Warlock Class Tree Is Underwhelming

In Development The War Within Patch 11.1.5 PTR
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I writhe this to express my belief that the Warlock Class Tree is fundamentally underwhelming.

The Good of the Class Tree

Before i start talking about the issues i have with the class tree i feel like i need to sing some praise on the things it does well, in the sense that it is home to some very incredible talents.

  • Soulburn being brought back is one of the greatest things to happen to warlock since Mists of Pandaria, this “Batman Belt” Talent is flavorfull, userfull, thematic and impactfull.
  • Demonic Healthstones are also an Amazing Trait, worth of its position as a Capstone.
  • Burning Rush is an amazing ability, even after the nerf to Fiendish Strife it proves to be a key-spell for the warlock, and it’s position reflect this.
  • Demonic Tactic is a smart way of leading warlocks towards a certain stat and potentially fix certain secondary stat imbalances.
  • The Choice nodes associated with the defensives are relevant and userfull with the choice depending on what content and encounter.

The Bad of the Class Tree

  • Too many talents are spent on Damage increasing talents who don’t do much beyond just increasing the damage of a spell or another by X%, this makes the talent tree very sterille in terms of choice besides 1 or 2 points.
  • Soul Conduit is incredibly hard to react or predict, i also don’t think its an effect who reflects or rivals Soulburn/Demonic Healthstone as “Capstone material”.
  • Spells like Teaching of the Black Harvest and Demonic Resilience aren’t meaningfull enough to be ever considered a choice.
  • Resolute Barrier does not seems to trigger from all forms of damage events, this seems to be a bug related to the damage type.
  • Fel Synergy isn’t strong enough to stand on its own as talent, only existing to give cheap acess to Capstones.
  • Many Talent’s ask of you to invest 2 points but they carry fairly low values or even impact.
  • Some Talents are too Niche that can spent entire seassons without ever being relevant.

The Role of the pet Utility

Pet utility have been used in the past as a way to create distinction between each pet for the warlocks to utilize, but for this sake warlocks have suffered with a struggle that not many other specs have.

  • Demonology is limited to Felguard, denying the possibility of having Imp Dispel, Felhunter Interrupt who won’t freeze a target in place, or Felhunter ability to purge debuffs.
    • In Contrast, Marksmanship Hunters who had similar issue as they did not desire to use a pet and due to that got denied utility exclusively tied to pets now had this issue fixed.
    • Other specs have acess to their interrupt, purge and other forms of relevant effects without ever being blocked by a specific pet or a 6 seconds cast time/3min CD.
  • This issue is also relevant towards Affliction and Destruction as while they may wield Imp, Felhunter, Succubus or Voidwalker they may only acess one utility at a time.
    • Compare this to classes who can Interrupt, but can also dispell, or Decurse, or Purge, all without being limited/needing to choose or or the other.

Another issue is that as M+ evolved it’s affixes more than once Blizzard have introduced mechanics who truly force the use of those utilities together, meanwhile.

  • Imp Dispells have been nerfed since BFA to only be able to dispell 1 single stack of a magical effect.
  • There have been seassons with affixes who forced non magical dispells that warlock as a class simply couldn’t deal with.

What is a Capstone?

When i think about capstones i think about meaningfull effects, drastic changes towards the functionality of a spell.

This is true for both Demonic Healthstones and Soulburn, but it isn’t about Soul Conduit, even as an actual damage increasing effect Soul Conduit is bland, sterille, boring.

I would rather have all 3 capstones being relevant forms of utilities than having something like Soul Conduit, specially when we have some bugs associated with it that are rather annoying.

How much Niche is too much Niche?

Currently Banish have a powerfull use in the M+ Scenario, it’s a good crowd control tool at Motherload 2nd boss, and it’s always very powerfull when you can use it at relevant targets.

But at the same time, it’s a spell who is only pick’d once in a bluemoon, i don’t remember have ever used it during S1 of TWW and a similar story repeats itself on Dragonflight.

Teachings of the Black Harvest is also a talent who is overly niche, maybe even more as i have never seen a use for any of its effects, specially when 1/3rd of the specs are locked out of the majority of those.

Its a shame because i rly like the core idea of that talent, i just dislike the execution of it.

Conclusion

All i ask is some consideration in regards to the topics approached here i could go on with a wish-list but i believe whoever reads this is already aware of possible desires and wants.

I have no doubt, the people who came up with Diabolic Healthstones and Soulburn can truly do some banger changes to the Class Tree.

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Agree with everything on this list.

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I’d like to add a few more things to this list:

  • resolute barrier is basically dead, dark accord is also too weak to ever be taken. Removing the prior and buffing dark accord to a 2 min reduction on our 25% wall wouldn’t be stronger than any other class’ 1 min walls but much better qol for swapping based on need.

  • hellcaller specific: illhoof’s design is also never used in any endgame , no one wants to pick an out of combat buffer that nerfs survivability in general. We want in combat mitigation. Maybe rework it to grants bonus % to soul link/ sac hp would work wonders.

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It’s important to understand that Warlocks don’t have only walls, you also have 15% increased hp and a few passive mitigation effects/shields.

