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July 10, 2009, 11:35 AM

#71 (permalink)

XavronMG

Character Info
Xavron
80 Gnome Warlock
Moon Guard US RP PvE
Guild: Veritas
Profile: Blizzard Armory
Talent Spec: 53/1/17

Re: Class Q&A Warlock

So many misconceptions by GC as to the real state of things on the ground.

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Originally Posted by Fallenman

A.The warlock is a caster -- a ranged damage dealer. They can fill only one role, which makes them a “pure” class as opposed to a hybrid. Warlocks have a reputation for trafficking with darkness, and their spells and abilities reflect this -- demons, curses, drains, fears. All warlocks rely on damage-over-time spells and demonic pets to some extent. The Affliction tree focuses on damage-over-time spells, curses, and shadow magic in general. The Demonology tree emphasizes the damage and abilities done by demons. The Destruction tree gives up a little of both to become a little bit more like a mage with direct damage and fire magic. Overall, the vision is for warlocks to feel less fragile than mages. They have historically had higher health pools and easier to sustain mana, but fewer emergency escapes. Keeping the mage and warlock feeling distinct is a big challenge. They fill a similar role and share similar gear so sometimes even the profiles of their character art look similar.

We no longer have higher health pools then mages. Full stop. If they want us to have higher health pools, then they need to fix our underlying mechanics, or buff our Fel/Demon armor.

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Going forward, we want to try and make the warlock experience more different from the mage. Our new plans for Soul Shards will help here. We want to make them a core mechanic instead of a minor feature that can be neglected at best and feels tedious at worst.

I find it bizzare that GC feels that soul shards are a minor feature of the class. To most of us, they are one of the core things about warlocks. The whole resource management mini-game around soul shards works just fine for affliction and demonology, it's destruction that is horribly broken due to their key rotation spells that eat shards like candy.

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We’re happy with the relative damage done by Affliction and Destruction. Depending on which Lich King patch you look at one or the other are slightly on top, but they’re close.

Affliction DPS is failing to scale in Tier 8.0 gear. I've been out-DPS'd by a 0/41/30 build on boss fights in Naxx-25, where the other warlock was wearing mostly Tier 7.0 gear. On a good fight in Ulduar-10, I can do about 3800, while rogues and kitty druids are doing 5-7k.

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Except for a brief moment early in Lich King, warlocks have been under-represented in PvP and we want to see more of them. We don’t want to get there through fear bombs, though. In fact, we think the damage locks can do is in a pretty good place. The problem is survivability, especially when stunned. Now some of the 3.2 changes are going to chill out damage across the board and we are increasing the survivability of pets in PvP. Both of those changes should help warlocks, who historically have been a little better in endurance fights than quick scrums. If those changes aren’t enough, we’re prepared to make additional ones.

Warlock damage is in a horrible place in PvP (for affliction). Our damage requires us to DoT up the target. Spells like a paladin shield or mage's ice block should not wipe our DoTs off of the target or prevent us from applying new ones. Fear has been over-nerfed and should not share a DR with our sucubus' seduction.

Our teleport feature is still a joke with too limited of a range (it should be more like 80 yards), a big green glowy "kill me here" circle, and takes too long to lay down. To balance out the additional range, give our party members the ability to see stealthed players if we stand within 20 yards of the portal. (Our see stealth ability belongs on a feature like that, not tied to an individual pet.)

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Lich King made the warlock pets more interesting but we think there is still a lot of opportunity here. Some of the pets have abilities that just don’t get much use (Imp Fire Shield anyone?)

Probably because (a) the imp's fire shield is a joke amount of damage and (b) it can only be cast on members of your party (it's not available for raid-wide application). So unless you can sweet talk your way into the tank group, the only thing the imp brings to the party is the health buff (made redundant by warriors).

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while other pets could benefit from a couple more abilities. The voidwalker for example does all of his damage through just a simple autoattack. While we are slightly positioning the imp as a Destruction pet and the felhound as an Affliction pet, we think we can make the choice of what demon to use at a particular time more interesting. The succubus has too narrow a niche, and the voidwalker is still used mostly as a level-up pet.

