Shattered Kingdoms

This is a rant. Mmmkay!

Dearest Lord Jesus above. I had planned on making this post after I had leveled, but this is so frustrating.

Edit/Note : The skill/spell list is just to show people what warlocks get and when.





Okay, first of all, leveling a warlock is such a massive hassle, mine is over 50 hours and just recently made Expert, where as my merc I just played was master 4~ and in a Tribunal in about 42 hours. I could understand making it so that you can't use earthquake or whatever to level off of things at range when they can't get to you. But then, you can't even use the AoE spells when the NPCs are in the same room as you because of this un-magnificent Throw thing, which has no effect whatsoever on anyone except warlocks, because everyone else just levels off of fighting 1 or 2 things at a time.

Things a warlock can use to level, hm...Burning hands? Sure it hits a group, but this seems to do approximately 1% damage per cast. Fireball? Not really worth using, unless you do it after an Earthquake(btw Earthquake needs to do more damage, or have a bash effect or something, seriously, it sucks except for drawing NPCs to level on...WAIT HOLY COW YOU CAN'T DO THAT) and if you do try to use Fireball and Earthquake together, have fun dying, when you're getting hit by all sorts of thrown crap, and low level SS only blocks like 7 or so attacks? and your fireball can do 15% to yourself through Resist Elements and being a magic resistant race? The only time I've managed to do this successfully was in Chibunei, because there's a lot of room to run away, you have to run away and cast invis(and hope the NPCs can't detect), take a nap and try again, I've probably died 10+ times trying to do this.

This leaves you with shocking grasp and lightning bolt, and off topic from the leveling for a quick question, I'd like to ask wtf purpose does shocking grasp serve? It seems to be the exact same as lightning bolt except it doesn't have any range...But, on the leveling, lightning bolt is okay(except I have max wisdom for my race, and it takes 4-5%? as opposed to magic missile taking like 1% on the delf sorcs at the same level that I played, and I think MM does more damage), but combine this with an elemental who actually does a decent amount of damage, and if you're just going around fighting 1-2 NPCs at a time, with these spells, you're getting just a tad experience and having to stop to rest all the time while getting just a tad experience.

Why even bother giving warlocks earthquake and fireball at low levels, and then making it impossible to effectively use them?

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Okay, off the topic of leveling, and onto elementals, who came up with the order of elementals? Fire as a material in SK sucks horribly(yes I realize fire elementals have energy hide which is stupid as well, considering water elementals actually have OMGZ water hide) also, Fire as the final elemental has a massive weakness.

IMO it needs to be redone as Fire first, then Earth, and Water, with Air last(how do you kill air? the other things I can see being killed but Air really would be the toughest IMO). I'd also like to see all of the elementals serve some sort of purpose instead of everyone just using the Fire one all the time. The Water one reaches if I remember, and might be able to trip??? which might make you use it once in a blue moon.

Fire elementals are immune to fireball and other fire things. The Air elemental needs to be effing immune to lightning damage and I know this is possible, considering I just fought a NPC who was immune to lightning bolt and shocking grasp but took damage from burning hands.

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Next topic! A pair of ideas I had concerning a warlock and his/her elemental.

1. Remove order lag from warlocks ordering their elementals, I would think warlocks would have a stronger bond with an elemental than anyone else would have with any sort of pet.

2. Let warlocks cast all of their "Self-Only"(Stone Skin/ Ironguard/ Resist/etc.) spells on their elemental, too.

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Basically, to sum up the first part of the post, W(hy)TF have warlocks been singled out to get hit with the mega nerf bat in the leveling department?

Edit : Oh, and all this BS with the leveling is on top of warlocks sucking horribly in PK now apparently. I don't think I've seen or heard about a warlock killing anyone in a long, long time.

Done for now, I might have some more complaints later.

[Alshain edit: Non-gameplay content removed]

Warlocks also need more chain lightning trainers.

Warlocks need more trainers for everything, I meant to complain about that too. All the NPCs in a certain area only teach things to fair, and I have yet to find any advanced teachers for the "warlock" specific spells, and I've asked A LOT of people ICly and OOCly.

