Unhappy with Warlocks? Use the upcoming Dev Q&A #LegionQA

[bloodmoth13]

We will get nothing, they will answer questions like "why can't my artifact be pink" at enormous length and at great detail, and questions about fixing the dreadful mechanics of affliction and demonology willbe totally ignored because they are locked in for the whole expac (like the idiotic last minute change to Reap Souls, even though the other affliction artifact talents are very obviously designed around how it originally worked, i.e. killing a regular stream of adds it would provide, basically a bandaid that was applie dlate in beta and was never fixed, despite a promise that it would be)

This is a typical "politicians press conference", which is merely an opportunity for them to appear like they care, though they don't, and to advertise whatever baubles they are planning to hand out by answering carefuly seelcted questions on them (expect at least three question about Karazhan to be chosen)

Theer will doubtless be loads and loads of questions about "how about fixing warlock dps so that affliction and demonology are viablle instea dof pushing everyone into destruction, which is itself low enough that pug groups refuse to take locks and kick them in preference for a mage/hunter/dk/dh"

If we are lucky, one will be picked in passing, with the usual anodyne "we carefuly monitor this and will adjust it if necessary"

Like the massive nerf to demo, we got a wall of silence until the famous "we don;t want you to play it" Q&A, which was basically a giant "fuck you" finger

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LOL, designed well? Are you kidding?

Destruction is totally, I mean totally, reliant on randomness, it's big nuke hits like a noodle and it's AOE is slow, clumsy and expensive

Affliction has everything piled into DOTs which as has been the case for the last decade causes the issue of "eithe roverpowered for multidot or underpowered for single target", with a horrible bandaid called Soul Effigy which is as much fun as watching paint dry, even then it has terrible single target and a botched artifact designed around a core mechanic they took away a few weeks from launch with no time to fix the Gold traits supposed to synergise with it

Demonology has zero, I mean zero, mobility, everything tied to long hard casts, including a filler which hits like a snowflake, reliant on a melee pet which can die (try using it on a fight like Helya), wonky guardian pets which refuse to switch targets, your aoe means literally burning your single target, and spamming Demonic Empowerment over and over and over. Demo is good at one thing, that's standing still and tunneling Patchwerk, and there aren;t any Patchwerks.

And all three are tied to talent trees that are incredibly binary, it is literally "wanna do good aoe? Be shit at single target then", when there are other classe slike fire mage who can sit on a cookie-cutter build they never change and excel at everything

If you want to see a good design look at demon hunter, unholy dk, fire mage, MM hunter.

You just picking the OP specs to compare it to?

Again, you are conflating balance issues with design issues, they are not the same, if destruction is bad because CB hits like a wet noodle, then thats a balance issue, tune up CB and then see how it plays, same with their aoe, having a build up with a huge pay off is fine too, so long as the pay off is worth it, what im seeing here is that the numbers are too weak, i see players far too often defend a shit design because it performed well and hate on decent designs because they perform poorly, gameplay has little to do with numbers!

i can agree that mobility is an issue, for demo atleast as they have nothing to cast on the move, but i dont think they need blinks. Im happy enough with summoning dreadstalkers, feels awesome imo, my issues with demo are spamming DE, feels lame to spam it so often, i suggest 2 charges, instant cast and increases demon duration by a small amount, and also demonwrath changing to causing your demons to deal splash damage instead of radiating damage.

Dont know about destro being entirely reliant on rng? I can agree that AOE is too slow, having a DoT spender feels bad, if they keep that as the case then they need to either lower the cost (get it out faster) increase the burst (ramp up has immediate impact) or break the damage to something insane.

Affliction has always been about dots, not sure why its a problem now? though i can understand that needing soul effigy (which does sound quite clunky) to compete on single target would be an issue, if blizz were clever they would tune the damage better and perhaps add some ST only damage, though i actually quite enjoy the gameplay of it. The artifact traits seem quite useless outside leveling i must admit, though dont you get free kills on escaping souls? Is a weird mechanic nontheless.

I dont think they are faultless, but i do think they are mostly well designed rotation wise, though i must admit they do feel a little incomplete, i think destro was fine before its changes, i enjoy the demo changes but it does feel clunky. Personally i think the worst designed spec is BM, 3 buttons with no synergy, i dont mind few buttons, frost for example, but the abilities need to mesh!

