What has been the problem with Warlocks since legion that made the community pissed?

[Keturno]

Im very new to Warlock, i decided to make one since its the only class i dont have at 100 and im having an absolute blast playing with it! With that being said i sometimes hit the forums up to get some tips and advice from more exprienced players and i've noticed that alot of people are against warlocks on their current state. Im honestly not critizing them, im just unaware of what Blizzard did to Warlocks to turn players who've been playing that class for years against it, and thats what im here to ask!

What has been changed in Legion that made the Warlock community not enjoy it? Was it over-nerfed? Did they introduce any new mechanic that isnt being very well recieved?

Note that im not with or against the class on its current state, its my first Warlock ever and im having fun, my Warlock playtime doesnt give me the exprience to judge the state of the class!

[Deleted]

Most of the changes that no one asked for and made the class less fun to play.

[Inci]

What made warlocks less fun for me is the lack of baseline movement speed buff, You can barely escape Odyns aoe in HoV.

[FelPlague]

mostly that no one can agree what they want
and the specs each have 1 major thing fucking them up

demo its demonic empowerment being so fucking clunky

affliction its the fact that without any adds on a fight its garbage

and for destro its the removal of embers, making it rather random, and chaos bolts dont feel as rewarding as they used to, i think chaos bolts should be like they used to be ,a fucking beast damage wise, hitting in the MASSIVE numbers, but you could only do one every 12 seconds (what i mean now is maybe have one require 4 embers instead of 2, but have it do double damage)

warlocks are in a ok place
just that we are clunky to play, and each spec is amazing in 1 sitatuion, and HORRIBLE in the next

1 target? Demo is amazing, affliction is HORRIBLE destro is ok
2 targets? demo is ok, affliction is ok, destro is aamzing
3+ targets, demo is horrible, affliction is amazing, destro is ok...

also alot of the class fantasy seems ot be missing...
destro feels like it shoudl be hitting for much higher hits, the specs one of his best stats it haste? wtf? destro should never be that, it should allways be about slow, massive blasts, huge crit, and massive damage...

demo feels like it should have 2 pets like BM, and allow us to juggle their abilities, or maybe be able to tame demons like a hunter with enslave pet, allowing us to choose our demons... as right now we have little to no choice... where hunters can really use any and every pet they want...

affliction is just slow with its play style, as sadly its built around adds, on fights there is constant adds like elerethe, its amazing, but on other fights its so boring... it should return to the early alpha version, where souls would spawn around you, and you were able to dot them up, cause right now on one target its "apply and maintain dots, then drain soul, keep UA up"



(btw my fave version o the warlock is the wotlk demo lock... with hot soul fire worked, and the demonic pact... i thought it was a cool play style and i really liked it, of corse, no warlock can agree what is the best, i dident care for metamorph, it was cool but whatever, we could get something like it, but not the exact same, as well it was and allways has been a demon hunter ability)

[pkm]

Making demonic circle a talent is literally the stupidest thing they have done. They can't be fucked designing new talents so they just take a baseline spell and make it to a talent and then you have "options"

Same thing with shadow burn.

[Inshabel]

They did a lot of pruning to abilities that we now miss (Soulshatter, Dreadsteed waterwalking etc.) lots of Warlocks are also salty about Meta being taken from us and given to DH's, Affliction got some abilities (Haunt and Haunting Spirits) taken away or changed to be unrecognizable and unfun from their old incarnations while getting the Soul Effigy monstrosity in return, Demo has to deal with Demonic Empowerment wich is a tiring maintenance buff. I don't have much to complain about Destro except that by changing Embers into Soulshards we really lost a lot of flavor. Also they took away the fact that GoSac used to give you one of the sacc'd demon's abilities so now we have no interupt if we don't use a Felhunter (which does poor dps for Demo and Destro)

I still enjoy the class but it does feel a bit barren compared to earlier expansions.

Affliction also has it's Artifact ability traits designed around killing adds, because the Scythe used to spawn ghosts for you to kill, but they changed that without changing the traits.

[Jessicka]

They changed a lot of things that didn't need changing, and they insisted well into Alpha/Beta that they weren't actually changing much with the class as they felt (mostly) that it was fine as it was, and they wanted to focus on Demonology with it being a 'new' spec. In part, that is actually true, so it's kind of a 'death by a thousand cuts' thing, a cumulative effect of minor things that added up to a lot, and lack attention being paid to those things slowly adding up.

