In to the shadowlands as Warlock

Classes Warlock
1

Hi , I’ve been playing warlock since classic I really wanted give my opinion about warlocks current and future status. I’m not invited to SL alpha so feedback in that regards would be off. This is my personal opinion but still I’ve a feeling many also share my feelings.

So we get useless curses back, big woop, doom doesn’t work and has no place in current wow, recklessness has absolute no value for the warlock, weakness is the only use able one while curse of tongues is only use able in pvp. Demonic circle baseline, sure good but in my opinion a signature spell like mortal coil should also be baseline.

-Curse of elements-
Why don’t you give back only curse that mattered to most warlocks back in the day, while putting all the other non-sense curses back in to the spell book.
-Fel flame-
Minor damage with instant cast while making your immolate lasts longer, that was one the best spells warlocks had, if you are going to take it back why mages has their ice lance take that too
-Shadowflame-
Moderate damage with instant cast and applies dot, what a cool spell omg a demon head appears above your head and just pressing the button satisfies your inner demons. Same as fel flame, if you are going to take it back, then take fire mages dragon breath and see their reaction.
-Armors-
Fel Armor and demon armor just bring them back please

There were so many good spells in the past that warlocks had, such as Dimension Rift, Demon form, Soul Swap etc and yet you go with worse curses in the history we had ? I’m really having hard times to understand at this moment.

Expectations
Destruction
Almost none of the warlock community likes to be 3min cd burster, especially when you get to do the damage in the last 10 secs of it. Nerf chaos bolts damage but increase other abilities damage . When you have your infernal and you get all your haste procs you feel like a king, but outside of that window you hit like a wet noodle. Please for the love of god change that play style. Fire and brimstone toggleable off and on, cataclysm and channel demonfire being baseline would be milions of warlock players happy. Again no one likes to be 3min guy.

Affliction
I heard affli is in a good state in SL. Having just 1 spender for soulshard is weird at this moment, maybe make it 1 spender for single target, 1 spender for aoe. Also soul burst was a really good skill back in legion. Also I don’t want to choice all active abilities of talent tree in order to do damage (for example; deathbolt+siphon life+phantom sing+haunt + darksoul is feeling like mandatory in order to do competitive damage), talent tree skills should improve my game style, not give me whole another bar of buttons to press and keep track of.

Demonology
Since legion it feels like blizzard don’t want players to play this spec, we lost our demon form we lost our weapon and we keep losing. Who though sacrificing your imps for a cast time tyrant was a good idea? Because that is the point now, forget about demon doggies and all other, just get many imps as much as possible and let tyrant eat them. Who though that was a competitive idea agaisnt becoming a demon himself/herself because that what we could do. I’m not gonna talk about dead talents like 60 row from shadows that only effects 1 spell.

Overall
-We are the only class in the entire game that has no interrupt while you guys are designing the entire game around that.
-We are constantly loosing stuff in every expansion and when you decide to bring them back, you bring back most unused spells ever.
-3 min destro lock is something no one wants to play
-Tanky spell caster is no longer the case for warlocks we lost it many expansions ago.
-Redesign destro and demonology talent trees, there are so many dead talents.
-Many others also stated but I really want to add here; a demonic stable like hunters that can hold different demons that has same abilities with the current ones can be a huge improvement about class identity.
-Make each pet stronger for each spec; fel puppy hits harder with each dot, imp procs instant incinerates, succubus makes the target take increased shadow damage.

Counter argument
Take away mages dragon breath and ice lance
Make elemental shamans lava burst only crit while earth elemental is out
Take away demon hunters meta
Take away rogues interrupt
Take away mage armors
Make death knight’s army of death consume its skeletons to make their pet stronger

Consider these changes and imagine how their communities would react to them, this is how I feel as a warlock atm.
Take your BFA warlocks necklace out and go in to a raid or dungeon and tell me how it feels like, that is your shadowlands warlock I believe.

Sorry for the long post , no potato here, also sorry english is not my mother tongue and also I’m writing this before i go bed, excuse all the mistakes but you get the idea :slight_smile:

3 Likes
2

I don’t know why this posted as my old DK lol :smiley:

3

I like demo as it is rn :persevere:

4

The lord of Dreadscar Rift is nothing but an imp master, great fantasy there.

