There’s a fair bit of animosity swirling around the forum since the drop of the Alpha build. Change is something people tend to handle fairly poorly. It happens with every expansion. Some like a new direction while others hate it. Everyone has their own idea of how a spec should flow and what parts of it are important or not. I hope we can consolidate our concerns, spotlight the good, and offer alternatives in hopes of having things change before they’re more set in stone. I’ll start with a set of likes and dislikes for each tree and hopefully from there we can have a more contructive, less sky is falling, conversation around the changes.
CLASS Likes
AoE curses
Impending Catastrophe esque ability (concerns with redundancy though)
No throughput talents.
Dislikes
Capstones still lacking anything to feel good about.
Shadow Trance not enabling movement while casting MG and DS
Agony stacking mechanic should lead to something other than just more damage.
DEMONOLOGY Likes
Eye of Guldan
Implosion having a clear purpose
Dreadstalker and Vilefiend consolidation
Dislikes
Fel Guard as a talent point
Lack of a strong 2 minute CD
A single target alternative to Implosion. Modified Thal’kiel’s Consumption comes to mind.
DESTRUCTION Likes
3 Conflag charges and spreading Immolate
Sargeras space lasers
New Rain of Fire talents
Dislikes
Too many points dedicated to Shadowburn
Soul Fire, Rifts, and Demonfire all feel sidelined (Almost literally)
Bottom 3rd of tree feels messy
My big ticket wish outside of these is Kil’Jaeden’s Cunning making it to the class tree and Decimating Bolt showing up somewhere in the class at all. I just love that visual man.
I really do hope that people put as much pressure as possible on Blizzard regarding Kil’jaeden’s Cunning.
There is absolutely no reason why Warlocks shouldn’t be able to move while casting spells like Incinerate and Shadow Bolt, especially in a game where melee classes have insane gap closers and pseudo-casters like Elemental, Balance, or Marksmanship are doing astronomical damage without casting.
The lack of mobility makes Warlock gameplay unfun and is a big reason why it’s one of the least represented classes in the game.
For PvP specifically, if Warlock mobility isn’t addressed, then the Conflagrate root needs to return as a PvP talent, just like we had in Legion and BfA.
Agreed. I love Warlock and generally love it in PVP but it has become so mind-numbingly unenjoyable to play against melee at this point. Can you win and achieve a very high rating? Sure, if you’re a really great Warlock (especially as Demo… dear lord don’t even get me started) but for most of us, idk. I hit 2K and decided it’s not for me at this very moment. Gate and port are just not enough, even while spamming COE and being a Void Elf and every other crutch possible, melee can just stick you all game and drain your team’s defensives while nullifying your damage output with zero punishment essentially.
We should be able to cast Infernal Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Ruination, Incinerate, etc. on the move. Why is that an issue for us to have, but not specs like Arcane?
Affliction has enough rot damage to not need this, and is having ironically some decent overhauls in the Alpha (outside of all the terrible changes for Demo and Destro). A lot of the damage is being rolled into your DoTs, Rapture is gone, etc. so I don’t think it will need any cast on the move. Demo & Destro though? 100%, at least for Demo’s big nukes since it is so immobile, and at least for Destro’s shard builder in Incinerate. Channel Demonfire arguably should be castable on the move as well. I don’t think it would make anything too strong as you would still need to plant your feet for Chaos Bolts which is your kill window. Just some thoughts.
I like to add that having black harvest as a capstone is a major fail.
It doesn’t do anything for that to be occupying a capstone position actually that talent should not be in the class tree with what it currently does.
They need to updated to either like supremacy/Doomguard or something actually worthtwhile of a talent.
Also like to add that I do not like seeing the current expansion tier set as something that should be NEW content for the next expansion. An Apex talent should be APEX not some 2 piece tier set bonus.
Looking at the base Class tree for Warlock… I don’t think I’d have any trouble getting the talents I actually would want from that… should have plenty of points to waste on the blocking nodes, I guess.
I actively loath any spell or talent that burns my own health or kills my own demons to get some sort of “benefit”, and I simply will not use them. Any of them that end up as blocking nodes will just get left off my action bars entirely.
