The Warlock Demonology Tank

As you may know, in MoP demonology warlocks are obtaining a new resource, demonic fury. This is consumed to use abilities while in demon form as well as providing a damage buff. Now with the beta live, some people have discovered this glyph.

Glyph of Demon Hunting
Demonic Fury now reduces damage taken instead of increasing damage dealt.
In addition, while using Metamorphosis, Soulshatter taunts your target, Twilight Ward will absorb all schools of damage and Demonic Slash is shorter range and generates fury.

In addition to this, datamining has revealed that when using the glyph, a warlock recieves a 600% increase to threat generation while in shadowform. The demonic slash spell has no cooldown and it's fury generation allows for permanent demon form AND demon form applies a significant armour buff as well as the standard tank crit reduction.

Warlock mastery now improves the effects of demonic fury, making mastery a mitigation stat with this glyph, warlocks will also have these cooldowns.

Twilight Ward - Absorbs X magic damage

Unending Resolve - The Warlock hardens his skin, reducing all damage taken by 50% and preventing his spells from being interrupted for 12 sec. (Shield Wall)

Dark Soul: Knowledge - Your soul is infused with demonic knowledge, increasing your Mastery by 30 for 20 sec. (30 Mastery would be a TON of mitigation)

As far as I'm concerned this is concrete proof that Blizzard wants to experiment with warlock tanking in MoP. According to some people who've examined the numbers in detail a warlock tank would currently have far more mitigation than most tanks, compensated for by a lack of meaningful avoidance. What are peoples thoughts on this?

By the way I lifted a lot of the info here from an excellent post by Seiru in the official forums, check it!
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...6995300?page=4

The new tank of choice for challenge modes!

I wonder if this is really a thing that will make it past the beta...it sounds amusing, but I'm dubious.

Edit: The direct link to Seiru's post is here for the scroll-incapable.

There's no way in hell this makes it past the beta without some kind of stupid arbitrary restriction that just flat out disallows Warlocks from tanking in raids. Let's go down the list here:

1. Mastery grants straight damage reduction, which gives exponential returns, which is something they've been trying to fix on tanks for two whole expansions. Also, Warlock tank itemization will consist of enchanting/gearing/gemming nothing but mastery, and if Tier 14 has a mastery cloth piece in some specific slot while Tier 15 and 16 don't, you don't ever get to upgrade that Tier 14 piece.

2. Look at the cooldowns and talents. They have a 100% damage reduction cooldown that doesn't drop aggro. An AoE life tap that gives them 4% of max health per second per target. Shield wall, half a dozen self heals and heal increasers. Yeah, this stuff is for sure balanced.

3. They're starting with 43% damage reduction baseline, and mastery on gear just directly adds to that percentage. They also get 600% armor from items, which is a LOT more than 110% armor from plate items.

Sure, they could nerf some of these things to bring them in line, but not without substantially nerfing Warlocks in other areas (especially PvP) just to shoehorn the tanking ability in. No, it's not going to make it live unless Blizzard is crazy, in which case it'll be worse than 3.0 Death Knights, in that Warlocks are so good at tanking the other tanks might as well not exist.

Totally agree that they seem stupidly overpowered right now, but I'm not sure it's unrecoverable.

The baseline damage reduction is fairly easy to nerf down to the same level as other tanks, they can nerf the damage reduction aspect of demonic fury without having any affect on warlocks in other areas. The difficulty will be in balancing a flat mitigation based tank against tanks which rely more on avoid.
The 100% damage reduction talent absolutely needs to drop threat, no doubts there.
They also need to figure out the itemisation, they could maybe have intellect provide some sort of mitigation, which would make gearing them a bit more like gearing a druid tank.

Add to it achimonde's vengeance dealing 5% of all damage back to the attacker. I'm all for more tanks, but many feral druids are butt hurt over this which I get... however more tanks being available helps the 5 man que times which will be an issue again when everyone is running 5 mans at the start of MoP. Currently they sound GROSSLY overpowered but that's just balancing... hell I think half the brewmaster abilities sound overpowered currently too.

Early beta build is early, and beta.

Warlock tanking can be done without being over or underpowered -- it's ultimately no different than adding a tanking tree to a brand new class (see: Monk). It's purely a matter of getting the right mechanics in, with the right implementations. The current mechanics are obviously not the right ones and need fixing, but they could easily move some numbers around and scrap/add certain mechanics and make it work.

I don't personally believe their goal at the moment is to let Warlocks be a full-time tanking class. It's possible, but it'd be weird to do that through a glyph, so my guess is they want to experiment with the idea of letting Warlocks function as dps/offtanks (which is a role that's becoming more and more valuable in modern raid design, e.g. Heroic Spine). However, we've seen in past betas that they've taken classes in new directions purely because players have latched onto ideas they loved (see: death knights as a pet class), so if it's something the community really really wants, I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see them let Demonology be a full-fledged tanking tree (or, perhaps more likely, give Warlocks a 4th spec ala Druid).

I miss tanking as a warlock... P1 Vanilla Nef AoE tanking the drakanoids, Sunwell tanking twins... tanking the head on H-Mimiron... Illidan P4... back when he had a phase 4 at least. I'm sure there's other's I'm forgetting.

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

I miss tanking as a warlock... P1 Vanilla Nef AoE tanking the drakanoids, Sunwell tanking twins... tanking the head on H-Mimiron... Illidan P4... back when he had a phase 4 at least. I'm sure there's other's I'm forgetting.

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Blood prince council

There is enough evidence, for me, that they tried that alredy for WotLK. I hope they will succeed this time.

