Warlock a class overhaul

[ishy]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...geNo=1&sid=1#6

Yay?

[Reveil]

nice CAPS skillz nothing new tho

[Screecher]

There just prob getting frustrated because they dont know the solution i dont even know what would help us any more lol

[zuxia]

As was stated in the full length of thread..blizz knew about the problems with locks on PTR, which has been running WOLTK for at least 6 months now, but have not come up with a fix, even though the warlock community as a whole has given many good implentable ideas, hence the community is justifable in being, "impatient". Many of the ideas that community has given would be easy implementation (from a programmer's point of view). Many of the ideas have or could be made balance easily.
I do believe they are working on it however it is not a high priority since warlocks did so well pre-wotlk...i.e. giving some other classes a chance to pawn us which can/does ease tensions since we previously faired well for the most part.

[Screecher]

I think we are a high priority only because they are seeing such a great decline in locks rerolling or just quiting, but idc i love my locky (: might suck in arena but as long as they dont nerf us no more pve wise I'm topping those charts

[direlock]

Blizz may have backed itself totally into a corner. With the huge burst dps available to melee, I'm not sure how they can fix lock pvp without doing something rediculous. Since I dont see them giving us huge melee mitigation, theres only 2 other solutions, huge up front burst dps from lock(dont see that), or mad running away abilities. Then again you never know what blizz is going to do, I hear they are going to buff rogue dps, since its low pve....

[Ofmanv]

I'm tired of GC saying "we're working on it" like that's an acceptable answer. Blizzard should have had PvP in at least a half way decent state before season 5 started.

Now season 5 is started and warlocks are falling way behind in the gearing race. If you can't make pvp viable for everyone then take the rating requirements off the pvp gear and make it honor bought until it is fixed.

[ishy]

Blizz may have backed itself totally into a corner. With the huge burst dps available to melee, I'm not sure how they can fix lock pvp without doing something rediculous. Since I dont see them giving us huge melee mitigation, theres only 2 other solutions, huge up front burst dps from lock(dont see that), or mad running away abilities. Then again you never know what blizz is going to do, I hear they are going to buff rogue dps, since its low pve....

Keep in mind, everybody dies fast in pvp not just locks.

What I'd love to see is a) pets gaining some more survivability.
b) Everyone gets an extra 10k/15k hp in pvp gear.

That should make pvp less bursty. Problem with just reducing the dmg will be that healing will be op.

[Bakis]

I'm pretty sure you've never said outright that you guys are doing a comprehensive review of every aspect of the Warlock class. That's a bit different from "We have changes in store...shards shards shards".

Either way, I vote you stop posting on the forums now and go devote all of your time to implementing those changes.

Hahaha. Man, goto love that nice but bitter and accurate slap towards BLZ developers.
Thank God BLZ actually made its first comment on how they view the severity of the warlock situation in PvP is and it's promising. Reading between the lines it's pretty clear that:

They think burst WOTLK is fine or rather that it's easier to overhaul warlocks than taking a step back with mostly all other classes just to swap 1 class being upset to 5 classes.
The downside of this tactic tho is that then the evergoing problem of not making PvE warlocks too op with changes will make the changes take forever.

My 10 cents are that they will throw a minor bone here and there (did I hear shards, summoning?) and the actually major changes, cos it will be needed to move alot of talents and introducing new ones, will probably drag out till early march.

+ BLZ aknowledge severe issues about warlocks as a class and changes are comming
- BLZ painted themselves into a corner due to Burst-WoTLK where their options are limited and the real balance will be months from now

[Deox]

I honestly hope this doesn't screw over how I play/have geared Destro to make it work real good.

[Bakis]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...geNo=1&sid=1#1

YES!! shadow embrace being fixed it seem.

PvE warlocks are FINE, some minor issues.

*shadow embrace bug
*affliction threat
*demonology being scheisse

Yes, it's harder to play lock and make good damage, much harder than most classes and affliction is harder than any other class/specc. But saying warlock is broken in PvE is simply not true. It's harder so less % of all locks can handle it and hence they claim it's too hard. In all fairness it need some fixes regarding that too then. I don't have any problems with making topdamage just like in TBC but now without the hated noskill SBspam. The poster above me clearly handle destrospecc but we goto keep in mind all casualplayers, kids etc that play warlocks and find affliction or destro really hard and are forced to boring Felguard + Incinspam.

BLZ need to have all kinds of skillevel represented when designing a class and when they say they want to make affliction more easy its not cos it's unplayable but simply alot more dependant on playerskill than it should be. Hello nobrainer mages and hunters? ;D

I'm sure however this is how they look upon it as well, so im not afraid a bit that they will screw up the nice challange of a dotcycle with all dots included. Nor that they will make destro too easy again. Hopefully they will play around some with numbers so our total damage is less dependant on a single spell being cast at some exact time like it is now.

[Ofmanv]

Warlocks are fine in PvE atm... Just like affliction was fine in kara and everyone said it was perfectly fine then. Then new tiers came out with more crit and haste. By sunwell how many affliction locks did you see though?

