I find it hard to believe that a minor inscription will allow warlocks to completely eliminate a fundamental aspect (and annoyance) of the class. I can maybe see an inscription removing the soul shard requirement off of Soul Fire, that's about it.

Really, the only soul shard buff I'd like to have is something that will let me get shards during a long fight. Maybe make CoD give a shard when it pops? Something along those lines. Because the only time shards are at all a concern is during repeated attempts on the same boss with no trash (three hours on Archimonde I used 44 shards).

Personally I've always thought it should be much harder to level weapon skills, the way they are now they basically serve no real purpose at all. If each weapon skill you raised beyond a certain point after the first became harder and harder (or had a cap), weapon specialization would mean something more than just the fact that no rogues use daggers. But it's far too late to make a change like that, they may as well remove weapon skill completely (and with the expertise change, it wouldn't surprise me if at some point they did just that).

While getting soul charges is annoying, it isn't as bad as people are implying. Sure, you have to go kill mobs but people do that anyway during dailies and farming, just a Warlock has to do one more thing, use rank 1 soul drain.

Note I would not mind if soul shards were removed and just leave everything the same, but I don't see that happening. Allow vendor bought soul shards (NPC is the Grim Reaper).

This could be a great idea, but what I would do is any time you are dead, you can click the Spirit Healer and instead of rezzing you can buy one shard (perhaps a piece of your own soul). This would alleviate some of the issue I mentioned above for repeated boss attempts with no trash but not make shards completely meaningless.

So, Hellfire suicide next to the spirit healer until the rezz timer makes it annoying?

On the subject of class "annoyances", I'd like to add that I hope something is done to alleviate or outright remove at least some of the annoyances hunters face on a daily basis.

For one, ammo currently forces us to travel to exactly two vendors world wide for the best available ammo. We can't just grab a few stacks from the repair bot like other classes can with their reagents. For another, the ammo bag limiting the amount we can hold. Now, these two annoyances were addressed with Thori'dal, but I really do hope that we see much more of this going into WotLK. I understand the flavor context of hunters using ammo. I also understand the cost argument because we supposedly save money with FD when other classes don't. But you really need to have been around when the only way to get Timeless Arrows was to travel to CoT when there wasn't that handy dandy portal in the World's End Tavern to understand how much that sucked. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibilitiy that when we're fighting Arthas, some hunter will go, "Hey guys. I gotta go to X zone I outlevelled months ago to pick up some ammo because he's the only one in the entire world that sells Ammo of Pwning. Be back in 30."

While I'm on the subject of annoyances, pets in general has always been one of my biggest peeves of playing a hunter. This holds especially true going into WotLK. They're basically saying hey, we're giving you guys all these cool new pets and cool new abilities, but if you want em, spend the next 10 hours straight grinding for them...and you can only have three. Too bad for Mr. Fluffykins who's been by your side for the last three years.

While this would be an interesting idea, I don't see it as something Blizzard would go for, really. Not that adding a vendor-type menu to the chat options with the spirit healer would be difficult, but I just don't see it happening.

I've always wondered why Blizz never thought to make the higher ranks of Drain Soul grant extra shards. As it is everyone only uses Rank 1 for the mana cost (and the damage is negligible). Why not just replace the scaling damage with scaling shards returned? Or is that too hard to implement, too?

Of course, they could just make them stack to 5/10/20, so we could carry around 100s. This would remove one of the biggest problems with them, which is not the fact you have to farm them but that you have to farm them often because you can't just fill up for a week at one sitting. Imagine if all the reagents for Priests and Paladins didn't stack at all? I really don't understand why they haven't done this yet. With a 28 slot soul bag that would give us 140/280/560 shards. 560 is a bit much, but I think 140 or 280 is reasonable; still limits us by taking up a fair whack of bag space, and retains the 'falvour'.

Since [Blinding Powder] isn't required anymore. I remember long arena nights where I had to pick pocket mobs hoping for some powder to be able to continue playing. But on the other hand reducing a lot of these "useless" stuff also reduces the mood. It's like with too many portals, too many shortcuts. It is a thin line between annoyance and intensity or distinction.

Great task for the Designers to develop distinguishing rituals without making them a pain in the ass.

That's a great example of the devs reducing what they found tedious to the point where it negatively impacts enjoyment. While I can agree that stuff like reagents shouldn't be completely removed, I think there are still a few glaring examples of flavor impacting enjoyment that should be addressed.

It's not too hard really. Require one for summons/healthstones. Remove the requirement for shadowburn/soulfire. Make Felguard the only pet that requires shards.

The fundamental difference about farming Soul Shards compared to regular farming is that because they take up so much space, and because we can go through them so damn fast, we have far less control over when we have to go farming. While I compress my repair costs into a single 12-hour farmfest per month if I want to, burning through shards on progression contant can force me to go out and farm them at least once per raid, in a way that I can't further compress without vendoring half my bank.