This is what I wrote here:
http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.php?74210-All-classes-should-be-changed-to-hybrids-(and-how-to-do-it)

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Actually, I think someone at Blizzard had the idea that warlocks should be able to role change to tanking during the development of WotLK. Unfortunately that didn’t go through, probably because of the introduction of the DK. I hope they take another look at it and implement it in the upcoming 2013 expansion.

Here is why:

• Metamorphosis increases your armor contribution from items by 600% and reduces the chance you'll be critically hit by melee attacks by 6%. That’s basically the same talent druids had for WotLK and now every tank spec has the crit reduction talent. And it affects only melee critical hits, as spell critical hits don’t exist in PvE.
• There was a taunt in meta form, which was removed for Cataclysm. Still, it was a taunt for a single role DD class. Doesn’t make sense if they didn’t play with the idea of letting warlocks tank.
• In meta form you had “Shadow Cleave”. Inflicts weapon damage plus 15 to an enemy and its nearest allies, affecting up to 3 targets. Sounds like some kind of tanking spell.
• Meta has a charge.
• In the WotLK zone presentation media event video (at 0:55) you’ll see the warlock class mount and the rider is wearing a shield. Looks like at one point they might have played with the idea to let warlocks wear shields. That would only make sence for a tank. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5c...ent_videogames
  

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I honestly hope they actually bring warlock tanking back. Perhaps not full time, but I always found the fights where warlocks tanked a certain portion of to be the most fun. On top of the ones that Aggathon and leethaxor listed, there's Leotheras the Blind and Grand Astromancer Capernian on the Kael'thas fight.

I can't honestly think of why fights with warlock tanks felt the most fun for me, but they were. Maybe it's that they have all sorts of different mechanics in them as well because, hey, if a warlock is going to tank, they might as well go crazy.

OMG how could I forget about Kael'Thas tanking, that was so much fun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGgi341JXQo

that looks like a LOT of fun o.o

Hopped into beta earlier to mess with demo tanking. I was right, it's a LOT of fun :P

Ridiculously OP too. Took my i372 warlock, specced him demo, and solo'ed ZG (minus Bloodlord). Was a bit hairy in a few spots (Zanzil took me a while) but I managed.

Lots of fun though.

This is so getting nerfed.

http://i.imgur.com/6AuSZ.jpg

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Originally Posted by blizzard blue post

Just to make our intent clear, the Glyph of Demon Hunting isn't intended to turn Demonology warlocks into a tanking spec. You won't be able to queue as a tank for Dungeon Finder for instance and won't have the survivability or tools of say a Protection paladin.

Historically, warlocks felt tankier than other casters and could even off-tank some encounters. We have made an effort in Mists to recapture some of that flavor. A warlock with this glyph should feel like they are about as effective tanking as an Arms warrior who pulls out a shield and swaps to Defensive Stance, or a Feral druid who goes into Bear form. You might be able to off-tank adds or pick up an actual boss for a short period of time if the tank goes down.


To make warlocks an actual tank would take more significant changes. For example, we want tanks to have to pick up separate tanking gear than their DPS gear (this is even true of druids) and want tanks to have to give up some of their DPS potential in exchange for their survivability. In short, it needs to be a commitment, and that's the sort of thing that needs larger gameplay changes than just a glyph.


That shouldn't stop the glyph of Demon Hunting from being fun though. As you can probably tell, we are trying to make even the major glyphs more about character customization and fun.

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I need beta access right now.

Follow up to the previously quoted blue post from Ghostcrawler:

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As some of you have pointed out, the glyph of Demon Hunting in your beta build doesn't deliver on what I described above as the design. The newer version of the glyph, hopefully available in the next beta build, allows a warlock to toggle in and out of the off-tank / survival mode, more like the druid going Bear or the warrior going Defensive.

The new shapeshift granted by the glyph is called Threatening Presence (PH) and adds Taunt and Fury Ward to the normal Metamorphosis toolkit. You still get the damage reduction from mastery instead of the damage boost from mastery while in this form. You can also choose to go into normal Metamorphosis even if you have the glyph. Let us know how it feels.

We appreciate all the feedback and passion on this topic. We expected this glyph would serve a pretty niche community and were surprised at how many players were excited about it. We are still in beta and are still very much experimenting with what kind of gamplay we can deliver in glyphs.

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I just... I mean how... Do they even... What are... Why are we...

Here I was waiting for a post this weekend that this was some sort of an April fools joke that got leaked and pushed by accident or them to admit that they were toying with the idea of lock tanking to see how it felt and what the community felt in beta. Instead, I get a post that makes absolutely no sense. I looked through the data mined items and I don't see any leather items with dodge on them so if all GC meant about gear sets was stat preferences and gem/reforge differences then I'm lost as that glyph did force the warlock (if it had functioned as intentded) to saccrifice DPS potential and it was a commitment as much as anything that can only be changed out of combat can be...

So, our options are now a completely nerfed glyph that makes no sense to spend time testing, balancing and developing or a glyph so powerful since there's no DPS peanalty if you choose not to use the Presence that lock "tanks" will be required on any fight that uses an off tank briefly.

At least we might be getting green fire at least... oh wait :(

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Originally Posted by GC

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4253968049#12

To make warlocks an actual tank would take more significant changes. For example, we want tanks to have to pick up separate tanking gear than their DPS gear (this is even true of druids)

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That's a very lame excuse. Cloth tank gear is already in the game since vanilla.

http://www.wowhead.com/itemset=520/ironweave-battlesuit

It's not like Meta couldn't be tuned with the expectation that the warlock equips items with tank stats. At least on 5 pieces Tx, rings, neck, trinkets and maybe weapon. I mean this is even true of druids.