I know you guys work hard, and many of you have to balance multiple classes and juggle multiple projects which that isn’t fair to you. What also isn’t fair is receiving the brunt of backlash for content updates that don’t necessarily cover all classes properly or that the community doesn’t agree with. So I want to give some legit feedback from a 2500 rated IO Destro Warlock. No flame, just honest feedback that has been shared by many but feels ignored for a while. I also want to express these are MY thoughts, I’ve played wow on and off since Vanilla and by no way do I represent the majority of players.
General Warlock Feedback
Curses feel strong but inconvenient at the same time and with how important kicks and interrupts are in S1 they are almost required on some targets in higher keys. However, having to spend 3-5 globals of every pull just to apply these curses at the start while you see the Balance druid and Frost DK burst at 4 million damage feels terrible. Warlocks in high keys feel more like utility classes than actual damage dealers and while I love the utility it decreases the QoL of the class overall. Hellcaller has Curse of the Saytr which is an interesting workaround, but you still run into the issue of blowing global casts just debuffing targets rather than actually damaging anything. Perhaps we can clump Vile Taint, Hand of Guldan, and Cataclysm to also apply curses to the targets with a talent node in the Warlock tree? Or perhaps a talent that also applies that curse to enemies within 8 yards of the main target? I think tying this into Amplify Curse would add a lot more to that node and make it feel worth taking in more than just a few instances.
Banish should be baseline. There is no reason in 2024 that our class can’t use Banish without having to talent into it.
Gateway should also be baseline. Our class is almost built around this utility at this point in both raid and M+ and not taking it feels bad. It needs to be baseline with maybe an increase in the debuff duration so you can take once every 2-3 minutes instead of 90s.
Fel Domination having a 3 minute cooldown is insane. Pets for aff and Destro are around 1-2% of our damage overall at MOST. It being a talent is fine but the fact I can cast infernal more often unless I talent to reduce to CD to 2 min is nuts. Call pet for hunters is instant, elementals for shaman are instant, and Fel Dom doesn’t even make this instant cast. I think it needs to be buffed to 2 mins or even 90s and it should make the cast instant. Hard casting a 10 second pet mid combat because I got 1 shot by a missed kick is insane.
This leads me into The Pet sac talent vs 3% extra damage for you and your pet. This is never a choice. Having your pet to kick is almost always better than sacrificing it and the damage you get in return is not worth the utility your pet brings.
20th Anniversary Update Feedback:
Destro Warlocks are receiving tuning for an issue that began to arise back in S4 of Dragonflight and TWW prepatch where Warlocks did more damage spamming RoF than we did casting Chaos Bolt in ST. This was remedied almost two months ago at the start of the season and having this change still coming to the game not only nerfs Diabolist dmg, but the overall QoL of the class as well. It feels very tone deaf to the average player, and has higher level players absolutely scratching our heads at this point.
Destruction Feedback
Destro remains one of the only classes in the game where two of our biggest damaging spells have a 3 second BASELINE cast time. Chaos Bolt without the talent to reduce the cast time, Ritual of Ruin Proc, or Diabolic Art feels TERRIBLE. In modern wow, there aren’t many classes that have such large cast times (See pyroblast for fire mage or glacial spike for frost mage). So having Warlock have TWO of them in their kit feels very clunky and when you are left hardcasting these spells or fishing for a proc that won’t come it can completely derail your output. On top of that, the damage that comes from the spell without a Diabolic Art proc ranges from 800k-1.1 mil, compare this to glacial spike which hits for 2 mil at least (and has a shorter cast time at 2.75 seconds baseline). Chaos bolt in its current state is both underwhelming and at time frustrating to press.
Next up would be our talents, which albeit are a massive improvement over Dragonflight in terms of how things connect and pathing you can take in the tree. That being said, there are a LOT of talents that have been hotfixed, changed, or nerfed that feel near useless to take and just waste a talent slot. A great example of this is Pyrogenics which also relates to the 20th anniversary patch notes on Diabolist. This was nerfed from 5% fire damage increase to now 3% when being hit by RoF. This change along with the 20th anniversary patch make this talent literally useless. Not a SINGLE build I have seen takes it in either Raid of M+. The same goes for Rolling Havoc, the nerf from 10% overall damage increase to 5% is NEVER worth to take. Havoc is still a GREAT talent, but we have come a long way from Legion where we had almost permanent uptime on it (which Frost mages now have instead).
