Anyone looking at the ability list for warlocks would think they might be combat leaning, and for the first say 10 or 15 levels of playing one, they certainly feel that way. But they very quickly hit a wall - their caps. Warlocks have Arcana 500 and Sorcery 700 as caps, and that's it. 100% of their combat ability rolls rely on Ranged Combat, which is permanently stuck at 400 for a maxed warlock no matter what they do.
Then their "defensive" skills in shadow cloak and orb rely on Stealth, which is also permanently stuck at 400. This can be raised to about 500 or so with arcana glyphs, which is better, but still generally not enough. They struggle tremendously with armor if going the pure sorcery route - even with the incredible Willpower reroll, they will drop channels fairly frequently, not to mention the large energy cost involved in maintaining them.
So this begs the question: what exactly *is* warlock for? It is frequently said that it is a "support" specialization, but so far its support prospects seemed doomed to taper off into irrelevance on increasingly stronger mobs. Familiars are cool - up until the point where we start fighting things with iron weapons or other anti nethrim measures, then they'll be dead in a flash. Essence Transfer has some limited cooperative use, though gated somewhat behind the fact that it is an openly sorcerous skill and a fair few characters have concerns about having any use of nether applied to them.
Arcanist can presently replicate the support influence of the warlock with a single use of the dorun glyph, and then they don't need to be in the room to do any more after the fact.
Add onto this that Arcana and Sorcery both are presently some of the slowest skills to practice in the game, with Sorcery taking the crown in that you can only practice it by 4 every 8 hours, then pray for an extra +2 at a 50/50% chance from a scholar task that refreshes once every 30-45 mins, and you're left with a specialization that takes an incredibly long time to mature into only mediocrity at best. Other classes replicate the debilitating nature of the Warlock with single, spammable skills at a fraction of the effort to obtain and maintain. The only thing Warlock has going for it at the moment is that you can whisper people across zones for three minutes every now and then and unnerve people by barfing up your familiar in public settings.
Here's some suggestions on what I think might fix it:
- Increase Warlock's stealth cap to 525. With glyph augmentation, this is 600 stealth. Orb and cloak bonuses should do the rest.
- Consider making channeled sorcery scale off 75% of someone's Sorcery or 100% of their Ranged Combat skill, whichever is higher. At 700 Sorcery, this gives them an effective level of 525 and does not require them to invest points in RC to achieve it. The fantasy of this also makes sense - controlling where the nether goes should be an act of sorcery, not an act of John Wick aiming prowess - that'd be a Nightblade thing, if anything. If you do anything, do this one.
- Add holdable sorcery foci with extreme weapon reach, or figure out some way of giving channelers the ranged fending/distance bonus that ranged weapons currently receive.
- Consider lowering the energy drain for sorcery channel use. Anyone who wants to go the pure sorcery route finds themselves locked very quickly into cast->BT->ELE->repeat because you need both 100% BT uptime to not explode in solo fights and you REQUIRE the energy income from ELE to not pass out and die after a minute and a half of combat. Managing it is gruesome and it only gets worse the more channels you use.
- Lower the sanity cost on familiar merging/detachment, or allow it to be resisted by willpower/meditation. The familiar is awesome and the distraction and passive defense it provides is great, but reasonably using it is unduly taxing on your sanity, especially given how hard it is to recover. You could halve it to -3.5 and it'd still be significant, but at least managable that way.
- Set your familiar to guard someone in your group instead of you.
- Talk through your familiar and teleport it to the location of someone you have a blood vial of, potentially allow it to deliver/ferry single small items this way.
- Construct a golem shell through some other means and have your familiar inhabit it as a combat companion. For bonus points, make the golem ridable, though a slow, lumbering mount.
- A panic contingency skill that exhausts your familiar and dismisses it when you're on the verge of death, but returns your soul fragment to you for a last burst of precious energy.