It's been 20 years - let us summon players by ourselves

Classes Warlock
1

The world is already incredibly easy to traverse between the addition of expanded portal rooms, independent hearthstones (e.g. garrison/Legion Dalaran), mage portals for new expansions, engineering wormhole generators, meeting stones, fast low-level skyriding, the refer-a-friend summoning feature, and directly queueable content.

Yet, we are still stuck with the same Ritual of Summoning design that’s been in place effectively since 2004: a clunky system where we have to wait for two additional players to click an object, pray they stand still, and then coordinate with one other player for each and every character we want to summon.

There’s no fun in this minigame and there’s no real point to the restriction anymore. My suspicion is these limitations were implemented out of concern that warlocks would trivialize the very slow world travel that was originally part of vanilla WoW’s design, or fear that a single warlock could turn the tide of Tarren Mill vs. Southshore. The modern game has moved on; today we are left with the nuisance of waiting for two other people to point their dragon in the correct direction, and then perform the whole “ritual” of clicking the portals. It requires attention with no real payoff. It’s like herding cats – which is much worse than herding imps.

We can destroy world-ending threats and command an army, yet we need some people who have never opened a book on shadow magic in their life to help us do this basic task. We can summon Pit Lords from the Twisting Nether, but by myself I can’t summon Fred the Gnome from one zone over.

Mages have the ability to teleport entire groups without additional help. What gives? Mages are no smarter than warlocks! This change would help enhance an iconic warlock class fantasy/utility without breaking the game.

Cut out the middlefolk - let us target a party member and summon them ourselves. This would be a nice quality of life change that encourages group content and lets us get to the fun parts of the game just a tad bit faster. It would make it more convenient when playing with smaller (<4) groups of friends. Lastly, I believe it would be welcome by both warlocks and their group members, and is a long overdue improvement to the class.

9 Likes
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I think the restriction has more to do with how to balance how much content a single warlock with an invis pot could skip.

3 Likes
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Not to mention the expectation that the Warlock would summon every player to the Raid all the time.

2 Likes
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Honestly yes. It’s beyond overdue for Warlocks to be able to put down a summoning stone by ourselves, and then have a single person be able to use it to summon party/raid members.

The worry a Warlock with an invis pot could summon people past content; if this was a worry then couldn’t it be a worry now for EVERYONE in the party to just have an invis pot and skip the same things? The warlock having one and a summon doesn’t contribute anything extra more invis pots don’t. We can’t turn invisible ourselves and skip multiple things.

The worry about the warlock need to be the only summoner; I think OP meant putting down a summon stone by ourselves and having only one person need to use it to summon another person. Not that the warlock needs to be the only one summoning.

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In addition, I think the player being summoned should have no say in the matter :wink:

But really:

and

It would be nice if you could do all of it with just one other person, like a dungeon summoning stone, though.

It does.

  1. Warlock invis skips and summons
  2. Other members invis skip another group
  3. Warlock suicide
  4. Healer rezzes Warlock
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I do respect the scenario-think-through to make sure we’re not accidentally suggesting some new game-breaking meta-warlock-skip-creating issue by asking for solo-summoning haha

But I have to ask, if this hypothetical summon-trick would EVER be beneficial to group timing/running, wouldn’t we be seeing two or three rogues in a group for multiple shrouds, or a whole party of druids smashing runs as they can all just go invisible? Those would be much quicker than a Warlock invising, through a group, taking the time to put down a stone, summon everyone, have the group run through to safety, Warlock suicide, then wait for the res.

But you’re right, I will amend my original statement from “The warlock having one and a summon doesn’t contribute anything more invis pots don’t.” to “The warlock having an invis pot and a solo-summon doesn’t contribute anything more invis pots or other classes don’t.”

3 Likes
7

It would be good to get some people who are invested in high end Mythic runs to weigh in – I’m not that person. But I suspect it’s either a non-issue or something that could be fixed with tuning.

In addition to what Zaiku brought up, mages have Mass Invisibility, and some classes have combat reset abilities (e.g. Feign Death, Shadowmeld) that could, in theory, be used to save time in runs.

If it’s a major concern that warlocks can summon after burning their invis pot, one solution could be to have summon take 15 seconds per target to serve as a disincentive for timed dungeon skips.

