First time playing warlock in retail why are warlocks so squishy compared to BFA?
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It’s really unfortunate. We have 1 three minute defensive cooldown, a 30s port and a 2 minute port. No soul link, no baseline demon armor.
Meanwhile I’ve been playing a warrior alt with what feels like 4 different built in walls, and more mobility and utility for their team. Hilarious, but sad.
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These new developers don’t seem to know what they’re doing nor do they care. To get a good Warlock experience you need to go to classic. Fortunately TBC is underway.
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-SL SS intensifies-
ya its pretty brutal in arena. 3s can be ok with a good healer. Play 2s if you like pain. RBGS though are pretty good
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Listening to Chanimal describe how lock plays rn is pretty depressing. I’m prob just an average lock so games are rough seems like melee just wreck me every game.
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Ya I mean Im not the best pvper but you are basically right. Afflic can perma slow which is nice for them but your not peeling a ww monk or x number of every melee with 4 gap closers.
On the arena forums there was a 2k plus rep chart and arena is basically the arms, ret, and fire mage show
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Locks are one of the worst classes in pvp right meow. If the opposition has a melee, we are screwed. They are buffing demon armor in the ptr but I do not foresee it to be enough to hinder melee from destroying us. I quit doing pvp on my lock solely bc I was sick and tired of being the focus of every single melee in Arenas. I play on my mage alot and I get less melee contact than my lock does.
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There’s a lot of reasons. One of which is each of our specs is basically tied down to a specific spell school, including our utility. So if your cast gets locked, you cant do -anything-, including utility and defensive spells, for 4-6 seconds.
The second is the sheer underperformance of our utility and defensives. Our single DR is 40% (a pathetic amount), for 8 seconds on a 180-second cooldown. Circle and gate are generally good utility, but both have to be pre-cast in order to do anything. Our primary CCs are a stun and a fear that both have cast times, and fall under the spell-lock issue defined above. Every other class has defensives and utility that are instant and/or superior to ours.
The third is that all three of our specs have delayed ramp-up damage compared to many other specs (especially melee) which are frontloaded. If you need 5+ seconds (demo/destro) or 10+ (aff) to realistically put out threatening numbers, and thats before getting kicked/stunned/generally CCd, well, any competent melee has already killed you at that point and is probably still sitting at 50% health (more if they bothered using any utility while locking us down).
There’s a reason melee trains any warlocks in most settings where there isnt a healer to kill first. We’re not a threat to them unless they let us freecast. If they train us, were just an easy kill.
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Demon armor and soul link helped. But IH said
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Warlocks are in a pretty bad space in PVP, atleast Destro especially, Affliction less so but it’s still not great. I’m assuming Demo isn’t really viable beacuse I havn’t seen a single one in arena this season.
Destro is a spec that requires us to be able to freecast if we want to do any damage and if you want kill potential you need to be able to chain 2 chaos bolts together. With how heavy the CC meta is at the momment this is insanely tough to pull off. Playing against melee classes (particularly arms warriors) is incredibly rough at the momment, when chaos bolt is so easily kicked, stunned, feared etc. Trying to land a chaos bolt on a warrior whos running around you lagging like a mf is very frustrating as well.
I don’t enjoy affliction anywhere near as much as I enjoy destro but it’s certainly the better of the 2 specs for arenas. Destro doesn’t have tons of ramp up time in terms of dots and stuff but it has tons of ramp up time in terms of cordinating CC whereas affliction has a bit of rampup time for damage (agony, corruption and UA) but requires significantly less CC cordination to actually land a kill. A lot of the time your dots will put someone down to 50%/60% HP pretty comfortably and all you need is 1/2 raptures to put them in lots of danger. The big thing with destro at the momment compared to affliction is that it’s essentially useless while stunned/locked out of spells whereas affliction will still have some pretty heavy damage ticking through, putting stress on the healer.
TLDR Destro sucks, affliction is boring but it’s viable
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Yeah I used to have a good time in bgs as destro in expansions past. Now not so much.
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At least our corpses look hot af with some of the best transmogs in the game…
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Was demon armor hot fixed? It says 150% on live. Wasn’t it 90? Or am I mistaken?
In total, it is roughly a 5% physical dmg decrease.
It SOUNDS and LOOKS good but in reality you won’t see a change in survivability.
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Was telling my friend the other day, it’s the price we pay for looking good 
master of nothing
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