Even though world PvP doesn't really matter, it's still too heinously powerful in 1v1 situations to be left alone. Blessing of Freedom and Dispels (when self-cast) are not viable counters, because of the silence effect. It would be rather hilarious if Pacify disallowed various non-typed buffs like cloak of shadows or bestial wrath (expect that to be true in at least one patch on live or test realms). Plus, an affliction warlock has many tricks to call out a PvP trinket early, many of which involve fear. And unless it secretly breaks on damage, it lets you always do to everyone what fear only does to people who whine on forums, while also not making them run out of shadowbolt range while you're winding up a cast or clip through the wall and make you wait four hours on a GM.

There are definitely easy ways to castrate the spell, like making it break on damage or share DR with fear or a long cooldown. Until it actually gets those (which it will, if it doesn't get replaced first), it's a broke-ass spell.

Agreed. Which is why I'd very much like to see it toned down and/or given a reasonable cooldown, but also given a DPS component to make it useful in situations where kiting/CC isn't important.

~20 second cooldown, but while it's up increases the damage of your Affliction spells by ~20%. This way it's not overpowered in PvP/5-mans, but not totally useless in a tank n spank boss encounters (The last thing we need is another Shadowfury) Speaking of which- Shadowfury should debuff the mob to take 5% more damage from all sources for ~5 seconds. I hate these talents that are so godamn specific. It's cool that 0/21/40 may be the highest DPS spec, but does Shadowfury have to be so terrible for raiding just because 0/21/40 exists?

That is not a tone-down, it's a buff of rather monumental proportions. Cast it, amp-curse, trink-up, DoT up, tap, drain. You'll be draining at 20% more and your DoTs will hit like a truck. When it breaks, DC and Bolt your problems away, as by now you're in execute range and are looking at +15% bolt crit.

Adding a 20% buff for it's duration is adding a CD to your synergy and adding massive viability to the spell. I'd gladly trade chain spam for that, particularly at 20sec. If we were talking 1m or 3m better still, different story.

As for Shadowfury, your suggestion won't make it viable in the context you quote. Assuming 41 destro, your next best setup is 20 affli. That'll be worth a global +6-10% depending on gearing I believe. Minus the 15% for sac, a loss of at best 5%. Adding a 5% buff from a GCD spell which will run it's self out at some point and need refreshing will not cover the difference. Ever. Though your notion does add massive AoE utility;

I'm more concerned that Cripple is too well developed for PvP and extremely lackluster for PvE. I truly think it needs rebalancing.

It has little to no use in raids because A) It provides physical damage immunity, making more than half the DPS population obsolete, and B) Bosses will unquestionably be immune to it's Pacify/Silence affects as well as it's movement speed decrease. So it's Ruin, or this. That's not even a fair question...

Two things need to happen. Cripple needs to be toned down significantly enough in PvP to have it's physical damage immunity removed, and it needs to be usable (even if to a much lesser degree) on raid encounters.

Personally, I'd prefer to see either an attack/casting speed increase, a flat "all damage done" decrease, a movement speed penalty, a massive decrease in chance to hit - perhaps removing the affected targets chance to crit, or a combination of some of the above effects.

It needs to compete with Ruin for raid viability. At least that's my opinion.

Cripple has enormous PvE use... as a CC. An affliction warlock could potentially control four targets with this spell - enslave one, banish one, fear one, cripple one.

I agree of course that a raiding warlock would never take it over ruin or DS and it provides no DPS increase.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. It has no PvE use on raid encounters, which puts it as a "no-go" talent for raiding and merely confines it's usage primarily to PvP and non-raid environments. Any way you cut it, that makes it poorly designed. In it's current state (which will most likely be nerfed before release) I can easily forsee it becoming the Shadowfury of Affliction for WotLK.

It would be preferable to design the talent as an alternative to Ruin, sacrificing far superior damage/scaling for an extremely powerful raid debuff to finally befit the debuffing tree of the debuffing class.

