I wish there was a dev that understood warlock

Classes Warlock
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I see the throughput buffs we are getting on the next reset, which are nice. Everyone loves when their class gets buffed, but Blizzard is showing once again that they don’t quite understand WHY certain specs are underperforming in certain areas.

-Demonology-

Everyone knows that our highest simming spec (Demonology) is being outperformed by our other specs in any fight that has a lot of movement, and Blizzard is trying to address this by reverting the demon core change, for what Dreadstalkers give after they despawn.

A great and welcome change, but doesn’t change the amount of hard casting we have to do, and the very strict and static Tyrant set up we have every minute. I don’t often find myself in need of demon cores, but rather I find myself lacking the time standing still long enough to get rid of my soul shards, especially during Tyrant set up when I have limited time before I NEED to cast Tyrant or waste my other cooldowns.

Make our cooldown rotation healthier, either involve less hard casts or take imps out of the equation. They are one of the main reasons everything has such a strict timing involved with our Tyrant setup.

Blizzard has said in a blue post that they think our class fantasy is being a tanky immobile caster, but that just doesn’t fit with modern WoW and the end game content being what it is.

Demonology in mythic+ isn’t nearly as viable as destro or aff, for simple but important reasons.
-We can’t interrupt without stunning, so we can’t be the ranged kick that makes a mob that’s free casting in the back walk into melee
-Our kick is 30 second CD instead of 24
-We can’t control what our imps are attacking
-All of our pets and summons can pull aggro by proximity
-And last but not least, we don’t even have the option of using our imp for magic dispel or felhunter for purge.

Solutions are equally as simple.
-Take the stun away from felguard’s Axe Toss
-OR- Let us have a second permanent pet, just for the Command Demon ability. So if we were in m+ we could use our felguard for damage, but have a felhunter out for interrupt, or imp out for dispel on certain fights
-Take away the entire aggro radius of pets and summons

For the record, I’m not saying that you can’t play demonology in keys, high or low. Technically with a good enough group you could have one player basically ignoring mechanics, like doing your fair share of kicks, and still time keys, but it just isn’t on the same level as other classes and specs.

-Destruction-

Destruction has always had the issue of not having a lot of upfront damage, being very handicapped by ramp time, and historically suffered from lack of mobility. Diabolist hero talents helped a bit by giving destro a little bit of burst every 20 or less seconds with Diabolic Ritual, and the NUMEROUS buffs to Shadowburn have made Destruction the most mobile of all the warlock specs.

Now, however, it feels like Destruction is a jack of all trades, master of none. We still don’t have a good damage profile for most packs of mobs in M+, and with having to choose between Cataclysm and Inferno we either have to manually apply Immolate/Wither and have an AoE spender that actually does damage, or have the convenience of applying our DoTs all at once, but at the cost of having an AoE spender that hits like a squeaky toy.

On top of letting us have both Inferno and Cataclysm, there has to be other options for Destruction, to help cement it’s place in the game. Giving us a 30-60 second CD to kickstart our damage in AoE, getting rid of Shadowburn and making Chaos Bolt instant cast (Shadowburn already does more damage per shard than Chaos Bolt anyway), make Havoc more impactful. Havoc used to be a staple of Destruction warlock, we were the king of two target cleave, but now its just sad.

Rain of Fire only gives 1 stack of Wither/Blackened Soul, so I can only assume they nerfed Diabolist to be on the same level, only giving 1 second of CDR. Personally I wish they would have left Rain of Fire giving 3 seconds of CDR to Diabolic Ritual and buffed Hellcaller to give 3 stacks of Wither/Blackened Soul instead. It would have made hitting Rain of Fire in AoE feel a lot more impactful. Right now with Hellcaller Destruction I find myself prioritizing hitting Shadowburn instead, because its the most efficient way of stacking up Blackened Soul, which is a huge portion of our damage.

-Affliction-

I don’t know jack about affliction. Maybe make applying DoTs easier? I see a lot of people hate on Affliction because of DoT management.

-Class Tree-

We don’t have many floater points available without sacrificing important talents. While you technically CAN sacrifice damage, or survivability, stamina, etc, you generally wouldn’t want to. I would love to see more talents become single pointers so we had a few more floater points available to us. Even if the talents we ended up replacing them with were useless, I wish we had options.

Speaking of options, warlock feels very limited on utility. We barely have a brez, nobody remembers to use our healthstones, every once in a while a raid fight or M+ dungeon will have a required spot for a gate, and now almost every other class is just as tanky as us. Short of being overtuned and being taken for our damage alone, there isn’t much of a reason to bring a warlock to a M+ group, and you would only want one in a raid group, max.

We either need a group buff, 2-3% crit or haste or something, or the ability to spread our curses to an entire pack of mobs in M+. With M+ having so many caster adds, being able to easily put Curse of Tongues on every mob in M+ would make us just as valuable as other classes, even if we don’t have a curse or poison cleanse, or bloodlust, etc.

If anyone has kept reading this far, thank you.

