Please use this thread to discuss Warlocks in the Mists of Pandaria expansion. Avoid excessive wish-listing and whining. Constructive criticism is fine. Make sure you are making a useful post. "I like X" is not useful. "I like X because it allows this or that" is useful. Common sense applies, if you're not sure feel free to PM a moderator or administrator. Thanks.

Probably worth noting here the proposed resource changes incoming for Warlocks:

• Unique resources for each spec.
• Affliction will continue to use Soul Shards, but with improvements.
• Demonology will use Demonic Fury. Demonic Fury builds during combat, and when maxed transforms you into Meta / Demon Form. Additional abilities available for Meta. Supposedly, you will be in Meta more often.
• Destruction will use Infernal Embers. Fire spells build up bonus damage, which is then released through nukes.

First of all, I really like the new talent system because the current system does not give you a real degree of freedom when it comes to personal preferences in abilities: The cookie cutter builds nearly take all the talent point there are, and a decision like "I need a damage reducing cooldown" forces you to a certain spec (e.g. destruction for nether protection) which has a lot of disadvantages of all kinds (e.g. missing buffs for the raid). 18 talents put into 6 tiers would give you an enormous amount of possibilities (3^6, obviously) if all of them would be viable.

The tiers seem to be sorted by "type of action" which also makes sense, this way you are not able to (and therefore don't feel forced to) stack (e.g. stack self heal on a healing intense encounter or mobility on a movement strong encounter).

Going into detail for the different tiers (always having PvE progression raids in mind):

Tier 1 is the health regeneration tier. The normal choice would probably be Soul leech: Current Simcraft numbers give roughly 6-7k dps with your main nuke, so this talent would provide about 1.5k HPS, healing you for roughly 1% per second. Dark Regeneration heals for roughly twice as much, but as it does not heal you for 155s afterwards I would call it rather situational. Probably it would become a far more interesting choice with half the runtime when it would actually help in "heal the raid to 100% before bad things happen" situations. Harvest of life might be useful when AoE-tanking many mobs but seems even more situational.

Tier 2 is the crowd control tier. While it's sad to see DC become a non-baseline spell, one can easily see how this tier will be adapted to the encounter: No cc possible means DC for the selfheal, stunable adds make Shadowfury interesting, Howl of Terror will probably be a rare choice for PvE.
EDIT: I concluded from the spell similarity of Mortal Coil to Death Coil that DC will vanish. If DC still exists baseline, MC will probably overwrite it as Nether Ward does now overwrite Shadow Ward.

Tier 3 is the defensive tier. The obvious choice is Soul Link (which, again, will not be baseline anymore as it seems). Sacrifical Pact will probably only be interesting when you're in a very special role, Hour of Twilight looks like PvP again.

Tier 4 is the active selfheal tier. Bloodstone is just a significantly stronger health stone, the interesting question is whether or not it really is usuable every 2 minutes. Spell Drain seems rather unusable in PvE because normaly you are not targeted by single target spells of a boss and even when you are, they are usually instant casts. Nether ward is a well known tool for us, so it will probably be a situational decision between NW and Bloodstone.

Tier 5 is the enhanced (or dead) demon tier. All three choices seem viable in one situation or the other: Supremacy will probably be the standard, Service and Sacrifice can be seen as damage cooldowns (most probably, Sacrifice is not viable for demonology, though). I personally don't like this tier because Supremacy is a flat dps increase, exactly what should not be in the talent tiers anymore.

Tier 6 is the special abilities tier: I don't see many situations where Archimonde's Vengeance might be useable. Kil'Jaeden's Cunning's worth largely depends on the damage decrease. In the current spell environment it seems a poor choice as you can keep all DoTs up while moving anyway and Fel Flame does significant damage. I interpreted this as a hint that you won't be able to keep up your dps while moving in the future. Illidan's Guile only makes sense when there are unimportant targets near the boss (otherwise you would AoE them) or two bosses next to each other. Splash damage is nice, but we already have decent AoE and the ability to dot more than one target, so I'm not really convinced.

All in all, there are at least two interesting talents in each tier giving a lot of variety which I'm looking forward to.

I wonder how the 8% magic debuff spreading will be implemented, if it's kept at all, of course. Now that jinx is out of the way for sure, i can't seem to find anything related to earth and moon, ebon plaguebringer or master poisoner in the new talent system for the other classes. Maybe they consider that given the multiple class that provide it today, they might as well as remove it completely : this would acknowledging the fact that it's uptime is already almost 100% in the majority of raid groups, given the fact that mindless or passive debuffing is not "an added or enjoyable gamplay".

The same goes for the shadow and flame / critical mass duo.

I like the synergy between Kiljaeden's Cunning and Harvest of Life for an interesting on-the-move AoE possibility. Assuming we can still start with Soulburn-SoCs if still available, this will allow Affliction at least to be able to move into place for a Shadowflame while spamming Harvest of Life, depending on its damage of course. Not to mention battleground tanking.

I hope it doesn't conflict with Demonology's on-the-move Hellfire, making the ticks longer.

I don't really understand the benefit of Enhanced Channeling: "Re-casting before it ends extends the duration by 3 sec, up to 5 times."

Two warlock related items of note from the Blizzard Q&A:

Activating demon form will still be controllable, rather than automatic at 100% demonic fury
Channeled spells ticks will update dynamically after moving, no word on normal cast time spells

> no word on normal cast time spells

Considering how the game works now, the cast time couldn't be slowed. I'm basing this assumption on the fact that currently, if you get a curse of tongues after starting to cast a shadowbolt, the cast time remains unchanged until the next cast.

Based on the same assumption, i think that channels spells would have the tick time adjusted from ticks to ticks. That's to say that if you're not moving when it ticks, and you just move between ticks, i'd say the tick times wouldn't change in the end.

Both of these would enable to "abuse" the slowcast/slowtick disadvantage. But these are only assumptions, of course...

That also leads to think there won't be clipping problems anymore. One could speculate a similar treatment would be applied to all channeled spells, resolving the Shadow Priest's Mind Flay problem for example.
You don't have to mash the button 5 times, but you could press it once as it's about to end the channel so it behaves similarly to how DoT refreshes work now.

This mechanic is now already in the game to some degree, currently if you refresh any channeled spell before the end it adds the next tick onto the new channel.

Being able to extend the duration to 15s seems kind of pointless to me, although may lead to some interesting LoS mechanics if you turn your channel into 15s long and then still are able to move while casting and then keep channeling out of LoS.

The idea seems to be a matter of convenience, not having to micromanage ticks overlapping with a refresh on a 3 second interval.

What in the world are you basing this on? It's certainly a central feature of demonology now, why is it unlikely for them to continue that?