Warlocks have been left behind in SOD

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Warlocks have been left behind in SOD

The setup
Metamorphosis costs 923 mana to activate (Every time I mount I have to reactivate Meta form).
Demon armor costs 800 mana to activate.
Summon Succubus cots 923 mana and a soul shard.
My mana pool is 2672. So after casting my required abilities, I have 26 mana left. Which means that in order to have my required setup, I have to drink 2 times before I am ready to fight at 100%.
In battlegrounds, Metamorphosis and Demon armor takes three quarters of my mana pool to reactivate before I can join the fight after a death. Every other class simply casts their buffs and still have over 90% of their mana or are 100% ready to rejoin the fight immediately.
In world PvP, it is a full round of buffs and you are required to spawn, run an entire minute away from the fight, and then take 2-3 minutes to prepare, before you can run back to the fight.
In short, it takes 2 water, a soul shard, and 2-3 minutes of time to restart after a death. This is nowhere near any other classes restart requirements.

The PvP Experience
Affliction is a worthless spec. Dots deal 400 damage over 30 seconds while every other class in the game can instant cast 600-900 damage. Scaling is non-existent with affliction abilities. You absolutely will not kill anyone with affliction.

Destruction abilities are strong in damage. However, they all require extremely long and punishing cast times. Destro warlocks are the only class in the game currently that are required to hard cast all of their abilities. When you multiply cast times + destro damage, you always end up lower than all other classes in PvP. Actually being able to let off a single 2 second cast in PvP is basically a one in a million chance. Warlocks are the first class targeted in every encounter because everyone knows how helpless they are.

On top of destruction having cast times, being able to fear anyone is also impossible. With everyone having insane mobility and instant casts, warlocks die before they can let off a fear. There are no talents or runes to help with damage knockback on hard casts, you create a worthless pvp class.

Metamorphosis is the only way warlocks are able to join PvP. However, spamming searing pain is less damage than all other classes and the self heals are atrocious and are not scaling with damage output from other classes. Healing 100 damage a second sounds good, but when everyone is instant casting 600-900 damage, it becomes completely worthless. Not to mention the setup requirement for meta in battlegrounds means that they are the worst class to play. While everyone simply waits 30 seconds for the res timer, meta locks must spend an additional 2 minutes drinking before they can fight.

Also, searing pain spam is easily the most boring class rotation in world of warcraft history. 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1,1… Get my point?

Even with Meta, Warlocks are bursted down in a mere 3 seconds by spell damage. Mages walk all over us and there is zero chance against a boomy or priest.

The PvE Experience

Finally, we have a small niche that warlocks do alright with. Destruction warlocks regularly hit top 3 dps in raids. That sure is nice, but again, the playstyle is incredibly punishing and mentally taxing. Hard cast times on these boss fights that require CONSTANT movement is horrible. The other classes simply click their buttons and run in circles. Warlocks must retire their entire damage output with every 1 inch movement.

Then on top of that, dance of the wicked was demolished. Now warlocks must life tap after every second rotation in order to stay in a long fight. This is not only punishing for the warlocks, but makes raid groups think twice before taking a warlock because it puts immense pressure on the healers to keep the tanks AND the warlocks topped off.

EXTRA

What in the hell is Shadowflame? Lots of people were excited when Shadowflame was datamined. Now that we have it. It literally does 130 damage over 8 seconds.

29 Likes
2

Preach!

Alot of haters on this forum will fly in here and claim metamorph is unkillable and we are so insanely tanky. But it isn’t true at all. Maybe we do decently in a duel. a controlled 1v1 with no X factors.

But in STV or AB even meta is a meme. And god forbid the enemy team has warlocks, you are forced to jump out of meta constantly to avoid being banished for 20 seconds, a CC which cannot be broken by anything btw. And since meta costs 900 mana you can only do that twice before you are oom. Which means an enemy warlock doesnt even have to land the banish, he just needs to start the cast and it is an automatic loose-loose situation for the meta lock… He can get banished or he can go oom.

There is no “GREAT” warlock pvp spec. We have destro+meta which lets us somewhat participate in the fighting by spamming searing pains for 200-300 dmg. We are like npc’s running around. And the second we get targeted by a spriest or a boomie or a mage we have to FLEE. In group fights this happens EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

Like you said, everyone knows how pathetic and easy warlocks are to kill so we are a juicy target for everyone else, and when we run around in our goofy meta form we are even easier to spot in a crowd.

Warlock is F tier in PvP currently… we need a lot of work. Or every other class in the game needs to be nerfed. Warlocks are technically the only “classic balanced” class in the game right now.

And yeah, wtf is shadowflame? Just remove this rune or buff it. Or at least let me delete the rune from my list. I get triggered just seeing the icon in my runes list. It was the ONLY new ability we got in phase 2 and it does less damage than my wand.

