Since we are going to get nerfed next expansion..

[Irian]

What I'd personally like to see happen:

Gateway removed. It was an experiment and, IMO, didn't work out. It feels clunky and poorly implemented, it's pathing is horrible and in PvP it's just downright awkward. It also causes PvE raid design problems (hi Iron Qon) where it ruins interesting fight mechanics.

Soul Swap removed. Affliction's dots buffed to compensate. Malefic Grasp redesigned or removed in favor of an affliction-friendly cast time spell. In my own opinion Malefic Grasp feels horrible.

Demonology being given a cast time filler. Touch of Chaos not scaling with haste and making Kiljaeden's Cunning largely useless for Demo isn't cool. It also just don't feel right.

Dark Soul nerfed across the board for all specs, and warlocks being brought back to the more "consistent, non-burst" style they had pre-cata.

[Tramzh]

There's no reason to do any of this.
Also, more on topic, why would Warlocks get nerfed? It's very middle of the pack this patch.

Saying there are not a single reason to do any of it might not be true at all. There could be other solutions but at the moment we are "OP" for 2 main reasons outside scaling:

1. We do too much damage when there are 1 or targets. - Main contender here is afflis Soul Swap. Rework Soul Swap or just remove it and balance around it. To add to this, in PvE affli feels more like a burst class right now than a consistent dot damage dealer over time, the slower the boss dies the more your dps will drop. Bringing the consistency feel back to affli would only do good ( I believe).

2. We do too much damage when things dies during the fight. - Shadowburn and DS might need tweaks to their resource gains. (DS obviously synergizes so well with Soul Swap.)

Nerfing destro is a personal opinion but it seriously needs a small tweak to it's rotation. The "press 1 button to make all your single target spells the best aoe in the game" is broken in power atm compared to most other classes.

Demo was amazing with UVLS and I hope they can bring that feel and flow back in 6.0 (55-60%+ meta uptime, in and out all the time). Even if the specs numbers was way out of control it was still a very fun and skill rewarding spec. Metaweaving was cool and all but it wouldn't be too bad to let it go to make the spec more "noobfriendly".

None of the lvl 100 talents will change much if they were added right now except for the resource talent which looked rather lame.

In the end it might just be personal opinions, but it's kind of getting annoying to get "scale down nerfed" each patch just to make the other classes anywhere close. I guess fire mages got same issues albeit they were not too successful in 5.4.

[Last Starfighter]

I hope they nerf the shit out of locks. The flavor of the expac vibe is getting old.

[Tietoso]

i just want the posers that want locks to get nerf to gtfo from the lock forums and back to their crappy class.
theres no reason why warlocks should be nerf, its never been more fun to play as a lock than this xpac. ffs all these ppl wanting locks to get nerf sound the same as the ppl asking blizz to get rid of flying in WoD, just gtfo.

[Deleted]

Is it bad that i'm totally happy with how the class plays as it is?

i've played all 3 during my current heroic progress (9/14 as of post) and all three specs have been pretty solid.
Affliction is great multi-dot, and apparently it's good single target. (i don't do well with affliction for some reason)
Destruction is awesome on fight where you can generate more embers than usual, and just pump out chaos bolts all day, alot of fun to play and delivers great dps. (i'm looking at you, sha of pride)
Demonology is great fun to play, and i use it for single target fights, as i can't really mash face with affliction, i respecced demo to try it recently, and did really solid dps on malkorok.

I can honestly say that i really enjoy playing warlock at the moment, it would be sad to see them changed. I don't for a minute think warlock damage is op though, i think blizzard just made the fights this tier very very warlock friendly, and made them very diverse.

If something had to get nerfed it would have to affect diversity, i'd probably make Rain of Fire not generate ember-bits, and we'll see how the dot snapshot removal hits affliction.

Gateway will stay though, they'll use it for mechanics in the new Mythic raid system, as they were interested in using class specific abilities for fights, and gateway is a pretty big candidate for basing tactics on it. More than any other base warlock spell i can think of anyway.