So giving stronger active defensives could be a bit too much, remembering that in DF they had to reduce our defensiveness strength on beta already because we could acess so many of those already.

Dark Accord is fairly userfull in fights who want Unending Resolve more times, you can see this in fights like Nexu’s Princess Ky’veza who intermission phase starts around every 2 minutes.

Resolute Barrier is basically bugged and only triggers from physical damage sources while most damage types you take as a dps are magical or enviromental otherwise it could be a good talent.

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A lot of words to make it sound as if the talents in question aren’t bad. Not sure what angle you’re pushing but a 45s reduction in a 3mins/25% dr is poor at best.

This might not seem like an issue in raids but it definitely is noticeable in pvp. Even with resolute and accord vs consistent physical damage that procs it on cd ( rarely happens outside of pvp) it is still a 1.5 min 25% dr, far weaker than any other short wall cd.

I don’t think having other tools warrants talents being bad/never picked, it’s supposed to be a tradeoff between two equally good options, justifying otherwise due to an extremely niche case in a single endgame difficulty mode doesn’t warrant nor disregard the initial point. The class tree needs a rework period.

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Here is the issue, you are comparing skills between different classes, but they are fundamentally different.

Yeah you walls are only a 1min CD and a 3min CD as a warlock, but you also enjoy Increase Health, Soul Link, Soul Leech, Fel Armor, Healthstone with Soulburn for increased HP.

So just comparing Wall from class A vs Class B will inherently ignore all that.

As for the upgrades, i do think the UR upgrades are an interesting choice as they give you the option between an Stronger UR vs a Shorter UR, maybe they could be a bit stronger (like being -60s instead of 45s for a nice round 2minutes).

But its a node who i don’t think match any of the issues i raised here.

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I’m just looking at it from the lens of a top pvper, i know it might seem like it’s unnecessary for raids but how is it ok having a talent option that is never picked? Or a tree branch designed around a system which was removed for our class offensively ( talking about the old tyrant talent which was an rng cdr , forgot it’s name). It’s basically the same thing, if the devs admitted it wasn’t a good system having rng cdr why keep it defensively?

As for looking at class toolkits, it’s a standard thing to do in pvp , which i’d say is a magnifiying lens when it comes to true defensive capablities for each class. Not trying to sound rude or anything but the damage pvers experience in 90% of content difficulty is trivial at best. Queue a shuffle if u don’t believe me and see.

With dampening, most of our kit is substantially weaker than at sustain compared to other endgame activities. Sometimes we wish we could opt out of a big wall for shorter interval weaker walls against specs that do extremely high consistent dps ( again a factor of class comparison ) but our alternative short interval mitigation cd is too high to function properly, which is why i mentioned it.

Though to be fair, my issue with your reply isn’t the difference between our endgame perspectives but rather the instantaneous rejection of class improvement when it does not affect the class in any way, this behavior seems to me like a detriment to class improvement, often associated with players who wish to keep things disfunctional for their own persona satisfaction. Which to me, is a substantial indicator of egoism, to keep it civil.

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Grand Warlock Design, and the effect wasn’t RNG, each shard spent would reduce the duration of cooldown by a fixed amount.

It was, on the other hand, uptime dependent meaning at fights who forced downtime you would see cooldown desyncronizations who the playerbase had a significant distaste.

Eventually it became a flat reduction just like Dark Accord, and now they just choose to incorporate it as baseline as people demanded it hard enough, well except aff who stayed with 2min Darkglare.

So i wouldn’t say its the same thing.

Wouldn’t that just mean instead of a baseline version of Dark Accord you want a stronger version of it? after all that is what you have opt out of big wall (40%) in favor of a quicker smaller wall (25%), the CDR is just not relevant enough for you.

As for dampening, isn’t the exact objective of this to force shorter matches? wouldn’t more frequent and bigger walls in part going against this idea.

Feel free to think whatever of me.

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Not sure what you mean by this, i simply want an equally strong option to our 40% wall, not asking for baseline changes.

As for GWD , it functions similarly to resolute barrier, instead of soul shards the metric is damage taken, not the most reliable form of cdr imo.

Anyway, i’m not here to argue semantics, there’s a plethora of issue with the class tree. Do you think warlock is perfect the way it currently is or is there something you would like to see changed?

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Now, if i would think this i wouldn’t be making this thread would i ?

As for resoute barrier, its currently bugged it don’t reduce duration from most sources of damage, maybe only physical damage even.

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I mean can the devs at the minimum address the two pointers in the class tree and the one that have seen 0 use since Dragon Flight.

Surely we can all agree that talents like accrued vitality/life blood/shadow flame/teaching of the black harvest/demonic resiliency/resolute barrier/dark accord must get redone no ifs. These talents haven’t gotten any touchup since they were introduced last expansion and they are useless, most of these see 0 pick. Black harvest is there literally to waste a point.

Banish should be baseline.

There’s already been plenty said about soul conduit so no point in going there.

Just some advice devs just bake in the damage throughput socretars guile/sargerie technique nodes the ones in the lower end already (not the crit one) and don’t put damage nodes like that in the future or change them w.e it is don’t put damage nodes like that in the class tree.

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