Gate and demonic circle are stupid and need to be updated to something I don’t have to click twice or have multiple buttons for. They suck and are extremely clunky. Only having movement when I setup before hand is trash and just is completely outdated in the high mobility meta we have now.
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Part of being a caster in general is knowing how to pre-position and set yourself up for success. When utilized correctly, they’re both very powerful spells. Circle usage alone can make or break a fight verse Melee.
While I disagree that Gate/Demonic Circle are stupid (they really really aren’t)… some of the fights this expac are designed by Devs who clearly forgot half the classes in the game cannot do damage while moving for very long…
… there is no “pre-positioning” yourself in H Queen Ansorek. You stay with the group and spend half the fight moving and scoring in the bottom half of the damage along with the rest of the casters, and that’s all there is to it. It does feel like crap.
Movement has always been an issue for us but that’s to be the expected trade off. We’re heavy hitters that depend on long-casting spells that hit big at the cost of movement. If we had hard hitting attacks and movement, the other classes would have a total hissy fit over how OP we are, on top of our already existing high rate of survivability and utilities.
There have been multiple instances where I’d find myself still alive and in one piece but those who have more free reign of movement are dead at my feet.
Not sure why you posted this thread on a warrior, though.
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Fixed. 
But yes, I accept the fact we have very little mobility and what little we have, all of it does require that pre-planning… but we definitely have our moments on fights where we can sit still and cleave.
Indeed. Being a warlock requires you to be two steps ahead of a fight. You need to stay on your toes at all times and because of that long-distance range for casting on top of our survivability, our reaction times are far wider than other classes.
Yes, our Survivability is amazing - it does not get enough celebration. Every single wipe, I’m always 3rd damage behind the tanks in my raid and it’s because mechanics that kill everyone else… just don’t kill me, and I can instantly recover basically my entire healthbar every minute, so if I know an attack would not kill me, I’ll sit there and eat it to get off another Chaos Bolt, go down to 10%, then just Soulburn + Healthstone back to full.
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PREACH! I’ve felt the same way, especially in the sdvent of Nerub’ar Palace. Burning Rush could be better or changed to something else entirely. I hate having to drain my health pool for a speed boost.
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This thread is an interesting microcosm of the vast gulf of opinions between high-end mythic raiders and everyone else.
0.1% opinion, can disregard if you don't care
Warlock is average for survivability, bottom tier for movement (minus destruction which has largely “fake” movement through shadowburn), and is below average for all three specs for dps throughput. This really was an extremely poor tier for warlock in general for mythic raiders.
This is all coming to a head in 11.0.5 which sees every top spec atm being massively buffed (see arcane getting a 8-15% throughput buff, enhance shamans simming anywhere from 30-45% more than warlock in single target, and frost dk getting a nearly 10% buff).
We’re going to need serious tuning, not to mention the entire game, after next week.
An example of a differing opinion is from this comment:
Take princess on mythic and put this quote in context. Nearly every targeted mechanic on this fight hits you for 75-80% of your healthbar. If you get targeted with two queensbanes back to back, your healthstone is nearly irrelevant. Part of the reason why warlock gets holy paladin beacon of light on this boss is because we don’t stack versatility (like so many melee atm) and we have extreme mobility short comings through burning rush. Our passive DR is also neutered from blizzard hitting the largest self healing nerf to any class during beta through the nerfs to soul leech. Ironically enough, this fight we became the worst caster dps through our survivability as well as our mobility. This is also shown through our extremely weak dps metrics on the fight as well. Anti-Magic Shell (AMS) is just a much, much better version of dark pact that allows dk’s to completely immune multiple important mechanics in raid + mythic+ while somehow having more absorb value than dark pact, without any of the negatives – Insanity.
If you’re interested in survivability stats and metrics see here:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/38#metric=deaths&dataset=50
Warlock is almost dead on average at the moment for survivability, while also being one of the few classes that has the highest EHRPS (healing actually needed to be put into the player) in stats.
This has two rammifications for warlock:
- Our weakness of mobility that is a requirement for most group content does not supersede our ability to live or rely less on other players, namely healers, to keep up with in raid. Death knight is the class that is by far overtuned in the EHRPS + defensives compared to every spec in the game, and has also removed it’s constraint of slow movement through the absurd value of death’s advance, and horse as Rider of the Apocalypse. If warlock is to continue to be a reactive movement class, this is something that should be looked at, since not only should we not be average here, but we should be competing with death knights who have a very similar fantasy to us (slow, tanky dps).
- The assumption being made here is that a warlock, if they are able to stand still and continue to dps, will end up near the top dps throughput. This is just completely false at the moment for nearly every type of content. Only in situtations with large to extreme variances in skill (which I will say is the vast majority of players) will there be outliers that can use their anecdotal experience to say that warlock is doing well-enough. In nearly all circumstances at the moment, all three warlock specs range from below average, to close to the worst spec if played optimally.
I’ve been stating through the entire beta process and my more recent feedback posts that there’s a big shift between how blizzard sees warlock class fantasy, which was stated to be a tanky juggernaut caster, and how the playerbase sees the shift in combat design; combat design is severely outpacing the ability of class designers to keep up with the shifts in movement-to-defensive ratios, especially with the nonsense that was the healer rebalance during beta. Warlock has been left behind, and has suffered since 10.1.5 from poorly thought-out short-term talent redesigns that will have to be changed shortly.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a complete overhaul of our general tree, and redesigns of some of the key talents from all three specs in the near future.
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The problem is that this isn’t really viable now due to the sheer amount of movement required. And it’s constant. Warlocks haven’t been given the same tools as other casters, and our survivability and tankiness keeps being reduced to the point glass canon mages are/were tankier. Thankfully this has been pulled back again in TWW (it’s whiplash ping pong being a warlock) and we’re starting to be tankier again… without enough damage or mobility. And we’re still often not as survivable as others.
Gateway doesn’t seem to be particularly useful anymore (and requires interrupting your DPS rotation to hard cast if you need to place it mid combat).
Circle I still find quite useful providing you are psychic or have done the fights before so know where it needs to go.
Burning thrush is still great, but unfortunately it does even more damage to you now than ever. Still rely on it heavily though.
But it really isn’t. It’s objectively terrible atm (outside of levelling and world content with a pet).
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Agreed, not sure what people are thinking when saying locks are a tanky class.
This is also apparent in pvp with warlocks having THE highest death rates for all 3 specs out of any class in arenas.
There seems to be a large gap between players’ understanding of what is actually tanky , maybe it’s the difference in content difficulty but in general it seems like the devs either don’t really care about the state of the class or they are going off of the average player opinion , both seem a bit farfetched but how else would we justify this state?
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The guy who designs warlock designs mage, and has done so since BFA.
He was assigned warlock after the previous warlock designer got fired/left.
That should explain everything.
He actively resents us and sees us as an afterthought.
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They see us as tanky because our entire shtick is our survivability and they can’t kill us in a single dps rotation if we stand still unlike mages who have a ton of escape. It’s just warrior qq that they have to use more than 2 neurons (2 more than they possess).
Our survivability has been getting slowly crept away and the guy who designs mages wants mage to counter everything and just kinda sees warlocks as something he occasionally remembers exists.
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