Before i start i want to speak abou current gameplay flow.
In current Xpac - BFA, whole game ideology is being fast, bursty, deadly. Successful classes doesn’t have much to cast, they have outstanding mobility, and great burst DPS. Being slow, imobile in current game means being dead.
As we see, warlock doesn’t fit in category of Successful class here.
Sure some may say that Destro could oneshot you with chaosbolt…but that person surely never played a destro in PvP.
In order to achieve 80k+ chaos bolt, destro needs long time for preparation. It requires destro to pick grimoire for infernal, and dark souls as talents, and then after that summon infernal and cast chaos bolts as crazy to gain that sweet empowered chaos bolt in the end of Infernal lifecycle. This preparation alone takes 20+ seconds, and any interupt or CC, may end this trick for good. Truth is, any melee monkey could interrupt warlock twice during that period, and i didn’t even mentioned that stuns and fears works as well.
Demo warlock are vulnerable as well, Demonic consumption build may take same 15+ seconds for prepatration that easily may be diminished to zero.
Current warlock playstyle is extremely narrowminded.
Destro - stack soulshards to spam chaosbolts!
Affli - stack soulshards to spamm unstable affliction!
Demo - stack soulshards to stack imps, then summon Tyrant that should empower or consume your imps! - yes this seems a bit more comlicated but it works the same as other spec.
And on top of that, every warlock spec shares same flaws with eachother - they doesn’t provide anything else outside of this Resourse build up machanics.
You can’t improvise with current tools.
Warlock abilities was pruned over course of WoW history. Not only we lost most of our iconic spells, we also didn’t recieved any good quality life changes, outside of changing soulshard mechanics in Cata.
We still has cast time for summoning our demons, while hunters summon them instantly. Rogues, one of the most safe classes in game, with amazing damage and CC, now has one of the best safe tool and heals. Besides Rogues now walk in stealth faster then outside of stealth. Mages now have most spells being instacast…ETC.
Another thing is Warlocks has too many hidden mechanics that works as freaking gimmick… Implosion - it’s damage based on amount of energy that imp had befor implosion.
Firts - No tooltip in game will say it to you, you should learn it by yourself.
Second - this is another barrier in the path of warlock that prevents him/her to deal good damage.
No other class in game suffers from it. And worste thing is, this hidden crap is result of lackluster work that blizzard designers did to the warlock. This might not happen if blizzard didn’t tried renovate warlocks in Legion.
No one asked for rework in WoD, you ignorance is what ruins warlock as class and it comunity.
Visuals, this may be the only mediocore thing in warlock, but itwas not without serious flaws. Demons we still have Shivarras, fel-imps and observers whom uses outdated models (TBC 2007). And i’m hoping that these demons will recieve visual overhaul as rest of our demons, because at this point this is an insult to all warlocks. Hunters recieve any Xpac new pets, new class of pets, new models for old pets, while warlocks was stuck with 10 demon models for years. This is not how you treat your cominity, even if it small as warlocks.
Now not only warlocks as class looks broken and unhealthy, but aslo it comunity. I can’t remember that warlocks was under such pressure.
Many warlocks left game at the start of BFA because they couldn’t find anyone to play with. When M+ has been opened, i was rejected many times bacause i played as Warlock, and people wanted to see class “that could do more damage”. In PvP it was clear from the Betas that warlock would be broken here, and broken not because their damage was good, but because it was too easy to kill them.
Now some one could say that Affli was good, and in uldir they looked good. But here is truth, uldir M race was done by professional PvErs like method, they don’t care much how class plays mechanicaly, they goal in numbers of your DPS. And yes, affli could show good DPS - but this doesn’t mean that it felt good to play Affli, that this was fun.
The best times were in 2.4.3 patch (SL/SL warlocks) which werent any certain spec but hybrid of affli and demo