Warlocks totally ignored during the Q&A

[CuchuCachu]

There's not much to address... They already know the QoL changes warlocks want, they talked about some of them last Q&A.

Damage isn't as big as a problem as people say it is. Demo is great ST and Destro is greate Cleave/AoE.

Give destro a buff to Channel Demonfire so single target is a little more competitive. What else is there to talk about?

Affliction is the only thing you could argue needs immediate help.

Most of the feedback was about Affliction so... ignored and getting nerfed in 7.1

[Zandalariprelate]

My guild hasn't started on Mythic yet but I still think I'm not that terrible a player.

By the way, still waiting on that top 100 Demon Hunter log.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking...ss=DPS&boss=-1

There you have also take this from a top dps dh who is in top 200 on ursoc(shadow priest, mage and warriors are in the top 100 without any other class)

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

Also why do you play affliction? While i like it, seens to do low damage as a fury warrior

[noaim]

Comparing with fire mages and saying "destro is solid". The problem is, when I look at the mage talent tree, I see tiers where I get to choose in what way I want to improve my dps or survivability. First tier are 3x damage buffs, choose the one you prefer. Second tier, 3x survivability, choose the one you prefer, etc etc.

If you translated the destro tree to fire mages, mechanic wise (roughly, and ignore actual numbers), first of all, pyroblast would never be instant cast, but in the first tier, you could spec to cast it (and fireball) faster after you cast fireblast, but then you would not get scorch, so you have no instants while you move. Also, dont forget, pyros use up 40% of the max you can have of a secondary resource.

In the next tier, you can further reduce the casttime of pyro, down to an amazing 2.1 seconds roughly (depending on haste), but if you do so, you lose flamestrike, or Incanters Flow (rune of power is deleted from the game). You can choose to keep one of those though, but then pyroblast is roughly half a second slower to cast. Also, Incanters flow uses a global every 20 seconds and drains 25% of your mana.

Third tier lets you choose between Ring of frost, Dragons breath or Shimmer, pick one, you dont get the others.

Tier four is fun, here you can choose to let Pyroblast increase damage on the target it hits while the dot is active (if it has a dot like it used to), or you can choose to have fireball hit targets close to the target you are nuking, or Combustion. Oh sorry, Combustion is no longer baseline, but you can choose it here at least. Downside is, it is a 20% damage increase, nothing more, but if there are several targets up, at least it can last up to three times as long (requires 10 targets, and if you didnt pick Flamestrike earlier, (which would by the way have a 45 second cooldown and 3 second base casttime, but apply a dot to the targets it hit), you have to manually cast a non-instant cast dot on all the targets and have it up on all 10 when you pop combustion to get the full 30 second duration.

Tier five lets you choose between blink, a much stronger ice barrier (or whatever its called) and a runspeedbuff, that drains your life. Remember, you dont get the two you dont pick, so you cant have both blink and ice barrier.

Tier six is another tier where you choose if you want more aoe dps, or more singletarget dps, its a few % whichever way you go.

Finally, tier seven you get to choose between being able to compete at all, but this requires the fight to have two or more targets up at all times. If you choose one of the other two talents, you do ever so slightly more singletarget dps (you can cast more pyroblasts basically) or...well, the third talent is just there because each tier requires three talents. And it might look cool if you use it on a target dummy.

Now, this is obviously not exactly how it would be, but I think it highlights some of the problems with warlocks too. While fire mages in this case gets to choose how they want to increase their aoe, or singletarget, in different tiers, we get to choose if we want to increase aoe OR singletarget in the same tier.

And this is for the warlock spec that is "solid" and "fine". I mean, if you want good aoe as an affliction warlock, you could go sow the seeds and absolute corruption. then you have a singletarget rotation basically consisting of keeping Agony up (recast roughly every 20 seconds), casting UA when you get a Soul Shard-proc, and then Drain Life in between. Oh, and you have to start with casting corruption once. If you want to really challenge yourself, you can spec Soul Effigy, then you need to cast Agony TWICE every 20 seconds. If you dont want to suck completely at aoe, that is.

[Deleted]

I wouldn;t have a big issue with situational talents if one could freely change them.