Still on the Talent topic next up is gonna be everyone’s favorite argument of the Inferno/Cata choice node. I understand the hesitation to change this due to the RoF single target spam, but with the new changes in the 20th anniversary and the ones that were made two months ago this choice node is borderline embarrassing. Cataclysm provides an insane amount of QoL in AoE scenarios and having the CHOOSE whether we can spread our dots quickly or waste 8-10 globals individually casting it just to buff RoF a little is awful. I removing Pyrogenics to replace it with inferno and giving us Cata or just making Cata baseline I think is the right move. On top of that, having to path into CDF just to keep my immolates up when other classes never have to worry about extending dots is a joke. Cata CD should mirror the duration of the immolate it applies, Aff suffers from this problem as well with Vile Taint downtime.
That will bring us to the CDF vs Shadowburn talent sides. Shadowburn is a great spell, having to invest 4 talent points into it to make it so is not great. On top of that, spamming Shadowburn in execute phase completely trivializes our class and is a speed run to carpel tunnel syndrome. CDF suffers from a bit of the same problem, having Cata applying immolates with shorter durations that it’s cooldown almost requires AoE fights to take two points at least into CD to make the talent worth taking. The third talent for it increasing the time and dmg I love because any less time having to spend channeling that spell the better and it makes it feel much better to press.
To the end of the negative talent rant we move to keystone talents. I think we can all agree Demonic Rift is and always will be a waste of talent points in its current state. Back in S3 of Dragonflight was one of the BEST variations of Destro and Demonic Rift which made the ability refresh from Immolate dmg, and do AoE as well as spawn a fire rift. That was ALL removed, and some of it was made into talents. However, the spell itself does less damage than an incinerate unless you invest upwards of 3 talents into it. Even then, the inconsistent refreshes (which are now from incinerate damage for some reason) makes the talent useless. For a keystone talent, this one is laughable at best. Demonic Rift baseline is so heavily undertuned and putting a nerfed version of a tier set bonus into our talents which requires us to invest 3 points just to get what we have from our clothes is insulting. Unless Demonic Rift sees some MAJOR tuning I believed it should be removed or reworked completely to make it relevant. Unstable Rift has the same issue, a useless talent for a useless ability taking up 3 talent points to do less damage.
As a highlight for keystone talents I do think the Soulfire proc, as well as the RoR change and Chaos Incarnate are great. The removal of the synergy we had in beta where CDF could prof SF, and I feel removing that took a lot of wind out of our sails going into TWW. However I feel the variety you get from the middle and left side of the talent tree is definitely a step in the right direction.
Diabolist Bugs
As amazing as the class fantasy is with this spec and hero talents, the amount of clunkiness and bugs that still exist this deep into S1 is a little disheartening. However, it has come a long way from Beta and I applaud the team for recognizing and fixing the issues we run into (i.e. Overlord charge bug, demons pulling mobs when summoned).
That being said, there is still a long way to go before this spec feels like it is working as intended. Starting off with our pets attacking random targets that aren’t our main target. This was “fixed” in a previous patch, however it still occurs constantly in dungeons like Mists where your Mother of Chaos or Pit Lord will attack the Fox instead of the boss. Idk what causes this, but it is still an issue.
Next comes Ruination from the pit lord. This spell is AMAZING and provides insane AoE and burst damage. However, there are many issues this spell suffers from including missing the target entirely when it is kited away, or watching the spell fall onto a dead target and deal 0 damage. I understand attacking a dead target isn’t ideal, but the time it takes the spell to cast and fall can be the difference between a dead or alive mob. And spending upwards of 30-45 seconds trying to get a Ruination proc just for it to deal 0 damage feels worse than stepping on a lego sometimes.
Finally is the Mother of Chaos and Infernal Bolt. I am unsure if this is intended, but when Havoc is active on a secondary target, infernal bolt does NOT provide double the soul shards, and does NOT interact or synergize with Fire and Brimstone. I am unsure what the devs intended for these interactions, but being punished for trying to get the most out of my class and mimic my big soul shard generators with havoc feels bad.
Conclusion
I get it, Warlock has been OP MANY MANY times over the years. From Vanilla to Mop to Legion warlocks have been a dominant class that sees a lot of playing time. The utility the class brings to a group is nothing to be scoffed at, and the tankiness the class provides as a cloth wearer is borderline OP at times. On top of that the class fantasy that came with TWW is some of the greatest class design we have seen in modern wow. The ability to summon demons at will and lay waste to large groups of enemies or to pop malevolence and make your withers bloom and do massive blackened soul damage feels amazing. Again whoever designed these hero talents for Destro knocked it out of the park. The class is only held back by the low damage numbers, buggy pet procs, curses taking up globals, AoE DoT spells not being able to keep 100% uptime (shadowcrash does it), etc. Warlock has come a long way and the team designing this class is doing a great job at creating an amazing class fantasy for Destro especially. It and baseline Warlock just need a few tweaks before it will feel like a proper class.
