Spooncraft

Little warning that due to the nature of my trauma over the weekend this is kind of a long post (as the Paladin one will be)

Warlocks (at least the original poster in this thread) are pissed and feel cheated this time around. I can’t comment and am thus staying out of the argument since my wife plays a warlock but my bias says they’re fucking overpowered anyway and didn’t need tons of work going into Wrath to make them viable, just to keep them fun.

Soul Shard system not even touched
I have said many, many times that this is something we’re looking at right now. I am going to be less sympathetic to QQ that we don’t read your posts if you don’t read ours.

Damage overall is too high, arenas feel “scrubfriendly” and even more luck-based
We think there is some truth to this. The recent resilience change was intended to help. We also expect health and mitigation to increase much faster than damage increases as players hit 80, but it is definitely a concern right now in PvP.

Completely reliant on having 11 points in Demo, maybe 17 (or even more).
This is not a major concern for us. As I have also posted, good talents are good. If you didn’t want them, they would be bad talents. If you had so many good talents that you had a hard time deciding, I’m pretty certain the response would be that the trees are bloated.

Shadowflame is a pathetic addition, it’s as if they’ve run out of ideas and don’t want to bother thinking of any good ones. We’re already strong enoguh at AoE, damnit. I mean really if you want to give us dragon’s breath from mages, just give us the green version and call it green dragons breath with all the same goodies of dragons breath.
Shadowflame fulfills a very specific role. If you hadn’t noticed, we are pushing Destro more towards fire and Affliction more towards shadow. Shadowflame is one of the few spells that crosses over because it does both types of damage (which should have obvious ramifications for a lock).

Teleport spell again pathetic (Can’t used while stunned) I mean really Blizzard you give us a good Defensive spell after all this time and you do it half assed. I mean we actually have to set this spell up in order to use it. Tell you what make it so that Pallys have to cast a spell first before they can bubble, make it so Rogues have to do something before they can vanish/COS, make it so Mages have to cast a spell before doing ice block or blink.
We think Demonic Circle is going to end up being a big deal. It’s not a trivial spell to use — it’s a thinking person’s spell. It takes planning and some intuition. I suspect it is being underestimated because so few people have actually gotten to use it yet.

Affliction. Complex PvE rotation is impossible to accomplish in PvP; you have to do far more work than before to do the same relative DPS as in BC - the spec is more reliant on spells with cast times.
We think the complex rotation is very hard to pull off in PvE too and seems to almost mandate a mod, which is a problem. We have some long-term plans to change Affliction around a little bit.

Why did you add glaringly PvE-based talents and changes like Master Conjurer, Demonic Empathy, Demonic Pact, Imp. Demonic Tactics, and others when you expect this to be our PVP tree?
There are no PvP trees anymore. My comment was that Demo may not have the sustained dps of the other two trees in PvE, but at least it would still be taken for PvP. We need to see if the survivability offered by the tree offsets its lower dps or not. (And before anyone responds that you would raid with 10 health if it would improve your dps, I’ll remind you that your dps when dead is 0.)

Chaos Bolt: Could have fixed our problems with quick, reliable burst damage, but was ultimately changed into a “add this into your rotation for a few more DPS!” spell.
Destro’s rotation was among the least interesting in the entire game. It needed major help. (src)

Round 2 Developers Q&A (src)

- Chaos bolt, Instant. (Why, because destruction is still way to dependant on Casting+Stationary , LOS, and being locked out of spell trees. Mostly make it instant for pvp but would also help pve dps if locks decided to go this path.) I know hunters have simular line of sight complaints but I beleive this is hurting destruction a lot more then our hunter friends.
We’re talking a lot about warlocks in PvP right now. Instant-cast spells may or may not be one of the changes we’ll make. Ultimately, changing Chaos Bolt and Haunt to instant just makes them different spells. We would have to nerf them significantly to make them instant, which would have PvE ramifications. Warlocks do have a fair number of spells they can cast while moving.

