Warlocks of old felt better

Classes Warlock
1

Of course, this is only my opinion, but I’ve been playing Nanette since 2004, and I feel demonology warlocks of old simply felt better. What I mean is, they felt more like what I believe a warlock should be.

The part of the current design I feel falls short are abilities like Hand of Guldan and the Doggos. Combining a temporary summons with a separate damaging attack feels cheap. Are they a summons or an aoe? Just make them an aoe and an aoe with a dot component.

Then, if we have the extra imps talented, we can dismiss them at all! We can’t just sit around town without these annoying pests.

I want to be a master of the demons I do have, not a zookeeper. The purpose of demonology was always put more emphasis on the damage they did over personal damage, unlike destruction or affliction, which was the other way around, not a matter of summoning a legion capable of taking me out if they turned.

Please don’t get me wrong, I like the overall damage output from Hand and Dogs, it’s more how the feel, considering the visuals. I just want to feel like I’m doing at least SOME of the work instead of watching a mob of imps, dogs, and a tyrant do it all.

Anyway, just a stupid Monday evening rant that I’ll forget about by tomorrow. Meh.

4 Likes
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dose not look like you play lock you may have made a lock but looking at profile and Rio you dont play that toon

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By whose standard? No, I don’t raid or do M+, but that doesn’t mean I don’t play her. Go troll somewhere else.

6 Likes
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Demo is one of the few pet classes in the game, and the only one that constantly spawns pets to fight (and maybe Unholy too next xpac from the look of its rework on the Beta). The whole point of Demo’s rotation is to be able to keep the floodgates open, and it’s hard to find another spec like it. And as far as our damage profile is concerned about ~65% of our overall damage is from pets. Demonbolt, Doom brand, and HoG (in aoe) still hit for a decent amount.

If you haven’t looked at the spec rework on the Beta I’m sorry to report that most of what is core for Demo right now is here to stay next xpac, but we do get some new stuff.

  • Diabloist gives you big demons, although the Hero tree’s main draw is the Ruination proc, which is basically the infernal lovechild of HoG and Chaos Bolt. Not to mention Diabloist is one of the most visually thematic Hero trees in the game.
  • Doom got reworked and hits for a good amount in aoe
  • Shadow Bolt hits pretty hard sitting in the top 5 of my damage in single target on the Beta (granted the tier set contributes alot to this figure)
5

…is there an expansion you’re thinking of?

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Not to mention the talents that alter Vilefiends appearance to Legion Raid Bosses.

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Not really. Things changed gradually, over time. But I think vanilla through Wrath maintained the best class fantasy for me. Again, it isn’t BAD now. But it’s deviated from the demonic version of a beastmaster hunter I liked.

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Doom has been double nerfed in beta both to now only being a proc chance on explosion and only shoots weak single target shadow bolts with a long cast time.

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Yea I wrote another post to discuss the Doom changes over the weekend, and there’s been some more changes to Doom with the latest Beta build.

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That last talent for doom in regards to the doom guard is doing some really poor damage since they changed it to single target.

If doom is set to single it shouldn’t be doing like 2% of my damage in a single target fight, to consider that is also based on core procs, which we don’t have as much as df.

That’s pretty bad for a last talent node. If it stays like that is actually better to ignore it that talent and put the point it into somethings else.

As for the general tree;

Here to hoping they adjust soul conduit. Never seen such a low proc rate on a capstone talent.

Why exactly does soul leech and soul link cost two points. Id say the same for some of the talents in 2nd row as well.

1 Like
11

This is just a self projection from someone reliant on RIO to play the game.

Not using RIO doesn’t mean you don’t play the game, even that you don’t play endgame.

Not everyone needs RIO to even play endgame.

12

I agree with you but for different reasons.

I dislike how every lock spec has become a builder/spender, hate damage only comes through cds and especially abhor that dots barely do anything outside of only being there to bolster the true new affliction playstyle, malefic rapture.

I wish dots still dealt good damage and the spec was centered around that ,so what if dots are too strong on council fights? It’s not like there are many of those anyway.

But what truly bothers me most is that eventhough damage shifted away from dots, dot application and maintenance still behaves as though dots are meaningful, why do we still have to spend so much time and effort managing dots when they’re only an afterthought compared to MR? Look at shadow priest, they got their dot application mechanics streamlined so they dont need to worry about dot uptime maintenance as much ( at least when gcds are concerned).

Furthermore, destro seems to be moving further away from chaos bolt, they just keep pushing things into the rotation, rifts, soulfire (chaosbolt 2.0), demon procs, infernals, channel greensnots… literally anything but chaos bolts.