To everyone else, I know this was a slog to get through but if you made it to the end I open it up to you to add anything I have missed, or voice your concerns in the comments. I am no expert and don’t claim to know what is best for this class, but I know for sure what we have right now is not what we all deserve.
Prior to the destro stuff I agree 1000% for general warlock stuff. Extremely accurate and pinpoints the pain points of all warlocks no matter the content. Ill take your word on destro as I have played Lock since classic 20 years ago and still have basically never touched it. I would rather play my mage lol. Aff and demo for me.
How are you liking them? Demo seems like it would be awful on any fight you are constantly moving and Aff feels weak when you play around Vile Taint so much.
I’m just going to quote somethings i have said in other post.
The only thing I disagree with you on is the tone of appeasement in your message. I’ve been reasonable with my posts here many many times, ever since early BFA when Destruction turned into a void of bad changes or no changes at all. Every time warlocks get a little higher on the charts or we find any talent combination that really works for us, they instantly nerf our choices, forcing us to use what they want us to use (like the CDF bonus set and other aberrations they’ve created). So when I post here, I’m in total rage mode. I really don’t care if they work hard or not, because to me, it looks like nothing but neglect. At this point, it seems like they want us to stop playing—it’s not an accident. They created amazing animations, customizations, and lore, only to shove the class into a clogged toilet, makes no sense, looks like the class tune is made by a monkey throwing random stuff into random cans of buffs and nerfes. NOTHING makes ANY sense.
I totally feel your disappointment and think your anger at them is valid.
The reason I try to come at them from a more level headed approach is because the team behind all this are just people. There is SO much going on behind the scenes that we don’t see and I can almost guarantee many of the feedback in being heard and echoed, just not applied right away. Balancing a game millions on people play is no small task, I think its important to treat them how you’d treat any employee trying to do their best at a big corp.
They just had an almost full rework of many classes, and while its incredibly sad to see Lock is untouched and slightly nerfed, I don’t want to give up hope just yet.
Feedback is a hard thing to parse but it’s made much easier when the feedback is delivered well. A lot of the items in Eloco’s linked post above are solutioneering. That is, they’re just some ideas to solve problems that aren’t well defined. As a community, we should strive to clearly provide descriptions of the problems and limit solutioneering. After all, we didn’t invent the Diabolist hero talents. Someone at Blizzard did. And they slap.
OP’s feedback is pretty great and I +1 a lot of it. Everything in the general warlock section is spot on. I’d add that Grimoire of Sacrifice used to have a point when it provided a little more AoE dmg and roughly tied on single target. Now that it’s tuned to never be more damage… it’s a dead node.
And I want to focus on just how many dead nodes there are in PvE play, even beyond what OP mentioned. Folks doing difficult content deliberately avoid all of these talents in the Destro spec tree:
Pyrogenics
Improved Conflagrate
Rolling Havoc
Flashpoint
Internal Combustion
Dimensional Rift
Unstable Rifts
This problem isn’t nearly as bad in the Aff/Demo trees. For Aff, we always avoid the two nodes around Oblivion because that spell is undertuned. For Demo, we avoid the three nodes around Guillotine because that spell is also undertuned. On an objective level, neither these capstones nor Dimensional Rift are unplayable - they just contribute less to DPS than other, passive talents. From the perspective of the player, it’s disheartening that if you want big numbers you need to avoid the cool damage button capstone.
I ask that the dev team considers tuning up the numbers on some of these nodes so players can find their own reasons to choose them. For example, if taking Internal Combustion was DPS neutral compared to Reverse Entropy, I might use it on Silken Court to take advantage of the short damage amp. If Oblivion was close to DPS neutral with Ravenous Afflictions on Rasha’nan, I would consider taking it to have another 1min CD ready on every phase.
That said, I’ll add my gameplay ethos is active ability management should provide a DPS gain when used ideally. So I would prefer that Oblivion results in slightly higher DPS in single target for Aff and that Guillotine results in higher AoE DPS for Demo because the player had to nail the execution and timing of each skill.
Honestly destro would be better if they made Cataclysm baseline, put Charred Remains in its place as a choice node vs Inferno and replaced Dimension Ripper with Kil’jaeden’s Cunning
Hell, dont even have to bring back Charred Remains. Just bring the pvp talent Fel Fissure, make it wider and deal damage.
Hi ! I just hit 2.5k on my Destro as well. When it comes to your post I basically agree with everything you said with maybe some details.
● Demonic Gateway should be a baseline spell for sure. But without any penalty. 90 seconds cooldown is already very long, you have to pre-position it and even tho Soulburn allows you to cast it instantly it costs additional Soul Shard.
