Might not be the most popular opinion or is it facts at this point?
Check every metric possible, 2s/3s/shuff and blitz, filter by top end ratings, locks slipped off the meta a week ago (even before the set bonus nerf).
All 3 specs have fundamental issues, which i’m sure no one really cares about here but gotta make this post anyway.
soul harvester aff’s mastery only applies to dots, it doesnt cover haunt/sbolt, this means it doesnt scale well and is apparent in that these values havent increased in s2.
hellcaller aff was gutted in beta and it never recovered. Lord forbid dots dealing actual damage instead of us being shadow mages.
chaos bolts deal 3 M dam on average, which seems like a lot but then you factor in everyone with their 12M hp and u realize u need 4 bolts back to back to down someone, you only have 5 shards and each bolt costs 2, is hardcast and everyone is hardwired into shutting down bolt trains at this point. It might function in lower ratings ( if it can survive) but at the very top end destro is a meme spec.
demo same issues it always had, giga ramp spec in a fast pacedburst meta, it’s just outclassed and easily disrupted by those that know when to disrupt it’s ramp.
survivability is among the weakest, as seen by the death rates, there’s a reason lock is the primary target almost every game.
At this point i doubt we’ll see more than 1 lock in the awc, and probably none in the quarter+ finals.
You only have 5 shards but if you’re playing correctly you’ll gain the 6th / 7th charge through other generation mechanics while you’re casting the first 2 bolts.
Hard to buff chaos bolt when there’s a possibility of 4 going off, or 3 with fast cast thrown in. Then they have double conflag, double burn + malev on top.
Demo is pretty wild if you pair it with a boomie or mage. Turns into a game of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” and running away the entire game since you can’t really leave either alone
I’m fine with opinions that warlock is lacking in areas, even was willing to ignore the 5 bolts to kill comment as if there aren’t other sources of damage going off + a second dps player on your team
But the quoted is straight up disingenuous. Warlock being the most killed target has nothing to do with how tank it is/isnt (it is) and everything to do with warlock being a mandatory target to attack unless you want to just lose the game instantly. And you know that.
Definitely my favorite is Frost Mage , comp might be crazy if the Rdruid hype is real . Demo loves a good dampener , it’s cool with Ele too, but in general Ele has a lot of responsibility when playing it so most of them rather play with a melee and focus on surviving tbh
As someone who has historically hated warlocks and thinks they are (up until recently being dethroned by warriors) the biggest victim class, I tend to agree that warlocks are just average now.
They are by NO MEANS bad. However, they’re just significantly more killable than mage/sp and particularly weak to other meta dps specs (feral, hunter, rogue, ww, war).
Demo is super solid with frost mage and probably good with boomy (haven’t played as it enough, but played vs it a few times and games were LONG but we also never died if we just respected tyrant).
Destro with a feral, ww, or rogue can end a game in a single cc chain, but always has the problem where if you play not to lose vs it it’s extremely difficult for the spec to actually end a game and it just gets murdered by everything outside of its goes.
Aff does a lot of rot and utility, but with repeated nerfs to feral and rogue, it lacks the control and mobility that mage brings and is susceptible to being ran down and its teammate cleaved as a result. Also, holy priest and rdruid being meta and able to angel+dispel/md and rdruid being able to treeform dispel UAs with impunity with both specs doing like 1.3mil hps with just hots really impacts the spec.
Feels like the meta is sp/mage/hunter+rogue/feral/war and I don’t think warlock brings any significant niche for or against any of those comps.
If you die game 1 vs a destro, theoretically your game 2 should last longer. And after that you should just as you said, play to not lose.
Playing to not lose is something most melee players hate doing though. Number of times we’ve domed some warrior because they simply refuse to ever leave line of sight is hilarious.
I think this depends on the enemy team healer. Few and far between ill have a game where I am left to free cast pulling over 1m dps as affy and getting solid cc chains off on a healer and things just dont die. Between everyone having super solid self healing and defensives now unless you can just do some insane burst which affy doesnt have nothing is going to die instantly
Had a kind funny experience with this in solo shuffle last night
-Game 1: warrior on the other team tunnels me (rdruid) the entire game, I just run around pillars and he eventually gets clapped LoS’ing his heals
-Game 2, me to warrior who is now on my team: “please don’t do that again, just go warlock”
-He does it again, and hits me with the “Heals???” after he leaps 100yd away and dies in the first 2sec chasing down the resto sham on the other team behind a pillar before I’m even out of stealth
It’s not just melee players, but yeah. So many players have some crazy main character syndrome where they need to be going in and making the play and securing the kill when in reality they’d just win WAY more games by not being a kill target and playing around goes.