[tithian]

Warlock nerfs will come through the removal of DOT snapshotting. I just hope that affliction doesn't become too boring after this, hopefully they can add a 4th dot to monitor, to keep things interesting.

Destro will probably be scaled dows as well, since now it does amazingly well in single target, cleave AND AoE. I'm guessing Havoc will have its CD increased and FnB will do less damage.

I also wouldn't be against giving the gateway to other classes as well, but with mythic raiding being 20-man only it is guarranteed you'll have 2-3 locks in the raid anyway, so in all probability all encounters will be designed around having access to the gateway (unlike 10-man heroics today).

[kardacz]

and you do realize that there were ppl that didnt enjoy that particular playstyle, hell having to use a direct dmg spell as filler for a dot spec was the most moron thing ever, never made sense to me, i just dont think you get the concept of soul swap and putting a cooldown on it would go against the whole concept of that particular spell, soul swap in its current form is as good as it gets. and hoenstly if you press that one button so many times you're doing something wrong, yes, you should use it a lot, but most of the times you hard cast your dots.

I do, but I don't laugh at them and instead respect their opinion. Something that's apparently foreign to you.
And some people liked shadow bolt so you're going to start laughing at them too?
So I don't understand the concept behind Soul Swap even though I said that the old version with a cooldown was better in my opinion. Go figure.
You use it several times on the pull just to roll your snapshotted dots which takes away any kind of effort in the first place. The initial design was to allow warlocks easier target swapping, not vomiting dots on everything that moves in a few globals.
The current version is just mongoloid with or without SB. Why bother, just give affliction one spell that puts all our dots up without any drawback along with haunt so we can reduce our rotation to spaming Malefic Grasp.

my statement stands, I love SB:SS, and I hope blizz do not take it away.

There will always be people on both sides of the fence, you can't please everyone I guess. Some prefer how it was in the previous expansions, some how it is in MoP. The same as with Shadow Priests.

To some degree they went overboard on both, but I think the crying about Warlock damage absurdity right now is half truth/half trope. We're a bit silly on stuff like Protectors, Nazgrim but there are plenty of fights...especially in the second half of Siege...where Lock damage isn't egregiously dumb.

Celestalon mentioned in one of his tweets that warlocks are overpowered.
https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...92206528536576
According to them it's all about snapshotting. I think he mentioned haste will update on each tick, not sure if it will be the same with spellpower/intellect.

[Jessicka]

I think the shadowflame stacking is probably fine, but if they were looking for something little to cut from Demo, I think getting rid of the "switch to meta while HoG is in the air" could go.

With snapshotting gone, that will be. Question is whether to remain in Meta while it ticks, although I doubt we'd have the Fury to sustain that kind of up time.

For some reason the community seems to totally ignore Mage and Rogue damage in PVE, and only when someone other than those classes tops a chart do the tears come. I wonder if there is a latent belief that Rogues and Mages are intended to be the top melee and range Pure respectively while Hunters and Warlocks were the "leveling and soloing" Pures. I think I'm going to write my Thesis on this strange community phenomenon.

I think the issue here is that broadly Mages and Rogues have a lower skill delta, so players have less of an issue with those classes being "OP" because they can get those numbers themselves. It's when they struggle with a class, but see others performing amazingly that they start to have a problem - they just hate not being as good with it as others, even when other classes are performing just as well.

It's like 'Fear'. People hate Warlocks because of Fear, even though it's not really radically different from any other CC in the game, it's just they remember the times they ran into the bad because of it, but forget the equal number of times it LOSed them, actually saving their ass and infuriating the Warlock. :S

[Algekevin]

I wouldn't mind nerfs, but I do hope the skillcap remains for at least one spec. I like to be rewarded for skillful play and look at logs to differentiate a good lock from one of lesser skill. With the removal of dot snapshotting and how Destro is atm, I'm hoping Demo will remain the same at least. The spec with the smallest skill ceiling should never be the best one to go for almost all fights of a tier in my opinion. That's just how I feel though, and if they dumb down all specs to the level of Destro(not that it's dumb, but it's too easy to learn and be good at with little experience to me), I'll likely swap to something more engaging, which sucks because I absolutely love playing Aff and Demo.

