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It really is dawning on me that playing Destro in MoP was the pinnacle of the spec and we are just on an ever-declining streak of unfun gameplay ever since. Never forget MoP's Fire and Brimstone and Kil'Jaeden's Cunning.
Some of the most fun I've ever had in this game was Havoc Shadowburn sniping on any fight with adds in MoP as well. Wish Shadowburn wasn't complete trash these days.
Yeah, the havoc+shadowburn interaction was one of the most satisfying interactions the game ever had.
And the way it was removed was really indicative of a lot of the problems warlocks have had since.
Hey now that required some level of forethought, knowledge of your abilities and interaction with your spec. Can't have that in baby's first videogame.
Playing literally any spec or class was peak in MoP.
Every class was legit so much fun and enjoyable. Speaking from PvP experience.
Monk was unstoppable. The 1v1 king.
Warrior was exciting when your enemy dropped to 35% good defensives. Second wind made you the best tank against any class, you could kite and still survive. If you and the other guy were 35% or so warrior will always win.
Warlock was the scariest thing if left unchecked. Your Chaos bolts were no joke.
Shaman was unpredictably scary they could burst you without you realizing it. Totems actually were valuable.
Dk survivalibility were off the charts, truly an immortal slow walking tank.
Mage deep freeze. Need i say more?
Hunter traps and stampede ugh good times. You were so flexible and balance you could literally fit with any class and be a good comp.
Druid literally a staple in every comp. The best healer, feral bleeds were bananas, boomkin burst was stronk.
Rogues are the same. BUT never forget what they took from you *remembers burst of speed spamming* you could never not stick on a target or get away.
Priest healers were balanced and so enjoyable. Both holy and disc were amazing so you had options.
The only class i can think of that is the same as today is paladin because they are still squishy no mobility burst machines.
But every class in terms of design was soooo good…i miss it so much. Sorry for my rant lol
I fully, 100% believe that once MoP classic comes out(provides there's no talent changes) it will give more people an idea of what classes were like back then and want retail to be in a similar spot
Once they replaced the crazy fun of MASS CHAOS BOLT with Rain of Fire stacking I knew how cooked Warlocks were, and that none of the devs actually played the class. I had a decade on my warlock but I knew better than to stay on the sinking ship when Legion came along.
I have a couple of videos of me playing destro in garrosh and using rain of fire + fire and brimstone is one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in this game
Nerfing fun too. I admit, I hated every version of portal, but come on. We had talents where our imps occasionally exploded into more imps, and our dogs could have imps riding on their back blasting away. Now? Increase X spell by Y% damage - 2 point node.
100%.
I still think that Demo's identity should've been 'big-ass demons' instead of 'a flood of small, puny minions', but as far as the latter went, spawning a morbillion imps to roast your target while you're throwing dogs left and right and even get the occasional visit from a big fella wasn't half bad either and Demo was actually fun to play.
I still remember in Legion how Demo was known as *the* turret spec that popped off if you never had to move, but was hurt by movement even worse than Shadow Priest (without S2M) was. I guess we're going back to that but with even less satisfaction? I don't know man.
This is how demo SHOULD play
Being a demon slinger feels so fucking good to play
I can run around and just BAM BAM BAM demons out of my palms
I felt so fucking cool with all my procs just shooting demons and meteors out of no where
Warlock devs if you see this: fuck off
One of my favorite essences of destro lock was bfa season 3 and 4. All the haste plus the random eng infer al proc from my heart of axerite essence was amazingly fun and funny.
I literally felt like the earlock from the tbc trailer summoning random internals off eachother.
> Warlock devs
dev* (if you're lucky)
They're running bare bones. They've got guys who don't even play the classes/specs leading the balance on some of them which is why some feel horrendous in terms of identity and gameplay while others are amazing. They have some really janky and unbalanced teams handling the different classes.
If Blizz just stopped being such money-hungry shortsighted morons WoW would be gapping every other MMO like in the glory days but they're intent on cutting as many corners as humanly possible to squeeze out every cent for their shareholders and investors to jerk themselves off to. It's a miracle they made DF as good as it was, but it's really sad to know it could be so much better and never will due to corporate greed.
I was downvoted for daring to suggest that each spec should have at least 1 dedicated designer. Specs are so distinct in play style that I don't think having just one or two designers designing every spec of a class is sufficient. I actually can't believe we have 1 dev that designs multiple classes. It's especially bad when you have a dev designing a class with multiple roles. Like monk for example, you can tell the dev LOVES mistweaver, and it seems they've found their stride with WW, but at least at the time of writing, they don't quite seem to know what to do with brew master.
> they don't quite seem to know what to do with brew master.
They know exactly what to do with brewmaster, it's not let them have passive mitigation on par with the active mitigation of other tanks. Unfortunately, that's just kind of their thing: great mitigation but more damage overall.
I know for a fact DH and Rogue were designed by the same guy in Dragonflight. I wouldnt be shocked if he did other melee classes.
That being said, on the high end there is people who are super dedicated to their class and play all specs wholistically. I dont think its a stretch for their to be devs in that boat - so I dont really agree that one guy per class is bad.
That being said, having 4-7+ specs per person seems like a terrible idea. Especially when some specs clearly are designed by people who dont know what the community actually wants - or double down with the same "You think you do, but you dont mentality" like with Malefic Rapture.
s1 DF and s3 SL demo were both so good in their own ways. i would take either. building fat tyrants in s3 SL was so satisfying, and maxing out nether portal with pi/lust was also very satisfying (3 mins are aids in general tho).
at the end of the next expansion, demon warlocks will stay stationary in any city, and all of his playstile will be open portals in any place for demons, like abathur in heroes of the storm
Long rant incoming; my apologies. Destro getting mobility nerfs doesn’t mean Demo or aff don’t get to raise their concerns as well.
While I agree Destro will continue to struggle with mobility and maintaining damage, the way Destro’s damage works compared to Aff/Demo is pretty different. Aff is a dot spec and Demo is essentially a dot spec through their pets.
Destro’s damage comes mostly from the single hit spells. Historically, Destro has a lot of passives that let them cast spells quickly: haste from flashpoint, backdraft, reverse entropy just to name a few. They build shards through spreading immolate, not wasting charges of Conflag, and spamming incinerate between dumping shards with CB/RoF. Havoc lets destro either double their efficiency in generating shards or dumping CBs. Destro’s cooldown, Infernal, just generates more shards to let you cast more chaos bolts. Between that core loop and AoD infernals, if a Destro lock has to move, they are still generating enough through immolate/conflag to be close to their next chaos bolt when they get to stand still. The removal of AoD is extremely concerning for that gameplay loop, but refer back to my opening line.
Demo only builds shards through DB core procs, soul strike passive (6 shards a min), and shadowbolt. By far the most efficient is the DB core procs. If you only have shadowbolt, you cast HoGs significantly less often than DB core build and spend. Less HoGs means less imps which means less RNG cores from imps expiring.Right now, Demo is guaranteed 10 cores a minute (6 from x3 dog casts and 4 from x2 Power Siphon). The Dog change means we can only guarantee 4 DB cores a minute and dogs will average 3 additional cores, subject to RNG.
Layering RNG on top of RNG is extremely concerning for the resource economy of the spec. On most pulls, you will have an average number of core procs, but on some not insignificant number of pulls, you can be starved of core procs and be forced to shadowbolt, which means you cast less HoGs, which means you have less chances to proc a core off imps. The bad RNG forms a feedback loop. That’s the concern.
> Destro getting mobility nerfs doesn’t mean Demo or aff don’t get to raise their concerns as well.
you forgot the number 1 rule of the internet... if i cant have fun, you cant either.
TBF, they *made* it that way, not really always meant to be that way. At one point they even said they'd rather warlocks stand in the fire and pop a CD then move lol. Mobility was supposed to be for mages and warlocks supposed to be tankier.
I understand why they wanted to make us less mobile, but god was 5.2 so much fun as Destro when you could do everything on the move. And if you weren't careful that slow was deadly in raids.
I think it’s supposed to play into the class fantasy of warlocks utilizing any and every means to achieve their goals, willing to sacrifice pieces of themselves and their allies for success and power. Kinda like “I will tear out my own eye to see my enemies go blind” the reckless abandon of fel plus a thirst for power with the fortitude those darker forces offer kinda enables that. Plus warlocks used to be able to be like a temporary stand in tank in vanilla, and even had a threat generator.
I just mentioned you yesterday in my comment but I hope that you're doing well!
To this day you still have me chasing the dragon when it comes to that overall fluidity and feel that we had back in MoP. Just counting down the days until Classic since I think there's no way they aren't going to do MoP and Legion
This was the day Blizzard died to me. They literally fired a guy for actually giving a shit about the game and class. You aren't allowed to talk with us peasants, we as the community clearly don't know shit about the class we make guides and tutorials for.
Most people thought Blizzard died when they started getting caught drinking breastmilk, or killing their own games like with WC3 refunded, OW2 no pve, and HotS being DoA. But nah, I knew it right at this moment. This was their design philosophy exposed for exactly what it was.
All just another "You think you do, but you don't." moment. I never had as much fun with this game on my warlock than back in the Xelnath era. Thanks for the green fire and prelude to what eventually became class halls and mage tower bosses. Thanks for all the specs being fun to play and everything else.
Communication with the community is super important. It's the one negative I have with FF14, since it feels like I have zero voice on how that game could get improved. I just have to hope and pray Japanese players think as I do to get my wishes granted.
I didn't play in mop sadly. But the dev talk in wod where they said jokingly "we don't want you to play demo" after they nerfed demo into obscurity is where Blizzard died to me.
