Warlock’s self-sustain - a shadow of former self

It is not a secret that current warlock self-sustain mechanics are not competitive as they used to be before The Legion xpac.

How your defenses works right now?

Your baseline core mechanic is Soul Leech - a shield that generates from your single target damage, shield can be generated up to 10% of your health (15% with talent).

From the start this is bad mechanic:

This is a passive/active combination that generates your weak shields from your damage, your damage is based on hard casting, and hard casting in current Meta is a doomed design.

With that mechanic demonology cannot efficiently generate shields under pressure, because

  1. Hard casting

  2. Your damage and damage of your demons are low 8% of damage to the shields is extremely low.

Second baseline defense spell is unending resolve…what can I say about that spell. It was a fairly decent spell, was…because before legion it was backed by your other defense and control spells.

Right now, unending resolve us almost useless with 3 min CD and 8 seconds of uptime.

Third defense/healing spell is drain life. DL was dreadfully nerfed, not only that healing part was nerfed significantly, but also mana cost kills it in the light of removing life tap.

Forth is health stone…oh boy, this is ability was just destroyed in legion by presenting one usage per combat. 20% of your health once per combat, when rogues was presented a crimson vial - 30% of your health with 30 seconds CD. In addition in legion Health stone and healt potions was on the same CD - brilliant.

Outside of additional talents this is all that we have right now.
One shield ability, one damage-mitigation ability, and two overnerfed healing abilities.

How your defences worked in pre-legion Xpacs?
First your defences was not a passive effects like soul leech, it was a combination of several things.

  • Your health - Warlocks had more health then other DPS classes in the game, there was two reasons for that.
    • Warlocks had more health, because they didn’t had a pro-active mobility, you had to tank your way out of combat.
    • Your health was a ressource for several key abilities like Life tap.
  • A good self healing abilities was your prime source of your tankyness.
  • Good and vast list of Crowd control abilities backed your damage capabilities, and allows you to heal yourself more safety.
  • Main demon’s abilities was on par with present meta of these days, all demons had their usage, their abilities not only was useful but also worked better then today, today their abilities feels outdated.

Before legion, your tanlynes depended only on you, there was no tauren crap like - "i need to deal X amount of damage to gain Y amount of shields, that will last Z amount of time. If you was injured you knew what tools to use to regain that health and back in combat at 100%.
Warlocks never was a masters of shields, they was master of regain their lost health. Even in MoP/WoD soul leech was optional talent, that was picked only in rare PvE scenarios.

Additionaly - Demon armor, and demon skin was always part of demonology talents (Pre MoP). It was not far in demo talent tree.
http://calculators.iradei.eu/talents/warlock
https://wotlkdb.com/?talent#I
Why demon armor excludes demonology now?
With that design approach maybe you should limit stealth only for subtlety rogues?

Old warlock self-sustain mechanic was the part of warlock gameplay, it was The core of successful warlock in PvP and PvE. It was important skill such as knowing how to heal, tank, to keep aggro and ETC. And now this is just pathetic shields that doesn’t provide any sort of deffence, and doesn’t engage player to improve his or her skills.

Shame on you blizzard.

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From my own experience, health Stone doesn’t save you from anything (without mentioning maledic trinket that make useless this technic).

Unending resolve is way too long compared to all defensive CD from all spec actually and it doesn’t save you when you face spec like ret monk etc. (actually when you used unending resolve you are dead, simple as that).

And for soûl leech it’s clearly useless cause when you got trained the shield never come back to full it’s just useless and terrible.

The rest you say it all.

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