In order to maintain interest in the game and provide depths, blizzard makes an ability that does something cool and then later in the game’s history, introduce more talents that make it necessary for you to do extra stuff in order to have the same feeling, and if you play classic you’ll notice this, there’s a lot of extra buttons and stuff that we do nowadays that our classes didn’t have to do back in the day, new abilities feel good initially but really they’re extra effort and skill you need to practice in order to do the same maximum damage possible that you’ve already been doing.
And sure the game might be boring without change, but there are many types of change, it doesn’t have to be this way, and I feel like warlock is one of the classes that suffered from.
Today I want to talk about the differences between legion and before, vs the more modern versions.
Starting with affliction.
Every time I play affliction I have to live with the realiztation that rotation back in classic used to be that you apply dots and spam shadowbolt, that’s it, your dots did damage, you didn’t need to do anything special.
And then we got soul shards and we had to also manage unstable affliction, but at least that was cool because UA was a dot, and at some point during legion, and in fights like coven in shivarra in antorus, blizzard realized that only dot specs can do spread cleave damage, and that instant cast dots are actually AoE spells, and decided to tune them for that.
And then we got malefic rapture and I’m not a hater but recently I started missing how dots used to the entirety of aff’s damage in in single target, I would rather have this over seed of corruption sow the seeds spam because at least it interacts with the dots a little bit more and rewards you for having your dots on everything in mythic plus, but in raid, I started thinking maybe this ability isn’t a good idea, because once we got it, then it got tuned for AoE in 9.1, and affliction never saw the light of day in the raid since then, and I’m pretty sure it’s because it’s so hard to balance, but if it’s for balance, then how is it not okay for affliction to be good but it’s okay for it to be bad in single target, and it’s not like affliction is crazy in mythic plus, it’s actually pretty average, and it’s one of the specs in break the meta, which says something.
The new affliction 11.1 tier set bonus increases UA damage by only 50% spreads it to 4 more targets, which makes me think that blizzard will keep this a thing, dots seem to be forever tuned for AoE and not for single target, which means affliction might never be good in the raid as long as this is a thing.
Oblivion tries to do this by having a single target soul shard spender and oblivion looks cool and is kind of a dot, but really it is under tuned and they should be buffing unstable affliction by like 300%, and the reason why it’s only 50% in the tier set bonus is because you’re going to have multiple UAs rolling in mythic plus, and this just makes me lose hope in playing affliction in the single target any time soon.
Affliction is similar to demonology, demo summons all demons, spams hand of gul’dan then casts tyrant, and affliction casts all dots then (used to spam unstable affliction), casts darkglare, and darkglare used to do a LOT of damage because of UA stacking 5 times by the way, nowadays it’s just an extra keybind you need to press every 2 minutes for an 8 second dot extension, and does 1.7% of your damage, and if you pick malevolant visionary it goes up by another 1.7%, for a massive whapping extraordinary 3.2% of your damage, for 2 talent points, I’m gonna get into tyrant gameplay loop in a second, but at least compared to darkglare, tyrant can be fun sometimes because it does big damage, the only difference between aff and demo is demo cannot do spread cleave.
Affliction also has one of the smallest talent trees in the entire game, and also containing a lot of 2 point talents so you that you have something to spend your talents on, notice how you’re playing almost the entire talent tree as affliction? I hate saying this but I do think they’re actually out of good ideas for affliction, and there hasn’t been any innovation on this spec since the introduction of tormented crescendo in 9.2 as a tier set bonus, but an instant cast spender isn’t really a big deal because a lot of specs have it anyways and isn’t even that big of a deal, but even that got changed to force us to attack the UA target, or else no TC.
But you know what’s the worst part about this? the first build of 11.1 notes are out and affliction got no changes, which makes me think that this spec is not even on their radar and makes me feel like they don’t care about affliction anymore, which is my favorite spec in all of WoW, and is the reason why I played for this much, but I hontestly never felt more hopeless for this spec.
