this class becouse i can't play with others for more than half an hour. Locks are forever my class no matter how much you punch em.
hi
favorite spec : Affliction (PVP) mainly ,
this guy (link down below) explain everything we need as Affly in arena / rbgs .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVJ44Ypm350