I have been looking around at server populations and the classes that were popular back in the days of vanilla and it seems to me that warlocks are not as popular as I expected. Is there a reason that they were not very common? To me they have excellent cc, many survivability tools like healthstone and voidwalker sacrifice, they have a really cool flavor and lore and they have a relatively easy leveling experience. All these great aspects of the class make it seem like a really awesome class to play, so why aren’t they more common?
I have vague recollections of warlocks not being very strong until they were buffed later in Vanilla.
Also, in Vanilla it typically took months to level up a character. Many players did not have alts.
Perhaps warlocks were simply buffed too late in the game for players to want to shelve their existing characters and switch to them.
Also, warlocks were not one of the “iconic” D&D type fantasty classes (like warriors, priests and mages). This might also have resulted in less popularity back then.
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Yes, and it is undeserved.
Take for example the legendary video series “World of Roguecraft”. It was very popular, and portrayed Warlocks as these droopy eyed armless children who can’t do much.
The truth is, they are extremely powerful, but like Warriors you need gear. We (I) will deal with it too. Part of the cost of picking a class that scales so well with gear is you kinda suck without good gear.
A well geared Warlock is going to be the absolute scariest thing in the game in PVP, and be good damage in raids.
Furthermore, the group/raid utility of having Warlocks is basically required. Stamina buffs, health stones, summons, etc.
Edit: version without sound muted by youtube.
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I think people are mostly turned off by warlocks because of two things:
- Soul Shards.
- Warlocks are “evil”.
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They were training dummies until BWL almost.
I remember the web site’s new-player guide explicitly telling players that warlocks were a complicated class to play, and between managing soul shards, differentiated pets, and all the utility stuff, you could argue that was true in comparison to other classes. In any case, that note may have scared potential warlocks off.
Kevin Jordan, WoW class designer, has also stated in interviews that this was intended to be the “freak class”, implying it had appeal to a particular type of player who was not in the majority.
In line with what Mistwynd said, warlocks were not considered to be strong until late in the game. I think in fact that they were okay all along, but it took people longer to figure out effective strategies. Even so, warlocks in vanilla always had more turkey talents than many other classes. I remember looking at talent trees for my alts going, “Wow! So hard to decide between all these cool things,” and then going back to my warlock and thinking, “Well, these three are necessary just to be effective, and then I guess this other one is all right, and oh I have to pick something at tier 3 just to get to the really good one at tier 4, might as well be that…”
But finally, as someone whose main was a warlock all through vanilla and TBC, yes, they were a really awesome class to play!
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That’s a multi-faceted question, and it has to do with how the game launched then evolved.
- Warlocks were weaker spellcasters, in terms of raw damage, than mages.
- Warlocks relied on dots, which take debuff slots. Originally, mobs had 8 slots.
- Pet management was perceived as a difficult thing for some players.
- Warlock fears were not desired as cc. Sheep was always preferred.
- Succubus casting Seduce was nice, but Sheep was always preferred.
- Most people didn’t even realize warlocks could banish and enslave.
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Drakedog was recently cited in another thread as a counterexample, but gear definitely helped.
They are a support-dps role. Your job is to spam your assigned debuff on every pulled mob as soon as they are pulled. Then, if you have spare time you spam shadow bolts.
Most likely guilds will force you to use imp for blood pact, and dots are out of the question with the debuff limit, so all of that fun theorycrafting you mentioned isn’t very applicable to raids.
It can be a pretty humiliating experience for someone used to retail, especially early on when your dps is low and pre-raid BiS is better than 95% of MC gear. It’s true that mages spam frostbolt, which could be boring, but spamming debuffs as a lock is different type of boring which involves more overall responsibility and less tangible results (damage).
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World of Roguecraft, Episode 2 has a lengthy segment on this.
Check my youtube video in my post, updated to start at this point.
Its funny, the first time I saw drakedog I was absolutely amazed. I never underestimated a warlock after seeing that video. I noticed that warriors and rogues had far more pvp videos than warlocks. Do you think that warlocks just didn’t have the same exposure as other classes, making it a part of why people didn’t pick them over time?
I think warlocks were perceived as weaker spellcaster, in terms of raw (that is, direct) damage, but more particularly because of the 2nd point, which really became apparent in raiding. If warlocks couldn’t use 2/3 of their damaging spells, then their overall damage output was in fact weaker. The fact that, like other high-utility classes, their curses were contributing to the DPS of others was often not considered.
