Feedback: Warlocks

In Development Midnight Beta Test
43

No way, Shadow Bolt is x10 more awesome than Drain Soul and has much more satisying visuals.

44

old shadowbolt with he darkish purple skull was way better in my opinion :slight_smile:

45

I enjoy the new one since I’ve played my lock since classic :stuck_out_tongue: and we have very little visuals as dots look like crap.

46

A lot of on point feedback here already.

Dark Harvest - its visuals are very cool and noticeable but 1) the damage is not there it lacks the oomph that a 1m cd should have. It has 0 things going for it. Damage is weak and thus heal is weak. 2) no utility, no debuffs, no DOT left at the end.

I feel this spell should be more impactful in more ways than just damage

Affliction - there’s very little afflictions in Affliction. Agony is dmg, corruption is dmg, Wither is dmg, ua is damage. CoEx is slow that’s OK, CoT is slower casts, that’s marginal really but OK, whatever. There’s not much else. No dmg reduction effects, no healing reduction effects, no afflictions to speak of.

Death’s Embrace - I absolutely dislike execute mechanics because they limit our damage outside of execute phase. I feel we are ginger just by the existence of this talent.

We have no nuke or burst damage. It’s not 2005 anymore and even Affliction needs to have a burst damage. Look at Consume Flame and Devastation from Flame Shaper. Maybe Malefic Grasp should be a spender to nuke target/targets with damage depending in the dots dmg (but without consuming) limited by shards and UA damage upped to compensate? Or maybe just put a proc or cool down on it and provide it with more power? Not 30% but 100%. Tie it to something maybe? That way Affliction can choose to go for multitarget or Singletary heavy dmg? Maybe make DoTs on targets affected by malefic grasp do dmg 100% faster or even 200%?

Drain Soul - update the visuals please

UA, Agony, Corruption - update the visuals for casting, more shadowflame feeling. UA should also be Shadowflame school imo.

Improved Haunt Baseline - it’s central to Affliction and needs to have this talent baked in.

Haunt visuals updated. It has looked like crap for however long it’sbeen in the game. Update it makes it look like some screaming soul flying towards target out for his soul

Succulent Souls for Soul Harvester seem to not work with UA and SoC. Barely spawning Avarice at all.

Nathrezim I like the fact it’s here because it also shows that every warlock deals with demons. Needs some improvements for sure and maybe some more logic behind it. Even more

Again, update visuals for Haunt. We have very little visuals and having something look cool would be great.

1 Like
47

I agree with you on practically everything; Dark Harvester can be a fantastic spell if it benefits from mastery. Potent Affliction still has Malefic Rapture, so there will probably be a change. It would have been better if Dark Harvester had the three shards gained during channeling for both hero talents, modifying the Soul Harvester capstone.
Graphically, however, I would have preferred, given the health recovery over time component, an AOE drain life spell similar to the old drain life talent from MOP (Harvest Life).

I agree about the burst, but I hope Darkglare is eliminated to introduce something thematic like the old Darksoul, as well as a spell like Deathbolt (an old PvP talent) for single-target

Unstable Affliction should become Shadowflame for PvP, replacing Malefic Rapture. We all agree that the graphical effects need to be redone; I’ll also add the sound effects: Agony is really irritating, it sounds like the noise of a toy gun. Haunt is a spell that graphically was supposed to be roughly like the current mortal coil

48

A few thoughs and feedback about Demonology.

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  1. Soul Harvester for Demonology

This hero tree is in a very bad spot for Affliction and Demonology. This hero tree needs to be changed to account for the spec changes.

  • Necrolyte Teachings has a Power Siphon element to it. That was fine when Power Siphon was a talent on its own, but now it’s in a choice node with Implosion.

  • Wicked Reaping is another talent that favors Power Siphon, because more demonic core procs means more procs of this talent.

  • Quietus is exactly the same, it’s a talent that encourages you to generate as many demonic core procs as you can.

  • Sataiel’s Volition has the opposite problem, it’s designed with having Implosion talented to get the full benefit.

Basically, the demonology Soul Harvester tree was designed with having both Implosion and Power Siphon talented into in mind, and now we can only choose 1 or the other, so something needs to change.

  • Also, Manifested Avarice + Shared Vessel + Eternal Hunger simply don’t work for Demonology. The Demonic Soul never spawns to attack our enemies, consuming succulent souls stacks doesn’t summon her.

  • Soul Anathema’s DoT isn’t tracked by the nameplates/Cooldown Manager but Shared Fate is. Also we need to be able to track the duration of Manifested Avarice via the Cooldown Manager.

