A trip down memory lane to those interested enough to know the history behind some of the warlock design changes and how it has impacted the class till now.
The original xelnath blog post which includes the full thought process behind why warlocks were changed :
An interesting read but what’s more interesting was the original blog by a player named Cynwise who wrote the most detailed breakdown , theoricrafting and the reasoning why the old warlock design was archaic and needed to be changed.
The link to Cynwise’s full breakdown can be found here:
What’s most interesting about this whole ordeal, if you’re one of the few that ends up reading the full articles of both these links, is that the warlock class is going through a similar case right now.
The class design has reached another state where the pacing of wow 3’s endgame encounter design no longer fits warlock’s current iteration.
Albeit the class representation hasn’t dropped as much as it did back in cataclysm, i fear this is the inevitability that will come to pass should the class mechanics remain the way they are moving forward.
History tends to repeat itself , and we no longer have someone who will step up to tackle the class like we did back then.
I remember when I was leveling my lock during MoP. I was playing on free server before and it was cata. The difference between cata and mop warlock was insane. I remember how boring cata Destro was. It was like I was playing a different game in MoP.
When I think about it the approach Xelnath had was something that every class should experience. Its sad to see that there is nobody who understands warlock class fantasy and its gameplay.
I did enjoy warlock even after MoP and I am still playing Destro as main but tbh I never had the same amount of fun after Xelnath. I would take MoP warlock with big damage nerf over TWW any day.
What I don’t understand are some design decisions :
● Why is Tyrant cast spell
● Why doesn’t warlock have baseline kick
● Why is drain life waste of keybind space
● Why did it take eons to remove combat CD from stone ( still must pick talent )
● Why was Kil’jaeden’s Cunning removed
● Why do I need 2 more ppl for summoning
● Why was Entrenched in Flame removed
● Why is DoT main damage source for Destro
● Why is there 90 sec CD on short distance gateway
● Why was Curse of Elements removed
● Why was Fel Flame removed
● Why was Metamorphosis removed from Demo
● Why is there a cast time on Corruption for Demo
There’s so many why’s that I could go for much longer. I understand that over the years every class went through changes but I feel like warlock lost’s its soul in the meantime.
What was once imo the most unique class in the game both play style and lore wise its now only husk of its former glory. Now before someone jumps at me saying lock has been performing well even after MoP/Xelnath I am not talking about performance. For example BfA destro performed well in the S3 and S4 but it was dull and boring. You had Infernal/Dark Soul up you were S tier once it dropped you played some weird B tier abomination.
If the class performs well it doesn’t mean its fun to play. Maybe for some people who only cares about numbers this is the way to go but imo for most people this isn’t the direction.
Either way Xelnath did an amazing job and I wish that more Xelnath’s would work at Blizzard.
PS: There is one more Why.
● WHY DID YOU REMOVE BURNING EMBERS FROM DESTRUCTION AND REPLACED THEM WITH SOUL SHARDS. IT WORKED THE SAME BUT WAS MUCH MORE FITTING FOR DESTRO THAN SHARDS.
Good reads. The thought that Blizzard would solicit player feedback seems like something in the realm of pure fantasy at the moment.
You don’t even need a ‘secret council’ as Xelnath describes. Many of the suggestions from the warlock community are nearly unanimous. Heck, you could probably send out a free-form box and create a word cloud of most prevalent responses and make the class substantially better by selecting the top concerns we raise.
Blizzard would need some combination of humility and available resources to make this happen.
As somebody that was high end raiding at the time of the xelnath debacle, I can provide some context for some of these changes. I will say that xelnath was also universally well liked by the council of warlocks that worked with him at the time, and it’s unfortunate that feedback isn’t parsed this way anymore by class designers.
I will preface all of these that, again, I am completely on the side of the community here and I’m just trying to add context (yes before you instantly reply, I know this list is partially rhetorical, I’m just hoping to spur conversation).
