Can we stop pretending warlocks are good and talk about why?

PVP Arenas
1

Yeah I know. But sacrolash! Heres the truth. Warlocks as a class has been terribly DESIGNED for the past 3 expansions. They have only been proped up sporadically by gimmicks and degenerate playstyles since Mist of Pandaria. During Warlords, Warlocks was propped up by Demonbolt aka Improved Chaos Bolt or meme 2 shot Chaos Waves. During Legion, warlocks was propped up by overtuned Fel Lords early on and absurd affliction self healing later on. During BFA, well we know the story. Destruction sitting in the middle of the map doing nothing until they manage to get off 1 spell and you die. Oh and affliction was viable for about half of s1 with one shot Drain life gimmicks. That lasted a cool 5 weeks of the expansion. Now its currently Sacrolash proping up affliction to be playable (Yes despite what you think cause you died to the single Destruction/Demo warlock, both those specs are garbage).

Almost all these are tuning issues, but it doesnt change the underlying issue that its terrible by DESIGN. Any spec or class will be good with enough tuning IE see marksmanship hunters who was a bane to players prior to one hotfix 2 weeks ago, and are once again basically non-existant in Arena due to having a terrible DESIGN.

But Yubie, Look at X and Y rank 1 pro players who plays this game 12 hours a day for a living along with other players who also play this game for a living. Yeah thats just proving my point. Outliers are not the exceptions. No, every other warlock player in PvP isnt just doing it wrong. Broo dood but you saw that clip where Chanimals did top damage vs a RMP and their team rotted to shadowplay? Oh sick did you see the other 50 where he dies to double melee cleaves if they so much as sneeze in his direction?

h ttps://clips.twitch.tv/PopularEndearingWitchBIRB

Heres the facts. Warlocks for all 3 specs are designed to be high ramp up damage specs yet lack any of the tools to allow the ramp. They have sub par survivability pair with the amongst worst mobility in the entire game. Their pets which is essential for 1/3 specs literally dies to collateral cleaving , and dies instantly if any smart player actually focus fires them.

Destruction is plagued as a one button wonder degen spec where you cast chaos bolt repeatedly=they die, you dont cast chaos bolt=they dont die. No one enjoys fighting this spec and its not very enjoyable to play either.

Demonology burst requires about 8 GCDs in uninterupted casting sequence just to hope your pet AI isnt LoSed or bugged out or once again, casually cleaved down without care. Half of Demonologys PvP talents still have legion levels of health/damage (Call observer literally has 500 hp, a short 20 yard range FROM THE WARLOCK so it doesnt even hit casters unless you are on top of them. Fel lord has like 9k hp, does no damage anymore, and will die to a single warrior bladestorm or DK abomination limb or Chain Harvest or any AoE.)

Affliction dots are the weakest dots in the entire game ironically and all of your damage is backloaded into malefic rupture which requires your other 4-5 GCD dots to be effective damage followed by 3-5 GCDs of more free casting. This works great in raiding but awful in PvP.

Above all, regardless of tuning, by design, warlocks are not FUN to play. You can buff their survivability. Make demon armor baseline. Buff demo/destruction damage. It doesnt change that the damage profile is horrendous and they are ill equiped to make use of their slow, ramp design.

35 Likes
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tldr, warlocks are always good and this is probably a bad take

14 Likes
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3x UA and forcing healer to dispel fears and youre looking at a lot of pressure. Class just requires skill instead of .5 chaos bolts 2x in a quad dr’d fear. I know its hard to cope to a skill ceiling increase

16 Likes
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Cannot agree more! 100% support, warlock design are pure trash. Demo lock totally wasted good material.

5 Likes
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Afflock is more than 100% fine itself. Its just the other specs right now that are a little over the top. Once they tune those, afflock will be extremely oppressive.

1 Like
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If you ever allow an affliction warlock to roll 3 UAs + agony + corruption through 9 GCDs the issue isnt the warlock being strong, its you being outplayed.

Also it may be hard to understand, but warlocks have existed for longer than BFA and warlock players dont exclusively play destruction.

3 Likes
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UA + VT + Mindgames + Fear, the healer will never dispel

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warlock is already shaping up to be extremely strong later in the season, let alone the expansion, especially if the classes that are overperforming right now get nerfed. the only reason people think warlock is bad is because it has a high skill cap again and is actually difficult to play right now. you get punished very hard for making mistakes in arenas right now, so if you dont know how to kite properly, youre going to get run over, and kiting isnt a skill locks have needed to know since id say cata so it makes sense people are bad at it. lock has a big learning curve now so its going to either take time for people to adjust, or theyre going to figure out theyre not as good at lock as they thought they were.

