Why do u hate warlock and how do u propose a "fix"

i see lots of salt about destro on these forums.

me personally i dont do arenas cuz i dont like them, but i find ganking them in BG pretty easy if they dont have a healer or buddy around. (rogue op tbh ngl)

Im guessing people dont like them because of the CC and insane durability?

how do u propose a fix? i think if they take away demon armor they would need something in replace, perhaps more mobility?

what do u guys say?

This is all my 2 cents.
No class should have

  1. Spamable CC
  2. Single abilities that can take 1/3 to 1/2 of someone’s HP.
  3. Cloth being tankier than tanks.
  4. Very low cast time on very high damage ability.
    Short list –
11 Likes

Passive survivability is what is hurting this game imo. Classes need to decide whether to heal or do damage.

13 Likes

I hate (current) destro because its design is very one dimensional:

  • one damage spell
  • not much team utility (compared to previous expacs)
  • zero mobility
  • high passive tankiness

How to fix it:

  • reduce bolt damage during infernals, increase incin and immolate damage
  • add shadowburn execute
  • remove flashpoint traits
  • nerf demon armor a bit, buff curse of weakness a lot (barely outperforms DA with max 50% uptime, literally no reason to ever pick it)
  • baseline circle
  • ember tap back (actually just delete demon armor and make ember tap the pvp talent)
3 Likes

There’s a couple main issues with destro

First, the big issue with demon armor generally revolves with an overall game issue. As we get more gear this xpac our health pools rise, but our damage does not catch up anywhere near as fast as health pools. This has caused every season to be slower than the past. The reason demon armor becomes extra strong here, is the very high health pools in general make it difficult to kill warlocks.

The next issue is a combination of a few other things. Their mastery is quite effective for damage reduction, and the flashpoint trait provided a significant amount of haste. This means that you don’t have to sacrifice anything defensively for high haste levels, which is honestly incredibly useful. Then the damage output combined with tankiness and flashpoint haste makes it relatively easy to get strong benefits from soul leech. Overall you have a spec that can deal a considerable amount of damage, has very high control, and is extremely difficult to kill.

Their powerful self sufficiency also synergizes incredibly well with resto druids or holy paladins, who can chuck out extremely large burst heals from Swiftmend SoTF regrowths or divine favor holy lights. The fact that destro is so tanky means that you can pretty much always survive a CC chain, and your healers can be mana efficient as they can let you drop low knowing they can easily save you - whereas if they had squishier specs on their team they would be pressured vastly more to constantly heal - in which case they can fall behind.

You can hit them in numerous ways. Many suggest flashpoint as a good area to hit. It’s definitely possible, hitting flashpoint prevents those scenarios where you’re just punished so hard for ever coming out in the open to try to win the game. You can chuck out very fast casts on one of the tankiest specs in the game.

I personally am not the biggest fan of hitting flashpoint. I’m actually quite ok with Wizards having very high haste levels and damage/control.

Really my largest issue is the passive tankiness. This kind of forces you to just play to extreme dampening to effectively win against warlock teams no matter who it is and the errors they make. You’re punished for playing offensively ever since they can just counter pressure your go outside of deep dampening in which case they can very easily win the game while you’re stuck in the open because of their fast casts.

The only legitimate weakness to destruction warlock is their lack of mobility, and since mobility is extremely important in high dampening this is what makes it so people can win by pretty much never interacting whatsoever. This makes gameplay pretty unfun on both sides.

Basically, I’m ok with wizards having high damage and control, especially with high haste levels.

However passive tankiness for wizards is always a bad thing, and it lets the advantage of them being ranged shine incredibly hard. You have to sit on them to shut them down, but staying on them also punishes you when they counter pressure offensive goes (which is just going to be reactionary) and it causes - pretty vicious cycle where there’s a person sitting in one spot never moving their character but there’s nothing you can do about it at all EXCEPT wait until 30-40% dampening.

