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Should I Return? - Scourge Warlock
emogamer26
Member Posts: 6 Arc User
TLDR At Bottom. So I posted a very similar discussion thread about 6 months ago and I was told given an inumerable amount of "No"s, but among the lot, there were a few people who gave light as to some hope for Warlock in the future. I played Warlock for 6 years up until the atrocity that was Mod 16 - Undermountain. I was excited to be able to queue as healer finally as I had mained Templock for a majourity of guild related events, but could only queue as dps. However, when the mod released, almost all of my friends, as well as I, were quite upset by the changes done to every class. My friend who mained Oath of Protection Paladin was quite displeased as he was still leveling his character because he was new, was no longer able to deal with basic creeps. I was upset because Dread Ring, a campaign I personally enjoyed just roaming around and doing the dailies, was now unplayable. So I queued up for dungeons a healer, and tanks couldn't even pull more aggro than me from my healing.
As previously stated, I played Warlock for 6 years. I started on the class and fell in love with it's design, the playstyle, and being able to opt into heal/debuff spec if I wanted. Getting to talk with other warlocks on what abilities were best and what setups to run was always a fun time. The Warlock's Curse mechanic was removed which saddened me, but only to be replaced with, what I can only describe as, a very lackluster beam for dps and a drain for healing. This saddened me as managing your curse was always a bit of a fun minigame to me, getting to play around with curse synergies and curse consuming abilities.
Secondly, soul sparks are tedious. They take a long time to build up, and they granted more stats based on how many you had. This part I did not mind. After the Undermountain update, they became a necessary part of the class, which wasn't the worst thing in the world, but I wasn't a fan of having to sacrifice them in order to use your tab ability, (Soul Scorch if I remember correctly?) for dps. Whereas the drain for the healing spec feels a lot more intuitive, but it drains health.
Lastly, I'd like to talk about ability pages and campaign rewards. Why? One of the things I found quite neat being a warlock player was the background for the ability page, being able to select feats that I could slowly feel the impact of building up as I level, unlocking buffs and passives based on campaign rewards, and picking paradigms and paragons that defined the playstyle you wanted. To start on this list, the very look of the ability page was cool to me, and actually felt like the people/person who designed it actually gave a damn about the small things. Now we just have a black background page with all your Encounter, At Will, Passive, Daily, and Feat powers on one screen. That felt superbly lazy on the developers part and combined with the "We were too busy being focused on 'Real Development'" comment on Reddit from Thomas Foss, felt like they just kinda abandoned the small things that made the game seem interesting, the small eye popping stuff that every artist knows is just as important as the main focus of their piece. The rework of feats was also something that just didn't make sense to me in any way. Making it so you could only pick one of the two feats on that section felt pretty bad as the new "Risky Investiture" (I believe) and it's counterpart, I felt like they should have been on separate feat selections because of their potential to synergize with each other. And although these new feats were supposed to feel like jumps in power, they were barely noticeable compared to the previous setup.
For my last point, I wanted to dedicate it's own paragraph to it. Diversity in playstyles between warlocks has come to almost nothing as it just feels like now more than ever, there's a meta to it. I remember when I started playing, there was a huge following behind the Soulbinder Damnation playstyle, building up soul sparks to keep your soul puppet strong and it became a very strong presence in fights. However this didn't eliminate Hellbringer Fury warlocks in terms of dpsing. The only thing we all agreed on for what was "meta" was that Pillar Of Power was kind of a crutch. Which I didn't mind. It was still a fun spell and gave defense, spell damage, and debuffed enemies who walked into it. Temptation you could run with either Hellbringer or Soulbinder and it was still fun and viable. I'm not quite sure how to heal in this current setup, but when talking to plenty of players, it seemed like everyone just defaulted to one setup that revolved around Curse Bite, a previously overlooked and unused spell. Now I'm not upset at an unused spell suddenly becoming viable, but that seemed to be the only thing that people used. And if you didn't, you were "griefing" as my former guildmates put it.
Despite my grief and distaste for the changes, I always find myself wanting to come back, as I did spend 6 years on a single toon for a reason. So I return to my title point, is it a good time to return to Warlock? If not, is there any hope for the class?
TLDR; Greatly unhappy with Warlock and overall game changes in Mod 16. Stopped playing since, but once in a while check the forums to see if I should return to playing warlock. Should I?
As previously stated, I played Warlock for 6 years. I started on the class and fell in love with it's design, the playstyle, and being able to opt into heal/debuff spec if I wanted. Getting to talk with other warlocks on what abilities were best and what setups to run was always a fun time. The Warlock's Curse mechanic was removed which saddened me, but only to be replaced with, what I can only describe as, a very lackluster beam for dps and a drain for healing. This saddened me as managing your curse was always a bit of a fun minigame to me, getting to play around with curse synergies and curse consuming abilities.
