The warlock class tree is currently one of the most boring class trees, with its utilities only being defensive and/or mandatory stuff, and almost nothing for offense, outside of simple damage increases to dots and filler spells and with midnight being on the horizon, I really want blizzard to read this post.
But what if I told you that I have an extremely cool mechanic that used to be unique for warlock, and one of it’s class defining abilities in classic and even in hearthstone, I am of course talking about the warlock ability life tap, but more generally, the act of warlocks sacrificing their own life points for more power.
Life tap was an ability that warlocks had up until Battle For Azeroth (2018), and it used to convert some of the warlock’s health into mana, back when managing mana used to be something all casters needed to care about, not only healers.
To understand how can we return the mechanic in a healthy way, we need to understand why was life tap removed to begin with: there was no need for it anymore.
In Battle For Azeroth, blizzard decided to let go of casters needing mana except for healers, so pretty much every caster DPS had no need for mana managing abilities anymore, therefore life tap had no purpose and got removed.
But what if it gave us something else other than mana?
Blizzard has shown some interest in bringing this ability back from the grave more than once, notable examples are soul tap, an ability that sacrifices your soul leech to gain a soul shard:
But also what I think is cooler than that and much more manageable: Tainted Blood Vial
Tainted Blood Vial was a torghast anima trait during shadowlands, and it basically allowed you to cast chaos bolt, malefic rapture, or hand of gul’dan for health instead of soul shards, and I want to add rain of fire to that, so it’s relevant for destro in AoE, obviously this was not intended for it to be used in raiding or mythic plus or even in the open world, so we have to adjust this a little bit.
Now the first issue with this is that it makes our soul shards useless which is not what I want to do, I want soul shards to be relevant because in the end they are our main resource.
But it would be really cool and a unique mechanic, if once every 30 seconds, you can cast an extra chaos bolt at the cost of 25% your own hp as an act of greed for burst damage and don’t have enough soul shards we can definitely adjust the cooldown and numbers here, but the point being, this is really cool and no other class has this, this is what I expect to be a capstone talent in our class tree.
So much class fantasy can be harnessed here, warlocks use life essence to cast dark magic, but they prefer to use other people’s souls, unless times are tough.