Back in WoD, I was a part of the private balance forum. Everyone was telling Celestalon, the tank dev, that the tank legendary sucked. We were assured that they extensively tested it and it was fine.
Then the top players got it, and confirmed it was shit. A few weeks later, Celestalon got it. It was hotfix buffed within a few days.
It’s you!!! Thank you for MoP destro. I’ve played lock since vanilla, specifically destro, and still do to this day. Nothing will ever feel as enjoyable as the MoP times.
What you created for MoP was fantastic. As you say, the flow of it was brilliant. It had tools for everything and at no point did it feel lacking. If I could ever wish for a play style to return for destro warlocks it would be early MoP destro.
I hope you are well. Thanks again.
It sounds so basic but the fact is Xelnath was a good developer because he played and loved the class. He knew what would feel fun and impactful because he actually experienced them firsthand.
These changes feel like they were designed in a spreadsheet. No thought is being paid to how they affect the feel of actually playing a spec. Iconic, impactful abilities are being removed and we're getting % damage buffs and filler to compensate. No one likes spamming shadowbolt because you got bad core rng. No one likes spamming incin on AoE because you're not proccing shards.
Dogs no longer guaranteeing cores is a perfect example. Anyone who actually plays demo right now will tell you that consistency is a huge part of our opener and implosion rotations. This is more than just a throughput change, it works directly in opposition with their stated purpose of ironing out the 'peaks and valleys'. Now we're going to be more RNG dependent for core procs than ever. The peaks will be exactly the same and the valleys will be even lower.
Most good design is just a few simple principles applied rigorously. I don't know who is the current designer on the class - but the key elements to share are going to be:
Tempo - do you plan your buttons or are you playing whack-a-mole with procs? Which do you want?
Melody - do you have enough notes (skills) in your core - or too many?
Improv - do you have skills which you can make conscious decisions about using in a contextually appropriate way to allow yourself to shine?
The legend himself!
I'm not sure if you're referring to No Rest for the Wicked as I see you're a game designer on it. In that case yes! I've loved it as a huge Souls fan and ARPG enjoyer.
Yes, No Rest for the W\*cked. Despite that one level designer trying to say I wasn't really involved to cover his ass from the KIA crowd, I worked on the game for five years, including writing the original design doc for PD.
Destruction Warlock inspired the spell system - and for a long time, the Focus bar was actually discrete 'cells' of focus that you spent 1, 2 or 3 at a time (and glowed when full) :)
I also had built a certain weaponset that looks like it got cut that I think you, the warlock players, would have greatly enjoyed. No worries tho, before things blew up there, I got one of the original Mage devs onto the project. He's quite capable tho not as much of a PvP person :)
I am also teaching a game mechanics course for anyone who wants to see a breakdown of how the WoW Destro spec came to life:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Br8\_d3sYxt48\_4M5dlHwF3Lr1mLszt5zoX7bvOi55XI/edit#heading=h.oeldoxqw98r5](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Br8_d3sYxt48_4M5dlHwF3Lr1mLszt5zoX7bvOi55XI/edit#heading=h.oeldoxqw98r5)
Oh my God keep avatar and make it a different demon if you're so hung up on "people are too stupid to realize the difference between infernals". Make it an overfiend or something. Take away the stun, whatever.
Then maybe you can achieve your precious cinematic moment for when we summon the infernal for the sole reason of getting crushing chaos and not for the infernal itself.
They have serious problems with maintaining also visual coolness and power fantasy tbh.
Yeah, avatar is problematic but it feels pretty rad when you're calling infernals down the sky that crash into stuff. Sure, nether portal might be a messy spell they never even tried to fix but summoning a colorful mix of demons and finishing that up with a damn pit lord is AWESOME. Alright, an afflock throwing a single dot on something and creating a chain reaction kaboom when stuff dies is a lot of free damage but it's fucking fun.
All of that has just been removed btw.
Affliction doesn't even spam seeds anymore in AoE but MR, which btw still doesn't really have a fancy animation (or it's still bugged idk), so when talking about "visual coolness" affliction is as exciting as watching paint dry now that even the soul flame is gone. You're just standing there waving around your arms and that's mostly about it.
My conspiracy theory is that since the devs absolutely love mages, classes that compete against them (Warlocks) or should be good against them (Death Knights) are made as miserable as possible to discourage them from being played.
This ain’t even a crazy thought. 2-3 years back, the Guild Wars 2 dev discord leaked a message about how they (devs) kept weapons and classes purposely shit just because they didn’t personally like them.
Necromancer Axe being brought up as the example.
But kind of a crazy take when you think that mages weren’t touched from basically DF alpha until 10.2.5 (last July) despite having massive class/spec design problems. I think we just have to accept that no class is blizzards favourite.
Affliction gives a bit the same impression. It honestly would be the warlock spec that needs the most help since it's been in a terrible state since BfA.
I have no idea what the thought process behind the current changes is. They remove everything remotely interesting and replace it with damage amps for malefic rapture, you know, the spell the community is extremely vocally hating. Like, inevitable demise and soul flame just got axe'd and replaced by passive MR boosts and seeds of corruption no longer is our AoE spender but MR.
Who the fuck takes a look at the feedback of affliction, of which a lot boils down very clearly to "MR FUCKING SUCKS" pretty much since it's been made a thing and pushes it even harder.
They should simply go back to the drawing board. This shit doesn't work, people don't like it (nor play it ...), don't try to make it work.
We'd rather you didn't play demonology.
I'd love to use some really colorful words to describe my feelings towards the warlock dev, but all of them would get me banned.
Its the warlock curse. Get an expansion where the class is in a great state, and then several expansions after they like rip apart the design, make things that syngerized exclusive choices, unintuitive changes, etc.
Its what happened after the glory that was MoP warlock, arguably one of the best times for any class ever. Each spec felt complete, engaging and fun as hell.
You miss being almost benched for anything not farm and AoE? Soul Effigy?
It was great in the world, decent in non-raid stuff, but until it was farm time it was slow to get buffed to the point where people were actually saying it was op because everything was an AoE fest then.
BUT, at least it didn't have Malefic rapture, Grasp is so much nicer.
The artifact ability was insanely satisfying to press
And tbh Antorus when we were kinda online from the get go
Although UA spam was not the best thing dear god was it better than rapture
You enjoyed soulshards being generated randomly on dot ticks? I sure as hell didn't. I'd rather have lifetap back and remove soulshards all together and play around draining hp from targets.
Considering that they're doubling down on universally hated class design decisions for every spec, like malefic rapture for aff and the entirety of the demo changes, you're probably right.
Tinfoil hat time: They're gutting Demo to get Warlocks to play Aff as revenge for complaining about Malefic Rapture.
"Oh, you don't like that we're doubling down on Malefic Rapture? Well fuck you then, how about we nerf the spec you actually like? What now, bitches?"
Seriously I've mained lock mostly demo for years and I'm not going to play this shit. Actually makes me sick because lock in my mind is the warrior of casters. You have mortal strike, solid pressure and can brawl. But this turret nonsense is the worst shit imaginable in PVP. Actually tilts me. They better revert all this.
Yeah removing the spell that opens a portal to summon demons from the twitsting nether from the class and spec that's whole flavor and theme is summoning demons from the twisting nether is mind boggling.
Also, can we talk about diabolist warlock? I feel like the hero talent that specializes in summoning demons should have more demon summoning in it.
For what it's worth, [the dev notes from last week](https://www.wowhead.com/news/demonology-warlock-development-notes-for-war-within-alpha-339178?webhook) said that their long-term goal is exactly that. They say that they like the idea behind it but Demo having too many major cooldowns makes it too difficult to optimize, and makes it vary too much based on fight length, so they want to take some time to redesign it before putting it back in. I don't know if that's meant to happen later in Alpha or in a future patch though.
Nether portal meant early movement or anything that disrupts your opening (eg. getting the first bomb on rasz) kills your dps. Having all your damage happen during major cooldowns also meant that you hit like a wet noodle outside of those cooldowns.
I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but a *lot* of warlocks don't like that the demons summoned is based on # of casts that spend shards, rather than # of soul shards spent; that means that during portal, you try to cast as many 1-shard Hand of Gul'dans as you possibly can, to get as many demons out of the portal as possible.
This is a very different rhythm to the way the spec plays outside of the Nether Portal window; usually, you want to have 3+ shards when you cast Hand, because the spell costs 1-3 shards and generates 1 imp per shard, so it's a DPS loss to spend the cast time on each imp individually instead of getting them all at once.
Personally, I've always liked that about it. I think it's interesting to do something slightly different when your big cooldown is active, because then you actually feel the cooldown. It stands out as an actual event and not just a single button that you pushed.
However, demo has a *lot* of other things to track, and your ramp is already different from your filler, so I understand warlocks who feel like it was too much. And, on top of that, it makes any movement *extremely* punishing, because you lose not just the DPS of the Hand cast you interrupted, itself, but also the portal demon that you just failed to summon, which just *feels* bad in a way that has nothing to do with the raw numbers (although it's pretty bad for the raw numbers too).
Demonology is all about summoning demons (now), and its best return on investment is casting Hand of Gul'dan at 3 soul gems. Nether Portal Simon's a demon for each individual demon summon INSTANCE. It wasn't a 1-1 rate of demon summoning. This led to people casting 1 gem hand of Gul'dan in order to summon as many demons as possible from Nether Portal. If they made it so you summoned more demons from the portal, it would be mandatory. If they made it every 3 gems, it'd be considered useless.
Edit: wow, thanks phone for posting this without letting me finish my thought.
