It is not a secret, that current warlock design is bad across the board.
The reason why warlock suffers in BFA lies not only in bad damage dealing mechanics…(All melee players, please take a note that damage dealing mechanics is not the same as bad damage numbers).
Like i said before warlocks suffer from bad damage dealing mechanics.
To future adress this issue let’s just take a look at basic warlock burst rotation, from pure time perspective.
Ok, in order to perform basic (without talents/essences) burst you need:
- Five soulshards
- Two or four stacks of demonic cores.
- Tyrant off CD
In order to fully embrace the situation, let’s pretend that we was in the middle of the fight(PvP) and we are out of shards, how our burst rotation would look like?
All next calculations will be performed without consideration of Haste stat.
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In order to generate Two stacks of demonic core, we will summon Dreadstalkers - 2 seconds cast time, and requirement of waiting 12 seconds until dreadstalkers will expire, that will give us 2 procs of demonic core.
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- Additionaly, when dreadstalkers expires, charges of demonic core will travel from dreadstalkers to us, and on the 40 yd range it takes from 1.5 to 2.5 seconds.
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In order to aquire five soul shards we need to cast five Shadow bolts, it will take 10 seconds to generate 5 shadow bolts.
After that we will need to cast chain of spells Hand of Gul’dan → Demonbolt → Hand of Gul’dan → Demonbolt → Hand of Gul’dan → Summon Demonic Tyrant
So lets have a look at amount of time that we need in order to start our burst:
So 0 soulshards, 0 demonic core procs.
- Two Shadow bolts - 4 seconds of cast time.
- Cast Call Dreadstalkers - 2 seconds of cast time.
- 12 seconds until Dreadstalkers will expire + 2 seconds of traveltime of demonic core.
- While we are waiting our demonic core procs we are busy generatin the soulshards by casting 5x Shadow bolts - 10 second of cast time.
- Hand of Gul’dan → Demonbolt → Hand of Gul’dan → Demonbolt → Hand of Gul’dan - 4.5 second of cast time.
- Cast Summon Demonic Tyrant - 2 seconds of cast time.
So in the end we have ~24.5 seconds of preparation, in order to Summon Demonic Tyrant, and at this point the burst hasn’t even began. Tyrant will deal damage for 15 seconds.
So from the naked start to the end of the burst it will take ~39.5 seconds.
Ok is we will take a look at more comfort situation, where we start combat with 3 soulshards, and we will be able to cast Call Dreadstalkers immediately… the preparation time will take whole two seconds less, we still will have to face dreadstalkers 12 seconds of timegate.
Our Burst can be separated to the three parts.
- First part is paragraphs from 1 to 4, this is relatively safe time of the burst rotation, because at this point any interupt or CC won’t ruin our burst rotation.
- Second part is paragraphs 5 and 6, this is really crucial part of our burst, because as soon as you land your first Hand of Gul’dan, and first wave of imps will spawn, you will have very limited time to continue your rotation and sommon a Tyrant.
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- When imps are spawned, they will start to cast their Fel firebolts, Fel firebolt has same cast time as your Shadow bolt - 2 seconds, each wild imp will cast only 5 fel firebolts before it will expire, so you only have 10 seconds to finish your burst rotation and Summon Demonic Tyrant. Idealy it will take 6.5 second, but if you will recieve any CC or Interupt during this part of the burst, it will ruin it.
- Third part is Tyrant’s damage itself, and things won’t go easier even here. He can be CCed, interupted, on top of that he has same cast range as we 40yd, wich makes him unreliable againt any mobile class who can cross these 40yd with one GCD.
Ok, let’s go deeper into our core damage dealing nuances.
Our core abilities is Shadow bolt, Demonbolt, Hand of Gul’dan and Call Dreadstalkers. In the stock form, Demonology greatest damage dealing source is wild imps that spawns from Hand of Gul’dan, and there lies a big problem for compedetive gameplay of Demonology.
You see, wild imps are not the only source of our damage, they also have chance to give us demonic core proc, they are also resource for our Implosion spell, and the only reliable source of Wild imps is Hand of Gul’dan, but Hand of Gul’dan is AoE spell with Splash damage. And in PvP situations where your control could play the crutial part, demonology suffers because the very nature of it’s damage dealing mechanics forces you to use AoE spell in the base rotation. And in situations where you, or your team mates used CCs like Fear, seduction, polymorph, hex or blind, Hand of Gul’dan can litteraly ruin CCs, because it was designed in the such way.
Of course, someone may say something like “But you can stop using Hand of Gul’dan during CC chains”, and yes we can stop using Hand of Gul’dan, but it will leads us to situation where we will have to stop using one of our core-base damage dealing spells, and because of that our overall DPS could suffer greatly from that.
