Will people pick warlock more this time around because they know how good they get?
Gotta get some hit from gear that comes in later cycles.
Early tier is basically designated IF Bridge/Org Bank cosmetic fluff. Iâm more excited about getting Felcloth stuff early on tbh
Yes, but mages will still be more popular. It isnât that warlocks are bad, theyâre good. Itâs just that mages are top tier at every aspect of the game and are also a ranged dps. Great at farming, great at pvp, great at pve, make your own water. Thereâs little reason not to be one.
I am death incarnate
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I thought they were horribly boring to level and they also really stink without gear, theyâre hard countered by rogues and especially undead toons, so majority of them were probably horde.
I know, right?! Some of our CCâs were type-specific, but that meant that we could have multiple CCâs at a time. And with so many demons in Outland, we could often do just that.
Warlocks are top-tier, if well played. They are great at farming, great at pve, and donât need water. 
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Well, thatâs one way of looking at it I guess. I mean, if people just think that sending in VW and then dot-dot-wand-wand-Drain Soul is the way forward all the time, yeah, it would be little different to leveling, say a shadow-priest. But once you get into juggling multiply mobs, leash pulling from big packs etc. it takes on new dimension. Chain-pulling and kiting 5+ mobs is do-able if you have speed enchants for example, in conjunction with juggling CoE.
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I got continual enjoyment leveling my warlock. Tastes vary. My paladin was the only character I actually deleted, I found it so boring.
Horde warlocks definitely had an advantage over alliance warlocks in pvp, with the Orc & Forsaken racials. Gnomesâ Escape Artist didnât suck, but countering stuns & fears was much more useful.
Well itâs assumed youâre going to be an orc warlock of course. Doing otherwiseâŚwell thatâs just silly.
As a former warlock in vanilla I will agree with you that Mages were better. Also, shadow priests were better at dealing with Melee. But if you played a lock right they were god tier.
I bet 10 to 15% of the players are going to play them to their full potential. They are easy to do well with but very difficult to do your best with. Retail locks do not play like vanilla locks. They donât spam buttons in vanilla. They play like a chess player. You have to manage your curses, pets and damage/cc all separately.
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All this and more. I never even tried Curse of Exhaustion, or several other builds/strategies that were available. I could play vanilla for years before trying all the possible playstyles (faction, class, talent builds, strategies & tactics within builds, world PVE, raiding, world PVP, battlegrounds, arenasâŚ).
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Most players just arenât cool enough to play Warlock. Itâs a little sad, but there it is.
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Aye, I love warlocks. They are like a Swiss army knife in the right hands. I still have a lot to learn as well. I did start out as Mage main, and then later rolled warlock and later again DK for some melee action. But I always went back to my warlock.
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Donât want to nit pick too much, but this is not accurate.
Hunter pets in Vanilla had to be found (rare spawns), tamed, trained, fed, and leveled (their level and XP were separate from the hunterâs. THEN you had to learn to manage your pet in combat situations.
As an example, if you want the highest rank of Bite to teach all your pets you must tame ONE warg found only in LBRS, a very difficult thing to solo (requires invis pots and liberal use of feign death).
All this complexity is one of the many reasons there were so many Huntards in Vanilla.
Just like Warlocks, their skill floor started low but went very high if you wanted to play the class well.
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The rotation is also one of the most dynamic and high skill cap in PvE, since itâs all about not clipping (or clipping to use abilities on CD depending on weapon) your auto attack. Then TBC hits and you macro it all to one buttonâŚ
Hunters had their own complexities and depth, to be sure, and I didnât want to get into the details. I was really talking about hunter vs. warlock pets in play, particularly in terms of varying utility abilities, not about acquiring and training. I should have been clearer about that.
The early class guidance from Blizzard did not highlight the points you mentioned, beyond having to feed your pet, and perhaps level it. Prospective warlocks were warned up front that the class was complex, if not told all the details; hunters werenât warned, hence the Huntards you mentioned. I met fewer really effective hunters than really effective warlocks in my time playing vanilla, but the ones who were, were devastating.
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Not to mention an accidental right click or sending the pet in at the wrong time would spell disaster⌠definitely the easiest class to fail spectacularly with.
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Warlocks and hunters shared that problem. 
My first time through Gnomeregan, done at a much lower level than I should have, our party leader had us jump off the balcony into the irradiated elemental area. She did not tell me to dismiss my voidwalker. It ran through the barracks and trained every single darn trogg onto us as we were fighting the elite elemental.
We all had a good laugh about it. Nobody was expecting itâwe were all new to the gameâand it really was hilarious to have an army of troggs roll over us. But once was enough, and the lesson was definitively learned!
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Sadly, that still happened in Gnomeragan when I quit in BfAâŚ