I really wish we could get some more mobility for locks.
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As long as drain health and health stones exist, you will never see great mobility unfortunately. Blizzard balances DPS specs around having either good healing or good mobility, druids are the only exception because itâs their class niche.
but drain health does basically nothing now unless you are afflic and also stack the trait and everyone gets the healthstones not just the warlock.
Every class has healing except arms warriors and dps dks. Iâd take rogue or DH healing if I get their massive mobility, cc and burst kits. Blizz wants class niches, but most melee can do everything and have no down sides.
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Personally rolled lock to be less mobile but be the tanky caster. Theyâve absolutely routed lock tankiness. Iâd take back our previous survivability before I took mobility. Thatâs our flavor. We donât get blink like mages, so we should be able to tank massive hits to make up for it.
I will say they do need to address the lack of any instant casting or mobile abilities whatsoever for demo. Demo feels awful the moment a fight requires any movement, which, in Mythic, lets be real - every fight requires movement.
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This a million times this. Iâd rather have more tankiness than mobility, because otherwise weâd just be a mage with a different flavor.
Give warlocks more tankiness, not more mobility. Demon armor is a good step in that direction, I personally am gunna be happy about seeing warlocks have almost as much hp as tanks again, just like the good ol days from vanilla.
I bet weâll need more for tankiness though than whatâs slated for 8.1. Maybe anyway. It probably doesnt help that afflic doesnât get to even use drain health for its intended design of survivability because of that stupid trait.
They getting 20% more stam and 125% more armor in 8.1 with the right talent choices.
Aff and destro will have thr highest hp pools and the armor of a hunter
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Yeah, as well as a shorter cast time on Casting Circle.
It seems like the low mobility identity is going to persist. The QoL is nice but eh, could be a little better.
Destro not in as bad a spot as Affliction or Demo though.
It isnât 20% more stam.
Its a 10% Stam Bonus (that does not take into account base HP), and then a 10% HP bonus (from Demon Armor).
It works out to being more like ~15% more total HP.
And the armor isnât going to help. The classes we have the biggest trouble with do a lot of magic damage anyway that bypasses armor. (Rogues, DKs, DHs)
Oh, and it locks you into another mandatory talent. So you get to have one talent choice. Because Curse of Weakness and Demon Armor are going to be absolutely 100% mandatory.
Stamina is directly proportionate to hp, there is no âbase hpâ anymore. If you scroll over stamina in your character sheet itâll say âIncreases health by Xâ and that number will match your current max hp.
1Stamina=20HP is how it works currently, not base hp involved. You have base stamina, but not base hp. If anything, the difference in wording is so that the two stack multiplicatively instead of additively, perhaps?
There HAS to be a downside to your class⊠if youâre mobile and ranged, your damage usually suffers in fights that donât require mobility. Or your survivability suffers, etc.
I donât understand these posts that ask to be overpowered. It happens often enough as it is without spoiled players demanding itâŠ
It has absolutely nothing to do with asking for overpowered classes.
Looking at boomkin vs Destruction spec - Boomkin has 3 instant casts: Moonfire, Sunfire and Starsurge to bridge movement. Particularly on Mythic difficulty extremely helpful for bridging. But also very valuable in M+, where a lot of kiting needs to happen on anything past 15/16 (or necrotic weeks for that matter) and some bosses are just high movement fights.
You will look like a wet noodle on tyrannical weeks, on a Yazma or Rhezan or Mogul or Rixxa or a Lord StormsongâŠ
Destruction merely has conflagrate and you will have one charge of it at most since you donât want to cap (!) - and one ticking Immolate dot which makes it the most punished class in terms of movement.
You could easily fix that, Petkolock (one of the best locks in the EU in terms of M raiding and M+) suggested to remove Incinerate, give Destruction Scorch with a similar shard generation - castable while moving. I think thatâs just one change to improve mobility, there are many other solutions.
You always need to compare to other ranged classes in order to determine whether there is a balance (utility, movement, dps, survivability). And looking at them - there is absolutely not. So itâs good that people are speaking out. Not hopeful that Blizzard actually listens, but at least there is a chance they will eventually to some extent.
