Warlock PvP input

[Xeranath]

The Demon Armor buff means shit because it is now a mandatory PvP talent. How does it feel that you have to give up something just to be on par with other classes? This is similar with Spriest's Edge of Insanity, and look at the state of their mechanics flow.

When will they understand that the class itself BASELINE needs help. Without this Demon Armor buff, we are still back to what we are right now. This is a CORE CLASS DESIGN issue, not a freaking use-this-talent solution.

Why are they so freaking adamant in not giving this baseline? They buffed us but also nerfed as at the same time. Destro alone has mandatory honor talents. This doesn't affect Affliction that much because the spec already has terrible honor talents in the first place (and I don't know which is sadder).

Waiting months for this lazy shit? Yeah, let's put a TAX right now for warlocks that decide to PvP. This is getting ridiculous.

- Casting Circle should have been that talent that got pruned. Its "buff" is pretty much what Unending Resolve back in Legion without the nerf to damage reduction. It's redundant at this point. Or they can just make it a talent that reduces Unending Resolve's CD to 1min, which is what this Casting Circle is now. I mean, God forbid a warlock can cast?!?! That should make this talent worthy of being chosen and actually promotes some variety in gameplay.
- Demon Armor needs to be baseline alongside Demonic Circle and then replace it with Howl of Terror in the tier to actually make it you know, a CC tier?!
- Then make that useless Darkfury talent make Shadowfury instant.

Gasp! An actually good CC tier with good choices?! Blizzard won't allow it!

Shut up. You are making too much sense. Which as you know, is anathema to Blizz's thought processes.

[Deleted]

Another round of pvp with warlock, another round of pure frustration. I don't see the niche of warlocks in pvp right now, every stupid thing requires a cast time that seems eternal when faced with melee classes, even stuns are not instant, mobility is worse than ever with portal non baseline, damage is underwhelming (yes even chaos bolt), we die just as fast as a mage it seems but with no get out of jail card.

I don't get whats the point of pvp with this class currently. Even shadow priest is less terrible experience than warlock

[venomancer]

Hey, in 3 months we'll be giving you guys a 10 year old spell back, but as a PvP talent kay? Be happy!

[Deleted]

Could bake this into the baseline class like it used to be tonight and the class would still likely struggle. This better not seriously be getting held off on until the next major patch if THIS is their solution to the dumpster warlocks are in for pvp.

5% damage buffs being thrown out to enhance like candy makes me not believe for a second that they're being "cautious" with these changes.

[Schirmy]

On PTR it doesn't even seem to be working correctly. If my math is correct, it'd be another ~13-14% damage reduction. I'd wager it'll still be a melee-dominated game.

[evertonbelmontt]

Lol.

Guess I'm pretty desperate if everyone else is outraged by this and I'm willing to take it eahUHeuaHEU

[Warning]

See quite a lot of people jumping to conclusions about these two upgrades (Demon Armor & Casting Circle).

First off lets address the complaint that mana classes can bypass armor. Imo one of our worst matchups is turbo cleave (warrior/enhance), in which the warrior deals roughly 80% direct physical damage and 20% bleed damage. The enhance deals roughly 50% physical damage with the rest being nature/fire damage. That means against Turbo our roughly 15% extra DR from armor means 12% less damage from the warrior and roughly 7.5% less damage from the enhance. A significant improvement in book and that's not even counting the added damage reduction and survivability we gain from 15% max health via better demonskin, healthstone and coil healing.

Then lets look at the RMD/P matchup. The armor in that case would only benefit us against the rogue of course, and assa rogues actually do penetrate armor to a significant degree, 70% to be exact, with ~30% direct physical damage that we benefit against from armor. That still means our armor buff reduces rogue damage by 4.5%. In this case however I think the Max HP is actually pretty significant. Rogue mage deals damage in short bursts rather than sustained and having to go through an extra 15% health to burst us down while the rogue also deals ~4.5% less damage will probably make a significant difference.

The other complaint is that this is gonna be mandatory but I actually am not sure it will be vs all comps. For example vs dual casters I probably wouldn't run Demon Armor.

I'm not trying to say that I think this fixes everything, I would still like to see a slight reduction in Shadowfury cast time for destro for example and honestly feel some one of our active Tier 75 talents should be baseline just for gameplays sake, but I think dismissing it offhand is a mistake as well.

[Deleted]

Instant and totally useless. I mean, those 900 damage Corruption ticks and 1100 damage Agony ticks are going to wrek face, right?

