Warlock Nerfs
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I’ve been browsing the forums a few days ago and noticed this topic, listing all the changes affecting Warlocks. I’ve checked old patch notes myself and ever found a few missing, so I decided to update this list.
Patch 1.1
- Howl of Terror: Increased the chance of breaking early.
- Fear: Increased the chance of breaking early.
Patch 1.02
- Warlocks can no longer kill players in duels. (not really a nerf, just a bugfix - but sounds funny)
- Fear: Players now have an increasing chance to break free of the effect, such that it is unlikely the effect will last more than 15 seconds.
Patch 1.03
- Fear - Mana cost changed to a percentage of base, which results in an increase in cost.
Patch 1.04
- Seduction (Succubus) - Is now considered a Fear effect for purposes of diminishing returns.
Patch 1.5.0
- War Stomp (Doomguard) - Now has a maximum of five targets.
- Warriors: Deathwish - Is now usable while under a Fear effect, and will also remove an existing Fear effect.
Patch 1.7.0
- Inferno - The stun effect can now be resisted.
- Druids: Druids should now be able to shapeshift back into caster form while Feared.
Patch 1.0.8
- Soul Link - Percentage of damage split with pet has been reduced (50% to 20%)
- Improved Drain Mana - Damage caused by this talent will now cause 150% damage instead of 200% damage, which is now consistent with other damage spells.
- Pets no longer break off attacks when their target is affected by Warlock Fear.
Patch 1.0.9
- Hellfire - Victims of Hellfire are now able to resist properly. Warlocks continue (as designed) to be unable to resist their own damage.
- Curse of Shadow and Curse of the Elements - These curses can no longer cause resistance to become negative.
Patch 1.10
- Death Coil - The horrify component no longer affects undead creatures (they’ve seen it all before.)
Patch 1.11
- Soul Link: If your pet is banished, Soul Link will stop functioning until Banish wears off. In addition, Soul Link’s tooltip has been clarified to indicate it only works with your imp, voidwalker, succubus, or felhunter.
- Fear: The calculations to determine if Fear effects should break due to receiving damage have been changed. The old calculation used the base damage of the ability. The new calculation uses the final amount of damage dealt, after all modifiers. In addition, the chance for a damage over time spell to break Fear is now significantly lower. Note that Fear continues to be roughly three times as likely to break on player targets as on non-player targets.
Patch 1.12
- Howl of Terror: This spell now uses the same resistance checks as the Warlock spell Fear.
Patch 2.0.10
- Demonic Tactics now grants increased critical strike chance to you and your demon pet, instead of increased damage. (affliction nerf)
Patch 2.0.12
- Melee damage of “Felguard” has been reduced (about 40%)
- The bonus that the spells “Corruption” and “Curse of Agony” receive from bonus spell damage effects has been decreased by approximately 10%.
- Soul Fire: Bomus damage reduction from 171.4% -> 115%
- Soul Link: The damage mitigation component has been reduced. (30% -> 20% mitigation)
- Imp Firebolt bonus damage reduced by 50%
- The talent Improved Firebolt changed from 1 second max reduction to 0.5 sec.
Patch 2.1.0 22
- Chance to break crowd control from damage: The increased chance for a spell to break from taking a critical strike has been removed. Instead, all targets over level 60 have a slightly larger chance to break out of crowd-controlling effects when they take damage. (Affliction (and Demo) nerf) - In addition, fear and seduce both have “heartbeat” resists and can break at any time, whether damage has been applied or not.
- In PvP, all CC’s have a maximum time of 12 seconds.
Patch 2.1.3
- Curse of the Elements and Curse of Shadow now have a duration of 2 minutes when used on PvP targets.
- Curse of Tongues now has a 12 second duration when used on PvP targets.
- Death Coil is now is now subject to diminishing returns in the Horror category. Currently, only Death Coil is in this category.
- Soulstones: Soulstones can no longer be used on targets not in your party or raid. In addition, the soulstone buff will now be removed if the target or caster leaves the party or raid.
- Spell Lock (Felhunter) duration reduced to 5 seconds (rank 1) and 6 seconds (rank 2), and cooldown reduced to 24 seconds.
Patch 2.2.0
- Banish, Seduction, Enslave Demon and Fear duration against PvP targets has been reduced to 10 seconds.
- Resilience Rating: The reduction to the percent chance to get a critical strike now also reduces the damage dealt by damage over time effects by the same percentage.
Upcoming changes:
- Mortal Strike and other healing reduction effects (like Wound Poison) will affect Drain Life (and probably Siphon Life).
- Fear Ward will now be available to all Priests at level 20.
- Hunters are getting a debuff similar to Mortal Strike
Other classes:
Rogue:
- poisons will last for one hour now, increased from 30 minutes.
- the speed at which Deadly Throw travels is being increased significantly, so it will reach the target much faster, and the snare duration is being increased by 1 second.
- Shadowstep can now be used at any time, not only while stealthed. In addition, after use of Shadowstep threat caused by the next Ambush, Garrote or Backstab will be reduced by 50%. The cooldown will however be increased to 40 seconds.
- Also on the Subtlety front is a change to Dirty Deeds so that it will also be increasing damage of special attacks by 10/20% against targets that are below 35% health.
- We’re also taking a look at bumping up Hemorrhage a bit, but no details yet on what that may be.
- Fleet Footed will now be a 15% speed increase instead of 8%
- In 2.3 Blind will no longer require a reagent. It will also be changed to a physical attack, will share the same diminish category as Cyclone, and diminish in PvE as well as PvP. (basically, Blind can no longer be dispelled)
Hunter:
- Arcane Shot (ranks 6+) will dispel 1 magic effect in addition to the normal damage.