TL;DR hit their tankiness, make other people do more damage to them and they’re fine. Can also just make it so they can keep double coil, crush the passive tankiness and give them mobility with port. Overall that would reward good play much more, prevent the counterplay from being do nothing until 40% damp, and at the same time allow warlocks to still be powerful IF they play well (compared to their being very low personal responsibility as destro on ladder outside of tourney play).

Edit: I’d like to add that multiple high threat spell schools become extremely frustrating to deal with when the caster is tanky. If they die much easier, this is fine because both sides can kind of play around juking/faking and whatnot. Mages also have the same issue when playing fire. But basically flashpoint haste with tankiness leads to two scenarios: warlock spams fear. If you let fears go off your team loses pressure and momentum, and the warlock team can set up bolts on you. If you kick their fear, they also get the opportunity to bolt you for free. Either way you’re in a lose lose. When there is a more consistent threat of death, your DRs are much more valuable and you have to be careful of when you choose to cast vs a scripted rotation where you can sit there as the warlock and do whatever you want and you have an answer no matter what your opponnent does EXCEPT lining until deep damp. WoD mages had this exact issue. BfA fire runs into a similar one (frost doesn’t since they opt out of RoF pmuch, but they still make it so you can never stop them anyways).

4 Likes

i’d be fine with warlock effective health if they didn’t passively regenerate it with soul leech and prop it up with armor

a bfa destro that sponges scads of HPS from their healer (because ehp is a terrible defensive stat when the game is good) sounds funny

1 Like

Umm, sure if you spec into big bolt then yeah, all your damage is bolt. It’s also one of the worst ways to play Destro into most comps because you’re dropping all your eggs into one basket. You’re probably also running a badge if you do this rather than another trinket. If you run Roaring Blaze and proc trinkets like Highborne Compendium and Shiver Scale your damage diversifies quite a bit. Add in actual pet control rather than setting it to passive like the vast majority of clueless locks in arena and your damage meter becomes incredibly diverse. Throw in Crucible major and you’re at like 19 sources of damage I want to say.

1 Incin
2 Immo
3 Immo tick
4 Conflag
5 Chaos Bolt
6 Infernal Drop
7 Infernal Tick
8 Infernal Melee
9 Pet Melee
10 Pet Ability
11 Highborne Comp
12 Shiver
13 Shiver Use
14 Roaring Blaze
15 Crucible
16 Crucible Dot
17 Crucible Proc dot
18 Cataclysm
19 Rain of Fire

Imp dispel is an amazing utility. I run it all the time when we run double lock versus jungle. It prevents the druid from burning dispel and getting maledicted. 2 aoe stuns which help tremendously against RM and smoke bomb.

Increasing incinerate and immolate damage just makes this spec even more dangerous than it already easy. Nerfing Flashpoint and nerfing Chaos Bolt just body bags this spec.

Demon Armor and CoW aren’t interchangeable. CoW is a solid pick into Assa, or Survival, or Ret. These specs don’t do much physical damage so DA isn’t an ideal pick. There’s also times you can run both and use it to save your partner. For instance, when you run MLD often times melee cleaves sit your mage, not you. CoW can be really good here. Also, you don’t always need COE up. You can use it after you fully fear DR a target to reduce the damage they have while they’ll stick to you unhindered. Seems like you just don’t understand the tool kit.

You don’t have to be a bfa destro gladiator to see that the design is very flawed tbh… but when you list immo ticks as meaningful damage, I don’t feel there’s really a point in arguing in the first place

8 Likes

Yea this is a big part of it

Huge reason you’re forced to just have a noninteractive game vs destro no matter what they’re doing, just makes it miserable to fight

Sadly this has just been a common theme this xpac though, too many low risk/high reward mechanics/specs/items causing frustrating gameplay

Immo dot damage is usually top 3 damage for destro. It’s significantly higher than pretty much everything else that was mentioned save for chaos bolt, sometimes conflag if you’re playing in 2s against a something you constantly fear that gets dispelled. Most of those things barely chalk up to 3-4% of your overall damage, but the thing is that there are tons of little sources of damage adding up. In my games last week as double destro the only time we ever ran big bolts was into RMPala because those games don’t really have an opportunity to OOM the Paladin and cause enough pressure without a large bolt. Against druid, priest, and MW these things become unhealable because your mana bar ceases to exist much quicker. If you lump everything into a 2 min 20 second CD you can just line up a defensive and be much more mana efficient, or hell you can just walk away from it. That simply isn’t possible to do when you’re doing consistently high damage throughout the match.

