Hello everyone. I’m creating a consolidated Warlock feedback thread for both feedback on the warlock class and spec trees, pvp, and bugs that I’ve found so far. My overall experience has been as a Gladiator PvPer in 3v3 Arena, Legend Solo Shuffle, Cutting Edge Raider, and Keystone Master M+ gamer (ratings vary from 2600 +/- 200 io, I usually aim to time a 10 on every dungeon each season). My most current experience this expansion has been mainly in 3v3 Arena and M+, so take my comments with a grain of salt.
Class Tree:
My main two issues here are that there are far too many two point nodes and that many nodes are dead due to low tuning, no synergy, they are pvp specific, or you can’t afford them due to the amount of 2 point nodes.
- Fiendish Stride felt bad coming into the new expansion compared to it’s old 2 point version. I often talent out of this to afford better points. I would like to see a buff to the damage reduction on burning rush closer to it’s old 2 point iteration.
- Howl of Terror / Mortal Coil choice node feels very biased towards always taking Mortal Coil. There are very niche scenarios, mostly in pvp, where howl is the go to choice. Coil is used mainly in pve for a on demand heal. In pvp, it is used almost exclusively as crowd control and has a .5 modifier on it. This nerf in pvp feels unfair as 9/10 times we didn’t use it to heal, we used it to cc. Compare this to Impending Victory which heals for more on a shorter cooldown. Maybe splitting these away from each other would be too overpowered for warlock, but it would be an excellent QoL change.
- Abyss Walker is also geared more towards pvp because it doubles in value in pvp due to a modifier. The main point of gateway and circle are to avoid incoming damage entirely, not to soak it. While I do appreciate more damage reduction when taking this talent, they go against the spirit of what the actual abilities are meant for. I’d be more interested in seeing this talent give the bonus that Impish Instincts provides (or just flat cooldown reduction). Perhaps it could also give the benefit of Gateway Mastery, or make this a choice node.
- Accrued Vitality is simply a dead talent with the loss of Inevitage Demise and Drain Life doing next to now damage/healing. Drain life itself needs further buffs beyond the one in 11.1 to make this talent at all viable.
- Sweet Souls only functions with players on your server. This may be a coding bug, but this really needs to work with any player on any realm. It sucks losing value on this talent because the party member you are with isn’t on your server.
- Unending Resolve and talents - Strength of Will, Dark Accord, and Resolute Barrier - I’ve talked about this before, but there is too much going on here that needs to be baseline. You can remove all of these talents and just make UR 40% damage reduction baseline with 1 talent reducing it to a 2 minute cooldown, if not just baseline. We are one of the last classes with their baseline wall (that isn’t an immunity) over 3 minutes long.
- DarkFury/Shadowflame choice node. Shadowflame is never taken. I’d rather see some type of AoE curse node for applying curse of exhustion/weakness/tongues. DarkFury itself isn’t a bad talent itself, but I really want to see ShadowFury become instant cast as a baseline, or have a choice between shorter cooldown/bigger area and instant cast.
- Swift artifice doesn’t get enough credit in early season where hast value are low. I actually enjoy this talent. However as seasons go forward with more haste, this will become increasingly less valuable.
- Teachings of the Black Harvest probably just needs an entire rework or a massive buff. The individual changes it provides aren’t massively impactful and this talent is mostly taken to get to demonic resilience.
- Fel Synergy is incredibly weak and is also just a toll to get to better talents.
- Demonic Resilience is a PvP only choice that we are sometimes forced to take due to how much aoe passively cleaves down our pet. Non-Demo pets are more susceptible to being swapped to and killed easily due to lower health pools and less damage reduction than the demo pet has. Just make this a baseline passive talent at this point.
