With the 0.5 slowly approaching I thought it would be a good time to bring up our class tree and how clunky and restrictive our tree is. Looking at the recent and upcoming overhauls the Monk tree and Paladin tree have/will be getting, it can be a little frustrating to see our class be neglected, especially after the “rework” we got over the summer. These aforementioned trees have great talent design and offer a lot more flexibility in comparison to the single floater point our Warlock tree can afford.
Notable and most pressing issues with our tree
Excessive 2 point gates
One of my biggest gripes with our trees is the 3 obnoxious gates made up of 8 two point talent nodes. 6 of these are essentially mandatory and eat up so many talent points that we can never afford to consider options such as banish or resolute barrier.
Soul Conduit feels horrible as a capstone
At a barely noticeable 5% proc chance, Soul Conduit feels awful as a capstone, especially with the proc rate getting halved going into TWW
What makes the Monk and Paladin trees good
Minimal throughput nodes
Minimal/Nonexistant 2 point nodes
Throughput nodes/talents are in the center of the tree, not in the bottom of the tree
Multiple utility options
The lock tree remarkably carries none of these traits. Are 4 nodes (6 points) worth of generic % damage buffs necessary? Is Soul Conduit, as it is now, capstone worthy?
I don’t think so.
I feel like there is a lot of untapped potential for more interesting capstones and utility.
Add support talents for Gateway, such as increased range or a shorter cooldown between uses.
Expand on the utility of Banish or Fear
Rework Dark Soul/Grimoire of Supremacy into a shared ability to center throughput nodes in the class tree around, similar to Hunter’s Explosive shot
Our class tree feels like it got left in 10.0, it desperately needs an overhaul
Soul Conduit is fine as a capstone, though allowing it to make Soulstone instant would be an improvement.
Banish was always fairly niche as an ability, being more of a PvP ability than anything else, so there’s not a lot they can do with it.
With Fear, they already have an option to make your target tremble in place. The only other thing they could really do is have the target become so feared that they berserk attack anyone standing next to them (though that may be overpowered).
Shorter cooldowns with Gateway would be a great improvement, along with buffing Fiendish Strides damage debuff to 30%.
Talent’s like Socrethar’s Guile 2/2 which increases Immolate damage and others like it need to go (or at the least be a 1 point node). Players don’t pick them because they like how they play or think they are cool, you take them because they are a flat damage increase, there is not choice there. You take them because they are too good not to take or to get enough points in the tree to unlock the next row.
Same with Sargerei Technique 2/2. If it must exist (possibly for balance and tuning purposes) drop it to one point I can’t imagine a warlock ever only putting one point into it or Socrethar’s Guile, that would give you a couple of extra points to pick up some of the 1 point utility talents like Shadowfury, banish, or teachings of the black harvest.
I really don’t like flat damage increase talents, and every class still has them.
Oh, I actually did that this expac for one really specific Delves build I made back when the damage was being constantly tune and my demon felt squishy. Took out a few points in flat damage to take Demonic Resilience and still keep Soul Burn and Demonic Healthstones! Admittedly, I felt it was a matter of life or death, but it still happened!
That being said, I wouldn’t mind seeing an out of combat channel that lets you quickly get 5 soul shards, or five imps if demo, between packs or prepull. I think it would make a large difference in openers.
I totally agree that Warlock tree needs a rework. I decided to try Ret Paladin for the funsies and it’s not even CLOSE. Every talent point matters and still It’s pretty easy to choose from, gives you a lot of liberty. Also they have so many good active skills there, Divine Toll and Avenging Wrath being in the CLASS tree makes the SPEC tree a LOT better to understand and feels like you’re not throwing points away.
Gate should be baseline, Curses should be baseline and Amplify Curse should be more pickable. Sargerei and Socrethar’s should be 1 point each so you could chose between spending additional points in Resolute Barrier or Demonic resilience.
Get rid of Abyss Walker, Lifeblood, Teachings of the Satyr and (arguably) Teachings of the Black Harvest. They’re very underwhelming and are clearly there just to say there’s nodes to choose from. Replace Teachings of Black Harvest or redesign it to actually be better, many demons could use an upgrade and this was the talent to do that.
Yeah alot of the talents in the warlock tree are def used as gatekeeping…
Black harvest is useless. I’m sorry but a a talent that enhanced pets most useless skills is useless. That talent itself should be change to supremacy giving demons new skills.
Not this will make felguard rush having 5 secs less CD and more range lol. Or the other pets that don’t get any use whatsoever. Even demon resiliency…
And just like someone said when you go into monk or pallies general tree there’s a huge difference on the points usage and power. Which is really odd…
Also soul conduit is terrible for all lock specs as a capstone. That is not a capstone ability. It wasn’t an ability most lock wanted back in earlier expansion but with our point usage is like taking the that eye talent we had. “It’s something” feeling shouldn’t be a capstone talent pick. Capstone talents should give you the feeling you’re picking something amazing.
To be fair, Soul Conduit makes a real difference when you need to heal your pet. Though, having said that, at least in Delves, you really don’t need to ‘emergency heal’ your pet too often (not with Brann in healer-mode).
