I suppose the idea is that mages + hunters need a spriest and that it's clearly a mis-design if there is one ranged class that doesn't require one to perform at its best. Sounds fairly dumb to me, was always nice that locks could be in the random 'crap' group with paladins and whoever else ended up not having a perfect group setup.

Warlocks won't need an SPriest, they'll just need an extra 33% or so more HoTs thrown their way.

That isn't a problem but is it a major DPS nerf with the extra Lifetapping required?

It is a DPS nerf, but since it's still heavily bugged I can't say how big it's going to be.

I'm sure warlocks can spec out of demonic embrace and grab +int enchants to nullify the effect of this change but its just a fundamental flaw to take two independent attributes and make a percentage of one abundant stat return the same percentage of the other stat.

For those of you who run WoW under MacOS X be prepared for a significant reduction in overall performance. I just installed the latest PTR patch and it was like watching a slideshow, disregarding all the other graphical anomalies (ie no water in the lakes over in Nagrand).

I hopped over to the Blizzard PTR forum to report it, but others have already done so. Tigerclaw had the following to say:

Won't tapping less but with +int gear be worse than tapping more but with normal gear. This seems the same to me as situation with t6 v2.

Edit. To be honest, I appreciate (possibly unintended) Blizz idea about gear versatility: e.g. trying to get hit capped, while losing minimum possible spelldmg, or getting enough stamina for the encounter, while losing minimum DPS. To me it seems silly that new gear simply has more stamina, more spellhit, more spelldmg than old gear. Trust me, gearing a shadowpriest is boring - you simply stack spelldmg and then suddenly find that in the same gear you have like 10k raid buffed hp and are hit capped.

Same for locks. If I was a lock, I'd appreciate having a choice to gear up for int and tap 1.5x times less, or gear up for dmg but tap 1.5x times more. Of course, this can be possible if Blizz provides decent items for both of gear choices.

Edit2. And yeh, I'm not an idealist. Of course, if I was a lock, I wouldn't be happy to receive dps nurf in 2.4 simply because someone decided to "rebalance" Life Tap. Single choice with 1000 dps is better than two fascinating choices with 900 and 910 dps.

In s2 people thought SL was godmode of some sort and usually left the warlock alone, nowadays people has got enlightened and figured out that a warlock with a melee on him cant do anything but using dots, and since he cant get out of harms range either, using abilites like sunder armor/exposing armor/executioner enchant will increse the damage taken by up to 20%, nullifying SL right there.

Ontop of that issue most meleeclasses can take out a warlock pet in seconds, removing the one ability that the whole class seems to be built around in PvP. The pets just scale horribly, around 30% of our stamina is all too little, and with no resilence at all killing a warlock pet has become the everday ganking of a lvl 62.

The 3rd problem is that with meleescaling for each arenaseason goes up, but with no defense at all we just become more of a burden to the team each season.
Warlocks and Priests has been asking for a proper CC since the very early days. That finally resulted in the worst bandaid ever, happycoil. All of a sudden the class seemed to be perfect, unfortunatly that probably was the start of the decline. I very much agree with you that the warlockclass was a real powerhouse early on but at this time the whole class seems to do a free fall, and I guess I'm not alone with more and more gladiator locks going over to play their melee altcharacter.
What can they do the balance the class? God knows, how do you fix a totally broken yet very powerful class in the right hands? Given warlocks a proper defense at this lvl would probably overpower us again (Hi CC the melee and dot and fear at will), right now I just feels like a reinforced sack of potato when I play arena and it's as boring as it ever can be.
Sometimes you wished that blizzard gave some useful insight on where they wanted to take your class...

The recent 'this is where i see shamans at at various levels' post by kalgan was nice, a clear insight into where the developers thought they have to go with balancing.

As for lifetap, tieing a nerf to lifetap will affect destruction more than affliction (dark pact) and demonology (less personal dps, pet will have enough mana anyway). It just needs balancing a bit more and having +stam not being such a liability on healing needed.

I'm still confused about the intent of the Life-tap nerf. From a pve perspective it simply doesn't make any sense. If you wanted to tweak warlock damage down, you'd recognize that what you really wanted was to tweak the 0/21/40spec. I don't think any dps is intimidated by the token affliction lock's death-grip on the bottom spot of the dmg meter. Even more so, Affliction burns through mana normally in a way that really only an arcane mage can surpass. If you wanted to nerf the 0/21/40 build, the obvious target is Demonic Sacrifice. The 15% scaling is a huge portion of the build, and really no one else sacrifices their pet.

