Say bye bye to Blood fear

[Phoenexis]

Give each spec sort of an improved CC, sort of like in Cataclysm.
Destruction gets Shadowfury (on a 20 second cooldown), Affliction gets instant Howl, and Demonology can get an improved Death Coil (like Mortal Coil).
The current CC tier would then have talents such as: Shadowflame (70% slow), a ranged Howl with reticule at the cost of 0.5-1 second cast time increase, and maybe a passive that renders the target immune to silence and interrupt effects for 15 seconds after being struck by an interrupt effect that doesn't lock out your schools. This would be amazing and once again promote smart play, on both your and your enemy's part. It would also reduce the amount of blank casts used that Blizzard has pointed out to be a bit degrading in PVP.

As for Blood Fear, it is a very annoying talent for both the warlock and opponent. It reduces the skill cap and limits CC. Since there's been an increasing amount of immunities against Fear, which many warlocks complain about, I propose the following change: The first 4 seconds of your fear ignore any immunities, a part from diminishing returns. (Maybe even Dispels? ) I think it would be an attractive change. I would personally take it.

[Deleted]

Don't mind it being removed at all, so long as similar effects across other classes go. As it stands instant fear is required with the amount of interrupts, stuns and incapacitates going out.

[wholol]

I believe what is happening is caused by the redirection of all the massive QQ, at first they whined about chaos bolt, but it was fine since every other class had a spec that could insta gib something, so all classes had somewhat achieved a balanced state of whining where no one class would whine about the other more than it's (let's call it ) rivals.
Then the new demo playstyle was found, the roar was too much to hide anymore, shifted blizzard's gazed towards locks once again, and to sate the intense QQ that was now directed towards locks, they ended up nerfing thing after thing, although justified I agree, but to do it to only change locks and leave the other classes untouched is not good conduct imo.

blood fear needs to be changed, I agree, but instead of looking at blood fear and warlocks, I think the bigger picture needs to be seen, PvP as a whole needs to change and soon, shifting away from all the burst / instant CC to a more pressure oriented pvp playstyle would be a much better direction for pvp in general.

[Deleted]

Removed? Right. Well, IF they remove this without removing/changing/tuning down all the other 43204930230 CC in the game, then we are one hundred percent & royally fucked. Seeing how fast they pull & swing the nerfhammer at warlocks.. I say that things don't look good for our beloved class.

[Delekii]

I don't know what the fuck they were thinking when they released MoP with the talent system as is - it bred such a massive influx of cc that wasn't previously available to a massive number of specs that the result was always going to be this. Blood fear is problematic, but it definitely isn't any worse than any other instant cc that can be chained with other instant cc.

There is a systemic issue going on with WoW PvP that seems to stem from Blizzard's belief that skill stems from chaining ccs rather than from any other source. There needs to be a paradigmatic shift away from abilities that cause the loss of control of your character, and instead a move toward abilities that limit or inhibit the abilities your character is using. There is much more skill involved in deciding NOT to use a cooldown of some kind because you currently have a -50% damage/cast time/whatever debuff on you than being UNABLE to do so because you are cced.

Changing in this way makes the low level pvp play more fun for those involved because they don't spend the majority of the active parts of the game unable to control their character, while it makes high level play a game where it is much easier to make a bad decision, because you can still press that button even though you shouldn't.

Imagine if we had a game where, instead of all the cc available, we had abilities like:

Fear: Your character is inflicted with images of horror, reducing resource regeneration and spell casting speed by x% for y seconds. Instant cast spells take all of your concentration, requiring a one second cast time.
Roots: Tangling vines envelope your character, reducing primary stats gained from equipment by x% and reducing your chance to hit by z% for y seconds.

So on so on - I wish "cc" as it stands in WoW was much more centered on this sort of change rather than simply "you can't do anything for x seconds - have fun".

[Fallensaint]

Man, there's a lot of folks who jumped on the thread title without listening to the interview.

What' GC's saying is that many instant CCs that were intended to be defensive CCs (like Blood Fear) are often being used offensively, and that's causing the problem where there's currently too much CC. So, instant CCs in general are going to be tuned down.

[Doktor Faustus]

The purging of everything Xelnath had a hand in continues.

Such a childish vendetta going on there.

LoL.

We have a believer!

[Charge me Doctor]

Well, no more blood fearing rogue with rocket boots up and watching him run away 40 yrds from me =(

[Bakis]

Trust me, we warlocks want to get rid of it as well....

I dont like the concept of it but its the only thing making our only viable PvP spec viable.

[zorkuus]

I wouldn't mind getting rid of BF but knowing blizz they will propably just nerf the crap out of it while giving nothing in return, essentially forcing locks to choose from the 2 other talents in the tier.

[Bakis]

I wouldn't mind getting rid of BF but knowing blizz they will propably just nerf the crap out of it while giving nothing in return, essentially forcing locks to choose from the 2 other talents in the tier.

Problem is Affe the only dot based spec is not viable in PvP. Both Destro and Demo got huge cast times, they cant afford having 1,5s fear casts.

[Baconeggcheese]

I doubt it'll be removed completely and is more likely to be re-worked.

