Recently I’ve noticed a glaring issue. The levels of armor and the balancing in general of supers. Each class has had their nightmarish and meta supers in the last year in spectral, nova warp, and smash and they were all adjusted. For a long time, dawnblade was a great choice for warlocks in general. At least, bottom tree. Then the nerfs came in slowly. After every update would be a patch note about nerfing dawnblade in some way. Then recently, the nerf to stormtrance absolutely slamming its neutral and super game. It now seems that warlock super cannot compete with a lot of supers. As of writing this, I’ve found that the best class is top tree dawnblade, as the dodge can be useful while shotgunning and utilized almost like a hunter triple jump to confuse enemies. But the super is terrible. It takes entirely too long to cast, there’s almost zero magnetism making it hard to hit people, and your giant head + flame FX get in the way. Not to mention the only way to move is use up valuable super energy and even then it’s very slow as people can run away fairly easily. It’s basically a weaker Jotunn. Then the removing of Felwinters helm. After using it, it was ok. Underwhelming in a lot of parts of the game, but a potentially useful pve pick. Could bring up warlocks in a good way. But they were slightly bugged where they would blind when not supposed to. So it’s been DISABLED nearly the whole season. Your telling me, Titans can have a helmet with wall hacks, damage buff, recovery boost, and shield charge for nearly 2 WHOLE YEARS. And it’s fine. Hunters have an exotic that can blind, confuse and take away radar on demand around every 10 seconds. But warlocks have a helmet that occasionally activates at the wrong time (I saw it happen maybe twice while using it). And it’s instantly disabled. For a month +. Then, the nova warp slightly buffed. Still can’t compete with other supers, but can be slightly useful with blink and astrocyte verse or the hand held. Now, I admit it needed a nerf. Hand held was too good. But it’s probably the most useless ability in the game at the moment. Most of the time you either kill yourself, do have the enemy health, or it takes too long to charge. Charge it beforehand? Nope, you just end up putting away too fast. Every aspect of it was nerfed to the point there’s no point in using it. Now I get that it could kill multiple people, but right now titans have an ability that can kill 3+ people with the ballistic slam and that’s currently untouched. Shoulder charge can take out multiple people if close together. Next, let’s count the number of useful pvp exotics for warlock. Let’s see, there’s ophidian aspects which can work as a fix for a badly rolled weapon without QuickDraw and gives a little extra melee range. Astrocyte verse(although the teleport is slow and if enemies shoot where you were mid-animation it still kills you, not to mention the radar goes away for several seconds and the cooldown on blink is really long without any indication of when it’s recharged). Potentially useful for shotgunning or making the nova warp super usable. Transversive steps - Semi useful. Great for shotgun rushing and reload is ok. That’s 3 useful pvp exotics out of 28 warlock exotics. The rest are mediocre, terrible, or cater to very very specific situations that will get you killed 99% of the time in any competitive pvp mode. I’m not saying nerf other classes by the way. I’m just saying buff warlocks up a bit. Feels like we keep getting the short end. Recommendations - Dawnblade - Give top tree more magnetism on hit. Increase damage a bit so I don’t get people half health when hitting them with a full on super. Make your default speed slightly faster, or reduce super taken from dodging. Reduce time it takes to cast. Dawnblade/bottom - Give it some neutral game. At the current moment it has nothing good except a (now) mediocre super. The trade off was supposed to be bad neutral game, great super. But after the slow death by nerfs it’s very underwhelming on all front. Also, either give it the aerial dodge in super, or just make the dash a jump ability instead of balanced glide. Nova warp - Shorten the charge time of hhsn and increase amount of time able to be held. Finally, don’t make it so it can kill the user. That was counterproductive. Stormtrance - Top tree should get faster recharge on blink(already super slow and easily sniped). Chaos reach needs to kill faster and have some more armor. At this point it doesn’t kill fast enough(regular people and other supers) and makes you a sitting duck as one of the lowest armor supers in the game. What’s the point of chaos reach if someone can snipe you out of the air instantly while your beaming them with your super. Bottom tree just needs a rework. It’s just not good. Nothing about it is good. Arc souls are underwhelming and the super is useless. Landfall is less than useful. Finally, just start buffing exotics. I’d be ok if you guys just took a season to start changing up exotics. I’m not just talking warlock, I’m talking weapons and armor for every class. There are so many exotics that have no point or usability. Please just start working on revitalizing some older exotics instead of creating new ones that are going to be disabled for a month. TL:DR Warlocks keep getting nerfed, with little to no buffs in awhile. While titans/hunters keep broken exotics for years(one eyed), warlocks continually gets over nerfed, nerfed for little reason(top tree stormtrance was ok, but not the amazing thing you made it out to be in the patch notes), or most of our trees remain near useless and broken. Warlocks are underwhelming. Edit: It seems that some are missing the point completely. While yes, top tree dawnblade is viable and fairly competitive, the super is less than stellar. From problems with camera angle, effects, no magnetism, the speed, and the need for direct hits is annoying. The super is not fun and the amount of effort needed to use it is not in line with many other supers in the game. But that’s not the point either. The point is that you can really only bring up top tree dawnblade as a viable and competitive subclass tree. I could see an arguement made for top tree nova and it’s charged void grenades, but even then people don’t tend to stay in void grenades in competitive or trials. The crux of the problem is simply: Out of 9 subclasses for warlock, 1 is viable for pvp. Out of 28 exotic armors, 3 are viable options for pvp. Edit: A user by the name of BookGoblin has suggested some nice buffs for warlocks and helps summarize what’s up. Here’s the quote. [quote]True. It sure would be nice if Bungie reverted the Rift changes they implemented at the beginning of D2. In the Beta your Rift would immediately start regenerating your health based on your Recovery. Now you have to hide and wait til your bar stops flashing red for it to do anything. Its the only class ability that isn't reactive. Attunement of Flame needs a better neutral game. Attunement of Sky's Daybreak needs a little more time. Stormtrance needs to retain tracking on Hunters that dodge. Attunement of Hunger's Nova Bomb needs faster activation and a more linear path (essentially Lance). Attunement of Chaos' Cataclysm Nova Bomb needs better, faster tracking seekers. It also needs a complete overhaul for its Axion and Scatter grenades. So there are issues. Noticeable ones. But we make the best of it because Bungie clearly does not want Warlocks to be better. Somehow these issues "balances" us out.[/quote] Edit: It seems during the guardian games, a good portion of warlock bounties are bugged. Which sucks and seems strange honestly. How can just one class get messed up. I’m not sure I understand how only the warlocks bounties aren’t working. Not to mention, no one seems to be mentioning it in the mainstream places. Only in the help sections. Nothing on twitter or reddit. Honestly sucks.