Secondly, soul sparks are tedious. They take a long time to build up, and they granted more stats based on how many you had. This part I did not mind. After the Undermountain update, they became a necessary part of the class, which wasn't the worst thing in the world, but I wasn't a fan of having to sacrifice them in order to use your tab ability, (Soul Scorch if I remember correctly?) for dps. Whereas the drain for the healing spec feels a lot more intuitive, but it drains health.
Lastly, I'd like to talk about ability pages and campaign rewards. Why? One of the things I found quite neat being a warlock player was the background for the ability page, being able to select feats that I could slowly feel the impact of building up as I level, unlocking buffs and passives based on campaign rewards, and picking paradigms and paragons that defined the playstyle you wanted. To start on this list, the very look of the ability page was cool to me, and actually felt like the people/person who designed it actually gave a damn about the small things. Now we just have a black background page with all your Encounter, At Will, Passive, Daily, and Feat powers on one screen. That felt superbly lazy on the developers part and combined with the "We were too busy being focused on 'Real Development'" comment on Reddit from Thomas Foss, felt like they just kinda abandoned the small things that made the game seem interesting, the small eye popping stuff that every artist knows is just as important as the main focus of their piece. The rework of feats was also something that just didn't make sense to me in any way. Making it so you could only pick one of the two feats on that section felt pretty bad as the new "Risky Investiture" (I believe) and it's counterpart, I felt like they should have been on separate feat selections because of their potential to synergize with each other. And although these new feats were supposed to feel like jumps in power, they were barely noticeable compared to the previous setup.
For my last point, I wanted to dedicate it's own paragraph to it. Diversity in playstyles between warlocks has come to almost nothing as it just feels like now more than ever, there's a meta to it. I remember when I started playing, there was a huge following behind the Soulbinder Damnation playstyle, building up soul sparks to keep your soul puppet strong and it became a very strong presence in fights. However this didn't eliminate Hellbringer Fury warlocks in terms of dpsing. The only thing we all agreed on for what was "meta" was that Pillar Of Power was kind of a crutch. Which I didn't mind. It was still a fun spell and gave defense, spell damage, and debuffed enemies who walked into it. Temptation you could run with either Hellbringer or Soulbinder and it was still fun and viable. I'm not quite sure how to heal in this current setup, but when talking to plenty of players, it seemed like everyone just defaulted to one setup that revolved around Curse Bite, a previously overlooked and unused spell. Now I'm not upset at an unused spell suddenly becoming viable, but that seemed to be the only thing that people used. And if you didn't, you were "griefing" as my former guildmates put it.
Despite my grief and distaste for the changes, I always find myself wanting to come back, as I did spend 6 years on a single toon for a reason. So I return to my title point, is it a good time to return to Warlock? If not, is there any hope for the class?
TLDR; Greatly unhappy with Warlock and overall game changes in Mod 16. Stopped playing since, but once in a while check the forums to see if I should return to playing warlock. Should I?
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The exception to this lies with a few special builds from a few paragons that are able to "highly utilize" the Bilethorn weapon enchantment to achieve considerably higher DPS, by maximizing its proc count. Warlock is now as common in the game as other classes. Everyone in every class wants more powerful skills and someone is always complaining, but balance is the best its "EVER" been at this moment.
But to elaborate, that Mod 16 "ruined gameplay" is a canard being fussed about by exploiters who can't accept that their multiplier spam builds are gone for good. To many who didn't use them, our character's classes got stronger.
My Rogue went from a scrub Scoundrel Tree to a 'godly' Assassin Tree.
My beloved Archers, with my new Lightning build (https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/comment/13116823) is no longer 'pathetic'. While it is still ways behind the cheesy Melee Warden (zzzzz, I wonder what happened to the equally cheesy old trappers), it's still way better than pre-mod 16 Archery ( I just had to let go of the old archery build and make completely new one).
The real reason why many quit after Mod 16 and 17 is due to core problem of repetitive vertical progression feedback loop.
This lead to progression and gameplay rut and eventually to the Developers themselves devaluing everything to 'reset' the game because everyone is essentially 'capped' so they took it out on maxed and high level players by nerfing everything from enchantments to boons to artifacts to companions and avoid hitting the newbies by raising the cap instead.
We identified all these in the various CDPs.
So they are doing passes on rewards, gearing, indiscriminate nerfing of items, scaling etc.
and planning horizontal progression, new events, overhaul of events, and dungeons etc.
I suggest watching the 2020 Roadmap Livestream: https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/neverwinter/news/detail/11369073
They published a general calender in there of their plans.
And as someone has said, class balance - while not perfect by far - has never been this well hewed.
