Warlock Class Design

#0 - Dec. 22, 2008, 1:45 p.m.

(Note: this post is focused on the Warlock class design - other classes may have similar issues, but I'm not addressing them here.)

The warlock class design has become a sort of Gnomish engineering box of tricks and gimmicks. it's disjointed, cumbersome, illogical and unreliable. It feels awkward to play a warlock. The talents are self-contradicting - Demonic Sac in the Demonology tree, for the most glaring example, but I ask my fellow warlocks - if you have any sort of experience with something that is well-designed - where form and function work together in an elegant solution, that is both simple to understand and has depth for those that need it (which sounds like classic Blizzard game design to me) - and then compare this ideal to what the warlock class design has become? It should be obvious to any level of gamer that the warlock class design has resorted to a grab bag of half-thought out ideas and flawed attempts to steer the class in some ambiguous direction.

Which of course leads people to make unconstructive comments like "the devs don't play locks" or "Blizzard hates locks" or any similar cries of anguish. What most of these people are trying to say is that the warlock class designers haven't done their job. After all, it's a game designer's job to make a game interesting and fun. Countless threads full of ideas have been created, and I won't recount the specifics of these suggestions, but I will say this: Blizzard needs to make this class fun again, and that starts with good design. If a full rewrite of the class is going to be necessary to make this happen, do it now. You should have had this done before the expansion came out, and the clock is ticking.

Right now, the warlock class design has the feeling of something that was designed by lazy and complacent individuals who just didn't care enough to do a good job. You can certainly say otherwise, but words aren't very useful when what is needed is action. Honestly, I wonder if there is anyone at Blizzard that can handle the task - Blizzard's track record on the warlock class is full of contradiction and confusion and broken talents and spells.

I think we're all waiting for an answer.

Ghostcrawler

#44 - Dec. 22, 2008, 7 p.m.

I'm not sure anything new is being said in this thread that hasn't been said already.

I did post a list of what we wanted to do with warlocks in LK and now that we have done those changes, we have a new list of what we want to look at in warlocks next. A few players linked it. I could have found the quote myself but I figured the community would be able to do it faster, which they did.

I am sorry if my communication sometimes seems disjoined. Reading all of these threads takes a great deal of time that I try to squeeze in during my other responsibilities. To some extent you're going to get what you're going to get. That may not sit well, but the alternatives are to give up on posting altogether or at least post a lot less frequently. I don't see a way I will be able to spend more time here than I do already. (As most of you know, I'm not a CM. I also don't want to hire people to read the forums for me, because that defeats the purpose. But I do have a lot going on.)

I think there is some truth to the notion that after enough tweaks here and there that you need to step back and take a big look at the class as a whole. I think we've reached this point with warlocks. We are satisfied with the changes we wanted to make in BC, which included things like giving Affliction more competitive damage, giving Destruction more than one button to push, and getting Demonology to consider more different types of demons. When I say we want to make some changes to the class, I would not interpret this as burning warlocks to the ground and starting over. Overall it's still a really cool and distinctive play style.

I'll reach for an analogy here, which can be illustrative but will also break if streteched too far, as all analogies do. We've spent some time checking the tire pressure and vacuuming out the interior, but every few thousand miles you want to actually pop the hood, check all the belts and hoses, and possibly even rebuild the engine. That is not the same as driving her off a cliff and then hitting the dealers for a newer model.