Warlock did not receive many sweeping changed with arc 3.0, we of course got a new melee ability tied to a fragment, but the rest of the subclass feels a bit disjointed. In this post I hope to highlight these issues and provide constructive feedback that will hopefully be noticed by the dev team.
Ball lightning is incredibly unreliable in both its base and amplified state, and Chain Lightning regularly has consistency issues and feels lacking in power or synergy to the rest of the Arc kit. While titan got the grenadier oriented aspect Warlock feels like it has very little reason to make use of any grenades at all, as they have no intrinsic benefits outside tangential fragment augments and gain no bonus while amplified unlike the assumed benefits we would receive. Ball lighting also shares a confusing cooldown timer with penumbral blast, and it is nowhere near as powerful. Ball Lighting (and Titan’s ToT Storm grenades’ after-strikes) also suffers dramatically from an unusually high knockback that pushes enemies away before they even get a chance to be hit by the second or third strikes. Titan’s storm grenades do not suffer as much from this (and even benefit) as the storm will track the target and keep them locked in this mid-air state for a long period of time until they die or it ends.
The new lightning surge melee ability is an ability I would label as "high risk, high reward" in mid to low level content, but in higher end content there is simply no reason to run this aspect as it becomes high risk, no reward, ending up in you dying most of the time or not securing many kills on enemies. I would like to see some sort of bounce back after killing or jolting an enemy in high level content and in pvp, as most of the time use of this ability puts you in a very bad position. This would also coincide with the description used in the arc 3.0 showcase where you wanted us to be able to get in and out quickly when using an ability like this, but right now this only allows for us to get in with little to no way out.
Arc Souls additionally do not feel like they have intrinsically improved as a utility to the kit, as they remain a disconnected piece outside of generic Ionic traces, but provide nothing else to amplification/jolting/blinding
Chaos reach remains extremely ineffective as an add clear, shutdown, or DPS super, as you remain suspended waiting for it to end to do a relatively weak amount of damage, or sacrifice all of that damage to get to safety sooner. It would feel drastically better if the extra time in air were halved for the sake of getting the damage out faster. Geomag stabilizers have additionally felt left behind as it only exaggerates Chaos Reach’s problem while doing nothing else for the entirety of Warlock’s neutral game, making it a horrible option for locked equipment content like Master LS/Grandmasters, and nothing more than a switch exotic everywhere else.
Stormtrance additionally is being referred to as an add clear super, but proves regularly frustrating to use in almost all content as it regularly takes not only from multiple ticks to multiple seconds to kill enemies, but feels incredibly vulnerable in anything outside of shutting down an unaware roaming super in PVP. The loss of transcendence also makes Crown of Tempest practically mandatory in order to make using the super feel better.
I would hope to see more synergy between warlock’s whole kit similar to Titan and Hunter, as everything feels a bit disconnected at best or detrimental at worst when using an exotic like geomags which you hve to use to make an already underwhelming and under-preforming super tolerable.
Thank you for reading.
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1 ReplyIn regards to the Arc Melee TP, How about, Based on the number of Enemies Jolted, you gain X% of Over shield? That way you have enough time to get out of the way.