There is so much things that blizzard did wrong with warlocks from overall class design to technical implementation of spells.
And if in legion we might kinda thought something like «Hmmm, they are trying new things and it just an experiment». But when crap like this happens in second xpac in the row it is not a “mistakes of dev team” - it is a negligence and lack of care about class an it’s community.
From overal point of view it is hard for me to immagine that blizzard just designed warlocks to be immobile, untanky, unsafe class in the game, where mobility and burst damage is the essence of the gameflow.
It is 2019 year, and warlocks only have a demonic gateways as sort of mobility spell right now, it is 1 spell more then we had in vanilla.
On top of that many of our core spells and mechanics was strip away from us, or redone in some bizarre way… well one good thing that was changed it is revamping old soulshard system - i sould give a credit where it’s due.
Let’s start with one simple spell that was one of the our core abilities for ages, and was fit the core gameplay design, lore and class ideology - a Life tap.
Yes spell that restored our mana at the cost of our HP. Is that was really necessary to remove it? Yes some warlocks thought that it is bizarre thing to eat your health in order to restore mana…but those warlocks never understood what was warlocks are about.
Life tap was an essential tool for warlock for many reasons, and had it ussage in PvP and PvE content.
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In PVE eating your HP in raids and dungeons created artificial pressure for healers, but warlocks always had tools to restore your health by yourself.
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In PvP it was a bit more triky, because eating your health in PvP always was a high risk ability, that awarded skilled players.
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From lore standpoint it was one of the iconic abilities for warlocks that defined their identity in class history, and elegantly implemented it’s role from lore in gameplay.
Blizzard you destroys warlock identity by such decisions of removing core spells.
Another problem is that from legion devs tries to shift us into something new, without revamping whole spell ecosystem that existed long before legion
As a simple example - our prime tankyness tool is sould leech right now, while it strongly goes against warlock lore and warlock gameplay designt pillars.
Another thing is that blizz forgot or just lies about warlock returning to old roots ideology…Demo for example
Right now they are force us to believe that warlock is always meant to be a puppeteer class. While in vanila and beyond this was not the case for many reasons.
Now i will touch most painful topic for me - demonology…yet again.
Let’s just start from one simple statement - puppeteer will never be a viable spek in the game, not on this game engine and not with current design team and current programmers.
What makes demonology diffirent from rest of the specs right now - amount of demons that we summon on the battle, and the fact that our main damage is our demons.
But Blizzard seems doesn’t understand one little thing - if demonology main source of damage is demons, then they should be designed and programmed way better than we have now on live servers.
Any puppeteer class desing requires a lot more attention then any other class for many reasons.
Demons are not simple firebolt where gamedesigner juts inserts:
- Cast time
- Spell type
- Spell Damage (formula)
- Animation for caster
- Visual animation for spell
- Projectile travel speed
While Call dreadstalkers is more complicated then firebolt:
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Cast time
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Spell type
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Dreadstalker damage
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- Formula of calculating damage from warlock item stats
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- Speed of attack
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movement speed of the demon - actually blizzard just caped all demons at normal movement speed, they even don’t benefit from your passive movement speed bonus
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Create model for demon
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Set up a proper animation
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Set up a proper sound
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Set up a demon AI
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- AI behavior pattern
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- Tool to control AI - we can’t control directly control all additional demons
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- Scripts
And for now we can say that devs who programmed our demons and design team did a terrigle job with demonology right now.
We can’t control wild imps or dreadstalkers, they just attack one target and switching them to other target sometimes is just impossible. During beta there was a tons of sujestions of how to solve this game design problem.
For example i had my own idea about that that i posted here on the forum and in the game sujestions.
At this point it is should be clear that current design of demonology demands a lot more attention from developers than they want to gave it and willing to spare.
I have created several topics about demonology specifically Why Demonology doesn't work properly now
Another big problem that we - warlocks have with blizzard is that they are not willing to fix us or revamp us in the middle of the Xpac.
Some might say that it is not right to change drasticly class in the middle of the Xpac and some stupid M+ race, but from my standpoint it is not right to leave class broken for years to come, because it is an old habbit to fix classes only with releases of new Xpacs.
Healty thing is to fix your game right now, don’t put it off until later.
For some people it may look like i’m one of those people who constantly whine on forums because of things…maybe now i whine about warlocks, but is my reason to wrong to be upset about things here?
I’m care about warlocks, maybe i don’t understand all things right, but i want to see warlocks in good shape again, and see that great ingame damage numbers are equal to great, fun and compedetive gameplay that this class provides.
Have a nice day!