I have recently picked up Warlock again after Dragonflight, and I just can’t believe how some things are still very outdated or no longer make sense on my beloved Warlock. (I mainly play Affliction, as you’ll see in my post.)
Let’s start off with health costs on spells. Warlocks were famous for self-healing, so it made sense before—but now? Healthstone and Drain Life heal for almost nothing, and all our damage just adds a bit to our shield instead of actually healing us. I tried healing my pet, but it’s easier and safer to just re-summon it. A few seconds of sprinting and I’m already down to 30% health (exaggerating a bit), with no real way to heal back up.
Damage profile of Affliction. I’m supposed to be the expert of rot damage, but sadly, DoTs by themselves deal very little damage. I constantly feel like a worse version of a Shadow Priest.
Applying DoTs. Somehow, we’re the most reliant on DoTs, but we also have the hardest time applying them. I mean, Seed of Corruption costing a Soul Shard and Vile Taint having a 30-second cooldown feels terrible compared to Shadow Priests, Unholy DKs, and even Moonkins.
Squishy? Yeah, I’ve never felt weaker. If my pet dies, I’m usually dead within seconds.
There are more things that bug me, but I feel like it mostly comes down to the fact that we have one of the longest ramp-up times in the game.
I used to main Warlock, but now I’m not even sure if I’m going to bother with it anymore. I really hope we’re getting a huge rework soon.
Let me know—what bugs you the most? What do you think should be changed in the upcoming expansion?
Unfortunately, I don’t think so. For years, we’ve been hoping for even the slightest gameplay change, and every time we find ourselves with 24 new talents that enhance the malefic rapture.
I’ll close with a revised quote from the great poet Dante: “Abandon all hope, ye who… play”
What bugs me the most is that the class fantasy of an affliction warlock is dope, but playing it sometimes feels like a big nope.
This spec has a lot of potential to be visually more attractive. I think few expansions ago when you had soul rot up and then aoe drained life looked awesome, something like that needs to be implemented.
When they say affliction i think about lots of life energy siphoning and decay. When shadow priest sends shadowy apparations or whatever, affliction could do this the other way around, siphoning the souls away that will fly twoards the player and get haste buff from that or stacks of something that empower a spell and send all the siphoned souls back for big damage.
The simple answer to why affli feels bad.
The degenerate who designed affli really likes Malefic rapture and refuses to change spec to be something else rather than MR spam. Unlike other DoT classes we need to work our butts to get our dots rolling, because we first need to get shards enough to not only aply dots but also do some other stuff.
Boomy or SP just press a button and apply DoTs on numbers of enemies. Even DK does that through mass spells, but not lock.
literally all they have to do is remove this stupid malefic rapture… its SO frustrating to play around AND you cant even see anything when you press it