[Grizelda]

Destro will probably be scaled dows as well, since now it does amazingly well in single target, cleave AND AoE. I'm guessing Havoc will have its CD increased and FnB will do less damage.

It's a pure DPS spec. Why shouldn't it have a complete dps tool kit? I think the days of this class can do this but sucks at that are over.

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1. We do too much damage when there are 1 or targets. - Main contender here is afflis Soul Swap. Rework Soul Swap or just remove it and balance around it. To add to this, in PvE affli feels more like a burst class right now than a consistent dot damage dealer over time, the slower the boss dies the more your dps will drop. Bringing the consistency feel back to affli would only do good ( I believe).

This makes no sense. If you feel Soul Swap makes you op, then you remove it. Why would you then rebalance it? You're saying it's not balanced in the first place, but you still want the same damage after you remove it?

Affliction used to be horrible on short lived adds. Now it's actually useful and you want to go back to that? Getting a full row of DoTs up and casting a SB that never lands because it's dead by the time the first DoT ticks?

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2. We do too much damage when things dies during the fight. - Shadowburn and DS might need tweaks to their resource gains. (DS obviously synergizes so well with Soul Swap.)

Many other classes gain resources off of enemies dying. It's the one thing we'll be able to be clever about after the removal of snapshotting. It's also part of Warlock lore. We will take your soul when we are done with you. Blizz keeps giving us things like "Glyph of Soul Consumption" so I don't think they have a problem with it either.

Playing Destro is like making trick shots in a game of billiards. We bank shots off of other targets, aiming for efficiency (to regen resources) and max impact (during procs). That is the art of Destro. It doesn't need another random button to push. If you think that's the case read the forum about button bloat. If anything the current 4 pc. would be a great proc to play with as a baseline effect. Shame about the loss of snapshotting, but it would still give us a small meta game on getting it to proc just in time for 3 havoced SB's.

[Jessicka]

It's a pure DPS spec. Why shouldn't it have a complete dps tool kit? I think the days of this class can do this but sucks at that are over.

I think it's an issue if it has a full toolkit and the alternative specs have very obvious strengths and weaknesses. I really do struggle to see what exactly Destruction's weakess actually is; because it's not like right now its weakness is being mediocre at everything, but bad at nothing, which is where it has been most of the expansion.

Demo and Affliction have very obvious strengths and weaknesses, same applies to the three Mage specs - they've been pretty clear in Rogue/Hunter discussion that that's where they want to go with them too in order to better define their specs.

[OokingDooker]

I think it's an issue if it has a full toolkit and the alternative specs have very obvious strengths and weaknesses. I really do struggle to see what exactly Destruction's weakess actually is; because it's not like right now its weakness is being mediocre at everything, but bad at nothing, which is where it has been most of the expansion.

Demo and Affliction have very obvious strengths and weaknesses, same applies to the three Mage specs - they've been pretty clear in Rogue/Hunter discussion that that's where they want to go with them too in order to better define their specs.

Destro's main weakness is the mobility issue. 40% - 45% of your dps will come from your chaos bolts, which has a long cast time and cannot be cast while moving. Missing even 1 trinket buffed chaos bolt due to avoiding mechanics is quite devastating to your overall damage done for a fight. affliction is virtually unhindered by movement, same with demo if played correctly.

[Grizelda]

If it's a pure dps spec it should be able to do the dps job presented to it. Each spec can have a different and unique way to get the job done. Maybe some multi DoT, some nuke, some juggle resources.

Then each player can choose the spec and style that plays to the players strength. Maybe you hate watching DoT timers. Maybe you're not so good at target switching on the fly. Maybe you're horrible at controlling your pet. Choose the style you like.

I don't think I should have to change specs in order to reliably AoE, burst, survive, cc etc. I'm pretty sure I've seen that Blizz wants a Destro lock to be a Destro lock and not have to change specs for every fight.

