Sunday, July 12, 2009

We don't need no stinkin damage

So the warlock Q&A has been answered. I am not going to bore you with details because there's really nothing concrete in there except some vague promises that things will improve for warlocks. Looking at the 3.2 patch notes it puts me in a somber mood to see that the actual warlock buff doesn't come from changes to the warlock talent tree itself but indirectly through a resilience change.

Resilience will be changed to a flat damage reduction across the board. Since previously both our dot damage and later our dot crit damage was taxed by resilience the change effectively means warlock damage will be higher relative to the damage that everyone else is doing.

The problem however never was our damage (not in pvp or pve). Warlocks left alone can output a significant amount of damage well capable of causing significant havoc in the enemy ranks.
The reason why warlocks fair so poorly in PVP at the moment is purely down to survivability of both the pet and the warlock (and maybe that darned felpup spell interrupt missing all the time).

While some changes to pet scaling will hopefully help the pet to stay alive longer (possibly even 3 whole GCDs) the actual issue is still with warlock survivability itself.

Warlocks don't live long enough to deliver their damage because their ancient high-stamina drain tanking capability has been stripped down to nothing and they received no other relevant buffs to their survivability (if anything the constant fear nerfing is really doing them in now defense-wise).

This makes warlocks easy targets for any melee that can manage to keep stepping on the warlock's toes, so easy in fact that a decent melee will maybe need 5-10 seconds to tear the warlock to shreds healing applied or not.

I see the signs on the wall though... if you keep buffing damage now to the point where the damage starts having an impact once again and only then address the survivability you can have a guess what will happen.

My thought on the current situation of the warlock class, beyond that the whole class is really poorly designed and could use at least some 'vision' is that we really don't need all the extra damage they're alloting us.

I never wanted to be a glass cannon... I wanted to apply my dots and then by the good graces of high armor (for a caster) / high stam and a few solid life-returning abilities live long enough to see my dots slowly ticking away on the enemy before having to re-apply them.

I don't envy anyone in charge of class balance but it seems to me it's harder to balance a class that was not blessed with a clear vision of what the class should/could be.

Perhaps it's time to delve deeper into the warlock design...

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