warlocks are still extremely lackluster. the soulfire being an execute is nice, but they need something more than a new button for 35% hp or lower. As it stands it’s going even further behind in dps from basically all other classes and doesn’t get much to make up for it. The tanking update for shadow cleave is nice but it’s not nearly enough to make up for a lot of its shortcomings atm. Here’s what needs to change:
Make Corruption a baseline instant cast. Just do it. Make the talent just do more damage
Make Dance of the Wicked part of Metamorphosis’s kit. Don’t separate it out into two runes, combine the two so more options open up.
Make Shadow Cleave have an ability to where it deals more damage by the number of DoTs on a target. Make it an actual choice to go shadow or fire damage.
Combine both parts of the drain life rune. It’s weird the chest slot has two parts that REALLY want to be combined into one. Since things are becoming baseline maybe make the dps increase based on how many DOTs you have baseline if you don’t want to combine the two. This will help afflock immensely.
PROPERLY FIX LAKE OF FIRE. Make it a 4 second channel to get the benefit so dps locks can still use it. As it stands there’s no reason to use it and fire warlock feels way worse because of it.
Add seed of corruption. It’s really odd that it’s not in.
Edit:
Did some additional testing. Here’s some general things I’ve found:
Shadowburn rune is just… useless. The idea behind it is solid enough but with soulshards still being a pretty big tax, it’s not usually worth it. Especially whenever the execute rune with soulfire just outputs FAR more dps. It’s also weirdly not as impactful for afflock as you’d think it would be. Instead it’s more of a semi-interesting cooldown for desto since you can combo this with chaos bolt.
My suggestion: have the rune remove the soul shard cost of shadowburn as well and make it your next 2 crits.
Why this works: making it your next 2 crits allows for shadowbolt to combo off of itself which for afflock/shadowlock is a much larger dps increase than just a single crit. For destolock/firelock it will allow your incinerate AND your chaos bolt to both crit. Remember: this is competing with a full execute ability. It needs to have a good reason to be picked and it needs to feel VERY impactful.
Afflock… Boy it’s in a weird spot. I really want to like this because it has a really intensive rotation to truly maximize dps. ONE ISSUE: you can get pretty similar results by just… not caring about DOTs. If instead of going with what afflock/shadow lock typically does (which is DOTing and letting them all tick) you go with a simple rotation of using immolate, conflagurate, then shadowbolt. That gets about the same dps as doing the other maximized rotation of (get ready) Haunt>Shadowbolt until crit > demonic grace > corruption > Curse of Agony > Unstable Affliction > Siphon Life > Drain life. And that’s IF your raid allows you to use curse of agony. This effectively means there’s no reason to actually truly go afflock as just shadowbolt turret will outdps it in just about every practical case.
Suggestion for fixing: Give pandemic a 15% increase to DoT effects or 15% additional baseline critrate for DoTs. Separate curse of agony and curse of doom from the debuff curses. (just add a tag to them, that’s an easy fix) and allow only one from each category to be on any target.
The reason why this works: Agony/Doom do end up adding a fair bit of damage, but as they stand you never use them in raids because recklessness is typically a better pick for the raid overall. The other major issue is that overall pandemic only adds about a base 8% to your dps rotation. Backdraft adds 30%. There’s a MASSIVE gap there, but that’s not just it. Pandemic really needs the rune “Demonic Grace” as well since demonic grace snapshots your DoT effects. This means you instead lose out on demonic pact which is a 10% spellpower increase for not just you but your entire party. That’s massive. That can be a potential 10% damage increase across 5 people. The buff to the “pandemic” rune makes the tradeoff much more appealing and makes the choice between “demonic grace” and “demonic pact” an actual choice as you will have a good baseline crit rate (20% or so) to get your DoTs working. You then can choose whether to go more party friendly or to go high solo damage.
EDIT 2: I’m deciding to put a full list of feedback and associated ideas that I think are worth doing in this list:
Make Corruption a baseline instant cast. Just do it. Make the talent just do more damage
Make Dance of the Wicked part of Metamorphosis’s kit. Don’t separate it out into two runes, combine the two so more options open up.
Make Shadow Cleave have an ability to where it deals more damage by the number of DoTs on a target. Make it an actual choice to go shadow or fire damage.
Combine both parts of the drain life rune. It’s weird the chest slot has two parts that REALLY want to be combined into one. Since things are becoming baseline maybe make the dps increase based on how many DOTs you have baseline if you don’t want to combine the two. This will help afflock immensely.
PROPERLY FIX LAKE OF FIRE. Make it a 4 second channel to get the benefit so dps locks can still use it.
Decrease Shadowflame’s cooldown by 4 seconds.
Decrease infernal armor’s cooldown to 15 or 20 seconds.
Add an increase parry rate equal to your crit rating while vengeance is active
Remove the “Curse” part from Curse of doom and Curse of Agony so we can use those in raids.
Give shadowburn rune the extra benefit of removing soul shard costs to shadowburn.
Give demon armor a 35% chance to resist spell pushback.
Give Pandemic a 15% dps increase to DoT effects or a 15% crit chance increase to DoTs.
