Feedback: Warlocks

In Development The War Within Beta Test
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In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Warlocks in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

The War Within Beta

All classes’ Hero Talent trees are available for testing. Please keep in mind that this is a Beta environment:

  • There may be UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
  • Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI).
  • Some new spell visuals and audio may still be a work in progress.
  • There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus at this time:

  • Finish work on changes to talents, especially wherever Hero Talents still need adjustments.
  • Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

Working from Feedback

Alpha feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Now that we are entering Beta, our focus on Hero Talent trees is shifting away from reworks and design changes and towards tuning and refining. We want to thank you so much for all the forum posts, videos, and discussions all over the internet. Your feedback and impressions have been invaluable for bringing their identities to life and making them fit into what you love about the classes you play.

We are looking forward to hearing from more of you as you get a chance to try Hero Talents for yourself. We are specifically interested in feedback or impressions on these topics:

  • Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree. This could be due to damage profile, utility, defensives, or something else.
  • Hero Talent trees that you feel are either too strong or too weak in power level compared to other options.
  • Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.
  • Hero Talent choice nodes that you feel could offer more meaningful choices.

Again, Thank You

Feedback throughout the Alpha test was highly impactful on our design of the game, and we look forward to refining every class with you in the Beta. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

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Id like to see the avatar of destruction go back to being the abyssal infernal. Seeing flame rift being removed again was a disappointment

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Where’s our spellbook? I can’t summon anything but the blueberry.

Also, the demonology “Starter Build” doesn’t fill everything out.

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Since we’re still dealing with this, years later, I feel compelled to call out that the new Affliction Warlock sound & visual effects still suck. Please give us glyphs for the classic spell effects.

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Here are my feedbacks regarding “Warlock - Destruction - Diabolist”, I will not talk too much about tuning and numbers yet (ya I know Overfiend is super OP right now lol…) and it is from PvE point of view:

  1. General class tree
    i) More or the less the same with DF class tree but Demonic Circle is not baseline is kind of awkward, I think should consider reverting this change, making DC baseline again.
    ii) Soul Conduit as capstone at 5% proc rate is laughably low, consider to make it 10~12% at least.

  2. Destruction Tree
    i) 1st Gate part: no matter how you path, you will at least put a point into RoF. In that case, why not just let RoF be baseline. In order to go to the right side of the tree, you are required to take Pyrogenics/Cata/Inferno to get to Scalding Flame then connect to the 2nd Gate then to CDF. Suggestion to make connection from Havoc/Mayhem node to Indiscriminate Flames and Scalding Flames. This will kind of interconnect the left and right side of the top part of the tree creating a better pathing perhaps because in that case you will not have to take RoF/Cata/Inferno in pure single target fight.

ii) 2nd Gate part: Here we will see a lot of talents that were originally 2 points then got reduced to 1 point talent. Tuning and number wise they are being nerfed by 50 % example like Ashen Remains and Eradication were originally 10% and they are now at 5%. Another example is Raging Demonfire which used to make CDF shoot 20 bolts, is now 17 bolts. Maybe these will be looked into in the future build so balance point in tuning can be found.

Regarding Dimensional Rift, it is good to see it is placed at the middle of the tree and made more accessible, but I feel like Flame Rift should have a place. Either add Flame Rift back to the baseline Dimensional Rift or incorporate it to the “Dimension Ripper” talent.

Fiendish Cruelty, Internal Combustion and Grimoire of Sacrifice seems to be the “dead talents” if no plan of changes are to be made about them.

iii) 3rd Gate (Capstone) Part: during the testing, Infernal (even with the related talents picked) is doing surprisingly low damage <5%, maybe is bugged I am not sure. As mentioned above Overfiend might also not working as intended as it casts Chaos Bolt every 0.5 seconds and is doing ton of damage lol! Chaos Incarnate also looks like it is bugged as it is reducing the damage instead of increasing the damage from the mastery.

