Putting a Phantom Foot in Your Mouth

A recent Blue Post by Ghostcrawler caught my eye and since the post is in reference to my favorite class, Warlocks, you all are subject to my penetrating analysis. Instead of paraphrasing, I’m simply going to quote the undead crustacean directly in his conversation regarding the Infernal.

“We thought ‘difficult to control’ would be a good cost to pay for ‘very powerful demon.’ We also thought it fit the kit of the warlock having to struggle to harness the demon’s power. Guess what? We were wrong. It wasn’t a fun implementation. We could easily change the spell to summon an army of Infernals, but they would all be individually weak. That’s how numbers work.

I think there is some promise to the idea that warlocks might have permanent pets and guardians, with the Doomguard and Infernal as DPS-timers in the second category, much like Force of Nature or Mirror Image. But we’re going to have to think through that design and analyze the technical and balance implications. Maybe it will work and maybe it won’t, but it isn’t going to happen for 3.3. If you’d like, we can bump the Inferno cooldown back up if it bothers you so much.”

The first part of the post gave some good insight into Blizzard’s original intentions regarding the Infernal. There is something appealing about having a pet that would be difficult to control that fits into the Warlock identity. The problem deals with the implementation of the pet mechanic. Instead of having to continually enslave the minion, wouldn’t it have been much simpler to sap health from the lock while the infernal was out? That way, there was a disadvantage to playing with the minion and it fit into the previously described lore.

The second part of the post is slightly more troubling. The idea of turning the Infernal into a variation of the Mage’s Mirror Image spell misses the initial point of the grievance totally. Warlocks don’t want a temporary use of a pet, they to be able to use the Infernal in the same way that we use a Succubus or an Imp; read PERMANENTLY. There are many niches that Infernals can fit into (design his stats to receive a buff from fire spells to make him useful to Destruction Locks) or introduce him as a viable secondary option on the demonology tree. Why have different classes if you are going to make all the spells the same?

Blizzard has already done 90% of the work for this minion (all of their spells and animations have been rendered), adding them in as real minions for the class would go a long way towards fulfilling an initial promise (well…more like a implied promise that was made during the Intro video but you get the idea).