The Warlock discord has provided the devs with 2 sheets filled with feedback about how to improve Warlocks. Unfortunately today’s changes are very disappointing and some (like Soul Siphon) are a testament to the state of this class. Since you can’t post links in forum posts, i’m gonna copy paste the raw text.
Xn’s Tank Feedback sheet:
Warlock Tank
Tank has many issues.
-Defensive CDs aren’t attractive because of high CD or low effectiveness. Vengeance needs a reduced CD (~1-1.5min), new Infernal Armor isn’t exciting, because of the rarity of spell dmg in raids. It needs some kind of offensive aspect to make it an exciting ability to use.
-Solution: In addition to reducing spell damage taken by the percentage equal to physical reduction, increase your own damage done by the same percentage for the duration. This pushes tanks into more defensive gear, freeing up contested dps slots and also gives use to some tank items that have been ignored.
This also provides dps warlocks with a on demand dmg increase spell without it being too op as they dont have metamorph to scale ttheir dmg. Basically maxes out at ~15% which can be attractive for short fights but not a must-take for all fights. Tanks would be forced into yet another dps rune slot without this change.
-Grace is terrible value for its rune slot, as it competes with the 3 strongest runes. It needs a significant change to be even remotely useful a la increased values and duration.
-Dance of the Wicked never sees usage because dodge in general is too unreliable and on top of that, weaker buffs can overwrite stronger buffs.
-Solution: Remove the mana gain since tanks dont have mana issues, make it not overwrite stronger buffs and give it a %damage buff every time you dodge so tanks dont lose too much dmg/threat by prioritizing dodge gear.
Dodge in general is a very poor stat though because it lacks meaningful impact and has no synergy with our abilities. On top of that the t1 tank set bonus wants us to get hit so it feels like the whole philosophy of how to gear tank warlocks is all over the place.
Offensive
-Searing Pain has strong dmg & threat which is nice. Forcing tanks to use Shadow Cleave to proc spelldmg from extra defense (Ring rune) feels bad though because cleave damage is terrible.
-Solution: Increase Shadow Cleave dmg drastically (x5) but make it split its damage when it cleaves. That way it has strong single target potential without being op for aoe. The way it is now, noone wants to cleave, even with the spellpower buff from defense.
-Melee Weaving is a cool idea but being capped at 1.4 (or 1.5 with attack speed enchant on gloves) speed weapons limits options. It’s also a noob trap since you need a macro to actively weave to not clip auto attacks. Remove it entirely or fix it to be able to weave with slower weapons too.
Warlock General
Soul Siphon
-Some runes are really bad and have never and will never be used in their current state. ex: Soul Siphon. The rune itself needs a rework but even just shifting it to a different slot might give it some usage.
Master Channeler and Demonic Tactics are too good, so noone picks Soul Siphon. It’s made for affliction warlocks but it’s paired on the same slot with the most powerful affliction rune.
NEW PTR BUILD EDIT: new Soul Siphon is still equally trash. The base damage of vanilla Drain Soul is terrible, the scaling even more so. Even with 1000 spellpower the drain soul execute will do less dps than shadow bolt spam.
Shifting Runes
-Shifting runes is a common theme. A lot of runes, especially P1 runes are too stacked on one slot.
-Legs: Everlasting, Incinerate and Demonic Pact are all in extremely high demand, both for the warlock and the raid. This isn’t a situation of “let the players choose what they like” but rather “which player is the griefer by not bringing X”.
-Solution: Swap one of the 3 with a wrist rune or just shift it to wrist without swapping. Wrist runes are the most underutilized and need a competitive spell on that slot.
-Chest: MC and DT are too good, lake rework coming too which will make the slot even more contested. When you have too many competing runes on one slot it’ll always result on one winning and the rest be 0% usage, so there needs to be some slot shifting.
Misc
-Soul Shards are a big issue at lvl 60. Mark of Chaos basically demands 10-20 shards per fight. Solution: Remove the shard requirement OR give us a QoL book to make soul shards stackable (20ish per stack is fine)
NEW PTR BUILD EDIT: Merge Curse of Recklessness into the rune too so Reck applies the elements/shadows debuffs too.
-ISB needs its charges removed. There is so much shadow dmg now with shadow priests etc that the debuff is basically instantly gone. Remove charges and reduce duration for balance.
-Conflagrate consuming immolate feels bad. Either QoL book or make immolate not be consumed part of a rune (Immolation Aura or Backdraft)
-Reduce Infernal CD and make it usable indoors as a strong dps CD. Other high CD spells have been adjusted (like Shield Wall) already.