Talents at the capstone are all good so far, that sub-1 second cast of Soul Fire from Decimation is cool.

Talents that need to be looked at are Burn to Ashes, Power Overwhelming and Infernal Brand. It does seems like they are outshined by the other talents in the same part of the tree and most likely won’t be picked in any circumstances.

  1. Hero Talent Tree (Diabolist)
    i) The demons summoned by Diabolic Ritual does not seem to do a lot of damage (total <10% damage refer to log attached), not sure if intended.
    ii) Infernal Bolt from Mother of Chaos is really underwhelming damage wise and mechanic wise granting 3 soul shards will normally causing to go over the shard cap. Perhaps dev can look into this.
    iii) Annihilan’s Below possibly dead talent as Howl of Terror is not usually picked in the class tree.
    iv) Cruelty of Kerxan - not really sure what this talent is trying to do because Infernal Machine is doing the same thing and is doing it even better. A redesign is needed for Cruelty of Kerxan.
    v) Gloom of Nathreza - good for 2 target fight I guess, completely dead for single target fight and with Cry Havoc removed from Destro tree, don’t think anyone is casting havoc on ST fight.
    vi) Ruination summoning Diabolic Imp does not feel fitting for Destruction visual wise, can consider changing it to Overfiend or bring back Blasphemy which does make it having more related to the spec tree. Not complaining about its damage.

Below is the combat log from the dummy testing, link are not allowed, just change the (dot) to “.”
www(dot)warcraftlogs(dot)com/reports/NRWmrbfyLKh2AG13#fight=last&type=damage-done&source=115

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Absolutely agree. Flame Rift is a lot of the appeal of Dimensional Rift. It just feels good when it procs. It definitely needs a way to be incorporated into the tree, or baked into the baseline talent perhaps?

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I like the overall direction. I feel more like I used to, back in the day. It’s nice not having temporary demons attached to abilities. The zookeeper thing felt more like they did all the work. Now, I’m actually doing things. However, there’s a missed opportunity here. Bring back the Demon Skin buff.

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The 4pc of 11.0 reads as:

When Conflagrate critically strikes, your Fire damage is increased by 5% for 6 sec.

Does this include Infernal and Rifts? Even if, its fairly weak, considering Infernal isn’t up permanently and only one of the Rifts does Fire damage (although others do Chaos too).

Edit: only saw now that the Fire Rift is gone. It was by far the most potent of all. Without it, Dimensional Rift needs severe tuning to be interesting.

Additionally, is the Chaos Bolt cast by from Summon Overfiend via Avatar of Destruction increased by Improved Chaos Bolt?

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8 talents are now gated behind taking Rain of Fire.

The community has CONSISTENTLY requested, with very concise and polite feedback, that Rain of Fire be made baseline.

Placing Rain of Fire in a position that FORCES you to take it to access talents related to spells such as Immolate is an unacceptable talent point tax.

This is exactly the OPPOSITE of what the player base has fed back to Blizzard.

Player feedback previous to the Alpha and during the Alpha has been ignored, with the excuse being that someone at Blizzard thinks they know better. Whoever that person is needs to be identified and put to work on something else. Someone else needs to take over there job, and it needs to be someone who reads feedback and acts on it, as opposed to reading feedback and thinking they can make a half measure which is better… but not what was requested.

You should not have to take Rain of Fire to get to talents such as Ashen Remains, which is totally unrelated. Not all of us play builds that desire to use Rain of Fire. There is endgame content in the game that does not require Rain of Fire, and it is unfair to force every single Destruction Warlock to take Rain of Fire because it being useful for one particular endgame scenario.

Does the player base really, truly, need to make any more of a case for this? Seriously?

The solution is to make Rain of Fire baseline.

This has been requested for the longest time. Please actually listen.

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I’m just gonna put here that I don’t like Implosion being moved up on the tree, and being forced to take it. I play Demonology to make and retain a large number of demons. Not to sacrifice them.

