There isn’t a single Warlock in the +15 groups on io .
Even in mid-high level groups, such as +10 to +12 Mythic Plus, Warlocks are very rare. Currently, Warlocks rank in the lower-middle or even bottom tier in terms of both tanky and damage. Initially, I thought this was just a case of poor balancing or a design mistake, but when I saw that Warlocks are being further nerfed in 11.0.5, it became clear that the developers are indeed aware of the class’s power level.
This leads me to believe that the low population of Warlocks is intentional on Blizzard’s part. I’m just wondering what the developers envision for Warlocks because it’s evident that, despite no group wanting to bring a Warlock, this situation still isn’t significant enough for the developers to buff it.
We don’t bring much to high-level keys. Our interrupt is mediocre at best. Our one stop (shadowfury) is also mediocre (cast time, not a short cd). We can’t dispel things unless we sacrifice our interrupt. We don’t have any immunity and our defensives are limited. Three other (generally better) classes have combat rez. To make up for that, we would have to do massive damage, and we simply don’t.
It’s not, and I never said it is. But it does reflect how weak and uncompetitive Warlock is right now. When it comes to class issues, there ISN’T a single scenario that is relevant to 99% of the players. If you are only doing low-level keys just for fun, class performance doesn’t matter to you (if you don’t care about timing your key), and I respect that. But what I’m discussing here is class performance, and the performance in mid-high and high-level key IS one of the ways to demonstrate class strengths and weaknesses. Also, the two activities in the game that are most affected by class tuning are raids and M+, most class changes are also based on their performance in these two activities. All I’m saying is that Warlocks are currently GARBAGE in these activities, to the point where they don’t even deserve to participate in one of them at a deep level, yet the developers are still nerfing the class.
BTW when I say “don’t deserve to participate”, I mean “nobody wants warlocks in their team”, in case you want to split hairs with your “99%” theory. Because in this game, you can’t do M+ alone. When you want to participate in an activity where class performance is important, and your class is very weak, it’s normal for no one to want to take you along.
If it indeed comes out some where that some of the developers have some weird bias toward the classes they have to manage.I’ll be pretty much done with this game.
Hopefully it isn’t true that a developer that was mainly designing mage is also designing warlock because there’s no way they can be designing mages as currently and then try to heavily push locks into what their pushing into.
One of the few reasons for me. Is the whole thing for demo since DF where they kept reducing our core procs while also ignoring the talents that were dependent on those procs. The removal of talents from the spec trees just to add them to the hero trees.
The fact they left grim feast in the class tree for the entirety of DF even though it was only useable for affliction in pvp or the that they also did it for doom as well where it wasn’t being used in pve at all.
And the worst one where every warlock player/include content creator we’re saying to not force demo into a a shadowbolt/heavy caster and they did exactly that which was a huge head scratcher. But we all saw the lead into it when they kept buffing shadowbolt almost every patch.
Umbral braze is just sitting there as a throw away point since that ability doesn’t do much damage with its procs worth a point but because they gated it to lock the hog talent is just hilarious. Just makes me feel like it was on purpose, they knew almost all demos disliked that talent which is a single target ability with a terrible proc rate and decided to put it as a prerequisite for an AOE talent ??? with all the feedback against it.
Also it looks like there also planning something not good for destro.
I have bad news for you then… It’s clear: Mages and Paladins will always get more love than any other class in the game, Hunters are just a bit behind em. As for this xpac they clearly lean towards Shamans, any spec is overperforming and getting reworked/buffed and even VFX updates.
DK’s are also their fav this xpac while both dps Warr, Feral druid and Devastation is getting the big L. Rest is fine-ish. (but BM hunter, but it’s getting reworked as always)
But indeed Blizzard clearly have a favoritism. God forbid Paladin not being an S pick with his stupid amount of utility and dps/tank/heal. Every single xpac a Mage spec either gets a rework and it’s OP af or they get a stupidly strong tier/ talent that makes them good. Even specs have favoritism, look how often they change Destro to push the Chaos Bolt spam while Demo and Aff rotted for years. This is like, the first time since Legion that Aff wasn’t the bottom of M+ tier list, at leas Demo got it’s time in DF.
Because community perception rules this game. Most players see success at the top = to success at the bottom. So this makes pugging hard, most certainly.
They don’t even care. They don’t read this forum. It would be better for them to just remove warlocks from the game. At this point, after playing the same class/spec for 12 years, I honestly hope they completely delete warlocks. It would be a relief to finally stop struggling with a spec they clearly don’t want us to play with in the last 4 expansions.