Warlock PvP Revamp

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Xom, don't make false claims.
I'm coming back from a long time off and I noticed you referenced keeping howl of terror as a talent. Does howl of terror exist anymore?

I feel like a lot of the stuff I used to have to keep people off me in WoTLK is gone and I end up just getting pummeled to death by melee. Shadowflame, instant shadowfury, howl, death coil, port. We used to have these things baseline and people would need to be a little smarter with their trinkets and fear breaks when fighting warlocks. Now they just break my coil and promptly stomp me to death.
1 Like
listen chief ima be real with you the blues are gonna completely ignore this
09/21/2018 07:30 AMPosted by Ðmon
listen chief ima be real with you the blues are gonna completely ignore this


Maybe they will, but maybe, just maybe, they won't. Gotta have hope.
Dmon is probably right, but there again, I do hope at least the initial overview is considered. In my opinion, the best possible chance we have is to seek to get the tools those old abilities used to have, but rolled into existing PvP talents as passive effects to some of the underused active abilities there. That would allow for a number of effective changes through the entire system without affecting PvE by adding more buttons there. This is important because Warlocks can get quite a bit of button bloat with the certain builds, and can feel clunky as is due to it (in the eyes of many PvE players I have spoken with).

Some examples of effects to add to underused buttons:

Soulshatter, passive added to also make Shadowfury instant cast (this is a talent all about instant effects that change the flow of the game).

Curse of Shadows, add the passive slow effect to targets affected by Conflagrate, Corruption, or targets hit by Implosion.

Casting Circle, could gain Norgannon's Foresight effect as a passive.

Rot and Decay, passively drains mana from the target if applicable, a good way to have a niche for PvP again, also just a flavorful effect on a talent that sees almost no play.

Passive physical damage mitigation could some tuning across the board when in PvP. Training the pet with Soul Link doesn't work with how Afflicion and Destro generate their shards (as opposed to Demo who needs to actually stand and cast to get shards), this is the only real problem with just making it Soul Link available to all specs now (sadly, I loved Soul Link and miss it terribly). Just tune it against what is really the problem, and allow us the tools we have to deal with casters as is (the mana drain idea above could also assist in that without being too overpowered probably).

The point is, we have these PvP talents, modify them with passives to add any effects that we need. Honestly we don't need much, instantly applied slows from an effect we use almost all the time, utility against healers, and passive mitigation against melee.
09/21/2018 05:29 AMPosted by Xom
09/21/2018 04:27 AMPosted by Indiscipline
...

https://i.imgflip.com/27dx5m.jpg


wtf dude i just got a VIRUS from this at work!!!!!!!!!!!!!


imgflip truly is a dangerous place :^)
Sadly, Blizzard is busy reading the Rogue forums...
1 Like
Bumping this. Really curious about everyone's thoughts on this.
Bumped
blizz please ;( entire classes being this terrible in a piece of core content should be unacceptable, can't believe I'm still paying for this game.

bump
This.
is
Really love to see the amount of effort you've put into writing this, it's easy to see you're passionate about it.

Outside of the base toolkit being severely pruned, another huge problem (especially for affliction) are honor talents. Most of affliction's honor talents are extremely weak or unusable. They're boring. Most other specs have interesting PvP talents that completely alter how their spec is played in PvP, have insane utility in PvP, or both. Affliction doesn't have anything even close.

The difference of Warlock class design in the WotLK/Cataclysm/MoP/WoD eras and WoD/Legion/BFA eras is sad. (In MOP we had baseline 70 yard gate, baseline portal, baseline howl, baseline soul link, baseline curse of exhaustion, soul swap, blanket silence, passive fel armor, and the choice between mortal coil or instant shadowfury.. nowadays we're either forced to spend one of our sparse talent points on a prior baseline ability or the ability has been nerfed/removed entirely. In comparison to those eras, the current iteration just feels bad. There seems to be a disconnect between the players and design team; as if the designers don't really play their own game and makes it feel like they're unqualified and incompetent. I would love to see many (if not all) classes have abilities added back and unpruned but judging by the direction of the game it seems highly unlikely and not in the same design direction blizzard is taking the game.

would love to have armors to swap between, or a single form of instant crowd control, or an ability to slow. But warlocks (and many other classes) have kept getting pruned and simplified to the point of gameplay becoming flat, flavorless, and unrewarding.

You're right, warlock DOES need a revamp. But those don't happen outside of major patches (unlikely) or expansions, and the trend for the last few years sees design shifting in the wrong direction. Blizzard has said warlock is supposed to be the "tanky caster", but we're currently the squishiest. It would be nice to hear from blizzard what their vision and plan is for the warlock class, but they've been silent.

With all that being said, an overhaul would be awesome but it would be unrealistic to hope for that any time soon. The best thing we can currently hope for would be to have Soul Link and Demonic Circle baseline for all lock specs. Bring back Howl of Terror in place of Demonic Circle in the talent tree and make the "Darkfury" talent make shadowfury instant . This would allow us to choose between 3 viable instant crowd control options which would beef up our offensive toolkit and would be a MUCH needed survivability buff, as well adding back a lot of flavor to the class.
ah yep they should unprune most of our tools by now for real, the tanky caster stuff didnt work at all, stand there being unkilleable and dealing a ridicolous amount of dmgs, having 0 setup kite or a way to secure the kill outside raw dmgs its not fun for both sides
Affliction is still garbage until blizzard do something with them.
To the top!
fix affliction you morons!
Great post man.

I honestly miss MoP Warlock... Especially Destro. :(
09/21/2018 04:08 AMPosted by Xom
warlocks are fine, get over it.


You just enjoy fighting target dummies, don't you Mr. Warrior?