Please stop

6 Likes

Nah 10char

The strongest healers right now.

:joy:

Ofc

But those healers with changes made towards mana and other things would struggle more if there was a consistent worry of their team dying

But they lose downsides playing with these immortal specs

Yeah Dillon you are totally right. I’ve been saying to my friends for a while that the problem is the stronger specs/classes (Hpal, Rdruid, Mage, Lock, Rogue) all synergize with each other into really strong comps.

Says it perfectly.

Meanwhile, the more balanced mid tier specs combine into OK comps. (Thinking Rsham, Disc, Survival, Feral, Ret).

1 Like

Yes but fast chaos bolts is just bad design. Especially when chaos bolt is their biggest damage spell with or without cds.

One thing you have to consider as to why blizzard went with the current design of destro is how they want it to function in raid fights.

The whole thing started with blizzard wanting destro to be king of cleave fights, cleaving chaos bolts all fight long. So in turn they nerf the base damage of chaos bolt but then created focus chaos for pvp. You can’t have a strong chaos bolt in pve as long as havoc bolt works as it is, because then locks will be breaking the charts on anything with 2 targets.

One solution I think is to remove focus chaos entirely and buff chaos bolt damage by maybe 25% ish. Along with bringing back shadowburn execute and buff the damage of incin and conflag. Brings back the whole double chaos bolt/shadowburn combo that used to be fun to pull off back in the days.

Or they can just make chaos bolt unhavocable in both pve and pvp and buff its damage, but then that might make destro’s rotation even more boring in pve.

I do think they should remove flashpoint also, as I believe chaos bolt should be a slow cast nuke not something that you can get 2-3 of in a coil/shadowfury cc.

As for their over-tankiness I think for all locks making port and soul link base line will help a ton, you can remove demon armor and random damage reduction from destro mastery and nerf/remove soul leech. Soul link adds a lot of tankiness but unlike the passives of DA and soul leech it at least has some counter play, and making port baseline means they don’t have to give up their crucial cc talent and adds a little more skill to playing lock, not just stand in middle and tank everything all match long.

1 Like

Ya but warlocks had fast chaos bolts in WoTLK and it wasn’t as frustrating since Destro could die

High CC, Good kiting potential, Great damage, but much squishier

Compare that to now where you instead are just giving up the ability to kite for passive tankiness

This makes the absurd haste much harder to play around

I agree. Nerf fire mage

2 Likes

Remove Demon armor. They don’t need a compromise.

Go back to cata when you didnt have passive tankiness. I think the only specs with passive tankiness in cata were disc with focused will and boomkin form increasing armor and frost armor for mages.

And your sources of tankiness were mostly casting heals. Drain life, healing surge, regrowth and the other druid hot, flash heal which were quick casted heal but weren’t insanely op healing and the only spec with strong heal was ret which has been the only true “hybrid” spec all along. Don’t go back to recuperate for rogue tho, that was way too good.

Then boost damage up from classes, not from trinkets. If you want to keep these ridiculous pve trinkets available to pvp because you want your playerbase to “increase your participation number” nerf all pve trinket effectiveness by 75% for any pve trinket. So they are strong but not overpowered. Right now all you do is nerfing pve trinket by 40-70% after 5months they’ve been problematic and then new trinkets become problematic.

Tl:dr
Remove all passive tankiness.
Reduce the amount of healing dps classes can do, or force them to be casted heal.
Boost classes damage, don’t throw in trinkets to do damage for you.
Boost healing if necessary.
Reduce all pve trinkets effectiveness by 75%.

We’d rather have our healthpool playing ping pong than being livelord tanks boring dampening crap every match.