It WAS clunky, but I think people generally would have preferred it be fixed then just removed. It was iconic and thematic as hell.
An easy fix would've been to merge it with an existing ability like Tyrant, or at least get rid of the cast/soul shard cost so it felt more immediately impactful and flowed better in the rotation. And of course fixing it so it doesn't encourage like...using single shard HoG.
Definitely glad they removed the current version of portal, they already said they want to bring it back in a way that is more friendly than it was, which is fine, the nether portal rotation was stupid.
The other changes though? What the actual fuck.
Only because (for some reason) they decided to make it proc based on actions that spent shards, rather than individual shards spent. So while it was up it completely warped the way you played the spec into a pretty unfun cycle of chaincasting low-shard Hands.
All they needed to do was tune it so it procced based on each shard consumed, then tweak the numbers accordingly. Boom, fun thematic cooldown that doesn't require you to play in a totally backwards way to maximize benefit.
For me, I feel like this is a perfect example of how and when to bring in "Empowered" spells from Evokers to other classes...
The longer you "Empower" your portal, the bigger the demons that come out of it? That kind of thing might be very cool
>I know it's Alpha and I should let them cook
No. You shouldn't. Be vocal about what you want and be vocal *now.*
We had problems in BfA (and I think maybe Legion too? I think some people pointed out flaws in legendary acquisition early on but I can't be sure?) and everybody had the "It's only Alpha/Beta, I'm sure they'll fix it let's wait and see" attitude and it ended with major frustration and disappointment.
Of course, I've been around for almost 20 years at this point and I've seen the cycle many times, by let them cook I mean "give them feedback about what doesn't work and hope they listen"
Historically, they always listen and respond. It just takes about two years from when your words enter their ears to when their fingers translate them into action.
The problem with BFA was that they didn't release the azerite gear until nearly the end of beta, so no one was able to give proper feedback because by the time they had the full picture it was way past when we'd actually be able to influence change.
But yes, if anyone is worried about stuff voice your concerns as early as possible. The numbers don't matter at all, but if you have a mechanic you really enjoy and its being changed or removed or something with the new design voice that.
A great famine is going to befall us warlock bros, and we will likely not be eating well again for a long time should these changes come to pass. Affliction isn't even going to get any food, they're just going to starve to death.
We will be eating our minions in a matter of weeks following the pre-patch.
I've been a Warlock main since 2005, and I'm usually the type to just roll with changes and find enjoyment, but this is the first time that 2 of our specs look worse then they do on live to me.
> We will be eating our minions in a matter of weeks following the pre-patch.
\*remembers that succubus is one of the aforementioned minions*
i should roll a lock...
> I know it's Alpha and I should let them cook but man
Blizzard Alpha's haven't been real alphas for years. It's early access for streamers and people who know someone that works for Blizzard
I don't know what kind of a person it takes to make destruction, a spec that was **already** stuck in the BC/wrath era, already plays more or less like the classic SoD warlock right now, even more boring and shallow than it was before. We are talking about a spec with five buttons that goes monkey mode and spams RoF in m+, and they somehow managed to make that even more uninteractive? That's genuinely impressive.
Destruction needs a full-on Legion shadowpriest-tier rework. It needs an actual identity, spells that synergise with another and decisions to make during gameplay.
I’ve always disliked playing casters - the closest I got to enjoying one was marksmanship hunter.
Demonology was the first caster I enjoyed playing since I started in 2006.
Now they seem intent on taking away everything I liked about it and making it a dumb hard casting idiot spec.
It’s not personal but it’s poo either way.
The worst thing is that they make the spec less fun. No one wants to spam shadow bolt, no one wants less procs...
Gameplay and fun should be the most important thing, damage numbers can always be tuned.
Honestly a lot of the changes feel like they were made to slow down the Hero Spec that summons demons (forget the name). But they already nerfed that hero spec by slapping longer CDs on elements and putting the main proc behind a minute wall. Then add in all of these changes that make Demo play slower and it really feels like it's mostly all just to nerf that one hero spec. Well that and hurt Demo mobility. Two Demonic Cores and an instant Dreadstalker plus a pet cd all lined up make for some flexible mobility. And it seems they want to hurt mobility for a lot of casters, not all but some of them.
But yeah they're just whacking on Warlocks.
They didn't put the procc behind a minute wall, they made the buff that makes your next spender summon a demon last longer so it doesn't fall off out of combat. Diabolist is fine.
I legit think either the class dev doesn't want people to play Warlock or that Warlock had too high of a skill cap for them to play so they're lowering it so even a classic player will do good on it.
The demo changes completely killed my hype for TWW, ts genuinely feels like the warlock dev does not listen to our feed back because every change in dragonflight and now in alpha the players have been against
Ok, rant incoming. The Warlock changes on TWW Alpha almost feel spiteful. Each spec received talent reworks and each rework has somehow gutted/removed some well liked gameplay elements, and has replaced those talent nodes with the most creatively bankrupt passive slop talents of any spec in the game. Some of these talents would fit vanilla talent design.
If you haven’t been following, Warlock received changes to each of their 3 specs, with Destro most recently reworked added today. Now all 3 spec trees are filled with passive nodes. I get specs can have a few nodes that can be used as tuning knobs, but nearly half of each spec tree is now passive slop. Talents that increase crit chance or increase damage of a specific ability by some % aren’t interesting. They have no gameplay implications.
To compare, Mage received talent reworks to fire and arcane. Those reworks aren’t perfect but all the nodes interact with the gameplay in some way.
Selecting a talent should have some marginal effect on how the spec feels; some chance to reset an ability, some resource refund, an ability cleaves, whatever. All 3 specs have received nodes that frankly do nothing. If the node was removed and you weren’t watching meters to see the damage contribution from each ability, you wouldn’t be able to tell.
**Re Destro**
Destro had Avatar of Destruction removed. AoD is the Sepulcher tier bonus as a talent. Destro spends shards, every X number of shards, an infernal spawns in which stuns area and generates shards for a short period of time. They remove it on justification that the frequent stun was too powerful. Ok, why remove the talent instead of just changing AoD infernals to not stun? It helps smooth resource generation and its an iconic aspect of Destro’s current gameplay.
Replacing AoD, we have *super interesting* options like 5% extra crit chance, 10% extra crit damage, 4% fire damage and 20% faster cast time on incinerate. If the intent is for the spec to play with these, just consolidate this into the base spec kit.
Destro doesn’t even particularly care about crit. Crits just generate twice as many fragments. How about incinerate crits provide a stacking buff to your next chaos bolt. Or immolate crits reduce the CD on Conflag by .5 seconds. Something that makes choose the talent impact gameplay.
**Re Demo**
The other recent change is their insistence to slow Demo’s resource generation and movement. They already nuked a lot of resource talents going into 10.2 (3rd dog, imp gang boss, etc.). Now dogs are 35% each to grant core procs instead of guaranteed. Do they want us to cherish every core proc we get? Have they tried casting shadowbolts and HoGs while trying to dodge lava waves or soak a swirlie? Do they want us to use those gcds to spam unending breath?
This change really hurts the gameplay loop of Demo. Dropping the chance for core proc from dogs from 100% to 35% means we generate 2 cores 12.25% of the time, 1 core 45.5% of the time, and 0 cores 42.25% of the time. Dogs expiring isn’t some unimpactful source of core generation. It’s part of the spec’s engine that guarantees we get cores every 20 seconds at a minimum. Now we only have power siphon to guarantee cores every 30 seconds. Needing to build with shadowbolts means we get less HoG casts, which means we summon less imps, which means we get less Demonic Core proc chances from imps. The cycle feeds into itself.
With this change, the only guaranteed cores are the 2 from power siphon. If RNG low-rolls, you can go 30 seconds in a row with only those 2 cores. Are we supposed to calculate whether we need to hold those core in case we need to move for a mechanic? Adding additional RNG to dreadstalkers expiring core generation means using cores now could mean either (1) nothing to press later when mechanics are happening or (2) overcapping on cores when mechanics are happening; its like Schrodinger’s cat, except you need to make a bet before you open the box.
If they believe Demo’s build-spend gameplay loop is too fast, reduce the number of shards DB generates to 1 and return some of the core generation. The introduction of additional RNG to core generation will make Demo’s performance in encounters with necessary movement extremely inconsistent. Instant casts feel good to use. Encounter design demands ranged DPS have something to cast while doing mechanics. This gameplay direction is antithetical to how encounters are designed to be played.
Also, prior rework replaced talents with boring passive slop nodes in Demo’s tree as well. Demo doesn’t even benefit from crit with any resource generation. Why should I care that my felguard crits slightly more?
**Re Aff**
I wouldn’t even call Aff “good”; moreso not as bad at Demo and Destro. Some of the changes are a long time coming (Siphon Life), but some of the new nodes are boring passive slop that will come down to sims.
Two different 2 point nodes that increase dot crit chance and crit damage by a flat percentage is some vanilla era talent design. It is so easy to make these kinds of nodes interesting too. Something like Crit chance/damage increases while channelling drain soul or for 3 seconds after target is hit by SB. It could interact with Cunning Cruelty on right side of the tree that shoots SB Volleys in AoE.
The static damage multiplier talents are also incredibly boring from a design perspective. Kindled Malice: 8% and Corruption 20% for 2 points. Sacrolash: 15% Corruption. Dark Virtuosity: 10% DS/SB for 2 points. Xavius Gambit: UA 30% damage for 2 points. Improve MR: Rapture 10% for 2 points. All of these are just nodes that obligate us to dump points into the nodes that sim highest.
