Warlock Devs, we NEED to hear what the end goal is of this sweeping rework

Destro now too?? I have a whole thread about how developers aren’t understanding that Demo wants Demons, but now Destro got backhanded too??

I’m not gonna waste everyone’s time complaining, but for the umpteenth time

Warlock devs, why are you reworking this class and what do you want warlocks to be??

It’s incredibly obvious that whoever is in charge doesn’t like or get what we play warlocks for. Demonology doesn’t want to be a Shadowbolt turret and Destruction doesn’t want to be Fire-Mage-But-Worse. TWW hyped up hero talents as ways to connect with your class more, but what’s going on with Warlocks is nothing less than an unannounced rework.

I can go on and on but ik you’re all feeling the same. If you don’t want demo to have their main damage be demons, or destro to have any flash, what is the goal? Are we ALL supposed to spam Shadowbolt?

Please dude just announce “we’re reworking warlocks to be _____” and stop making all of these insane changes that don’t make any sense with the class feel.

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Don’t ask why. Ask when.

When will this dev be replaced with someone who has a clue?

Bad changes tend to follow other bad changes, the warlock dev has gotten pretty much nothing right for destro and demo since aberrus.

Why would that change after these patch notes? It’s just gonna get worse and worse.

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Just caught you in the other thread big homie. I hate to be one of those people freaking out on forums but I couldn’t agree more. I like fr don’t even wanna play WW now if they’re just gonna gut my favorite class because Bob from the raid team says he doesn’t like the big scary Avatar

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I am shocked at how bad warlock is getting.

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I think the palpable level of disrespect is what’s killing me. These aren’t “minor tweaks” and they keep using this nails on chalkboard euphemism “health of the class”. If there’s a damage problem, there are 200 ways to fix that with damage scaling and passive talents. Reworking the entire class to be green turret or purple turret with no flavor and acting like nothing happened is unbelievable

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I think it would be healthy for the class to get a new developer.

Someone who’s priority is “health of the class” shouldn’t be a developer, because they are for sure gonna dish out some stinkers.

If your priority as a developer is “health of the class” and “balance” instead of gameplay, you should not have that position.

There are various way to control lock damage without destroying the class.

If the stun was the problem for avatar, just remove the stun, why would you remove avatar, unless… You don’t know how to code, and literally did a copy paste of infernal with a different color, but don’t know how to separate the stun from blasphemy.

Which if that’s the case, then you DEFINITELY should not be a developer.

If the problem for inferno was aoe scaling, you just cap or soft cap the resource generation, or even square root rain of fire.

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That one line struck me hard: when i think of Demonology for all these long years i am thinking of this big powerful demon being the focus and everything else being supportive to that.

Over time though that image had faded away to… i’m guessing were a master summoner of little demons? Shadowbolt as a filler i don’t mind if it was to just be the filler and not a generator. That i’ll agree with, being a shadowbolt turrent is not what i would imagine for a Demo lock.

It certainly has imps and little fel dogs so you are doing a lot of summons, but ya to your point it would be nice to go back to a big hefty Felguard being the focus and less shadowbolt spam/generator.

The lack of clear direction of where blizz is going, and what the community, of which it has many different views on the subject, is not aligned and is going to be chaotic if they don’t start communicating and creating dialoge.

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Man, I work software QA irl and stuff like this would never slide. Again, hate to sound like a hepped up jerk, but this feels like somebody’s pet project to make Warlocks into something they like. Your job is too make this game fun for us. Balancing is fine, but I literally do not care at all if Developer A thinks it would be more fun if they didn’t have so many darn imps

I love the take man. Personally, I’m a little more into the summoner fantasy, but I can respect the heft. Have you seen the TWW demo changes tho by chance? They’re reducing your ability to generate Demonic Cores (and therefore Soul Shards) down to almost nothing. I know it sounds bombastic but no exaggeration this means about 95% of your gameplay will be casting Shadowbolt and your can use Hand of Guldan maybe every 10 seconds or so.

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It seems like they look at the feedback and then do the exact opposite.

I’m surprised they haven’t given destro 3 point talent nodes at this point.

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“Emberstorm is now a 3 point talent that increases your fire damage by 2/4/6%”

Chef’s kiss

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I just realized that the devs had 2 obvious layups - making Cataclysm baseline and adding Doombrand to the demo tree - and somehow ended up doing neither…

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We want bi _ _ er chaos bolts.

GG

moo

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Their goal, based on 2/3rds of the changes, is to make our specs significantly less fun to play.

My disappointment has nothing to do with damage or being OP or anything. Destro and Demo are going to feel WORSE to play going into TWW, which is a terrible feeling. Going from one expansion to the next is supposed to enhance your toolkit and make you excited to play, and that is not how I’ll feel about either of those specs. And it’s not like they hit a home run with Aff, it’s…ok.

Demo turreting shadowbolts because the devs want Demonbolt to feel like “a moment” is the biggest miss of a dev comment I’ve ever seen.

Taking away Avatar of Destruction because they want Infernal to be a “powerful moment” is ALMOST as big of a miss. Like man is it close.

Basically they want us to have fun once every 2 or 3 minutes, then being boring as hell the rest of the time.

This is really sad because the hero talents genuinely seem cool, but all 3 specs sound completely awful outside of the hero talents.

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I feel like this concept is like, impossible for whoever in charge of Warlocks to grasp. I feel like the devs are hanging around like “yeah there’s a bunch of people complaining because they’re not OP anymore psshh typical entitled behavior” when the reality is you’re actively losing the plot on what Warlocks are. Nerfs are normal, mobility reduction is normal, ripping away class fantasy? Not normal new xpac balancing

It’s alpha and they’ve admitted that there’s more change to come, but some sort of ultimate “theme” goal would be nice.

The Demo changes are off because stunting demonic core procs too much effects many other talents. Immutable Hatred is going to need some steroids if it’s staying in it’s current form and going to be viable and Reign of Tyranny is supposed to allow you to buff more imps but if you’re casting too much between HoGs then you’ll never have more than 10 out to boost regardless.

Destro changes just started but feel like it’s half done (hopefully).

Affliction rework is what it is because Malefic Rapture is staying around.

Back to the OP point: we need to know what the end goals for the specs are rather than this handful of changes every week. And if part of the process is making some changes and waiting for feedback then let us know that’s why it’s coming out in parts, but still give us a vague end result.

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Well said, this is really my whole point. These changes seems targeted at the core gameplay/fantasy of destruction and demo warlocks, which is why it’s such a big deal for some people. If I can only have like 2 imps up and just spam Shadowbolt 99% of the time I’ll absolutely play a different class, but I’d rather someone just say “we don’t like that demonology is the summoner spec, we want to make it more like destruction.” Totally fine, I’ll see myself out, but don’t disrespect your players intelligence like this.

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Didn’t they decide at the end of Shadowlands (or maybe it was BFA) that having Infernal be such a “powerful moment” was a bad idea and they wanted less focus on that? Now I guess they want to go back to that and in a year they’ll decide no that’s a bad idea again and repeat the rework process.

The funny thing of this all look at the unholy dk reworks and the rider of the apocalypse.

They just gave rider of the apoc our soul link ability.

To add to this they also gave unholy DK season tiers exactly as read from the current season tier.

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I’m not surprised. Have you glanced at Mage for TWW? You would think they have players in the building helping with the changes.

I used to think everyone was gonna take an L to make room for hero talents but nope, just lucky us.

As the game requires more and more mobility we will continue to strip it out of your class. Let classic players stay in classic where they can have and love 8 apm. No one who plays retail wants to be a shadowbolt or incinerate turret.

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