The problem is that after BfA, when Blizzard removed Entrenched in Flame (the Conflagrate root), it didn’t immediately feel like an issue because of the Night Fae Soulshape ability, which was basically mandatory for PvP. This in itself shows how bad the whole Covenant system was. Playing Warlock in PvP without Night Fae was almost pointless.
With Dragonflight, things changed because we lost both Soulshape and the root. Curse of Exhaustion is worthless against modern gap closers, it simply doesn’t do anything.
It’s honestly crazy how awful it feels to play against melee cleaves without this root.
As I said above, I really hope players will pressure Blizzard to either properly address Warlock mobility or at least give us tools to deal with the hyper-mobile melee specs.
Something I did notice is that while the UA dot on alpha reads with stacks seeming like it’s refreshing and rolling the damage of the previous UA into the reapplication. It’s really still just 5 separate UAs on the target. There’s no way of telling when previous UAs are gonna drop.
I feel like giving UA the Devouring Plague treatment would be nice but with UA having a cap of applications I’m not sure how that would work.
Why would AoE tongues or exhaustion be any less impactful for demo or destro? The curse is still slowing or reducing the casting time of all targets hit. I will say though I hope that instead of tongues alone it becomes enfeeblement/satyr and they give hellcaller a new choice node.
Can’t say I’ve seen a single change to demo that I’m actually excited about. I like monitoring each cd cycle and working to maximize them. Losing all of that in favor of a 5 button spec just doesn’t sound appealing at all
If I wanted 5 buttons I’d play BM or some other braindead spec.
That seems to be a common complaint. I do have a few things I like that I detailed in the first post. I realize I’m a minority among the rest of the forum though.
I think adding another short CD ability to hit that has some way to proc to reset the CD and react to would go a long ways. Then having Eye of Guldan be a 2 shard cost instead of a 3 shard cost would smooth out single target quite a bit as well.
There are certainly more things to address but in the current flow of the spec they have going on Alpha I think that would help at least.
We need to get over soul swap. What are we swapping?
An agony that gets spread passively now with shared agony? No.
Corruption that gets added with sew the seeds anyway since it is our main AOE spender too? No.
UA stacks? Our main spender that should be rigid and not swapped once committing because you should be managing shards smartly? No. And if you want UA to hit hard you need to sacrifice the flexibility of hot swapping it when you feel like. It needs to stay committed to its target to justify strong damage. And shard gen is pretty good in TWW so we’re not going to be starved like we were in Legion/BFA.
There just isn’t a use case for soul swap anymore and even if it was back it’d be too expensive and still cost 2 GCDs which is the same time it takes to apply our only 2 dots anyway. There is just no reason for it and I’d rather have tools that let me spread and maintain rather than “swap”.
The damage would still be strong from UA because it’s not copying or spreading damage it’s placing it from one place to another. For priority kill targets. With UAs stacking mechanic it would be more applicable than it was with Rapture.
I’ll take your word for it though that I won’t want it in those situations.
Which comes at a cost. A shard, which is damage lost, and you will need to refresh the dots you took. Just a free, no downside, swap isn’t going to happen.
So you want to dump like 3 shards on a boss to prestack then use 2 GCDs to transfer those reduced dmg dots (because they ticked off on the boss) to another target? Then recast agony and corruption onto the boss?
Instead of just casting 3 UAs on the priority spawn for less GCDs and more damage because you’re not having to refresh the boss?
Again, soul swap just isn’t needed anymore with shared agony, longer agony time, stronger seeds, and UA being a spender. We also have a much higher shard gen overall than in legion/BFA so we don’t have to worry about being starved. You can ideally roll a UA on a boss then 2 UAs on the priority with some MG procs and it’ll die fine.
People also need to make up their mind. When it was UA with bad seeds everyone wanted more flexible options, so MR came to be. Then everyone complained about MR because they wanted dots. Now people are complaining that they want swap back because they don’t want to wait for dot ramp. We are a dot class, ramp is inherent and the skill/joy comes from timing and damaging that ramp.
It wouldn’t need to be the version we had most recently. Could have a simple 20 second CD and to offset the GCD lost damage can be baked into the base spell itself like it had back in Cata. It hit for a fairly strong amount back then as well.
Either way your mind is set and so is mine. I like the thematics, visuals, and feeling of utilizing the spell. While you’re looking at it in another way. I’ll agree to disagree.