Currently the Voidwalker does not recast “Threatening Presence” which is the main taunt and job of the Voidwalker to hold aggro
Please stop ignoring us, this has been going on since the start of BfA, hop on a Dev toon and test it!
The workaround is macro “Threatening Presence” to your skills, but this is bad for raids or dungeons
I personally have filed two bug reports and so far nothing has been done
Threatening Presence is a self-buff which you keep it turn on at all times. (correction: Turn on if you want your pet to tank. Turn it off if you don’t. You can check for the ‘buff’ icon on your pet if threatening presence is on or off)
The actual taunt spell is Suffering.
To be honest, it can be considered as a miracle that voidwalker managed be our reliable pet-tank given the utter lack of proper design.
Realistically speaking - how effective would a tank be at holding aggro if all they can do is:
a, spam a weak aoe and
b, auto attack.
My voidwalker can taunt??? I thought he was just there to look cool. I mean he can’t taunt too good since I always end up with something on me after shooting one chaos bolt at something.
whatever the case is, the voidwalker cannot hold aggro like it did for the last 7 years I played it! something is wrong, it’s broken with everything turned on, it’s broken! bugged!
We just have to get used to the fact that VW’s threat generation isn’t what it used to be. Can’t solo big elites or aoe packs without getting aggro anymore. And it kinda makes sense tbh. Locks got a ton of hp already. If we also had a pet that could hold aggro like a player tank, it would be unfair to other classes.
What you’re doing is settling and making excuses… you as a warlock should never be able to pull aggro from your voidwalker and yet it happens with solo mob, or packs of mobs … it’s broken and needs to be fixed … if I wanted aggro I’d roll mage and if they wanted us to tank as warlocks we’d have a lockdown CD of some type but we don’t
“If we also had a pet that could hold aggro like a player tank, it would be unfair to other classes.”
Are you for real? this is exactly what the voidwalker is for and has been since the start of WoW
What happened was they did some changes to our pets, but it was either rushed or, in lack of a better word, half-assed.
Here’s the changes done to Voidwalker:
[old] Shadow Shield - Encases the Voidwalker in shadow energy, reducing physical damage taken by 60% for 30 sec. Each time the Voidwalker is struck, a blast of Shadow damage is released, dealing x Shadow damage and reducing the power of Shadow Shield by 20%.
10 sec cooldown 60 Energy
[new] Shadow Shield - Encases the Voidwalker in shadow energy, reducing physical damage taken by 40%. Passive
Now the funny thing happen: on paper, it looks to be an improvement to voidwalker. A passive 40% damage reduction that’s always on is indeed an improvement over a 3-charge shield with a cooldown.
The problem is the new change affected threat generation, which ironically Voidwalker still has zero single attack spells other than auto-attack. In other words, voidwalker now has only 2 option to generate threat/aggro, since the ‘free damage’ from Shadow shield is now gone. Like i said earlier:
What they need to do is to give voidwalker a single target attack that is able to generate enough damage/threat.
ps: somehow they also took away Void Reflexes passive (10% extra dodge and parry) from voidwalker, which was previously shared on both voidwalker and felguard. Removing a tanking passive from a tank-only pet, sound absolutely logical.
I think they redid how aggro worked at the beginning of bfa and that caused a problem with our voidwalker not retaining aggro like it should. Which is a massive problem while leveling and in solo content.
It sounds like the reduction of VW threat generation was a side effect and an oversight if anything, not intended by Blizzard.
First of all, let’s agree on the basic concept:
Damage = Threat. No damage = No Threat. Else tanks won’t be needing any attack spells except casting taunt on every cooldown and just auto-attack.
Agree? Great.
Now here’s the problem:
Before BfA - Voidwalker has 3 ways to deal damage:
1, auto-attack,
2, spammable weak aoe and
3, reflective damage from Shadow Shield when it was attacked.
It wasn’t great damage, but all 3 spells formed the basis on how voidwalker generates threat and maintain it. In fact, you can turn off the spammable aoe and voidwalker would still be able to hold aggro, thanks to the reflective damage+auto attack.
After BfA - voidwalker now has only 2 ways to deal damage, because they have changed how Shadow Shield works: they turn the damage reduction passive, but they also removed the reflective damage.
Like i have mentioned on earlier posts: Even if you have a really great threat amplifier, how realistically can you generate and hold aggro when all you can do is auto-attack and spam a weak aoe? Is it surprising that even if you turn off the spammable aoe to avoid pulling the entire area, voidwalker still can’t even hold threat on one target at all since now it has literally no way to deal damage other than the laughably puny auto-attack?
Fairyland, In Legion warlock felt like a god in the fact that even in raids we were extremely hard to kill and the VW in the open world was basically immortal
In BfA it all changed and now warlock (until geared) feels like &^#$% and the VW dies within a few seconds of combat, I don’t even bother to heal it because it’s faster to just save a shard and recast it, which I shouldn’t have to do because those shards should be used for fighting mobs … Blizzard went from one extreme to the other and broke the VW, it without a doubt needs to be looked at!
I also don’t appreciate the fact we needed a glyph to give our VW’s an armor look something we already had and they removed and now from Legion to BfA on my server the damn glyph cost 30k gold! because Blizzard went and %$#@ed up the professions and had to act fast … the current team is killing this game
no, it’s worse than that. warlock is unplayable in an instance solo. cannot hold agro at all. I can right-click and turn on threatening presence and suffering, then /reload, and they are off. I can turn them back on, and then pull a group, and they get turned off in the middle of the fight. It’s completely broken.
Hopefully it will get fixed, but if SL turns into another BfA where warlock pets can’t hold aggro what’s the point of playing this game then?