Ofcourse affliction seems fine for now. This is the low end of the scaling spectrum just like kara was. More content will come out with better gear and affliction will get left in the dust just like last expansion.

[Bakis]

Warlocks are fine in PvE atm... Just like affliction was fine in kara and everyone said it was perfectly fine then. Then new tiers came out with more crit and haste. By sunwell how many affliction locks did you see though?

Ofcourse affliction seems fine for now. This is the low end of the scaling spectrum just like kara was. More content will come out with better gear and affliction will get left in the dust just like last expansion.

Are you for real? Affliction is fine now cos SB is the single biggest damagepost in affliction, just like in TBC but now we can afford ruin. We also got better coifficents (im not english so i bet i misspelled that word) and tons of new talents that improve damage. Only thing that is "broken" is that the skillevel needed to perform well is pretty high. Especially compared with other dpsclasses.

Affliction can't even be compared in WoTLK and my mediocregeared lock is he still beat the hell out of hunters and mages except when they hit some lucky critstreak.

[Ofmanv]

Are you for real? Affliction is fine now cos SB is the single biggest damagepost in affliction, just like in TBC but now we can afford ruin. We also got better coifficents (im not english so i bet i misspelled that word) and tons of new talents that improve damage. Only thing that is "broken" is that the skillevel needed to perform well is pretty high. Especially compared with other dpsclasses.

Affliction can't even be compared in WoTLK and my mediocregeared lock is he still beat the hell out of hunters and mages except when they hit some lucky critstreak.

Affliction's dps is better, yes. Because we're back at square one of the scaling spectrum as I said. As gear progresses scaling will haunt affliction.

Shadowbolts do the most damage because it's the most frequently cast spell. Dot's all need be applied once. If shadowbolts were the highest dps there wouldn't be any point in putting up the dots, would there?

Dots still don't scale with crit. Pandemic is a talent, affliction has to spend talents just to catch up to what other classes have baseline. It also doesn't account for CoA, Immolation and Siphon Life. Haste still can't account for affliction having a larger portion of dps coming from a small time frame of dot rotation supplemented with relatively lower dps shadowbolt downtime. Having more time to throw in shadowbolts just isn't as beneficial as it is for homogoneous dps'ers like a frostfire mage.

[lrs078]

This is some of the first good news in some time. However, as most of us in relationships can attest, communication is key. Blizz does know how to design a class. They did an awesome job w' the DK. However, they have bandaid fixed, over nerfed, and otherwise set skills and talents in opposition to themselves for so long its just a mess and does require some big changes or at least outside the box attitude to fix. Time to stop thinking "if we buffed xyz skill 2.5% would that solve this?" and more to what do they need to survive? What isn't used? Change what isn't used to something that addresses the problem. Honestly...to balance out melee we'll need plate'ish mitigation, pets that live, alot of instant casts, retalitory talents, true mobility, etc. Honestly I see them doing some changes that also align w' their other stated goals of simplifying affliction's casting or PVE dmg balance. PVE stuff is pretty minor and in the fine tuning stages yet PVP is going to need an overhaul. I"ll be shocked if they don't have to retune PVE a bit once PVP is fixed. That is likely what is taking the time. However....time is something the community doesn't have.

WOTLK is the first true pvp gearing reset. By starting locks so far back we (and they) are left in a spot when we are vastly undergeared. Either we a) get buffs to catch up and then OP when we are as geared, b) get similar buffs to compete but are undergeared till the next xpac, c) delete all PVP gear and start over thus enraging everyone, d) truly "welfare epic" items. A and B I'd say are possible and likely while C and D are pretty far fetched. Unless you give every caster an easy way to get the previous season's gear at the end of the season so the next season isn't just a gearcheck. Hell, make pvp gear that is "only active in BG's and Arena" like a consumable/buff item. We can pvp, pve isn't impacted, life goes on....

One thing missing from ALL of this is a genuine apology from the dev team. They told us to have faith, be patient, etc and they let us down. First it was disdain/indifference but now they are so wrong there that we are past any denial there is still no apology just a "we are working on it shut up till its fixed". For someone who already feels jilted that just makes it worse. Have they forgotten the effect of the "you were right, we were wrong, we will do our best to not do it again, we apologize" buff? I think they'd be suprised how many people would get off their case with that and a little consistent feedback.

If you are in the hospital waiting on a loved one in surgery you don't want to hear the nurse say "yeah, we are still busy hackin on him/her just shut up and we'll let you know when they are done". Even if the doc or nurse may feel that way a good hospital will not treat a patient's family that way. It doesn't cost them anything to handle it that way either except happy customers in the meantime. For now let's have some of the bad coffee and vending machine snacks in the form of a felhunter glyph and summoning shard tweak.

[Ida]

Mobility.

End.

Edit: Pet survivability

End.

[ishy]

Mobility.

End.

Edit: Pet survivability

End.

This and some dispell protection for those that don't have unstable affliction .