With 3x EP the specc is enjoyable but no traits in SL and we get even more hard casts.
The only redeemable part of current demo is the imp sacrificing mini game with demonic consumption.

5

The entirety of Blizzard Entertainment hosts a total of 4 class developers.

Is it then a surprise that none of them play warlock to begin with if they play the game at all?

6

Weeeelll. If you ask just about any affliction Warlock that isnt ansolute fanbois and want the class fantasy fulfilled and actual fun over meters they Will tell you that aff locks is terrible both in SL and has been for quite many expansions now.

Last time affliction was in a great place was MoP. It was truely fun, close to the class fantasy, had some great mechanics and spells.

I do agree with you on one thing. Why om earth have they given us 3x useless curses when our curse of elements, the only one that truely did something worthwhile outside of PvP isnt implemented.

7

It was much better in Legion. Regarding SL i can’t say i’m a big fan of what i’m seeing, however for different reasons, not just “it’s not like MoP therefore it’s bad”.

8

Destruction
Almost none of the warlock community likes to be 3min cd burster, especially when you get to do the damage in the last 10 secs of it. Nerf chaos bolts damage but increase other abilities damage . When you have your infernal and you get all your haste procs you feel like a king, but outside of that window you hit like a wet noodle. Please for the love of god change that play style. Fire and brimstone toggleable off and on, cataclysm and channel demonfire being baseline would be milions of warlock players happy. Again no one likes to be 3min guy.

Kinda agree but don’t really nerf chaos bolt, rather make abilities stronger but make shard generation slower.

Demonology
Since legion it feels like blizzard don’t want players to play this spec, we lost our demon form we lost our weapon and we keep losing. Who though sacrificing your imps for a cast time tyrant was a good idea? Because that is the point now, forget about demon doggies and all other, just get many imps as much as possible and let tyrant eat them. Who though that was a competitive idea agaisnt becoming a demon himself/herself because that what we could do. I’m not gonna talk about dead talents like 60 row from shadows that only effects 1 spell.

I’d go as far as to say we’re not talking about dead talent row but dead spec. As you yourself outline, Demonology is dead.

-Tanky spell caster is no longer the case for warlocks we lost it many expansions ago.

Honestly I feel this was almost lie from Blizzard. Tbf when we have Demon skin and dark pact at the same time we kinda felt tanky for a while even in times as bad as Legion. But of course they couldn’t allow that. Now we are super tanky only through Demon armor which is the worst, most boring ability ever.
Now we are tanky caster, which isn’t really tanky (DA is op but its boring and badly designed) and doesn’t have any mobility even though even actual tanks have some.

-Make each pet stronger for each spec; fel puppy hits harder with each dot, imp procs instant incinerates, succubus makes the target take increased shadow damage.

Honestly I disagree here though. Yes give demons more utility I 100% agree but true utility. Tying a demon to each spec doesn’t really feel like a good design choice. Rather demons should have the utility of their own that all specs can make use of in certain situation.

For demonology I would go even furhter, give us lvl 30 (whatever level it is in SL, the second tier) a whole tier dedicated to our demons. With one talent being let’s say Pleasure through Pain to encourage succubus, second would be let’s say you can now have one additional lesser felguard and one talent that makes your imp buff your minor imps.
Then the rest of the talent trees would tie into this in certain way, with having talents that tie into each demon’s ability differently or talents that synergize with one specific demon, or even talents that work different for each demon, that’s my two cents.

Ofc demonology also needs to come back to some sort of transformation but I think that’s kinda implicit. Current demo doesn’t work anyway.

9

I’m really glad to find a post about the current state of warlocks in BFA and SL.

It feeled like no one was really carring about warlocks basically being stripted of all their identity spells/talents at every expensions gaining only boring/useless curses back.

Your post is very impressive and i do agree with most of it, but sadly i’m kinda convinced that blizzard will not look after those feedbacks and just let warlocks stay like this .
Why can’t we have our identity back and not just being lesser firemage (destro), Unholy DK/SP (affli) and what ever the kwak was blizzard trying to do with demo ?

Do they even play this class or is it just all for the beloved DH ?

10

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.