This was a thing in dragonflight beta. The quote was that they wanted pet utility to “mean” something. They also wanted warlock pets to be important in the same sense that it coincided with dark soul being removed in dragonflight and wanting visual clarity for when warlocks were doing “damage” in pvp and in world content.
Purely pvp. I’m unsure why it’s not instant, it’s legacy at this point from BFA.
Incredibly poor tuning and wanting to try and reduce overall “chip” heal from all classes in the game. Too bad death knight and ret paladin still exist.
This is a juicy one that I could write a whole post on since I was there giving feedback during the massive shift in 5.2 → 5.3 KJC. TLDR: In warlords they removed every “cast while moving” mechanic from the game as they wanted to carve out niches for melee and ranged. Ele sham and warlock got blasted from the sky during these changes (but they left mage and made it more glass-cannony compared to mop). Pre-5.2 KJC was even better than the one most people remember from 5.3 onwards, but they really hated this talent in every feedback post they gave, and intentionally created archimondes darkness (double dark soul) in order to compete.
This is specifically a hellcaller issue, and something I see them maybe trying to tackle in the future.
It’s always been 90s, even with long gateway. This is actually a good point and gateway should be baseline but long gate (70yds) should be a talent.
This got cut during the great pruning of 6.0. They thought dark intent was better at the time, and that we didn’t need curse of the elements anymore (considering people actually despised using it in mop etc.)
6.0 pruning that butchered warlock mobility. It was cut specifically because of the same reasons as KJC. PVP suffered the most from it, fel flame was barely used as any spec (unless you played pvp specifically) in pve. The one you should be more annoyed with is ember tap being removed.
Abysmal demo rework in 7.0 that was universally despised. I agree with the context of your reasoning here and wish it could be a choice node with tyrant or something. My feedback was that meta could’ve been a stand-in for nether portal at the time and that you just summoned double demons during it’s duration etc.
I’ve been saying this since legion. The animation that burning embers gave destruction as you were lit on fire the more embers you had was far superior. Similarly, when they squished shards into bits in 7.1, they continued the trend of chaos bolt costing 2 shards instead of 1 ember (like previously). Having the ability to hit 4 chaos bolts back-to-back gcd wise was simply better than only 2 etc.
Our biggest issue is not having the fantasy of the “casty juggernaut” that blizzard has given to us. Not to mention the flavour text of affliction makes no sense anymore as “drains” and “dots” are less important than previously.
We need to catch up to modern combat design and stop living in 2014 when warlock mobility was first taken away. Fights aren’t designed like Butcher or Gruul anymore. Imagine demo lock on Blackhand without aspect of the fox. Despicable.
MoP warlock was arguably the most overpowered PvE class of all time. I remember they were so OP by the end of the xpack blizzard said they wouldn’t nerf them since too many guild where relying on them. So nerfing their DPS would render them unable to clear boss they were farming for weeks.
I don’t remember this happening, but I do remember them saying this about vengeance for tanks since that was the biggest outlier in all of mists. I remember the day they nerfed UVLS rppm proc rate by 40% for affliction and demo though. Fun times, that was specifically targeted at top 50 guilds at the time abusing troll affliction (before we found out soul swapping tech). UVLS was also the catalyst for them removing snapshotting from the game entirely (with feral also bug abusing RoR).
EDIT: Also a fun fact, but trinkets were also the reason why in legion they completely redid the rppm formula behind the scenes and introduced “deck of cards” rng mechanics for classes. Hasted rppm is really rare now, and if its a thing it usually gets nerfed. They also turned off having trinket procs on pull too, which was really unfortunate.
After soul swap tech there wasn’t much they could do unfortunately. That’s why the gave soul swap (specifically exhale) a shard cost in wod.
MoP classic is going to be a spectacle because you’ll have brewmaster and prot paladins having sit macros or turning their backs to get hit over the hp cap and bug vengeance out. If the vengeance bug is removed (doubtful blizzard even remembers the cause of it as it actually continued on with resolve in wod), it’s going to be halarious.