You cant put out any meaningful damage without hard-casting several UAs and a Haunt into a target.

Yeah lol its amazing how useless and fillerish all dots feel outside of stacking UA.

The same thing goes with destro, everything hits like shit outside of chasbolt and even chaosbolt deals significant damage every 3 minutes. Damage distribution for most casters this expansion is really really awful imo, too much useless filler spells and too much packed into single cooldowns or azerite traits.

- - - Updated - - -

See quite a lot of people jumping to conclusions about these two upgrades (Demon Armor & Casting Circle).

First off lets address the complaint that mana classes can bypass armor. Imo one of our worst matchups is turbo cleave (warrior/enhance), in which the warrior deals roughly 80% direct physical damage and 20% bleed damage. The enhance deals roughly 50% physical damage with the rest being nature/fire damage. That means against Turbo our roughly 15% extra DR from armor means 13.5% less damage from the warrior and roughly 7.5% less damage from the enhance. A significant improvement in book and that's not even counting the added damage reduction and survivability we gain from 15% max health via better demonskin, healthstone and coil healing.

Then lets look at the RMD/P matchup. The armor in that case would only benefit us against the rogue of course, and assa rogues actually do penetrate armor to a significant degree, 70% to be exact, with ~30% direct physical damage that we benefit against from armor. That still means our armor buff reduces rogue damage by 4.5%. In this case however I think the Max HP is actually pretty significant. Rogue mage deals damage in short bursts rather than sustained and having to go through an extra 15% health to burst us down while the rogue also deals ~4.5% less damage will probably make a significant difference.

The other complaint is that this is gonna be mandatory but I actually am not sure it will be vs all comps. For example vs dual casters I probably wouldn't run Demon Armor.

I'm not trying to say that I think this fixes everything, I would still like to see a slight reduction in Shadowfury cast time for destro for example and honestly feel some one of our active Tier 75 talents should be baseline just for gameplays sake, but I think dismissing it offhand is a mistake as well.

Its something that should be baseline because its the "class fantasy" of warlock, the tankiness justifying our total lack of mobility. But its also not enough because warlock surviving 5 extra seconds won't solve anything wrong with the class currently vs melee classes. They need instant cast stuns, howl of terror and decent self healing. Not overpowered self healing like it happened before but a nice balance wouldn't be too much to ask. Or even use soul shards to heal like in MoP

The main issue and its been talked about since WoD is the whole pruning of mobility targeting way more casters than melee. They want casters to feel vanilla but melees in general have kept their modern style of gameplay which is millions of times more mobile and defensive than vanilla/BC. Also every spec in the game gets an interrupt or 2 on top of stuns, on top of basic movement itself hampering cast times while weapon disarms are much rarer and happen to be monopolized by a few melee specs (rofl) except moonkin. I don't even get the point of being ranged caster these days if melee get to do superior burst on demand damage, better defensives and mobility that negates most advantages ranged have (which would be 40vs40 fights). At least casting should be rewarded with superior damage in pvp to justify this whole hassle. But casts aren't worth much anymore, they lack impact. Spamming a filler with melee vs spamming a filler as caster is around the same damage but one is instant and way easier to pull off with no obstacles outside of stuns. Same for actual big hitting abilities. Big big disparity of power

[Schirmy]

I miss how melee would just stand still in Wrath. You could kite a melee into oblivion; they had to think about when to use their gap-closers effectively. Should I use Shadowstep to get back on the caster for up-time? Or save it to swap a healer? The decision making process has been watered down a lot these last several expansions. Even in MoP there was still a decent skill-gap and ceiling to melee. Now I can't tell the difference between a 1800 and 2800 rogue/Warr/DK.
@lateralsx5 you are spot on.

[Deleted]

I miss how melee would just stand still in Wrath. You could kite a melee into oblivion; they had to think about when to use their gap-closers effectively. Should I use Shadowstep to get back on the caster for up-time? Or save it to swap a healer? The decision making process has been watered down a lot these last several expansions. Even in MoP there was still a decent skill-gap and ceiling to melee. Now I can't tell the difference between a 1800 and 2800 rogue/Warr/DK.
@lateralsx5 you are spot on.

Yes. They've given all melee characters way too many forgiving mechanics and have once again displayed that blizzard balances the game for PvE and tries to squeeze in hotfixes that kinda makes PvP work.