Specifically, things like for Affliction the new Artifact, the switch from Haunt to Unstable Affliction as the resource spender, and a shift from 'execute' damage to 'on-death' procs. Slow ramp up caused by the dual RNG resources and duplication of effects. Poor implementation of Soul Effigy. Individually, they probably wouldn't cause much consternation, but added together they don't make for a bit of a mess.

Demonology itself has been pretty divisive, some of us didn't want to lose the Meta playstyle at all, others welcomed the 'master summoner' idea but don't like how it's been executed; most complaints are regarding Demonic Empowerment and just how frequently it has to be cast, and how little actual feedback you get from having done so. Combined with the lack of mobility, poor capacity for burst or switching targets leaves it short on tools for dealing with real encounters.

Destruction, the shift from Embers to RNG Shards has caused huge upset, as has the cutting of abilities to be returned as talents giving overall, fewer abilities to play with. The apparent difficulty in balancing Wreak Havoc leaving the spec weak on single targets has also caused a lot of concern.

[Shadocat]

Beeing on fire taken away and given to mages.
No interrupt, no snare, a useless stun as a talent.
Close to nothing to cast while on the move for destro.
Randomness of damage.
Haste beeing the best stat while it always scaled pretty badly.

So much gutted because of "reasons" while beeing "in a good place already". :-(

Just try playing a fire-mage, these should have half of their spells removed and ice-block
and blink converted to talents in the same row...

[Deleted]

First : Yes, Warlock are viable : DPS is good, we are still tanky, we can still have some mobility (burning rush, TP).
We are not talking about numbers here (Destru could get a ST buff,Something to help mobility for Demo, but otherwise it's not horrible).

The warlock community is pissed and bitter:
*MoP revamp was a really good thing
*All 3 spec were polished during Wod

*Here comes Legion :
*Bliz changed demo cause meta shouldn't have been in the warlock lore in the first place but they still wen't with it and created lore around it.
=> Ok, shouldn't have been here in the first place but was so daaammmnnn COOOOOOOOL !

*They also changed destru and affli (and here comes the problems) :
-> Affli has been broken since they changed the gameplay of the artifact without changing the trait : => unfinished job
-> Destru lost the ember system, lost FnB for all spell (which was cool), lost baseline ability, etc ...

*Warlocks reported those problems since Alpha
*Nothing was made
*And now they start acknowledging the problem (which is good) :
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/...page=3#post-59
*But we still have to wait for the next PTR (maybe 7.2.5, ...).

You can find the actual gameplay of warlock to be fun but in my opinion :
*destru : 3 spells rotations : conflag/CB/Inci (+ refresh immo and rift) and you keep doing it again and again and again ...
*Demo : same thing invoc pet/ buff pet / filler

You have very little choice to make, you just need to follow your rotation (and for demo, pray that you won't have to move when casting Thal'kiel's Consumption).

During Wod, we had 2 charges of "Soul Harvest" and needed to choose when was the optimal time to drop all "ressources", this burst phase was really important and you could felt powerfull during it (best example was transforming into a demon and unleashing the demonic energy you save during a minute).

[Deleted]

the issues are not as game breaking when u are leveling, i had a blast leveling from 100 - 110 as affliction.
But when when u really wanna get the most out of your class u will notice we always do 'ok' in 1 thing, and bad at the others (like alot of people told here)

And the Warlock on it's own has a superb class fantasy(with the order hall and class Q's), but the speccs on there own miss some feeling

except for affliction, it's still slowly (slow ramp up time, hence making it less fun) draining the life out of your victms while u wave and laugh at them kinda feeling. Jumping around and spamming dots on everything kinda feeling as in tbc. But it doesn't work in the current state of the game where everything dies pretty fast (if u are grouping with other people, thats why the issue start to be an issue when u are maxed level)

Demo is just spawn pet empower the pet, spawn pet empower the pet, spawn pet empower the pet .... instead of spawning lots of demons and then going full harambe on the enemy.

And destro is missing the calculated and anticipated BANG BLOW SHIT UP moments, as in MoP (best expansion for destro tbh) It was really fun to try and make the most of the phase where u could dump 5 CBs in a row when all trinkets and raid buffs were up. Now everything just hits 'oke', and incinerate has the most useless feeling to use now, since it doesn't generate nothing, just some low/okish damage. Since everything is closer together (damage wise) its the overal picture thats more important, in the end the total damage on the fight is oke. So now it is a pretty dull (just follow the rotation) kinda feeling.