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  1. Diabolist for Demonology

The tree is good and works almost completely. Soul Harvester was never good for the spec in TWW, it makes 100% sense that we would always play Diabolist in this spec. Demonology doesn’t really have a choice of hero tree.

The biggest problem with the Diabolist tree is the tracking of the Diabolic Rituals via the Cooldown Manager, it’s terrible and it needs to be fixed.
Demonic Art isn’t tracked at all. Diabolic Ritual has 3 different icons AND icon locations in the tracked buff section for some reason. It needs cleaning up.

Diabolic Oculi are annoying because they compete with the glyphs of Soul Shard and I wish there was a way to preserve the visual customization of the floating shards.

Also, Destruction can stack up 3 Diabolic Oculi with Rain of Fire before pulling a boss, Demonology can’t do that. It’s already an issue in TWW where Destruction needs a 1 min timer before a pull to build Diabolic Oculi and Ritual of Ruin stacks.

I think it would be best if Diabolic Oculi faded automatically at the start if a raid encounter. Diabolic Ritual has the same issues.

Diabolic Gaze projectiles are very ugly and keep us in combat forever.

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  1. Apex Talents

First, the apex talents don’t work at all at the moment. You don’t summon demons, you don’t get shard refunds on hand of gul’dan casts, there’s no visual or sound effect for the portal we’re opening, etc.

These Apex Talents recreate ALL the issues that Nether Portal had before, which is a big problem since it adds an extremely punishing 25s window every minute where you need to play perfectly and not move.

I like the idea of summoning a giant portal and summoning demons out of but the implementation is just not good.

  • First, it forces you to play Power Siphon and hoard your Demonic Core procs for your Tyrant. So it breaks the rotation for 50% of the time.
  • It requires us to be standing still for 25s after summoning our Tyrants and have a perfect cycle of building/spending shards. it’s not realistic. At least in M+ we didn’t play Nether Portal in the past, but now we’re forced to.
  • You can get 0 value out of this talent. Nothing happens passively like most Apex talents. If you haven’t planned to have 5 shards and plenty of Demonic core procs in advance, you can’t do anything with this.
  • We have no idea about what we’re summoning, what damage they deal, how they work, there’s NOTHING in the tooltips.
  • These talents create an impossibly high ceiling for the spec that goes against the stated philosophy for class deigns for Midnight.
  • The intermediate talent that buffs Hand of Gul’dan damage by 10% has another bug. The 2nd point spent into that talent doesn’t increase Hand of Gul’’dan damage further. Also a measly 10 or 20% damage buff to Hand is pretty bad.

A few suggestions to fix it:

  • First, you summon a demon from that portal as soon as you summon the Tyrant, so you actually get a benefit instantly.
  • Second, remove the portal duration and cap the number of demons you can summon out of it. So Casting the Demonic Tyrant gives you 3 stacks, your next 3 Hands of Gul’dan consume a stack and summon 1 super demon from the portal. And that’s it. Keeping the shard refund could be good.
  • Third, you put a passive somewhere, spending shards has a chance to summon one of those demons. With a nice summoning effect.
  • A tooltip somewhere of what demons we can summon and what they actually do.
  • I think this would remove the punishing aspects the talents currently have, make it punchier and not require you to hoard Demonic Core procs or playing Power Siphon.

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  1. Demonology’s spec tree

I think Demonology is boring to play, I think the tree has a lot of pretty bad/unnoticeable talents. There are a lot of things that I would like to see changed.

  • Call Dreastalkers

Can we have Dreadbite addeed into the tooltip?

  • Power Siphon / Implosion

I could write pages about this choice node. I think it’s very bad. I think we should be able to get both talents again, like in TWW.

The Soul Harvester tree was built in TWW with the TWW spec tree in mind where we had access to both.

The current Apex talents heavily favours Power Siphon over Implosion, it’s not even close.

The 2 spells don’t fulfill the same role, Power Siphon has a pull/burst set-up quality, Implosion is an AOE burst tool. The 2 spells are in a choice node to reduce the number of keybinds, but having the same keybind for both makes no sense to me.

Without Implosion Demonology has the EXACT same rotation in ST and AOE, it’s VERY boring.

The 30s CD on Implosion is bad, the spell doesn’t track how many imps we have, so you can easily send less than 6 imps. If it’s to stay in its current form with a 30s CD, it should summon and then explode 6 imps, not use your currently summoned imps.

We desperately need an Imp tracker in the Cooldown Manager please.

  • Summon Felguard

I don’t know what this is doing in the spec tree as an optional talent. You can build an entire Demonology talent tree without picking this.

The tooltip of the spell is TERRIBLE, it doesn’t explain that it is a permanent pet, how powerful it is, what it does.

