Interview With Azael: The Future of Warlocks and Necessary Changes for them to Survive

Since season 5 of the Arena began, the amount of theorycrafting on any forum pertaining to WoW has increased dramatically. While DK's and Rogues are of primary discussion here on Gameriot, I think that Warlocks, one of the classes in dire need of assistance, have rarely even been talked about. Perhaps it's because they've been so dominant in the past? Regardless, today I sat down with one of the most acclaimed Warlocks in the history of WoW, Azael, to discuss some of the primary issues with Warlocks, and what needs to be done to bring them on par with other classes.

Jasi: Hi Azael, lets start with an obvious: It's clear Warlocks are hurting right now, what are your biggest personal issues with the class?

Azael: Warlocks have a lot of problems in arena right now, the biggest one that stands out for me however is that our pets have still not scaled even close to well enough, and they desperately need resilience, and probably hp buffs as well.

Warlocks strength in BC stemmed from the fact that we were able to tank large amounts of damage while putting out steady damage throughout the course of a fight with our DoTs. With damage the way it is right now, even with massive amounts of HP and Resilience (I have 23.5k hp unbuffed, and ~750 Resilience with my trinket), you can easily die in one stun, or one interrupt / silence on your healer. In 3v3 you basically need a really good demon portal to be able to get away, and the spell simply does not have enough flexibility.

You have to pre-plan your demon portals, to get one that's even worth using, and with the way arena is, the fight can easily change locations putting you out of range of your portal when chasing someone for a kill as walking half way back across a map to get in range of your demon portal with a slow on you takes forever, and even if you drop a new portal where you are, you have to gain distance on it before using it makes any difference.

Not to mention the fact that you can't even drop a demon portal on the elevator in Orgrimmar arena, and most fights are over before you get to even set one up in a decent place and use it.

Jasi: How do you find that you overcome adversity and deal with these issues?

Azael: Well I basically just started doing arena on my warlock this week, but I've played on a few 3s teams, up to 2k w/ Dimetra and Litreocola w/ only a few losses, up to 2120 w/ Sck and Litreocola on the same team, and more recently games w/ Zyz / Kollektiv and Sck / Zyz. The reality that I have found is that your success just depends massively on what teams you play against. When playing with Entrepid and Litreocola, we enjoyed the comp very much and I got to 2k with maybe 6 or 7 losses and I came out thinking that the comp was pretty strong, however we really didn't run into many DK / Paladin / X teams, and those pretty much dominate warlock teams.

Basically I have found that to find any success you need good teammates who're willing to play with a warlock, and having a Paladin is pretty much needed, because against a lot of teams when playing with a shaman they will just zerg your healer with fear immunity and he's dead before they even able to be feared. Having your rogue or melee going on their rogue or w/e is locking you down is also pretty much a must, once you're free you can spread dots and start to control the fight a lot, DoT damage is pretty strong if you can get a full set up, and fears seem to last forever, you can solo a healer pretty easily if they don't have a trinket or bubble, so spamming fear works wonders, it's also very effective against rogues that you're targetting as it really can last a long time even with your whole team on them and it makes it so that they can't dodge your rogues kidneys etc.

You basically have to plan out your demon portal, and have your healer know where it is and be in a good position to heal you when you use it. However, even with near perfect play you are at a big disadvantage against most teams, a lot can happen that just makes it impossible to win. Against many of the double physical teams if your paladin ever stops spamming holy light on you, you can easily just fall over instantly, which makes it hard for him to keep himself topped, and makes them an easy target for a swap from a DK once gargoyle is out.

This allows DK Pally X teams to pretty easily kill your pally or you, not to mention the fact that your pet can be killed in 1-2 hits almost every game, so using a felhunter is almost pointless against most teams since it just dies and devours / spell locks fail anyway. I honestly played a ton of the games starting w/ a void and using it the whole time so I didn't lose soul link.

Jasi: In regards to pet survivability, do you feel that a change in that resilience is shared with your pet would be sufficient to alleviate the current issues? What kind of percentage would you like to see ? If not, what other changes would you like implemented?