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I wish there was a choice node for Implosion, some AOE spell that doesn’t sacrifice our pets.

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Can we PLEASEEEE, PLEASSEEE get a new shadow bolt graphic. The purple poop has been around too long already.

  1. Replace it with a new one, preferably a black one that had sinister tones to it.
  2. Provide us with a glyph that allows us to use the old graphic.

The current graphic kills the tone of the class and does not fit the “shadow” theme.

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Initial thoughts on demo: (aoe)
MASSIVE button bloat. I even took a ton of passives and i still had over 10 buttons to push on a regular basis.
Implosion: i love it, but where does it fit? I found myself rarely pushing it bc i was too focused on keeping imps up for the big guy. I feel its only there to push just incase you have imps during down times, but with so much going on there wasnt any. I also dont think it should be so high on the tree. I know its there bc if it wasnt no one would take it. It needs to either be higher on the importance level during rotation by providing something more or it needs to be a passive or something.
The spec itself is very convoluted. I was playing the demo hero talents and its like do i wait for rumination or can i use my big guy now? Which spell is going to be empowered. Theres so much going on that trying to streamline how things works is just a nightmare.
Doom: much better than it was before, however, it needs to be more incorporated into the spec.
I am very disappointed to see we cant choose between demo and aff hero talents at the same time. I mean, whats the point? Just throw those talents into the tree and call it a day. Thats all it is, a mini talent tree. You take all the talents anyways and there is really only 1 choice talent that matters. The other two are just defensive talents. Tbh, i was quite disappointed at the hero talents. I identified over half that were previously already in the talent tree for dragonflight. Why the copy/paste? Hero talents were supposed to be game changing, and the first/last ones are. However, the rest inthe middle are just disappointing ones that any player would find in their normal talent trees.
Thats it for now, but there is certainly a lot that can be improved.
I can say, on a positive note, that i really liked all the numbers coming out in aoe. I felt excited with how much damage was being spread out, and how dmg continued to tick without having to be overfocused on a spender.

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Visuals

*1- Soulfire has a 5 expansion old classic mage Pyroblast placeholder animation. This needs to be updated already.

2-Shadowburn needs an update.

3- You made a beautiful updated vfx for life drain, then removed it from affliction as a filler and forced them to use a Vanilla old Drain Soul animation. Drain Soul needs updating.

4- Demonbolt does not work with green fire, unlike its previous animations. Please fix.

5-Destruction’s imp pet with green fire shoots an outdated low rez fireball instead of the updated high rez green firebolts demonology’s imps shoot out. Please fix.

6- Update Channel Demonfire to the animation the chaos mother uses, the fel fire from CDF looks low rez and outdated.

7- Malefic Rapture needs an animation that’s not a copypasted Implosion without the jumping imps.

A huge issue with Affliction is that it has barely any visual feedback, especially on large hitbox mobs and bosses where the dot visuals stop being visible.

Compare Affliction to Shadow Priest. One class has proper visual feedback, the spells feel impactful and visible with an army of apparitions, void torrent, void entropy, and the other class has barely any visual feedback to what they do, you only see them waving their arms around with a tiny purple glow on their hand.

8- Why did you prune our Soulkeeper? It’s one of the coolest Legion demon models alongside Inquisitors. Give it back somewhere or as a glyph.

My suggestion is to grab the proc from Soul Harvester and turn that inner demon from a void/shadow elemental into a Soulkeeper instead.

Soulkeeper thematically is much more fitting as a visual proc to SoulHarvester than a void fiend.

9-Haunt needs an update.

10- Give dual wielding Wrathguard back. We specifically glyphed wrathguard for the cool dualwield animations, then you made them one handed unlike the real overworld wrathguards.

For a short while, fel guillotine was restoring the dual wield on cast as a bug, but you removed that.

Gameplay

Please give that interrupt choice node back on the class tree.

