Looking at the design of lots of spells and effects of warlocks and comparing it to other classes it feels weird that while a lot of specs while getting talents to improve spells, we have to put talents to fix spells. Soul leech is a great example of broken mechanic that had to be fixed by demonic skin. Here li
[Warlock] Soul leech BUG - Needs to be fixed ASAP
But this particular bug means that our talent Fel synergy doesn’t provide us healing from numerous damage sources.
Healthstone next great example of spell that is bad on it’s own and requires few talents to be useful in competitive scenario.
The basic cooldown mechanic with 1 min CD out of combat is older than most blizzard employees. We have to use pact-of-gluttony for Healthstones being viable outside of leveling.
And the overaboundance of slow effects. Why warlocks have so many slows in their toolkit?
We have
Curse of Exhaustion.
Whiplash from succubus.
Shadowflame - by the way, it is among the least picked talents for Warlocks - and there is reason for that.
Whiplash and Shadowflame is useless because no one would pick shadowflame over Darkfury talent because darkfury upgrades the basic stun. Succubus is useless in all possible game modes right now, because her whiplash slow is not useful as curse of exhaustion.
And curse of exhaustion is probably fine as it is. And to make things worse, right now rest of the curses doesn’t provide meaningful benefits as exhaustion.
While other classes build their class/spec with talents brick by brick adding elements that they need, we warlocks need to pick talents that fix baseline abilities or previously picked talents.
Speaking of useless talents - we have banish for fel sake. Where in game it can be useful? Lifeblood - Is only usable by Destro and Affliction because Leech stat is not adapted for demo - with Leech your demons heal themselves and not you.
I hope that 12.0 will bring a proper rework. I really want to play affliction, but the way dot specs work and how cringe re-applying dots on multiple targets is, no ty. Even on hellcaller destruction is already kinda cringe, but doable.
Warlock is a good example of button bloat, but besides of that there’s also a lot of uncertainty. Like when does my Curse of Tongues actually work? Does it work on channels? Does it work on boss mechanics? Curse of Satyr or whatever on hell caller is a huge QoL for curses, but do we really need them? If they are truly that strong, then why not give them an AoE application with a cooldown? Truly nobody enjoys manually applying them…
Why does immolate have a cast time? Why is Soul Fire a separate button and not just a proc for immolate? Why does Shadowburn exist? It feels like warlock overall has too many buttons that do similar things but with slight variations, this needs to be looked into imo.