[Scathbais]

If balance is okay, then perception of poor balance as a result of poor gameplay mechanics is inevitable. Especially when all our specs are so slow to ramp up; if you don't get the shards or the procs or whatever in an early clump, or you didn't have them saved from trash, the current content doesn't last long enough for the RNG to even things up and you can very end up looking pretty bad, especially compared to more front loaded classes because you had nothing to work with.

It used to be that that was a feature of Aff and Demo, but there was payoff at the end with strong executes. Neither have that now, you're building up to a flat line of throughput, not through an almost exponential gradient where you'd pile in more and more damage as the fight went on. You reach your peak halfway through and that's it.

Affliction is working with 4 resources: Mana, Shards, Souls and Compounding Horror stacks. 3 of them are entirely RNG. It's grotesque over complication when you see that people were complaining of similar issues with old Demo having too much with mana, molten core and fury. Even now Demo has mana, shards, and even minions as a resource. The more of these pools you have, the longer they take to build and more effort to manage. These layers are what create the slow and unresponsive gameplay. It can be like trying to steer a super tanker.

Great observations, but the bolded text really sums it up nicely. Bad mechanics -> poor performance -> perception that class is underperforming.

[Mehrunes]

You just picking the OP specs to compare it to?

UH and MM are OP specs? Both are the middle of the pack, if that for MM.

Again, you are conflating balance issues with design issues, they are not the same, if destruction is bad because CB hits like a wet noodle, then thats a balance issue, tune up CB and then see how it plays, same with their aoe, having a build up with a huge pay off is fine too, so long as the pay off is worth it, what im seeing here is that the numbers are too weak, i see players far too often defend a shit design because it performed well and hate on decent designs because they perform poorly, gameplay has little to do with numbers!

Having to either spec for AoE and do shit ST or spec into ST and do shit AoE and subpar ST anyway is both balance and gameplay. Your talent choices are gameplay choices and alter your rotation which is even more gameplay element. And having a build up having a huge pay off for Aff at least would require buffing them through the roof if you go at it from the perspective of tweaking damage numbers alone since they have multiple layers of RNG and if stars don't align just slightly tweaking the numbers won't fix the DPS because of the gameplay aspect of it.

i can agree that mobility is an issue, for demo atleast as they have nothing to cast on the move, but i dont think they need blinks. Im happy enough with summoning dreadstalkers, feels awesome imo, my issues with demo are spamming DE, feels lame to spam it so often, i suggest 2 charges, instant cast and increases demon duration by a small amount, and also demonwrath changing to causing your demons to deal splash damage instead of radiating damage.

How are Dreadstalkers relevant to mobility when they have 1.5 sec cast time that only goes away if you do PvP and take the Honor 10 Talent? Good point on the on the Demonwrath, splash damage would be much better.

Affliction has always been about dots, not sure why its a problem now? though i can understand that needing soul effigy (which does sound quite clunky) to compete on single target would be an issue, if blizz were clever they would tune the damage better and perhaps add some ST only damage, though i actually quite enjoy the gameplay of it. The artifact traits seem quite useless outside leveling i must admit, though dont you get free kills on escaping souls? Is a weird mechanic nontheless.

This is indeed mostly balance problem (aside from Effigy that while not that awful on paper is atrocious in practice and has terrible UI support), but we were told our DoTs would finally do solid damage on their own again, without a plethora of buffs and debuffs throttling them because DoT specs being able to multi-DoT somehow became a problem around Cata or MoP and it's simply not true. And once you hit 4+ targets you spend almost all your time refreshing them ad nauseum, casting long-ass SoC in between (speaking of which, I think they increased the cast time of it). And while on Aff, Singularity could jump to another target if there's still duration left and the target dies. Or just stay in the area. Or lower the remaining CD.

[Xandy]

And the complaints about mobility....what the fuck is that? Do you pretend warlocks were ever mobile?

MoP? WoD Demo?

[Jessicka]

MoP? WoD Demo?

Even Cataclysm, remember Fel Flame? Think that's when we got Demonic Circle as well. Affliction is still pretty mobile to be fair.

[Xandy]

Oh yea I forgot about Fel Flame and yes Demonic Circle relegated to a talent which we will never choose was a big hit to our mobility as well. It's true Affly is mobile with all its instants but from what I've been reading it's not a raiding spec for the most part.