I guess that if u now start to play with a warlock it's all oke and good fun, but we had some beter moments and complexer gameplay (witch makes it more fun for most of us)

[Keturno]

affliction is just slow with its play style, as sadly its built around adds, on fights there is constant adds like elerethe, its amazing, but on other fights its so boring... it should return to the early alpha version, where souls would spawn around you, and you were able to dot them up, cause right now on one target its "apply and maintain dots, then drain soul, keep UA up"

Out of everything this just seems the worst. I remember back in beta watching a video on Affliction and i do recall the soul, however having a mechanic removed with unchanged traits to enhance that one mechanic seems rather... lazy and un-productive. Just the thought of Blizzard thinking that it'd maybe go by the players just seems extremely fucking dumb. It obviously wouldnt, and it didnt, and now it still requires changes that blizzard *apparently* didnt want to make back then.

[Soulstealing]

What made warlocks less fun for me is the lack of baseline movement speed buff, You can barely escape Odyns aoe in HoV.

Because Portal & Gateway arent enough to escape it? Yes our baseline movement speed buff was moved to be a talent, but don't act like we don't have some form of mobility.

[Drakile]

I feel like one of the biggest issues is that Blizzard will make a statement like "We don't want to shore up weaknesses, we want to double down on strengths" So they made Demonic circle a talent to make us less mobile and set about to making us tanks, until the first major patch of Legion where they nerfed our survivability pretty hard with a talent swap, it was nice to have teleport back on a tier that I could take it without feeling penalized but it went against what they had just finished telling us.

That inconsistency was persistent through alpha/beta and into live, I'd venture to say that's one of the most frustrating parts.

Sprinkle that over, the removal of Meta, the removal of embers, the introduction of soul effigy, the hack job that is the aff weapon, severe lack of mobility in demo, demo not living up to some people's idea of master summoner, as well as other gripes, all coming together to culminate into the general aggravation with the devs.

[Hendawgg]

Pretty much everything that's listed in here is spot on. Actually, i had forgotten some of these things, like being on fire as our embers filled.....being reminded of them only pisses me off more.

And then i look on MMOC's front page to see that Shadow got buffed by 25% across the board.

ARE YOU F'N KIDDING ME????

ARE YOU F'N KIDDING ME????

[FelPlague]

Out of everything this just seems the worst. I remember back in beta watching a video on Affliction and i do recall the soul, however having a mechanic removed with unchanged traits to enhance that one mechanic seems rather... lazy and un-productive. Just the thought of Blizzard thinking that it'd maybe go by the players just seems extremely fucking dumb. It obviously wouldnt, and it didnt, and now it still requires changes that blizzard *apparently* didnt want to make back then.

well the spec is based around having constant things to kill
in some sitatuions it works, and affliction is amazing
but with the soul thing removed it just becomes harder

- - - Updated - - -

Because Portal & Gateway arent enough to escape it? Yes our baseline movement speed buff was moved to be a talent, but don't act like we don't have some form of mobility.

really...? you mean both things that require setting up ahead of time to use? and one of them is a talent...

[valky94]

i play demo/destro, but mostly demo as my destro wep needs AP and have no issues with the specs themselves and how they play, the only thing i dislike with the class is 0 class mobility, what Inci already said i died 2-3 times on odyn in mythic HoV just because i was a milisec off, if only they could make burning rush baseline or give us back demonic circle and make it placeable on the ground simillar to mages rune of power, just any kind of mobility is what i personaly miss in warlocks (not counting gateway as it feels kinda clunky sometimes and has a 1.5 min cd)

[Alaira]

There are a few things that ruined Warlock for me and made me decide to play something else.
• Baseline abilities were made to be mutually exclusive talents. Warlocks didn't gain anything with the Legion talent design; they lost.
• Abilities were stripped away from Warlocks and given to other classes. Most notable would be Metamorphosis being given to Demon Hunters.
• Demonology was completely redesigned into a Pet Swarm spec. Historically, pets have had bad AI and pathing making them unreliable/clunky.
• Removal of baseline utility spells for movement and survivability.
• Destruction's many changes detailed below.

Prior to Legion, Destruction Warlocks had a different resource system: Burning Embers. Embers were a bit like Death Knight Runes in that they weren't binary (full or empty). Embers were gradually refilled through spell casts awarding Ember "bits". Each Ember had 10 bits, and several spells including Incinerate, Immolate, Conflagration, and Rain of Fire (MoP) awarded bits when they dealt damage. This gave the spec predictability. Warlocks knew when they would be getting a full Ember and plan accordingly. The current iteration is random resource generation, except Conflagration which is on a cooldown and is our only baseline instant-cast spell.