As he said in the video, the talent was intended to be a defensive thing NOT an offensive thing. I think it much more likely that we'll see a change along the lines of *when we lose 10%(or whatever number) of our max hp we get an instant fear or the target automatically gets feared.

Something that forces the talent to be used as a defense rather than an offensive move.

Though there's still the issue that warlocks simply don't have the cc kit other classes have. A lot of this is because pets are so gimpy and easy to kill this xpac coupled with Gosac being so strong.

[Deleted]

Some warlock really layed down the hurt on those developers because i have never seen so much nerfs incoming on a single class ever in this game.
Im happy that i decided to abandon my warlock a long time ago because warlock will be worse than shit if blood fear gets removed. Pathetic balancing.

[Nerraw]

I don't get it. We're getting excessive nerfs while still maintaining one of the lowest representations in top-ranked PVP. In the meantime, other classes with as many problems as us, or even worse problems, are running around untouched.

[kushlol]

I'm glad it's getting nerfed. Now all the warlocks who can't juke interrupts will get upset and re-reoll again. However I still feel a little gimped without having all of the baseline cc we were used to....howl,death coil and sfury when specd destro. We should have death coil back at the very least and possibly make the instant cc choice between shadowfury howl and blood fear. I'm glad they want to nerf instant cc's across the board but without these types of cc's I feel locks are very underwhelming in terms of dmg and the pressure they can create.

[Nerraw]

Again the big question is whether we'll get compensated in some way or not. If we don't, it's not looking good for the class at all.

[demonik]

I find it ironic that you listed at least 4 major CCs locks have access to, while excusing 3 of them as "not really main CCs" because they're on your pet - not that you can't plan your pet before the arena nowadays. Hunters using monkeys will be pretty amazed to hear that their monkey blind isn't really a CC.

Druid cyclone is a problem, yes, because iirc it doesn't even drop form when you get predatory swiftness. But NS is on a 1 minute CD so you can plan around it, and feral druid's need 5 combo points on a target to ensure an "NS-clone" from predatory swiftness, so if you snare/kite them effectively that cyclone uptime drops dramatically. Not to mention that outside of bash, it's literally their only CC and it DRs crazy quick.

Priests have a PBAoE "instant fear", meaning "point blank AoE," meaning they need to be in melee range and it's not effective as an offensive CC without major planning, nor is it useful as a peel - it's mainly a defensive CD. Psychic horror requires orbs to cast, and if they're getting free MBs off on you, they probably deserve the Horror, but no fear (lol, pun), using horror means they have to give up DP, their "burst", to cast it, til they get more orbs. And honestly, if you put yourself in such bad position that a Psyfiend can corner you for 10s, you deserve the fear, because, you guessed it, it's another proximity based fear, and this one is stationary so you honestly have to be awful to get caught in it.

lol you act like aoe fears are less effective or useless. I guess you never played against a warrior or paladin or rogue or any other melee class that has to be that close huh? sorry but you don't know what your talking about. and what about warrior fears or all the other instant cast cc's? if they nerf blood fear then they better take a look at all the other classes instant cc's.

I'd also like to just say that the removal of blood fear isn't my biggest issue, if they removed it then its gone whatever oh well, but they're most likely not gonna compensate us for it or take a look at balancing other classes cc's and that is my biggest issue.

[Lulbalance]

Problem is Affe the only dot based spec is not viable in PvP. Both Destro and Demo got huge cast times, they cant afford having 1,5s fear casts.

Aff is actually viable, a few of the highest rated locks in the game are playing Aff right now. i feel like trink nerf hurts all specs but mostly demo since the ramp up time is high so imo you'll see more affliction and destro.. destro is a huge pain over 2k so that leaaaaves.....?

On topic though; i agree with your point about BF in the state of the game as it is. needed.

anyone who thinks they're fly by hating on BF the way things are right now in arena is clowning.

it sucks.. but its necessary. if they nerf it without compensation and you like pvp..it's gonna be less than 'ideal'.

[sickestnerdchills]

It seems like a lot of people in here have never PvP'ed without Blood Fear. If you had you would realize it's a bull talent. They don't have to compensate for us losing it, warlocks have to compensate for not having it. It was a crutch and I'm glad it's gone

[Bogdan]

Blood Fear was the ONLY reason a Warlock team could've scored a kill in arena... Not Chaos Bolt post nerf, not Chaos Wave post nerf... but BLOOD FEAR... Now that both CB and CW got nerfed along with the inevitable Blood Fear nerf will make Warlocks be even more shit than they currently are, if possible...

The only thing Blizzard needed to nerf in 5.1 was BLOOD FEAR, not CW or CB... GL scoring a kill after the Blood Fear nerf (whatever the nerf will be, they will most likely make the talent pointless)...

Imo the best way to nerf the talent without making it completely shit and still have some uses would be either giving Fear a 0.5 reduced cast time with this talent, making Fear a 1.2 sec cast time down from 1.7, or leave it the way that it is, with 10 secs CD, 10% HP cost, but with reduced range from 30 yds to 10 yds, forcing Warlocks to actually chase the healer in arena to fear them, not like it is now, healer pops his nose out of LOS, gj he's feared...