TLDR: any unmitigated damage you took as a tank redistributed attack power to you based on your total hp value. Vengeance was bugged the entire expansion and would actually cap out above your current total hp value so you would have tanks used /sit etc. to get hit with unmitigated damage that would hit them harder than their full hp value to get absurd attack power values (this was abused on every world first kill that xpac btw). They partially fixed it when blizzard FINALLY figured out that armor contributed to unmitigated damage which is why you could get hit for more than your hp value.
If you’re interested actually, the stats for a lot of heroic logs from ToT and siege are still up and every top log is a tank (for non soul swappable abuse bosses).
Actually, it was abused the most in the final patch once theorycrafters figured out what exactly the bug was doing with unmitigated damage and armor values. This is why you had multiple top guilds deciding to 1 tank malkorok, and toward the end of the xpac intentionally bug abusing every fight with dodge mitigation on bear druid (hence why bear and brewmaster were so strong on paragons of the klaxxi).
If you look at the world first lei shen kill by method they also abused vengeance in ToT (the previous tiers you mentioned)
While I doubt it’ll ever be instant cast (we can hope) Tyrant’s cast time (like Vilefiend) could do with some pruning.
This has been addressed several times, but, basically, when Blizzard gave Warlocks a baseline kick, players complained en-masse, so they reverted it.
Pruning
As I understand it, to stop players from abusing Warlocks into porting everyone in a group. Though, having said that, one extra person for summons would suffice.
Pruning
Demon Hunters (there are extensive forum posts dealing with this) and Tyrant.
Corruption is obsolete for Warlocks (except Aff) after level 10, just as other talents for other Classes are, depending on the Spec you choose. This has also been discussed in other forums extensively.
Aesthetics, basically so all Warlocks use the same resource so changing between them isn’t confusing.
Having said that, a Glyph that changes Soul Shards to Burning Embers would be cool!
I hate that that’s the case, it doesn’t even work the same. If warlocks can’t have meta cause it impedes the class fantasy for demon hunters, than demon hunters can’t have meta cause it’s almost literally a copy/paste of shaman ascendance.
Personally speaking, I tried playing demon hunter cause meta, but it’s not even close to what I want out of meta. All the leaping around and constant jumping and zooming is too spam-y as well, I just wanna be able to turn into a big demon lobbing waves of energy at their enemies while commanding a demon minion. Was that too much to ask?
Most of what you asked about was done because of pruning, or because blizz was trying to “turn the page” on certain playstyles such as casting while moving. Blizz doesnt necessarily think everything through when they make decisions, however, at the time it was moving locks towards the “turrent” playstyle. Now that is unrealistic and blizz is about 2 xpacs behind in keeping warlocks updated. Im sure that once they do, the game will move on and locks will once again be behind the curve.
Unfortunately, the problem is compounded by a handful of select players with large amount of influence. Thats why we see such horrible decisions because, more often, its due to one or two players desire to have something in the game and completely against what the community has expressed.
If only. I’d like to know who these players are, as somebody that has also had some direct feedback, I swear they do the exact opposite of what players ask for ever since xelnath was in charge.
They need to switch their mindset of a holistic class design (from level 1-80) and more about how the talent trees play at the end-game level. The nonsense of infernal being good as a leveling “chase” node is key to where their thinking lies with talent trees.
It is easy, or to some extent, desireable to not believe that such few people have such overwhelming influence. People like to feel in control, or at least feel as of the company has their best interests in mind. To remove such securities would ultimately remove the security blanket of self-determination for one’s character or, at the least, the lost of one’s voice, leaving them inconsolably vulnerable. Hense the intense emotional attachment of many in the wow community to blizz and the game.
In essence, warlocks experience the same but at a smaller scale. After all the drama, blizz took away the voice and drove locks away. However, even though blizz ultimately disregards warlocks, they understand the importance to streamers and the 1% and their followers. Hense why they get alpha invites. Even if they dont always get heard, they are still the closest locks get to a “voice.”
Its fascinating from a real life perspective, if one were to be as determined to approach it from such a place.