Warlock is suffer from many design and tech problems that when you start to play other class, warlock feels like it some crappy early acces prototype.
I will use demonology as an bright example, but other specs can compare their experiece.
Lets start with blizzard’s pride - the visuals
1. Visuals V gameplay effectiveness.
I will not touch visual changes for shadowbolt effect or something like that, no, i will speak about The visuals like wild imps for example.
Wild imps in legion spawned around your target, that gave them tactical advantage. While now they spawn around you, and this is absolutely a disasterous change. Imps base goal is to do damage, not being pretty, not to make you are company.
In legion they had opportunity to deal damage, even if target has tried to ran away from warlock, and warlock managed to land a HoG on target. Now they spawn around you, and they suffer as you if your target just moved further then 40 yd range.
Additionaly, now we had to watch “pretty” animation how balls of fel energy fly from the target to you, and summon these imps. This creates the problem for PvP.
Travel time of this fel orb is extremely long, and it migh take a seconds to reach you and spawn imps. In addition to that, now wild imps (well basicaly every demon) AI responce time is extremely long. Not only game waste several seconds for that pretty animation to spawn imps, imps themselfs waste around 0.5 seconds before they will start cast fel fire bolts that also requires 2 seconds (baseline) to cast, and it has slow travel time of the projectile.
Same goes with vilefiend it’s AI is extremely unresponcive after demon was summoned, not only demon requires you to cast some spell to the enemy, to properly aggro on it, but it wastes around 0.5 to 1 seconds to aim on target and start to cast bilesplit - 2 seconds cast time.
This artificially slows already slow class.
2.1 Demons performance and gameplay design flaws
Their abilities and gameplay was not updated for the long time, yes some of them gain and losed some abbilities, but their core ideilogy was never changed in constantly changing WoW meta. And there is the problem. Demons are not juts damage like dots, they are NPC controled by warlock and approach for their spell design/functionality should be diffirent then design/functionality of corruption of fireball.
Right now dreadstalkers are blunt damage dealing ability, that is limited by NPC AI/movement speed. Yes their movement speed is a huge factor in PvP, not only they run with your normal speed, their melee design makes the extremely uneffective against all mobile classes in game, because if target moves faster then dreadstalkers, they won’t damage it. Additionaly dreadstalkers will miss if target moves faster then 130% of normal speed, because dreadstalkers will land meters away from the target.
2.2 Abilities loked behind pets
This philosophy, when our core abbilities was hidden behind pets was justified when such philosophy was applied to the whole game.
- Warlocks - some abilities was locked behind demons.
- Warriors - some abilities was locked behind combat stances.
- Rogues - some passive abilities was locked behind weapon types.
- Shamans - some abilities was tied to the totems.
This desing philosophy was one of the pillars of game in the past. But in current game state, warlocks still has this outdated mechanic. Yes, serves as deffinition between our demons, but game designers could differentiate our demons by their combat abbilities, not locking interrupt by felhunter, or seduction by Succubus. And here we come to another problem
2.3 Outdated gameplay design of main demons combat/utility.
Current design of demons with normalised damage is just ridiculous. The one thing that distinguish one demon from another, is one ability… some will interrupt, some will incapacitate the enemy, some will deal aoe damage ETC. This is very outdated desing for such huge part of warlocks as their demons.
By the lore we has access for so many possible cool demons, whom lore description provides tons of ideas for gameplay overhaul.
For example, we has succubus, and her role on the battlefield was narroved for one seduction that shared diminishing with fear. This demon has so much pottential to be fun, but blizzard refuses to change her, and even nerfs her by removing knockback from her. if only they changed her seduction effect from incapacitation to brief mind control, that change alone would made her more valuable. And same goes for onther pets.
And problems with key abilities that locked behind specific demons might not be so significant if we still had ways to quickly swap our pets like it was in Cata/MoP/WoD
3. Shared ideology between specs
With some visual and gameplay distinction between demonology, destruction and affliction, all warlock plays almost the same.
How our gameplay looks?
We spend some time in preparation state:
- Demo - Summon bunch of imp
- Destro/affli - Gatrer soulshards in order to spam it on one major abillity.
Damage dealing:
- Demo - Empower our imps/minor demons by Tyrant or sacrifice our imps in order to empower Tyrant.
- Destro - Empower Chaos bolt by infernal.
- Affli - Empower our dots by darkglare.
At the end all warlocks no matter what spec they play share same weaknesses:
- No mobility.
- Hard cast design.
- Mandatory necessity of ramp up, in order to deal big damage.
- Zero instant burst capabilities.
- Questionable tankyness.
- Pruned self heals.
- Pruned CC.
I’m the only one who sees it as a total class design failure?