17 Likes
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Yup, while Demo buffs are really nice, I just wish Tyrant and Vilefiend were instant cast.

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In a nutshell, Destro’s buffs are going to be significant - about a 6-8% DPS buff. TBH, I don’t see Destro’s issue as ramp time - with the standard Soul Fire + Conflag + SB + Pop Potion/Trinkets/Infernal + Chaos Bolt + Conflag + Chaos Bolt, that’s a lot of up front damage. In AoE, I see CDF getting more play - with Cata + CDF or Immolate + Immolate + CDF + 2 Shard RoF Spam. I think Destro is in the big winner, and this change will put them in the top 1/3rd, I’m hoping. It would be nice if every pure DPS class had AT LEAST one spec there.

Aff, sadly, is not getting much of a buff from this - it looks better on paper, but when you understand how our damage profile is dominated by 50% Malefic Rapture, even on single target, these changes to our dots nets like a 3% DPS increase. Which, don’t get me wrong, I’ll take (everything helps)… but Aff still will have an overall output issue, and a huge feels issue for me since we still hit like a wet noodle outside of Soul Rot windows and might as well just go AFK on a pull where Soul Rot + Vile Taint are both on cooldown, or if the tank just doesn’t know how to play with an Afflock and chain pulls unpredictably - we have 0 flexibility.

Demo, I will say, they are at least addressing the right stuff - it needs more mobility. It’s overall output is technically tuned higher than Aff/Destro, but it sees less play because of how many hard casts they have to throw out. Giving them significantly more demon bolts is a step in the right direction, but we’ll have to see how the simming looks.

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I should have specified, ramp time is just with AoE, like in M+. Rain of Fire is very underwhelming, it takes a lot of enemies, making use of the uncapped AoE, all of them to be standing still, and to layer multiple Rain of Fires on top of each other before the damage really starts rolling in.

Its better than it used to be, with Diabolist. Which just got nerfed though.
Destruction has good baseline AoE damage, but doesn’t get to truly shine unless the packs live long enough.

I mean, at least they said the right buzzword, “mobility”, when referring to demonology, but they don’t understand demonology enough to realize that more demon cores, while nice, won’t solve the mobility issue. =(

Demonbolt could be legit instant cast baseline, permanently instant cast, and demonology would still be considered a turret. You always can make sure you have demon cores before Tyrant with Power Siphon and pooling, but Tyrant set ups on high mobility fights is still terrible.

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Yeah, the meta right now is basically “any class with overpowered CDs on a short cooldown that they can use 1-2 times every pull.”

Warlocks have CDs on a short cooldown that they need to function as a class (which means they have no flexibility or ability to adapt to a situation they didn’t expect)… and all of our 2 minute cooldowns suck by comparison to what other classes have on a much shorter cooldown. IMHO: Darkglare and Infernal should be 1 minute cooldowns, they’re nice but in TWWs insane burst damage meta, 2 minutes is an eternity and they do not have the impact to justify that long CD.

For Demo, agreed, all dogs and Tyrant should be instant cast. Just let this “Casters should be turrets” design philosophy start to die again. Who is it for? The raid designers either have to design with one-hand behind their back or risk half of damage dealers hating their raids… and I have yet to hear a single player ever say: “You know what I love most about my class? The fact I cannot move and do damage at the same time. It’s glorious to STAND YOUR GROUND like a Florida resident, MY SPOT, and UNLOAD.”

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Yeah. Honestly demo doesn’t need any more buffs. I don’t even think it needs damage buffs we just got, aside from the core qol fix.

Poor destro has been down that route some many times, buffs to nerf back to buff and on on, just fixed the rotation’s fluidity. Not this here more damage to XYZ ability.

They need to stop being stubborn and fixed it’s casting rotation. Either by making some instants or adjustments on imps/vilefiend/tyrant flow.

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The turret caster things has been dead since like SL but they keep forcing 2 to 3 specs to stick to this while everyone else is just running around spamming.

They did this when they wanted more and more mechanics in dungeons/raids. That’s their doing.

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Ya pretty much Demo lock and Demon Hunters devs are the worst, have been for decades

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Instant Tyrant would be cool, but what they really need to do with Vilefiend is to shorten it’s cooldown by 5 seconds to give the Warlock time to cast him mid-Tyrant cooldown without screwing up their Tyrant rotation.

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I think it is extremelly funny that we have CORRUPTION, as a casting dot

If this is not a sign of “not understanding warlock” i dunno what else is.

  • With so many doom interactions, i rly don’t understand why it can be an instant dot, that replace corruption and have a chance to summon the doomguard with each tick damage

  • I still think Vilefiend should replace the hounds and i will die on this hill

  • Tyrant need to be instantcast

  • We need a interrupt not bound by a pet ASAP

  • Demonic circle need to be baseline and the talent gives another charge

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Hot take: Demonology is the spec that should have gotten 2 pets. Not BM hunters. For this specific reason. Then Felguard wouldn’t need the interrupt on its stun.

