Warlords of Draenor : Class Changes Ideas

[Elise the Seeker]

I created a thread on the US Battle.net Warlock Forums and decided to share it with MMo-Champ.

Here are some changes to the class that I thought of that could help developers for our class.
Developers usually look around the class forums during expansion times to see what we want and here is what I feel we need. Im going to break it down with all three specs.

Affliction
[ul][1] Remove Malefic Grasp and make Shadow Bolt / Drain Life our filler again.
Create a Glyph of Malefic Grasp turning our Drain life to have the same visual as malefic grasp.
[2] Return Haunt to the way it worked in cataclysm and remove the soul shard requirement. Instead, have soul burn modify it.
[3] REMOVE SOUL BURN: SOUL SWAP. Please, it's unbalanced and this is the reason for most of the MoP Drama in the first place.
[4] Make Unstable Affliction Cleave whenever it ticks. It's unstable! So if it cleaved it would make sense.
[5] Give us back Soul Harvest. It was a spell every warlock had to love. It generated shards and healed us.
[6] Curses are cool, but they feel a bit clunky. Having to always apply Curse of The Elements in pve is annoying. Just make it a passive aura.[/ul]

Demonology
[1] At lower levels shadow bolt has a 1 second cooldown, which turns into 2.3 seconds at 90. This causes caster form to feel very clunky.
[2] Bring back the old Demonic Leap, and create a glyph for our current one.
[3] Metamorphosis , In my opinion should become a stance like shadow form. The new 100 talent that causes touch of chaos to generate fury should be baseline. Make a minor glyph that turns the meta stance to the dark apoth wings. Dark apoth was false hope for warlock tanks anyways.

Destruction
[1] Honestly, Destruction is amazing this expansion but alot of people still miss old aspects.

Talents
Tier 15 - This in my opinion is a good tier.
Tier 30 - Demonic Breath should become baseline, and replaced. It doesn't compete
with the others.
Tier 45 - This also seems to be a good tier.
Tier 60 - Alot of people have problems with burning rush in PvP. Other than that, its pretty good also.
Tier 75 - Grimoire of supremacy was a good idea, but too many people missed their felhunter. Make this glyph increase our base pets damage and create a glyph for the new pets, or create an item that changes our current pets.

Grimoire of Service - It's not really an interesting choice. Most people choose it because they either like their old pet, or use it when their demonology for the extra spin.

Grimoire of sacrifice is good.
Tier 90 - It's good, but Kil'jaedans cunning should become baseline and replaced.

Of course most of these are what I want, so you can leave your opinion on what you want.
What do you want for warlocks in Warlords of Draenor? Whats your opinion on these changes?

[Kamswow]

I like where warlocks are now but from the sounds of it they are making them a lot more simple by removing dot snapshotting, which is a good or bad thing depending on who you are. I'm not sure why you would want to replace MG with shadowbolt after you called it a clunky spell for demo. I also think making meta form just a permanent buff for the spec makes it boring. I like swapping in and out of being a demon. I hope the beta is soon, I'm dying to see some of the changes.

[Elise the Seeker]

I'm not sure why you would want to replace MG with shadowbolt after you called it a clunky spell for demo.

I also said drain life and before mg , shadowbolt had instant procs.

[TiagoRamos]

Demonology needs more love..at least in pvp. we are so broke...

[Deleted]

wont dotts do less damage without snap? i mean with snap they snap for the hole duration on the dotts. while without snap the dotts will only tick while buffs are up which may have a lower uptime when dotts.

[theburned]

I created a thread on the US Battle.net Warlock Forums and decided to share it with MMo-Champ.

Here are some changes to the class that I thought of that could help developers for our class.
Developers usually look around the class forums during expansion times to see what we want and here is what I feel we need. Im going to break it down with all three specs.

Affliction
[ul][1] Remove Malefic Grasp and make Shadow Bolt / Drain Life our filler again. Why would they do this, malefic grasp works very fine at the moment.
Create a Glyph of Malefic Grasp turning our Drain life to have the same visual as malefic grasp.
[2] Return Haunt to the way it worked in cataclysm and remove the soul shard requirement. Instead, have soul burn modify it. Haunt is one of the few spells that makes the difference between a good affli lock and a bad one together with snapshotting, removing half of the gameplay from affli doesn't sound like a good idea does it?
[3] REMOVE SOUL BURN: SOUL SWAP. Please, it's unbalanced and this is the reason for most of the MoP Drama in the first place. it's currently imbalanced due to snapshotting, this will be removed in WoD so why change a thing that presumably works with a new system.
[4] Make Unstable Affliction Cleave whenever it ticks. It's unstable! So if it cleaved it would make sense. Affli already has enough cleave you can't just make spells do stuff because it fits the name.
[5] Give us back Soul Harvest. It was a spell every warlock had to love. It generated shards and healed us.
[6] Curses are cool, but they feel a bit clunky. Having to always apply Curse of The Elements in pve is annoying. Just make it a passive aura.[/ul]warlocks already buff 2 things having a 3rd one passive sounds slightly OP, though maybe adding it to immolate wouldn't be too bad of an idea.

