Returning character w/questions

[elderdrake]

I am thinking of dusting my lock off and leveling him finally to 110 but I am curious as to where they currently stand. I played a demonology lock back in WotLK but took a break and went to a few other classes. I have found that I love my new Vengeance DH (fun factor) and I loved (past tense) my Hunter (pets) but I find the changes in Legion too much for me to enjoy that particular class as I used to. So I am wondering how demo locks are faring at end game. I love the artifact as it reminds me of the skull from the old school Planescape pc title so a win there for me. I like pets also but my experience with my Hunter is that the dev in charge of pet AI is...special. Special in that he or she is an affirmative action sort of hire person, but I digress. I see so many differing view points on the fun factor of the class, to be expected, but I do see people complaining they are mechanically broken a bit now. Is this true or just qq'ing and the usual class drama? Also how are they handling themselves in PvE content for both WQ and raids? I don't need to be the fotm club uber dps but I don't want to suck either. I am also trying to tie this in with what I can gather from the upcoming 7.1.5 patch and even though changes are still to come, I am sure some people have an idea of where the next patch changes will take us so I am a bit curious.

Any insight and answer to my above questions I thank you in advance for. Looking forward to hearing back from the locks out there in the trenches, happy hunting.

[Joryy]

YMMV, but I found demo to be a fun and engaging spec. My biggest frustration was how.... non-adaptive the spec was (and the ramp up time). The most salient example of what I mean is Vault of the wardens. Every boss except the first puts you in the dumpster -- they go immune so you have to re ramp, they have extra damage phases that you can't really take advantage of. Demo works in this great big 15-25 second chunks, and many fight's windows are smaller than that.

Nowadays I mostly play affliction though.

[Deleted]

I am thinking of dusting my lock off and leveling him finally to 110 but I am curious as to where they currently stand. I played a demonology lock back in WotLK but took a break and went to a few other classes. I have found that I love my new Vengeance DH (fun factor) and I loved (past tense) my Hunter (pets) but I find the changes in Legion too much for me to enjoy that particular class as I used to. So I am wondering how demo locks are faring at end game. I love the artifact as it reminds me of the skull from the old school Planescape pc title so a win there for me. I like pets also but my experience with my Hunter is that the dev in charge of pet AI is...special. Special in that he or she is an affirmative action sort of hire person, but I digress. I see so many differing view points on the fun factor of the class, to be expected, but I do see people complaining they are mechanically broken a bit now. Is this true or just qq'ing and the usual class drama? Also how are they handling themselves in PvE content for both WQ and raids? I don't need to be the fotm club uber dps but I don't want to suck either. I am also trying to tie this in with what I can gather from the upcoming 7.1.5 patch and even though changes are still to come, I am sure some people have an idea of where the next patch changes will take us so I am a bit curious.

Any insight and answer to my above questions I thank you in advance for. Looking forward to hearing back from the locks out there in the trenches, happy hunting.

Demonology is very punishing, not that interesting (Spam demon bolt, summon a few demons now and then, empower them), and requires a ton of haste (Haste is quite above int in value for Demo). Your DPS could easily be crap simply because you got targeted by abilities during fights, and while that would also affect others, demo locks take a much harder hit to their DPS.

Warlocks are very strong for soloing content. Even before you get heroic dungeon level gear, you can easily pull a lot of enemies and kill them off without worrying too much, and using VW or infernal to tank elites works just fine.

Personally, I don't like locks right now. There are a bunch of issues with regards to utility, but the class just isn't that interesting to me.

Other classes usually have situations where they can make use of mechanics to do cool stuff. Warlocks don't really have that any longer (Destruction used to cleave shadow burns onto a raid boss from adds to skyrocket DPS, for example, but now destruction simply does poor DPS if you are not able to cleave anything, and even when you can it is mediocre).

I would probably be better able to give you a meaningful explanation if I knew what you found fun about classes. Destruction, aff and demo are pretty slow paced, virtually set in stone "rotation" wise, and they mostly don't have interesting ways to squeeze out more DPS.

[Zaroch]

Other classes usually have situations where they can make use of mechanics to do cool stuff. Warlocks don't really have that any longer (Destruction used to cleave shadow burns onto a raid boss from adds to skyrocket DPS, for example, but now destruction simply does poor DPS if you are not able to cleave anything, and even when you can it is mediocre).

This right there is my biggest problem with the class right now, I no longer feel that I am abusing my class to the fullest in any kind of situation. Like when you are a hunter and there are 15-20 adds clumped up together(Helya) and you hit that Barrage button and have an evil grin on your face or when you are a fire mage and boss has a phase where he takes %100 more damage or you get a buff that increases your damage for 15 seconds(Xavius) you Combustion, Rune of power, trinkets etc. go ham and see your dps climb to the top, I can't feel that in destro or demo anymore. Affliction gets close to that with lots of AoE abusing mechanics but it isn't good for anything else so no one plays affli.

[Deleted]

This right there is my biggest problem with the class right now, I no longer feel that I am abusing my class to the fullest in any kind of situation. Like when you are a hunter and there are 15-20 adds clumped up together(Helya) and you hit that Barrage button and have an evil grin on your face or when you are a fire mage and boss has a phase where he takes %100 more damage or you get a buff that increases your damage for 15 seconds(Xavius) you Combustion, Rune of power, trinkets etc. go ham and see your dps climb to the top, I can't feel that in destro or demo anymore. Affliction gets close to that with lots of AoE abusing mechanics but it isn't good for anything else so no one plays affli.

Pretty much, and a big part of it is that none of our specs have real DPS cooldowns. It has honestly been disheartening for me to go from MoP -> WoD -> Legion. WoD was almost entirely a watered down version of MoP for all specs, and Legion watered it down even further. What's left are some very basic decisions, and never really having those "Fuck yeah" moments any longer.

I keep hoping for some significant and cool changes for locks, but they just don't seem to want to do anything. No procs, nothing to react to, a manabar for no reason at all other than to "justify" having life tap, no interrupt, 3 sec CR, the list goes on. Ion's interview, where he talked about wanting Demonology to be more like a necromancer in D2 sounded amazing, yet here we are, with no signs that they actually want to go that route.

[-Zait-]

Returning lock too

I'm pretty irritated that they messed with demon portal like they did and that they removed it from baseline as well as Haunt. Haunt and mortal coil has less interesting animations also, minor but annoying.

This iteration of lock feels like the definition of fixing something that isn't broken.