Warlock is fun, but it could be better

Classes Warlock
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You know, lock would be even more fun if they did a few things:

For destro:
1: Soul fire should be insta cast, and also have a chance to reset it’s cd on immolate ticks, also ritual of ruin should make your bolt insta cast, and channel demon fire should be castable while moving, this would solve destro awful mobility at least a little
2: Cataclysm should be it’s own talent
3: Crashing chaos should be either a cd extension based on soul shard usage or a talent that increases the damage of your soul shard abilities up to a cap based on how many you used, i would prefer the extension personally, it’s just more fun.
4: You need to do something about channel demonfire piss poor performance. Either it generates some soul shards when it hits the targets or whatever.

For demo:

1: Bring back hand of doom
2: Add the old tier set from vault as a talent replacing umbral blaze
3: Talents like pact of the imp mother should count as if you spent soul shards and work with things like dread calling.

For affliction
1: Bring back shadowlands tier set in place of malefic affliction
2: Soul flame should be straight up removed, it’s a gimmick, and a bad one, it’s useful in certain situations, even too strong, and awful in others, it also means that the devs have to take it into consideration when tuning, which means this gimmick is getting in the way of aff doing better aoe, also this ability while it might be cool to see, really doesn’t improve the gameplay in any significant way. Increase the damage of seed, remove soul flame.
3: haunt is bloat, and should be integrated into unstable affliction.

And then for the general build

1: Infernal, dark glare and tyrant should be baseline
2: Grand warlock design should be in the class tree, this would allow for awesome combinations such as rain of chaos/gwd or gwd/reign of tyranny, while still allowing choice in other part of the tree, but let’s be real, no one, and i mean, NO ONE is picking things like chaos incarnate because they like it.

After you did all of this, you simply tune the numbers and done.

And there you go, the most fun caster spec in the game.

2 Likes
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post edited.

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Soul flame was like one of the best things that legion brought to warlock, this explosions are very satisfying

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Soul flame is nothing but trouble for affliction.

If you think otherwise, you’re wrong.

Soul flame is the reason why aff aoe cannot be tuned properly.

It’s also irrelevant for your rotation, and does nothing aside damage when the target dies. So it’s not only bad for the spec as a whole in terms of tuning, but it’s also irrelevant for gameplay.

It’s literally a meme.

You can agree with me on this, or be wrong. Your choice.

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so if soulflame is irrelevant, then why it can’t be tuned properly? just don’t tune it

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It’s irrelevant for the gameplay of the spec.

It’s not irrelevant for the damage, don’t be intentionally obtuse, and pretend that you didn’t understand the argument. And misrepresent it in order to make your point.

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There are quite a few more issues and necessary fixes than the ones you mentioned.

the 4 set is a talent. I guess you mean the 2-set then. I don´t think malefic affliction is the problem. The problem is that it tracks onto the target and not the spell itself. They fixed it once, so they could fix it again, see:

Also Soulflame is not the issue, it is SoC cast time and shard dumping. Demo have hand of guldan, Destro have Rain of fire. In AoE affli can barely dump all their shards and having to cancel SoC casts due to affixes or mechanics is very punishing.

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Malefic affliction absolutely is the problem, dread touch would be fine by itself, it’s malefic affliction that causes the issues.

And yes, soul flame absolutely is a problem, comparing it to hand of gul dan or rain of fire is nonsense.

As they are not even remotely the same. Seed of corruption would have been an actual comparison.

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See you are interesting you say soul flame is crap but you haven’t once said why other than it doesn’t affect rotation despite posting multiple times, just effectively repeating it’s bad because I said so.

The argument agree or your wrong means nothing, learn to articulate your argument better.

So I shall ask again, why is it bad, in your opinion, and what would you change?

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What are you talking about?

I specifically pointed out the problems with it.

You just refuse to see them.

Pay attention.

Read this again, and actually listen"

Soul flame should be straight up removed, it’s a gimmick, and a bad one, it’s useful in certain situations, even too strong, and awful in others, it also means that the devs have to take it into consideration when tuning, which means this gimmick is getting in the way of aff doing better aoe, also this ability while it might be cool to see, really doesn’t improve the gameplay in any significant way. Increase the damage of seed, remove soul flame.

This is not an opinion. This is the truth about soul flame.

You people want me to repeat an argument i already made, while your argument is nothing more than, i like soul flame because i like it, i like the “explosions” look, just get out of here. And let the adults talk.

Also, it pisses me off when people dismiss the argument because they don’t agree with it, i perfectly explained exactly the problems with soul flame. And even if i didn’t, the fact that it doesn’t do anything for the gameplay is already negative in itself. Although it would be fine if it didn’t also have these other problems.