In a pvp environment, if blizzard feels that warlock gear isn't stat balanced in a way they like, that too is an easy fix. I have yet to meet a warlock that doesn't wear a full pvp gear set up to pvp with. Or, perhaps it's time to really revisit Soul-link.

Generally, when Blizzard changes something, even if the change itself is poorly implemented, the goal is understandable. For the Life-tap change, I simply don't follow the logic. Why nerf the defining skill of the class from now until the end of Wotlk so harshly?

Did you really just say you felt warlocks were 'totally broken' in PVP, but broken meaning 'bad'? I have truly seen it all.

---

Warlock wishful wondering to the contrary, I suspect the lifetap change is not a case of 'collateral pvp damage', but a very deliberate choice to nerf warlock sustained DPS across the board. Warlocks being one of the top DPS classes may not be part of The Vision(tm).

The whole "warlock problem" revolves around this issue, at the start of S1 before everyone was fully geared you could counter warlocks with any heavy melee team, then once everyone completed their S1 set SL/SL warlocks with 500 resilience were godly because they could tank any S1 geared melee, now with the several dps boosts on S2 and S3 armor and the resilience levels remaining unchanged the table is finally starting to turn again.

The balance line for warlocks is very much influenced by the gear available to them. They can either tank you and trying to focus them is an uphill battle, or they cannot and are thus vulnerable to being shut down by heavy melee/focus fire.

With this I don't mean to state that they are currently too strong/too weak, blizzard just needs to be very careful with how they balance resilience/armor and dps stats, as the viability of warlocks revolves around it. Personally I think it's very close to being balanced at the moment.

Seems they introduced a severe Bug with Bag switching again which seems to be able to crash the world server when exceeding certain values you can attain with it.
WoW-Europe.com Forums -> Public Test Realm

(if this is still too obvious just remove the post)

The spirit changes they've been pushing recently (along with stuff like water shield for shammies) seem to have been aimed at reducing dependency on Shadow Priests for a few classes. Our locks are always the last to get one, given that they have unlimited mana at the cost of a few shadowbolts. Bringing 3 of them to a raid does not seem to have been the intended idea, given that most other healer off-specs end up filling a 1-per-raid niche.
With hit/crit on warlock sets and spirit on mage sets, there's an obvious design philosophy at work. The gear's flexible. They may be wasted stats for you, but they're great stats for a destro lock. The spirit on mage gear is never "wasted" as mage armor is available for any mage when necessary (such as on the Kaz'Rogal fight.)

Which are one of the most useful utilities a raid can have. Don't forget CoE and CoR. Two different sizes of healthstones (which do not share cd with potions). Seed of Corruption, proper AoE...

1. There's a vast difference between what a perfectly optimized raid would be and the raid you end up bringing.

2. Don't forget the other curses. Depending on what classes are run, giving 10% DPS to all of the mages or a substantial boost to the melee DPS may be enough to save your raid spot.

3. Personal ability matters. Last night, I watched >This mage< pull 600 DPS. Meanwhile, >this ele shaman< pulled 800. Just because your class should be out-DPSed by that other guys class doesn't mean it'll actually happen.

4. Gear matters. Even if you should be down there at the bottom of the charts, you've still got the awesome gear(and maybe DKP) you earned from all of those raids when you were top dog. It'll be a while before everyone catches on that your class kinda blows now.

We can work around it in PVE. We can click off Fort. We can hunt for gear with little stamina and lots of int (e.g. new tier 6 pieces). We can enchant and gem for int. We can take even more gear with no stats at all, increasing our damage stats (e.g. belt of blasting). Hell, the changes to Incinerate will allow us to do more DPS than we already do! Good thing dropping raid DPS through ISB by 10-17% isn't worth increasing the personal DPS of a few Warlocks by 22% or people would really have something to cry about.

In PVE, I'll live. I can take the hit.

In PVP? In all seriousness, fuck this shit. I've taken a lot of nerfs with a grain of salt, but this takes the cake. Its the most uninsightful, badly thought out change to the game since they tried to make Ruin increase crits by 60% and completely ignoring the real source of the problem at the time: negative resists. Thankfully we talked some sense into Blizzard and made them realise the real source of the problem of 8k Soul Fires and 5k Shadowbolts.

Hopefully we can do the same again.