-I’m aware devs are hesitant to tinker with talents (thus the rune system) and I agree with that approach, however some runes to utilize/change heavily underused talents would be nice. Dark Pact, Spell Stone, Fire Stone, Hellfire Stun talent are all dead.
-Any or all of those changes will help warlock be more fun and competitive without tinkering with numbers, potentially imbalancing them.
Niche’s DPS Feedback sheet:
P4 Runes:
Mark of Chaos - this rune is underwhelming for multiple reasons. It is a lower dps and clunkier destruction rune, requiring specing into the destruction tree. All deep destruction users will use Decimation since they will have talents supporting Soul Fire. The rune serves no purpose as it is not very attractive to affliction, and it’s weird that if it’s intended to be affliction oriented that you must spec into a different tree.
I suggest the rune be completely reworked or replaced by a different idea that is directly tied to affliction or at least more general in purpose. If you must stick with this rune, I have some thoughts to improve it. Auto-crit is bad for game mechanics. It devalues the crit you have on your gear and from buffs. Change the effect from 1 cast with 100% crit, to 2 or 3 stacks of increased crit chance, such as 2 stacks of 40 or 50% increased crit, or 3 stacks of 30% increased. Increase the duration of the buff from 10 seconds to 15 seconds to allow us to use all of the stacks. Often we will be casting other spells in between and may not be able to use 2 or 3 direct damage spells within 10 seconds. 15 seconds matches the cooldown time of Shadowburn, so it fits nicely. Lastly the spell requires a soul shard, and if using it on cooldown, means you’ll go through 4 shards per minute. Most bosses will then require 4-12 shards each and you will spend all your time during trash refilling with drain soul instead of being productive with damage. Remove the shard cost, or come up with some way to regain the shard such as when the crit buff is consumed, you get the shard back. Additionally, if used by affliction players who already have 4-5 dots to apply, haunt to use, and shadow bolt to cast, adding another unique cast makes the rotation very full and difficult to play.
Also, Mark of Chaos is currently (likely) bugged to affect Immolate’s direct damage as well as dot ticks when using Pandemic rune. When MoC is used, the entire Immolate spell is 100% crit.
Decimation - this is a solid rune for destruction users, but interacts awkwardly for affliction users, and there is no affliction option. Mechanically it is good and produces high dps during execution range, possibly too much, and will be a problem for balancing for short and long fights. In 2019 classic, we were killing some Molten Core bosses in less than 15 seconds, and even now in SoD Sunken Temple, the first boss is a 20-30 second affair. This execute will do very little in this case. On the other side, if raid bosses are buffed to the point where they are all several minutes, then this rune might be too strong. I like this rune but I worry how volatile it will be.
Spell hit ring runes (and melee skill) - 6% spell hit is a minimum effort solution to help specs with spell hit issues, but giving it to all classes, including those who already have upwards of 6-10% hit from talents, makes their gearing less interesting and restricts them from competition on great gear that happens to have spell hit. The specs that had no hit from talents, however, still need 10% and that is a large investment. I don’t know how you go back on this decision without an uproar, but I would have selectively given this spell hit to those who have none only, not to all.
Additionally, a point about the melee skill ring runes - these ring runes, spell hit and melee skill address 2 different game systems, but, as ring runes, are being delivered as if they are the same. Melee skill addresses the combat table and the glancing blow damage reduction penalty based on attacker skill vs defender skill. The idea is to occasionally reduce attack damage against targets 3 levels above you or higher. The analogous system for casters is not spell hit, but partial resistance. Mobs have flat level based resistance for each level they are above you. This resistance cannot be reduced by spell penetration or by any other means. Melee often have very little issue reaching their hit cap. Casters are getting spell hit from these ring runes, and for some classes it’s not enough to cap, and then melee also get their partial damage penalty lowered/removed while we still have to deal with the full effects of partial resistance. This is a double win for melee with casters left behind as usual. There is no in-game system currently to deal with partial resistance, but a change could be made so that spell penetration can reduce this level based resistance, and a small amount of spell pen could be added to these spell hit ring runes. That is likely the simplest solution but other systems could work.
General issues:
Pet imbalance - I hesitate to bring this up for fears of getting nerfed, but the Imp, due to being spell based, is far and away the strongest pet. We need serious buffs for all other pets, including Felguard (even after Demonic Frenzy is added) so that they are viable. The difference started small in P1, grew in P2, is huge in P3 and will get even wider in P4. Currently an Imp does at least double the damage of the next best pet, usually more than double. This is because of external spellpower buffs like demonic pact and spellpower scaling from the warlock being very strong for its Firebolt. The other pets get either no effect or little effect (succubus) from spell power and need some way to scale from it, or they will be doomed to never be used. Giving each pet a spell with considerable coefficient could be a way to do it, felhunter with shadow bite applying a high coefficient dot, upping the coefficient of lash of pain for succubus to 2-3x what it is, minimum, etc. Giving “melee” pets an internal spellpower to attack power conversion would be simpler, or dramatically increasing the warlock spellpower to pet attack power scaling. Strong pets are a bright spot in SoD, so I don’t want to see Imp nerfed, rather the others brought up to its level.
