Warlock Q&A Released

Once again it’s time to hear what Ghostcrawler and the rest of the development team have to say about the World of Warcraft classes moving forward. We’ve seen the Q&A feature for the Shaman, Mage and Death Knight in the past. Now it’s time for the Warlock Q&A.

warlock shadowbolt

In the mage Q&A, the devs mentioned that they’re planning to make mages and warlocks feel less similar and that since they’re happy with where mages stand right now from a design perspective, warlocks will be the class that would be drifting away. Ghostcrawler said that the soul shard system is the area they want to make a few changes to achieve this goal. Right now shards are more for maintenance and thus take a back seat to the actual warlock game play. Shards are used to summon the minions, healthstones, summoning portals and other things that are “cool” but necessarily totally needed. They want to change that. They want to make using shards a core mechanic and that using a shard would provide a combat boost instead of used for just minor things. They want shard usage to be a big deal! [maybe things like a trinket like ability costing a shard to increase spell power or things similar to that? That would be so cool if it were].

The devs also want to make pet usage and abilities more interesting. Some pet abilities just aren’t used that much anymore (imp fire shield) and some pets aren’t very interesting to use like the voidwalker. They want us to make interesting decisions when deciding which pet to use for a certain scenario. They also feel like it’s time to improve pet survivability especially in PvP. They said that they’re going to address this by slowly going to make pets scale with all stats, starting with spell penetration and resilience.

They also recognize that warlocks have a problem with threat management especially since other classes can reduce their threat by just spending a couple of points in one talent while locks have to spend a lot on talents that even belong to different trees. They’ll have to figure out a way to solve this problem without moving around the talents too much. A partial solution is lowering the cooldown of Soulshatter to 3 minutes. Talents that affect the range of certain spells also suffer from the same problem as the threat reducing ones and thus are in the same boat.

Here’s a list of other things that were discussed in the Q&A and are being considered for implementation (meaning they’re still just thinking about it, okay).

1. More burst damage for Affliction warlocks through Haunt and Pandemic

2. Hellfire doesn’t have much of a niche and could get cut in the future.

3. Green fire! Instead of giving it to all fire spells, they might just make a new spell have it.

4. Class specific flying mount

5. Being able to customize or change the appearance of the warlock pets.

Looks like warlocks have quite a bit of interesting and cool things to look forward to going forward and I wish the devs some luck and success in trying to address the issues mentioned in this feature.