No different than what shadow priests get. It may not be a good idea but there is precedence.

Shadow priests get something like that? So what? The mechanics of their spec is entirely different, and a change like that would be asinine. Quite frankly, i think there are too many people arguing for drastic and sweeping changes where they aren't needed. You tweak numbers, you don't destroy the building and start from scratch.

The first 2 tiers of the destruction tree are a lot more powerful than DS alone, which is why the change to ISB isn't so out of line when you think about it. ISB alone right now is only ~3% less damage than DS, and its the first 5 talent points you spend. If they aren't entirely removing talents that absurdly powerful, i somehow doubt you're about to see DS moved to another tree. A change in numbers perhaps, but that's about it.

DS in the destruction tree would give you a pretty crazy amount of damage increases. Even supposing that they made it a second 51 point talent. You would then be able to access: Devastation 5% increased crit, Ruin crit does 100% normal damage, Emberstorm increased fire dam by 10%, Backlash 3% crit, Shadow and Flame 20% spell dam bonus to incinerate and sb, kindling soul which will add more spell dam and then extra spell dam when you crit, eternal flames is another 10% added to crit dam w/ destruction spells, then you could add in DS for another 15% fire dam and finally, you get an unresistable good damage nuke in chaos bolt.

And that's only counting the destruction tree b/c with this build you could also get 5/5 imp corruption making molten core a valuable talent and at times increasing your fire damage by an extra 10%, while still having enough points to get demonic aegis 30% increase to fel armor as well.

Affliction with demo sac would face the same problem as well as w/ a ~25% increase to all your shadow damage spell w/ additional talents effecting DoTs they would be ticking for incredibly high numbers. To be honest, I think they should just nerf demo sac and improve the other 51 point spells to make them worthwhile for raiding.

Maybe by adding an increased damage DoT to chaos bolt so that fire warlocks would have to add another spell to their rotation every 8 seconds or giving some bonus (such as any Chaos Bolt crit makes your next spell instant cast and it does not activate the global cooldown or having it increase your haste by a percentage) and by doing something to cripple so it effects bosses in some way. At least that way warlocks would have to manage spells for their damage.

If DS remains as is, every PVE warlock will have DS and put the remaining points in Destruction*. As exciting as that sounds, I'll pass thanks. I'd like at least the illusion that my talent points can be freely spent. Or do you see a lot of viable builds that do NOT include DS given the current alpha notes? Because that's my problem: there aren't any, and trying to make the other talents work so there can be is a lot more a "sweeping change" than just changing DS to something besides a kludge for bad raid+pet mechanics.

* Unless they fix spell crit/haste, Affliction isn't as good a raid option as Destruction. Even if that is fixed, DS plus either Aff or Dest isn't a giant improvement in my book.

Do you seriously want me to make a list of classes/specs that need to go 15-20 points into other trees? So basically, your complaint is i cannot have my cake and eat it too? It doesn't matter what they do to DS, there will always be a 'best' spec, and as far as you're concerned, you won't ever be free to spend points as you wish.

15-20 points is very different from 21 points, because they don't prevent you from picking up the end talent. Even so, 15-20 is probably too much -- Blizzard has made changes to a number of talent trees to ensure that that you didn't have to spec more than about 10 points into any given tree to be effective. In my own class, Evocation, Improved Arcane Explosion, and Ice Block were all changed for that very reason.

So, in short: the fact that other classes need to spec that far into a specific tree to be effective doesn't support the argument that having to spec 21 into Demo for DS is fine, it just points out that those other classes have problems that need fixing as well.

Having a "best spec" is fine as long as the difference is small enough that anyone except the most rabid min/maxer can use the less effective spec and still consider himself effective. Blizzard's done remarkably well with this on the Mage class, and seems poised to do even better in WotLK with Mages and other classes as well. Having a "best spec" by such a wide margin that not using it is essentially cutting your throat is simply not good design, and that's the situation with DS at present; it deserves to be addressed.

What's more, it's pretty obvious that Blizzard is trying to break the DS/Destro stranglehold, by adding incentives to switch your spell school mid-rotation and by adding a 5-talent requirement to DS that is of zero value to a non-demonologist spec. Given that we can see pretty clearly what their intent is, it's perfectly reasonable to point out the fact that they have failed to achieve their goal, and to suggest reasons why and possible solutions.

The margin between destro and affliction is exagerated, its quite fine to run an affliction lock in your raid, the DPS about breaks even and you gain a lot of survivability on your tanks. There's nothing wrong with only one of a particular spec being needed, e.g survival hunters. Like i've mentioned before, i certainly don't think DS is perfect. But when the best argument people have for removing it is 'well it would be nice to spend more points in destro', i'm not really seeing the point of moving it.