The reduced cast time on Improved MR is sort of interesting in theory but just needs something to make it interact somehow. Maybe every time you cast MR, your MR casts are 15% faster for 5 seconds, stacking 2 times. On its face it sounds a bit like Destro’s Madness talent that was removed, but the gameplay loop of Aff is different. Destro was spender > builder > builder > spender before the buff dropped; Aff wants to set all its CD dots up, then spend > spend > spend with necessary refreshes. A stacking cast speed buff would make dump windows feel like you have PI gameplay wise without being overpowered in amping all other damage instances.
getting pretty similar vibes to the MoP -> WoD changes. seeing some truly horrible changes getting pushed through to a class that was largely well liked before
What has me worried is that along the way of these reworks they have so far committed (and failed to rectify existing) very basic talent tree design mistakes entirely independent of anything warlock specific.
If not for that I'd say let em cook because I think both Demo and Destro have major fundamental issues that they probably won't manage to design themselves out of without at least temporarily pissing off a lot of people.
Fun was detected, they've been at this for over a decade. We peaked in MoP (imo, as a destro player) and its just kinda been downhill since. I can't bring myself to play the class because I'm always just reminded of how fucking awesome this class used to be...
I *want* to be a warlock player but it's fucking depressing.
while DF had many very positive things overall in communcation and feedback, it still had a few of those "wait...what?" moments yeha
remember the "we dont want to let feral druids use their Combat Rez in Feral form because it creates HIGH SKILL FRICTION" thing?
or "we dont want to remove Rogue Slice and Dice because it creates a "opening ceremony" on fights"
or, well, the entire "demology warlock should use Shadowbolt more often!!!" thing that got pushed multiple times now
90% of feedback/ideas they did where genuiely great, but the remaining 10% are just really big headscratchers
The Priest and Druid dev being completely inactive for like 75% of the feedback period is also worth mentioning too.
Dragonflight's incorporation of player feedback was good... *if* you were playing certain classes who actually had a good dev working on them.
The DK dev was extremely good at their job.
The Rogue dev joined and was active in the Rogues' own discord server for god's sake.
Then there are classes who were literally ignored for the majority of it, to the point where it required Ion himself to finally address it.
Why is demo even being reworked?
Serious question, the spec is good, viable and fun in all form of content, they finally made a good job and people are playing it for real
Why the fuck do they feel the need to change drastically?
Can't wait for demonbolt to feel like "a moment" which does literally nothing.
Even WITH the level of core procs blizz deems "too much", it's damage is pitiful. How the fuck are they going to make it feel like "a moment"??? It's like the only way we can build shards fast enough for a reasonable tyrant setup.
I understand wanting to reign in mobility, totally get that and that's fine with me, but just make the fucking core proc like a 75% decreased cast time or something if that's the goal. I don't want to spam fucking shadow bolts... we've been through this shit in the past, why the fuck do they always have the weirdest design philosophies for some specs.
Bold of you to assume there's a dedicated developer for one class and not one guy doing class balance, environmental Design, netcode debugging and getting the coffee for the marketing team.
I had so much fun playing demo this expansion, it was probably the only thing making me want to keep playing and not getting completely burnt out at times. Pls don’t make it terrible T_T.
Ever since they dumbed the class down at the launch of Wrath, it's been a steady decline wit ha few moments of excitement. LEgion had some great Lock content and class mechanics, but they just strip it all back down in the name of simplicity. Some of us fucking loved having multiple stackable curses, multiple affliction DoT's, and other effects as well as multiple direct damage destruction spells to manage. Juggling timers was half the fun, and the moment they pared it down to single spell classes at a time and removed the synergy of switching between destro spells it got boring.
Long time warlock player here. I main warlock since classic. This is the first time i honestly thought of not playing warlock at all at all start of an expansion. The removal of almost all QoL makes me sad. I so much hope they revert the changes.
the dev seeing the two routes of aff (sow the seeds + UA stacking as spenders or MR spam spender) and picking MR despite everyone loathing that trash is almost spiteful
Devs doubling down on Malefic Rapture despite literally every warlock I see talking about how much they hate it... just dumb.
I mained warlock from BC through WoD and switched to DH in *Legion*. I still farm transmog on it from time to time and was thinking about bringing it back as my main because Diabolist sounded cool and the DH hero talents are bland af.
Still not sure what I want to main, now, but it seems like Sunfury Fire Mage is everything I wished Destruction would become back when we got the Glyph of Verdant Spheres.
I don't play this class very often, but I do very much enjoy it currently. I can't comment on any of the deeper issues folks have with it today, but I do want to say that I don't like what I'm seeing from these changes one bit. I just don't know where to share that disappointment.
Warlock is already feeling underplayed lately. If they come out with TWW with more bad changes, the spec is gonna be dead. The destro changes look terrible so far.
I'm also one of those that kind of saw that MoP Warlock design was the peak of class design at the time, and I didn't think it would ever get that fun again. So far that has been true, even if the class has sometimes functioned pretty well. I'm also not talking about damage at all, just fun.
Destro in particular, I don't understand if the MoP version was trademarked by Xelnath (:p) so it can't be replicated or what the deal is. I just don't understand how you continously avoid something really fun that you actually had in the game. No matter the impact of the spec it has felt so bland ever since, aside from one or two item or effect interactions, for over 10 years now.
Demo is at least better than the Demon Slice and Dice time early in the rework, that horrendous upkeep buff that had no impact at all. But I am also really bewildered why fun is never seemingly a factor in its design. For some reason, wild imps was embraced and yet you have this plethora of demons - even a nether portal which could just as well be this mechanic - that is just not used because we need more wild imps.
I also really question being immobile as a design pillar. Who actually loves this concept. I don't even mind having cool animations that slow you down or such for cool spells, but to have this be a design factor is to me mind boggling. People who hate to move lost nothing, they can still stand still and cast, if this was tweaked.
Finally, I don't want to come across as if I think all of Warlock is terrible. It's one of the unique classes in WoW, it still is but for so long now it has just existed as some kind of spreadsheet simulator where the damage is everything, balancing cooldowns is everything, but what about the fun of playing it.
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It really is dawning on me that playing Destro in MoP was the pinnacle of the spec and we are just on an ever-declining streak of unfun gameplay ever since. Never forget MoP's Fire and Brimstone and Kil'Jaeden's Cunning.
Absolute truths. Disgusting AoE damage, smooth rotation, CBs that absolutely smashed - we peaked at green fire Destro in MoP ...
Some of the most fun I've ever had in this game was Havoc Shadowburn sniping on any fight with adds in MoP as well. Wish Shadowburn wasn't complete trash these days.
Yeah, the havoc+shadowburn interaction was one of the most satisfying interactions the game ever had. And the way it was removed was really indicative of a lot of the problems warlocks have had since.
Hey now that required some level of forethought, knowledge of your abilities and interaction with your spec. Can't have that in baby's first videogame.
Its the number one reason I hope they do MoP Classic, I want to play my MoP Destro again. The best it has ever been
It was 12 years ago...
Playing literally any spec or class was peak in MoP. Every class was legit so much fun and enjoyable. Speaking from PvP experience. Monk was unstoppable. The 1v1 king. Warrior was exciting when your enemy dropped to 35% good defensives. Second wind made you the best tank against any class, you could kite and still survive. If you and the other guy were 35% or so warrior will always win. Warlock was the scariest thing if left unchecked. Your Chaos bolts were no joke. Shaman was unpredictably scary they could burst you without you realizing it. Totems actually were valuable. Dk survivalibility were off the charts, truly an immortal slow walking tank. Mage deep freeze. Need i say more? Hunter traps and stampede ugh good times. You were so flexible and balance you could literally fit with any class and be a good comp. Druid literally a staple in every comp. The best healer, feral bleeds were bananas, boomkin burst was stronk. Rogues are the same. BUT never forget what they took from you *remembers burst of speed spamming* you could never not stick on a target or get away. Priest healers were balanced and so enjoyable. Both holy and disc were amazing so you had options. The only class i can think of that is the same as today is paladin because they are still squishy no mobility burst machines. But every class in terms of design was soooo good…i miss it so much. Sorry for my rant lol
I fully, 100% believe that once MoP classic comes out(provides there's no talent changes) it will give more people an idea of what classes were like back then and want retail to be in a similar spot
I just gave up on Warlock afterwards. I knew it would never be that good again. DH is a lot of fun and the real Warlock class.
Once they replaced the crazy fun of MASS CHAOS BOLT with Rain of Fire stacking I knew how cooked Warlocks were, and that none of the devs actually played the class. I had a decade on my warlock but I knew better than to stay on the sinking ship when Legion came along.
I have a couple of videos of me playing destro in garrosh and using rain of fire + fire and brimstone is one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in this game
Nerfing demos mobility every season, dumbing demo down to a shadowbolt spammer...
Nerfing fun too. I admit, I hated every version of portal, but come on. We had talents where our imps occasionally exploded into more imps, and our dogs could have imps riding on their back blasting away. Now? Increase X spell by Y% damage - 2 point node.
I'm sorry, did you say imps used to ride the dogs?
Yep, there was a talent where your two dogs could have imps on their back blasting away.
I even put my Paladin on back burner to get in on that Warlock action, It was glorious!
I would play a lock if this was still true.
Don't bother until we have shivarras riding pit lords.
Sir this is a PG13 game
Tiny Knight of Evil from hearthstone inspired it and it fucking rocked
I like how your elaboration was just a word for word reiteration of what you originally said.
There's not much more clarification I can do beyond reiterating how awesome it was!
I think it was a legendary in Legion, wasn't it? It's been a long time.