I agree, Black Harvest could do with a rework. Perhaps remove the Felguard’s Pursuit cooldown altogether, have the VW’s Shadow Bulwark generate a burst of threat, have the Imp’s Singe Magic turn him into a “beacon” that absorbs direct magic attacks until he’s destroyed.
Not sure about the other two.
Does Soul Conduit really help? I suppose the extra leftover soul shard would be available for a Soul Burn: Health Funnel. Or where you thinking of Soul Burn? Tbf, half our talents seem to have Soul in the name.
I was wondering why you kept saying soul conduit.
Kept thinking where is this pet heals he’s referring to. Good to know you ment soul burn. Which soul burn is fine as a capstone due to its usage applicable to many different situations.
But soul conduit that talent’s proc chance is pretty garbage for a capstone talent. Hahha the reduced cast times on soul shards/headstones should be baseline already. Or what they should have done is added soul shard use into soul burn but nope they needed to be complicated and make it a talent.
Anyways I have a feeling those talents for reduced cast times for headstones or the resurrect soul shard have to be baseline at some points. Black harvester will most likely be removed too since pets useless abilities reduced CD is pretty troll for a class talent tree design point. When supremacy exist in the past.
Yeah, looking at our class tree compared to others, it’s clear it needs some help. Sure, theres some nice things in there here and there, but overall it just seems very underwhelming. A lot of dead nodes, too many 2 point nodes. Sad thing is, as of right now, there’s hardly any lock changes in the big anniversary patch compared to others, and it comes out in a couple of weeks.
Same could be said Abyss Walker too, its so negligible and feels somewhat counter-intuitive. I’m using Demonic Circle to get out of fire, the extra tiny bit of DR is often useless.
And looking at the tree I forgot about the Mortal Coil vs Howl of Terror choice node . . .
When will you ever pick HoT over MC? Why did they feel the need to deny Diabloist a choice node by making a talent that requires us to talent into HoT . . .
The weird thing is if the hero talents don’t work on all content is a badly design talent and I mean talents that work in pve but not pvp. Gotefiend resolve has 0 use in pvp.
Why is it even in there??? This reminds me of the talent affliction lock only used for pvp in the general tree.
If some random players can see this the moment they look at this. How do professionals that have 6+ yrs experience not see an issue with abilities that only have use in only one type of content in any of the trees.
I take that back, professionals don’t design things in the this way.
Similarly with how they went and decided to reduced core procs but just fail at addressing any of the talents that were part of that design. They needed to be told by others that this is going to affect said talents. Which let’s face it the devs just outright decided to ignore it.
Even though I hate the talent if you’re going to keep umbra braze in that slot, the least you devs could do is up is rng proc chance on hog back to 30% and while you’re at it get the proc for isntant deeadstalkers to 20%.
You decided to design a hard caster and then give it some really strange low percentage on rng with poor damage.
Annoying as all you devs design a hard caster and then proceed to give it non of the benefits.
Warlock Class, most of its specs, and even the Hero Talents themselves all feel like they suffer from designers who lack a creative vision for the class.
With Monk and Paladin, in particular (as well as DK), I genuinely feel like the designers behind them have inspiration - a fun, clear vision of several different ways the class can play, expanded upon in their Hero Talents.
Warlocks, it feels like they just took our old school abilities and had no other ideas - so they just made them worse baseline and made us pay talent points to get them back to what they were, then had some of the most unimaginative capstones possible.
And the Hero Talents… I mean, what can you say? They basically just made Afflcition, Demonology & Destruction into Hero Talents, crossed out their names, and wrote Soul Harvester, Diabloist and Hellcaller in their place - and none of them add any difference to the playstyle outside of a couple of mechanics tweeks - like you wanna be at 2 soul shards before Soul Rot for Soul Harvester, and you may occasionally want to hold off procing Diabloist stuff if you know in a few seconds it would be better… but that’s basically it.
Lol hahaha yeah they literally took about 4 of our talents and made them points in the hero tree.
Demo’s bloodbound imps, the one where hog guldan does damage per soul shard and the two where when you use your port or hearthstone is as if using macro soul burn, had me “but I already have this, why are you giving me a fake talent”. Lol
Where’s my when I use this defensive it actives the other at reduce effectiveness, or my pets now have new utility abilities on me at random times, or you now have two charges of this, or you use this it reduces the CD of the other, this ability is now useable on the move. Or when you use this your physical reduction is increased…gateway now 2 charges idk instead of the garbage of attaching our heal overtime to a 3min CD or that weird leech shield buff. Junk… Several specs got almost added new defensives/mobility and all we got is here you can the use same ability you had last expansion except now it doesn’t cost a soul shard. !!!
On another why is our bug defensive still a 3 min cd. Like why??? Is not an immune and dk had theirs reduce to 2 min.
I think if the devs wanted to go down that route all 3 specs would need some button pruning, or at least Aff and Demo do.
Maybe reworking Dark soul to be an additional effect added to each specs’ big demon cd, somewhat similar to how Avenging Wrath or Berserk function for Pallies and Druids, could work out better?
Or reworking Grimoire of Supremacy to summon a Doomguard/Infernal in addition to our normal summons would work? This could mesh with Demo’s Felguard dependency + give Grimoire of Sacrifice access to the Doomguard/Infernal’s command ability (I might have the name wrong here).