But you can't. You've got a comination of that dumbass tome (clearly a time and gold sink) or you can't do it at all (Mythic+)

Playing a warlock the talents do not feel they add interest and choice, they feel like punishments that box you into one role at the cost of another

Compare having to choose between Sow the Seeds/Siphon Life and Living Bomb/Unstable Mind

The result is that locks (and particuarly affliction) tends to feel like a one trick pony, whilst you're competing with people playing classes who excel at everything.

Our most direct "competitors" I would say are mages and hunters, and both of them have in fire and marksman specs that have virtually no weaknesses, but are incredibly versatile and strong

It's just a joke that the devs think that healthstones and portals go even slightly towards rebalancing that desirability

[Violetti]

It doesnt take much to understand how bad destro talents are when one talent alone dominates some bosse(WH)
Also most ppl, even most top100 players/parses ignoring topdps talents because they are that bad. You could cut 1 talents in each row and noone would shed a tear

[volrat]

There isn't a whole lot to address tbh.

There's a lot of hyperbole and doomsaying on this forum, but warlocks are extremely solid right now.

....say the guy with 8k post...

I cant figure out the why in this and other forums, from the very beginning of all the issues we appointed in Warlock design for Legion, only the "professional" users always say that everything is fine... even after Blizz had admitted that a large part of the community isn't happy at all and has created an official thread on all his forums ( ignoring it, but it is still something).

if actualwarlock issues are nothing to you, or you are not aware of them, there is no need to come here to tell us that if we do not like a thing we are jerks, thnx.

[Baconeggcheese]

@volrat

Lolwhat?

[Deleted]

If they nerf melees, fire mages and shadows a bit then warlock is in an okay position.

It's hard to predict now, because of scaling and tier sets which completely throw over the balance

A 4 piece T19 Feretory of Souls Destruction warlock might be completely bonkers. I haven't looked into other classes set bonuses though.

[Gaidax]

....say the guy with 8k post...

I cant figure out the why in this and other forums, from the very beginning of all the issues we appointed in Warlock design for Legion, only the "professional" users always say that everything is fine... even after Blizz had admitted that a large part of the community isn't happy at all and has created an official thread on all his forums ( ignoring it, but it is still something).

if actualwarlock issues are nothing to you, or you are not aware of them, there is no need to come here to tell us that if we do not like a thing we are jerks, thnx.

Or maybe it is a cue to some to look more closely at what they may be doing wrong (god forbid, how is that possible???).

But I guess whining is easier.

[Lucrece]

If they nerf melees, fire mages and shadows a bit then warlock is in an okay position.

It's hard to predict now, because of scaling and tier sets which completely throw over the balance

A 4 piece T19 Feretory of Souls Destruction warlock might be completely bonkers. I haven't looked into other classes set bonuses though.

Why would they nerf melee? The one expansion where people might consider bringing one instead of stacking more ranged DPS?

Outside windwalker and rogue, none of the melee even make it past middle of the pack DPS in overall raid performance.

How can you possibly whine about melee when shadow priests, hunters, and mages are sitting above all melee.

The only place demonhunters, the new class all whiny babies bandwagon QQ at, performs well in is mythic+, and by higher mythic keystones such as 10+ and onwards demonhunters fall off and hunters, mages, and shadow priests are brought instead.

[Deleted]

Or maybe it is a cue to some to look more closely at what they may be doing wrong (god forbid, how is that possible???).

But I guess whining is easier.

Maybe you should accept that for whatever reason, a lot of the warlock playerbase is unhappy and underperforming compared to comparable pure dps classes?

It really doesn't matter what the cause is, does it?

I just don;t buy into this "warlocks are unhappy and underperforming because they are all uniquely bads" because the logical counterpart to this is that the other classes are doing great because for some weird reason they aren't composed of bad players like the warlocks are

If warlocks are underperforming compared to other classes even though potentially they shouldn't, that points to class design issues and an imbalance in the skill-effort-reward ratios. If lots of people find playing a warlock disatisfying then it needs designing, rather than telling the paying customers they need to suck it up and learn to appreciate it.


But I think even you have admitted that affliction is in poor shape, yes?

And would you not agree that demonology is pretty poorly designed, and tends to tunnel too much into single target, whilst affliction has a badly designed artifact mainly because of late changes and it is also way too tunneled towards aoe?