You reverted the option to put spell lock in the class tree for pvp reasons, but that destroyed our demon choice variety. It’s all felhunter all the time thanks to that.

Put in a choice node where the warlock can choose to cast spell lock themselves or have it on their felguard pet. That will free up demon choice and variety for the warlock.

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For my part, longer form feedback later during beta from me, but a quick note regarding Destruction tree;

Two weeks ago we had Infernal down center of the tree and it felt good, finally had the main cooldown accessible like everyone else, and I felt like most everyone liked that tree.

Then dimensional rift was moved to its placed and infernal pushed back down bottom right.

Now I am a dimensional rift hater for sure, I don’t like pressing that button at all it feels empty to me, having that center of the tree instead of infernal is puzzling at best. I understand that it’s ‘extra mobility’, but I don’t like Rift being the solution to that at all, nor it being near forced unto us.

TLDR; I thought the talent tree for Destruction from 2 weeks ago was better than the one from last week.

More feedback later!

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Overall, extremely impressed with the revamped Destruction. It went from slow and clunky to having a lot of feasible, viable options. While I think the dream of a Destro that doesn’t use infernal is still probably not “viable”, these changes have stepped a lot in the direction of smoother gameplay while also really feeling like Gul’dan 2.0.

Extremely, extremely happy to see Decimation return to a soul fire proc. Improved chaos bolt fixing the pain point of losing the cast reduction of ahn quiraj is good too.

Minor Tweaks

I am very surprised that cataclysm is still not baseline. I can -understand- rain of fire not being baseline just like Starfall isn’t baseline as one of those “The top of the tree is light enough you can pick it up without losing anything” but it still feels weird.

If there’s no flame rift option, I’d like to see Dimensional Rift getting a cooldown reduction. Assuming the recharge talent is the same as Legion, it’s a low enough % that you don’t roll in the DR charges.

Probably like to see Ruin pumped up to 10 Critical Damage Bonus? Since the node before is 5% flat crit, usually it’s 1% crit / 2% crit damage. Otherwise at 5%, -probably- in a rarely to never taken category outside of maaaaaybe a minimal button build.

Power Overwhelming and Chaos Incarnate feel odd. The capstone section is very heavy and competitive in a -good- way that makes these two standout. I know the intention was to nerf Chaos Incarnate out of its “always take” status. I don’t think it’d be unreasonable to scrap CI and buff PO a bit.

Overall

Much more fluid and fun for sure. I think for the vast majority of “Destro Enjoyers”, Destro’s sweet spot in Cata/MoP as a fairly fast paced, direct damage that wasn’t 80% chaos bolt, and had a few satisfying procs. It looks to be more on that track again, and I’m very excited for it. A few points to potentially look at, but overall extremely minor.

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Haha! I’m sorry, but I can’t help myself. You want to replace purple poop with black? Wouldn’t that be more poop-like?

Just being silly. Carry on.

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No, I want nothing that looks like it does now. A skull would be great. A red spell like the old Seed of Corruption would be awesome. Anything but the horrible purple crap we have meow.
I know your joking. :wink:

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the Malevolence talent is pretty ugly. i would love to see the old metamorphosis model be used for it or give us a glyph to change it. or a glyph to have metamorphosis as a spell we can toggle on and off

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So fresh off the bat - I enjoy some of the things done to the Warlock talent trees.

But I will say Hellcaller Hero Talents are pretty boring. Soul Harvester is much more interesting and I can’t see myself wanting to choose Hellcaller at all. I think it could use a bit more tuning but it probably won’t be touched at this stage :confused:

Also I cannot agree with this enough:

I’m tired of this narrative being forced on me by the Devs. I do NOT enjoy this type of playstyle. If I’m going to be forced to do the summon a bunch of demons thing then at least don’t force me to do the Imp + sacrifice playstyle. I’d much prefer the buffing of the feldogs + summon bulky dudes style.

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