Warlock PvE feedback - Blue Tracker

#0 - Jan. 2, 2009, 1:35 p.m.

TLDR: Warlocks are in decent shape in PvE and mostly fun to play (my post is more in the context of “fun” than numbers). I’d like to see dark pact, eradication, and possibly haunt tweaked for affliction. Affliction rotation could also be simplified easily through small glyph changes. I’d like to see some changes in the deeper talent areas of demo to make the builds a bit more dynamic and fun, or at least to scale a bit better. Destro shouldn’t have to pay such a heavy price for its mana return talent. I feel my damage is competitive with other ranged pures. Id like to be convinced that we’ll scale as well as mages, and sometimes its hard to look at hunters and not be jealous of some of their choices/abilities/versatility relative to their pets.

Long Version:
I’d like to give a little feedback on the way I see the warlock class in PvE and then a little bit comparing to other ranged “pures”. I don’t post on these boards much, as I prefer EJ forums, both for the quality of thought/posts, as well as the moderation. I do focus a lot on theorycraft and numbers at times, but this post is more about the “fun factor” with warlock raiding. I’m posting this mostly because all of the discussion lately seems to be around warlock pvp (and some QQ no doubt). I’d like to give my feedback strictly on PvE and without QQ as a reasonably experienced raider. Hopefully it is useful to the designers and/or other members of the community.

Background on me:
I played all three warlock trees in TBC raiding – affliction in Kara, Demo in T5 and into T6, and of course 0/21/40 destro after that. The most fun I ever had raiding in TBC was learning gruul and VR around patch 2.1 (when we still had to position pets) with no 2pc T5 bonus as 7/43/11. Realizing that playing badly meant 10th-ish dps and that when I learned to manage the pet and play the build well I dominated (not only finishing #1, but often 20-30% ahead of #2) was absolutely exhilarating to me.
I never enjoyed 0/21/40. It felt stupid and impossible to suck. Seeing the first 10k crit was fun, but I was thrilled when the spec was nerfed in favor of more complex options.

In WoTLK I have played affliction, meta/ruin, FG/Emberstorm, and MD/SnF builds. I have found FG/emberstorm the most fun for me, even though my dps was a bit higher as affliction

Overall, I think the warlock is pretty well off in PvE; the devs have done a good job providing viable and fun alternatives for dps. DPS varies a bit, but all trees are viable in current content (by this I mean your rDps is not gimped to the extent that you need to “spec X for this fight or sit out”). Well played affliction will surpass any other build, but this is ok in my mind. Affliction max dps does not come easily.
I do want to stress that while I will make suggestions/observations in the paragraphs that follow, I am reasonably happy with my warlock in PvE. Demonic teleport is fun to use even in raids. Shadowflame dmg is ok, but the narrow cone makes it a pain to use, even while solo grinding.

Affliction:
Haunt - I wish that travel time didn’t play a part in haunt’s cycle. I’m not asking for it to be instant cast, but having SE or in rare cases corruption fall off the target because of haunt’s travel time is annoying.

Dark pact - what is the point of dark pact anymore? Lifetap returns more mana, and the HP sacrifice argument doesn’t fly in raids given JoL, VE (sometimes), siphon life, and haunt. I think this talent needs some work/replacement. Perhaps amplify curse could apply to this talent? It would give added value to amplify (which some raiding warlocks take), and would make dark pact a more attractive talent (an interesting choice – GC has said he likes us to have these).

Eradication - It should be a nice way to squeeze in more shadowbolts, but too often the UAïƒ Immolate pattern I have set up leads to clipping when I:ve procced eradication. With my gear the 1.3 sec cast goes to 1.1. I have enough to watch out for with affliction, trying to get my mind around delaying refresh of UA for an extra .2 seconds when I proc eradication is a bit of a PITA. This frustrates me. Can it just be changed to make the next 5 shadowbolts within 20 secs have a faster cast time or something ? I think this would be more “fun”

Rotation - could glyph of agony extend the curse to 30 secs? This would do worlds for simplifying the rotation and provide an interesting glyph choice (CoA glyph for easier rotation with slightly less dps potential vs max dps glyphs corruption, SL, immolate, or imp and a harder rotation)

Demo/Desto Hybrids (0/41/30 and 0/30/40+1):
I like the rotation, but it would be nice if deep demo had a dmg spell or other cooldown to pop. I know why the change to DEmpowerment was made, but frankly I just macro it now to my incinerate button since it’s off GCD, so its not really all that interesting in a raid setting. Maybe as gear gets better we’ll find a Meta build is worth

#1 - Jan. 2, 2009, 8:37 p.m.

Thanks for the feedback, Turturin.

We're generally happy with locks for PvE too. I think the rotations are more interesting than they were in BC and it's nice to see Affliction up there with Destro. Demo is probably still too low, but see below.

As I've suggested before, there are a few things we are looking at on the PvE side of locks:

1) Get shards into a place that is more interesting and less of a hassle. We have two models we're considering. One is very cool, but a huge change to gameplay, which might mean it has to wait. The other is more of a quick fix that we'd do until we can implement the very cool model.

2) Simplify Affliction's rotation a little bit. This might involve making dots last a more uniform duration (so you didn't feel that external mods were mandatory) or just reducing the number of spells you're expected to cast.

3) Locks are still built a lot around damage over time, but a lot of fights just aren't lasting a long time. This might mean locks needs some more options for quick damage, or the problem might fix itself in Ulduar.

4) We're a lot happier with demons in LK, but we still have some work to do. The Voidwalker, Succubus and maybe the short-term demons aren't quite there yet. Improving demons should also help kick Demonology up a notch.

5) There are a couple of awkward places in the talent trees still.

Note that I am only talking PvE here. Some of these changes will help PvP too, but some of the lock problems in PvP will require different solutions too.