I would like to see execute shadowburn once again like in mop, FnB or cataclysm baseline, soulswap for aff locks, and less imps and for demo. possibly remove shadowbolt from demo and make “summon imp” be the filler. use other demons for the class fantasy, never understood the hand of guldan thing either, make a spec not a meme like “implosion” i get its funny but really? i cant take it seriously.
glyphs for old chaosbolt/incinerate animations and maybe let wrathguards dual wield once again.
not for nothing but another thing id like to see come back, and this goes back a while, In vanilla the felhound had a passive detect invisibility ability. If a rogue got to close or walked past it they would be come partially visible. Blizz took this away and never replaced the ability on the felhound…
In general I want Archimonde’s Vengence, Kil’jaden’s Cunning, and Mannoroth’s Fury as end warlock talents.
For demonology, theme wise I would like small and big demon talent paths. Maybe in the middle is the casting/pet buff path.
This is a big wish, but bring back melee demo. Just imagine it, big demon path and being a melee warlock. I’m not saying bring back tank Demo, but melee demo. Design it as such. Make it different from demon hunters. Instead of being an armchair general, you are leading the charge of big demons.
For destro, an aoe path and a single target path. In the middle buffs to your kit (like incinerate, conflagerate, immolate damage increases). Maybe flavor buffs as well.
Option to make infernal something else for single target, no reason other than you have a pure single target option. Maybe make it increase your single target even more. Again not needed.
To be clear, warlocks had a spell to see through invisibility. The fel hound passive was paranoia that increased stealth perception. I think it was also easier to see through stealth in general if they walked in front of you.
I’m a simple man; I see Malefic Grasp, I heart it.
Man, I’m so sad I didn’t play lock when MoP was live. I’ve been playing on a private server, just to see how it was, and I’m so jealous. I’m just gonna give a few examples of how amazing it was back then. Apologies for the wall of text that follows.
Let me first talk about the talents. The first four rows were ALL about survivability or utility. Nothing was about damage. Most of your damage was baseline, which is amazing in and of itself. The second to last row was about improving your demon; whether it was a flat damage increase, summoning a second demon for a short time, or sacrificing it for increased single target damage, max health and % health regeneration.
The final row actually changed your gameplay somewhat, and drastically changed certain spells. Giving multiple charges to Dark Soul, allowing you to move while casting your filler spells, or a 1 minute CD which gave you 500% increased AoE and 100% damage on your AoE spells for 10 seconds. This is how a talent tree should be. Utility or survivability, with very minimal damage increases or learning new spells.
Next I want to talk about the spells we had BASELINE, at least for the destruction tree. One thing to note, they used Burning Embers (BE) as the resource, instead of Soul Shards, but they are essentially the same thing. First you had Ember Tap, which costed 1 BE to instantly heal yourself for 15% max health, with no cooldown.
Secondly, you had Shadowburn, which was your execute at 20% hp. This costed 1 BE, just like it does now, however it didn’t have an internal CD. Also, it did more damage than your Chaos bolt if it critted. Chaos bolt does 3k damage, while shadowburn does 4.1k damage, just as an example (at level 73 with crap gear). You could cast this multiple times during execute, or cast on multiple dying targets, to keep all your BEs.
Now this next spell is amazing, and probably my favorite. Backlash - “Gives you 25% chance when hit by a physical attack to reduce cast time of your incinerate by 100%.” Last 8 seconds, and can only proc once every 8 seconds. Now this spell allowed us to be competitive against physical DPSers, such as melee and hunters. This spell alone would make us viable again in PvP.
One thing that today’s warlocks don’t have a lot of are instant cast spells. Aff locks don’t have any direct damage instants. Fel Flame is an instant cast that generates BE, with no CD or charges required. We also had Backdraft and Dark Soul: Instability both baseline. No talents required.
Finally, we have Soul harvest. This allowed you and your pet 2% health regen every second while out of combat. This made it super easy to continue from pack to pack while leveling. Also made it so that my pet doesn’t feel as much of a wet noodle, as I didn’t have to health funnel after every pull of 3 mobs.
There is also quite of few spells that each individual pet has, that made it unique. For example, your void walker has disarm, which is amazing to be able to cast against a melee. The Succubus has Whiplash, which knocks all foes back 5 yards. Little things like this made each demon useful in their own way.