Rain of Fire had no resource cost, and wasn't built to hit like a truck. This made it less punishing when mechanics dictated that targets be moved out of its area of effect. Tanks who don't consider ground-targeted AoE were also less of a frustration. It also wasn't our only form of baseline AoE. Fire & Brimstone was a baseline ability that worked as a toggle, and wasn't limited to Incinerate. Warlocks weren't pigeon-holed into permanent cleave. We could decide when to AoE to avoid attacking targets like CC'd adds or neutral NPCs.

Chaos Bolt had a lower resource cost and could be cast more frequently. Spamming Incinerate is not fun gameplay. In addition to the frequency, we could make intelligent decisions about when to dump all of our embers and have more meaningful burst through casting twice as many cooldown-buffed Chaos Bolts.

Destruction's Mastery was also changed. Previously, it buffed the effectiveness of Ember-spending spells (plus a few Ember generators). In Legion, it causes a random amount of damage up to your mastery percentage. You could get screwed with bad luck and do zero (or very low) extra damage. This is especially poor when cooldowns are used. The combination of random extra damage and random resource generation means that your ability to damage can vary wildly, but not in a good way.



Blizzard has acknowledged that they made mistakes, but has stated that they don't have time to fix them. Maybe the next expansion will address some of the problems they introduced, and along the way they'll attempt to put a band-aid on them.

[Deleted]

I think in all of Wow's history(except maybe Vanilla), Warlock is currently the least complete class Blizz ever created. the thing that annoys me the most about this situation is that Blizzard keeps coming out and outright telling us that they are not happy with Warlock design but that they can't change it right now. first off, that is such a frustrating thing to hear as someone that just wants their class to be as good as the other classes in the game. and also they keep using this exact same statement almost as if they believe this is a perfectly fine excuse. when you are employed to balance a class, "I know it's bad but I can't fix it" is NOT a proper excuse. that's akin to a schoolkid telling his teacher "I can't turn in my homework because I forgot it at home", but then that kid repeats this excuse for the next few weeks.

[Hendawgg]

Since i didn't get to finish my rant because work interrupted me (Something my lock CAN'T do)....


The lack of an interrupt pisses me off to now end. Mythic Iggy and my guild is calling for Interrupts on the eye stalks....i can't do a damn thing about it. Stun doesn't even affect them. Can't set up a freaking kill in PvP anymore because i have no interrupt. And don't tell me about that stupid Fel Hunter, since Lock pets are so freaking clunky. In an RBG situation with a multitude of target swaps, a clutch interrupt using the Fel Hound is damn near impossible.

Removing water walking from our Dread Stead? Gee thanks for a totally unnecessary nerf to fun. Meanwhile, Spriest and Mage and can slow fall to bypass geographical constraints....

The change to Shadow Burn was awful. It hits like a wet noodle now. Long gone are the days of setting up a kill with an interrupt followed by SBurn execute. WTF BLIZZ????? And now they want to put it on a CD? It already blows ass!

This thread got me in a bad mood....

[Orwell7]

I have 34 points in Destro, 28 in demo and 34 in affliction.

I have the bis bracers, the destro back and demo waist legendaries. I do good damage in raids. I feel useless on almost all encounters.
On progression I was useful on Elerethe because my gateway.
What I remember?
On Nythendra I didn't realized that Demonology is a better ST spec than Destro, so I was barely above tanks.
Ilgynoth? Good tentacle damage, I admit it, but brain damage was abysmal.
Ursoc? At this time I grinded my heart out so I can compete with Demo spec, that was a fine moment!
Dragons of Nightmare... for a few tries I told to go down the portals, which we've failed to do with my dps. After they switched me out to freely cleave, the boss was easy.
Elerethe.. ok, gateway was good. But the moment I got even 1 mechanic to deal with, I dropped down the damage meters HARD.

Cenarius, at this time my Demo spec got the 28th point, and I tunneled the boss the whole time. Offdotting the drakes had me yelled at as the dragons would breathe on me and the raid - now I learned how to do it properly, but my DPS was low if I couldn't off-dot.

Xavius is not a fight that needs explanation, too easy.

Now with ToV:
on Odyn and Guarm my dps is fine, but for Helya I feel the need to fully upgrade my affliction spec and use it on that fight, because it can be middle of the pack when there are things you can use Agony on.
However, with the 4 legendary cap, I have zero chance of getting the 20% Agony-Haste head or the belt. So I either reroll to something that looks good in 7.1.5 (hint: among ranged, only elemental, shadow, balance, hunters and mages look good...), or I won't be in for the first kill.

Also, the warlock community, where every nuthead defends the class when they only play locks as an alt (or don't play at all), is making me sick. I don't want to be part of this abuse-loving group, because blizzard always see these people as justification on their design choices which are just bad.