Destro might be okay, but demo and affliction have massive issues of their own and I would suggest that even destruction tends to lean much too heavily on Wreak Havoc - take that out and what would you have?

Even IF warlocks for some reason scale amazingly well, that just turns the intial gearing experience pretyt sour, it;s no use saying you willbe amazing in tier 19 gear so suck it up until then.

The way that locks have a tendency to underperform, the very low and shrinking player base and the levels of disatisfaction - to me these ppoint to a class issue, not a player issue. On average warlock players are no different to the average player sof any other class.

[Gaidax]

Maybe you should accept that for whatever reason, a lot of the warlock playerbase is unhappy and underperforming compared to comparable pure dps classes?

There is an overwhelming evidence of what? https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10#dataset=90

Destruction is just fine really, as you can see there (and surprise btw the higher you raise the skill bar the better it becomes) - it sits right at the same spot (or better) as every bloody spec ingame besides 3 specs that are truly opening a gap to it - Fire Mage, Shadow Priest and Marks Hunter.

Demonology just needs a small nudge and it will be right at that spot as well and the whole design argument is worthless because as we seen in Legion pre-patch all it takes for Demo to dominate is simply a numbers tuning and it will eat everyone for breakfast in most content despite the limitations.

Affliction is the only spec that needs attention and careful at that, because there is a very good potential to turn it into a monster with careless changes.


So no, I am not buying your sniveling - your complaint is that Warlocks are not as OP as the 3 specs I mentioned? Well, I don't think that is a Warlock problem there, buddy.

And really mentioning Wreck Havoc as if it's some sort of sacrilege there, well news to you - this is our great ability we have that allows us to be there and every bloody spec has its own crutch to cheese meters one way or the other, in our case our tool is one of the best because it allows to produce MEANINGFUL concentrated damage on priority adds, as opposed to Hunter "lol Barrage!" on blobs, for example.

Let me tell you one more thing you do not realize yet, in Nighthold - Destruction will grow so powerful that it may actually need some toning down simply because almost everything there is a bloody cleave fight and I suspect Demo will also get its spotlight too, although Destruction is pretty much ensured there.

[Lucrece]

I do wish demonwrath wasn't such trash for demo ;(, I'm pretty much forced to run implosion if I want any effective aoe whatsoever.

[Zandalariprelate]

There is an overwhelming evidence of what? https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10#dataset=90

Destruction is just fine really, as you can see there (and surprise btw the higher you raise the skill bar the better it becomes) - it sits right at the same spot (or better) as every bloody spec ingame besides 3 specs that are truly opening a gap to it - Fire Mage, Shadow Priest and Marks Hunter.

Demonology just needs a small nudge and it will be right at that spot as well and the whole design argument is worthless because as we seen in Legion pre-patch all it takes for Demo to dominate is simply a numbers tuning and it will eat everyone for breakfast in most content despite the limitations.

Affliction is the only spec that needs attention and careful at that, because there is a very good potential to turn it into a monster with careless changes.


So no, I am not buying your sniveling - your complaint is that Warlocks are not as OP as the 3 specs I mentioned? Well, I don't think that is a Warlock problem there, buddy.

And really mentioning Wreck Havoc as if it's some sort of sacrilege there, well news to you - this is our great ability we have that allows us to be there and every bloody spec has its own crutch to cheese meters one way or the other, in our case our tool is one of the best because it allows to produce MEANINGFUL concentrated damage on priority adds, as opposed to Hunter "lol Barrage!" on blobs, for example.

Let me tell you one more thing you do not realize yet, in Nighthold - Destruction will grow so powerful that it may actually need some toning down simply because almost everything there is a bloody cleave fight and I suspect Demo will also get its spotlight too, although Destruction is pretty much ensured there.

But remember some parses are quite low as frost dk with less than 200 or frost mage which is gonna inflate the number in that ranking

[Unlockmyhrt]

It does not hold up in Mythic at all. The mechanics are designed to make you move, not allow anyone to stand and take them.

It's where the whole "tankiness" thing falls down. It would only be meaningful if they made warlocks massively armoured fortresses - that 20% shield doesn;t do much at all, and the 40% mitigation is three minutes

Both of these do very little to counter the warlock being lumbered with long hard-casts and rotations that fall to bits th emoment they are interrupted

In Mythic modes mobility wins out every single time.

