Well, I'm with you, and really only see Account-bound items being badges and such.

However, if Blizz wanted to go completely nuts they could make a lot of ABoE items that are designed to become hand-me-downs to alts, I suppose, though surely that would barely get any use, considering alts are likely to be classes with different functions, different gear types, etc (like a tankadin leveling an alt hunter to farm with).

We have blue confirmation that Mind Flay will be able to crit in the near future, and that similar changes will be made to Affliction locks: Link: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Shadowpriest Community Concerns - Revised 9-2

So, what spells would crit for an Afflock?

I was semi-expecting a glyph to increase the damage but reduce the healing component of drain life. If such a glyph existed, combined with the ability for drain life to crit, and talents like soul siphon, nightfall and death's embrace, drain life could potentially become a reasonable filler (though clearly not the ideal solution). Ultimately though I'm sure we'd all be hoping for dots critting.

If it's channelled spells that will be able to crit, then Drain Life would seem an obvious choice.

The way she made it sound was that making a spell crit-enabled required the entire recoding of the spell. So it could be any type of spell, doesn't have to be only channelled spells. Drain Life would be a good choice. I'd nominate Corruption as well, since that's such a great "Affliction Warlock" spell (if you were going to pick one out).

I'm guessing the dots critting will be similar to the way the DK Unholy Talent "Wandering Plague" works but without the AoE component. It seems they have the technology pretty firmly in place already.

Wandering Plague Rank 3
When your diseases damage an enemy, there is a chance equal to your melee critical strike chance that they will cause 100% additional damage to the target and all enemies within 8 yards. Ignores any target under the effect of a spell that is cancelled by taking damage.

They have the basic technology in, but it sure doesn't work well(lots of issues with wandering plague) ^^. Also, while they did it this way for DKs, I wonder if they'd change all dots to use the same system. DKs have a limited amount of disease, and there's a limited amount of unholy DKs, but you could assume that if every tick the server checks for a crit, applying it to every dots in a raid would cause some server overload issues(maybe). Or maybe just slap a talent near the end of affli for locks, stuff like that.

So others have well chimed in here, but I feel it's worth adding some color from our experience.

Bloodboil, our first kill was 10 healers. Obviously, that fight is not a gear check in any sense of gear check. As has been noted, having your tanks geared != gear check. Having your mages put on a piece or two of PVP gear != gear check.

Archimonde is almost an anti-gear-check. Yes, when you go back in full tier 6 it's an absolute lol-fest. But it requires no particular dps no particular healing. A well geared tank? Welcome to WoW.

RoS is a slight gear check, but hardly one in which you are going to get there without the gear already in place. I mean the very first time we made it to phase 3, we killed RoS. The first-ever clean phase 2, we won the fight. It just didn't feel like a gear check at all. I would tend to agree that Najentus, RoS, Kazrogal are moments in Tier 6 where the woefully undergeared are going to hit the wall, but they aren't gear checks in the vein of Vael/Patchwerk/Brutallus at all.

And, yes, in fairness I think the Curator example was a good one. Perhaps Gruul too is a good example from way back when. Of course, those were checks on whether you were showing up without having done lvl 70 dungeons as opposed to gear checks on whether you were somehow "progressing too quickly".

Drain Life is a poor filler spell because it's a 5 second channel (before haste effects etc). You're juggling Corruption, UA, Siphon, Haunt and Immolate at the very least. Drain Life is going to get clipped almost all of the time.

I'd nominate Gruul and Prince as gear checks, at least for the average guild just after 2.1 came out. Gruul was relatively flexible though (you needed good healers+tanks OR good DPS).

I think Gruul was much more of a stupidity check than a gear check to be honest. I know several guilds and have been in pugs that have had abysmal gear but were able to kill Gruul simply because nobody nuked their friends with Shatter.

And prince was really a tank gear-check (in reality most bosses are I suppose). Can your tank survive thrash + possible parry insta-gib or is he going to get tent spiked once phase 2 hits?

More on track, of any spells that should be able to crit in a warlock's arsenal I would toss my vote out to Unstable affliction, Haunt, or both. My reasoning behind this is because builds that are more invested in affliction will obtain them and assist with affliction specific scaling issues as opposed to just helping warlock dots in general.

Or if you've got 3 healers and are relatively undergeared, do you have enough DPS to get through Phase 3 before the Infernals become unmanageable?

But then you have people levelling alts simply to give them access to tradeskills on their mains. It'd throw profession balance out the window.

I don't think drain life or corruption are very good "afflcition" spells to buff to increase affliction efficency compared to the other builds. Y'know, since all warlocks have access to both of those. Besides, corruption is probably the strongest dot available anyway, and drain life is a self-healing spell that easily heals 550+ HPS at lvl 70 soloing undebuffed mobs - I don't see the point to re-defining it when it already has a very good and important role, albeit rarely used in raids. I guess they could add a deep affliction talent that makes corruption crit, but it sounds more complicated than that to do it.