[Deleted]

Its impossible to even kite a DK, the less mobile melee spec with ret paladins. Thats how non existent warlock kitting is with no real slow, no real root. Succubus is really not the powerful CC pet is used to be now that seduce ability doesn't really change much of the outcome given how weak damage is for most spells outside of cooldowns.

So basically damage reduction is fine and all but self healing needs to be boosted and then again it will become retarded design of warlocks facetanking everything, I'm not a fan of that design either. I liked destro in MoP with ember shard heals, sure the tankiness was a bit too much but the healing was nice and clearly more pvp-efficient than a weak drain super easy to interrupt

[Warning]

Don't really agree with the above, Destro damage in arena is extremely scary. We are the most dangerous class if left alone to cast and even outside cooldowns we can take 40-45% of someone's hp in a single cbolt + 2 conflags with cremation up. I think we need two things to be competitive: a shorter shadowfury cast time to more reliably set up kills and some tankyness especially vs melee. I'd like to get baseline coil, though the CD would need to be higher than 45 seconds if we also got the other stuff. Demon Armor at 15% hp and 125% armor will probably take care of the survivability issues. I don't see how you can say we don't have a root when conflag root is extremely powerful, easily capable of getting us fears on healers or on a melee that is on us.

The spec needs help but it has to be measured, we aren't weak against double casters for example so against those comps we shouldn't get much stronger.

[Orwell7]

The spec needs help but it has to be measured, we aren't weak against double casters for example so against those comps we shouldn't get much stronger.

Yeah, everything is fine, all the naysayers are just noobs who cannot be bothered to l2p.

You know what's dangerous?
Go on an Arena and count how many times you've been wiped out of existence in 10 seconds. THAT is dangerous, not Destro...

[Schirmy]

Also Fear being 6 seconds is so fucking lame.

[Deferionus]

Soul link has been the defacto lock damage reduction ability since the creation of the game tbh, pets getting cleaved is part of the toolkit, proper pet micro management adding a layer of additional depth, not that it's hard to resummon a pet these days ( long before your pet dies).

Something like demon armor can work of course but would require blizz creating an entirely new talent/pvp talent and adding it to our class which postpones it a while longer than it would if they decide to add soul link for all classes or do a numbers tuning on soul leech.

This. When I PvP'd competitively in WOTLK and Cataclysm I had a macro for pet move here and pet attack so I could put the pet on the healer or have it run off. If the melee switched I would health funnel it, move it away so the melee had to chase it, and start summoning a new one behind a pillar. It essentially made it into a waste of time for the melee to kill the pet. It also made warlock vs warlock games fun because you could banish the other warlock's pet and do a hard switch + cc on the healer to try for a kill.

There were a ton of strategical applications for the pets with soul link in those two expansions that has been lost in this watered down combat system we have today. That type of decision making was one of the differences between someone at 2400+ and someone stuck at 2k.

[Warning]

Yeah, everything is fine, all the naysayers are just noobs who cannot be bothered to l2p.

You know what's dangerous?
Go on an Arena and count how many times you've been wiped out of existence in 10 seconds. THAT is dangerous, not Destro...

I do play arena, its the main thing I play wow for. I know the specs limitations pretty well and if you read my post you'll see I mentioned those. I also know it's strengths though and a proper discussions requires honestly considering both.

[wholol]

Read somewhere that demon armor is 125% of armor gained from gear not total armor, so it'll be less than 10% physical reduction gain.

[Warning]

Read somewhere that demon armor is 125% of armor gained from gear not total armor, so it'll be less than 10% physical reduction gain.

Currently on the PTR it doesn't increase armor at all, but I think all our armor comes from gear. It'll be roughly 15% physical damage reduction.

[wholol]

Currently on the PTR it doesn't increase armor at all, but I think all our armor comes from gear. It'll be roughly 15% physical damage reduction.

I tested it on balance druid since their moonkin form grants 125% armor, it definitely does not increase the total value of armor by 125%, was actually around 70% of total, I'm guessing the same formula will apply to demon armor.

[Warning]

I tested it on balance druid since their moonkin form grants 125% armor, it definitely does not increase the total value of armor by 125%, was actually around 70% of total, I'm guessing the same formula will apply to demon armor.

Hmm that's interesting. I added up all my armor from gear and it matched the total armor on the char screen, is that different for moonkin? Or do they perhaps have another percentage based armor increase that Moonkin form stacks with additively?