Good Afternoon Blizzard,
I am writing to you as a concerned player that has been playing the game as a Warlock since July of 2005. Over the course of 13 years, I don’t believe I have written out such a lengthy post, but I feel like the Warlock community’s “player vs. player” issues have been disregarded, or simply not addressed. My post is meant to be a respectful perspective, from an experienced player, to highlight some significant issues that have been identified in the current state of PvP. I would like to have a meaningful and open discussion on survivability, utility, and talent changes that could lead to a better gaming experience for the community.
Over the course of World of Warcraft I have gotten to witness the ups and downs of the Warlock class design. I started playing the game prior to the “World of Roguecraft” days (thank you Mute), whom highlighted Warlock insufficiencies and resulted in some significant changes to both rogues and Warlocks. I don’t want to make a video like Mute did 13 years ago demonstrating the current imbalance of the game, but given the announced changes that have occurred up to this point, it just may come to that. I feel like the really big issues behind the Warlock class are being kept in a dark closet, like the Ritual of Summoning, only to never be opened again, which as a player has been rough to witness.
The original design of Warlocks was to be a caster that had little to no mobility, but was compensated by being able to withstand large amounts of punishment. This was achieved by having a passive damage reduction, the ability to heal themselves while dealing damage to others, and an inflated health pool that rivaled tanks. In this current expansion, Battle For Azeroth, Warlocks are getting shredded by melee classes that have extreme mobility, high damage reduction, instant cast crowd control, and 50+% slows and snares. In addition to that, Warlock self-healing and demon skin have been drastically nerfed in the current expansion, which has compounded the issues even further. As a project manager, and as a passionate player of the game for all these years, I want to help untangle this mess with you Blizzard. This is the expansion of bringing abilities back such as tremor totem, arcane brilliance, etc..., so it is time for Warlocks to get their kit back as well.
Excellent post. This section in particular I liked. I really wish I understood their thinking process more clearly, as to why were left with nothing. Survivability or mobility, but we have neither? It defies logic.
P.S. give us MG back please, allow me to drain health and do damage. At least make warriors and rogues work for their kill.
WTF is taking so long for blizz to do simple changes to warlock so we can acutally F**ing play.
Im thinking the same thing :(
The biggest change that could help warlock in my opinion would be bringing back soulburn teleport.
Really liked the last suggestion. Bringing back soul burn could be really cool. No news on locks yet, bumping for Wednesday!
Everyday i log on, the first thing i do is check for blizzards blue post on demo locks...
Still nothing :(
I am right there with ya. I personally would like to see Blizzard bring our class back to it's original design before we get specialization changes focusing on affliction, demonology, or destruction. One thing that can't be denied is that affliction is the dominant pve spec per warcraftlogs for mythic kills. I might have seen 3 demonology warlocks in the top 100 parses for all boss encounter s combined. Here's to hope!
I actually had a dream where in my dream I woke up and looked on wowhead and it said they deleted warlocks. I woke up & thought wow I need help man
More like a nightmare. It would be nice if a community manager communicated the intended changes that were previously teased during last week's hot fixes.
09/26/2018 09:33 AMPosted by
Wrathh
More like a nightmare. It would be nice if a community manager communicated the intended changes that were previously teased during last week's hot fixes.
Maybe the tease was the previous buff they did to destruction.
and that was all they were gonna do?
I really am hoping that is not it. With any luck the right eyes will see this and get the ball rolling.
Totally agree with all of this. Something needs to be done sooner rather then later!!
Give warlocks an ability that makes us like guldan in his mythic form something with beefy green spikes maybe buff defense and offense. Give us thorns with a haste buff in addition to all the stuff we asked for already. The thorns thing basically being extra for our pain and suffering
warlocks die in the openner of every arena, they are squishy AF!
Soulburn was such good design, it gave so many more design options for utility or burst without having to make lots of extra buttons, just give it a soulburn version and be done with it. If they were concerned with it being a do nothing on it’s own, then give it an effect like a small AoE around the caster that reduces enemy haste (provides some PvP use and nice for a Lock wanting to kill many mobs in PvE). Such a spell could have a 30s CD and a 5 second duration to give the user a window to utilize the Soulburn effect.
That would be so excellent, so many options they could give Warlocks again without having to make new spells. Soulburn: Summons to get on demand interrupt, taunt, seduce, or clense. Soulburn: UA to dump all other shards instantly for burst/priority add killing. Soulburn: Healthstone (heat for much more). Soulburn: Corruption creates a wave of corruption like Frost DK dragon breath ability that applies corruption to all enemies hit (and finally get rid of stupid Seed of Corruption, make Phantom Singularity the new baseline AoE). Soulburn: Phantom Singularity for using it even if it were on Cooldown, no more than one singularity can be up at one time (per Lock). Soulburn: Agony for an empowered spreading version of the dot. Soulburn: Fear for an instant cast and applies a string slow after it ends. Soulburn: Gateway for instant cast, immediately uses it, and gives movespeed for 5 seconds (Lock Blink with small movespeed for creating a bit more repositioning power).
Soulburn allows for almost any effect we could want to be added without adding a million more buttons or talents. Just a very direct an class specific way handling balancing or utility that we just do not have in the game right now.
https://clips.twitch.tv/HotLazyDotterelEleGiggle
recent warlock clip lmao
For !@#$s sake, do something to Warlocks, they are automatic focus on arena, "Tanky Caster" my !"#%!"#
Back to the top with you. We struggling out here.
A reiteration in one place of some of the best suggestions:
1. Shadowfury - Remove cast time
2. Fel/Demon Armor - Options to adjust defensive capabilities giving us healing bonuses and physical damage mitigation
3. Demonic Circle: Teleport - Break Snares/Slows + provide Immunity to snares/slows for 4-8 seconds after using
4. Shadowflame (Glyphed Version) - lowish duration high % conical slow (70%)
5. Netherward - non-dispellable & increase duration to 4-5 seconds
6. Howl of Terror - Leave as Talent but re-incorporate the deminished CD from taking physical damage effect
7. Pet survivability/Re-summoning - Needs a look, we've lost all means to reliably re-summon a dead pet in arenan and they die too easily