I recall one subspec that had its tree changed because it required too many points in 3 different trees to be effective, and that was combat daggers. The mage situation was entirely different, a mage without evocation sucked, and ice block really should have been baseline. A affliction lock without demonic sacrifice does not miss it, ever. Neither does a non-raiding destro lock for that matter.

I'm not too sure about blizzard actually trying to break DS yet, given what the destruction 51 point talent is, and i'm not convinced molten core was meant to allow a shadowbolt/incinerate rotation either. It makes a lot more sense in my view, when you look at it as a talent that's meant to make corruption worth it.

Ahh, the "If they must suffer, so shall we all" line of reasoning. I think Lhivera addressed that pretty well so I'll leave it at me not being moved by that argument. As to your second point, I think your implication that you know me so well that you can already determine that there exists no possible change to Demonic Sacrifice that could make me happy is quite misplaced. In fact, I believe at least two people in this thread have already mentioned such a change, not including myself.

Before this turns in to pointless argument over whether DS needs an overhaul or not, I'd like to table that as I don't think there is really anything else to add there. Instead, I've been looking at deep demo to try and see how it stacks up and things aren't looking good. With SL losing 5%, DKs increased % looks like all it does is counter-balance the loss, any maybe not even that much. The 51 isn't really DPS-oriented, and even the new 31 isn't really worth it I don't think. Unless the imp/succubus talents are supposed to be Heavy Demo's raid DPS (which is odd, considering the Felguard is a heavy Demo talent) I'm just not seeing much. In fact, there might even be a DPS decrease over TBC.

Not really, just simply no one has come up with any compelling reason why demonic sacrifice is so awful, that it requires a restructuring of the trees. If we wanted to make the argument that 21 demonology is too powerful and attractive to destruction specs, then we better start making that argument for the first 20-21 points of destruction too. I sure as hell don't see anyone picking up the 51 point demo for raiding, and assuming cripple does not work on raid bosses, that's not about to get used in a raiding build either.

That's absolutely true, especially with only 2.5 slots per class available.

Perhaps DS should be baseline (and weaker, of course). Then it's not locking Destro into a single PvE build, and the talent slot can be used for something more Demonology-esque. Replace Master Conjuror with a 2-point talent that improves Demonic Sacrifice, swap its position with Improved Enslave. Improve some deep Destro talents to compensate for the reduced effect of DS.

I don't think it can make Corruption worthwhile. At around +2100 damage, it's going to add about 450 damage per proc. Corruption's going to proc it roughly twice every three casts. So you're trading 6 seconds of Incinerate casting time for about 900 damage. It's not even close to working for Corruption.

I don't really see a "have your cake and eat it" problem at level 80. A Frost mage who puts 71 points into the Frost tree will still have to make some choices between PvE and PvP talents if he wants to optimize his build toward one or the other, or if he wants to make a compromise build. So there's nothing inherently wrong with being able to build a good PvE build in Destruction without going 21 into Demo, and I think it improves the game if you have the choice to be effective both ways.

What did you use to determine this? After some check's, my incinerates right now would average 5132 damage after crits. Assuming i get 2 off, that's a little over 1000 damage added every 1 and a half corruption casts. Its not quite worth it yet probably, but its not too far off.
Hmm actually, considering with haste i can actually fit 3 incinerates into that 6 second time frame, molten core looks fine.

Just give destruction something like this as 51 pt:
YouTube - WoW - BOOM!

They they would be viable in pvp and aoe encounters at least.

Whoops, I was looking at the wrong calculations -- I was comparing non-DS-with-MC Incinerate damage to DS Shadow Bolt damage.

/slap self.

Wow! I might be jumping the gun, but I think I will go ahead and say that this spell pretty much seals the deal for warlocks being the single best anti-caster class in the game bar none. A spammable silence, CC and Snare, rolled into one where the target takes full damage from magical attacks without the worry of the target running around or even the cripple breaking due to damage.

Coupled with the already godlike anti-caster abilities available to warlocks, this spell could lead to some amazing combos. Silence the mage with this, and shield the cripple with an unstable affliction, hence preventing it being dispelled by anyone else. Now you have a solid 10 secs of beating on the mage/caster without a worry. Furthermore, you can save your fellpups spellock for after the target has gone through a full cycle (including diminishing returns, assuming this spell has diminishing returns, which it might not) of 17secs to further the silence by 3 secs, having a total of around 20 secs of free casting on a mage.
The greatest thing with this is that even if fear was on diminishing returns before you went into this combo, 20secs will cause fear to come off DRs, allowing you to fear again with impunity!
All you have to make sure is that you devour magic on the mage enough with the felpup to get rid of his mage armor (which I think we can all agree will be a trivial task at best) and force out the trinket use early with a fear, then fall into this spell combo.