There’s also the fact that Mythic+ have a minimum requirement for kills, so it’s not like you could just stack skips to trivialize the entire dungeon.

It needs to be demonstrated that warlocks could do something that’s 1) novel and 2) advantageous given the suggested change.

That’s already more or less the status quo though:

Raid group forms
Lazy players refuse to go to meeting stone/dungeon portal/whatever
“warlock”
“warlock can u summon”
“summon pls”
“1”

There’s already an expectation that we provide that service, and 99% of the groups I’ve been in, the warlock is left to initiate the summons one by one – it’s also just more efficient due to knowing who you selected each time. If you’re inside of a dungeon, you already need to be paying attention to bring out the summoning closet at the bare minimum, if not taking the lead in initiating the portals.

The difference between the current system and a solo warlock summon system is N-2 people involved.

If you drag your feet and the group is upset, then it’s up to them to arrive first then and use the meeting stone, same as we’re dealing with right now. What’s their alternative, booting the person who has the summon ability?

As annoying as it can be to be the summon provider (as we are currently), I’ll gladly accept the responsibility to help the entire group assemble that much more quickly.

It’s kind of analogous to the old days when you would pester a mage to conjure food and water for you. They could always just ignore you, and you could always buy food/water yourself. But it was in everyone’s best interest for conjuring food to be as easy for the mage as possible (we got refreshment tables!), while being a nice utility and class fantasy aspect of being a mage.

3 Likes
8

I can’t imagine it will work. Even Gul’dan could not open the portal to azeroth by himself. He needed alot of victims to do it. It takes alot of energy to summon people which is why it takes so many people to open the gate.

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At least reduced to just needing the warlock and one other. The devs have consistently change things for other classes due to modernizations.

Do the same for all classes not just some and not others.

2 Likes
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Lore-wise, there might be some inconsistencies already in the game when it comes to teleportation. Player mages can open portals to Shattrath (another world), Stormshield/Warspear (both another world AND another timeline), and Oribos (the airport of the afterlife) whenever they feel like it.

It could be that Gul’dan was concerned he’d only be able to summon four of his favorite orcs to Azeroth before having to form another group. Or maybe he knew that he’d run out of soul shards well before he could summon all of the invaders.

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Warlocks are not mages. Their magic is fueled by god knows what. Our magic is fueled by life. And our magic is far more dangerous if it goes wrong.

It would make far more sense if when we start turning on the TV that it kills everyone within 50 yards of the warlock to fuel the summoning portal.

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True, but if no one joins in then it’s not on us that they don’t get the summon, as such you generally don’t get bombarded with whispers.
Personally, I’d settle for just needing one other to summon, especially when it comes to LFR.

To be fair, this was no more of an expectation than us providing Healthstones is now.

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Unfortunately a lot of players feel entitled to a warlock summon. If you could summon people directly, the non stop requests and expectation to summon anyone who wants it would be insane.

It’s already bad enough getting whispers of “summon plz, you’ll have to find the rest of the party to click kthx”.

1 Like
14

The problem is warlocks keep giving into people’s demands in groups. If we stop doing it for people except when we want to then they will stop demanding it. just like when people demand in groups that we soul stone the person they want us to. No they are not in charge of soul stone distribution. As a warlock we will decide who and when someone gets a soul stone.

We are evil warlocks. It is time we stop letting the masses push us around.

2 Likes
15

Warlock gateway already gets us up and through placed others can’t go by themselves. (Heck I climbed trees in Kortia, bypassing puzzles)

But 2 person to drop closet would be QoL

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If you want easier magic I recommend playing a mage.

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It’s also been nearly 10 years that we’ve had Thal’keil with us who could perform the ritual by himself. Surely we would’ve learned how by now

2 Likes
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i mean you and two friends can use invis pots…

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Should be able to summon the stone on our own, but still require another person to click the portal.

Shouldn’t be locked to those in the group though, anyone should be able to click.

2 Likes
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That’s already the expectation lol, but then we also have to beg two other people to click / wait on them to arrive.

Seres makes a good point, but easily fixed. Make it 1-man summon outside of instances, leave it as 3 inside.

1 Like