Your biggest gripes with the warlock?

[Mentat55]

General
Lack of a defining / different mechanic for Warlock's Curse, which looks a lot like Hunter's Quarry
No feat to augment a warlock's curse damage, a la Backstabber and Lethal Hunter
No choice of at-wills -- it's eldritch blast/strike and your pact at-will
Sharing Prime Shot with rangers -- seems like lazy design, could have designed something more flavorful for the warlock

Star Pact
Split of Con and Cha powers

Dark Pact
Spiteful Glamor is boring

 

[jstomel]

I'm a big fan of the warlock and I actually think that it's a well balanced though difficult to play class. That having been said, I do have a few gripes. First, Eldritch Blast isn't all that great an at will. It's OK and certainly some people will want to take it, but it would be nice to have the option of a couple other pact-neutral powers. Plus, it nerfs the infernalock because their pact at-will targets Ref and one of the great advantages of the warlock is being able to easily target a diversity of defenses.

Second, a lot of the warlocks powers are really not very strikerish. It's great that the warlock has a strong controller component, but it should not eclipse it's primary role as a striker.

Third, the heroic tier warlock feats are not very good. They are also not very dramatic. You have made a pact for power with eldritch forces from beyond. There should be some feats that emphasize the coolness of this.

Fourth, the starlock is not very well thought out, for many of the reasons stated on this thread.

I note that many posts on this thread speak of the difficulty of getting a warlock with a decent AC. Are you all taking into account the fact that a well played warlock should be getting concealment nearly every turn?

 

[CapnZapp]

My gripes are not pact specific:

* the class is not newbie friendly - it is complicated and requires attention to play well. If the warlock and sorcerer - at least the dragon build - traded books, most issues would fall away automatically.
* the class is much more of a controller striker combo than the PHB lets up
* the star pact in particular suffers from MAD
* warlocks are spectacularly gear dependant: the abilities conferred by several rods should be made available as feats as well.

Also, if you don't do wishlists, it's hard to come up with believable loot - the warlock has much more specific demands than, say, the loot for a fighter or wizard.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I dunno. Starlock is certainly a finicky kind of class, but honestly its not as MAD as people make it out to be. You just have to knuckle down and realize you aren't going to be able to use both the CHA and CON based powers. You're going to have one at-will that's worth using and a lot of the supposedly star pact based powers are not going to be good choices. You still have a whole slew of choices. If you go CHA intensive then you're going to select a lot of "fey pact" choices or you're going CON intensive and picking a lot of "infernal pact" choices.

At that point the starlock really is no worse off than plenty of other classes which have their choices of class powers limited to some extent by ability score allocation. There are still a WIDE variety of choices. The MAD issue only exists if the player isn't clever enough to realize that its impossible to make one starlock that can use all star pact powers well. Nor are they worse off in terms of NADs, they'll have a good INT and thus getting a good stat boost to AC and Ref, and either a good boost to Fort or Will, which is really the same as anyone else. Make CON/CHA your third best stat and boost it now and then, you won't be in bad shape. All riders are INT, so that isn't an issue.

I'd say the main thing with the starlock in my game is he has decent defenses, they are just all not top tier. Considering he's concealed practically 100% of the time when he gets attacked it isn't effectively a huge problem.

The issues I see are more like there aren't a lot of interesting build options in heroic tier, the warlock is pretty picky about equipment, and its not a class that you hand to newbies and have them be terribly successful at. Overall if its built right and you get one or two key items then you're very much competitive with everyone else. Lets face it though, every class eventually runs into that "I need certain items to excel" thing. It just happens a bit later for melee classes (they need IAoP and a damage boosting weapon) etc.

ALL of the classes in retrospect could have been tweaked here and there, or the vast majority anyway. If I were "fixing" warlocks all I'd do is give them some decent heroic tier feats and repair the awkward at-will situation. That would make them more interesting and possibly a tiny bit stronger.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

I agree with some of what you are saying Abdul, except that one has to keep in mind that:

- Non-MAD star locks essentially only have 1 at-will; and
- It is severly annoying going through powers and saying "oh, that sounds cool based on my background" only to find that its for your low stat.

Based on both of these annoyances, as soon as PHII came out, I swapped to sorceror and can honestly say I'm having at least twice as much fun.

 

[Stalker0]

Based on both of these annoyances, as soon as PHII came out, I swapped to sorceror and can honestly say I'm having at least twice as much fun.

Which I think is one of my main annoyances summed up, I think the sorceror fills the niche of the warlock and does a superior job.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

I suppose that's another way to look at it - personally, it was a flawed class (especialy the Starlock build) from the get-go and all that PH2 and the Sorceror did was highlight its deficiencies.

Which is a shame, as I love the star lock conceptually - just not mechanically.