Originally Posted by
Malderas
The more I think about these changes (and after seeing Ghostcrawler's twitter response there) the more angry I'm getting about this.
I've been maining this warlock since the start of BC, and I've always just rolled with the changes. Never really complained at all.
This is actually the first time I've considered shelving this character since I started playing it. If I start leveling now, I can get an alt to level 90 before 5.4. I even finally bought the cloth heirlooms for my priest and mage, which are each only level 12.
I seriously don't understand the reasoning here.
Okay, I mean, I get that they didn't intent for every warlock to pick Kil'jaeden's Cunning. They didn't want every warlock to be moving while casting. I get that.
However, what I don't understand is why they then made it the only desirable talent in the tier. Archimonde's Vengeance is a joke, and Mannoroth's Fury has situational utility at best.
Hell, I don't even understand the names for those talents. What do any of those characters have to do with those mechanics? Why not design talents that are thematically linked to those characters? But I digress.
So, we've got this talent which almost every warlock is taking. It's even pretty much mandatory if you want to kill Kanrethad and get your green fire. And here's the thing: it's actually really fun. It completely changes the way you play your warlock. It's basically a new playstyle, unique amongst casters: lots of hard casts and channeled spells, but you still have decent mobility while you're using them.
Well, we have this talent for most of the expansion, people get used to it, people enjoy it. Blizzard even balances warlock DPS around having it, because all of the warlocks are picking it. It starts to feel integral to the class. I know that whenever I switch to MF, I can't wait to get back to using KJC.
Anyway, towards the end of the expansion, Blizzard finally decides that too many warlocks have been using this "unintentionally" fun ability for too long. Not enough people are picking the other two talents, so naturally it's time to gut the one that people actually like. Not buff the other two, no way. Why would they do that when they could just have three talents that are equally unappealing?
So they nerf KJC, and it's a terrible change which I personally hated, though I could at least wrap my brain around the reasoning. What I can't understand is why they also nerf Mannoroth's Fury, a talent which is only marginally useful to begin with, but I suppose it's part of their scheme to make all three talents equally unappealing. If they didn't nerf it, it would become the only desirable talent, and they can't have that.
So, thankfully, myself and my warlock brethern are quick to speak out about how crappy this change is. How spiteful it seems. How it guts something which, sure, maybe turned out to be better than they originally intended, but was nonetheless extremely fun. Insert hundreds, probably thousands of complaints.
And now, Blizzard's response is, "Okay, we're still going to nerf them, but we'll nerf them ever so slightly less. And to make up for it, we're going to nerf some other stuff too! But we'll phrase it like a buff!"
Seriously, what's the reasoning here? I can't grasp it. Why would you take our only instant cast -- keep in mind that instants can be cast while moving -- and nerf it by adding a cast time to it and removing its functionality (refreshing DoTs), when our complaint was that you're taking away our mobility? We can already cast it while moving, and it lets us refresh some of our hard cast DoTs without having to stop and hard cast them again.
Where is the logic in that nerf? I can't find it. Most of our abilities are already hard casts. That's what made Kil'jaeden's Cunning so fun, don't you get it? Having a lot of hard casts, balanced around the fact that we still have some mobility while using them. That's a fun and unique playstyle for a caster.
If the problem is that the mobility while casting is unfair or unbalanced, make Kil'jaeden's Cunning baseline and balance the class around it, even at the expense of DPS and PvP viability, because the playstyle is frankly far more fun with KJC than without it.
If the problem is that you just plain don't want us to have complete mobility while casting, then by all means, find a way to nerf Kil'jaeden's Cunning without completely gutting the fun factor. Don't nerf one of our very few instant casts, which is already our "mobile filler" spell. Just take our existing hard cast filler spells (Malefic Grasp, Shadowbolt, Incinerate) and let us move while casting them. Maybe even make a passive on KJC requisite to do so.
If the problem is simply that too many people are taking this single talent, and that goes against your desire to eliminate cookie cutter specs, then either rework the entire tree such that all three talents are desirable, or buff the other two talents so that they're desirable alternatives to Kil'jaeden's Cunning. Under no circumstance should your solution be gutting the one desirable talent in the tier, to make the other two look better by comparison.
Sorry that this became a wall of text, I got a bit carried away.