Give demon form a permanent form for warlocks, especially if your going to be succeptable to MORE cc then you were before IE Turn evil and Banish. (Why, because “I know blizz hates it when we compare classes but” every other talented form regardless of damage reduction abilities is permanent if you spec into it” So unless this is a failed attempt at Beastial Wraith which may I remind you makes you immune to All types of CC not adds more) As well Give Soul Link the 5% bonus damage back, not sure who in the world decided to take this away.
We don’t want warlocks to be in demon form all the time. I think we’ve explained the Soul Link change before.

Give us back our old Self Buffs, the New fel armor is not cool and the Armor on Demon armor is downright terrible. I guess this is complaining so my solution, fel armor, 130 spell dmg and 30% more + healing, Demon Armor 2000 Armor+ and increased health regen.
What is your beef with Fel Armor? Our internal testing found that once you have gear with Sprit on it that it can improve you dps by 20% or even more. You may be low at your current levels without Spirit. That will change in just a couple of weeks.

There is talk about dispel resistance for destruction! this is kick ass and long overdue, what about for the few dots demon locks use?
We’re looking at dispel resistance for locks in general.

Metamorphosis and Demonology Tree
The taunt is there because we thought it might be fun in a 5-player instance for the warlock to be able to tank once in awhile, especially if the main tank goes down on a pull. It’s not the signature ability of Metamorphosis. We don’t have a problem with the spell. It is useful in PvP and provides a nice damage buff in PvE. Some of its abilities, like the Immolate, can be useful in the right situations.

What I said, and I clarified later, was that Affliction and Destro seem to do competitive damage in PvE. Demo is lower than that, which is not ideal, but we are also concerned Demo’s survivability might make it the only raiding spec if its dps was just as high. In the meantime, we think people will still spec Demo because it is useful in PvP.

Our new design is there are no PvP vs. PvE trees. But it will take some time to reach this point because we didn’t want to rip out every talent of every class and start over. The death knight has 3 trees with different flavors, but no PvP, PvE and tanking tree. The warrior and hunter are a lot closer to that than they used to be. We’re working on all the others, including Demo. (src)

Warlock Pets
I doubt raid leaders are going to be bringing death knights just for Hysteria. The whole point is nobody brings something unique to raids so important that it gaurantees them a spot. Locks still have several very potent buffs — it’s just that there are other ways to get those now too.

The Felhunter was just too well-suited for PvP. There was no reason to bring any other pet.

We would like to get the Voidwalker a little more use besides just leveling though. (src)

Metamorphosis not permanent
When I say we don’t want it to be permanent, I mean that we don’t want another class that doesn’t look like the player race.

When we’re tossing around potential new spells in an expansion, one of the guidelines is to avoid adding a long-term pet or a long-term alternate form. We feel like we have gone to that particular trough to drink plenty of times already. From a lazy designer perspective it’s easy to look to other classes when coming up with new ideas, so we try not to overdo that. Having a permanent demon form just crosses a line for us. We already have druids and Shadow form.

When I said one of the reasons we rejected Camo because stealth was supposed to be a special thing for rogues and cats, hunters challenged that notion by trying to appeal to logic or pointing out other inconsistencies. But this isn’t the kind of thing you can debate your way into or out of. We just don’t want to add more pet classes or more shifting classes to the game.

Summoning a temporary pet is fine, though we’ve almost done that one to death, and turning into an alternate form temporarily is fine. (src)

Warlock development process through beta
When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

• Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
• Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
• Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac’ing pets as often as possible).
• Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
• Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
• Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
• Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
• Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we’ve moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

• Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
• Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
• Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren’t worth the investment.
• Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
• Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
• Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
• Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction’s rotation doesn’t require such a big brain.
• Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that’s vauge, and I’m reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we’ll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them. (src)

Demonic Pact / Empathy
Demonic Pact and Demonic Empathy are two talents we’d like to work on. I am surprised you’d say that about the Felguard though. I have seen him able to do 1000 dps or more at 80 when fully buffed. (src)

Warlock Spell Damage Coefficiants
The coefficients of these spells were hotfixed last Thursday I believe.

Corruption’s coefficient went from 0.156 to 0.20.
Immolate’s coefficient went from 0.13 to 0.20.

This ends up being a reasonably significant dps buff to all 3 specs. In our preliminary testing, Demonology may have benefited the most.

Please recognize the changes these numbers will have on your class when making subsequent posts. (src)