Some more dev activity on the warlock beta forum:

"In an upcoming build we are changing Ruin to a 5-point talent. However, it will swap places with Devastation. Devastation will become a 1-point talent (5% spell crit). This will be a minimal change to the Destruction Warlock, while opening up Ruin to other builds without having them sacrifice their 51-point talents."

WoW Forums -> Aff: Haunt vs Ruin

blue.mmo-champion.com - Improved Corruption

blue.mmo-champion.com - Mirror Image > Metamorphosis

That means only 15 points are needed to get Ruin in destro, very nice for both demo and affliction builds (probably a must have for raids). The 51 points talents from both affliction and demo are a higher dps gain than 21 point destro now (5% crit).

Metamorphosis is on average a 6% damage gain even if you do not use any of the special abilities. But its cooldown and duration fits well with heroism, so with some cooldown stacking you should be able to get considerably more out of it.

Thank god, I wonder what changed their mind after x years of denial. Nowadays all they talk about is "fun". Spending 5 points to make one of your base dots instant is definitely "not fun".

Corruption is going to be a monster now, I wonder if they can even keep this without serious PvP balance issues.



Again I sense serious Arena issues with 2 Warlocks dotting you up, popping their god-mode defensive-offensive CD and nuking the hell out of you, while being in the tree with the most survivability. This talent is now like Bestial Wrath, except higher damage modifier and higher cooldown, meaning more spiky. The duration is too long to sit through with cooldowns. I doubt this is going to stay unchanged.

Well the form is still a demon, which means other locks and palas have a way of negating it (fear, banish) plus it isn't immune to CCs like Bestial Wrath is for hunters. It might be enough for Blizzard to consider this balanced.

As for Corruption being a monster now in PvP, they can further increase the effect resilience has on it for all I care. But we'll see what happens when they launch the new build. Hopefully some time soon.

Affliction getting ruin and haunt now is incredibly sexy, demo also now gets all its good stuff and ruin, big time scaling and dps boosts for those specs.

Affliction Corruption is going to be ticking for like infinity now with +13%, +20%, +20%, +20%, +15%, +10%dmg, +66% spellpower, and +100% crits, that gain +18% from raid buffs(did I miss any modifers?), I imagine great QQ incoming when there are 3000-3500dmg corruption ticks. I don't really see how this can be balanced in pvp with demonic teleport now.

Also unsure how metamorphosis is going to be balanced in arena. It is like a super heroism, that increases your armor to atleast dual-wielding plate levels, and presumably can't be dispelled. It will be interesting to see how this shapes up. Certainly looks more likely today that warlocks will be amazing than it did yesterday, for both pve and pvp.

I really don't believe the +40% damage from demon form will prevail. It seems too op.

I actually leveled for a bit as 0/21/40+ saccing the voidwalker and just spamming SB. There was no downtime and it is really low maintenance playing.

Drain Soul with a UI choice [in the default WoW UI menus] to destroy shards after a set # in inventory?
Heck if they're gonna destroy downranking this and leave imp soul as is, this could take away a little of the sting

edit - Pandemic should expand to include whatever is used as the Affliction 'channeldotnuke', if this happened

You can macro that as well; something like that probably wouldn't make it into the menu systems, if only because no other class has options in them.

If anyone wants the macro, they can PM me for it. I like it for Affliction farming for mana regen.

I agree that affliction generally looks really interesting now, and I can also see the whine about potentially huge corruption ticks, alas I dont think that QQ would be justified considering how many talent points we actually spend in buffing corruption if you go deep affliction.

Meta is also 51 points deep, and any spec that deep into demo will lack many of the other damage increases affliction or destruction would have. I don't think its unreasonable, but I fear it'll be nerfed like the dot coefficients were when 2.0 came out, because we were using new talents/mechanics on old gear.

Damage is rarely unbalanced in pvp because it is the easiest thing to tweak. They can cap it, not to mention the myriad of ways to cleanse a Corruption dot anyway. As such, the chances of 3k corruption tics happening until we are in a world of gear where that would be normal is zero. Destruction can routinely crit for over 10k now, but is considered useless in arena. High damage, when it is all you bring to the table, isn't enough to make any class even viable in arena, much less overpowered. The era of one shotting people died long ago.