Warlock buffs in 2.3:
- There is a change for Ritual of Souls which will significantly reduce the time to cast and complete it.
- Banish may no longer be cast on targets tapped by other players
- That’s it!
Now, I’m not saying other classes weren’t nerfed over time - they were, some even more than warlocks. But don’t you dare saying how locks never get nerfed! I’m pretty sure I even missed some nerfs while looking at the patch notes, for example Insignia of the Alliance/Horde was changed a few patches back, which gave warriors and rogues another way to remove fear effects, even Death Coil. There’s also dozens of undocumented changes.
I admit it, Warlocks are very strong in PvP, even overpowered vs. some classes/setups. But Rogues and Warriors don’t have much problems killing Warlocks now, so they are the last ones who need buffs. Every single class is getting buffs except Warlocks, and it’s been going on for the last few patches.
Shadowpriest/Lock combo was too strong in 2v2 arenas, so they got nerfed by resilience in patch 2.2. Now, locks are considered generally overpowered, especially SL/SL specs (siphon life/soul link), but is that really the case? What option do I have when fighting melee classes other than DoT + Drain Life spam? Casting Shadow Bolt with 0% pushback resist? It literally takes ages, and in the end it will get Kicked or Pummeled.
You’re saying Death Coil is imbalanced - what about Cloak of Shadows; you’re complaining about paladin’s bubble which can now even be dispelled.
Let’s see, I play arenas with a Holy paladin, +1700 bonus healing. We enter the arena, and for the sake of argument, our opponents are Holy paladin and MS (of course) warrior. My usual routine is Curse of Tongues on pala, and damaging DoTs on warrior. I need 6-7 seconds for that, maybe more. Casting Fear on pala, get Pummeled. Cast fear again, pala dispells with trinket. All my DoTs are getting cleansed in the process. Only damage I did was with Curse of Agony on warrior. Meanwhile, my teammate is struggling to heal me with Mortal Strike debuff on me, wasting precious mana while the opposing team’s paladin can pretty much go AFK. What options do I have besides Drain Life on warrior or Drain Mana on paladin? Warrior just keeps smashing me with his sword without breaking a sweat, while me and my pala try to keep me alive, and while I try doing some damage.
It’s even worse vs. rogues: cheap shot, kidney shot, gouge, blind… I can’t even Drain Life properly while getting all the interrupts, my teammate can’t heal while being CC’ed for half of the fight. Rogue has much more interrupts, while a paladin has one bubble and one Insignia. After I place some DoTs on the rogue, he simply uses Cloak of Shadows and removes them all. If he’s close do dying, he can even Vanish and go bandage somewhere.
Let’s snap back to dueling a rogue for a moment. You think Fear is annoying - how about rogue’s stuns/CC? Duel starts, Cheap Shot, Backstab, Backstab, Kidney Shot… I use my Insignia, run away a bit, get Crippling Poison, try casting Fear - Kick, cast Fear again, he uses Insignia. If there’s some distance between us and I start casting some spell, I won’t do much against his Deadly Throw and PvP/Arena gloves equip bonus (spell interrupt and 3 sec silence) unless I fakecast - even if I do, my movement speed is still reduced and I won’t get far. Oh wait I have Death Coil, lets cast it. Oh snap, he used CLoS. So much about my imba Coil. Since I used all my cooldowns so far, Drain Life is the only thing keeping me alive while he’s feared and my DoTs tick. That is, if I’m not already dead. If I run out of mana and have to Life Tap, I’m almost doing him a favor. Don’t forget, he still didn’t use Blind or Gouge.
Fighting a warrior is easy - cast Siphon Life, Corruption, Curse of Agony, Immolate, and hope your Drain Life can keep you alive while DoT’s do some damage. Don’t bother using Fear, warriors are almost Fear immune with all the abilities available to them. Even if you do Fear, it won’t last long. Coil is pretty much the only thing that can save you; unless it gets reflected - watch out!
There was once this arena match, where I died, along with shaman from the opposing team. My pala had about 3k mana, while the other team’s mage was out. He kept polymorphing my teammate and ran away from him for 4 minutes, till his mana regenerated and his cooldowns were gone (evocation, water elemental). He even bandaged from 2k hp to full. Of course, the mage won. Balance?
I’m not angry because warlocks are getting nerfed (ok I am a bit but that is not the point) - I’m frustrated because I will be running away from every noob or halfskilled rogue or warrior I bump into in battlegrounds because soon I will have no chance of defeating them, even if they have worse items than me or no skill. I’m mad because I feel like I wasted all these months getting arena points and honor to buy some good items, and now when I have 11.7k hp and 360 resilience - decent PvP gear - I can finally beat the crap out of someone. Until 2.3 comes. You will see me picking up armor scraps in Alterac Valley, killing rams and do other PvE stuff, because I’ll be too afraid to run into a warrior or a rogue (or even a hunter, if they get Mortal Strike).
Time to get honor on my druid I guess.
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How is banish not being able to be cast on targets tapped by other players a buff?
It promotes killstealing from classes who can tag something with an instant cast after the Lock has put dots on but done no damage. Its a nerf.
It’s not a buff, it’s just me trying to be sarcastic, but obviously I failed.
Lock didn’t get any buffs, that was the point
I know how you feel about rogues and warriors in arena — the stun us, locks, and we can’t even do anything except wait for death to take us. LOL! Well, I guess that’s why they all want to kill the lock first in an arena…we are powerful…powerfully nerfed!