If X class has horrible AoE it's not Destros fault.

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Demo and Affliction have very obvious strengths and weaknesses, same applies to the three Mage specs - they've been pretty clear in Rogue/Hunter discussion that that's where they want to go with them too in order to better define their specs.

You're saying that a class should be defined by it's weakness? That sounds very sucky.

Demo has problems that need to be addressed in a few small reworks. I'm assuming you mean it's horrible AoE. I've also heard fury issues. Affliction also has sucky AoE. I'm not sure what you think it's other weakness is? But these problems should be addressed. I don't think "switch to X spec for this fight" is the correct solution, or (according to your previous posts) the solution you want.

Regarding Mage/Hunter, I think that was a discussion involving Mobility vs. Damage. One is able to burst well at the cost of movement the other can move well at the cost of burst. That sounds fair and balanced.

[Jessicka]

I think the mantra is "Close enough to compete, different enough to be able to shine." I wonder the same thing about spec being a commitment, with the changes to the loot system. It's not like Shadow, Elemental or Balance are good at everything to compensate for the lack of choice of DPS specs in the ranged DPS role - although they do have clear strengths - so it stands to reason that Pure specs should be no different.

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You're saying that a class should be defined by it's weakness? That sounds very sucky.

Tricky when you're defining a weakness as being not as good as someone else's strength.

[Grizelda]

I think the mantra is "Close enough to compete, different enough to be able to shine."

That sounds reasonable. Thank you for that link. That looks like a great topic.

I remember the topic of Pure Vs. Hybrid came up with Xelnath back in the day and we got conflicting feedback. Really I still don't know what the official policy is.

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Tricky when you're defining a weakness as being not as good as someone else's strength.

I just think that it's a problem if the answer to a problem is change your spec to be competent. Change spec to shine? Fine. I realize some have different degrees of min/max tolerance, but it doesn't seem to be a good idea to nerf X to make Y seem better. Overall balance? Yeah fine. I get that.

[Fullmetal89]

Why would they have to nerf us just because we are doing well. What they need to do is figure out how to place everyone on the same level we are currently at. This is the problem with balancing, Blizz always seems to get frustrated with balancing classes so they end up nerfing who ever is on top leading to the FotM model. I rerolled from hunter to Warlock this expansion, something I hadn't done since BC. I don't plan on rerolling to some other new class because they decided to nerf the hell out of Warlocks. I'm hoping it wont lead to that but if it does, I'll probably quit if it's as unberable as Hunter's were during MoP launch.

[xskarma]

Tricky when you're defining a weakness as being not as good as someone else's strength.

Well said. I think this is the main issue with ANY (percieved) balance problem in WoW.

[Grizelda]

In this instance, you should probably replace the word weakness with inadequate.

Or inadequacy. I just had to go look up how to spell it.


End point being, It's probably better that a spec is defined by its approach to a job rather then it's inadequacy in preforming a job.

If the design were otherwise, we would have to balance abilities...and disabilities?

[Jessicka]

I just think that it's a problem if the answer to a problem is change your spec to be competent. Change spec to shine? Fine. I realize some have different degrees of min/max tolerance, but it doesn't seem to be a good idea to nerf X to make Y seem better. Overall balance? Yeah fine. I get that.

My tolerances are generally pretty high, I'd much rather find a way than switch at the first sign of trouble, but I have felt forced to switch out to Destruction at low gear levels for earlier progression, and still do on Galakras. I was within a few pulls of switching for Thok too because the Bats came in at ~3m 30s which is the absolute worst time for a Demo lock - no cooldowns, want to be pooling Fury, not blowing it all away on Void Ray/Immolation - and we were struggling with them. So by no means do I think the current situation is perfect.

[Grizelda]

If the design were that a lock is a lock is a lock, and should be prepared to switch to any spec or play style in order to do the job at hand, then fine. I'm cool with that.

I get the impression that Blizz doesn't want that, but quite the opposite. Fine I'm cool with that.


Just be consistent.