To counter the warlock need ot hard-cast, it would only be meaningful if we could make ourselves invulnerable and still cast - the equivalent of ice-block but still being able to cast

and we won't get that.

All we really have is an ability to be slightly more slopping in not standing in the green shit too long. We sure as hell don;t have the ability to stand in it and keep on casting dmeonic empowerment or chaos bolt lol

I think your looking at it the wrong way, Our ability to absorb damage has a lot of benefits, one example is Ursoc, His charge tickles, and his aoe Roar does a lot less to me than the rest of the raid, this is easily seen on raid frames by looking at health pools. You are one less person your healers need to heal up asap where others get crushed by the same mechanics. Another benefit is mythic Dragons and flower soaking. The way our shield regens allows you to take boatloads less dmg while soaking flowers, again making healers live easier

As Destro our 40 Percent Dmg Reduction is a 1min CD

[JV Chequer]

Bitching about warlock senseless it's not feedback, ppl tends to whining to much about "numbers" without point out how to fix it and what have to be fixed, That's pretty much how to not be listened.
Stop saying about "how we sucks" and start thinking about "why some ppl are getting good numbers" and what need to be improved on gameplay.

[Deleted]

There is an overwhelming evidence of what? https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10#dataset=90

That's why I said "a lot of the playerbase", and "unhappy" as well as "underperforming", and it's not just a numbers issue either

Destruction is just fine really, as you can see there (and surprise btw the higher you raise the skill bar the better it becomes) - it sits right at the same spot (or better) as every bloody spec ingame besides 3 specs that are truly opening a gap to it - Fire Mage, Shadow Priest and Marks Hunter.

Who are, of course, pretty much our most comparable "competitors", particularly fire mage and mm hunter, and yes, I did notice your inevitable mention of "skill" there.

Demonology just needs a small nudge and it will be right at that spot as well and the whole design argument is worthless because as we seen in Legion pre-patch all it takes for Demo to dominate is simply a numbers tuning and it will eat everyone for breakfast in most content despite the limitations.

Not really, and the devs don't think that either. Sure, you can make up for a disatisfying spec design by giving it big numbers, people are always happier if you give them big numbers, but really demo does have it's issues. Notably it's immobility, it's reliance of guardian pets (and pets in general given the AI), you seem to be saying let's just give it big numbers to compensate for it's inherent flaws well that's not really a good way to deal with things, not least because these flaws were highlighted a lot through alpha and beta. You end up with demo as "okay it;s still bad at target switching and stuff like that but the numbers are so huge this compensates, oh dear, that makes it wildly overpowered in any situation where demo can stand and tunnel which is probably what demolocks will end up being told to do in raids, never mind hey". I remember what that's like from affliction in ICC.

Affliction is the only spec that needs attention and careful at that, because there is a very good potential to turn it into a monster with careless changes.

Only if they insist on repeatedly buffing it where it's already strong and failing to buff it, or even nerfing it as in 7.1, where it is weak. Unfortunately that seems what they are doing. Those buffs were badly targetted and entrenched affliction's problems, basically being a one trick pony where almost everything about it's design screams "trash aoe!". Given they have made statements about wanting "strengths and weaknesses" that is possibly intentional, but it's taken to a pretty extreme level and moreover it's not something that applies to our "competitors" in anything like that degree either.

So no, I am not buying your sniveling - your complaint is that Warlocks are not as OP as the 3 specs I mentioned? Well, I don't think that is a Warlock problem there, buddy.

I'm not a "buddy" to anyone who feels they need to resort to personal abuse and childish name calling

And really mentioning Wreck Havoc as if it's some sort of sacrilege there, well news to you - this is our great ability we have that allows us to be there and every bloody spec has its own crutch to cheese meters one way or the other, in our case our tool is one of the best because it allows to produce MEANINGFUL concentrated damage on priority adds, as opposed to Hunter "lol Barrage!" on blobs, for example.

Like I said, it's just bad design to have destruction lean so heavily on Wreak Havoc. Your yourself point out "it;s our great ability", it's actually you who is treating it as sacriligious to criticise it or point out it;s flaws.

