BLIZZERD EHATS WAROLKS

Ever since the first fear nerf (which couldn't really be called a fear nerf, as it limited duration on all forms of CC in PVP), the favored cry of the bad has been "Blizzard hates Warlocks," sometimes accompanied by such favorites as, "They should just delete the class and give everyone a level 80 (class)," or, "The class serves no purpose anymore," or my personal favorite, "Things were so much better in [vanilla/BC/3.0]."

I've got a lot of opinions on this, but to sum them all up, warlocks right now are in a good place. Overall in Wrath of the Lich King, we've been in the best place we've been for PVE ever, though it's been a rough ride for PVPers.

BUT VANILLA WAS BETTER!


Ok, I'll bite, let's talk about how things used to be...


The bulk of vanilla locked warlocks under the debuff cap. 40 people got to compete for 8 debuff slots. After CoE, CoS, mark, and the sunder stack (the priority debuffs that didn't get pushed off), that doesn't leave much. Even after the debuff limit was increased to 16, they were precious things, dots never went full duration. Curse of Doom? Have fun. What this meant was that every spec we had was a shadowbolt spam spec. Hell, affliction (SM/Ruin at least) was the least DOT based spec we had - shadowbolt was higher DPCT than any of our DOTs, mostly because DOT scaling was terrible. Not that shadowbolt's was much better, by the way, frostbolt's damage with fireball's cast time and higher mana cost than either.


We were specifically designed to be an inferior caster for several reasons: We had DOTs, we had pets, and we weren't mages. Mages were intended to be the supreme caster, hands down. Our dots weren't feasible in raids, our pets weren't viable in raids, and the only threat reduction we had (in raids that were highly threat sensitive) was so deep down our worst DPS tree that by the time we got it, we didn't need it anymore.

We were in a good place though. We had three specs that could do comparable DPS. They were basically the same spec, one had strong shadowbolts, one had stronger shadowbotls but with longer cast times, and one had good shadowbolts with low threat. That was it, but at least we weren't, say, Paladins, who had one functional tree. Retribution was so broken Holy was better DPS. Protection was so broken Holy was a better tank. And holy couldn't even heal all that well next to a priest, let alone DPS or tank.

About the time that guilds discovered you didn't need multiple warlocks past Garr, the class started seeing a rapid decline in high end raiding. It didn't help that they eventually figured out you didn't have to banish to kill Garr easily. There was a long period when one warlock for Curse of Elements and one for Curse of Shadows was normal... Then somebody pointed out that the only class actually benefitting from CoS was the warlocks and you didn't even need that, just one for CoE.

Combined with the complete lack of sublte design in 40 man raiding, and things spiralled out of control. Some of the frontier guilds had a boomkin, cat druid, and warlock there only for the sake of buffing their array of mage, rogue, and fury DPS, who accounted for every other DPS slot. This worked because there was no distributed raid utility - all the buffs could be covered with only a few characters, which left the rest of your raid slots open for the classes designed to be best at what they do - holy priests, prot warriors, mages, rogues... Fury warriors got in due to runaway rage generation, which Blizzard eventually nerfed hard enough that they barely saw the light of day again until Wrath.

Toss in a shard system that would require warlocks in a raid with a "standard" 5 locks to bring 50+ shards and still run out half way through with no way to replace most of them, and it was hard to keep things fun raiding as a warlock. I developed an unhealthy love of Jagermeister and Mountain Dew during my BWL months. Raiding 7 days a week back then you could still validly call your guild casual, and it took everyone 3-4 hours of farming to pay for those raids. God forbid you were in content that actually called for flasks, a server could only spawn enough black lotus to cover maybe three guilds using flasks on the whole raid..

BUT THEN BC MADE IT BETTER

Yep, so much better we... still spammed a single spell. The same spell as in vanilla. Yeah, we out DPS'd mages, and shadowbolt's runaway scaling meant that it got bigger crits than it did for most of Wrath, but the only thing that kept us where we were was the fact that Blizzard was extremely lax about PVE balance during BC.

We spent that entire expansion with the Sword of Fucking Damocles dangling over our heads. Class supremacy as a design rule was still in effect, and every patch brought twin worries: That the destro tree would be reposessed for the fire spec it was meant to be or that mage caster supremacy would be enforced. It got talked about, the threat was real. The only thing standing between warlocks and three more tiers of CoE bot was a lack of timely developer response to severe mage scaling issues.

Just to rephrase, the reason warlock DPS was tops is that Blizzard allowed a balance situation to continue for four tiers of content. The exact same situation (only worse) than warlocks chaffed under for about two months in the early phases of the Icecrown Citadel rollout before Blizzard decided it was unacceptable and took steps to change it, and people acted like it was the end of the world and just time to reroll mage now. Mages had that for two goddamn years, no wonder they cry so much.

Throughout our darkest times in Wrath, warlocks have never been even half as far behind mage DPS as we were in vanilla. We weren't even as far behind them as they were behind us in Sunwell, and they didn't fare badly at all. For the first time ever, we're MEANT to be on par with mages, and when we're falling behind, Blizzard has reacted, as they did with 3.3.2, and are continuing to do in 3.3.3.

When the class was nerfed for PVP several times in the Ulduar timeframe, it always received buffs PVE side that worked out to net gains in DPS. These hurt scaling and led to problems down the road, but right now we're reaping the fruits of those problems, and in powerful, game changing forms. From Glyph of Quick Decay to the new Demonology nuke rotation,

BUT MY SHADOW BOLT CRIT FOR 11k IN SUNWELL AND BARELY THAT NOW!

And your DPS has close to trippled nonetheless. This is what having a spell rotation does. Warlock DPS is no longer stands or falls on a single spell's scaling. Even though that spell scales lower and is generally weaker than it once was, DPS rotations involving it do far more damage than the old spam specs.