13 Likes
3

Soul Link Demo warlock with Felhunter is still relatively tanky against spell damage, but I 100% agree with everything else you said here.

4

Thank you for the reply. I was actually nervous when posting that nobody at all was going to agree with me and everyone was just going to say “Get good”.

Shadowflame does deal less damage than the wand… oh god

3 Likes
5

While I wouldn’t say a majority of warlock runes are bad, they are by and large standard. Theres a lot of improvements in the runes for fire damage, and a very selective amount for shadow damage. Almost none if you have Meta rune equipped since all the other runes for the hands get locked out.

Admittedly I don’t know much about it in pvp, I’ve done an incredibly small amount of it cause I don’t like pvp so I got my ring and got out. But while I was doing it I felt like I melted soon as anybody got close to me. And yea, getting banished on cooldown was a bit much. Unbreakable 20 sec CC feels kind bad, especially when the other warlock pre-casts the spell so you’re immediately CCed again as soon as you come out.

I’d love to be Demo spec more, but you leave so much damage on the table when you do holding aggro becomes a problem. And again, all the runes seem to want you in Destro spec and all the ones that encourage using demons are just incredibly…meh (I really like the quest for Synergy rune but the ability itself almost never seems to trigger. And when it does, 5% ain’t much compared to 10% shadow/fire damage on crits when you can improve your chance for crits and do additional stacking multipliers for fire). Especially with classes like mage that just can immediately do huge damage inside of 3 seconds. And I’m not talking about aoeing, I’m talking raid boss fights. And when you got 4 people spiking in damage, and only one 10 sec taunt, going destro eschewing other builds feels like the only choice just to bring focus back to you.

1 Like
6

Yeah, the runes have really pigeonholed warlocks into a fire mage build. I would really like to see the runes apply to both schools of damage so you can choose which to play.

1 Like
7

From a PvE note ive been weaving melee in with Searing due to use of Imp Firestone.

My approach has been nearly a full Demo perspective, however i wonder if anyone had had like with the Siphon Life tanking?

PvP though: ooooof

1 Like
8

Every single aspect of warlocks is garbage in p2 when it comes to pvp.

Want to try the bloodmoon event? Every other class has spammable 4-500 damage instant cast nukes to snipe kills at the altar. Warlocks? Well we need to spend 1500 mana right on top to try and last more than 10 seconds, and then we get a 150 damage instant cast spell that just does enough damage for someone else to snipe before our next cooldown. I’m just so sick of how little the devs obviously care about this class. Glad my sub runs out next week and I can be done with it.

4 Likes
9

Play destro spec in pvp with meramorph. Get conflag and spec into 5/5 imp searing pain. Gear offensively. Suddenly you have a spammable instant that deals 600+ damage

1 Like
10

No it absolutely does not. Maybe if you are absolutely bis gear searing pain will non-crit for 250, but no way are you hitting that high of a number. And you still die to pretty much every other class easily.

1 Like
11

I’ve seen searing pain crits for over 700 and conflags for 1k. And if you use demonic tactics and demonic grace then you are suddenly critting for a lot. And this nuke is spammable too, its not like starsurge/swd with its cooldown

3 Likes
12

I don’t know if you every played warlock before, but casting shadow bolt costs a lot of mana too. Warlock has always been this way. Life tap is part of the rotation.

3 Likes
13

And again, that’s great if you’re completely bis and absolute full damage gear. Most are not and are completely left behind. And any other completely bis class will still turn around and dump on you.

14

Im definitely not in full bis i only have 4-5 gnomer pieces everything else is of the eagle or my bfd epics still

I have no problem but maybe you are considering 1v1? Im talking about team play

1 Like
15

As a ranged hunter this post makes me laugh.

2 Likes
16

So how does a warrior beat a meta warlock? I have mortal strike, and even keeping MS up fulltime (which accounts for the majority of my rage, hardly any rage to do anything else vs a meta lock because we hit for so little damage against their armor), we are not able to kill them.

The only scenario I could see working in the warrior’s favor is at the start of they fight they get multiple autoattack crits so they actually have the rage required to do more than MS on cooldown. But even in my PVP gear which pretty near to BiS pre-gnomer, I only have 20% crit.

2 Likes
17

Why is it funny? As a ranged hunter your pet has more burst still than a warlock.

18

He’s probably talking about parses and how ranged hunters are just so low right now compared to Locks. Locks are #4 right now and ranged hunters are just barely licking the floor right now.

19

Destruction Warlocks

20

Meh. I ran that a few times now in STV and all it does is let you live for a few more seconds at the cost of no instant Corruption, more resists without Suppression and low damage. You also have a huge target on your back since you stand out in the crowd as a giant purple demon.

SL is going to be great in PVP at 60 when we have 20 more points to spend but for now I just went back to my glass cannon Fire Destro build.