Secondly, i have seen a lot of BM hunters over the years say they don’t like having 2 pets. While i cannot imagine a single demo lock complaining about having the ability to use the other pets.

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Its because the second pet doesn’t do anything…you don’t get their abilities or special stuff. As BM i would rather have one strong pet than a Zoo

Same way for Demo, i do think we should have the option for a stronger fellguard and having two demons at once.

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Just pitching in my thoughts

An issue that was created when they decided that slapping on interrupt on top of axe toss was a great idea - which doesn’t turn out so well in practice.

What drives me insane is, we had a near perfect solution, sitting right on the demonology pvp talent, whereby a little tweak could have done wonders for the class as a whole.

Allow me to refresh our memories:

* Call Felhunter

* 40 yd range
* 1% of base mana
* 1 min cooldown
* Instant
* Invoke the power of Felhunter from the nether to instantly Spell Lock the enemy target. 
* Call Felhunter cannot be used if your current pet is a Felhunter.*

ALL they need to do, was reduce the cooldown to match Spell Lock, and make it baseline. BAM! we instantly solve our interrupt issue while making our class - not spec, class - better.

In case someone yells about ‘having double interrupt is overpowered’ - do all of us a favor. Go see an Ophthalmologists, come back, and read the entire talent description, especially the last sentence.

Which is why i’m extremely annoyed of the position of Inner Demons talent. It is a hassle for world questing, but i can’t skip it as it literally is the corner stone of the entire left side of our talent.

While we think of how to improve wild imps, can we just swap the position of Inner Demons with Rune of Shadows? that would at least help for the time being.

I disagree. I think Corruption as a baseline spell for warlocks fits perfectly as part of our class fantasy. Let’s not forget that warlocks are primarily a dot-based class, where dots are considered our staple identity.

While each warlock spec should have their own specialty to separate them, i think having a iconic baseline dot would tie different warlock specs to be reminded that they are warlocks still.

The real problem lies on implementation, which lacks practicality for the demonology spec, and a sour taste for Destruction where immolate replaces corruption.

An instant cast Corruption, having a chance that they could either spawn wild imps or gain a soul shard would be a nice improvement, while Umbral blaze could be changed to apply Corruption to targets hit, pays homage to Legion where HoG used to apply Doom on targets hit.

On that end, it is also my opinion that by this point, Immolate should have been instant cast as well, which is proven by the new Hellcaller talent Wither.

Does instant cast Wither destroys raids and inflated Destro performance? Of course not. So then why still keep the cast time on Immolate, which neither serve any practical purpose or benefit, except forcing us to be more immobile?

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This solves almost everything.

Making vielfiend ( charhound ) and tyrant instant saves us about 3.5 seconds of hard cast per tyrant rotation. This would be a game changer.

Also I don’t want to lose per agro as the OP mentions. I use my pets as tanks as a a solo player so if this is a thing make it a toggle. Where we aren’t making them passive just turning taunt and agro off.

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No, the problem is that crap being a casting ability, while Aflic get an instant cast

Immolation replacing corruption is nice, Doom should replace corruption for warlock as a instant dot. Demo is more of a summoner than a dot spec, so doom having chance to summon doomguard fits more than a hard casting on corruption

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Hold on a sec, did I miss context here? You shouldn’t be casting corruption as demonology at all.

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And you can’t see how it is stupid having a skill that you should not cast, at all?

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oh ya, in that case it’s very stupid, but they decided to do this during Dragonflight with a lot of classes for some reason. There are several spells for every class in the game that are completely useless and are used purely for people sub level 10 or something (specless).

Thinking of arcane shot for bm for instance.

EDIT: I guess I didn’t really give my opinion

Ya, it’s really stupid and was something I argued against early on in the DF beta since it gives the wrong impression to newer players as well who have no idea what to hit, and may not necessarily look at guides.

Honestly, the shift in DF to move a lot of spells to class-wide or to focus on specless gameplay is really silly. Retail wow isn’t built for the leveling experience, and for some extremely odd reason they decide to cater to the “new player experience” over having a holistic approach to each class. I understand the economics behind drawing people in, but at least do like what you said, and have doom replace corruption. Just look at the mumbojumbo they said about infernal this beta cycle about it being a good node to look forward to while “leveling”. It’s really silly.

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You know, maybe I have an unpopular opinion here, but I think every pure dps class should have a spec that’s “generic” or “jack of all trades”. My issue, is that they’ve been on the fence with warlock for ages now, and destro just blows in comparison to other easier specs like frost mage, bm hunter, assassination, which are all super straightforward and easy to play specs that hand-hold your dps and have a ton of quality of life.

Here’s what I said a while back in another thread that I still believe would do some short-term work for making destro feel better.

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I wrote a whole pile of stuff about the class tree and affliction with the intent to also talk about demo and destruction but then I thought… Why bother?

I have no faith in Blizzard to listen to feedback and make positive changes.

Only thing I have to look forward to is the post MDI dungeon nerfs so I can put in the bare minimum effort to finish season 1 portals and gearing.

2 Likes