Normal-people cripple (like doomguard and mobs and such) is usually a dehaste or a damage reduction rather than a traditional CC. That in itself is raid-useful, either as a constant small damage reduction (assuming it stacks/is greater than shadow embrace and/or thunderclap), or even as a cooldown-limited large one. I'd pay good money for a 10-second 50% damage reduction on pulls, phase transitions, enrages, healers-got-knockbacked, and the like, and it's a useful control-based PvP talent as well. Whether I would pay Ruin for it depends on encounter design and the DPS increase by going over 50 in affliction, but the possibility is at least there.

I understand the thought but I don't think that's quite true, it turns on a couple points:

(a) For progression content, are players expected to respec for each fight?
(b) Will raid encounters be designed to specifically make non-dps talents useful?

The first point is essentially the case right now (Nether Protection for example is highly useful in some places and a nonstarter in others). If Cripple is not useful for a given fight, then you don't have to take it: respec out and take a summon back.

For the second point, it is not necessarily the case that a non-dps CC talent would result in a loss of raid dps, because the presence of an additional CC lowers the tank/healing requirements and may allow the raid to drop one of either for an extra dps (M'uru sentinels come to mind).

The only thing that could be worse than having 51 point talents that are generally useless for raiding pve would be having 51 point talents that are generally useless for raiding pve but that are a must on certain fights, forcing warlocks to respec I can already envision then taking the warlock tank thing from a few fights and morphing that into the warlock demon form tank requirement.

Right now there is a three sided whammy that looks like it is once again encouraging a 0/21/50 (0/21/40 right now) spec: Mediocre 51 point talents, insanely good 21 point talents and not enough filler in all 3 trees to make putting more than 50 points in any one tree (and giving up a 21 pointer in another tree like ruin or DS).

It's a troubling puzzle I agree, but the poster under you is on par to what I believe the answer to be: Nerf Cripple to put it bluntly.

A silence (which may or may not be considered an interrupt, see: Silencing Shot) or Pacify have little to no place on a boss encounter, and to my knowledge, there exists no boss in game that can have their movement speed slowed. However, other effects CAN be used to a lesser extent on bosses, and would still have debilitating but not overpowered use in PvP.

For example: hit modifiers, damage modifiers, attack/casting speed modifiers, regeneration modifiers, etc...

Those possibilities are all useful in both mediums to varying extent.


Yet another possibility is a conditional modifier which would allow Cripple a point in PvE. The programming seems to already exist in the new Mage spell Frostfire, where if the condition is met for frost to deal additional damage, the spell school is modified to Frost.

This same conditional modifier can be programmed into Cripple, where: if the target is immune to cripples effects, the target will take additional damage from your Corruption spell (2x or 3x damage perhaps?), possibly increasing the effect of your Malediction by an addional X% (which would make the debuff WELL worth bringing to an encounter by buffing raid DPS to account for more than the DPS loss). This would then give it a raid utility for trash without drastically underpowering the same warlock come time to pull the boss. It would simply be another debuff for that warlock to keep up.


I'm sure there's a way, and I'd be all for discussing potential options to see this used on Boss encounters in some form.

I would still *really* love to see pure affliction (using dots and drain life only) as a viable raiding setup. There were positive moves made towards that in TBC and I see more positive changes (like drain life refreshing corruption) but so far it doesn't look like enough - sadly we will probably see warlocks of all 3 talent tress STILL forced to use a destruction spell for their main attack.

Hm, doesn't really scan when you look at the Mage talents. Frost PvE and PvP is essentially identical -- you dump virtually every point (or literally every point) into Frost. The differences are very small details. Arcane's 51-pointer is great for PvP because it allows damage on the move, yes, but being able to deal damage on the move is also one of the biggest complaints mages had about PvE in TBC, so it also applies there. Fire's 51-pointer provides some small passive defense against sneaky rogues and druids, but it's primarily useful in PvE AOE situations. The compromises between PvE and PvP in most cases seem to be getting smaller, not larger (indeed, the pressure to respec at all is getting smaller, not larger).