Azael: I guess it just depends what kind of a percentage your pets got from your resilience, I mean there are games where nothing has even happened yet and your pet is dead, and you're just left wondering what just happened. Holy paladins can two shot your pet with unresistable damage, it can be tabbed to with sudden death and one shot, a rune strike crit will most likely one shot it, and it will die constantly to random DnD + Pestilence on top of the damage your dealing to it from Soul Link. It is just silly how fast the thing dies, and it's hard to know what it would take to fix it, because it's painfully obvious that they need help, but if you make them too strong it quickly becomes overpowered.

As an example of how big of a joke they are at the moment is I had one game where I was sapped, my pet was shadowstep ambushed for it's full HP. I then got opened on, trinketed, demon portaled and fel-dom'd my pet, the rogue vanished, and ambushed my new pet one shotting it, shadowdance was then popped and I died in about 3 seconds after that to an ambush or two plus an evis.

Like I said though, it's very hard to say a precise number, as it would really have to be tested to get it to a place where it's good, but not overpowered, maybe 30% of your resilience, and your spell hit, with next patch as far as I know the dispel change is going to effect felhunters, so devours should always dispel something if it's a debuff, which is VERY nice, because it's extremely frustrating for your healer to be getting spam mirror image sheeped and having every dispel fail.  As for spell penetration, it'd be nice for your pet to have that too as an arcane mage with shadow prot, as well as others are basically immune to it, but with the way it is, you honestly can't even afford to gem spell pen at the moment because you need to gem full stamina and resilience, so giving your pet a portion of that would effectively do nothing.

Even if your pet gets 30% of your spell hit, it'd still be missing cap by nearly 3% assuming you have 4% hit, and although resisted spell locks are annoying, most of the resists now aren't from your pet missing hit it's from the massive amounts of resist some people get through talents, which is another problem altogether.  Blizzard deemed it overpowered that our pets had resist, then turned around and gave it to arcane mages, frost dk's, etc.

Jasi: What talent specs have you been experimenting with? Thoughts on the SK-100 top warlock that is playing SL/Destro?

Azael: Basically the only thing that I have found that works is haunt / sl, 54/17.  I've played metamorphosis and it's just depressing how bad it is right now, destro isn't even an option as your sustained damage is horrible, and you really can't hope to get enough casts off with a deadly brew rogue on you, or double melee on you to make it worth it.

Playing as a meta lock, you're able to be banished, instant-turn evil by all the pallies that have that glyph, which is a huge amount of them, and you're not immune to fear so you can basically just be CCed the entire time when you have it up.  Expose armor is also bugged and takes you to zero armor even though you're well over 20k.

I can't really say that I've been paying attention to SK-100, so I haven't really seen that, and if there's a destro lock having great success then that is impressive, but I would be surprised if it works at the highest levels in most comps.  It worked to some extent at 70 with patch 3.0 because it allowed you to actually live through mages with Nether Protection, but even then you got absolutely crushed by cleave teams, and there are so many now that I just don't see it being successful against all the dk + physical damage teams. Not to mention the fact that all the physical damage classes do far more damage now compared to level 70.

I would be really surprised to see a destro lock do well with a deadly brew mutilate rogue on them + a DK with mind numbing and two physical damage classes, or a ret paladin + a BM hunter.

Jasi: What kinds of changes would you like to see made to Metamorphosis?

Azael: There are too many to list, but the expose bug is being changed next patch which is nice, but I mean you spec 51+ points into demonology to have your pet be weaker than my DKs ghoul, which has no minimum range on it's stun, more survivability with huddle, and honestly higher damage most of the time.  If they insist on having meta be banishable and allowing pallies to use turn evil on it, then it should at least be fear immune since you're a demon, but honestly I think that you shouldn't be able to use turn evil / banish on it.

Even with those changes though your damage is just AWFUL outside of the meta, and your only real chance is killing someone with immolation aura which requires them to stand beside you for basically the entire duration.  Once out of it you have limited instants, no slows, etc, you just become a massive joke.

I was playing 5s on my death knight with glick and others, and we ran into two meta warlock teams, and between glick and our pally the guy basically didn't get to cast a spell when he popped meta, and we completely ignored him outside of it because he did nothing.