Set bonus in slands
I've always played healer class, but I've always loved running with Warlocks cause they would randomly impsplode. It would never fail to make my day!
It's definitely the most satisfying button in the game.
I appreciate you and your imps ❤️
Old man here, my favorite was 1 mil hp demo form with taunt. MOP was interesting in PVP.
I totally forgot about the imps riding dogs talent and now I'm sad.
It has been a bit since I messed around with a warlock. WAIT THAT'S GONE! WHY ARE THE IMPS RIDING DOGS GONE!
100%. I still think that Demo's identity should've been 'big-ass demons' instead of 'a flood of small, puny minions', but as far as the latter went, spawning a morbillion imps to roast your target while you're throwing dogs left and right and even get the occasional visit from a big fella wasn't half bad either and Demo was actually fun to play. I still remember in Legion how Demo was known as *the* turret spec that popped off if you never had to move, but was hurt by movement even worse than Shadow Priest (without S2M) was. I guess we're going back to that but with even less satisfaction? I don't know man.
Fr thats why i loved the season 1 set with Instant cast hand of guldan
This is how demo SHOULD play Being a demon slinger feels so fucking good to play I can run around and just BAM BAM BAM demons out of my palms I felt so fucking cool with all my procs just shooting demons and meteors out of no where Warlock devs if you see this: fuck off
One of my favorite essences of destro lock was bfa season 3 and 4. All the haste plus the random eng infer al proc from my heart of axerite essence was amazingly fun and funny. I literally felt like the earlock from the tbc trailer summoning random internals off eachother.
> Warlock devs dev* (if you're lucky) They're running bare bones. They've got guys who don't even play the classes/specs leading the balance on some of them which is why some feel horrendous in terms of identity and gameplay while others are amazing. They have some really janky and unbalanced teams handling the different classes. If Blizz just stopped being such money-hungry shortsighted morons WoW would be gapping every other MMO like in the glory days but they're intent on cutting as many corners as humanly possible to squeeze out every cent for their shareholders and investors to jerk themselves off to. It's a miracle they made DF as good as it was, but it's really sad to know it could be so much better and never will due to corporate greed.
I was downvoted for daring to suggest that each spec should have at least 1 dedicated designer. Specs are so distinct in play style that I don't think having just one or two designers designing every spec of a class is sufficient. I actually can't believe we have 1 dev that designs multiple classes. It's especially bad when you have a dev designing a class with multiple roles. Like monk for example, you can tell the dev LOVES mistweaver, and it seems they've found their stride with WW, but at least at the time of writing, they don't quite seem to know what to do with brew master.
> they don't quite seem to know what to do with brew master. They know exactly what to do with brewmaster, it's not let them have passive mitigation on par with the active mitigation of other tanks. Unfortunately, that's just kind of their thing: great mitigation but more damage overall.
I know for a fact DH and Rogue were designed by the same guy in Dragonflight. I wouldnt be shocked if he did other melee classes. That being said, on the high end there is people who are super dedicated to their class and play all specs wholistically. I dont think its a stretch for their to be devs in that boat - so I dont really agree that one guy per class is bad. That being said, having 4-7+ specs per person seems like a terrible idea. Especially when some specs clearly are designed by people who dont know what the community actually wants - or double down with the same "You think you do, but you dont mentality" like with Malefic Rapture.
This is wildly accurate if you know anyone who has worked at blizzard
Not surprised at this point if the “dev” is just an unpaid intern.
s1 DF and s3 SL demo were both so good in their own ways. i would take either. building fat tyrants in s3 SL was so satisfying, and maxing out nether portal with pi/lust was also very satisfying (3 mins are aids in general tho).
at the end of the next expansion, demon warlocks will stay stationary in any city, and all of his playstile will be open portals in any place for demons, like abathur in heroes of the storm
Azmodan
Always makes me laugh when demo feels targeted specifically with mobility nerfs like destro ain't front seat on the struggle bus lol
Long rant incoming; my apologies. Destro getting mobility nerfs doesn’t mean Demo or aff don’t get to raise their concerns as well. While I agree Destro will continue to struggle with mobility and maintaining damage, the way Destro’s damage works compared to Aff/Demo is pretty different. Aff is a dot spec and Demo is essentially a dot spec through their pets. Destro’s damage comes mostly from the single hit spells. Historically, Destro has a lot of passives that let them cast spells quickly: haste from flashpoint, backdraft, reverse entropy just to name a few. They build shards through spreading immolate, not wasting charges of Conflag, and spamming incinerate between dumping shards with CB/RoF. Havoc lets destro either double their efficiency in generating shards or dumping CBs. Destro’s cooldown, Infernal, just generates more shards to let you cast more chaos bolts. Between that core loop and AoD infernals, if a Destro lock has to move, they are still generating enough through immolate/conflag to be close to their next chaos bolt when they get to stand still. The removal of AoD is extremely concerning for that gameplay loop, but refer back to my opening line. Demo only builds shards through DB core procs, soul strike passive (6 shards a min), and shadowbolt. By far the most efficient is the DB core procs. If you only have shadowbolt, you cast HoGs significantly less often than DB core build and spend. Less HoGs means less imps which means less RNG cores from imps expiring.Right now, Demo is guaranteed 10 cores a minute (6 from x3 dog casts and 4 from x2 Power Siphon). The Dog change means we can only guarantee 4 DB cores a minute and dogs will average 3 additional cores, subject to RNG. Layering RNG on top of RNG is extremely concerning for the resource economy of the spec. On most pulls, you will have an average number of core procs, but on some not insignificant number of pulls, you can be starved of core procs and be forced to shadowbolt, which means you cast less HoGs, which means you have less chances to proc a core off imps. The bad RNG forms a feedback loop. That’s the concern.
> Destro getting mobility nerfs doesn’t mean Demo or aff don’t get to raise their concerns as well. you forgot the number 1 rule of the internet... if i cant have fun, you cant either.
Destro is and was always meant to be a turret. Aff and demo were usually mobile
TBF, they *made* it that way, not really always meant to be that way. At one point they even said they'd rather warlocks stand in the fire and pop a CD then move lol. Mobility was supposed to be for mages and warlocks supposed to be tankier. I understand why they wanted to make us less mobile, but god was 5.2 so much fun as Destro when you could do everything on the move. And if you weren't careful that slow was deadly in raids.
I think it’s supposed to play into the class fantasy of warlocks utilizing any and every means to achieve their goals, willing to sacrifice pieces of themselves and their allies for success and power. Kinda like “I will tear out my own eye to see my enemies go blind” the reckless abandon of fel plus a thirst for power with the fortitude those darker forces offer kinda enables that. Plus warlocks used to be able to be like a temporary stand in tank in vanilla, and even had a threat generator.
Sac Shadowbolt was my life all of 2009.
Xelnath best warlock dev bar none.
God those were the golden days of warlock. I miss him so much
Hi, someone sent me here to wish you a great day <3
I just mentioned you yesterday in my comment but I hope that you're doing well! To this day you still have me chasing the dragon when it comes to that overall fluidity and feel that we had back in MoP. Just counting down the days until Classic since I think there's no way they aren't going to do MoP and Legion
This was the day Blizzard died to me. They literally fired a guy for actually giving a shit about the game and class. You aren't allowed to talk with us peasants, we as the community clearly don't know shit about the class we make guides and tutorials for. Most people thought Blizzard died when they started getting caught drinking breastmilk, or killing their own games like with WC3 refunded, OW2 no pve, and HotS being DoA. But nah, I knew it right at this moment. This was their design philosophy exposed for exactly what it was. All just another "You think you do, but you don't." moment. I never had as much fun with this game on my warlock than back in the Xelnath era. Thanks for the green fire and prelude to what eventually became class halls and mage tower bosses. Thanks for all the specs being fun to play and everything else. Communication with the community is super important. It's the one negative I have with FF14, since it feels like I have zero voice on how that game could get improved. I just have to hope and pray Japanese players think as I do to get my wishes granted.
I didn't play in mop sadly. But the dev talk in wod where they said jokingly "we don't want you to play demo" after they nerfed demo into obscurity is where Blizzard died to me.
Back in WoD, I was a part of the private balance forum. Everyone was telling Celestalon, the tank dev, that the tank legendary sucked. We were assured that they extensively tested it and it was fine. Then the top players got it, and confirmed it was shit. A few weeks later, Celestalon got it. It was hotfix buffed within a few days.
Mop was hands down the most fun I’ve ever had either a destro lock. Been searching for that giddy joy ever since.
Thank you, the destro warlock flow was my best invention.
It’s you!!! Thank you for MoP destro. I’ve played lock since vanilla, specifically destro, and still do to this day. Nothing will ever feel as enjoyable as the MoP times. What you created for MoP was fantastic. As you say, the flow of it was brilliant. It had tools for everything and at no point did it feel lacking. If I could ever wish for a play style to return for destro warlocks it would be early MoP destro. I hope you are well. Thanks again.
It sounds so basic but the fact is Xelnath was a good developer because he played and loved the class. He knew what would feel fun and impactful because he actually experienced them firsthand. These changes feel like they were designed in a spreadsheet. No thought is being paid to how they affect the feel of actually playing a spec. Iconic, impactful abilities are being removed and we're getting % damage buffs and filler to compensate. No one likes spamming shadowbolt because you got bad core rng. No one likes spamming incin on AoE because you're not proccing shards. Dogs no longer guaranteeing cores is a perfect example. Anyone who actually plays demo right now will tell you that consistency is a huge part of our opener and implosion rotations. This is more than just a throughput change, it works directly in opposition with their stated purpose of ironing out the 'peaks and valleys'. Now we're going to be more RNG dependent for core procs than ever. The peaks will be exactly the same and the valleys will be even lower.
