Is there a reason Blizzard hates Warlock?

[xenogear3]

Besides bad mobility and taking forever to cast a spell, Warlock has the longest way to reach his Class Order Hall.
DK, Druid, Mage and Monk have teleports.
Lore wise, Warlock should have its own teleport, because of his famous Summon Portal.

At one point, Warlock was redesigned and can move while cast.
Then this head developer was fired.

I heard the head developer for Mage is Vice President.

[Deleted]

My warlock has way higher survivability and damage than my mage, besides Warlock does have a teleport it's called Dalaran HS. I admit a direct portal would be nice but other classes have it worst

[ItachiZaku]

Warlock was main bad guy in last expansion and is set to be last raid boss of first tier for this one.

[TheCookieGod]

If you had complained about the way the specs were designed, I'd have agreed with you, but your main gripe is that we have to take an extra 30 seconds to walk to our order hall?

Come on.

[Lime]

Warlock is just the Beta Class. It tests toys for other classes.

Death Coil was removed from baseline and given to DKs as a damage ability.
Demon Form was given to Demon Hunters.
Green Fire was given to Demon Hunters.
Being able to cast on the move was removed and given to Mages via talent.

There's more, but I'm half awake. But at least MoP was very nice to them. No clue how they'll look in Legion.

[Relapses]

They still have PTSD from Warlocks in SoO.

[Deleted]

I think they're hardcore Christians and don't like demons. Okay, maybe not since they just added demon hunters.

[Jessicka]

Warlock is just the Beta Class. It tests toys for other classes.

Death Coil was removed from baseline and given to DKs as a damage ability.
Demon Form was given to Demon Hunters.
Green Fire was given to Demon Hunters.
Being able to cast on the move was removed and given to Mages via talent.

There's more, but I'm half awake. But at least MoP was very nice to them. No clue how they'll look in Legion.

The Fury build and stance dance mechanic was tested on Demo and given to SPriest.
Charges on a cooldown were tested through Archimonde's Darkness and given to Mages through a Rune of Power revamp.

There is definitely some truth in it.

[TheFreeman]

The Q&A today should be interesting to say the least.

The anger is real.

[Snes]

Warlocks were PvP raid bosses for a couple of weeks during pre-patch and now we're paying the price for it in PvE.

[Deleted]

Warlocks were PvP raid bosses for a couple of weeks during pre-patch and now we're paying the price for it in PvE.

Usually the other way round

[Pony Soldier]

They take forever to cast? On my Demonology warlock his cast times are fast I sometimes have a hard time keeping up with all the cooldowns and such. Then again I don't play warlocks that often.

[Lisa Frank Succubus]

Oh boy. Another one of these topics.

I don't know where the complaint about taking the longest to get to the order hall comes from, just go down a little tunnel, down some stairs you can jump down and wham. Takes me a bit longer to get to the DH hall where you have to glide down.


I think warlocks are harder for blizzard to balance compared to other classes. When they do well, they do extremely well at their role but pve now is pretty good for me though I guess every person I group with is just horrible since they allow me to top meters or get to #2 and I'm not left in the dust below the tank.

It does suck that we lose cool stuff though, I miss verdant orbs so much and now it seems fire mages have them. I don't even care if Kael'thas was a mage and not a lock its crappy to just take something away "because" though I did read that many glyphs were lost simply because they had to be associated with a spell or something to work. Also explains losing glyph of nightmares but oh my god does that make me salty.

They still have PTSD from Warlocks in SoO.

I think the player base still does. In fact I don't believe blizzard is this malignant entity that wants anyone to not have fun but the playerbase complains loudly when warlocks are doing exceptionally well. I remember the first month of WoD wasn't great at all and locks complained but other players just went "You deserve all of this for being OP in SoO!". PVP works the same way.

[MoanaLisa]

The Q&A today should be interesting to say the least.

The anger is real.