- Pact of Gluttony. The absolute biggest and best win warlock has seen in a long time. I love this talent. My issue is that healthstone ought to just function like this baseline. It also ONLY affects the warlock and not their party members. It is awful that you have to drop combat to start the cooldown timer with baseline healthstone. I would like to see this talent either become baseline or at the least also give it’s effects to party members. This talent is also not usable at all with the new PvP talent bloodstones. Meaning that you have to drop combat in pvp when taking bloodstones, which is nearly impossible to due outside of battlegrounds.
- Soul Conduit needs a buff for aff and destro. 5% feels very unimpactful.
- Soulburn is still a fantastic talent, but I’d like to see interactions with soulstone (instant cast), and bloodstone (adds a heal component or more damage/haste/crit).
- Interrupt/Pet Kick. We really just need a choice talent of some kind allowing for our Spell Lock to be cast by the warlock, or cast by the Fel Hunter. Alternatively and possibly the best option is that it just summon a short duration Fel Hunter that casts Spell Lock, which would allow the warlock to still interrupt while having another pet out for it’s utility such as Imp.
- Summon Pet Cast times. 6 second cast times on pets, even with Fel Domination is just outdated and a feel bad change that was implemented. If you have used Fel Domination and lose your pet a second time, it is difficult if not impossible to get it back out during intense movement heavy encounters or during pvp. Killing warlock’s pet a second time after they used Fel Dom and tunneling them into the ground with interrupts, CC, knockbacks, etc. is a viable strategy for countering a warlock. This is even more impactful vs demo locks which lose 20% of their damage and their mortal strike and a stun with no felguard out. Pet Summon just need to be reduced so that while punishing a warlock by killing their pet, you don’t suck all the fun out of the game for him because he’ll never get it back out for the rest of the match or until Fel Dom comes off cooldown.
Destruction
We’ve seen a ton of good changes and QoL improvements with Destruction. I actually mostly enjoy the state of destruction. My main gripe is that in pvp content, destruction play more like affliction as a rot spec. The recent buffs to chaos bolt have helped in this regard. The real issue here is that the diabolist tree received too many nerfs during the beta. I’ll touch on that later.
- Flashover needs to become baseline again. Flashover used to be a talent that gave backdraft two charges per cast.
- Backdraft on retail is consumed while either Ritual of Ruin or Decimation are active. The Ritual of Ruin portion is fixed on the 11.1 PTR. The Decimation piece needs to be fixed. It feels awful to have a backdraft charge eaten by a proc that already drastically lowers the cast time of SoulFire/Chaos Bolt.
- Rolling Havoc needs a buff to old 2 point values to help destruction feel like the 2 target king it should be.
- Demonfire Infusion is a great new addition, though I think it should be tuned to be close to Channel Demonfire. It does get Synergy from Raging Demonfire and Demonfire Mastery, however it does not receive the additional bolts from Raging Demonfire.
- Flashpoint needs a buff to 2 point values and the pvp modifier needs to be removed. It provdes a measly 3% haste on pvp combat which makes it rarely worth taking.
- Dimension Ripper is another great new additon, however proc rates are far too low. The problem here with all the rift talents is that they were only viable with the dragonflight tier set that gave the fire rift and gave it a chance to reset. It also had a much higher proc chance in dragonflight. Rift needs the fire rift baseline and we need more access to rifts by buffing dimension ripper proc chance or granting a chance to reset into another talent.
- Power Overwhelming feels undertuned and needs to be something you can build and maintain easier.
- Chaos Incarnate feels awkward to take at all with the new tier set. It feels like they want to just revert this to the old value through the tier set. I’m not sure what to do here, but it is questionable whether this is worth taking at all once we have the new tier set.
- Fel Fissure feels like it should apply a debuff to the target instead of a ground aoe effect similar to the new aimed shot mechanic for marksmanship hunters. Destruction does not chain gun chaos bolts and it is far too easy to just walk out of this ground debuff.
- Bane of Havoc was massively nerfed (with good reason) when talented with Mayhem. Hopefully the new mayhem buff increases the value of this talent. There is also a bug where if you choose this talent after entering instanced pvp talent, you cannot actually use it. If you pre-talent it, you can.
