Community Warlock QA Thread for Beta (non-testers, please post here!)

Classes Warlock
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Hey all! I hope we’ve spoken before, but if we haven’t I’m Luxtos. I’ve made a couple threads about Locks through Alpha here and got to talk with a lot of the community about their issues. It’s really awesome to hear from you guys!

I think we took some wins on the Demo front a few builds back (emphasis on some), which was in no small part because of the Lock community speaking up, but lurking through the forum, it’s clear there’s still a long battle ahead of us (cough cough Destro Rifts)

So today, I’m making this thread to try and keep that energy up.

In real life, I’m a career Software Analyst (fancy way of saying QA for technical/business crap) and if it’s okay with you guys, I’d like to use what skills I have to be a voice for the Walock community this Beta test. I’ve never Beta tested WoW before, so I’m not sure if I’ll have more access to forums devs will actually read, but if so I want you guys to speak through me.

So without futher ado, here it is:

-What conerns do you have for Warlock? (Utility, balancing, performace)
-What questions do you have about specifics (talents, synergies, builds, etc)?
-What changes would you like to see?
-What are your thoughts on the changes made in TWW so far?
-Is there anything, broad or specific, you want me to try and give you feedback on?

All I ask is that in your posts, you guys let me know what you do (PvP, Delves, WQ, Raid, M+) and what spec you play. I’m gonna do my best to respond to everyone with a write up, and compile common topics in the OP (if this thread even gains traction lol). Any content you guys want tested I will absolutely get my hands on.

I also encourage other beta testers to jump in and be a part of this effort as well. It’s our job to make sure the community is happy.

So lay it out for me guys. I’m not an employee or beholden to any corperate nonsense, just an old Warlock player who wants us all to eat in 11.0. The most important part of QA is that the end user (you guys) are satisfied, so tell me what I can do to make that happen and I will get to it, big or small.

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As a Demo main who runs m+ and raid, here’s some of my thoughts for Demonology’s spec tree in particular.

In terms of utility is kinda feels like Demo is found a bit lacking compared to Aff or Destro. With Hell Caller Demo’s sister specs get access to aoe curses but Soul Harvester and Diabolist don’t offer anything like that. I don’t think this will have a huge impact but its something to point out, especially with Demo being locked into Felguard and missing out on other utility like Felhunter’s dispel or Imp’s purge.

Demo’s rework has been up for about 3 weeks now and the glaring bugs have not been addressed yet. Namely: the mark of Shatug/F’harg setting Vilefiend’s cooldown back to its original 45 seconds, despite this never being mentioned in the tooltip. There’s also the lesser issue of the hounds of Sargaras not being extended by Tyrant but this is at least somewhat implied to be an intended interaction (via Tyrant’s whitelist), and honestly, provides an interesting choice between a stronger demon versus a longer lasting demon that provides a higher uptime for the Houndmaster’s Gambit.

In terms of the tree as a whole: I quite like it. There is no more 2 point talents gatekeeping and a lot the bland and generic filler talents the devs have stuffed into our tree across DF have been removed. I like the reworks/support to Doom and Vilefiend and the idea of a crit based build being an option is nice too.

There is also some potentially dead talents in the tree that also need to be looked at. For example you can talent into Shadowtouched without also grabbing Vile Maw or Foul Mouth, making it a dead talent. Similarly you can talent into one of the hounds without ever talenting into Vilefiend, producing the same effect.

I would love to see the removal of Immutable Hatred / Guillotine. With the nerf to our core proc generation IH is in a bad spot and we don’t really need anymore aoe damage with Guillotine either. I think a single target focus capstone would better round out the tree and provide a compelling option over left or central talents.

Also: I think Dreadlash and Carnivorous Stalkers (CS) should swap positions. When building for single target you have to talent into Spiteful Reconstitution (SR) or Dreadlash to talent into Soul Strike. This isn’t a huge deal, but both these talents are more aoe focused and I would like to be able to path into Soul Strike via CS instead. This way SR is more optional and gives us more agency to take Imp Gang Boss.

Aside from the previously addressed bugs and issues Demo looks to be in a good spot coming into TWW atm. I think people are sleeping on Soul Harvester but I like the idea of speccing into either big demons (Diabolist) or more imps (Soul Harvester).

I think the bugs and dead talent issues with the spec tree really need to be focused on.

Edit: I decided to buy into the beta so I’ll be posting my feedback in the beta forums. Also I noticed they fixed the cooldown issue with the hounds, so disregard that.

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Man, do I have things to say about our base warlock tree, like the fact that our capstones are kind of useless, I know soul conduit and soul burn people think are great but soulburn being a thing implies most of the abilities it’s used on (mostly demonic gateway) just needs to make the ability baseline or just roll it into a talent, I think a lot of our utility should be baseline, like demonic gateway or demonic circle, and that our class tree should lean more into supporting our demons with the capstones being about the demons, im looking at you my old friend perma doomguard from back in legion. And I know it could cause problems for demo, but an easy way to fix that is if demo is your spec it helps felguard with said talents or gives you a second pet to use with your felguard depending on a talent

Some examples would be something like pact of the felhound empowering your felhound to deal5% damage and lower the cd of its interupt, this could work with felguard increasing its damage by 5% instead, as for some like grimorie of supremacy (perma doomguard talent from wod) it could let demo have an extra doomguard perma pet.

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I think most of us warlock know the capstone in our class tree are rather underwhelming in power.

Especially soul conduit sitting at 5% as a capstone. I’m just over it atm. The healthstone/soulstone one is really cool but those are more like qol over than actual talent for the class tree. Soulburn is not bad though. Teaching of the Black harvest (which we can all agree have some pretty bad added bonus for pets) that one should really be replaced by supremacy I think its called but its w.e its been mentioned so many times, or removed.

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Probably going to expand on this later on, but for all three of the spec trees, the majority of capstone talents seem… underwhelming. Especially affliction, but it just feels like instead of something fun with some oomph, most of them are just ‘talent plus’ modifiers for ones we pick from rows farther up.

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For Destruction, one of the capstones is even just a talent from higher in the tree moved down (Diabolic Embers). Another capstone is currently a DPS loss if taken (Chaos Incarnate).

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I can’t speak for balance necessarily, but Destruction seems p fun with Diabolist, I’m really enjoying it. I’d like to customise the Overfiend however, giving us a felfire option would be wonderful, I’m sure the textures/skinning for it are somewhere ready to be used.

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The beta version of chaos incarnate is so insanely badly thought out. Instead of fixing it to 70% (which immediately makes it worse for all spells that would roll a 71-100% value on the mastery effect), it should make the floor 70% up from the baseline 50%.

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