TLDR: Most of the talents were about Survivability or Utility. Most of the spells were baseline, and included a bunch of useful spells no longer in the game. Demons were more useful and had variety. Warlocks didn’t suck against melee.
ill speak in broad terms because specificity without knowing what’s in the tree or how it’s built is a little silly
i’d like to see
more mobility, or even better more survivability. i’d like to just have more cooldowns to just weather the storm of mechanics. i think that’d add playstyle flavour to warlocks that’s missing. Dark Pact and Demon Skin (and Unending Resolve if that goes into the tree)both low in the warlock tree on main pathways so they are effectively baseline and maybe one additional cooldown of a different sort.
aff decoupled from Malefic Rapture and Darkglare. they can be in the tree if we must but shouldn’t be what the spec revolves around.
updates, though not overhaul, to demonology spec to prevent stagnation.
punchyness added to destruction outside of major cooldowns. maybe add smaller cooldowns that fit inside the standard dmg cooldown rotation nicely, or just allow Chaos Bolt to hammer things again.
Aff: 2 full sides; 1 side focused on DoTs, other side on direct damage.
DoT side is rot style, DoT damage itself, faster DoT ticks, execute DoTs, spreader for multiple DoTs.
Direct damage side has higher regular damage, maybe MR for those that want this still in the game. It just reduces the damage DoTs do by like 75-90% or something and places it into MR instead so basically 9.0 Aff back.
Rot side has Malefic Grasp talent for ST, plus Rapid Contagion. Drain Soul is baseline spell for filler for Aff. There could be a talent in here to make Drain Soul heal for 200-300% of the damage it deals, akin to Legion Aff just nowhere near the damage it dealt since you won’t have as many modifiers going on. In this section there is also a talent that both reduces the cast time of SoC by 50% and makes your SoC spread Agony the first time it does damage to a target. This would put your AoE DoT spreader to the first damage it takes from seed applying Agony, rest you have to manually refresh.
No darkglare, get that thing outa Affliction spec. Soul Harvest, DS:M, the only 2 CDs Aff needs, if any at all honestly. I don’t actually think Affliction needs a CD. I think what Aff should have is multiple “your DoTs tick X faster” talent points to the point that, maybe, they end up becoming able to tick 100% faster or something, maybe not that high, maybe 50% idk, but something more than 30% total from all the talent points. They could even bake this into MG, instead to make it apply to 1 target only.
Direct damage style Aff tree should have Shadow Bolt replace DS if you choose it with Corruption procs able to cause SB to be instant, so Nightfall back there. MR somewhere in the tree. More seed damage on this side. Soul Flame talent thing over here would be fine imo.
Demonology: I would like for Demo to be centered around 2 types of Demo: summoner as is the case now, and then proc based using summons.
So, with Demo I would like for one side of the tree to basically be close to, if not the same as it is now with the pets being the star of the show, be it imps, felhounds, a new big demon. I would rather they get rid of Tyrant and a big summon, instead just being the game of summoning multiple big demons or many smaller demons and nothing more, letting them do their thing while casting fillers n such, then resummoning more big or smaller demons into filler.
The other side would be proc based based off of sacrificing summoners. An example of this would be: you summon 2 imps, you sacrifice them to get 2 uses of instant cast Demon Bolt. Everything on this side revolves around Demon Bolt, and your procs make it do different things. Saccing imps makes it deal regular damage. Saccing FelStalkers/hounds makes your DemonBolt do damage plus apply a debuff to take more damage from your Demon Bolts. Saccing the BileScourge dudes makes your DBs hit everything around the target as well, so it becomes an AoE Demonbolt. Saccing a diff summon makes your Dbolt deal Shadowflame damage over time for a few seconds. Things like this would be cool and seem really cool, but it’s all based off of the power of the demons you sacrifice as to what your DB gets to do and it’s all damage you deal directly.
Destro I think should have 1 side about fire damage, including the Searing Pain or Hellfire thing back, while the other side should have Chaos Damage. You get to choose to empower your fire spells more, and pick up more fire spells or to pick up more chaos damage spells and empower your chaos damage up there. Both have AoE spells, both have ST spells, you just choose the spell school you want to specialize in more and go down that route.
I would love meta to come back as a destro talent. it fits it better than current demo if it came back as as it was in mop
we’re already the tankiest DPS in the game, i think anything more than what exists now is massive overkill between DP and SL
In PvE, yeah, in PvP, not even close. In PvE, though, I much prefer Demon Skin and wish they’d have buffed that more than DP. DP is cool, I love bubbles so I love both of them, I just prefer passive things over actually having to hit defensive buttons. Like, 1 active defensive, like Unending Resolve, is enough for me and then everything else should either be a passive defensive, like how Demon Skin is set up to just automatically begin recharging if it’s not at full value, or it shouldn’t be there.
