Originally Posted by
Nagassh
He was the "head" of the warlock revamp, but it was a team effort. Hard to say how much Xelnath is really responsible for, since he's mentioned himself that he had a wide array of ideas for demonology without meta and with more of a play on summoning pets etc, it went through a lot of itterations (some of them sounding terrible) that were partially due to the team reigning him in or the people with more mechanical knowledge just saying shit won't work. He also said the numbers guys often told him things would be problematic.
He was fired because he seemed to;
a) Be having a lot of friction with the team, trying to push his own agenda when they didn't feel things would work, the Cataclysm spell was what he was trying to push at the time, and it was a pretty terrible idea that didn't fix the problem he was trying to at the time (lack of peels in pvp).
b) He was pretty vocal and talkative with the warlock community on MMO champ, he was great at giving off the vibe of being "one of the guys" and trying to do his best to make warlocks great, unfortunately he was also a bit too openly critical about what HE wanted and when he disagreed with the team / was unhappy with a decision the team made.
The result of the two was him leaving the company.
Can't say I think he was as big a loss as some of the warlocks around here act like he was, he definitely had great community interaction and made you feel like he was trying to make warlocks good after feeling pretty neglected, but the ideas that were his and he really pushed (Cataclysm) was pretty terrible, and MOP launched with a huge array of problems with warlocks - chaos bolt in pvp, chaos wave crits in pvp, affliction being terrible in pvp, but has been overtuned in pve all expansion, Blood Fear (he thought was a defensive CD, anyone with a clue about pvp wouldn't), our entire final tier of talents was a disaster etc
Hard to tell how much of the good and bad was his and how much was from the team though, so who knows. He was a cool guy though, as slagging-off as my post might sound, I've no doubt he was trying his best to improve the class, but I think he either didn't listen to some of the numbers guys enough or didn't quite have as much pvp knowledge as would have been ideal considering some of the choices made that the team has slowly been cleaning up since he left the company, and some that still persist now.