Demonology
[1] At lower levels shadow bolt has a 1 second cooldown, which turns into 2.3 seconds at 90. This causes caster form to feel very clunky. and you still want affli to have it as baseline? Also a balance issue, at lower lvls you need a spell to cast all the time at max level you got other spells which you should use.
[2] Bring back the old Demonic Leap, and create a glyph for our current one.
[3] Metamorphosis , In my opinion should become a stance like shadow form. The new 100 talent that causes touch of chaos to generate fury should be baseline. Make a minor glyph that turns the meta stance to the dark apoth wings. Dark apoth was false hope for warlock tanks anyways.It is already a stance like shadow form, it just works in a different way and it costs to be in it, it's great for class distinction and skillful play with the specc.

Destruction
[1] Honestly, Destruction is amazing this expansion but alot of people still miss old aspects.
Personally I like destro because of the whole min/maxxing aspect of it, but for others it's boring and way too easy to play.

Talents
Tier 15 - This in my opinion is a good tier. the shield spell is pretty much the only thing ever used, some use the heal + healing effects increased, but noone uses the drain life component due to it being a dps reduce.
Tier 30 - Demonic Breath should become baseline, and replaced. It doesn't compete
with the others. adding more cc to the warlock does not sound like a good idea, just reworking the spell slightly would do more good, just adding an interrupt or making it an disorient with 3 sec duration, or 2 sec + 3sec slow.
Tier 45 - This also seems to be a good tier.
Tier 60 - Alot of people have problems with burning rush in PvP. Other than that, its pretty good also.its high risk high reward in pvp, and its the only valuable talent in PVE, the only other useful talent is subpar to gosac imp.
Tier 75 - Grimoire of supremacy was a good idea, but too many people missed their felhunter. Make this glyph increase our base pets damage and create a glyph for the new pets, or create an item that changes our current pets. ...I dont really get what you wrote here, but too much usage of the word glyph either way, a quick fix would be to have a minor glyph that just makes the pet look like the normal pets, personally I prefer the supremacy pets.

Grimoire of Service - It's not really an interesting choice. Most people choose it because they either like their old pet, or use it when their demonology for the extra spin.
It's subpar so noone use it except for demo locks where it's the best one. Noone uses it because they like their old pet... really?

Grimoire of sacrifice is good. is OP as soon as you get the KTT trinket
Tier 90 - It's good, but Kil'jaedans cunning should become baseline and replaced. Having one of the best spells in a tier become baseline is not a good idea from a balance perspective.

Of course most of these are what I want, so you can leave your opinion on what you want.
What do you want for warlocks in Warlords of Draenor? Whats your opinion on these changes?

Really please don't spread ideas that would get a class back to a worse state than it currently is in, and don't use arguements like "people use subpar talents because they like the old pets" when talking about balance and playstyle issues.... Ask for a minor glyph for it....

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wont dotts do less damage without snap? i mean with snap they snap for the hole duration on the dotts. while without snap the dotts will only tick while buffs are up which may have a lower uptime when dotts.

The thing is that the numbers still have to add up... yes in theory if nothing changes except for the snapshotting then they will do less damage.
But the damage from the dots would have to be increased to compensate, so here is where the playstyle changes, you have to play more skillfully with haunt and malefic grasp, to increase your dps. This is a good thing though, as you get a bigger reward from using those spells correctly, while atm it is needed to max dps, currently you just snapshot and use haunt and MG to increase the damage of the dots that tick for more almost all the time.

[Elise the Seeker]

Really please don't spread ideas that would get a class back to a worse state than it currently is in, and don't use arguements like "people use subpar talents because they like the old pets" when talking about balance and playstyle issues.... Ask for a minor glyph for it....