Additionally, Imp has more base stats at 60 (intellect and stamina) than other pets (432 vs 386), so it will always have a 5-6 player-spell-damage lead with regard to Demonic Knowledge rune. Please increase non-imp intellect (or stamina) to be in line, since this is yet another place non-imps are lagging behind.
Curses - Affliction needs to be able to use Curse of Agony or Curse of Doom in order to be competitive. In order to be able to use Curse of Agony in a raid, you need the 3 utility curses applied, so you need 4 warlocks or at least 2 warlocks and 2 priests. Priest curses are limited in being able to apply once only, and it can resist, so priest curses are unreliable, especially so for bosses with multiple targets. Thus the real requirement for Curse of Agony is 4 warlocks, with the 4th lock being able to use it. Warlocks are currently one of the lower dps, and are not stacked, mostly brought for utility, so most warlocks will never be able to use Agony. I propose replacing Mark of Chaos rune with a rune that turns Agony and Doom into Banes, similar to how it was changed in Cataclysm, so we can provide our utility curse, and still use formerly damage curses to be competitive.
Potential curse bug - Curse of Doom is currently not benefitting from Haunt. It is a damage over time ability and should work with Haunt.
Horde and Alliance disparity - Currently horde warlocks are at a disadvantage due to alliance having judgement of wisdom, which works for warlock pets. Shamanistic rage and mana tide and such on horde side do not work for warlock pets. This results in a 2-4% difference in potential dps, since horde warlocks have to life tap for our pets more often, resulting in fewer damage casts. Allow Shamanistic Rage to work on warlock pets, disable JoW for pets, or find some other solution.
Spell Levels - Some spells will no longer be competitive at 60 due to not having a level 60 version, particularly Drain Life, for use with Master Channeler. Others likely exist as well, but this example is enough of a difference that Master Channeler will not be used for PVE DPS.
Soulwell - Would be a welcome addition as a quality of life grimoire from a dungeon boss.
Outdated and obsolete talents -
Improved Drain Soul - has no effect except in solo questing. Drain Life, Haunt, and Siphon Life make this obsolete by providing better mana restoration via Life Tap.
Improved Curse of Weakness - Has no effect except in solo questing, and if you cast a curse at all, it will be curse of agony, not weakness.
Fel Concentration - obsolete since drain life is only cast with Master Channeler. Drain mana is a very niche use spell and it being interrupted is not really a problem in those situations.
Improved Drain Mana - has anyone in the history of wow ever taken this talent?
Dark Pact - SoD introduced a change to allow our life tap to also affect our pets. Clearly the issue was pets needing mana, so we definitely do not want to go the opposite direction. This talent is beyond obsolete and actually harmful to a SoD player. It’s a capstone 31 point talent that competes with Ruin, a fairly strong destruction talent. It needs to be redesigned and be at least as strong as Ruin and scale similarly too.
Cataclysm - obsolete since our pets consume mana faster than we do, and thus we life tap more often than we need for the player. Talent has no effect.
Improved Shadow Bolt - Currently we almost never get to benefit from this with future shadow bolts, as the charges are eaten by shadow priests and blades of eternal darkness and any other random shadow proc before we can finish the next cast. We’ll get some dot ticks boosted occasionally, but effectively this is not a debuff for ourselves. Remove charges similar to how Stormstrike was changed.
Aftermath - even pvpers don’t take this because the chance is so low, and daze isn’t a very strong mechanic, compared to stun or disorient.
Intensity - has some situational use with hellfire when paired with concentration aura or earth shield, but that is quite rare as Shadow Bolt Volley is the preferred aoe spell. In TBC, this was changed to affect all destruction spells, and I would request this for SoD, as we currently have no spell pushback defense.
Demonology tree - I’m not going to detail it, but it’s a train wreck. Pets are strong in SoD, so sacrificing them is not worth it, and almost all other talents in the tree are extremely weak or offer nothing of value. I’d suggest leaning into this tree for tanking as they are the only ones who use it, and only for mitigation, which they don’t need currently.