This is an interesting point, considering hunters were quite popular. But hunter pets are basically DoTs with a health bar, and warlock pets each bring their own utility, so you have to plan which pet to have out, and know how to position each differently, how to use their utility stuff, etc. etc. That is pretty complicated for some people.
Using Fear in dungeons was often a guaranteeed wipe. Good warlocks knew how to fear-juggle with Curse of Recklessness, but if your party didn’t know about that, they would freak out on you. There were enough bad warlocks using Fear and leaving their pet on aggro in early days that they got a very bad rap for instance play that took a long time to overcome.
Sheep was preferred because it was visually obvious. Succubus seduce just put a few pink hearts over the target’s head. I remember I had to write a macro spamming tells not to break my succubus seduce, other players would do it so often.
And finally, yeah, banish and enslave were really underappreciated by other players, and even many warlocks didn’t make good use of them. I played heavy Demonology, and I remember juggling demons by sacrificing my minion and enslaving a demon foe at key moments during fights, something I wouldn’t expect most players to care to manage.
The warlock class was deep, hard to learn to play well, and hard for non-warlocks to understand and appreciate.
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There were 2 locks on my server in Vanilla before BWL that were straight lethal. It was comical how much damage they could do in a short window.
BWL just made them even more ridiculous.
I learned very fast that staying out side of their range was key to survival. It actually taught me how to kite casters and avoid taking damage VS locks / SP’s and other casters.
After that everything was easy for me in PVP excluding a certain balance druid who was played by the god damn devil… The dude was immortal or something, could never kill him and he always got away when he was getting worked.
Cant discount balance because without gear they can kill you slowly no matter how good you are if they don’t suck… With gear they become even more aggravating.
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In PvE it really is 2 different worlds in Vanilla. Pre hit gear and post hit gear, once zg hits and you are able to easily stack hit gear you should be a MONSTER, assuming you know how to press that shadowbolt button really really hard.
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It was a little more involved than just that, but not by much. In my raiding time, each warlock was assigned a particular curse (Elements, Shadows, maybe Doom), and they had to watch the debuff icons and reapply it. One warlock was sometimes allowed to to Curse of Agony or Corruption, but other debuffs and DoTs often took priority.
This was absolutely true for the warlock in the main tank’s group. You had your imp out, and it was an important contribution to the raid, even if it affected your damage output. This was given more recognition than the debuffing as far as “raid contribution”. Raiding had its own whole separate world of theorycrafting, which got locked down early in vanilla raiding, and not much experimentation was wanted past that stage.
All this too. There was (and probably still is) an obsession with topping the meters, and your contributions as warlock were probably responsibible for a good chunk of other people’s rankings, but did you get credit for that? No…
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You definitely needed an industrial-strength keyboard for top DPS. We told you warlocks were gear-dependent! ![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
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A blues and greens warlock with hit can embarrass a GEARED frost mage.
its all about the right kind of gear. ignoring the set gear that is crap and stacking the correct items that give you the most dmg output. Ignore EVERYTHING stam/int.
edit: I laugh whenever I see a warlock with tier 1 gear on.
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Warlocks also got their talent revamp late in vanilla so they were not strong at the beginning like they were at the end.
Early on in vanilla Warlocks were weaker, and they were far more complex and difficult to pick up than Mages were. We didn’t know about Demonic Sacrifice/Ruin and Shadow Bolt spam and during the period where we had only 8 debuff slots we couldn’t really have Shadow Weaving on the boss to increase the DPS of the Warlocks - just the curses that increased the DPS of the Mages, really. Once people got more gear (BWL+) and the rework came out, and people figured all of it out, Warlocks were competitive.
Likewise in PvP, early on they were weaker and they required a lot of gear - like the magic version of Warriors. Mages are still going to be more popular, but Warlocks will likely be much more popular now - though on the Alliance they’ll still be in demand since they have to contend with WotF.
It was more in TBC than Vanilla but I remember having to talk my way into dungeon groups that were looking for CC. It usually took a couple of trash packs before I felt like they believed me that I really could lock down a MoB with seduce/etc and then we’d get to those mixed groups where I’d seduce one and banish something else and keep them that way…I need to get back in practice.
I didn’t start playing until after it happened but I do remember that Warlocks got a fairly major re-vamp/buff in mid to late Vanilla.