How to Fix Warlocks

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Warlocks have some serious issues in classic, the main being there only really being one spec for pve (Ruin) and the other trees simply existing to support those. This is also a glass cannon spec rendering you useless in pvp, there is practically no viability for destro in pvp, beyond seduce soul fire meme stuff.

Demonology has no viability in terms of actual gameplay, it exists merely to sac your succubus/Imp for pve, or soul link/feldom for pvp. Warlocks have no cleave, their aoe is far inferior to mage. For comparison arcane explosion has both crit scaling and better spell power scaling compared to hellfire, which leave you standing still, damages you, cannot crit and you have no means to escape like with blink, nova, slows or ice block.

My suggested changes would be to make each spec viable and have a distinct role, I will not cover demonology fully as it recovers a major rework of that should also affect BM/Hunter pets, mainly making them scale with both the masters stats and buffs.

First what needs to be done is making feldom and master summoner baseline and changing the talents to improved feldom with a 5 min cd at 3/3. Demonic embrace should not lower spirit. Demonic sacrifice should also be baseline at half the effectiveness, with improved demonic sacrifice deeper in demonology. The improvement talents for imp, succubus and voidwalker should be merged and also have bonuses to felhunter. Improved spellstone should be replaced by either Felguard or making Infernal a summonable pet instead (without enslavement and having to be outdoors). Spellstones and healthstones should be given a playstyle effect for demonology, i.e affecting mana, damage and the pet.

There is simply too much that would have to be reworked in demonology for me to offer further suggestions.

However the following baseline changes should be applied to warlocks:

  1. Feldom baseline & a halved form of demonic sacrifice baseline.
  2. Demon Armor should give 33% of spirit as spellpower.
  3. Hellfire coefficient should be raised from 33% (over 15s) to 100% (This is still lower than arcane explosion).
  4. Rain of Fire’s coefficient should be raised to 100% (Currently it does less damage than blizzard does, which also has the best slow in the game)
  5. Drain Soul’s duration should be lowered to 5 seconds and deal 50% more damage to targets at or below 20% hp
  6. Drain Mana should scale with spell power (50%)
  7. Curse of Shadows & Curse of Elements should be merged into Curse of Chaos and affect all magic damage instead.
  8. Curse of Chaos & Curse of Recklessness should reduce the cast time of your next soulfire or shadowbolt by 1.5s when cast against a target above your level.
  9. Drain Soul damage ticks should have a chance for soul shard (0% when you have no none soulbag slots)

Now for the real talent tree changes.

Affliction:
Improved curse of agony should be raised (from 2%, 4% and 6%) to 5%, 10% and 15% per point.
Nightfall proc chance should also have a chance to proc from drain soul and the effect should be raised to 3% per talent point (from 2%)

Dark Pact should be replaced by Harvest:
Affliction spells are now able to critically hit. Drain Soul affects all targets affected by your damage over time effects and Drain Soul deals 33% more damage per damage over time effect on your target and costs 10% more mana per active damage over time effect.

Destruction:
Bane and Cataclysm should switch places. Bane’s soul fire cast reduction should be increased from 0.4s per point to 0.5s per point. Cataclysm should be raised to 2% per point and also reduce threat by 3% per point.
Aftermath should be changed to be 100% but only affect shadowbolt, conflagrate and soulfire, apply a slow at 10% per point for 6s.
Intensity should affect all destruction spells and it should include the effects of Destructive Reach.
Improved Immolate should take Destructive’s reach spot and not unlock any new talents.
Pyroclasm should be a slow instead (25% per point).
Ruin and Conflagrate should switch places.
Conflagrate should have it’s spell coefficient raised to 60% (from 43%) and if it critically hits it should affect the target with a conflagrate dot, dealing immolate tick damage to all nearby enemies (5 yd) every 2s for 6s.
The talent leading to the now new last talent (Ruin) should be replaced by Improved Soul Fire:
Soul fire no longer requires a soul shard and has no cooldown.
Ruin should be changed to also allow hellfire, rain of fire and immolate to crit.

Edit: Some further points about demonlogy.

Summoning pets & sacrificing them should be part of an active playstyle (Ideally to buff yourself temporarily and your infernal. Sacrificing an imp could make your infernal do significant aoe damage, sacrificign a succubus would make it deal single target shadow damage. Right now and until like Legion? you basically just summon a pet once and either sac it or keep it around, basically just a cooler version of a buff, not an active part of the playstyle that could make warlocks unique.

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You know sod is right there?

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They won’t change vanila this much…or wait they actually do, it’s called TBC

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Several classes recieved bigger changes in actual classic though.

What does sod solve? They completely gutted pvp for the sake of mindlessly adding stuff. Everything I said here is more thought out. I have more insight and experience of classic wow than you or the devs.

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you can ruin - DS or ruin - SM tho, and grab a lot of usefull things like improved hs and instant corruption. Which is more specs then some classes have.

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Warlocks are probably one of the most finished classes in classic and are the best caster class in the game imo, particularly for PvP.

SM/Ruin excels in both PvP and PvE, you state that it is glass canon but I have never found this to be the case and I played warlock from 06 on classic and then played warlock on vanilla from 2013 - present.

I will say that in the case of “fresh 60” on somewhere like era where many people are in Naxx gear it is not a good spec to run for PvP but this is due to the unique circumstances of era.

On something like the anniversary servers there should never be much of a reason that you would be dying in a 1v1 or even most 1v2 match ups as a Ruin warlock.

As a Ruin warlock you will be kiting people primarily, this means with melees keeping CoE up on target and fearing them as and when necessary, letting dots do the world while you get Shadow bolts and nightfall procs off.