I’ve never really liked darkglare, I wish it was another demon instead, but a big eyeball doesn’t really feel as cool as the humanoid demons tyrant, doomguard and infernal, and I always wished they would let us summon or transform into legion inquisitors :
this would be an awesome transformation for hellcaller malevolence or summon for affliction, in fact, I think this might be an even more fitting than the old metamorphosis model, which is never coming back
Moving on to demo
- Want to summon a doomguard? one button press and boom, you have a doomguard that could be made permanent with a talent, and all specs could do this.
Here are the steps to summon a doomguard today:
1.be demo
2. have wild imps
3. wait for them to die or use power siphon
4. cast instant demonbolt
5. cast it again to reduce the duration
6. now you only have a chance to summon a doomguard for a few seconds
7. why ?
Demonic tyrant is the new doomguard because it is our main cooldown, but tyrant sucks and we all know that, very low quality of life and close to impossible to get the most out of in some situations, to the point where demonology was doing more damage than destro in theory and in sims, but no one played it because you could do that, but you could also play destro and be mobile with shadowburn.
Almost every problem that demonology has is because demonic tyrant setup, and everyone will agree with this, I mentioned in the aff part how it’s similar to affliction but the reason why darkglare setup doesn’t seem to be as problematic is because affliction dots are instant cast, and you can move during them so you don’t really have a problem, also most of your damage comes from after using your cooldowns and not before, as demo we have this weird turret mode that just needs to go honestly, I’m just tired of it, there are many ways to make demo life better.
- maybe bring back the dragonflight season 1 tier set bonus, that makes demonbolt proc an instant cast hand of gul’dan .
- maybe make tyrant and vile fiend instant cast because it’s cast time, the cast time exists really for no reason other than annoying the caster, why is felguard, a 2 minute cooldown instant, does damage, and interrupts and stuns the target, but vile fiend is a cast time?
- demonology needs to cast while moving during tyrant setups.
just something to make tyrants more consistant, please, every other class can just cast their cooldown and do damage, go watch a fire mage play, they hardly ever hard cast anything other than pyroblast for sunking’s procs, and also they can cast scorch while moving, and they can shimmer twice while casting, why do warlocks have to suffer this much to cast the main damage dealing ability?
Destruction is probably the least problematic spec in the war within, and the reason for that is because blizzard listened to feedback and made the spec more mobile by buffing shadowburn.
And well the class tree is just baseline stuff, socrethar’s guile, sargerei technique, soul conduit, demonic tactics, swift artifice, all of these need to go in all honestly, boring classic style passive talents that give you baseline stuff, this should be baseline buffs to our abilities, with soul conduit as 5% doesn’t do anything really, it rarely gives shards, to the point where I don’t notice the proc anymore, it’s so rare.
The class tree is full of defensives, but when I play PvP they don’t do anything.
Pact of gluttony sounds cool in theory until you realize you need to be in combat for over a minute after you use your initial healthstone to have a benefit out of this talent, so it’s useless in mythic plus where you do pull by pull, you’re never going to need this unless you’re fighting a high end boss or pulling back to back, but remember, if you drop combat for even a second, the healthstone cooldown will start anyway, so this is only really useful for the raid.
warlock vs shaman:
shaman: you transform into a cool ghostwolf that can be glyph and run fast
warlock: you run fast but you damage yourself
why ???
I do understand the fantasy of warlocks damaging themselves to gain power and that’s cool and all but does blizzard think this is worth it? in fantasy damage to yourself and health sacrifices happen when you’re about to do something BIG and no one else can do.
also burning rush used to have a talent next to it that reduces the damage taken by a whole 10%, that’s right, 10% of 4%, that’s saving 0.4% of your health.
I feel like this class needs to step up when it comes to quality of life, class fantasy and coolness factor, I’m already trying to find another class honestly, but none of them feel like home…