- There are no other flavor talents that are destruction specific in the PVP talent pool. The rest of them are generic talents that modify class tree abilities or that all specs have access to. I’d love to see new flavor talents added to bring some more life to the destruction pvp pool.
- Bloodstones have several bugs/issues. First, this is one of two really terrible kiss/curse pvp talents. The other being deathwish. The problem is that both talents very gimmicky and almost never taken. Losing our on demand heal feels absolutely terrible considering we rely so heavily on healthstone to survive in pvp. Unless you give us an absolutely absurd amount of haste, I can’t see a reason to take this. The talent gives 30% haste, not 20% as in the patch notes (KEEP 30% PLEASE), maybe this makes it actually worth taking, but still… It doesn’t worth with Soulburn or Pact of Gluttony. Without PoG functionality, you cannot use your bloodstone more than one time in an arena unless you somehow manage to drop combat, which is almost impossible to due. Some kind of soulburn functionality would be cool to see. Again, I want to emphasize how much I hate and think it is a detriment to warlock in pvp lose your healthstone to take this talent. Even if you kept the healing component, you run into a problem where you’ve wasted your healing/defensive when using it offensively and you’ve wasted your haste amp if you use is to heal yourself. Consider just making this effect work on our major cooldown such as tyrant/infernal/darkglare. The last major issue/bug is that it can only be used while in combat, meaning you can’t pre-use it before initiating combat. Not the end of the world here, but it is odd that it functions this way.
Affliction
I think Aff is in an okay spot. I like that the healing component of Soul Rot was changed after the loss of drain life enhancing talents. I’m pretty happy with the tree here outside of just a few talents.
- Volatile Agony/Perpetual Instability. I don’t really enjoy the pandemic refresh reward mechanic of these talents and you almost nearly get the value in pvp environments where it isn’t always possible or correct to refresh in the pandemic window.
- Vile Taint / Infirmity. A few things here. Just make VT instant cast, with a short cooldown to be able to maintain Agony in AOE/M+ permanently. Shadow Priest enjoys the Quality of Life provided by shadow crash applying both dots without every needing to manually refresh. Give us this QOL! Infirmity should also just give the damage amp component to both VT and Phantom Singularity. It should be clear that taking VT is a AOE/M+ QoL / damage talent and PS is a Single Target talent.
- Oblivion continues to not be taking in all content due to shard cost and lack of damage. The recent buffs have helped, but I think this talent needs more to see any real play.
- Death’s Embrace needs buffs to the damage portion and a change to the healing portion. Maybe the recent drain life buffs make this work better. I liked the old death’s embrace that simply scaled as the target’s health got lower.
- Dark Harvest needs the same QoL rework that Primordial Wave/Splintered Elements got. Give us high crit/haste up front at 1 target with scaling at further targets.
- Ravenous Afflictions probably needs a flat buff because it procs too infrequently currently.
- The main problem with all the PvP talents is that we are so locked into 2-3 talents that it makes many flavor talents impossible to take.
- Essence Drain may have gained small value with the Drain Life buff, but I don’t see us taking this ever.
- Rampant Afflictions should just be baseline to UA. Shadow Priest gets to spread their protective DoT to as many targets as possible, but this talent neuters the damage UA does and is hard to ever take due to other talents being so hard locked.
- Jinx has become nearly mandatory to take and frankly I like the talent. I just feel like this talent lightly resolves the issue that aff has in spreading dots to multiple targets and not needing 9 casts to do so.
- Rot and Decay needs to be baseline or in the spec tree somewhere. Again, better aff lock aka shadow priest has this option in their spec tree. Many warlocks take this talent for QoL.
- Soul Swap has dropped off in value due to aff being more about burst with shadow bolt and haunt and less about spreading, amplifying, and rotting the enemy down with our DoTs. Consider reworking this talent to the old version with the regular version costs no shards and copies/paste all dots, while soulburn amplifies it to instantly apply Agony, Corruption, and Unstable Affliction.