● Grimoire of Sacrifice used to be much better talent. It used to heal you over time, giving you more stamina and it also increased damage of CB. This version is nothing but a joke. I just killed Sha of Anger boss in the anniversary event, did more than 100M damage and grimoire was 3% of it.
And its exactly the same in M+ or PvP. Its damage its just horrible for Destro. It needs to be either buffed a lot or reworked.
● When it comes to curses the Satyr one is good and I agree Cataclysm should apply it or apply random one if you don’t play Satyr.
● Havoc duration should be increased as well as damaged done to Havoc target.
● Dimensional Rift. While I really like this spell cause it looks great imo and it fits the theme of Destro its damage is weak. What I would personally love to see is that it costs Soul Shards and its damage is increased by the amount of Shards spent on it.
● Overall damage. I still think Destro needs % damage buff.
● Entrenched in Flame. Now this is PvP thing but bring it back as a optional replacement for Curse of Exhaustion in form of PvP talent.
Demo sucks right now for sure, but, I’m managing to pull a bit through… when people make mistakes… or when RNG decides to smile on me once ever 10 hours for 5 seconds.
But, that’s Warlocks, we suck at the beginning of expansions, are freaking monsters toward the end. The sad part is, the expansions are only getting shorter.
I completely agree – I also think that rain of fire as an aoe ability sucks. If they don’t want to have an alternative aoe choice node (charred remains) at least make a debuff that just follows your target.
Glad to see the general sentiment is similar to mine.
It feels awful to see other classes living out the destruction fantasy in a superior fashion than destruction warlocks. Chaos bolt is wimpy - you can just “feel” like you’re blasting and then look at the meter and have to grimace. So many clunky talents/hero talents. Why the combined CoW + CoT is a “hero” talent that barely works is beyond me. Even with gear, we aren’t invited to keys.
Destro locks only have one good thing about them at the moment: Green fire. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out why every spec sims higher in performance then destro, only to be able to “move” more freely in destro then in demo or aff. the only saving grace is that as a team, if you have one, you can figure out where to stand, when to move, etc. so that it is less likely for you to die while hardcasting spells in the other two specs. Destro procs should all be instant cast. Overall warlock movement speed needs to be addressed as we literally have to burn ourselves to get some running done. Chaos bolt needs to hit like a mf truck if its gonna take the time to cast it, not just some cool animation. AND pets: if they didn’t die during the fight when i did, why the hell do i have to resummon them for 5 seconds.
TL:DR- Bottom line: Fix movement, procs, pets, and overall spell casting. Or you will only have frost DKs and their cookies taste like s#$%.
Well said. I’m basically giving Blizzard until next week - if they don’t buff basically all lock specs in the promised Oct 29 hotfix patch that’s supposed to give tuning to the classes they completely ignored in 11.05, I am shelfing my lock and probably going to check out FFXIV’s expansion for a few months, give them some time to figure out how to balance this game.
I made a similar post for Demo pain points. I’ll link it here to add to this post, without retyping the whole thing. I bullet pointed the talents I think are where the problems lie, and added what I’d like to see different in the demo talent tree that kind of elaborates on what I feel like the devs are already going for.
Warlock class design is outdated , we all know it and have mentioned it countless times.
But there’s also tuning issues, it feels like the class was dropped both mechanically and (arguably) numerically.
The odds of the class getting a proper rework is slim at best ( they don’t even have the time to test bugs before shipping, let alone an indepth class rework), which is further amplified by the fact that the mage dev is the one who designs warlock ( guess the previous lock dev was canned/quit or something), so there’s little room for us getting anything meaningful.
At best they’ll buff some damage to shut most of the whining population up, which works unfortunately cause people are more interested in parsing high than playing a fun class.
Really well put, these are great suggestions. I think that with cata we need some kind of proc or refund mechanic to go along with it. If you’ve played elemental shaman you know how satisfying and fun it is to get those earthquake procs, now imagine if we got that with cataclysm. Also I think it would make more sense if later down the road they reworked rift to replace shadow burn. I think it fits much better to be on the single target side of the tree, it also fits the class fantasy better than shadow burn IMO. And I know it’s been said before, but we need a burning rush rework, it’s such a bad ability. The last thing you need when trying to avoid damage or get to safety is to take damage continuously until you turn the ability off, which at times seems to get stuck in the on position.
Again, love this post and hope the devs see it.
Thanks! I really want to see some more flavor for Demo, especially after the Diabolist additions. Blizz just hasn’t fully pushed the potential for the class.
I totally agree, many of the nodes we have are either so niche you take it for ONE fight or PvP matchup, or you ignore it completely. Pretty annoying ngl