- - - Updated - - -



The thing is that the numbers still have to add up... yes in theory if nothing changes except for the snapshotting then they will do less damage.
But the damage from the dots would have to be increased to compensate, so here is where the playstyle changes, you have to play more skillfully with haunt and malefic grasp, to increase your dps. This is a good thing though, as you get a bigger reward from using those spells correctly, while atm it is needed to max dps, currently you just snapshot and use haunt and MG to increase the damage of the dots that tick for more almost all the time.

You only see this on the perspective of pve, rather than both pvp and pve.

[theburned]

You only see this on the perspective of pve, rather than both pvp and pve.

the only statements that are not working for pvp is the ones where pvp isn't the issue or the grimoire's as its a choice between supremacy and sacrifice, which is ok, as long as service gets used by demo locks.

And possibly the soul burn + Soul Swap, which I assume is the reason you added this comment as you most likely feel its the most OP.
and I guess you are right, probably should just refresh your dots, or add new dots with 70% effectivity, or 40-60% duration, so that you would have to spend 2 shards to use it.

[Cebel]

heres a better change...

Make spells have different balancings based on whether its pvp or pve. You could even have them do additional effects ( disorients etc ) against players, while it does more damage to bosses ( to offset the loss of the disorient ).

They've needed to do it for awhile, and until they do pve and pvp will never be balanced separately from one another.

[theburned]

heres a better change...

Make spells have different balancings based on whether its pvp or pve. You could even have them do additional effects ( disorients etc ) against players, while it does more damage to bosses ( to offset the loss of the disorient ).

They've needed to do it for awhile, and until they do pve and pvp will never be balanced separately from one another.

its a way to get around balancing issues, but it does hurt the feel of gameplay a lot, and there is a reason they went away from this model in the very few cases it exsisted in the game, deep freeze, for example.

[Cebel]

its a way to get around balancing issues, but it does hurt the feel of gameplay a lot, and there is a reason they went away from this model in the very few cases it exsisted in the game, deep freeze, for example.

How did it hurt gameplay? Deep Freeze was fine ( i played a mage in cata ). It did its job in pvp and it gave it a chance to be a useful ability in pve. Sure its dmg was higher than it should of been, but it didnt change gameplay for the worse.

Im not saying make the spells completely different functions in different game modes ( pvp vs pve )... im saying make their numbers and maybe some SLIGHT mechanical changes ( much like the deep freeze ).

PVP is at an all time bad this expansion, and its due to the absolute insane scaling of items and power in the game currently. This change would completely solve that, without affecting PVE which has been absolutely amazing this entire expansion.

[Riven]

These changes are awful for too many reasons to list, but this one absolutely blows my mind.

Demonology
[1] At lower levels shadow bolt has a 1 second cooldown, which turns into 2.3 seconds at 90. This causes caster form to feel very clunky.

What.
Why would you want our spammable caster form filler to have a 2.3s cooldown, is this written wrong or a joke?

[Zathrendar]

How did it hurt gameplay? Deep Freeze was fine ( i played a mage in cata ). It did its job in pvp and it gave it a chance to be a useful ability in pve. Sure its dmg was higher than it should of been, but it didnt change gameplay for the worse.

Im not saying make the spells completely different functions in different game modes ( pvp vs pve )... im saying make their numbers and maybe some SLIGHT mechanical changes ( much like the deep freeze ).

PVP is at an all time bad this expansion, and its due to the absolute insane scaling of items and power in the game currently. This change would completely solve that, without affecting PVE which has been absolutely amazing this entire expansion.

TBH I agree with you, I for one don't really understand their self-imposed injunction against differentiating spell mechanics for PVP and PVE, and the example of DF is a good one. It did, however, cause scaling issues.

Personally, on the whole I am happy with how warlocks have shaped up this expansion. I still think destro needs a bit more fleshing out, and I am one of the few people who enjoyed the Soul Fire interaction with the spec. Maybe it was poorly implemented in Cata, but I enjoyed the extra spell and its synergy with the other spells. The only thing is it did make you feel a bit like a fire mage, albeit it was not proc-based so you could control when you used it. I haven't played Warlock PVP for ages so I don't know how they are in that domain and would be interested to know - I am guessing it's still affliction #1, destro a good viable second choice and demonology rather weaksauce. I liked the Cataclysm spell and I hope something like it makesi t in the game in the future.

The changes I would like are mostly cosmetic, e.g. Metamorphosis changing based on race and gender. I also wish they'd make the Observer a ranged pet, it's a Beholder! They shoot beams out of their eyes as their primary attack.