If Summon Felguard is to be in the talent tree, then it needs to be in Hand of Gul’dan/Demoniac/Call Dreadstalkers spot.

Also the “glyph” for our Felguard that makes it equip a weapon is such an antiquated way of doing things. Can we get a modern way to set up which weapon it uses please?

  • Infernal Rapidity

Completely unnoticeable, untrackable, we’re supposed to guess the power of this thing.

  • Inner Demons

We have no easy way to track our Imps with the current interface options. i’m not sure this talent makes sense anymore. Besides allowing us to cast Power Siphon before a pull, what does it actually accomplish?

  • Summon Demonic Tyrant

Can we have Demonfire added to the tooltip?

  • Antoran Armaments

What’s going on with the 10% armor to the Tyrant? Is that a joke? So many spells in the game could use tooltips with essential information on them, but we decided to add this?

At least Burning Cleave is in the tooltip, that’s good.

This talent breaks the customization options of the Demonic Tyrant, which feels bad.

  • Spiteful Reconstitution

Pretty weak talent, the Wild Imp summon part is untrackable, unnoticeable. This talent is also the only path towards the left branch of the lower section of the tree. It’s followed by Demonic Knowledge which is another pretty weak talent. It feels bad to spend 3 points in weak talents to get to Doom and Dommguard.

  • Doom

I hate having to constantly switch targets during a pack to cast Demonbolt on a different enemy to spread Doom, it’s so clunky and old.

Can’t we just have Doom be spread automatically if you cast Demonbolt on a target that already has it?

  • Summon Doomguard

This is a 5 target capped AOE burst tool with a 2min CD (maybe 1 min with good gear) AND it costs a shard.

Destruction has Cataclysm that’s uncapped, 30s CD and with Lake of Fire deals a monstruous amount of damage.

Remove the CDR component, just make this a 45s CD or something.

  • Eye of Gul’dan

Doesn’t work consistently at this time, very often the eyes just float around and don’t do anything. But they look cool. Their beam could use a more modern spell effect though.

  • Grimoire: Imp Lord/Fel Ravager

I have A LOT of issues with this talent node. I think it’s very very bad.

First, the idea of mixing a DPS CD with a utility tool is just not a good idea, it’s not practical. I know you are allergic to adding more buttons and keybinds but this is not an elegant solution at all.

Is Demonology meant to have access to 2 interrupts now? A clarification would be nice.

Not being able to track the CD of the Grimoire, the DPS CD while it’s on Cooldown because we see the dispell or interrupt spell instead is not convenient at all, it’s terrible.

We can’t decide who we dispel when we summon the Imp, which is bad.

This is a very weak talent throughput-wise, because it has 0 interaction with the rest of the tree or the hero talents. Why would we pick what is essentially a utility talent in the last section of the tree, which is supposed to be the section with the best stuff?

At the very least, when we pick either one, give us the Grimoire button AND the dispell/kick button separately. It makes 0 sense to use the same keybind for a DPS CD and a utility spell, NOONE does that.

  • Stabilized Portal

This talent might as well not exist, +3s does nothing, it’s very weak, it’s useless.

  • Demonbolt

Green fire option please.

2 Likes
49

1. Soul Harvest should once again extend DoT durations

This interaction was one of the most satisfying parts of Affliction’s kit. Extending DoT durations not only felt powerful, but also reinforced the spec’s identity as a DoT-centric playstyle rather than a pure burst window class.
Currently, Soul Harvest feels incomplete without this mechanic.

2. Darkglare should be a choice node with Soul Harvest

Historically, Darkglare and Soul Harvest filled a similar design niche:

  • Both are cooldown-based power windows
  • Both reward multi-DoT gameplay
    Making them a choice node would let players shape their gameplay around either:
  • A thematic demon-summon burst window, or
  • A DoT-centric resource and duration extension window

This also solves redundancy and avoids overstacking cooldowns into a single, mandatory combo.

3. Remove the 5s cooldown reduction on Soul Harvester

The current 5-second CDR pushes Soul Harvester back into awkward trinket desynchronization, which was a big issue throughout Dragonflight.
Affliction does not benefit from constantly chasing perfect alignment with external cooldowns—especially when our kit relies more on DoT ramp and less on frequent on-use bursts.

Going back to a stable, predictable cooldown is healthier for the spec and avoids the “nearly synced but not quite” problem that plagued many builds in the past.

3 Likes
50

Regarding Dark Harvester, wouldn’t it be better if the visual effect was from the targets toward the warlock (instead of being from above to the targets while channeling), while he has his hand forward like when he channel Drain Life?

It seems much more appropriate for a spell like this that deals damage by draining life