Heh. This is bound to be a fun topic…Metamorphosis was one of my fav times to play Demo lock for a long while. Also with that glyph that could allow you to turn into a comet when you fell from the skies. But then they had to design a whole class around that idea. Let’s rewind the clock for a bit, shall we?
I’m not a “hardcore” player, in the sense that I don’t push for M Raid, or any other very difficult content, but I have been here for a while, I do try to play most seasons if RL allows for it, often aiming at least for 2k rio and heroic raid ,and that’s fine for what I can take out of this game nowadays. Most of the content that I do in this game is with my warlock, which I created first as an undead back in 2005, over the years he transited from the horde to the alliance, back to horde, back to alliance eheh, but you get the idea.
I feel that peak warlock gameplay was in MoP and everything since then has ebbed at the class’ identity and performance, with legion being a very severe blow to our dark egos.
Going back to vanilla, Mage was THE op caster class…period. They had the best tools, the best solutions for challenges, etc. But still, warlocks beat them. Between TBC and WOTLK, locks were untouchable. And this created a sort of salty rage in the community against warlocks, given how the class was also very edgy and cool to play as. Once MoP was over, the warlock dev was thrown out the door and the class began to loose its direction, after what was IMO one of the coolest class quests in wow ever. With the release of Legion and DH, there was no longer any sense to keep meta and the “demonic transformational aspect” of warlocks since the DH was out and they had to focus on that. I’ve always looked at DH as the sort of “Warlock pet that became a class” eheh.
Nowadays, tbh I kind of like the Demonology thing where you summon hordes of demons to do your bidding and your cooldowns are impressive demons and hellcaller allows you to spawn the stronger demons etc. This certainly aligns the class with that “necromancer summoner” class a lot of players wanted wow to have (and that UH dk certainly has nowadays) but there is a sort of “ramp up” aspect of the spec which makes it sub-par in some scenarios, wherein you need various GCD to become performant, where other specs are just stupid bursty and can mow through packs in an instant. Destruction is a bit better on this, and affliction worse, but the overall feeling is that you need to ramp up damage on the warlock, and plan your CDs very well with the packs in order to display that impressive damage we ought to be known for.
Further into this the lowered reliability of healthstones in higher keys, the lack of overall support and utility save for specific curse use or demonic gateway… Yes, it feels like warlock has lost ist shine, and becomes 2nd choice at best whenever the DPS isn’t solid enough to warrant a solid pick.
I do have a few ideas that could allow the class to shine better, such as:
- Allow at least one spec of the class to have “permanent curses” as passives. Let’s say in affliction, whenever you cast corruption or curse of agony on a target, it also receives your “chosen curse” (weakness, tongues, exhaustion) passively, similar to a sort of “on apply” unholy aura. This would ensure the curse is always put on the target and is relevant on every pull.
- Give us some of that risk-reward thing back. Back in the day, lifetap WAS part of the rotation. Healers knew this, feared this, but all respected the warlock player that knew how to use lifetap. I would LOVE for lifetap to be back in the form of allowing you to lifetap in exchange for a full set of soulshards once every 45s-1min depending on the spec.
- Enough with the wet noodle feeling. Except for chaosbolt, most warlock spells feel like an accumulation of wet noodles. Remember the SM/Ruin build where each shadowbolt was potentially one-shotting players? Yes a tad overtuned, but at least people thought “oh sh1t, here comes a warlock”.
Finally, I think Blizzard did a massive mistake when they decided to allow versatile classes (ie classes who can play DPS/Healer and Tank) to have DPS specs that out-perform dps-centric classes (Looking at you palas and druids, not monks). I know that Paladins are seen as the “introductory” class to WOW for most players, but still. This creates the sensation that players can just pick a versatile class and do their thing and change specs as they want, but also creates less attention from devs on the core-dps classes. I’m no rogue player, but the current consensus is that rogue needs some love and it hasn’t been shown because rogue is probably the least played of the original wow classes nowadays.
1-button spam that is coming soon will allow more players to diversify and learn improved playstyles, but I can sense that it will also showcase even further how certain classes are in serious need of rework.
Wow this has been a longer post, and not necessarily talking about metamorphosis, so here’s a cookie 