P1-P3 Runes:
Lake of Fire - I know this one is getting reworked currently, but if it is intended to be the dominant fire chest rune, know that the current fire spec is quite crowded. Adding another cast into the rotation will make it difficult to play. I’m curious to see what you come up with. Back during Phase 1+2, I was hoping LoF would be changed to spawn the ground effect when Conflagrate was used so that it would be less clunky, but we got Backdraft.
Backdraft - The purpose of this rune is to give warlocks spell casting haste, however in order to use it properly you need to cast conflagrate, using 1.5 seconds of the 10 second buff, then cast another immolate so you have it ready for the next conflag, using another 1.5 seconds of buff, leaving only 7 seconds for casting spells that are longer casts than the GCD. There is a lot of waste here, and the duration of the buff is quite short so it feels cramped. A couple easy solutions would be that conflagrate no longer consumes the immolate or backdraft lasts longer (15 seconds, the length of immolate works nicely), or both.
Soul Siphon - continues to be useless as it has always been since SoD launch. It is underpowered and shares rune slot location with Master Channeler, both Drain Life runes that should be used together, but cannot be.
Destruction wrist rune - does not exist. Felguard is not competitive, Unstable Affliction can’t be used with Immolate, and Immolation Aura is a tank rune. Please add something destruction warlocks can use.
Chaos Bolt - I’m not sure what happened with Chaos Bolt’s scaling, but it is barely worth taking now. The additional effects don’t do much either. People have forgotten to equip Chaos Bolt while raiding as fire spec and not noticed, since the damage is lackluster.
Waist runes - these are a mess. Invocation has been tweaked so many times and has never been useful, but please don’t make it baseline as it will make affliction difficult to play optimally, and will actually hurt our performance. Shadow and Flame is the best rune here, mechanically, as it scales with your gear (crit) and can be reliable, particularly with dot crits. However, in practice Grimoire of Synergy is stronger since it was buffed. It is not fun to play with, though, since it is reliant on the pet procing for the player, and vice versa, and the proc chance is dismal for reliability. A higher proc rate and lower damage increase would be very welcome. I would really like to see Shadow and Flame as the strongest rune since it scales with gear, but the 10% cap on damage increase is too low when Grimoire of Synergy only needs 40% uptime to match 100% uptime Shadow and Flame. Grimoire is feast or famine and is frustrating, and nothing can be done to improve the situation.
The Demonic Pact - Incinerate problem - this is a crazy strong support rune, but being on the same slot as the main filler spell for destruction means you must play affliction, and that affliction player must sacrifice Everlasting Affliction or Demonic Grace in order to help their party members. I don’t know if making it baseline is the correct play, but it being locked for destruction specs is bad. Perhaps having Demonic Pact available on legs AND wrists (but not stacking of course) would solve some issues, giving destruction a wrist rune, and giving affliction the choice of where they want to take it, if they want to take it.
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Overall I feel like warlocks are fairly solid, with only small problems that need to be addressed to stay competitive with other casters. I don’t know where all casters will land at 60, but currently at level 50, we all parse similarly, with elemental shamans over performing a bit after their recent buff and shadow priests lagging behind with the extra utility penalty.
The main problem is the disparity of physical damage and magic damage and I am happy to see at least one step taken on the P4 PTR to address this with Occult Poison increasing non-physical damage. This won’t be enough by itself, however. Physical dps are far outperforming casters, currently, and it will be worse at 60. The free weapon skill is like salt in the wounds, too.
A cause I’ve been championing for months is using npc armor as a tuning knob on the developer side. This historically has not been touched, with most monsters having level based armor, then thematic adjustments that are mostly also standardized. These are commonly referred to as Warrior, Paladin or Mage, going from highest to lowest. A few outliers exist such as Ghamoo-ra from BFD, recently the last 4 bosses in SoD Gnomeregan, Void Reaver from The Eye, or Supremus from Black Temple, which are extreme examples of thematic armor, but armor tuning has never really been done before.
Currently, we are able to reduce most of the armor on raid bosses to nearly zero, and at 60 we’ll be able to get it even closer. Extremely low armor has a dramatic effect on physical hit damage and is one of the many reasons physical dps scale so much better than casters. I propose adding small amounts of armor to raid bosses and trash mobs, moving that point of extreme armor reduction up just enough to move the balance of physical vs caster to where you want it to be. This could be as little as 400-800 armor added, depending on the results. Set the armor amount, then try it, and adjust as needed. This will help curtail the quadratic scaling warriors have with rage that spirals out of control with all the buffs they have and extreme armor reduction, and help bring other physical dps in line with casters. If some partially physical specs are brought too low, my suggestion would be to enhance their non-physical-hit damage, like bleeds, poisons, holy damage, until they are brought up to par.
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There is a post about this on NA forums but I’m reposting this for the EU people.