Oh my, and after 20 secs of crippling the mage, you can go into another 20secs of fearing the mage (assuming it doesn't break early) which will then make cripple be off the DRs, allowing you to do it all again! Rinse repeat!

Haha! This spell makes me giddy like a little girl

You're acting like this spell is specialized against casters. It's not. Pacify prevents several types of actions including all offensive abilities, whether physical or spells. In fact, depending on whether Pacify prevents healing, the Silence effect may be entirely redundant.

In either case, expect this talent not to make release as-is.

That would be true, only if we assume your interpretation of "pacify" to be true. So far, I don't think we have any conclusive evidence on what pacify actually does, and there does not exist a mechanic in game currently that falls under the category of "pacify" (unless I am mistaken and have missed some critical piece of information, which could be true). The closest thing to the word that I can think of is the hunter's tranq shot.
Silence, on the other hand, is a well documented, well understood mechanic. For all we know, pacify might just be fancy wording. On the other hand, it could be a new mechanic to counter things like Beastial Wrath, and the new Warrior Bladestorm talent (aka "cannot be stopped untill killed"). While it could be the "be-all-end-all-works against everyone and makes them do nothing" talent that you are stating it is, that is highly unlikely, since, as you pointed out, it would make the silence part a mute point (loljoke).

I do hold to my previous statement, the fact that the talent description distinctly states "Silenced" means that, if nothing else, this talent is specifically designed with anti-caster ability in mind. In some way, it could be the descendant of the Warcraft 3: TFT's Blood Mage ability "Banish" which worked in similar ways (slowed down target, making them immune to physical, but took extra damage from magical attacks).

All that being said, even though the talent may or may not make it into the final version of the game, it does give us insight into the developers thinking at this point. Obviously they didn't just pull the spell out of a hat and decide to devote programming and art development hours on a whim. They are probably looking to give the affliction lock (or perhaps all locks) another anti-caster ability. We can accept this to be true by just observing the fact that this ability even exists in the first place. All in all, that fact alone states volumes about the possible future for warlocks, and gives good insight into the developers minds.

There are mobs in Terokkar that pacify their target, which makes them unable to perform physical attacks.


edit: beaten

Hmm...mob spell. A little 'iffy' for my tastes, given blizzard's proven inconsistencies between mob spells and player spells (sheep?). I'm still not convinced.

To elaborate (I should have stated this earlier), I do not believe a player spell contains a "pacify" mechanic. The thing that is, however, pushing me to lean more towards pacify not being a "complete loss of control" spell is that looming "silence" in the description.

All that being said, it has been a long long time since I was last in Terrokar. According to the wowhead spell description, it states "Pacifies an enemy, rendering it unable to attack for 5 sec"; does anyone remember if this is limited to just Physical attacks? Or is it all attacks. Given the npc spell description, I'm leaning more towards a "all attacks" but then again, I cannot remember what that spell does, for the life of me :P

The inconsistencies tend toward the details, however. Mob polymorph still applies a shapeshift and a confuse, even though it doesn't heal the target (anymore). There wouldn't be much point to using the specific term "pacify" unless it was intended to behave in a similar manner to the existing "pacify" mechanic. If it was just intended to be a silence, they would have just left it at "silence."

The reason they would mention both is that "pacify" doesn't prevent you from casting non-hostile spells such as heals, or blink. Pacify prevents hostile action. Silence prevents spellcasting, hostile or otherwise. Cripple, as currently written, will do both.

It prevents all hostile action. And there's no reason you ever would have come up against it, really, as it's only cast by non-hostile mobs, there's only one quest that requires you to kill only a very few of them, and as a ranged attacker, it's unlikely they would have got close enough to use it on you.

Actually, the Pacify used by mobs prevents one from performing any hostile physical actions, while still allowing hostile or non-hostile spell casts -- it's a physical "silence," so to speak.

It seems to make sense. Cripple destroys one's ability to spell cast and deal physical damage for a few seconds.

Hm, I could swear I was unable to cast spells against them. I'll have to go give it a try.

(2 minutes later)

You are right. I stand corrected!

Ah! Now this is starting to make sense.
So Cripple is, essentially, the warlocks (pseudo/reverse) total immunity, with a twist. The twist being that it is spammable, and allows the warlock to offload any and all spells that he wishes on a target that cannot harm him in any way, shape or form (unless DoTs) for a total of (theoretically, if we assume DRs) ~17+ secs if the attacker is melee, and ~20+ secs if the target is a caster (and felpup is out).
The downside being that it works for only one target.

Given the already vast amount of battle control a warlock has, it's starting to sound like this ability has ventured into the territory of overkill, imho.