[Jessicka]

Oh yea I forgot about Fel Flame and yes Demonic Circle relegated to a talent which we will never choose was a big hit to our mobility as well. It's true Affly is mobile with all its instants but from what I've been reading it's not a raiding spec for the most part.

I don't think Affliction has ever been 'bad' for raiding for more than the fortnight after an expansion launch. Purely mechanically it lends itself to the environment; the only time you lose damage is when you're not casting filler, which is a tiny proportion, otherwise DoTs can usually be cast pre-emptively to cover most movement or out of range time. This is why I'm loath to agree that damage is a problem; but rather the convoluted mechanics and ramp up that give a strong perception of weakness - it's managing 4 resources which is as far as I can think pretty unprecedented; that 3 of those are built from RNG procs is ludicrous, slow, and frankly not actually realistically manageable.

I haven't given much of any credence to simulationcrafts for a long while now, as specs have become more resource and ability management based, and encounters built to work with that; Patchwerk is just a horrendous example to try to base anything on. So seeing it down there in those stack ranks is, for me, pretty meaningless. There's just too many variables in the spec that can be adapted within an encounter to get more (or I suppose fuck up and get a lot less) out of it in an encounter.

[Cwimge]

I'm being the soothsayer here. But holding out hope seems foolish at best, blizzard have made their idiotic decision and it's a solid 2-5 years of absolute garbage for warlocks going forward. After a few days during the pre-patch I swapped to enhancement shammy and while it's hard to walk away from my main since wrath I can't bring myself to try and fight a battle blizzard is determined to pretend does not exist.

No lock questions will be answered in a satisfactory way- if at all. At most I predict a smug asshole off-hand comment about "players have expressed frustration at having to learn their class again" and for the rest, stony silence and question dodging

[Styxz]

That thread is hilarious. Don't remember ever seeing anything like it. Been playing for years.

The community response team has handled this whole thing poorly.

[Deleted]

can someone write this for me. I can't I am EU :

- Destro doesn't feel enganging with the huge single target downtime. Incinerate is very boring.
- Single target soul shard generation is low
- Rain of Fire is hard to cast with costing 3 soul shards and the damage is not that great considering how hard it is to pull that cast off.
- Wreak Havoc needs to be off the global. It hurts so much while playing
- Mastery is unfun. Less damage taken and random damage? who thought of that? it's bad.
- Chaos Bolt cast time is soooooooooo long. Especially when untalented and with low haste. I honestly switch to desktop sometimes to watch 1-2 funny pictures and switch back to game when cast is finished. No joke.
- Make GoSac a bit better single target.
- Make shadowburn baseline

[Xandy]

can someone write this for me. I can't I am EU :

- Destro doesn't feel enganging with the huge single target downtime. Incinerate is very boring.
- Single target soul shard generation is low
- Rain of Fire is hard to cast with costing 3 soul shards and the damage is not that great considering how hard it is to pull that cast off.
- Wreak Havoc needs to be off the global. It hurts so much while playing
- Mastery is unfun. Less damage taken and random damage? who thought of that? it's bad.
- Chaos Bolt cast time is soooooooooo long. Especially when untalented and with low haste. I honestly switch to desktop sometimes to watch 1-2 funny pictures and switch back to game when cast is finished. No joke.
- Make GoSac a bit better single target.
- Make shadowburn baseline

Done

That thread is hilarious. Don't remember ever seeing anything like it. Been playing for years.

The community response team has handled this whole thing poorly.

It's pretty funny, I get a good chuckle every time I read it

[Sunlighthell]

It's really funny to see how other classes artifact trait bugs/abilities get their hotfixes every day and ours stay broken regardless of tonns of feedback. (sweet souls for example, also warriors got they trait reworked, and aff still has on kill traits /faceplam)

[evertonbelmontt]

I'm going through every page and upvoting every warlock that posts. I don't even care if it makes sense anymore, I just want to see Blizzard's response to our issues, justified or not at this point.

After the patch hit I tried to do some mythic in the finder and I was getting auto declined almost instantly. Now I'm 840 after doing it with guildies but the feeling is still warm.

Thank you for bringing this here.

