Feedback: Warlock Updates

#1 - April 18, 2024, 5:54 p.m.

In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Warlocks in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Thank You

Before we continue testing The War Within, we’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who read and responded to the Hero Talent previews we posted over the last few months.

Looking to the Alpha

In this first Alpha build, every single class has at least one new Hero Talent tree available for testing, with the rest coming in the following weeks. We’re asking testers to initially keep several things in mind:

• There are UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
• Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI)
• New spell visuals and audio for several new Hero Talent trees are still a work in progress. Many trees are using placeholder assets for now that will be updated over the course of Alpha.
• There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus right now that we are prioritizing over other concerns such as tuning or generic class updates/maintenance:

• Finish building the remainder of the Hero Talent trees that are not yet available.
• Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

With the Alpha build being playable and all of the discussion that will occur around the flood of data, we wanted to reiterate that the responses to our blog previews were highly valuable. The feedback we received allowed us to make some early improvements or revisions while we didn’t yet have a public test environment. It allowed us to take some big early swings on certain trees, and then react to early feedback quickly.

Going forward, we aren’t planning to publish any additional Hero Talent previews in blog form, since we’ll add the remaining classes to the Alpha as soon as they reach their ready-to-test state.

Working from Feedback

Several Hero Talent trees have received changes after reading feedback to the blog posts. Some of these were tuning changes to ensure that the Hero Talent tree felt competitive, while others were significant design changes. The feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Going into Alpha, we feel good about the shape of the Hero Talent tree designs. Keeping a consistent number of utility and defensives nodes across all trees, having parity between number of choice nodes, and the overall structure of the trees are things we’re confident in.

We’re also working on tweaking some core class designs as well. In some cases, it was necessary to make adjustments to the class or specialization talent trees before significant work was done on a Hero Talent tree. In other cases, we did work seeking to improve base class talent tree designs.

Alpha Feedback

Now that we’re in Alpha, we’re looking for feedback on how it feels to playtest these trees. We’re specifically curious about:

• Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree.
• Hero Talents that create frustrating or unsatisfying gameplay or rotations for your spec.
• Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.

Throughput comparisons of Hero Talent trees are helpful, but we’re more interested in gameplay, feel, and choice feedback at this stage. Also, when possible, we appreciate it when you focus posts or articles on a single spec and Hero Talent tree, rather than combining feedback about multiple issues.

Again, Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback on Hero Talent trees and are very excited for you to see everything else we’re working on. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

#2 - April 19, 2024, 8:22 p.m.

Greetings Warlocks,

We’ve been very excited to see the community’s reactions to the Warlock Hero Talents, and we appreciate all of your feedback.

In the coming weeks, you’ll see multiple changes to the Warlock class and specialization trees, and we’d like to provide some context for these changes here.

Core Goals

• Ensure each capstone is interesting and exciting.
• Reduce the amount of throughput talents, to free up utility choices.
• Reduce the number of ranks for talents that don’t warrant multiple ranks.

Affliction
The Affliction specialization tree forces a choice between a single-target or multi-target profile rather than providing a viable build that is adaptable in both situations. We want to redesign, introduce, and remove talents, as well as address the tuning of Malefic Rapture to help reduce this friction.

Demonology
For Demonology, we want to address the number of long cooldowns available as well as reduce the amount of resource flooding. We’ll also look at underused talents such as Doom. The feedback provided during Season 3 was instrumental in helping illuminate a path forward for Doom, and you should expect a redesign of it in a future build.

Destruction
For Destruction, we have plans to reduce the fluctuation in power based on target count. We also want to take another look at how Destruction plays in multi-target situations and look for ways to improve underused talents such as Cataclysm and Soulfire.

More to come
As always, we’re reading feedback and discussing other changes. We’re still monitoring discussions about Hero Talents, and will make adjustments as needed.

Thank you for your thoughts thus far. We look forward to hearing more as development progresses!

#8 - April 25, 2024, 9:26 p.m.

Greetings Warlocks,

Today, we have various Core and Affliction tree changes hitting the Alpha. We want to take a moment to go a bit more in depth as to what certain changes were made and why. As a refresher, here are the goals for our Core and Afflictions that we posted last week along with some additional goals that we can dig into here.

Class

• Ensure each capstone is interesting and exciting.
• Reduce the amount of throughput talents, to free up utility choices.
• Reduce the number of ranks for talents that don’t warrant multiple ranks.

Affliction

• Address the tuning of Malefic Rapture in single-target and multi-target situations.
• Reduce complexity and the amount of active buttons that contribute to it.
• Erase the need to choose between a single-target or multi-target profile by adding more adaptability and flexibility.

While we cannot go over every change here, we’d like to get a bit more detailed than last week’s update and explain some of the bigger changes coming in this build.

Class Tree Throughput
We’re removing a lot of throughput talents from the class tree to allow warlocks to pick up more utility without feeling forced to take mandatory talents to be competitive. These talents aren’t compelling options when placed against utility as they will always be the right answer to have. This allows us to move that power into the specialization trees and tailor throughput-centric talents to be specific to that specialization’s gameplay.

Malefic Rapture
In addition to becoming baseline for Affliction, we are introducing new talents that will help Malefic Rapture become the go-to spender for both single-target and multi-target situations. This should also shift Seed of Corruption to being a means to apply Corruption to multiple targets rather than what you spam in dungeons. In addition, we are redesigning Siphon Life to be friendlier to Affliction’s rotation and expect that its new design will make it easier to optimize Malefic Rapture.

Affliction’s Adaptability
While we do want Affliction warlocks to have a preferred talent setup for single- versus multi-target situations, we don’t want it to feel like they are powerless if they are in the opposite situation. By focusing on Malefic Rapture being Affliction’s main spender and removing talents that are only valuable in multi-target situations (Soul Flame, Soul Swap, Doom Blossom, etc.), we’re hoping that the Affliction tree feels less punishing to fill out.

Is This It?
Not at all. We expect to make changes based on feedback and our own playtesting. We want to get the ball rolling on changes we knew we want to make, so we could start the discussion early on and make adjustments before The War Within launches.

Thank you all for the continued discussions and we look forward to your feedback!