Re-Enable Soul link for PvE metalocks and disable it in BGs and PvP.
You’re out here doing God’s work. I hope they listen to your feedback cause this is spot on!
Just wanted to add we need some sort of defensive CD or help with our existing ones. We have no snare and no mobility. I’d like to see howl of terror made instant cast or deathcoil’s CD reduced to 1 min if nothing else.
Also soulwell and seed of corruption.
Soulshards stacking to 20?
Def need to remove SS cost from Shadowburn for that rune to work.
Actually, on that note of the first one. Can we talk about Vengeance and Infernal armor? Let’s talk about Vengeance and Infernal Armor.
Blizzard, who are these for? 10 seconds of magical reduction on a 1 minute cooldown, so 50 seconds of downtime per minute, why? You can make it a 20 second cooldown and I don’t think I’d be willing to take it over decimation. Something needs to be added to it. Maybe 35% of all damage you take is also transferred to your demon? (ALONG WITH the cooldown reduction. Seriously that’s ridiculous) Maybe healing is more effective on you? I’m just spitballing here.
Speaking of who is this for… Vengeance… Why? 30% extra health on cooldown, again who is this for? It needs actual utility like increasing dodge chance or parry chance on top of the 30% health. You’re giving pandemic or backdraft, both REALLY good runes for a 30% health cooldown? Really?
Also: Increase the range of demonic charge by about 15 and decrease cooldown by 5 seconds. It won’t be busted in pvp because banish exists, trust me.
Improved shadow bolt charges need to go away. Someone also needs to point out that a 40% reduction in soul fire cast time is still a ridiculous 3.6s cast and im pretty sure a soul fire cast isnt worth 1.6 incinerates.
affliction ideas to be viable:
-buff felhunter so that shadowbite actually does damage like wrath/cata (maybe increased by % amounts for each active dot on your target?)
-remove “curse” from agony and let it be its own thing so that we can always use it despite comps demanding debuffs (occult poison will probably fix this anyway)
-include drain life in the pandemic rune / make drain life double crit chance of your other spells while slotted
-nightfall proc chance needs to be affected by crit… or proccable by UA in addition to corruption
-mark of chaos rune also removes the soulshard cost of shadowburn
-increase % scaling on haunt to 30%?
-amplify curse changed to passive increase to agony, as opposed to 3 min cd
-qol book for soul harvest so locks can solo farm shards pre boss pull to have them for fights without tanking all their damage on trash in raid
I never used it and I tanked ST. It’s a pretty mediocre last stand ability whenever just adding more hp doesn’t REALLY do much to let the healers actually catch up since it adds no mitigation or dodge.
Cool. I used it and tanked ST and found it useful. I’m sure there are others who did as well and others who didn’t use it but that doesn’t change the fact it was made for Meta Locks considering it mimics a Warrior Tanking ability and had an added effect specifically for Meta Locks to remove Fall Damage when used, which came in handy during the first boss when being knocked into the air.
It would be nice if the Shadowburn rune could snapshot this crit onto dots. Even if it is just the first tick, you could go Shadowburn into curse of doom to get the guaranteed crit for that.
Id rather there be a rune for affliction that didnt need 11 talent points in a different tree. It may be the “meta” for dps. But I remember a time when SoD was intended to allow different types of play. Not to tack on shiny stickers over the same talent tree youve used in every instance of vanilla wow.
By investing 11 points into the Destruction Tree for Shadowburn. This does prevent you from going down the full affliction tree… by 1 point. You miss out on Dark Pact, a practically useless ability anyway.
Though I will say that they really should have made a rune that gave people a reason to use Dark Pact. Maybe something along the lines of “Rune of Dark Power - Dark Pact now has a 15 second cooldown. When you cast Dark Pact, for the next 9 seconds, your pet casts the next spell that you do.” (e.g. If you have an imp out, you cast dark pact, and then Haunt. The imp also casts Haunt)
We really just need a reason to ever take Dark Pact other than pvp reasons.
The biggest change warlock could see is something no one ever talks about. Pushback protection on spells. Please give us that in P4. Bake it into Demon Armor. Please do not implement seed of corruption. That spell is wayyy too strong. Im a warlock main, I currently tank parse clears because dpsing on lock is baaad in ST. I would like to dps in p4 and not be pigeon holed into searing pain spam because of knockback and movement mechanics. You need to bake a corruption refresh mechanic into something other than the rune thats tied to Demonic Pact. I will run demonic pact 100% of the time. Its a buzzkill not running Demonic pact knowing your friends are nerfed or asking the destro lock who gives up 25% dmg to run it.
Agreed on this for the knockback. Metalock needs a massive knockback protection buff. Corruption refresh has two ways to do it but tbh neither way feels really worthwhile compared to the other runes. I should probably make a follow up post summarizing all changes asked.
rune would be much more attractive option, for affliction (and all warlocks for trash) at least, if it caused the spell to not have a shard cost and could actually be used as an execute on mobs during trash to accrue some shards for other needs.
shadowburn kill something and then 100% crit chance on next sbolt volley while ur cleaving? yes please!