4 Likes
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Aff is far away from well designed. Especially the slow kite playstyle are pure garbage. That’s world pvp, not arena pvp. Most of arena are too small to kite. While you kite, you kite your healer too and since warlock is so squish, once they are caught, they die in 1 sec with wall

1 Like
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You once again failed to understand design=/=tuning. UA dispel is overtuned Yes we agree. Affliction is played in shadowplay only to moderate success because shadow priest provide affliction with the tools they need to ramp. Their ability to slow down the game is why the comp is playable.

If one singular other spec is REQUIRED to make affliction work consistently, then affliction or any warlock spec that requires the same is not well designed.

1 Like
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Oh for sure,

You can already tell afflock is really good in the right comp that support their gameplay and cover up even more with them, cough, spriest, cough.

And most locks are used to BFA gameplay standing in a location and casting Chaos Bolt without using anything.

Kite with your healer, not away from your healer.

Night fea warlock has the best mobility right now.

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Ah the old classic “people are just bad at it and no one has enough IQ to make it work”.

2 Likes
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Night fea mobility 1.5 min cd and you cannot do anything during the 12 second if you want to use the second blink. Once you are caught be 2 melee mango you die in 1 sec even they don’t have DPS CD.

3 Likes
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not exactly what i said but sure.

when warlock is as easy to play as it has been for the past few expansions and it goes back to being hard to play, the people who got carried by the class being easy to play and passively tanky are either going to have to adjust or realize they got carried by their class. but if the takeaway from what i said is “git gud ur bad” then you clearly missed the point and nothing that anybody says is going to matter because youre just going to dismiss everything that doesnt agree with you.

4 Likes
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Yes, sorry I wont agree with

“the only reason people think warlock is bad is because it has a high skill cap again and is actually difficult to play right now. you get punished very hard for making mistakes in arenas right now, so if you dont know how to kite properly, youre going to get run over, and kiting isnt a skill locks have needed to know since id say cata”

You make a generalized sweeping assumption that warlocks players just dont know how to play/kite because they had 1 viable strategy for 1 spec for 1 expansion where they didnt have to kite/play well.

Im not dismissing you because you have a different opinion. Im dismissing it because it holds no weight or merit.

1 Like
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not having to kite in bfa is the blatantly obvious xpac where you didnt need to, but it goes back further than that. warlocks were pretty tanky in legion too. and if you want to go back even further, you could argue that you didnt need to know how to kite as well in mop / wod as well because thats when we got a ton more defensives. we got ember tap, dark bargain/sac pact, and dark regen. all of those gave locks alot more survivability outside of just kiting. whereas in cata and earlier all we had as locks was port, which is kind of what weve gone back to now just with 10x more mobility.

theres definitely problems with locks design right now, im not talking about that here. but what i am saying is that warlocks are much better then people are giving them credit for, especially looking forward once we get fully geared and assuming the classes that seem likely to get nerfed actually get nerfed.

3 Likes
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Again this holds no merit because the gamestate of melee was vastly different. If you want to go back to an era where locks had the tools to support kiting, such as 70% CoE, soulburn Teleport, INSTANT 20 SECOND SHADOWFURY, baseline Coil, Baseline Howl, 10 second duration fears with a much higher damage threshold to break, actual instant cast with weight to it.

Ferals, Rets, and Non MM hunters had no kicks prior to mop. Rets had no divine steed, no undispellable freedom that gave 20% movement speed. Warrior had no heroic leap and their charge was buggy where if you jumped at the right time you would be in a further spot than they arrive in. Rogues had one viable PvP spec in sub and it has absolutely gutter tier overall damage compared to now along with one charge of shadowstep on a longer CD.

I could go on but this should prove what im saying. The archtype of the warlock has not adapted with the times and is outdated. Thus, whenever warlocks are good, its not because of satisfying gameplay, its because of some overtuned gimmick that makes it degenerate to fight and play against.

THIS IS A DESIGN ISSUE.

7 Likes
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pretty sure the mage in that clip is a bot

turbo full uptime on my lock perfect time to gpy

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warlocks still have more mobility then most of those classes. the only classes with more mobility then locks is ww and feral, and even that is debatable. the one thing i have noticed with locks is that its really map dependent right now. if you get mugambala, robodrome, tolvir or black rook hold theyre insanely slippery. but on maps like sewers or lordaeron they have a bit harder of a time kiting.

im not arguing that theres not a design issue, there clearly is. i havnt enjoyed playing my lock since mop, but that doesnt mean that theyre not in a pretty good spot right now.

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A pretty good spot would be sub rogues and ret paladins who already suffered multiple nerfs prior and are still S tier despite of them.

If Sacrolash gets nerfed without compensation, that would mean warlocks would have ZERO viable specs. Warlocks are hanging on for dear life and will live/die by this cheese legendary without other changes