And why, if they intended for Destro 'locks to be avoiding the 51-pointer for PvE in favor of the Demo 21-pointer, did they add a 5-point requirement to the Demo 21-pointer that is worthless to a Destro 'lock, while a Demo 'lock would be taking it anyway? That was an obvious attempt to discourage Destro 'locks from speccing DS -- a failed attempt, yes, but an obvious attempt.

Exactly. As I believe I stated earlier in the thread Affliction will be in a tough spot if the 51-pointer isn't raid viable. The other two options are Demonic Sacrifice, which nullifies Dark Pact, or Ruin, which only effects ~50% of an Affliction Warlock's DPS (Shadowbolt) from a stat that Affliction doesn't really stack (crit). Affliction doesn't have much in the way of raid DPS options if Cripple stays as it is. If crit ends up effecting DoTs then Ruin will look a lot more attractive since we'll have more crit...but it's either that or Cripple being reworked to something else for deep Affliction to really have a viable option for raiding.

mages might be simaler to the druid talent thinking (go all out in your desired tree to succeed) in that frost and fire have very little in them that benefiet anything outside of their own schools; and while i dont think any of the 41 talents are useless in pve, imo they have pvp in mind when they add them. slow, db, and water ele are all AWESOME pvp talents.

as far as moving the demo talents, i think that was not to discourage the speccing for DS, but rather to preserve certain talents as benefiets for people who actually go deeper into the tree. things like decent seduce duration or instant pet summoning all of a sudden become perks exclusive to people who go demo for more than just DS.

Garak's Dream Affliction 51-Point Talent: Overheals from your Drain Life spell get turned into more damage on the target being drained, at some ratio that makes it comparable to shadowbolt. For 51 points, we get a mainline affliction filler, and one that gives Dark Pact an effective DPS component to boot. And no, I wouldn't worry about PvP too much because you hit the warlock once and he goes back to normal damage (ooo, metagame possibilities!).

Actually druids have similar issue to warlocks - even worse - they got to sink ~15 points in resto to be decent at either feral or balance (need intensity for mana regen - and 4% damage increase in resto tree. Mana increases I canunderstand - but dps increases in resto tree - lol.

and the trees are bloated beyond belief... you can spend all your talents in one tree and still not pick all of them up.

Actually I don't see how its related to shaman at all (they have 3 trees that all do different roles) and the hunter pet feels like it is more of an integral part of being a hunter than a demo pet is for a warlock (in that hunter pets are general all around side kicks while ours function more like collections of utility spells that we can choose from or not even use at all). I'm not really sure how it would be any different than now to be honest. How is letting us cast only affliction spells any worse than the pve raiding specs that only cast destruction (bar a curse every 5 minutes)?

The reality is that like mages, warlocks are damage dealing casters - whatever else blizzard had hoped that we would be (caster boss tanks with soul linked felhunters?), we are far more like mages than we are any other class. And maybe there is something to be said for some variety and options. I've been casting shadow bolt as my main attack, no matter what talent spec or level, from everything from Ragefire Chasm to Brutallus - a viable alternative might be nice.

Anyway, its a moot point as it doesn't look like blizzard is not going in that direction and seems to agree with you (probably because they can't figure out how to make drain life viable in pve without being broken in pvp). I didn't intend for this to turn into a whine thread. Its just dissapointing to look at the talents and realize that you will probably be doing the exact same thing in 2 years that you are doing now (mashing shadow bolt).

You really didn't read my post, i specifically mentioned that as a problem they seem to be aware of, and trying to fix with talents. You DoT's are your secondary damage spells, and used in conjunction with nukes to put out maximum DPS, at least theoretically. Affliction gives your debuffs (CoW, CoE, CoS e.t.c) a bigger bite, in addition to increasing the value of your secondary damage type (and giving you one or 2 extra along the way). Just like demonology doesn't have the pet putting out 80% of its DPS just because its demon specific, i'm not sure affliction is meant to be 100% of your DPS, the tree doesn't look like that anyway. Obviously there are issues with this, mostly with regards to the 2 different hit talents now, but i don't see how using shadowbolt (or incinerate) makes a big difference.