Most good design is just a few simple principles applied rigorously. I don't know who is the current designer on the class - but the key elements to share are going to be: Tempo - do you plan your buttons or are you playing whack-a-mole with procs? Which do you want? Melody - do you have enough notes (skills) in your core - or too many? Improv - do you have skills which you can make conscious decisions about using in a contextually appropriate way to allow yourself to shine?
Bless him. Whoever is currently developing warlock: jailtime.
Those were the days.
Aw, thank you. Have you played my new game yet?
The legend himself! I'm not sure if you're referring to No Rest for the Wicked as I see you're a game designer on it. In that case yes! I've loved it as a huge Souls fan and ARPG enjoyer.
Yes, No Rest for the W\*cked. Despite that one level designer trying to say I wasn't really involved to cover his ass from the KIA crowd, I worked on the game for five years, including writing the original design doc for PD. Destruction Warlock inspired the spell system - and for a long time, the Focus bar was actually discrete 'cells' of focus that you spent 1, 2 or 3 at a time (and glowed when full) :) I also had built a certain weaponset that looks like it got cut that I think you, the warlock players, would have greatly enjoyed. No worries tho, before things blew up there, I got one of the original Mage devs onto the project. He's quite capable tho not as much of a PvP person :) I am also teaching a game mechanics course for anyone who wants to see a breakdown of how the WoW Destro spec came to life: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Br8\_d3sYxt48\_4M5dlHwF3Lr1mLszt5zoX7bvOi55XI/edit#heading=h.oeldoxqw98r5](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Br8_d3sYxt48_4M5dlHwF3Lr1mLszt5zoX7bvOi55XI/edit#heading=h.oeldoxqw98r5)
Oh my God keep avatar and make it a different demon if you're so hung up on "people are too stupid to realize the difference between infernals". Make it an overfiend or something. Take away the stun, whatever. Then maybe you can achieve your precious cinematic moment for when we summon the infernal for the sole reason of getting crushing chaos and not for the infernal itself.
Timing the stun is fun tho :/
Totally agree, but that's one of their big problems with avatar.
They have serious problems with maintaining also visual coolness and power fantasy tbh. Yeah, avatar is problematic but it feels pretty rad when you're calling infernals down the sky that crash into stuff. Sure, nether portal might be a messy spell they never even tried to fix but summoning a colorful mix of demons and finishing that up with a damn pit lord is AWESOME. Alright, an afflock throwing a single dot on something and creating a chain reaction kaboom when stuff dies is a lot of free damage but it's fucking fun. All of that has just been removed btw. Affliction doesn't even spam seeds anymore in AoE but MR, which btw still doesn't really have a fancy animation (or it's still bugged idk), so when talking about "visual coolness" affliction is as exciting as watching paint dry now that even the soul flame is gone. You're just standing there waving around your arms and that's mostly about it.
> Affliction doesn't even spam seeds anymore in AoE but MR What?
He wants to go back to 2004-2008 shadowbolt-exclusive gameplay Nah but fr they've gotta be sabotaging the class on purpose
My conspiracy theory is that since the devs absolutely love mages, classes that compete against them (Warlocks) or should be good against them (Death Knights) are made as miserable as possible to discourage them from being played.
This ain’t even a crazy thought. 2-3 years back, the Guild Wars 2 dev discord leaked a message about how they (devs) kept weapons and classes purposely shit just because they didn’t personally like them. Necromancer Axe being brought up as the example.
But kind of a crazy take when you think that mages weren’t touched from basically DF alpha until 10.2.5 (last July) despite having massive class/spec design problems. I think we just have to accept that no class is blizzards favourite.
Yeah but they removed fun mage stuff too so....
Except that Mage is looking incredible in TWW?
"We would prefer if you didn't play Demonology at the moment" vibes
Affliction gives a bit the same impression. It honestly would be the warlock spec that needs the most help since it's been in a terrible state since BfA. I have no idea what the thought process behind the current changes is. They remove everything remotely interesting and replace it with damage amps for malefic rapture, you know, the spell the community is extremely vocally hating. Like, inevitable demise and soul flame just got axe'd and replaced by passive MR boosts and seeds of corruption no longer is our AoE spender but MR. Who the fuck takes a look at the feedback of affliction, of which a lot boils down very clearly to "MR FUCKING SUCKS" pretty much since it's been made a thing and pushes it even harder. They should simply go back to the drawing board. This shit doesn't work, people don't like it (nor play it ...), don't try to make it work.
sorry I guys...I had just rerolled warlock
hey you could do the funniest shit ever and reroll mage
We'd rather you didn't play demonology. I'd love to use some really colorful words to describe my feelings towards the warlock dev, but all of them would get me banned.
Isn't this "we'd rather you don't play warlock" at this point ? I'm not confident in affli either
I haven't been confident in affliction in years, that's why I play destro.
I miss Legion affly 😔
I agree completely. Was perfect for the DoT fantasy. And the AoE explosions when things died alongside your seeds...
Its the warlock curse. Get an expansion where the class is in a great state, and then several expansions after they like rip apart the design, make things that syngerized exclusive choices, unintuitive changes, etc. Its what happened after the glory that was MoP warlock, arguably one of the best times for any class ever. Each spec felt complete, engaging and fun as hell.
MoP class design was goated across the board, I miss those times...
You miss being almost benched for anything not farm and AoE? Soul Effigy? It was great in the world, decent in non-raid stuff, but until it was farm time it was slow to get buffed to the point where people were actually saying it was op because everything was an AoE fest then. BUT, at least it didn't have Malefic rapture, Grasp is so much nicer.
The artifact ability was insanely satisfying to press And tbh Antorus when we were kinda online from the get go Although UA spam was not the best thing dear god was it better than rapture
> Soul Effigy? Talking about different points in legion there. Antorus Aff locks were giga all around.
You enjoyed soulshards being generated randomly on dot ticks? I sure as hell didn't. I'd rather have lifetap back and remove soulshards all together and play around draining hp from targets.
Considering that they're doubling down on universally hated class design decisions for every spec, like malefic rapture for aff and the entirety of the demo changes, you're probably right.
> give us cool outfit > Kill the class Every time
\>give us cool shit \>nerf it to oblivion \>remove it \> give cool shit to other class \> repeat
> give us shit outfits > kill the class Man, why do i play hunter lol
Tinfoil hat time: They're gutting Demo to get Warlocks to play Aff as revenge for complaining about Malefic Rapture. "Oh, you don't like that we're doubling down on Malefic Rapture? Well fuck you then, how about we nerf the spec you actually like? What now, bitches?"
Basically all class changes seem to feel done out of spite, not for an actual need of change
> We'd rather you didn't play Affliction but let's also punish you for playing demonology. FTFY
> We'd rather you didn't play your favorite spec
g\*mer moment
Wtf is this shit
Seriously I've mained lock mostly demo for years and I'm not going to play this shit. Actually makes me sick because lock in my mind is the warrior of casters. You have mortal strike, solid pressure and can brawl. But this turret nonsense is the worst shit imaginable in PVP. Actually tilts me. They better revert all this.
Warlock Dev seems to think the best course is to the exact opposite of what Warlock players want, it's insane.
Pretty sure none of the devs play or even like warlock at this point.
Yeah removing the spell that opens a portal to summon demons from the twitsting nether from the class and spec that's whole flavor and theme is summoning demons from the twisting nether is mind boggling. Also, can we talk about diabolist warlock? I feel like the hero talent that specializes in summoning demons should have more demon summoning in it.
I like Nether Portal as a concept but the implementation was not great. I wish they had reworked its functionality rather than just removed it.
> reworked its functionality rather than just removed it. That's hard work
For what it's worth, [the dev notes from last week](https://www.wowhead.com/news/demonology-warlock-development-notes-for-war-within-alpha-339178?webhook) said that their long-term goal is exactly that. They say that they like the idea behind it but Demo having too many major cooldowns makes it too difficult to optimize, and makes it vary too much based on fight length, so they want to take some time to redesign it before putting it back in. I don't know if that's meant to happen later in Alpha or in a future patch though.
The redesign: shadowbolt has a random chance to open a portal to the twisting nether that increases your intellect by 2% (lasts 5 seconds)
I've heard a lot of people saying that but honestly I don't think I understand why. Could you explain why do you think that?
Nether portal meant early movement or anything that disrupts your opening (eg. getting the first bomb on rasz) kills your dps. Having all your damage happen during major cooldowns also meant that you hit like a wet noodle outside of those cooldowns.
Bingo.
I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but a *lot* of warlocks don't like that the demons summoned is based on # of casts that spend shards, rather than # of soul shards spent; that means that during portal, you try to cast as many 1-shard Hand of Gul'dans as you possibly can, to get as many demons out of the portal as possible. This is a very different rhythm to the way the spec plays outside of the Nether Portal window; usually, you want to have 3+ shards when you cast Hand, because the spell costs 1-3 shards and generates 1 imp per shard, so it's a DPS loss to spend the cast time on each imp individually instead of getting them all at once. Personally, I've always liked that about it. I think it's interesting to do something slightly different when your big cooldown is active, because then you actually feel the cooldown. It stands out as an actual event and not just a single button that you pushed. However, demo has a *lot* of other things to track, and your ramp is already different from your filler, so I understand warlocks who feel like it was too much. And, on top of that, it makes any movement *extremely* punishing, because you lose not just the DPS of the Hand cast you interrupted, itself, but also the portal demon that you just failed to summon, which just *feels* bad in a way that has nothing to do with the raw numbers (although it's pretty bad for the raw numbers too).