In situations where you are against another caster class you have the tools necessary to drain their mana and keep yourself up to win the fight.

If you are struggling you can sacrifice void for an on demand shield or death coil if you need some breathing room. Stacking stam means you will nearly always have a greater health pool than any other casters.

Affliction as a pure spec is also viable, demonology as a pure spec is not particularly viable but it can work in PvP as well and pure destruction works extremely well when you have the gear for it.

Soul link is of courses a meme spec but it is also primarily geared towards PvP.

Warlocks are an amazing class and I think you would struggle to change them without making them insane OP

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Instant corruption basically had no place in raiding until the buff slot limits were removed, but I think even now you will end up just running two fire locks(after the fire resistant raids nonsense), which means they don’t touch the affliction tree.

I don’t see how warlocks are a finished class, basically only warrior, mage and priest use beyond 3 abilities. Warlock in standard vanilla is curse of reck/elements and shadow bolt. Or maybe immolate and Searing Pain instead of shadow bolt after BWL. TBC Is not much better in that regard.

Warlocks are hard carried by how good curse of reck is in pve. Without curse of reck you would probably run 0 warlocks as mages are just better. In pvp mages are also straight up better.

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They won’t touch anything since they said they want this new release of Classic as close as possible to the one in 2019. You will have to wait for TBC or play SoD.

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I don’t agree at all, what you have posted is from the shallow perspective of a pve lock.

Warlock is a PvP class and most people don’t get that. Warlock is to casters what rogue is to melee. A good warlock is unbeatable in PvP, in lve it might now be exciting but on PvP there is no class as good as warlock on classic

Edit happy new year

2 Likes
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Well warrior is the only pve class. Mages are objectively a better pvp class. There is no way you’d want more warlocks than mages in a premade. Practically all duel tournaments tend to show that mages are the best class too. Not only are warlocks not the best in pvp they are low demand in premades and one of the weakest in pve. Further extending this to solo pvp/boosting/gold making mages are the hero class outside 40 man raids. Best in every single category.

Moreover the changes I proposed would primarily affect pve, bringing them to a state still inferior to warriors but more comparable to mages.

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That’s mage my friend.

Rogue and mage are both squishy classes with lots of cd management in order to survive/win.

Both of these classes rely on resetting fights multiple times to achieve victory. It’s even a staple in arenas how synergetic the two have been historically due how well their playstyles mesh together.

Warlocks are closer to warriors. Both are designed to take the damage not avoid it. Both rely on brawling rather than resets. And both are hyperscalers.

Warlocks don’t get enough items in vanilla to reach escape velocity, but you start to feel it towards naxx and once tbc starts you know the rest.

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You agree with me except on my comparison to rogues. Otherwise we don’t seem to disagree on anything here.

I don’t know about you but I think warlock is very very good in classic, I don’t see what changes you can make to locks that wouldn’t just make insanely overpowered

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I’m not the one asking for changes. Besides asking for changes in a vanilla client is peak comedy imo.

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They should simply try doing that classic+ where they figure out how to balance or well at least make classes viable within reason.

Fix cat feral? just make FF proc omen like in wotlk.
Ret? SoB maybe 10s crusader strike etc.

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All they need to do is add +hit to itemization for lock gear so locks can get hit capped. Or make Suppression for all spells not just affliction.

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I made a post about some general changes needed. However even with 16% hit warlocks are still trash compared to mages in 40 mans.

Some of the primary reasons why warlocks are bad is because they fall behind on trash. Arcane explosion is better than hellfire with not nearly as many drawbacks + blink for mobility.

Also the first 3 warlocks you bring lose out on 1 global +dot potential per mob. You also need a 3rd warlock for shadow to be better than fire warlock, then you need a shadow priest (literally the worst dps spec in the game, same tier as retribution) to max out with shadow damage. But even with the shadow priest fire mages are still better on single target.

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Is this post meant for future classic+ or classic anniversary?

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Ideally anniversary and future classic versions, but it appears blizzard is making the TBC mistake for the third time in a row.

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Is it a mistake though, if most people prefer it? “TBC waiting room” is a very common sentiment on Anniversary. There is always Era. And we’ve all seen last year what current year Blizzard’s attempt at Classic+ looks like.
Imo TBC is the best “Classic+” there is. It is how the original devs envisioned improving and fixing the arguably broken vanilla game. If anything, a fun experience would be playing “Classic” on tbc prepatch, with raids unlocking every couple months or half year. It would also fix the idiocy of ST class and T0.5 quests not being in game when people actualy could reasonably use the gear.

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Did you play it the last time? There was a massive drop in population after TBC release and again in wotlk, servers were outright abandoned.

Class design has improved (for the most part) every expasion, probably the least improvements were seen in TBC. TBC (and wotlk) tried to fix class balance by just doubling down on buffs/debuffs, which is not a good solution. However even in TBC you still have outright bad specs with most classes only having 1 or at most 2 useful specs (Like classic). Arms is a good example of a bad spec just being given value by a debuff. Boomkin is even worse in that regard, frankly never worth bringing. Same issues exist in pvp, frost & arms are really bad in pve, but in classic mages are forced into frost due to fire immuities/resistances in MC and BWL. In pvp it’s the opposite, they are by far the only good specs for any pvp other than niche 1v1 matchups.

ST Class quests are another massive problem in classic (I agree that delaying it and making 60s go into sunken temple when AQ is out is idiotic), but a bigger issue is that for most classes the rewards are mediocre or outright bad, but for warriors (The only good DPS class classic) get a trinket that is bis for the entire game, along with a ridiculous healing component.