Just a snippet, to help with the idea of how the throw thing completely screws you.



11%? And my CON is only like 1-2 points off of durable? Now imagine that happening 6-10 times in one round. WTF?

Don't even bother expecting RE to reduce fireball damage. RE sucks, hard. It's only use is in stopping magma cling, at this point. I understand at one point it was actually effective in helping to reduce other elemental damages, but now it just blows.

Elementals actually should be immune to damage of their own type, just like the fire elemental is. Air should be immune to lightning, earth to stone, water to water/cold.

Warlocks also got kicked in the balls, hard, when they were told they were the only caster class that couldn't have a store-bought pet as well as their magic-bought pet. Thanks for that.

Shocking grasp has one advantage over Lbolt; it's mana cost is about 1% less than lbolt. For that, you get no range, and a little less damage. And yes, Lbolt costs far and away more than magic missile, as well as doing less damage. That should be changed. Ideally, the cost of the two spells should be roughly equal. Oh, and I'm pretty sure it casts a little more slowly than MM as well. Other than that? Yeah, it's useless. Use it to draw, and then move on to...Um...pole-mace? Probably kill things faster that way.

All in all, though, I wouldn't seriously look for any improvements to the warlock class any time in the near future. There have been enough very vocal, very popular complaints about this class over the last three months that if something was going to be changed, it would have been.

Might as well suck it up, or delete, because no one is listening.

EDIT: Elemental timer still needs to be reset on death, or at least count down while dead.

EDIT2: And why even bother trying to stop magma cling considering that cling damage can be completely ignored with something like 2MP.

o elem bash I guess helps with throw.

I don't see how levelling a warlock is harder than levelling a sorc or even a priest(combat wise, anyone can spam spells and brew/scribe anyway). I mean they get a pretty good tank that does little damage(more xp for the warlock), they get to wear mithril, they have some pretty nice spells for damage at higher levels.

D-A, warlocks get their good spells at mentor and master, and you can't really get mithril till mentor and master either...The problem is GETTING TO mentor and master(and even at the high levels, the other spells seem to suck now, like I said, when was the last time anyone saw or heard about a warlock killing someone who wasn't either naked or wearing utter crap?)...And as far as the bash/throw thing, I don't see how that helps when I'm trying to fireball ten NPCs to death. And, yes, sorcs have it better, they can GM off of their level 1 spell(which is better than any spell warlocks get for leveling). [REDACTED], give warlocks lightning missile at level 1 and have it be the exact same as MM and the problem would be solved. I want to know why warlocks got like singled out for the shit-end of the leveling stick.

Leveling priests sucks too I would think, but I've never even played a priest past level 1, so I can't really comment on that.

And elementals do a lot more than "little" damage, a sprite with a pole-mace is effing little damage.

Excuse the language, this has just made me really mad. >_<

I beg to differ on that one. I know because I had gotten full mithril with a scout of mine at lvl 26. Mithril is everywhere in SK, especially the not top AC mithril. You just need to know where to look for it. But even if you don't have mithril, you start with scale/leather or even brass. That's a lot better than what a sorc or a cloth priest gets at the first levels(where the thrown daggers etc hurt more).


Wait, we were talking about levelling, not about PvP. Since when do levelling NPCs wear suits with phat enchants?


Don't fireball 10 things at once then. Warlocks were able to utterly annihilate rooms filled with NPCs with relative safety and they were the kings of plvling. I don't see how it's harder to spam lightning bolt as a priest spams spear of faith(which has really limited use) or how to use your group affect spells as a priest plvls with flamestrike. And all that until you get to mentor+ when you get some great plvling spells.

And I tell you these because I don't consider the levelling of warlocks, priests or sorcs to suck at all. Warlocks just got slowed down to the normal levelling speeds of other classes.

I like the no order lag suggestion.

Warlocks really do suck hard right now, makes me wish I would have rolled something else, but now I have all this time invested and no real desire to go back to the grind just yet.

Amateur - Mace
Garazul - Pole-Mace (Tanso)
Cities - Pet Stores
Until,
Journeyman - Conjure Elemental

Soooooo where's the problem in leveling again?