As someone who started playing the class this expansion, I really enjoy warlock, but all of the specs feel like they have significant problems in one way or another.
Demo feels the most balanced and versatile at the moment, but it’s also the spec I find the least interesting from a thematic and gameplay perspective. I’m more interested in destruction and affliction but the problem is, anytime I go to play them they feel incomplete, or like a watered down version of another spec. It’s strange, because they have such clear and strong spec fantasies/identities but the talents don’t really reflect what could/should be possible.
I don’t think a full on overhaul is necessary but definitely a talent tree rework to make the specs more flexible. And just a general design philosophy change with affliction, because it’s pretty confused at the moment.
I read your entire post, I haven’t played lock this xpac so I can’t comment. However I feel like “problems” are characteristic of warlocks from a class fantasy perspective. I think the Life Tap spell captures this well, it gives you mana but takes health. Is that the direction you are going with your critique of DF Lock? Maybe you could elaborate more.
Only thing Id change is having current tier baked into talents or baseline to allow rift to be a viable option. And maybe a way to have cry havoc be a viable alternative to only rain of fire spamming on aoe.
Affliction though is so awful. Everything felt bad on it.
Destro is fine, it only requires a bit more mobility (and cataclysm baseline). I also wouldn’t mind dimensional rifts either baseline, or higher up on the talent tree. I don’t play a lot of Aff so can’t speak on it, but both specs require higher health mobs because they require a lot of ramp-up to do high damage. Once you start doing beefier keys, you’ll see them shine.
Demo is fine. Some slight tweaks could be done for sure, but an overhaul is not needed for demo
Affliction though? Ugh throw that whole spec away. It’s not fun at all. So slow, sluggish, bloated, and has the most bland and boring visuals of any spec in the game.
Destro I think needs some tweaks, and a visual update to incinerate. The spell would feel so much better if it even just looked like fire.
I mained aff from vanilla through WoD and I always loved it. I just went back and tried to level her up so I could go on my guilds alt raids and omg it feels terrible right now. I hate it
I can’t imagine even playing Affliction outside ST raid encounters. Manually applying Agony to every mob while Vile Taint is on CD is a royal pain in the rear.
I think Destro not being pigeonholed into playing CDF is good, but it also highlights a problem with the design of the spec/talent trees. The fact that the spec felt clunky and even more turrety(because for some reason, CDF can’t be channeled while moving) for a whole patch because they decided to make that talent central to the specs game play is not great spec design.
While it does feel better than it did, the lack of mobility and the forced choice between Cataclysm and inferno do make the spec feel incomplete, imo. I’m not even saying I hate destro, btw. I do enjoy it, but every time I play i just feel like it is missing something. If they made those changes, destro would be pretty much amazing.
Demo right now is in probably the best state it’s been in since they removed Meta. The only change they need in the future is to make Doom work like how our current set bonus works.
Destro is functional. It’s largely worked the same way since MoP with a couple extra things bolted on so why fix what isn’t broken? Though bringing back old fire and brimstone for our AoE would be cool.
Aff is almost good. The core is there, it just needs some fixes to the tree itself.
Destro is almost perfect and have been in a good spot for quite some time now.
Only real issue with them is having to pick between ST or AoE talents.
Otherwise, personal wish is more chaos like BFA visions of perfection. Was fun getting like 6 infernals running around at once.
As for affliction. I would prefer to have the legion one back minus the mirror. Current one clearly don’t know what to do with it’s own abilities seeing how Rupture and Seeds cover the same niche of aoe spam.
Couldn’t they just have made Seeds able to stack, or trigger it’s previous applications explosion on recast?
As for Demonology. I just wish there was an option for what kind of minions you would “sweat”, not interested in imp spamming. Also still mad about the removal of Metamorph in Legion, no reason two classes can’t have different flavour of the same ability.
I liked s4 shadowlands lock a lot, they just needed to iterate on that.
Affliction is the only spec that was improved since the start of dragonflight, but it’s not a great spec anyway, it was barely improved, as for destro and demo, i’m having far less fun playing them compared to s4, or even start of dragonflight.
What Aff. needs is a reduction in the number of DoTs it has. Malefic Rapture is nice, but it feels like it’s redundant. Personally, I would like to see it proc off of Drain Soul myself, similar to how say Psychic Link works for Priest and I’d like to see Siphon Life tied into Unstable Affliction. That would solve a lot of the issues with Affliction IMHO.
Destro on the other hand, could learn a few things from say Elemental Shaman. The spell duplication mechanic is fun and would make sense for a Warlock throwing as much felfire out as they could. As it stands now Chaos Bolt is just a hard cast version of Lava Burst, with no real proc interactions that are meaningful besides Conflagerate.
Nah. Haunt should be removed or folded into Unstable Affliction. IMHO we should get Bone Spirit, the Diablo spell for Necromancers as a 30 second or so instant cast. Besides Siphon Life is more a Warlock’s theme like Drain Life is. Drain Soul is an option and not everyone uses it. Some people actually like Shadow Bolt’s Nightfall spam too.
Malefic Rapture by contrast is just crap. It would be more useful and justified if Warlocks had a way to mass dot their targets like what Shadow Priests have with the Misery and their whole Shadow Crash synergy.
Yeah Siphon Life just isn’t good. It exists because it’s worth casting, but it has no meaningful synergy with Affliction beyond Rupture and Darkglare caring about the number of DOTS.
The flow of the spec would be improved massively if Siphon Life was reworked to give Corruption like 30% leech or something.