The second, more contingent, problem with soulshards is that in order to resolve the dilemma of warlocks either being underpowered without them or overpowered with them, the current solution is that they simply don't add much to the class at all. Most shard costs are out-of-combat maintainance costs. The very few in-combat uses are limited in use by cooldown, and more importantly, not particularly more powerful than the rest of our spells. The entire theoretical purpose to having soul shards, being able to restrict a powerful spell through a unique non-mana non-cooldown mechanic, is squandered by the spells being basically balanced without the reagent cost.

This problem already exists, as if you have 39 warlocks casting Drain Soul on a mob as it dies, 39 soul shards are produced.

Ooh. Combine this with the "make the various ranks of Drain Soul more distinct" idea.

Each rank of Drain Soul drains a different rank of shard. Any spells that consume shards can consume any rank of shard, and will always consume the lowest ranks first.

The only effect of a shard's rank? They stack in piles of (n-1)*5. Rank 1 doesn't stack. Rank 2 stacks to 5. Rank 3 stacks to 10. Rank 4 stacks to 15...

I promise you most warlocks will stop downranking Drain Soul.

Shard farming isn't really that big of a deal. I can walk into virtually any raid with 5 shards and be fine, I'll have a full bag long before the first boss. The only significant issue is when you are in a situation where shards are unfarmable for a long period of time. If they would just give us some mechanic to be able to generate a shard or summon a pet with no shard cost every 5-10 minutes, I can't see any time where having enough shards would be an issue.

The one thing I wonder is why was there no epic 32 slot Soul Bag in BC? The top size Soul Bag hasn't changed since MC.

Have they ever given a reason why soulshards don't stack to at least 10? It always puzzled me how they made the max stacks of just about everything bigger, but ignored soulshards. Letting warlocks carry around 100 soulshards with minimal discomfort would go a long way to solve the entire problem.

Each Soul Shard created is an individual item that even has the "Made by" designation, and nothing with the "Made by" designation is stackable. For them to be made stackable would most likely require a complete change in the creation and storage process of the information, which may or may not be difficult to do.

Also, making them stackable basically changes the entire fundamentals of them, eliminates the need for soul bags, and basically trivializes them to the point that you may as well just remove them entirely.

On a related note, I've always wanted to put Healthstones and Soulstones in my soul bag and can't see any good reason why I shouldn't be allowed to.

I don't know if this is the place to ask, but I'll do anyway.

My feral druid tried Lord Ahune today and I noticed avoiding his Ice Spear attack was rather difficult at times because the adds would daze me when running away. I only have limited experience on my druid and I wouldn't know if for example resilience reduces your chance to get dazed (defense does at least) , but with the expansion changing Survival of the Fittest to -6% critical strike chance reduction (so they will likely have no defense on their gear) doesn't that make druids a rather vulnerable class in some fights?

Soul shards are not tradeable, so the "created by" is useless anyway.

Maybe, but not much more than they are now anyway - you can only be dazed from behind, if I recall correctly, and only if you are not at 490 defense, which a druid never is.

Thus, the chance of getting dazed may be a bit higher than it is now, but on the other hand, you shouldn't turn your back to a boss anyway, for you can't dodge attacks from behind.

Seconded. FD doesn't save you nearly enough money to justify the amount of money we can spend on arrows, especially given that we already have to farm for the same amount of consumables as anyone else. Plus pet food, if you don't have a WS. We're also the only class that *has* to pay money to PvP effectively. The better we want to PvP, the more money we have to pay. It's retarded. More bows in WotLK should take note from Thori'dal: ammo doesn't add anything to the play experience.

Pets are a whole other barrel of bs. The 3 pet limit thing, eh, it's a pain, but whatever. you don't really need that many pets. The fact that when you want a new pet could you theoretically spend up to infinity hours before it's viable for anything is an unnecessary time sink. Happiness also needs to go; the fact that my pet can go from 125% damage to 75% damage over the course of one boss fight, which I have basically no way to improve, is just stupid.


Edit: Between this and the soulshard discussion, this is rapidly turning into a "things I don't like about my class" thread. I'll stand by my statement that ammo and pet happiness, at the very least, should just be removed in the expansion, or seriously retooled. Dramatically drop the price of ammo, and make pet happiness completely unrelated to damage output.

If the reason affliction warlocks don't want shadowbolt to be their filler is because it's not an affliction spell, I suggest we solve the problem by changing shadowbolt to the affliction school since destruction locks don't seem to have some meaningless hang-up about what school they're using. There, I fixed your spec.

It's not simply that it's not part of the affliction tree, it's that nukes are completely inconsistent with the affliction flavor. Affliction is about DOTs, debuffs, and channeling, a nuke just doesn't fit. It's like if in between shots hunters had to work melee attacks into their rotations.