Probably less interesting than you think. Concentrated class campaigns are easy to ignore because they usually go way off the rails. They will like just pick or make up a representative question and move on. They do decide what to answer and what isn't worth the time.

[clevin]

My only issues with 'lock are from destro (I have the Affliction artifact but haven't played it yet) and they're mainly easy to fix:

1) Chaos Bolt takes forever to cast atm. perhaps with enough gear that's correctly itemized (haste >> all), this will fix itself, but even at 803, it's tough. There is a talent to address this, though.

2) More importantly, it takes 2 shards to cast a CB and shard generation from Immolate ticks feels a bit low (it's a 15% chance per tick). Again, haste will help as it speeds ticks, but I think boosting that chance would help a lot. This also affects Rain of Fire (needs 3 shards). Basically, shard generation feels too slow and hinders our ability to cast.

3) It feels esp annoying on AOE for trash - Catcalysm is great, but on a moderately long CD (45 secs) and RoF is unusable without 3 shards (so unless you save them from the previous pull you wont have RoF up for a given trash pack) and I'm not sure its damage is competitive, esp for the cost.

4) Another way to address all of that would be to cut the shard code for CB and RoF. And/or to remove the Shadowburn shard cost so we could cast it as a mob dies even if we've just spent shards to kill the mob.

Basically... give us better shard gen, competitive AOE so we're not annoyingly behind on trash as destro and I'm happy. The run to the class hall? Not an issue.

[Calfredd]

Warlock is just the Beta Class. It tests toys for other classes.

Death Coil was removed from baseline and given to DKs as a damage ability.
Demon Form was given to Demon Hunters.
Green Fire was given to Demon Hunters.
Being able to cast on the move was removed and given to Mages via talent.

There's more, but I'm half awake. But at least MoP was very nice to them. No clue how they'll look in Legion.

I still have my green fire. Your point about demo form makes it sound like they removed it as well.

[Molis]

I am liking Affliction while Questing. Nobody should be complaining until you have proper gear and raids start.
Then we can look at numbers and mobility.

[clevin]

I am liking Affliction while Questing. Nobody should be complaining until you have proper gear and raids start.
Then we can look at numbers and mobility.

The problem with that is that people form opinions about classes early on. Locks are already viewed as under powered and not worth taking to mythic 5s. Plus, not everyone will raid and they should have decent performance in heroic and mythic 5s if they do that (I'm not worried about open world, we're fine there and arguably better than other casters since we have such good survivability).

[Therougetitan]

The real crime is they removed class fantasy from destro. Instead of Burning embers they got soul shards. Instead of turning fiery as they gained those embers they used to have it got given to Fire Mages combustion. The Verdant spheres glyph removed and... surprise colored red then given to fire mages. It's a load of crap. Destruction still uses fiery spells too yet they gutted its flavor so much. It no longer has any strong thematic.

[Relapses]

I think the player base still does. In fact I don't believe blizzard is this malignant entity that wants anyone to not have fun but the playerbase complains loudly when warlocks are doing exceptionally well. I remember the first month of WoD wasn't great at all and locks complained but other players just went "You deserve all of this for being OP in SoO!". PVP works the same way.

I was joking but what's sad is that despite how broken Aff was in SoO, the SS rotation is still had the highest APM any spec the game has ever seen. (S2M SPriest is close which is why I'm maining one this expac. ) It was a high risk/high reward playstyle which, while obviously was easily exploitable, also left a lot of room for error since if you fucked up once, your pull was ruined. I miss that kind of gameplay. Hell, even Aff's iteration towards the end of WoD was pretty satisfying to play for nearly the same reasons but they went and fucked that up, too. I honestly felt Warlock was in a great state before the 7.0 rework since each spec had a clearly defined role and playstyle. I preferred Aff/Destro to my broke ass Arcane Mage in HFC and now I'm not even sure if I'll bother leveling my Warlock at any point in this expansion.

It sucks because I feel the direction they're taking the class right now is meandering at best and outright insulting to the playerbase at worst.