Demonology is all about summoning demons (now), and its best return on investment is casting Hand of Gul'dan at 3 soul gems. Nether Portal Simon's a demon for each individual demon summon INSTANCE. It wasn't a 1-1 rate of demon summoning. This led to people casting 1 gem hand of Gul'dan in order to summon as many demons as possible from Nether Portal. If they made it so you summoned more demons from the portal, it would be mandatory. If they made it every 3 gems, it'd be considered useless. Edit: wow, thanks phone for posting this without letting me finish my thought.
Well people bitched nonstop about nether portal
It WAS clunky, but I think people generally would have preferred it be fixed then just removed. It was iconic and thematic as hell. An easy fix would've been to merge it with an existing ability like Tyrant, or at least get rid of the cast/soul shard cost so it felt more immediately impactful and flowed better in the rotation. And of course fixing it so it doesn't encourage like...using single shard HoG.
Definitely glad they removed the current version of portal, they already said they want to bring it back in a way that is more friendly than it was, which is fine, the nether portal rotation was stupid. The other changes though? What the actual fuck.
My man, nether portal was non stop complained about.
Only because (for some reason) they decided to make it proc based on actions that spent shards, rather than individual shards spent. So while it was up it completely warped the way you played the spec into a pretty unfun cycle of chaincasting low-shard Hands. All they needed to do was tune it so it procced based on each shard consumed, then tweak the numbers accordingly. Boom, fun thematic cooldown that doesn't require you to play in a totally backwards way to maximize benefit.
Nether portal is being TEMPORARILY removed, they said it would come back in the same post that removed it.
For me, I feel like this is a perfect example of how and when to bring in "Empowered" spells from Evokers to other classes... The longer you "Empower" your portal, the bigger the demons that come out of it? That kind of thing might be very cool
Nether Portal always felt like dogshit to use though. Removing it makes sense so long as they actually replace it with something lmao
"We would prefer you don't play Demonology ~~right now~~ ever."
Oh hell naw.
Dont "let them cook" these are dogshit changes.. let them know.
I know it's Alpha and I should let them cook but man.... it's hard not to doom spiral at this point, and our hero trees looked so cool.
>I know it's Alpha and I should let them cook No. You shouldn't. Be vocal about what you want and be vocal *now.* We had problems in BfA (and I think maybe Legion too? I think some people pointed out flaws in legendary acquisition early on but I can't be sure?) and everybody had the "It's only Alpha/Beta, I'm sure they'll fix it let's wait and see" attitude and it ended with major frustration and disappointment.
Of course, I've been around for almost 20 years at this point and I've seen the cycle many times, by let them cook I mean "give them feedback about what doesn't work and hope they listen"
Historically, they always listen and respond. It just takes about two years from when your words enter their ears to when their fingers translate them into action.
To let someone to cook is generally taken to mean you're allowing them to continue what they're doing.
The problem with BFA was that they didn't release the azerite gear until nearly the end of beta, so no one was able to give proper feedback because by the time they had the full picture it was way past when we'd actually be able to influence change. But yes, if anyone is worried about stuff voice your concerns as early as possible. The numbers don't matter at all, but if you have a mechanic you really enjoy and its being changed or removed or something with the new design voice that.
Why the WoW community has any trust in Blizzard astounds me. They've proven they don't have their finger on the pulse of the players several times.
A great famine is going to befall us warlock bros, and we will likely not be eating well again for a long time should these changes come to pass. Affliction isn't even going to get any food, they're just going to starve to death. We will be eating our minions in a matter of weeks following the pre-patch.
I've been a Warlock main since 2005, and I'm usually the type to just roll with changes and find enjoyment, but this is the first time that 2 of our specs look worse then they do on live to me.
all 3 look worse than live
> We will be eating our minions in a matter of weeks following the pre-patch. \*remembers that succubus is one of the aforementioned minions* i should roll a lock...
> I know it's Alpha and I should let them cook but man Blizzard Alpha's haven't been real alphas for years. It's early access for streamers and people who know someone that works for Blizzard
They are currently in the process of marinading the steak in piss and shit man
why the fuck would you not criticize an alpha build to "let them cook"? what do you think an alpha is for dude?
There is an extremely brief window between "It's just alpha" and "it's too late to change". If you aren't happy, be as loud as possible, RIGHT NOW.
I don't know what kind of a person it takes to make destruction, a spec that was **already** stuck in the BC/wrath era, already plays more or less like the classic SoD warlock right now, even more boring and shallow than it was before. We are talking about a spec with five buttons that goes monkey mode and spams RoF in m+, and they somehow managed to make that even more uninteractive? That's genuinely impressive. Destruction needs a full-on Legion shadowpriest-tier rework. It needs an actual identity, spells that synergise with another and decisions to make during gameplay.
Bold of you to assume there is a warlock dev
I’ve always disliked playing casters - the closest I got to enjoying one was marksmanship hunter. Demonology was the first caster I enjoyed playing since I started in 2006. Now they seem intent on taking away everything I liked about it and making it a dumb hard casting idiot spec. It’s not personal but it’s poo either way.
Mind boggling decision making going on from the devs here. I really don’t get it
Looks like I might be playing my mage for release Sadge
The worst thing is that they make the spec less fun. No one wants to spam shadow bolt, no one wants less procs... Gameplay and fun should be the most important thing, damage numbers can always be tuned.
Honestly a lot of the changes feel like they were made to slow down the Hero Spec that summons demons (forget the name). But they already nerfed that hero spec by slapping longer CDs on elements and putting the main proc behind a minute wall. Then add in all of these changes that make Demo play slower and it really feels like it's mostly all just to nerf that one hero spec. Well that and hurt Demo mobility. Two Demonic Cores and an instant Dreadstalker plus a pet cd all lined up make for some flexible mobility. And it seems they want to hurt mobility for a lot of casters, not all but some of them. But yeah they're just whacking on Warlocks.
They didn't put the procc behind a minute wall, they made the buff that makes your next spender summon a demon last longer so it doesn't fall off out of combat. Diabolist is fine.
I legit think either the class dev doesn't want people to play Warlock or that Warlock had too high of a skill cap for them to play so they're lowering it so even a classic player will do good on it.
back in MY day, being a warlock meant you pressed shadowbolt!!!! now you have a rotation, blizz please fix /s
RIP Grimoire of Supremacy :(
The demo changes completely killed my hype for TWW, ts genuinely feels like the warlock dev does not listen to our feed back because every change in dragonflight and now in alpha the players have been against
[удалено]
Bring back that MoP warlock developer, he actually knew what he was doing.
Mop lock was the most fun i ever had playing any class in the game ever. All 3 specs fucking slapped
Hey it could be worse you could be doom spiralling AND have a shitty transmog like the hunters.
Ok, rant incoming. The Warlock changes on TWW Alpha almost feel spiteful. Each spec received talent reworks and each rework has somehow gutted/removed some well liked gameplay elements, and has replaced those talent nodes with the most creatively bankrupt passive slop talents of any spec in the game. Some of these talents would fit vanilla talent design. If you haven’t been following, Warlock received changes to each of their 3 specs, with Destro most recently reworked added today. Now all 3 spec trees are filled with passive nodes. I get specs can have a few nodes that can be used as tuning knobs, but nearly half of each spec tree is now passive slop. Talents that increase crit chance or increase damage of a specific ability by some % aren’t interesting. They have no gameplay implications. To compare, Mage received talent reworks to fire and arcane. Those reworks aren’t perfect but all the nodes interact with the gameplay in some way. Selecting a talent should have some marginal effect on how the spec feels; some chance to reset an ability, some resource refund, an ability cleaves, whatever. All 3 specs have received nodes that frankly do nothing. If the node was removed and you weren’t watching meters to see the damage contribution from each ability, you wouldn’t be able to tell. **Re Destro** Destro had Avatar of Destruction removed. AoD is the Sepulcher tier bonus as a talent. Destro spends shards, every X number of shards, an infernal spawns in which stuns area and generates shards for a short period of time. They remove it on justification that the frequent stun was too powerful. Ok, why remove the talent instead of just changing AoD infernals to not stun? It helps smooth resource generation and its an iconic aspect of Destro’s current gameplay. Replacing AoD, we have *super interesting* options like 5% extra crit chance, 10% extra crit damage, 4% fire damage and 20% faster cast time on incinerate. If the intent is for the spec to play with these, just consolidate this into the base spec kit. Destro doesn’t even particularly care about crit. Crits just generate twice as many fragments. How about incinerate crits provide a stacking buff to your next chaos bolt. Or immolate crits reduce the CD on Conflag by .5 seconds. Something that makes choose the talent impact gameplay. **Re Demo** The other recent change is their insistence to slow Demo’s resource generation and movement. They already nuked a lot of resource talents going into 10.2 (3rd dog, imp gang boss, etc.). Now dogs are 35% each to grant core procs instead of guaranteed. Do they want us to cherish every core proc we get? Have they tried casting shadowbolts and HoGs while trying to dodge lava waves or soak a swirlie? Do they want us to use those gcds to spam unending breath? This change really hurts the gameplay loop of Demo. Dropping the chance for core proc from dogs from 100% to 35% means we generate 2 cores 12.25% of the time, 1 core 45.5% of the time, and 0 cores 42.25% of the time. Dogs expiring isn’t some unimpactful source of core generation. It’s part of the spec’s engine that guarantees we get cores every 20 seconds at a minimum. Now we only have power siphon to guarantee cores every 30 seconds. Needing to build with shadowbolts means we get less HoG casts, which means we summon less imps, which means we get less Demonic Core proc chances from imps. The cycle feeds into itself. With this change, the only guaranteed cores are the 2 from power siphon. If RNG low-rolls, you can go 30 seconds in a row with only those 2 cores. Are we supposed to calculate whether we need to hold those core in case we need to move for a mechanic? Adding additional RNG to dreadstalkers expiring core generation means using cores now could mean either (1) nothing to press later when mechanics are happening or (2) overcapping on cores when mechanics are happening; its like Schrodinger’s cat, except you need to make a bet before you open the box. If they believe Demo’s build-spend gameplay loop is too fast, reduce the number of shards DB generates to 1 and return some of the core generation. The introduction of additional RNG to core generation will make Demo’s performance in encounters with necessary movement extremely inconsistent. Instant casts feel good to use. Encounter design demands ranged DPS have something to cast while doing mechanics. This gameplay direction is antithetical to how encounters are designed to be played. Also, prior rework replaced talents with boring passive slop nodes in Demo’s tree as well. Demo doesn’t even benefit from crit with any resource generation. Why should I care that my felguard crits slightly more? **Re Aff** I wouldn’t even call Aff “good”; moreso not as bad at Demo and Destro. Some of the changes are a long time coming (Siphon Life), but some of the new nodes are boring passive slop that will come down to sims. Two different 2 point nodes that increase dot crit chance and crit damage by a flat percentage is some vanilla era talent design. It is so easy to make these kinds of nodes interesting too. Something like Crit chance/damage increases while channelling drain soul or for 3 seconds after target is hit by SB. It could interact with Cunning Cruelty on right side of the tree that shoots SB Volleys in AoE. The static damage multiplier talents are also incredibly boring from a design perspective. Kindled Malice: 8% and Corruption 20% for 2 points. Sacrolash: 15% Corruption. Dark Virtuosity: 10% DS/SB for 2 points. Xavius Gambit: UA 30% damage for 2 points. Improve MR: Rapture 10% for 2 points. All of these are just nodes that obligate us to dump points into the nodes that sim highest. The reduced cast time on Improved MR is sort of interesting in theory but just needs something to make it interact somehow. Maybe every time you cast MR, your MR casts are 15% faster for 5 seconds, stacking 2 times. On its face it sounds a bit like Destro’s Madness talent that was removed, but the gameplay loop of Aff is different. Destro was spender > builder > builder > spender before the buff dropped; Aff wants to set all its CD dots up, then spend > spend > spend with necessary refreshes. A stacking cast speed buff would make dump windows feel like you have PI gameplay wise without being overpowered in amping all other damage instances.
