Several pet related bugs in combination with a clunky pet control have always been a part of the warlock class and a major downside of our ability to control a minion alongside our character.
Especially in a pvp environment quick and unfailing pet commands are very important to overcome your opponent and to help your team. Prior to patch 5.0 i was able to combine serveral spells of our different minions (mostly imp or felhunter, rarely succubus and felguard) in 3 macros to control my target and focus target (spell lock, axe toss, seduce), dispell myself or my teammates (singe magic) or activate additional cooldowns (devour magic, whiplash, flee, felstorm). Other players chose to control arena targets 1, 2 and 3 or use mouseover commands in their macros.
This obligatory part to be succesful as a warlock player has always been a hurdle to new and unseasoned players, but it could be overcome. Mists of Pandaria promised quality of life improvements due to several innovations, for example the new Control Demon button or the ability to get rid of your pet without losing to much damage and utility. But in contrast the situation got much worse comparing to Cataclysm. Let me explain this further:
- Control Demon: This new overall pet control ability is completely useless in its current form. Not only are we not allowed to arrange suitable spells ourselves, but in addition pressing the button interrupts spell casting every time.
- Grimoire of Sacrifice: Actually a good choice for everyone in pvp, but in praxis both the empowered demons and their spells have different names than their basic counterparts and cannot be activated the same way in macros. So you have to add additinal lines or change your macros every time u skill into GoSac.
- Grimoire of Sacrifice: A differentiated use of this ability in combination with temporarily active pets results inevitably in clunky and dull pet control solutions. You cannot include "Control Demon" in pet macros because of interferences when pets are not sacrificed and the act of sacrificing does not dismiss your dead pet for quite a while and blocks the use of "Control Demon" as your own spell.
Mists of Pandaria comes with good ideas and design intentions regarding warlock pets but they are poorly executed. I always dreamed of several self-composable ability sets comparable to shaman totem calls but they gave us a completly useless button serving as cover-up for our problems. Give us ways to activate the same ability with the same command regardless if our pets are empowered, sacrificed or in their basic form.
The problems of pet control exist since release but apparently Blizzard is not in the position to improve the situation since many years, they havent even tried it properly. Seems that a specific warlock issue is not worth the effort. Maybe you can spread the word to places where developers actually take notice if you share my views, but if nothing changes i am going to enjoy another challenging and versatile class without profound design flaws: my shadowpriest alt ;-)