BUT BUT BUT DEMONIC SACRIFICE!

Let's face it: Demonic Sacrifice was never anything except an apology for a design oversight that left us with a large chunk of our class being completely inviable in a raid setting. It carried a certain flavor, but was nothing more than a clunky substitute for a broken mechanic. It's taken a long time, but demonic sacrifice hasn't served any purpose for a long time, our pets finally, after four years, worked when we started raiding in Wrath. For a long time, neither pet class actually GOT to be a pet class.

I was pretty dumbfounded when several times after the removal of Demonic Sacrifice, I read posts on the lines of, "A pet class isn't what I signed on for." A pet class is exactly what you sign on for when you click the purple button. Reality forced the class to be a totem class for one expansion and a one button caster that had to cast a few spells every half hour for another, but the description and talent trees have always been that of a pet class.

So let's look us right now:

• No more mage supremacy - we are no longer an inferior caster by design rule.
• Three viable talent trees (two of which have viable variations). More raid-viable specs than we've ever had, and they're not all different ways to do the same thing like the last time we had more than one good spec.
• Raid viable pets. The first time this has happened for us ever.
• Developer action when DPS is being outscaled by (or outscaling) other classes.
• Complexity. People have been saying "warlock is hard" since day one, yet our PVE history has been one of almost nothing but pressing one. Single. Button. My keyboard only dates back to Hyjal, but there's no 2 left on my 2 key, it completely wore off back before I even saw serious work on Supremus. From six tiers of shadowbolt spam, our simplest rotation now consists of four spells, and our most complex consists of nine(!). Even our top PVP spec of BC was SL/SL, a simple but brutally effective spec, no fun for anyone involved with either end of it.

BUT BUT BUT CATACLYSM!
Yep, Cataclysm. I'm confident. The class is a lot better now than it was in BC, and several things stand promising in Cataclysm.

Flexibility of spec. None of our specs have much wiggle room right now, talent trees bloated badly in Wrath, and not just for warlocks. Blizzard's biggest design promise (and biggest design challenge) is a revamp of all talent trees to get rid of this ongoing bloat.

An end to shards as we know them, and the introduction of a unique resource system in it's place. People like to call it a recycled DK mechanic, but the similarities between the proposed shard system and the DK rune system starts and ends with the fact that both are integrated into the UI. It shares that effect with the combo point system, and totem bars, too, but it's no more similar to them for it.

"Dumbing down" of stats? We as warlocks are losing two stats from consideration: Spirit and spellpower. In the place of spellpower, however, Intellect becomes a significant stat. It's one we've never taken into consideration when gearing before. In place of spirit comes Mastery, which if you want complexity, there's probably going to be the most complex and mathy stat the game's ever seen - it will do something completely different for every spec. So we're losing two stats, but gaining two others. And one of those two will offer more complexity than anything we've ever had to worry about when it comes to itemization. The character system is also extending with the Path of the Titans and Archaeology glyphs, adding more specialization factors to consider, and Reforging adding a freak curveball to itemization.

Developer attitudes promise to continue the current policies of viable talent trees, distributed raid support, and most importantly response to PVE balance in the timeframe of minor patch cycles rather than expansion cycles as it was in the past.

The worst worry we face in Cataclysm is a poor transition into tier 11 content. As a first tier raid I'm sure it'll be the pinnacle of raid difficulty, just like Molten Core, Karazhan, or Naxx were as they stymied guilds for weeks on end. Oh, wait... Few warlocks are likely to see content where it becomes an issue while it's still an issue if Blizzard continues as they have in Wrath.

BUT MY DPS ARE STILL BAD!

One last parting shot for Mr. Bold Text Guy: Never let the fact that your class's DPS is falling behind others be an excuse for your DPS. Eternal's Boomkin Andris put a number of DPS parses at the top of the Boomkin top lists over at WOL, he saw numbers pushing 8k in TOC. And Balance had some terrible scaling issues, worse than any warlock specs.

3.3.2 was less than a 5% buff for any warlock spec. Yet many, MANY people claimed to see 10-15% increases or more. Why? Because they were comfortable using the "warlocks are nerfed" excuse and ok with putting out poor DPS. When they finally got buffed they actually started playing up to par and getting numbers up to par. They could have been up to par before, they were happy coasting along being just good enough.

The whole point of getting an ideal spec, tweaking your gems, arguing about whether conflag or chaos bolt should be cast first or if it's worth stacking shadow embrace ahead of DOTs is that your DPS is never good enough, no matter how good you are.

People like to say serious min/max raiders have no lives. We real people have lives, we're happy being just good enough. Just think about the attitudes here. "Never good enough," vs. "Eh, it's done, what's the difference?"

There's some professional basement dwellers playing WoW while mommy and daddy pay the bills, sure, but I'm not one of them, and I don't personally know any of them. I have a career, even if it is a dead end IT job. I have a girlfriend, and live in daily fear of conversations involving the M word. I'm under thirty and own a house debt free in a troubled economy. I've built my career on the attitude that the job's never good enough. That's an attitude that's been associated with success for centuries. It's gotten me ever job I've ever held, it's kept my current job through layoffs, a merger, and a recession.

That job is why I can piss away half my evenings killing imaginary internet monsters, and the other half talking about it, and I bring the same attitude to my imaginary internet monster killing. It's gotten me into guilds beyond my gear's worth for my entire WoW career - guild were I earn my keep, not get carried to great gear. It's gotten me into one of Scarlet Crusade's top guilds. It could get me into better guilds if I tried, but I'm staying in Eternal until Kdorf kicks me out, and my cat Loki is just too cute for the guild to let him. That's another rant, entirely, though.