I'm not even sure how casting purely affliction spells will suddenly make the affliction tree that much more fun, instead of a 2.5 second cast, you now have a 5 second cast time 'nuke' that has the potential to really throw off DoT refreshes. Apart from that, you're pretty much doing the exact same thing, there's nothing new and refreshing about switching up whether you're using lasers or bolts.

I just had an interesting idea. What if you removed the "you cant have a demon out" part of demonic sacrifice and moved it much deeper into the demon tree? This would solve a bunch of problems in one fell swoop: Free up Affliction and Destruction from being hemmed into X/21/Y builds because of the insane power of DS, allow them an easy way to buff demonology (they could tweak the actual percents of the DS whatever they felt was good for the trees balance), make this fire/shadow nuke weaving idea that blizzard seems to want to implement actually possible since you would not be locked into one element type or the other (and could actually take more than 50 points in destruction and even some in affliction - no more dotless destro locks), and fix what has always seemed an odd part of the demon tree (a zillion points to buff your demon and the one talent that removes it completely for a small self buff?). Thoughts?

I'd much rather them change Demonic Sacrifice into a short term buff (30 seconds, a minute?) that triggers when your pet dies.

The problem is even if DS goes away for Destruction Warlocks and Affliction Warlocks, so what? You'll just be back to the SM/Ruin days of using your imp on passive for the life of your warlock. The only real gain is you can plunk more points into Destruction than you can now and pick up flavor talents and slot some additional points into affliction for support talents (or weak DPS talents).

Neither option is honestly that great and I doubt Blizzard is going to be making the effort to turn Warlock minions into something similar to Hunter pets that provide a significant portion of your DPS regardless of spec. Another option would be to make Soul Link a base line ability for the class and have the healing to pet through damage take Soul Link's new place as the 10 point talent.

Suggestive puts forth very good points, allow me to supplicate his post with the following:

If DL became a viable DPS choice, you'd be looking at a spec which dealt comparable DPS to any other, healed it's eyeballs out, had infinite mana not only via LT but DP too, has an imp to buff the group and offers malediction. Not only that, but with the need for SB removed, you'd quite possibly go for a sacced Succ to make things even worse.

Even by retroactively adjusting Drain Life to give half the life, you're still excessively overpowered, compared to other specs. Examine the choice:

Either you are a Demo build, which has a lot of hard work keeping the bastard alive and splashes Destro or:
You're a Destrolock, with no pet out, reliance on LT, a movement problem (due to DOTs) and a pathetic Drain that can't save you, or:
You're Affli. You clearly give the largest buff to the raid, you offer the most flexibility from a motion perspective, you offer Bloodpact, you can tap your imp, you sacrifice nothing in DPS terms and you heal your face off.

I'm curious:

With the new molten core talent, won't the proposed (somewhere earlier in this thread) 21/0/50 spec be much more viable?

Instant Corruption, SL, more powerful corruption, nightfall.
vs.
DS

I consider most of the other talent points in Demo to get to DS filler, As the only ones you get any use of give you slightly more stam/int. (Oh, and that nice 30% boost to Fel Armor...)

If the new molten core talent were slightly reworded, to have fire increasing shadow, and shadow increasing fire, would not tossing up a Corruption,SL,Immolate, then starting a incinerate cycle, tossing instant SB's whenever nightfall procs, be more of a boost than just 15% fire/shadow damage?

Even in it's current form, with 2(3 if you have CoA) dots ticking, increasing your fire damage by 10% all the time, giving you life back, be more valuable than a sacrificed pet?

I think it comes down to which gives you more damage/utility: SL/emp Corruption, & the 2 GCD's it costs, or a DS'd pet's %age increase. Ain't a math/spreadsheet wiz, so someone else would have to prove it with numbers.