The op title often comes from the bias of seeing warlocks played at the highest level while at the same time ignoring the fact thats the warlock played by the best and at its best. Warlocks is a high skill gap class to begin with alot of disadvantages when played like a normal class or to be blunt like a human. Many Warlocks try so hard to be a hunter its infuriating to watch and they can't see that's why they struggle. It's an ability spam and support class but the community has a twisted view on abilities in an ability game so Warlocks try to play like hunters and titans and will lose everytime. Icarus was nerfed because the community gassed it up based off it being played by the best rather then the worst just like stasis was. Warlocks at the average level are some of the worst players you can go against but the class continues to be nerfed based off the best so those Warlocks only get weaker and the best have to display more of their ability which leads to more nerfs further destroying the class. Bungie has to fix it, its no longer something we can affect beyond complaining about it . The issue with the class isn't its kit its the fact that bungie is demanding and raising the skill required to play a class that was meant to display skill with use of skills but those have been removed or nerfed so you basically have little to nothing to work with which is why warlocks are upset. Top warlocks show what can happen at their best not what happens on the norm. Most warlocks will either die as part of a collateral or in their rift. Most warlock also don't use their abilities until they are about to die feeding the illusion of long cooldowns while ignoring the fact the ability was just wasted. Most warlocks despite the hate for hunters lose more to titans which can do our job slightly better and with protection while being aggressive. As long as Bungie continue to raise the skill required to play the class then it will decline and eventually only exist in pve. I am often the only warlock on my team in crucible and thats a sharp shift considering titans were in those shoes last season. You would think Bungie would notice a drastic drop in warlocks and correlate 3.0 being the culprit but maybe Bungie wants warlocks to be rare. A drop in warlocks means less work and minimal work while hiding behind it being a skill class. You also got to account for warlocks like me that were tired of Dawnblade and asked for it to be nerfed for others to useful, instead bungie hit us with the uno reverse card and just nerfed everything so it backfired and now we have to work twice as hard just to do what we use to do innately. I still main the class but purely out of the fact its harder to play and that i'm in a minority. I guess thats a twisted way of giving it more value but I come from darksouls so its nothing new to me.