Warlock visuals are amazing. I love the demon customization, the spell animations, the sounds, the dedicated side quests, and more. The class fantasy is truly great, and there’s so much potential to explore. But mechanically and performance-wise, the class is a complete mess. Every spec needs a significant overhaul. I’m focusing on Destruction because that’s where I’ve invested most of my time.
With constant complaints about how bad the class is and how underwhelming Destruction has become, we thought, “Finally, maybe we’ll get some buffs.” But no. Instead, we got the 20th Anniversary Celebration Update Notes.
After 200 lines of changes (mostly buffs) and improvements for Shamans, Warlocks got a total of three changes, almost irrelevant. In short, we’re still going to be drinking piss in the queue.
- WARLOCK
- Soul Rot’s icon has been updated.
- Hero Talents
- Diabolist
- The cycle of Diabolic Ritual is now reset when entering an arena, entering a battleground, starting a raid encounter, or starting a Mythic+ dungeon.
- Overlord will now use an alternative attack if there are no available paths for charging. There should be no difference in throughput between the alternative attack and his current attack.
- Diabolist
- Destruction
- Diabolic Ritual has been updated – Chaos Bolt, Rain of Fire, and Shadowburn grant Diabolic Ritual for 20 seconds. If Diabolic Ritual is already active, its duration is reduced by 1 second instead. When Diabolic Ritual expires you gain Demonic Art, causing your next Chaos Bolt, Rain of Fire, or Shadowburn to summon an Overlord, Mother of Chaos, or Pit Lord that unleashes a devastating attack against your enemies.
- Touch of Rancora has been updated – Demonic Art increases the damage of your next Chaos Bolt, Rain of Fire, or Shadowburn by 100% and reduces its cast time by 50%. Chaos Bolt reduces the duration of Diabolic Ritual by 1 additional second.
- Developer’s note: We’re adjusting Diabolic Ritual to avoid a situation where constantly casting Rain of Fire, due to its instant cast time, provides the best output for Diabolist. To avoid adding to Diabolic Ritual’s already lengthy tooltip, we’re adding functionality to Touch of Rancora to add further value to casting Chaos Bolt so that its cast time doesn’t hinder its usefulness to Diabolist warlocks.
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What is the logic behind this? Are Warlocks some kind of sick joke from Blizzard?
To me, it looks like this:
“WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING, SO WE’RE MAKING SOME MINOR CHANGES SO YOU WON’T COMPLAIN THAT NOTHING CHANGED. SEE YOU LATER, NERDS.”
In the current M+ scenario, we don’t even have a slot to play. Groups trying to optimize save one slot for a Shaman, one for Augmentation, and the last for a Mage/DK. I had to beg on my notes saying, “Please invite me to your key, I’m in queue for 3 hours.” I’m 622 ilvl, 2450 io, have all +9 timed and 2 +10 timed, and I still get denied in +8/+9 keys. And you know what? They’re absolutely right not inviting a Destruction Warlock. We underperform compared to other classes, so if they have another class with slightly lower ilvl, io, or whatever, they’ll go with that.
We need buffs, and there are many simple changes that could help. What really grinds my gears is that Evokers got two talents turned into baseline—why can’t we have that? Other classes got 6+ baseline changes. They always say, “deep changes can’t be patched on a normal Tuesday,” but just look at the number of lines for Evokers, Druids, and Shamans. What the hell are they thinking about Warlocks? Do they think everything is fine? I just can’t understand.
Things we URGE to turn into BASELINE:
Quoting for other post that i made:
One of the main issues is the overwhelming time we spend casting spells that don’t return enough damage. For example:
- Infernal Bolt used with Fire and Brimstone should at least cast one incineration with the proc., not to mention that procs need to beinstant cast, not .5 sec, not .3 sec, instant cast. Zero sec.
- Repeat with me: All procs needs to be instant cast.
- All procs needs to be instant cast.
- All procs needs to be instant cast.
- All procs needs to be instant cast.
- Ruination, Decimation, Ritual of Ruin, Infernal Bolt, every single one of this being instant cast would be a HUGE life change to destro.
Beyond that, Havoc needs more uptime. We proc so many abilities that don’t benefit from it, wasting a lot of its uptime while casting all these procs. That’s why some players end up using the Mayhem talent, which is random, hard to manage, and should complement Havoc, not replace it.
- Havoc needs more uptime, since we proc so many abilities that usually don’t benefit from Havoc, wasting a lot of its uptime while casting all these procs. That said:
- Havoc should be baseline.
Other stuff that could be changed that i mentioned in some early post:
- Ruinating delay to hit the ground is absurd. Not to mention the inumerous time that the skill simply doesn’t deal any damage at all. When we had the “speedcast” it was acceptable, but now with the slow cast + the absurd delay to hit the ground it’s just ridiculous.
- Decimetion talent proc use time is too short, its like 8 secconds. Wich means you often lose it because you don’t have the window to cast (Also it should be instant). And often when you use it the proc is gone and you start casting a 3.2 sec skill wich grind my gears really hard, feels like the spec is malfunctioning.
- Diabolists procs need a daft punk buff, they should hit Harder, Better, Faster and Stronger.
- Cataclysm and inferno should not be in the same talent choice.
- Roaring Blaze and Improve Conflagrate should not be in the same talent choice.
- Chaos bolt takes too much time and the damage doesn’t match the time casting.
- The ritual of ruin used to summon an infernal with stuns, wich was really great and wasn’t broken at all. They removed it and retarded the way we stack embers so we don’t use the Ritual of Ruining that often, since this change the damage curve is soo slow and we don’t get that sweet sweet reward after stacking every buff to spam dmg.
- Fel Domination 3 min cooldown is so ridiculous, TBH this spell being a TALENT is rididiculous, making us cast for 4.8 sec to summon a pet is ridiculous, everything arround this is ridiculous. I can’t understand why they make this so much painfull to a pet spec to summon / ressumon the pets while they usually die in misterious ways even we having a TON of macros to control it. - Just a small sample, you are in a dungeon, your team wipes, everyone release, warlocks needs to summon the pet (because you probably already used the Fel Domination, or because you want to save it in case you need to switch pets or your pet die), create a soulwell and put the soulstone on someone (when you have). At this point everyone is already at the point of the wipe and you start running with Burning Rush hoping that any debuff starts hitting you and you die again. This is frustration at the finnest.
- Soulstone cast is ridiculous long and we should not have to spent a talent point to make it shorter.
Given the current game numbers, Chaos Bolt should not hit for less than 1M for geared players. It needs to hit hard, and when we have buffs, it should hit even harder.
The way Destruction works today, we’re not destroying anything besides ourselves—it’s more like self-destruction, because it takes a lot of nerves to push the spec. It’s frustrating.