[pies1]

After Reading the Q&A thread, it proved to be what i feared..
A lot of locks writing crap like " Oh our DPS Sucks, Buff us!" Not usefull posts that direct issues or state the mechanical issues..
Combined with the fact that people are writing stuff that aint true, like we're doing 10-50% of the other classes damage or that we're useless to bring to mythic or heroic Dungeons just adds up to blizzard being overfloated with useless posts and they're gonna have to find a needle in a haystack to find any worthwhile posts..
We've got some mechanical issues currently, and could use some buffs especially to our mobility compared to other ranged classes, but balance wise we're not in nearly as bad of a state as a lot of these people are claiming...

Why exactly should it be the community's job to tell developers how to fix shit they broke?

[blackops2008]

I must be the only warlock in the world without any issues finding group for mythics. Did mythics for 2 weeks without any issues, i beat them in the first day.

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> Soul shard generation low
> high downtime with lots of incinerate

You obviously didnt play the beta. Wait until you get your artifact weapon talented with immolate crit trait leveled + relic and legendary belt + tier set + good haste. You'll barely cast incinerate you'll swim in shards.

If they buff destruction's native shard generation they'll need to nerf tier and legendary belt

[Avikur]

Destruction actually has 8 abilities/talents/artifact traits that 'have a chance' to do something (not including the variations in the rifts), thats a lot of RnG, even excluding talents which you could pick alternatives you still have 6 including mastery, immolate and artifact traits, all of which you can't avoid. It's just too much RnG imo.

The issue with AoE is we have to pick certain talents for an 'AoE build', this totally ruins our single target dps, also to do AoE you would use rain of fire, which again ruins single target because you can't use chaos bolt if you're spending shards on rain of fire.

Also bring back the MoP version of fire and brimstone, make it cost a soul shard but make it a toggle that causes incinerate or immolate to hit all targets near your main target, that would go a long way to fix our AoE.

We're too balanced around havoc, our single target damage will never be as good as others because we can literally double our damage if there is 2 targets, personally i'd much rather havoc caused 50% damage to the havoc'ed target and then they buffed our single target dps.

Survivability is good, but if that's at the cost of damage i'd rather they toned it down and upped our dps.

chaos bolt doesn't hit for enough, it went from being the hardest hitting spell in the game with a long cast time to a pretty standard spell ... with a long cast time.

Sacrificing pets should give you one of your pets abilities like it used to so it's meaningful to decide which pet to sacrifice, also please go back to the old GoSac with a flat damage increase, or keep it as it is but make it constant damage not a chance to cause damage.

The new mastery sucks so bad, I'd much rather our old one back.

And my biggest issue - mana ... well, life tap to be precise, I despise that spell, it's so irritating, doesn't add to flavour and is just plain frustrating, scrap that and give us back our old chaotic energies that made our mana regenerate really fast.

I played destro on the beta and decided I would level my lock but not first, which is sad as my lock has always been my main and the first one I levelled.

[varren]

The issue with AoE is we have to pick certain talents for an 'AoE build', this totally ruins our single target dps, also to do AoE you would use rain of fire, which again ruins single target because you can't use chaos bolt if you're spending shards on rain of fire.

Yep this is a huge problem. The Warlock talents, at least for Destro, are way too specialized. You can get close to WW/Havoc levels of aoe, but you have to completely sacrifice your single target damage, whereas most other specs/classes don't have to completely tank their single target to achieve decent trash dps numbers. 1 or more of the aoe talents need to be made baseline. It's really baffling how badly they screwed Destro compared to how nice it was in MoP/WoD.

[Deleted]

Done

Thank you mate. Very nice of you

[sugarfree]

Well the main thread is now a Warlock feedback thread. You just read through the pages and you'd think it's in a warlock forum.

It's sad and funny at the same time how they really screwed up the class mechanically.

[Deleted]

Well the main thread is now a Warlock feedback thread. You just read through the pages and you'd think it's in a warlock forum.

It's sad and funny at the same time how they really screwed up the class mechanically.

There is a lot to sift through though. Some of it is useless, but I'd argue that a whole bunch of mechanics could use some changing for warlocks:

1. Life tap. Doesn't feel good to use, is never really a benefit.
2. No baseline interrupt.
3. Lack of dynamic rotational things. Makes rotation very rigid and somewhat boring for most specs.
4. Demonology is very unforgiving. Slight mistakes and you lose a ton of damage, unless you have insane amounts of haste.

A lot more stuff, but those are probably my main issues at the moment. Numbers could be tuned higher for all specs as well, an issue for more than us though.