Having destruction be so dependent on one single talent is bad design. With it destruction competes, without it, well, it doesn't. Being able to in effect permanently do double damage means it;s hard to balance destruction, because swing one way and they become wildly overpowered where they can fully use Wreak Havoc, swing it the other and they become terribly weak anytime they can't. It tends to render other talents more or less irrelevent, to become indispensible, removing choice, the moment I saw Wreak Havoc I thought "now that is going to cause issues"

What the devs have done is actually manage to extend affliction's ages old issue of "make dots strong for single target and they become more and more overpowered the moment you can multi-dot" to destruction. This is exactly why Chaos Bolt is no longer our big, scarey nuke becaus eif it was it would be ridiculous being able to double it. The devs have just painted themselves into a corner with this, the same way they have done by insisting that affliction be dots, dots and dots. Unfortunately, class design seems to have taken a bit of a back seat to class fantasy.

Let me tell you one more thing you do not realize yet, in Nighthold - Destruction will grow so powerful that it may actually need some toning down simply because almost everything there is a bloody cleave fight and I suspect Demo will also get its spotlight too, although Destruction is pretty much ensured there.

Jolly good. There's nothing like jam tomorrow. So basically, what a great design, destruction becomes overpowered because a bunch of fights favour it via one single talent that allows it to virtually do double damage all the time, th emost likely outcome being that they will simply nerf Chaos Bolt or somesuch to tone it down, and oops, neve rmind to what that will do to destruction everywhere else?

And you don't see this as poor design? Okay.

[Faenskap]

Destro has more mobility now than it did last xpac or prior to mop, afflictions about the same, demo is the only one that's seen significant change and frankly that needed to happen since demo basically didn't get punished for mobility on a level that rivaled hunters.

If your experience with locks started with KJC, then you may have never learned how to play around extremely limited mobility, but its again not new for the class.



Ideal to the player would be having permanent KJC back, which is horrible game design.

I started with warlock in MoP ("blabla FotM reroller blahblah"), so I had KJC and Fel Flame. Since I'm not completely shit, I've overcome being without those spells. The only place so far in Legion fight-wise where I felt being immobile was a severe weakness was in EoA (Serpentix/Azshara). But it's not the movement in fights that bother me, it's the fact that every other class has some way of moving faster than the default running speed, which becomes very obvious in dungeons, or if you're in some big outdoor cave or something. Or Suramar's ruins of Falanaar *shiver*. Yeh, haven't been there with warlock yet

That really is the only issue I have with warlocks atm - the out of combat slowness. Eh, guess I could buy swiftness potions. And bring back warlock horsies' waterwalking!

[Nadiru]

Blizzard conflates tankiness with survivability, when they aren't the same thing. On a one-to-one basis, Warlocks can take more damage. But they can't parlay that extra tankiness into ignoring mechanics, because that would be overpowered, and they can't have the same mobility as Mages because then they'd just have way more utility than Mages for no reason. What's worse, while Mages aren't tankier, they're way more survivable, because avoiding or ignoring damage is always preferable to soaking it, because soaking still stresses healer mana and eats up "smart" healing targets. The fact that Mages can reset their debuffs or ignore positioning errors with Ice Block once extra per encounter is just gravy, as is Shimmer and Cauterize.

[Lucrece]

I think arguing about survivability is pointless, because it distracts from the issue that is the ability to DPS with movement being far more valuable.

Let's be honest here, raids were cleared without needing warlock survivability. It doesn't matter that the mage takes more damage if he facetanks something, because the fact is shimmer allows him 2 instant teleports which do not interrupt his casting on as short as a 15 sec recharge rate.

Demo and destro have considerable losses to movement compared to a mage, and fire is just a big transgressor (which also shows up in pvp) because they made it so they have so much instant cast damage that movement barely affects fire mages.

Then there's the fact that warlock talent trees just suck if you realize that classes are getting baseline tools to both aoe, move, and be single target. A large issue with warlock mobility would be resolved if they swapped Demonic Circle with Demonic Gateway.

Warlock has to either spec for single target, or in the case of demo spec into Implosion to have any aoe whatsoever (demonwrath is worth jackshit as an aoe spell).

That's just not right if you're going to give several other classes baseline tools to be flexible and not be a Codex of the Tranquil Mind consuming machine (which doesn't even work in mythic keystones for some retarded reason, way to make Inscription even more pointless).