As for the dps part, I can only say its not the same it was before mod 16. Its a complete different playstyle than before. I gave up on maining dps shortly after mod 16 droped because it was way too frustrating to play for me. I never could get into a good rotation that felt fun to play and deals good damage. Since then they changed a few things, but i am not geared as dps anymore and therefore i am not able to compare my damage to other classes. Just the fact that they are not able to fix the ap gain for warlocks over two mods is still a mystery to me. In my opinion hellbringer falls very short in terms of game design compared to other classes. It had great potential to be a fun class with different playstyles. Maybe you will have more luck with the dps path then I had, but it still takes a lot to change to get me back into dps.
I see no problems with running old content at the moment. I woud actually say its way easier to get through it now than it was before mod 16.
In the end its up to you to decide if you'll have fun with this class again, but i would at least give it a try.
In a nutshell, it does not work.
If I have to guess, it is probably a security measure to avoid people to find out what a valid username is.
By the way, even in my era, I could not use my user name to login. I had to make another name to login.
i.e. my user name is plasticbat. My login could not be plasticbat. It was just not forced to use an email address.
Beyond that, you can complete the content without some meta group but many players will insist on it anyway. Warlock has a bad reputation but this is more a people problem than a class problem. Not saying all is rosy, but there are a lot of detractors and they are what pulls the class down more than anything.
For both paths, there are some issues. Hellbringer isn't the top dps (nor the bottom) and isn't the most intuitive. I've recently switched from a Curse Consume build to one that uses low cooldowns and the Soul Scorch cooldown feat. It seems to do pretty well but I haven't run any harder content with it yet.
Big issue with healers right now is that players prefer Paladin's blue HP shields for the safety margin. Massive temp HP bars let people play sloppy, and Warlock can't compete on that front. (Neither can cleric FWIW) The massive damage spikes in current endgame make it hard on traditional reactive healers.
IMO, the biggest issue in the game is a lack of worthwhile content, especially for groups. People run their RQs and then may just log out or go to run solo content (of which there are a lot of viable options to run). People who want to run queued content don't have a lot of choices that will actually reward them materially. TOMM is out of most people's reach. Infernal Citadel doesn't have good loot, LOMM gives mostly the same rewards and isn't as demanding. Cradle's ES6 drops are worth less than the ES5s from Dread Ring lairs... A lot of old content is buggy and scaling is still trash.
Personally, the warlock, both pre- and post-changes, is one of my least favorite classes to play. So, how does that help you?
Hope this helped
As far as aoe it's on par with a tr if not better being ranged. Problem being trash killing makes the damage look closer within 10% with lots of adds...untill you run tomm. To match a wizards single target damage output in tomm you need 4 warlocks stacking cd and foe to be on par at maxed endgame if there are 2 wizards using roe.
So in the end, warlocks are king of clearing trash mobs, but that's about it...unless you run with a pack of warlocls.
I log in every so often and then log out and check in like you. Very disheartening what has happened. Just my 0.02.
diversity = m16 removed most choices from game 90% people of same paragon use same feats and same spells
m17 = added recycled content from m16 and one top 2% trial
m18 = added map where you grind gear for +- week also farm new boons by doing few quests per week
and nothing else except dungeon
events = mostly same 1 new but it wasnt around for months
professions = masterwork is ruined they added stuff thats better and easier to craft than anything MW offers legendary tools are obsolete to new 10k ad ones as well but honestly consumables are only thing people bother to craft
infernal citadel - basically second tomm 99% randomly queued groups is absolutely slaughtered at first boss
you basically need 85k caps and 300 -350k hp to stand a chance if you reach this point you are doomed anyway because you spend more time assembling group from top 2-5% than in dungeon itself
warlock isnt top tier dps ... and its far behind as healer = OP(massive temp hp on top of max making people survive 1 hits) dc ( heals on completely different level) for example main aoe heal spell for sw have 400 magnitude dc 750 similar pattern exist in damage reduction yes you can heal but dc or OP will do it with half work / gear
overall no they dont see any m16+ stuff as mistake they pretend to hear .. make stuff like cdp to talk with community but int he end they ignore 100% of it and continue in same steps
if you talk around a bit ..majority of old players is bored/pissed by the lack of content/choices and hanging around only because they struggle to abandon characters and all that time spent on them so they just waiting for change or just clearly appear once per week/month to see nothing changed and go away again
but yeah many old guilds remind ghost town
and iam afraid change is highly unlikely as they have no reason to really care as long as theres influx of new players that fill the holes in income before they reach the dull endgame with 0 diversity
sooo... if you want return it might be fun for few weeks until you learn the new stuff but i definitely dont recommend warlock for that its currently second grade citizen by having 2 underpowered paragons .. most classes have atleast one that works and one
or you can wait and see if they wake up or ruin neverwinter even more before you decide
but basically if you didnt like m16 then dont bother .. they continue in same tracks
I play only my Main GF since Alpha and was thinking about getting back into the game with that special situation out there. But since they removed the tactician GF Buff machine I was always afraid, that tank gf is useless.
To start a new character, play all campaigns again and farm them up with good stuff again is nothing I would like to do in this game again.