It's always the subtle things that end up having the most dramatic effect, I daresay no one predicted SL/SL as the dominant pvp spec while BC was in Beta. All of these changes read like a warlocks wishlist come true, but we can count on them being within reason, and all of us who have played warlocks for any length of time are quite familiar with the feeling of the nerfbat as well.

Unless I misread your post (and re-reading I'm not sure still), it seems you're saying that raid buffed corruption ticks are going to be OP in pvp....which would be true, except for the fact that raid-buffed corruption ticks don't happen in PvP.

I agree with some other posters though, 40% seems like it will be over the top.

And although I personally like the changes announced, doesn't the new meta basically encourage the warlock tanking in PVP that Blue said they wanted to avoid?

From a PvE standpoint with the ruin change, I think we just got to have our cake and eat it too, which is awesome (but hopefully not OP).

The armor increase on Meta is nice, but in terms of PvP, you still won't be able to parry or block like a Warrior Rogue Ehaman or Paladin (Whatever) would be able to. Since you'll most likely be spending some time casting things like AoE shadowbolts or whatever. Still, Meta + Circle might lead to some good midigation for a while.

One of the major things I see is the instant corruption makes it easier for Demo locks to use the Molten Core talent, which was what blizzard started they wanted. Now we don't have to sac 5 points into Affliction to do it. The ruin change looks really useful, but I'm very visual and until I sit and stare at the updated talent tree, it doesn't make as much sense to me where it will play in.

From what they said, all they're doing is swapping Devestation with Ruin, but Ruin will cost 5 points and Devestation just 1.

I think he's saying +13%[CoS], +20%[Imp Cor], +20%[SE], +20%[Haunt], +15%[Impr sb], +10%[SM]dmg, +66% spellpower [Emp Cor + EA]. But then Contagion is still missing, Pandemic + Death's Embrace for an extra 15% near death, and the occasional Nightfall.

And if I compare that with the mage talent critical mass, I doubt devastation will stay at 5%.

They've said many times you can't always compare talents between classes.

That asied, I'd much rather an activated 21 over a passive crit%. Any of the following would be much more fun and still have basically the same effect:

+50% crit chance for 6 seconds, 1 minute CD
+25% crit chance for 12 seconds, 1 minute CD
+50% crit chance for 12 seconds, 2 minute CD

Given being able to time cooldown abilities around things like Bloodlust/Heroism/Trinkets, a slightly lesser benefit would probably still work out with no overall change to full Destruction DPS. Maybe go with +50% crit chance for 10 seconds, 2 minute CD.

That was my first thought when I read the change. So they fixed the paradox of ruin being to powerful to skip over a 51 point talent by just letting us get both. So how to they give Destro back its "21 pointer" of power.. without going full circle to 51 pointer vs 21 pointer.

As for the change to the armor buff.. its very interesting. 360% scaling vs 600% is a fairly drastic boost. While considering this is logical due to cloth having low total armor in the first place, we could abuse this to gain more armor than intended by item swapping before meta use.

Consider an item like Pillar of Ferocity which would add 3300 additional armor when morphed. A situational choice could be made to item swap for additional mitigation vs melee or not to vs ranged. I wonder what lvl 80 weapons with Armor on them will be like in this manner, I have not looked at any of the wrath gear.

No, corruption was always easy to use as demo....1/43+x/15+x was actually the highest dps demo build.

The choice now becomes between filling out the deep demo talents for 0/54/17 or 0/53/18 or slimming down to 5/51/15 (my assumption is that meta is now very worth it in PvE)

There are really tough choices either way, which is good.

What I really wonder is will isb+bane+ruin make it so that immolate is not worth while for demonology in PvE. If that becomes the case, no one will use molten core, and this will actually make demonolgy talent choices easier, but will make it slightly less interesting to play in PvE (in terms of spell rotations).

I can't believe how much they fixed metamorphasis. They basically added everything we wanted (keep your pet, keep your spells, some kind of % buff, surivability through increased AC and snare reduce and a few unique spells) and the corruption/ruin changes are both great (if long overdue). That said, 40% for 45 seconds is definitely too much. I was hoping for 25% myself.

As for OP corruption ticks, I don't know. At least a few of the % modifiers are going to be tough to get up (have fun casting that haunt with a hunter pet or rogue on you) and with the unstable affliction silence going from 5 seconds to 3, there shouldn't be as much fear related to dispelling lock dots.