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Two classes stayed about the same: Priests and Rogues.Three classes had small gains in popularity: Shamans, Druids, and Warriors.Hunters received substantial changes to their mechanics in Cataclysm this is somewhat counter evidence to the opinion that the change to Focus from Mana was bad for the class. Two classes had statistically significant increases: Mages and Hunters.All three of these had substantial changes to their mechanics in Cataclysm. Three classes experienced significant declines in their playerbase: Paladins, Death Knights, and Warlocks.Let’s go with them as being at least relatively accurate. (Here’s the spreadsheet if you want to follow along.) Without knowing the methodology between these two censuses it’s difficult to assign a high certainty between comparing between different data sources, but these numbers appear to be consistent across other census sites. This data is taken from two sources: Armory Data Mining (fortunately, not updated since 3.3.5) and World of Wargraphs. Warlocks are less popular now than they were at the end of Wrath.
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#COMBAT 3 85PLAY PATCH#
I had to wonder:Īre warlocks less popular now than they used to be? That’s the question we must start with – is the decline one of perception only, or is it based in fact?Ĭomparing WoW census figures from the end of Wrath (patch 3.3.5) and what is presumably the last patch of Cataclysm (4.3.2) indicate that the answer to this is definitively yes. She went from my main to a neglected tailoring alt over the course of Cataclysm.īut the months ticked by, fewer people talked to me about the hexenfreude of playing a warlock, and more asked me what was wrong with the class. I stopped playing a warlock when 4.2 was released. I learned to love healing and tanking, for crying out loud! What kind of a warlock likes to tank things that aren’t the floor? Just because I’ve fallen out of love with a class doesn’t mean that the class is broken, right? People change. Maybe it was just perception that there were fewer warlocks out there. It didn’t really have anything to do with warlocks at all – it had much more to do with the gear transition in endgame PvP, a lack of interest in raiding, and a desire to see more of the lower brackets. The specific incident that knocked me off my warlock main was too personal, too isolated. Was it me? Was it the class? I felt very uncomfortable extrapolating my own experience out to warlocks in general. I had become one of the missing warlocks, and I didn’t even really know why. At first I thought it was due to my dissatisfaction with the PvP endgame at the end of Season 9, but as the months ticked by and I made no effort to pick up a warlock, any warlock, I found myself wondering if it was really the endgame I didn’t enjoy in Cataclysm – or warlocks. Warlocks weren’t getting benched for playing warlocks … they just became scarce.Īt the same time, I went through my own problems playing my warlock main, Cynwise. DPS was never so lackluster that it couldn’t keep up. I remember several Demonology warlocks in the world first Heroic Rag video. Some of the major kills of that expansion featured warlocks prominently – remember Stars doing Yogg-0 and all those Drain Soul beams? – but Cataclysm had those kinds of moments, too. It’s not like warlocks were hugely popular in Wrath of the Lich King, but I didn’t recall quite so many people asking me questions like this one. Leveling warlocks became an elusive beast for me to find on my own leveling tanks and healers. Battleground appearances became increasingly rare. Players didn’t see them in LFD, or later, in LFR. I heard this question more and more often as Cataclysm progressed. This is the first post in The Decline and Fall of Warlocks in Cataclysm series.