Copy and Paste of my Reddit topic that I posted a few days ago.
Hi,
I play Warlock since MoP and I’m currently in a top 100 guild. The purpose of this post isn’t to pretend that Warlock is unplayable, but rather to outline the issues currently affecting the class and its specs, just as every class has areas that need work. Blizzard frequently mentions that they read Reddit and appreciate detailed feedback accompanied by concrete solutions, so here you go.
Survivability
By design, Warlocks are meant to be tanky through Soul Leech, Dark Pact, Unending Resolve, Healthstone + Soulburn, and several talent points that offer Damage Reduction (DR). However, Warlock still takes some of the highest DTPS in the game and its kit is not strong enough to compensate for this.
Mythic Sszorak is a good example of these limitations because the encounter totally annihilates the Warlock’s defensive toolkit due to constant rot damage and the requirement to hold key defensives for mechanics like Virulence and Venomous Surge:
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In heavy DTPS encounters, Soul Leech never actually builds into a meaningful absorption shield but functions instead as a tiny passive heal that is consumed instantly by rot damage.
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Rot damage continuously depletes the Warlock’s health bar, which directly nerfs Dark Pact because its shield is calculated from 20% of your current health rather than maximum health. In other words, casting Dark Pact at 100% HP provides a 400,000 HP shield, whereas casting it at 50% HP yields only a 200,000 HP shield.
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Unending Resolve sits on such a long cooldown (3 minutes) that it offers zero flexibility, forcing you to save it exclusively for Venomous Surge, which follows the Virulence mechanic.
Further, in a M+ context, high-level key design heavily favors flat DR over absorption shields. Because damage scales indefinitely, static shields value lose significant effectiveness compared to even small % DRs. In an environment where DR is king, Warlock only has access to a DR every 3 minutes.
To address the above issues, I see several potential solutions (without saying that all should be implemented):
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Redesigning Soul Leech to mirror Arcane’s Refractive Images by having it grant a passive % DR, or drastically increasing its current generation rate above 3% to allow the absorb shield to actually somewhat stack under high DTPS.
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Revamping Dark Pact into a direct 15 to 20% DR cooldown, or alternatively its absorb shield could be calculated based on maximum health rather than current health while lowering the health sacrifice down to 5%.
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Reducing Unending Resolve’s baseline cooldown from 3 minutes to 2 minutes and increasing its duration from 8 seconds to 12 seconds to bring the ability to modern standards.
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Buffing Soul Link which was historically reduced from 30% down to 10%, meaning there is plenty of middle ground to find the right spot.
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Converting Drain Life into a short 30-second cooldown spell to provide a meaningful active burst heal on top of Healthstone.
Demonology
Demonology has virtually zero friction between Single Target and AoE. Currently, switching from one profile to another is about changing Mark of Shatug into Mark of F’harg. It is extremely convenient but it creates a massive imbalance against, in particular, Affliction that must commit to either profile. And devs are left with no granular tuning knobs except for Shadow Bolt and Demonbolt in a Single Target context.
The Felguard situation is cringe and has been an issue for over six years, but it reached its absolute peak this season. As a reminder, the Felguard is arguably one of the worst kick in the game because there are situations where Demonology actually has zero kick simply because Axe Toss may stun a mob outside of the pack.
Right now, optimal play means not even playing the Felguard at all, which completely defeats the purpose of devs putting Felguard in the talent tree to signal to new players that it is the intended pet of choice. I do not believe the fix is that hard to be honest:
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Make Hand of Gul’dan baseline.
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Put Felguard on the talent point instead of Hand of Gul’dan.
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Instead of the current Felguard talent point, put a choice node between current Axe Toss and a proper kick like the Felhunter’s.
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In addition, have both options on that choice node increases Felguard’s damage by x%.
Affliction
Affliction currently suffers from a complete lack of a clear spec niche. Right now, its only niche is a fight with spread cleave, an important % of fight time in execute phase under 40% health, mechanics that restrict camera orientation, and a bloodlust window at 0% boss HP. That niche is named Coiled Altar, and given the popularity of that encounter, we likely won’t see that niche again anytime soon.
Malefic Rapture was removed but it did offer distinct niches to Affliction like priority target damage and burst. Current Affliction has none. If properly tuned with some targeted talent redesigns, Affliction could easily own several distinct niches, for example:
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High single target without uncontrollable spread cleave because of the existence of Haunt that amplifies damage on a single target.
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High execute damage, that would require a talent point beyond Death’s Embrace since true execute strength comes more from increased resource generation or unlocking a specific ability rather than a flat percentage damage increase.
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On another note, I think the Spread Cleave niche is dead because currently it only relies on Agony and Corruption/Wither that do not pull their weight enough to carry that profile. With current design, I don’t believe devs will achieve Affliction not being subpar in that niche vs Destruction, Shadow and Balance.
Beyond niches, Affliction talent tree suffers from fundamental issues:
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The end of the Affliction tree is split between either buffing your Single Target spender (Unstable Affliction) or your AoE spender (Seed of Corruption). There is a consistency need across specializations from the developers. If Demonology can do both Single Target and AoE at the same time, why can’t Affliction? And if Affliction is forced to choose one or the other, why isn’t it clearly better at Single Target than Demonology?
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Overall, talents that simply buff spenders are lame, especially at the bottom of the tree. The end of the talent tree should seek to further enhance a spec’s core features in a way that remains functional and rewarding across every scenario (for example, supercharging Nightfall so empowered casts hit like a truck or spread to nearby targets to complement the Shard Instability design introduced in 12.1), lean into unique niches (like an execute path built around Death’s Embrace), or grant and further enhance cool active spells (like Dark Harvest).
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Please untie Malefic Grasp from Darkglare. The original Midnight Beta iteration where Malefic Grasp proc’d via Nightfall was exponentially better and felt much more organic to play. I’d even argue to have Malefic Grasp as our core spell instead of Shadow Bolt/Drain Soul (like the devs did in WoW Forever).
Destruction
Destruction really feels old, but what’s funny is that it’s been the same core design since Legion, yet it is somewhat still under-baked and degrading over the years:
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All good additions of cool spells introduced over the years, like Dimensional Rift or Decimation, are either unexciting filler talent points or have been discarded entirely.
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The talent tree itself is uninspired. Channel Demonfire used to be a middle-tree talent and was moved down to a capstone position without any meaningful change, alongside a clutter of passives that do nothing to change how you actually play the spec.
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Developers consistently fail to make changes that would make sense, such as Crashing Chaos still not buffing Shadowburn which confuses any player who doesn’t read a guide, while simultaneously making changes that make zero sense like removing Rain of Fire’s interaction with Wither stacks.
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On a personal note, it is quite sad that a spec named “Destruction” has devolved into such a flat damage profile.
There is a genuine need to lay Destruction flat, go back to the whiteboard, and actually sort out the mashup of half-baked ideas currently clogging the spec:
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If Hellcaller no longer interacts with Rain of Fire, then Rain of Fire should either be deleted or completely revamped while resurrecting Fire and Brimstone alongside Charred Remains, or Havoc needs to be revamped to enable AoE alongside what it does currently.
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Developers need to decide whether Dimensional Rift should be fully deleted or if there is a real commitment to supporting that iconic ability with a dedicated talent tree path.
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Passives like Avatar of Destruction, which is now a shadow of its former self, should be evaluated to determine if they even belong in the talent tree anymore.
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Developers need to ask what would actually make Channel Demonfire exciting as a capstone talent, and why that spell is being prioritized as a capstone over a spell like Dimensional Rift.
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Etc.