But, yeah, personally speaking though Idc bout the movement part, I would easily and happily trade movement speed for being so much beefier/tankier.
If they gave us a node of like: Choose Burning Rush as is it now, or even making it a passive of +20% movement speed baseline or +15% movement speed baseline, vs Demon Skin and buffed Demon Skin to be able to go up to +30% of your max hp at full value, recharging at 1% per second, I would full on pick Demon Skin at every turn there, even in PvP. Though making BR passive and just remodeling it into a +15-20% movement speed buff at all times, would actually feel so much better to me than it is currently.
I also don’t think you can turn BR off if you are CCed by like a stun in PvP or something, either. They might have fixed it, but back in like Legion if you did PvP with BR then if you were stunned you could not toggle it off so you’d be automatically losing 4% hp/second plus whatever damage they’re doing. It was nice against Rogue openers, though, as you could burn yourself out of Sap at the time, so there is that.
I thought of a way metamorphosis can be a talent for all 3 specs without changing the specs drastically.
Metamorphosis increases damage by % scaling with mastery and transforms abilities.
Shadowbolt /incinerate turns into touch of chaos, dealing chaos damage and refreshing corruption/immolate.
Immolate/corruption turns into doom which has a chance to summon a felhound or imp on damage last 1 minute deals damage every 10 seconds reduced by haste, summoned demons produced 1 soulshard on death after 10 seonds
Unstable affliction/hand of guldan/conflag turns into chaos wave, deals chaos damage to enemies hit.
Malefic rupture/chaos bolt/demonbolt turn into soulfire.
Soulfire costs 2 soulshards touch of chaos produces soulshard fragments, doom costs mana and chaos wave applies a dot that produces fragmemts to all enemies hit.
Metamorphosis is extendes by 1.5 seconds for every soulshard used during its duration. Last 20 seconds baseline.
Just an idea i had but would really love to see the spell return to warlocks
Just suggesting cool previous spells we no longer have access too. I’ll add to these regularly as I think of more.
Class wide
-Soul link
-Dark regeneration
-KJC
-Disarm on voidwalker
Affliction
-Soul swap
-Haunting spirits
-Soulburn
Destruction
-Burning embers
-Ember tap
-Old fire and brimstone you could toggle baseline
Demonology
-Metamorphisis
-Chaos wave
Honestly they should give the pvp talent that changes havoc into an AOE, but just make it do reduced damage or something because 20 CB at once would be crazy 
does burning embers have any functional difference from the soul shards we use now?
I really like this idea for Metamorphosis, basically turning it into a more interesting and fun MoP Dark Soul.
As an alternative Demo-only idea for it, I’ve been trying to think of a way to work it into the current playstyle while not fundamentally changing too much about how the spec currently works. My thought is to introduce it in a choice node on the talent tree alongside Demonic Tyrant.
The choice of Demonic Tyrant would be much the same as it is currently on live, though with the baking in of Demonic Consumption. This allows for the continuation of the current playstyle for those who prefer the pure summoning aspect of the spec.
The counter choice on this node would be Metamorphosis (or call it Dark Apotheosis or something if they don’t want the confusion with the Demon Hunter version). This form would be the option to take if you prefer to use your demons to empower your own damage for a time. Unlike the Tyrant, this ability would not grant a buff aura to your demons, but a damage buff to your own spells, which would also change as in the past. Shadowbolt would turn into Touch of Chaos, maybe instead of the Corruption duration increase it would give a small percentage to summon a demon/imp. Hand of Gul’dan would turn into Chaos Wave. Demonbolt would remain the same, however it would gain the effect of Sacrificed Souls, increasing its power based on how many demons you have summoned. This part would be the counter to baking Demonic Consumption into the Tyrant summon.
Just a rough idea, but I feel something like this could make for an interesting build-changing choice node while bringing back the option of Metamorphosis for those who want to use it, and even giving a more meaningful choice between two of our current level 50 talents (balance permitting).
are we getting meta back on the talent tree, nice blizzard
just wishlist
They worked different in the sense that you had burning ember fragments and you could tap into them to empower abilities.
so basically just a different skin for soul shards, but probably still 5 instead of 4. okay cool, might be good as a glyph then