Jasi: On the topic of 51 pointers, since you're playing Haunt, how do you feel about it and the rest of the affliction tree? Any changes you'd like to see?

Azael: Haunt is pretty strong, your damage when you get free is solid, it's a fun spec with a lot of instants and good mobility.  Instant howl of terror on a 32 second cooldown with the glyph is a ton of fun, definitely my favourite talent on a warlock.  I feel like affliction damage is around where most classes should be, it's strong once it builds up and you have a full dot stack, but there's no retarded burst coming out of nowhere and insta-killing you.  Haunt / SL is pretty good and if you play it right with great teammates and a good comp you will have success even now against a lot of teams, so with a few buffs here and there to survivability it will be around where it should be.

Haunt resisting can really screw you over pretty bad since it increases your dot damage by 20%, and it's also a decent little nuke, it even falling off for a bit can be a huge pain, it having no travel time would be nice, and if it or ua were instant it would be amazing, but I'm not sure if that's really reasonable, because it would really make it too easy to get your full dots up, and make it basically impossible for healers to ever dispel since UA wouldn't be preventable.

One thing I think should be changed however is Shadow Embrace, I really feel it should be applied by your instants, corruption, ua, etc, as right now it's only applied by haunt and shadowbolt, so although it is a nice debuff, it can be really far too hard to keep up to make it worth the talent points at the moment.

Jasi: in terms of warlock survivability, do you think its an issue with damage being to high around the board, or a more talent issues? Blizzard is weakly responding either way with the Fel Armor buff.

Azael: It's a bit of both I think.  The demon armor buff won't really do anything, it's 1200 more armor, and although it's kind of nice, it really isn't going to change anything.  A lot of the changes coming next patch are huge steps in the right direction, so I'm hopeful that future patches will continue in the same direction, and everything will be fixed before the ESL Finals in Germany.  The dispel changes will mean your healer might actually be able to get rogue poisons off you which is really nice, and the demon portal buff willl mean you have a better chance at kiting once you use it since it will break snares, but the bigger issue is that you really just need to be able to get to a point where you're able to live through interrupts, and where games are lasting long enough for your DoTs to have an effect on the game, since right now (especially if you don't play with a paladin), the game is over before anything really happens, so when your dots are ticking for maybe 1k max it doesn't really compare to classes being able to hit for 10k+ or chain 6k hits, and the games can just end before you even get a chance to get involved in it.

For it to happen, damage probably needs to be dropped across the board, although it is already far far better than it was at the start of the season since people are getting a good amount of gear now, and have a much better chance of living through a CS.

Warlocks are extremely hard to balance though, because if your survivability gets to high it gets to the point that it was in season two where you basically couldn't die and so you just slowly but surely were able to kill the other team with steady damage from a target that was nearly impossible to dent.  Blizzard really needs to get it in the sweet spot where you're able to live if you play well, and keep your pet up through good micro with it, and quick heals / health funnels on it, but where you can still die through bad positioning or a solid coordinated burst plus an interrupt on your healer.

Buffs I'd like to see: Pet survivability obviously which I mentioned, a buff to soul link maybe back to 25% or so, and an improvement to demon portal more so that maybe you can use it while stunned even if it means the stun still persists after you land.

As far as damage goes, I'd much rather see other classes damage come down to where warlocks are rather than warlocks go up to where the other classes are because damage and burst is just ridiculous at the moment. And that would also help out a lot of other classes, not just locks.

Jasi: How do you feel about the different pets right now? Would you like to see a change to felguards or succi's for example?

Azael: Felguard needs a lot higher damage to be worth it honestly, BM pets make it look like such a joke, and even ghouls are better. Succy has never been useful but I don't see that changing. If it has high HP seduce is way to overpowered. They'd have to rework it, especially w/ the instant seduce talent.

Jasi: Thanks for the interview, any final shoutouts or comments?

Azael: Thanks to my sponsors, EG, Intel, Kingston RAM, Razer, Stoked Energy, check us out at www.myeg.net