From the PVP perspective, okay great, the change nerfs SL/SL a little bit in 1v1. It won't do ANYTHING to the spec in group fights. This change isnt going to make SL/SL warlocks run out of mana much quicker. They still have amazing health restoration from their pocket druid, siphon life and drain life.

Given that, why do they even feel the need to nerf it, when its not even dominating? Warriors dominate 2v2 and 5v5 and absolutely nothing seems to be being done about it.

The biproduct is it also nerfs the hell out of Destruction in PVP. Like it actually needed a mana efficiency nerf or something.

Another biproduct is the nonsense of scaling. Why the hell should stacking my most important stat be detrimental? I get a new piece of PVP gear with 10 stamina and 3 intellect more than the last piece. Guess what. My Lifetap now costs me 160 more health and I gain 60 more mana. Great! So I'm getting nerfed more and more as time goes on. What a fantastic idea, to make a class which was never given, nor is given any intellect, to scale with intellect and scale downwards with Stamina.

You shoulda just mentioned spellhit on priest gear. Hehe, for those times we need to shackle/mind control/psychic scream! Or when we have to smite things.

The thing that puzzles me the most is, why the "nerf" to evocate and then throw spirit on gear?

Well, to be fair, it is useful on precisely one fight for the Mana regen - Kaz'rogal; granted, you're also using it for the resistance, but hey - I typically manage to peak our DPS on that fight, but then, we've had it on farm for ages and I've been 61 Frost for 3 months now (that and Supremus are the two best for Frost fights in the current game). Also, spirit is used for the +damage from improved Spirit, but yes, I really do wish that they'd finally just decide to eliminate the 5-second rule and no in-combat health regen (encourage spirit on everyone). They could fiddle with the coefficients, but then you just make the regen talents / mage armor function as a multiplier. (30% increase to your regen from spirit).

For what it's worth, following his advice on my Core 2 Duo Aluminum iMac and on my Core 2 Duo MacBook has fixed any graphical issues, though of course it doesn't look as nice. I have not experienced a "significant reduction in overall performance," however! Framerates seem completely unchanged... the difference is with M2UseShaders set to 0 that the Death Effect does not work, water isn't translucent, etc.

As to Warlocks:
I may be way off base here but it does seem Life Tap needs to be redesigned. Think of it in terms of item budget. Originally, before BC, Intellect and Stamina cost the same item value. However, 1 intellect gave you 15 Mana while 1 Stamina gave you 10 HP. So stacking mana cost less item budget than stacking Stamina. Life Tap was designed with this in mind... you were supposed to have more mana than HP, so the cost was relatively higher than the reward.

Come BC and this was turned on it's head by the reduction in item cost for Stamina. No longer was Life Tap trading the "more expensive" resource for the "cheaper" resource as it did when originally designed (10 stamina per item point vs. 15 mana per item point). It now traded a cheaper resource for a more expensive one (20 stamina per item point vs. 15 mana per item point). I'd argue that this fundamentally broke the original concept, and needed to be addressed.

That said the correct way of addressing it would probably not to be basing it off maximum health. I'm not sure what the correct way would be.

If they have to nerf LT a simple nerf of the +shadow damage coefficient or the amount of mana you get back per point of health would be FINE. I could live with and understand that. Its always been 1 health for 1 mana except if you have Imp LT which gives 1.2 mana per 1 health.

But having the health reduction and the mana gain not linked in the slightest? Its absolutely stupid. The scaling is completely wrong and it just hurts the specs that depend more on stamina for survival even more and for no good reason (i.e. Destruction and Affliction).

Why should throwing on a +12 stamina gem in a gem slot increase my health by 180, increase the amount of health I lose when I lifetap by 27 but return no more mana than I would have got before I put the gem in?

Now I quickly compared Malefic with tempest or more specific the 3 new items of the sets.

tempest - malefic:
dmg: 0
crit: -6
hit : -19
haste: 1
sta: -9
int: 0
spi: 54

So as a mage you loose 6 crit rating, 19 hit and 9 sta for a overwhelming 1 haste and a totally ineffective 54 spirit. What makes me really sad is the hit rating. With all the new gear that drops in SWP without any Spellhit it means, that we must put 2 more spellhit gems into our gear, thats 20 Spelldmg (24 - 4 from Gemming Bonus) that we loose,

The only spec that could benifit from the 54 Spirit would be the new Arcane one...