Nobody wants to play Destruction - The Oncoming Warlock Holocaust

So with patch 3.1 comes a myriad of balance changes. Hunters are not looking so hot and terrible players like Levidian will fall back to the 1800s where they belong. DKs and Paladins will still be ridiculous and druids will still suck so things really won't be that different but whatever. I don't really give a **** about other classes so anyway..

The warlock class as we know it is on a precipice hanging over the abyss of unplayable terribleness. Blizzard in their infinite wisdom decided the completely gut the affliction tree with a series of "simplifications". Siphon Life no longer exists as a DoT and Immolate is literally taken off your bar once you hit 41 points. Warlocks now only have 2 instant cast magic debuffs and one terrible curse that is only barely ahead of Curse of Elements for dps curse of choice.

Fear is also getting **** all over. After all the epic crying about dying in Fear, Blizzard decided to make it unusable. It is going to break more quickly than Fear did in 2.4 and you don't even have Siphon Life for low damage dispel protection and might have to resort to casting low rank spells that are more expensive mana wise than their higher level equivalents. This was more of a big deal versus other warlock teams when people actually used felhunters to dispel their teammates instead of tunneling auto devour. This is kind of a tangent but people play 100x worse than they did in BC. For example, about 90% of frost mages will polymorph my teammates without putting a winter's chill up. It's ******* Arena PVP 101 and the most skillful thing these idiots can manage to do is resist spell lock even though they have Curse of Elements up because they're too ******* stupid to decurse themselves while they're running around spamming ice lance.

The only class that ever dies to a multiple fear lockout is shaman, which is ironic because they have the best fear self protection. This often requires the shaman to have retarded teammates that don't stop you and all your cooldowns (Death Coil and Spell Lock lol). Shaman, you don't die because fear is op you die because your class sucks, sorry. Blinding shaman and then swapping to them the instant they trinket and killing them in under 5 seconds is one of the funniest things in this game and way more stupid than a 10-12 second fear combo. Spam fearing a DPSd target (a DPSd target being a target your teammate is on because you don't put out real single target damage) is honestly fine. It's a 2-3 second "stun" and kills your DR on the target which isn't really that bad a trade off since they're being trained anyway.

Affliction warlocks have no burst. The only way to create pressure is to dot more than one target, otherwise your damage might look something like the PMR's priest's damage. In 3.1, dotting more than one target will result in your most powerful spell being worthless. The only thing that separates the average warlock from a good warlock is usage of fear. The best part of the warlock class is being able to apply a CC that isn't removed instantly by competent healers. UD players and shaman teams have had a pretty huge advantage on warlock teams for the most part for this reason and nobody can deny how big a deal it is.

Destruction is ******* stupid on TR. I logged on randomly a few days ago and I was incinerating for 4k, Chaos Bolting for 5k and Conflagging for almost 7k. There is only one option for warlocks next patch and that option is turning into a tunnel visioning terribad. As destruction your fear protection is basically nonexistent and at a 20 yard range it won't really be used that much. Now a good warlock will have less impact on a game unless it's from their tunnel visioning damage output. Warlocks are going to become watered down mages except they're going to get trained by melee all day long. The skill-based warlock class is pretty much dead if Destruction becomes the only viable spec. Crap like the now nerfed instant seduce is even dumber since it's probably the most easily countered CC in the game and encourages tunnel visioning even more.

Since Blizzard will probably not want to leave warlocks unscathed, here are some suggestions. Warlocks are not the party of no and I am ready with my own ideas. First of all, Fear could be made to work similar to Hungering Cold. A debuff that breaks on damage unless that damage is an affliction spell. A similar damage cap to what it is now for affliction spells would also be fine. You really really should put Siphon Life back in just with an adjustment to make it unattractive in a PvE rotation. There is a lot more to PvP balance than there is to balancing a PvE rotation. Things like spell duration, number of debuff slots, damage per tick are a lot more significant and taking out Siphon Life removes a lot of utility. Taking out immolate takes away our best spell to cast when we're locked out of the shadow tree with nothing to replace it. The fire tree should have something more interesting than just red damage but thats probably asking for too much.


TLDR Affliction is actually a skill based spec and Destruction is completely devoid of skill in the way playing a ret paladin is completley devoid of skill. Blizzard is retarded and shortsighted and has no idea what is actually going on in their own game.