I got a better idea, letâs not remove spells and instead add them. Such as re-adding Searing Pain as a quick .5 sec cast but lower damage spell that can be cast on the run. Or I dunno, SOULBURN which would use a soul shard to allow your next Chaos Bolt to be instant cast, healthstone to heal more, Demon to be Instant summon, etc.
Iâd be okay with the current lack of mobility if the tankiness was increased back up. Thatâs always been the difference between mages and warlocks, right? At least at first. One was squishier but had tools to âdodgeâ damage, the other was sneaking plate under their robes and would just eat the damage while resisting it or healing back up.
Over time though, mages received tools to handle damage better while warlocks lost a good chunk of their tankiness. Please donât get me wrong, Iâm not doing a warlocks vs mages argument. I play both classes and I like both classes, but I have noticed in the last few class readjustments over the more recent expansionsâŠitâs almost as if theyâve forgotten this was supposed to be the big difference between the two classes. Mages have gotten some healing abilities, which is fine mostly. Small healing abilities that still fit in the âslipperyâ avoid damage theme, while warlocks have lost tankiness and healing. Exception during legion with the drain life filler for affliction, that was overkill but then they went too far in the other direction. Only this last patch did warlocks get their passive stamina back, and odd decision to remove it to begin. If weâre going to be slow casters, then thatâs fair. That fits the role, but make sure they can survive the damage like they ought to.
Or stop piling on movement on every other class. I think that annoys me the most on my warlock in pvp. The fact every one else and their mother has some fast quick way to get to their location. You can basically win any fight against a warlock by merely walking away at a casual, relaxed, pace lol. That is a weird design decision.
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actually arms warrior at least have victory rush, and DKâs have a Death Strike (I think itâs called death strike). Which is something. Meanwhile Mages have absolutely zero heal/health regen capabilities beyond sitting and eating/drinking.
They are, however, one of only two classes in the game with a baseline on-demand damage absorb in their DPS specs, and that bubble is based on max HP rather than spellpower, too. The mage survivability concept is that they absorb the damage rather than heal it, thatâs what sets them apart from warlocks (who drain their enemy for healing/absorption) and priests (who directly heal themselves).
actually the mage survivability concept is that mages avoid taking damage. Our bubbles donât absorb much at max level, and are on a 30s cooldown. Where as we use blink/shimmer, frost nova, etc to aid us in positioning and avoiding damage. Our bubbles are laughable.
To say that we rely on absorbing the damage would imply that we are tank-y. Mages are not durable, but rather fragile. I also think theyâve balanced the absorbed amount around the fact that we have access to an azerite trait that gives us another damage absorb bubble. Which makes us even squishier before obtaining our azerite traits.
Your bubbles are the largest absorption effects in the game aside from Disc priests (and maybe even better than theirs, I havenât compared them). Mage bubble is 22% of maximum HP. Soul Leech maxes out at 10%, or 15% with talent. Spriest bubble is 209.4% of SP, and caster SP generally hovers in the neighborhood of ~4.5% of max HP, plus or minus a bit depending on whether your trinkets have passive intellect or not, meaning spriest bubble is roughly 9-9.5% of max HP.
Now, granted, both of those have much more rapid use. Spriest bubble has 30% the CD of mage bubbles. Soul Leech is 8% of damage done, plus 0.5% max HP per second with talent (DPS to max HP ratio appears to be roughly in the range of 8-9%, so the damage component is around 0.7% HP per second). But to say your bubble is useless is hilariously wrong. In terms of HPS average, itâs lower than spriest and warlock, but in terms of instantaneous absorption towards specific hits (since youâre rarely just constantly taking damage during a boss fight), itâs roughly twice as strong as spriest and warlock absorbs.
Youâre right, of course, mages are also designed around avoiding the damage entirely. I was just talking about their self-healing philosophy, where they self-heal akin to how a WoD-era Disc priest healed, by preventing the damage instead of healing it.