Mop had it figured out, it was smooth ,buttery & straightforward. Now you have 20 different filler and spenders. Why is infernal not a demo spell? Demo’s niche is demons yet destro seem to have almost as many demons as demo with diabolist,ritual and rain. Darkglare also shouldnt be a thing, give us a cd that increases dot damage instead of another demon.

Anyway sry for the rant, kinda not liking how the direction is always moving away from these points, i just want things to be less convoluted again, spells that deal damage without cds and less clunkiness by forced random new abilities into the rotation.

1 Like
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In a way, I agree with you unilaterally across all classess. What was wrong with just having mana, or whatever a class’s resource was? What warrented a second resource?

1 Like
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lol what dude I look at they really have not played lock this xpac. so its wild to me someone wants to speak on a spect they really dont even play I found that odd. I look at raid , dungeons and pvp at every lvl and by the looks of it they lvl up the lock and thats about it

15

You can’t just dismiss their opinion because they don’t play the content that you think is only relevant. Nanette is lvl 70, have some S4 open world gear and it’s enchanted and gemmed, so they clearly do play this character. They didn’t even ask to change anything, just shared their opinion about spec feel, there is nothing wrong about it, even though I disagree with them.

I think current class design fits nearly perfectly, demonology should summon legions of demons from Twisting Nether to tear the enemies apart. While the Beast Master hunters should rely on their permanent pets. But that’s just my opinion.

16

I believe we have a difference of opinion then, and that’s okay.

For me, it’s more about control. I am the summoner. I summon demons and dismiss them. They obey. That’s the fantasy I grew up with in this game. Now, they come and go as the please, whether by additional spell effects or on their own (wild imps). Either I control them or I don’t. Since it doesn’t feel like I do, save the main summon, I feel less in control.

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The game is more than just raid, keys, and pvp rating though. Don’t delude yourself that this is a game like LoL where the only point of the game is to climb the rankings. WoW is an mmorpg after all.

Not to mention OP isn’t even talking about balancing issues, but playstyle and spec fantasy design, so the fact that OP does not engage in endgame content isn’t really a factor here. Same can be said for you.

If you don’t agree with OP that’s fine, but coming into this thread with this holy than thou attitude is in poor taste. Your comments add nothing to the discussion.

1 Like
18

I mean vanilla Demo, really? I can see TBC when you get felguard and even wrath. But Vanilla?

19

In most cases it was to build more player agency and variance into rotations (and also mana was often wildly different between classes resulting in DPS variances that had little to do with the skill of the player). Two cases that exemplify the shift:

  1. At the end of Wrath, Ret Paladins had a rotation based on a strict cooldown priority which could be macro’d into one button and performed basically optimally. So Blizzard decided that it…you know…probably shouldn’t be the case that a macro can play a spec better than most humans, so they (presumably) decided that Ret needed an aspect of decision making, where either one of two abilities could be preferred over the other in different situations, and a /castsequence macro would not automatically always choose the right answer.
    So they went with Holy Power, a new resource to be generated- and then spent (the Cata iteration was godawful for Ret, but it’s been greatly improved since). Now, instead of a rotation based strictly on cooldowns where a couple of abilities always take priority over particular other abilities, the priority shifts based on the current level of resources and players have to actively be aware of their resource situation as well as ability cooldowns (I’m aware that WAs can basically do all of this now, but I’m talking about back then)
  2. By the end of Cataclysm, Warlocks (oh look we’re in the Warlock forum) had steadily built up damaging abilities over the expansions, and the rotations were getting quite messy. Those rotations were the result not of any sort of internal logic or synergy, but of enough different and random abilities having a DPCT greater than whatever filler the spec possessed. Destro, in particular was an absolute cluster#$%&, featuring (iirc) four DoTs, a maintenance buff that could be kept up in one of three different ways, two or three direct damage abilities with CDs (one of which was ignored during Lust), and a filler. It was messy nonsense, and Warlocks received a much-needed simplification going into MoP, and with the simplification (particularly for Demo and Destro which weren’t juggling as many DoTs and short-CD abilities anymore) they needed something to keep the player engaged. Enter spec-specific resources, where instead of following a muddled mass of CDs and DoTs that demand your attention at very specific moments (we didn’t have Pandemic windows in Cataclysm you may recall), you follow a different set of rules, where watching your resources and spending them when you think most appropriate is the name of the game.

Could they have gone in some different ways? Sure, probably. One of the other hassles of cooldown-based rotations like old Ret (or Enhance) was the occasional frustration of haste levels making ability CDs feel very awkward when the CD didn’t line up with the GCDs properly. In the last few expansions, though, the revelation that ability CDs get reduced by haste has made for much smoother CD-based gameplay for many specs. There are other models that could be considered, presumably, but if you’re looking for variance and player agency, building and spending is a good-and variable-base to build on.

20

What a wonderfully thought out and answered post, I agree with you whole heartedly.

1 Like