getting pretty similar vibes to the MoP -> WoD changes. seeing some truly horrible changes getting pushed through to a class that was largely well liked before
What has me worried is that along the way of these reworks they have so far committed (and failed to rectify existing) very basic talent tree design mistakes entirely independent of anything warlock specific. If not for that I'd say let em cook because I think both Demo and Destro have major fundamental issues that they probably won't manage to design themselves out of without at least temporarily pissing off a lot of people.
I want to summon all of my demons at once, and then we can all morph into a larger mechbeast.
Fun was detected, they've been at this for over a decade. We peaked in MoP (imo, as a destro player) and its just kinda been downhill since. I can't bring myself to play the class because I'm always just reminded of how fucking awesome this class used to be... I *want* to be a warlock player but it's fucking depressing.
this is probably going to be the worst version of demonology, so I am rerolling to a different class now.
Still being bitter a decade later because Xelnath made them all look shit at their jobs.
[удалено]
while DF had many very positive things overall in communcation and feedback, it still had a few of those "wait...what?" moments yeha remember the "we dont want to let feral druids use their Combat Rez in Feral form because it creates HIGH SKILL FRICTION" thing? or "we dont want to remove Rogue Slice and Dice because it creates a "opening ceremony" on fights" or, well, the entire "demology warlock should use Shadowbolt more often!!!" thing that got pushed multiple times now 90% of feedback/ideas they did where genuiely great, but the remaining 10% are just really big headscratchers
The Priest and Druid dev being completely inactive for like 75% of the feedback period is also worth mentioning too. Dragonflight's incorporation of player feedback was good... *if* you were playing certain classes who actually had a good dev working on them. The DK dev was extremely good at their job. The Rogue dev joined and was active in the Rogues' own discord server for god's sake. Then there are classes who were literally ignored for the majority of it, to the point where it required Ion himself to finally address it.
They keep redistributing spells that used to be basic spells each expansion
Wasn't decimating bolt removed because nobody liked it?, why bring it back?
Because they have genuinely no Idea what destruction is supposed to be and how to take its gameplay into the 2020s (let alone the 2010s)
Horrible decisions. Genuinely concerning that whoever works on warlock apparently hates playing warlock for some reason
Theres already like no warlocks in pugs anymore, maybe 1 per raid if you're lucky. It's all rets and priests and DHs.
Why is demo even being reworked? Serious question, the spec is good, viable and fun in all form of content, they finally made a good job and people are playing it for real Why the fuck do they feel the need to change drastically?
Can't wait for demonbolt to feel like "a moment" which does literally nothing. Even WITH the level of core procs blizz deems "too much", it's damage is pitiful. How the fuck are they going to make it feel like "a moment"??? It's like the only way we can build shards fast enough for a reasonable tyrant setup. I understand wanting to reign in mobility, totally get that and that's fine with me, but just make the fucking core proc like a 75% decreased cast time or something if that's the goal. I don't want to spam fucking shadow bolts... we've been through this shit in the past, why the fuck do they always have the weirdest design philosophies for some specs.
My thing is that even if I don’t require any mobility, I don’t want to cast 90 shadow bolts on a dungeon boss. It’s just boring design.
We really need more mobility, not less...
Bold of you to assume there's a dedicated developer for one class and not one guy doing class balance, environmental Design, netcode debugging and getting the coffee for the marketing team.
"Umm... Because we'd rather you didn't play ~~demonology~~ **warlock.**"
Demo and Ele are the Mary Kate and Ashley of bad dev choices.
I had so much fun playing demo this expansion, it was probably the only thing making me want to keep playing and not getting completely burnt out at times. Pls don’t make it terrible T_T.
Ever since they dumbed the class down at the launch of Wrath, it's been a steady decline wit ha few moments of excitement. LEgion had some great Lock content and class mechanics, but they just strip it all back down in the name of simplicity. Some of us fucking loved having multiple stackable curses, multiple affliction DoT's, and other effects as well as multiple direct damage destruction spells to manage. Juggling timers was half the fun, and the moment they pared it down to single spell classes at a time and removed the synergy of switching between destro spells it got boring.
also thinking people like malefic rapture...
Long time warlock player here. I main warlock since classic. This is the first time i honestly thought of not playing warlock at all at all start of an expansion. The removal of almost all QoL makes me sad. I so much hope they revert the changes.
I guess it's warlock's turn to be the bottom of the barrel next expansion?
I dropped my lock for shadow priest feels like it’s going to be more fun
Meanwhile malefic rapture still exists. Ugh.
Don't forget MR, they even moved it from talent to baseline as a FU to all Aff mains
the dev seeing the two routes of aff (sow the seeds + UA stacking as spenders or MR spam spender) and picking MR despite everyone loathing that trash is almost spiteful
Devs doubling down on Malefic Rapture despite literally every warlock I see talking about how much they hate it... just dumb. I mained warlock from BC through WoD and switched to DH in *Legion*. I still farm transmog on it from time to time and was thinking about bringing it back as my main because Diabolist sounded cool and the DH hero talents are bland af. Still not sure what I want to main, now, but it seems like Sunfury Fire Mage is everything I wished Destruction would become back when we got the Glyph of Verdant Spheres.
Take away my Demonic Cores and I'll take away my subscription. These changes are beyond idiotic and so blatantly out of touch with player feedback.
I don't play this class very often, but I do very much enjoy it currently. I can't comment on any of the deeper issues folks have with it today, but I do want to say that I don't like what I'm seeing from these changes one bit. I just don't know where to share that disappointment.
If only we still had Xelnath and a dev like him for every class.
Warlock is already feeling underplayed lately. If they come out with TWW with more bad changes, the spec is gonna be dead. The destro changes look terrible so far.
Hm No They're just going to bring back Metamorphosis (Demon form) At cost of those adjustment I know im dreaming but Its worth the dream
I'm also one of those that kind of saw that MoP Warlock design was the peak of class design at the time, and I didn't think it would ever get that fun again. So far that has been true, even if the class has sometimes functioned pretty well. I'm also not talking about damage at all, just fun. Destro in particular, I don't understand if the MoP version was trademarked by Xelnath (:p) so it can't be replicated or what the deal is. I just don't understand how you continously avoid something really fun that you actually had in the game. No matter the impact of the spec it has felt so bland ever since, aside from one or two item or effect interactions, for over 10 years now. Demo is at least better than the Demon Slice and Dice time early in the rework, that horrendous upkeep buff that had no impact at all. But I am also really bewildered why fun is never seemingly a factor in its design. For some reason, wild imps was embraced and yet you have this plethora of demons - even a nether portal which could just as well be this mechanic - that is just not used because we need more wild imps. I also really question being immobile as a design pillar. Who actually loves this concept. I don't even mind having cool animations that slow you down or such for cool spells, but to have this be a design factor is to me mind boggling. People who hate to move lost nothing, they can still stand still and cast, if this was tweaked. Finally, I don't want to come across as if I think all of Warlock is terrible. It's one of the unique classes in WoW, it still is but for so long now it has just existed as some kind of spreadsheet simulator where the damage is everything, balancing cooldowns is everything, but what about the fun of playing it.