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Things I can get behind for Destro:

  1. Soul Fire being a forever cast, only to hit about as hard as an Incinerate, or on par with about 1.5 Conflagrate (depending on critchance), is just hound-excrement. Especially since quite a lot of fights are movement dependent. I’d rather see the damage severely dampened to allow a short or even instant cast.

  2. CDF should at least be able to cast while moving, and possibly even generate some shards as well. Interrupting the flow that badly while not adding diddlydoots to the core mechanics which every other skill does is sad design.

  3. Disconnecting the Rain of Fire shard generation talent from Cataclysm is just a very, very good idea. Being able to pick both is probably not going to break or make us but will help in instant high pressure AoE situation, as well as a QoL in M+. Compared to (just an example) Evokers that can choose to instant blast away their hearts out, it’s rough to go “No, no, don’t murder as fast, I need a bit of ramping!”.
    Of course there are other, much more frontloaded AoE classes, like almost any other, but it’s the closest analogy I could find.

And if I could I would rather pick the previous Tier set bonuses to this one, but I think that’s implied in my text already. It is what it is.

Sorry about the disjointed numbering compared to the OP, I just have no opinion on Crashing Chaos specifically.

However.

  1. I think the tree has an overabundance of deep-tree nodes that require too many points, making the choices in the end always shift to the right. The left side LOOKS interesting but Ritual of Ruin with Master Ritualist and Avatar of Destruction just feels so bloody good, and works for both ST and AoE, that picking anything else just hampers your core flow.

I fervently wish Blizzard interprets this in any other way than “Let’s GUT IT”, and tunes the left side to be comparable, or simply finds another way to design the left side better.

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Id say those are some pretty good points.

The problem with soul fire being tuned around such a long cast time is that it would have to hit incredibly hard. Also, it’s just not very fun to have such a long cast time.

I think it’s cooler to just have it insta cast, deal about the same damage as it does now, and generate the same amount of shards.

And yea, cata/inferno should not be a choice node, having a way to instantly spread dots to your targets should never be a choice node with something. For any dot reliant class. People argue that this makes dot weak by themselves, and yea sorry, if that’s what it takes to make dot classes not bad to play with in aoe i am willing to take the tradeoff.

Now, destro isn’t really a dot class, but the point still stands.

Slightly nerf inferno if you must, but it would be beneficial for the class to have cata and inferno separated.

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I made no argument either way I just asked you to explain a reasoning better than I don’t like it and it should be removed.

I don’t like the current SOC, the entire design is whack. AOE is about speed, there’s nothing fast about how warlock deals damage.

AOE so SOC should be a fast cast time. A seed hitting a seed should not only explode it but also have interaction such as increased damage and not just waste it by over writing it.
They should also increase duration of dots.

That’s afflictions biggest issue, dots either run out and lost all dps replacing them in AOE to a pointless venture as group dead before you reset.
This was why soulflame existed but it’s not a great solution plus 2 points for it is expensive.

Other issue is same again it’s applications of dots
Stuff dies beforehand so no way to get rolling fast.

A bandaid style fish would be to make seed cast faster, chain seeds increases damage ideal for dungeons but niche to dungeons.
Seed shouldn’t overwrite other applications it’s should just trigger and also both seed damage counts.
Make seed flare up dots and also increase DOT duration too it could also extend duration of dots or even put dots on targets other than affliction instead of just increasing agony stacks.

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My biggest issue is how they put baseline AoE spells into talents now, so you are either forced to run full ST build or full AoE build which sucks.

After playing Evoker and returning to Warlock, it leaves much to be desired.
I tried both Affli and Destro and I am immensely disappointed at the lack of AoE skills which SHOULD be baseline and -not- talents.

In raid if I run pure ST build, I’ll suck at killing off mobs along the way. If I run AoE, I’ll suck at bosses. And guess what? It’s annoying having to just constantly ‘switch’ talent builds along the way, sometimes you don’t even manage due to combat.

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Well, considering what they did recently to demo, i don’t think they are interested in making lock more fun to play.

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Seed of corruption and MR essentially exactly same thing. 2 Spenders to aoe how that even is an idea someone came up with… Make the seed apply dots and rupture refresh them to full duration there is no other solution/salvation to this current abomination aff spec. Or complete overhaul. This spec is the worst thing that ever is put into game files. Worse than mop scenerios.

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No, seed is the aoe spender, rapture is the st spender that you use sometimes in aoe like when you get a proc. Or 2 target cleave.

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Yes and that really doesnt make any sense.

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I mean, not really, there are plenty of abilities that have both st and aoe implications, by the same logic then fire breath is also badly designed.

Malefic rapture is fine, seed of corruption needs it’s damage increased, and soul flame should disappear and never return.

The only reason you use mr is aoe is because of the free proc anyway. Otherwise in aoe, you would just use seed.

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