Demonolgy
I think Demo is in a pretty good spot as well. The reworks and reversion to demonic core procs have been the right direction. I don’t have a lot of gripes here other than how weak demonic tryant feels.
- Fiendish Oblation just feels so unimpactful. The extra core is nice, but for this to be active once every two minutes feels like a talent you would just never take. It also comes in as all your other demons are expiring. With a cap of 4 cores, you likely waste this every single time. Consider a massive buff or rework.
- Blood Invocation also feels pretty unimpactful. A nice slight buff, but the cooldown reduction component would have been nice to retain.
- Reign of Tyranny feels great to take, but very hard to achieve the 15 imp cap unless you are under the effects of bloodlust or get lucky with pact of the imp mother procs. Without this talent, tyrant itself is NOTICEABLY insignificant. It is funny to me that players used to be scared of the tyrant, while now you can mostly ignore it unless they are playing as diabolist. Tyrant simply needs to deal good damage without Abyssal Dominion and Reign of Tyranny. Those talents should be tuned to amplify this damage and make tyrant into a good threat while not making it overpowered. Players should need to respect this demon when it comes out. Imagine if you could just ignore a warrior when he pops Avatar because it only amplified his damage by 3%. You just wouldn’t care.
- Summon Vilefiend/Mark of F’harg. There is a bug where Mark of F’harg doesn’t change the spell to fire school. It used to function this way, giving you another spell school to cast on if you get kicked in pvp.
- Improved Demonic Tactics / Demonic Brutality. Simply under tuned and nearly worthless in pvp due to crit damage nerfs.
- Immutable Hatred just needs a buff since our core economy has been buffed to make this viable once again. I want to take this talent, but it just doesn’t do enough damage even with infinite cores.
- Call Fel Lord needs another buff to keep up. The recent buff was a good step, but this is often still a disrespected demon/cooldown. Melee will gladly eat the short stun and small damage to stay on top of you, or will simply move out of his aoe circle to hit you with longer reaching spells (Death Knight/Paladin)
Diabolist
I’m generally pretty happy how diabolist fits the fantasy of summoning demons, especially as Demonology. The only thing lacking seems to be pvp modifiers and weak defensive choices.
During the Beta, Diabolist Destruction warlock talents Touch of Rancora got hit with severe pvp modifiers that were in reaction to a bug where warlocks could stack Diabolic Ritual/Demonic Art 3 times instead of once. This lead to one-shots on the beta. The bug has since been fixed and the talent is still nerfed. Ruination now hits for less than chaos bolt, likely due to pvp modifiers.
- Infernal Vitality/Infernal Bulwark. IV is a decent heal but a bit counter intuitive as you want to wall at high health to reduce damage. I’d rather see this somehow buff Unending Resolve or give passive damage reduction, perhaps per diabolist demon summoned? IB is also very weak in terms of defensiveness, loses value in dampening, and you will never do enough damage (especially while taking damage) to reach the new maximum threshold of soul leech this talent grants.
- Annihilan’s Bellow. Oddly has a pvp modifier on the radius of the talent. The big problem here is that we rarely ever take howl of terror in any content. In fact, the only reason to take howl of terror is because of this talent. I would much rather see this choice node be between annihilan’s bellow and a talent that modifies mortal coil.
- Gloom of Nathreza as destro feels so bad to have to maintain havoc in single target. Destro typically doesn’t eve take havoc in single target fights. Change the functionality for destruction.
Soul Harvester
I think I can vibe with the idea of Soul Harvester and it jives with Affliction with the whole souls theme. I don’t have a lot of issues with Soul Harvester.
- Gorefiends Resolve is useless in PVP and feels like it should be in the class tree. Give us a better choice here such as Eternal Servitude and perhaps an Amplify Curse modification to hit multiple targets, shadowfury becoming instant cast, or bringing back the burning rush modifier that gave us a free no damage BR on a shorter cooldown.