I got SO many of my elite sets on “weaker” specs like ret/unholy dk by just playing safe and letting the other team make mistakes.
I think this something a lot of players don’t understand until they actually play the class, too.
Warlock has good defensive mobility with port and gateway, but has almost no ability to chase someone down to secure a kill. So if you’re weening around a pillar when they have DRs/CDs, there’s really nothing a warlock can do without putting himself in an awful & punishable spot and even then they can still get away pretty reliably.
No you didnt, you went on some unhinged ranting about how it’s impossible for warlock to beat a melee cleave and tried to say that gateway and port were useless.
You also specifically asked for aff buffs, which it doesnt need. Warlock feels pretty fine as is. Just because it’s not an overtuned outlier doesn’t mean it needs buffs.
Buddy, you don’t play warlock enough to understand the problems with the class. I only went into the rant because you claimed you could kite a melee cleave 24/7 with a brain in a hypothetical scenario. When in reality it doesn’t work that way in real world situations.
And it needs a buff, mainly Shadowbolt, Haunt, and UA dispell kickback because that thing is tuned for last season’s health pools.
I think I understand it significantly better than you given that I have more gladiator titles as warlock than you do, and I’m consistently higher XP without severely negative winrates either.
You’re right that you have more games played this season, but that’s not exactly helping your case.
I literally never said that, ever. No class (except mage) can permanently kite melee. It’s impossible with current mobility. However, you have tools to rotate through when they do connect that can keep you alive and counterpressuring; which was something you said was impossible.
I wouldn’t actually mind a UA buff for that reason, but I don’t think haunt or shadowbolt need buffs either, especially with Jinx being 75% of a dps rotation and also applying a perma slow.
Here we go again with the How many do you have? I have 3 titles…but I guess you’ll say they were 10 years ago
This is the only thing that matters in TWW. That’s like me armchair playing druid for you when it’s not my main and I haven’t qued as many games as you do.
If you read my OP in the last thread, I clearly asked for future warlock buffs to not have the “Does not apply to PVP” modifiers because I warned that if it continues to happen, warlocks will no longer be viable.
But you don’t read do you??!
This is how I know you don’t play warlock in the current season.
No good warlock spams jinx in this dispel-friendly meta. If you do, you’ll starve yourself of soulshards. As soul harvester, you need soul shards to do more malefic raptures (our hardest hitting spell) if you want to maximize your dps.
I dont know, its entirely just my experience but my lock seems fine. i wish demo would be in a better spot as its my favorite spec but aff burst (god i feel horrible for saying that) feels amazing. And i have a considerably easier time in pvp on my lock atm then some of my other dps.
On a serious note, I think Destro is in a good place, actually. It has good single-target pressure, and you can buff bolts if you add more mastery to your build.
Aff has the issues you explained well. I agree with this one.
I think one way to fix demo is to increase its passive shard generation with a CD reduction on soul strike and lower its damage. Plus, removing the facing requirement of Hand of Guldan and possibly even the range requirement of call dreadstalker would add some good quality-of-life fixes to the spec.
Survivability is fine. The issue is how our damage profiles work relative to the meta. Every spec does the same or more single-target pressure than we do in AOE situations. Its one reason why hellcaller isn’t good right now.
I was at 2k mmr and fought feral, dev, ret and only managed 2 wins through luck.
The amount of damage coming in as destro versus what i had to do is just silly. Im sure theres some super giga amazing players who could manage it, but when im taking more damage in 2 seconds from instant unavoidable damage than i could do with freecasting, the game is bad. If i was chaining bolts, sure. But incinerate and conflag need a buff. It sucks on these health pools. I routinely have conflag hit for 300k damage. Why is a primary ability with charges hitting for 300k.
Rip rake literally doing 400 to 500k PER every tic and im hardcasting incinerates for 400k to 800 on a crit. 5% of someones health isnt cutting it.
And Shadowburn needs to hit way harder for on the go damage. There’s no reason it should be doing 600k, 1m on a crit then its a 2 charge ability with a cooldown and a significant source of damage.
Double conflag and 2x burn doing a combined 25% of someones health without defensives is stupid. It really isn’t tuned high enough.
I had my sac bubble popped inside a maim stun when the feral + ret were on me together WITH unending resolve as well. I don’t think melee classes doing 2m dps is really needed when destro has to spend the entire game trying to not die and setting up a ruin kill.
How many do you have? I have 3 titles…but I guess you’ll say they were 10 years ago