If affliction is going to be shackled to the Fel Hound, then it needs a lot more damage output and health. And since patch 3.0, the succy has been a favorite DPS pet for affliction warlocks. Definitely not a "niche" pet.

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A.Demons are a big one. Warlocks are a pet class, but they gain more of their own power from their pets and can make their pets do more than say a hunter or death knight. The way they do damage is different from a mage because a lot of their damage, even for Destruction, comes from damage-over-time spells instead. Warlocks bring some utility that doesn’t strictly increase raid damage, so we feel like it’s fine to keep those abilities unique to the lock -- things like summoning and health stones.

Soul stones with a long 30 minute cooldown and health stones aren't really all that much raid utility any more. Not with the faster pace of Wrath of the Lich King raiding. The cooldown on soul stones is too long (it should last for 20 min with a 15 min cooldown).

And we still don't bring enough utility to the raid, if that's supposed to be our niche. Why can't we dispel curse or magic as a core mechanic? The only time I get asked for See Invisible is in Naxx's outer ring where the tanks want to be able to see patrolling ghosts before they show up.

And for anyone other then a Demon warlock, it takes way too long to change demons (plus costs a soul shard).

I won't even get into the issue that using our Infernal is counter-productive compared to a druid's treants, a mage's water elemental, or a shaman's fire elemental.

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A.Yes. As we have hinted on occasion, we have a revamp of the entire system in the works. This is a big change, beyond the scope of the 3.2 patch, but we are confident -- CONFIDENT -- that the new system will be something warlocks finally enjoy. (I’m sure I will never, ever regret saying that.) We hope to be able to talk more about it at BlizzCon, but the basic idea is that shards provide a combat boost when needed without becoming a resource that needs to be farmed. Currently too many of the shard abilities are maintenance-like things such as demons and stones. Blowing a shard should be a big deal -- an exciting moment. We want to make shards fun and remove the hassle, but we want to make them a core part of the warlock experience and not a marginalized feature.

Make them stack, don't put a limit on quantity held, and stop making destruction specs spend them like water in order to do damage.

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A.We are going to lower the cooldown of Soulshatter to three minutes. We don’t think the shard cost is a big expense in PvE situations. Threat-dump abilities are tricky to balance. We don’t want these spells to feel rotational -- you aren’t supposed to do say Curse of Agony, Immolate, Soulshatter, Curse of Agony, Immolate, Soulshatter. They are there for emergencies.

Not enough. Lower the cooldown to 60 sec. Hunters get a free aggro wipe every 30 sec. Why do we only get a 50% aggro wipe every 3 minutes that uses a reagent?

Hunters don't use feign death as part of their rotation, why would warlocks use soul shatter as part of their rotation. Saying that you won't make the cooldown lower because warlocks would make it part of their rotation is a poor argument.

Quite frankly, soul shatter should do more then just aggro dump. If it's going to be left on a multi-minute cooldown, then it needs to have application in PvP as well. Preferably by removing all harmful effects (stuns, DoTs, debuffs), which would bring us up to parity with rogues, mages, and paladins.

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A.As you probably know by now, we are dramatically lowering the cooldown on Fel Domination.

Which is great for demon warlocks, but does nothing for aff/destro. Almost sounds like "if you want to PvP, go demon".

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A.Yes, and Haunt is probably the right place to do it. Haunt is one of the few Affliction spells that can’t reach the 200% crit level, so we are going to make that change through Pandemic.

Eh... maybe...

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A.We’d agree that the “interesting tradeoff” isn’t that interesting, and in fact it’s hard to find niches for so many different AE spells. Long-term this might be the kind of spell that gets cut.

Frankly, Hellfire needs to be boosted in damage (comparable to SoC), with a lower threat coefficient. Right now, it's not worth running up and using Hellfire (unless you're in Demon form?). Then it would have an interesting tradeoff of damage for life.

...

Basically, I'm not pleased with the state of Affliction Warlocks in 3.1. Our damage has fallen behind the other classes, which is a clear sign that we aren't scaling correctly.

(And no, I won't switch to destro because I really really like the affliction playstyle.)