Hellcaller
I feel like Hellcaller missed the most on fantasy here. The other two hero talents fit with Demo (Diabolist) and Aff (Soul Harvester) in ways that matched spec identity. I summon demons (demo/diabolist), I siphon souls in my soul shards (aff/soul harvester), and I have slightly spicier fire? (destro/hellcaller). I think this was a chance to lean in to summoning brick melting, disintegrating, blinding, flames of Sargeras level hellfire. This would have really fit destruction by bringing in some kind of enhancement to their fire and chaos toolkit. Instead aff gets spicy corruption and destro gets immolate with a hint of herbs and black pepper. I know we won’t get any kind of crazy rework here, but it would be something to look at into the future.
- Illhoof’s Design is a net loss in survivability. On paper this does in fact improve the maximum cap of soul leech you can have. The problem here is that you only cap soul leech before a fight starts or when the very rare occurrence happens that you aren’t’ taking any damage and are yourself dealing a lot of damage for a significant amount of team to “re-cap” your max soul leech. This leads to Illhoof actually just decreasing your hp pool, your Demon Skin soul leech absorbed (since it’s based on health), your dark pact, and your health stone. Just remove the hp reduction entirely or better yet have it buff demon skin.
- Zevrim’s Resilience got buffed recently making it significantly better. The problem here is similar to the Infernal Vitality problem. You want to Pact at high health for max value and a healer is probably healing the health you lost while the damage you are taking is being absorbed by pact. This makes the healing component a bit useless outside of solo content. The other issue is that it makes Ichor if Devils nearly useless as you have much less health to heal back from. But what if you pact at low health and get 20 seconds of healing? Okay, here’s where this talent shines…but it assumes your dark pact lasts that full 20 seconds. It won’t. For one, you pacted with low health leading to a lower shield to begin with. For two, players in pvp or pve monsters are hitting your dark pact absorb and destroying it within 5 seconds. We already have a talent (friends in dark places) that outright buffs dark pact, so maybe something else could work here to replace ZR. Maybe we can look elsewhere like healthstone and mortal coil and buffing their healing component or adding absorption effects?
- Curse of the Satyr is extremely niche in that there are few classes and mobs that need both curses at once. The only time this shines is amplify curse, but we can’t spread amp curse in AOE and there are many dispels in pvp making amp curse only good for a few seconds. Maybe just let this buff each curse individually.
- Aura of Enfeeblement. Again, few things need both curses, but it does give us that AoE that we desire, we just have to blow our wall to get it. Make this our AOE curse choice node and tie it to amplify curse or something.
- Malevolence used to give 15% haste during the beta. 8% feels so weak. Just give this a buff.
Tier Sets
I’m looking at these set bonuses from a pvp and M+ lens for each spec.
Starting with Aff, I’m happy that not only do we get a haste proc, but we also have some control over when it procs with it being tied to summon darkglare. The 4 set bonus i’m unsure about though. It could be great in M+ and PVP settings pending tuning, but it seems like it will be useless on single target unless the UA’s can stack, which hasn’t been a feature since Legion. Overall I think this is an improvement over the S1 set bonus and I’m looking forward to playing with it.
For Demo, I’m extremely happy with the set bonus. This will be a solid tier set in both single target and AOE in all content. My one question or concern is if the extra dreadstalker will be extended on tyrant and if the !Jackpot you get from the tyrant itself will be extended and counted towards reign of tyranny. If it does, this may be an excellent tier set design.
For Destro, I’m unsure. The 2 set seems a bit underwhelming, however the 4 set bonus I would like to see last for a longer period of time. My biggest question is if the 2 set bonus also is enhanced by the channel demonfire talents such as more bolts, faster/stronger bolts, and immolate extensions. If those things all tie together that is great, however it does force us to play those talents. I would prefer to not have to be tied to channel demonfire for a tier set again.