There are other spells there to change, anyway, not available to other speccs. Unstable Affliction isn't a bad condidate, I daresay, it (usually...) being the only castable dot left for affliction. I hope they'll be more inventive than just "let's make a dot crit!", though.

There could always be the whole "Requires Alchemy (450)" or "Requires Blacksmith (375)" tag slapped on some speciality items.

What sort of profession balance are we talking about anyway? The first thing that comes to mind, is a Main Tank with the best "Tier 3 Blacksmithing Crafted Tanking Gear", with custom sockets in every available slot, BoP enchants on his Rings, a Belt Buckle, a (BoP) Dragonscale Leg Armor Kit, a Ruby Hare in his Trinket slot with a Solid Dragon's Eye in one slot and a Thick Dragon's Eye in the other, and Swordguard Embroidery on his cloak?

I can certainly see how that would be going over the top. One part of me wants to say, "If the guy is willing to invest that much time and money into decking himself, then let him!" But then the other part of me recognises how much of an advantage this would provide to a guild during progression. It would certainly have the potential to trivialise content... (pre-consumable nerf all over again) though as I said, sticking the profession requirement on select items would ensure that such extents were unreachable.

Regarding the idea put forth that Gruul and Prince were gear checks. While I agree that they may have required a certain level of gear to beat them, I don't think they were proper "checks". A check is something that stops your progress. Neither Gruul nor prince really stopped your progress. You could just skip them and go onto the next stop in progression. Is the last boss in a dungeon a "check" if killing them isn't required to attune to the next dungeon?

I hope they include gear checks in several of the 10 and 25 man raids. They are some of the most fun fights to beat in my opinion. Crushing patchwerk was always fun even weeks after we'd finally downed him. Also, the wipes are really fast which can add some variation to the "long dying boss" fights.

Edit: Thanks Brio, forgot about that. Actually I haven't played since they unlinked that attunement, but I guess it just didn't stick in my memory.

Except, auroram, Gruul was required for SSC attunement and Gruul 1.0 was a very serious check. Too many things have been nerfed in BC. So much has changed with so many of the bosses. Not complaining about it, just stating the fact.

Gruul 1.0 wasn't so much a gear check as it was a "can your guild throw money at auctioneers" check. Before the consumable changes, you had to blow DPS pots, health pots, mana pots, mitigation pots, you name it. Now you still have to do it, but you can't have a flask, 3 elixirs, a food buff, and 2 separate potion cool downs. It was a T4 fight, and supposed to be done by entry level raiders who have maybe cleared a few bosses in Kara. Gear checks should be something a couple tiers above entry level, so guilds that finally get there can go "ah, this is a gear check, I've heard of these, blah blah blah". Rather than walking into an instanace, getting raped in the face, and going home saying "screw raiding, I'm off to farm badges". This could work in new Naxx because there are 4 wings; when a bright eyed group of new adventurers walk up to him and get pasted, they can go try 3 other paths

Just like Shiin said, it should be as easy as putting the backend code of Arcane Missiles to Mind Flay / Drain Life and you have a channeled spell that can crit. Modify the duration, amount of ticks, spell coefficient etc and you are set.

On a sidenote, Drain Soul definitly shouldnt be the trigger spell Shiin.

You're looking at this the wrong way. If one person can do this it doesn't mean he's "dedicated" it means everyone else has to follow. Do you want to grind out 6 alts and all the professions?

Considering the (un)reliability of Arcane Missiles in the past years, are you sure you want to do this?

Unless you're in a guild with totally crazy leaders, or blizzard starts balancing bossfights around this for whatever reason, nobody has to do anything of the sort. Heck, I was one of the 0.6% of players, or whatever, who killed Kael'thas at the time we did it and we were running around with shadow priests in blues and warlocks in T4/T5. Tradeskills, besides maybe alchemy and resist gear crafteds, have never been required to do anything. They're more like a luxury or reward for investing large amounts of money.

And we killed brutallus without drums in a sub-optimal raid with 3 warlocks doing top dps so don't come saying (like people are regarding the forthcoming 3.0 for some reason) that we need drums for that fight, because we never have.

Anyway, obviously if - however unlikely - all BoE items were radically changed into "BoA", or whatever you want to call it, tradeskill items not meant to be traded among players would (very likely) get a tradeskill requirement to prevetn exactly this so it's moot anyway.

One interesting tidbit: info about the new Badges of Justice, from Naxx, in the Statistics section of the Achievement UI:



At the moment, the 10 man Naxx badges are Badges of Brutality, and the 25 man version are Badges of Inequity.