5/5 Improved DS with CoR is a 20ap increase DPS increase over CoR, which is safely approximable as zero. All it costs is three points of unbridled rage, which is well worth 800 armor penetration.

You are absoltuely right I am not sure how I made that mistake.

I don't get why you guys are suddenly considering the CoE/CoS change a problem; there seem to be locks amongst you who consider the relief as a reason -not- to bring a lock to a raid, rather than a free "here's incentive to try Incin build, a free 3% to your fire mages, and one more CoD for the same raid".

Claiming the merge of curses is a bad thing is like saying using pens instead of quills is worse because you feel bad about not using the ink-pot any more.

Well it is certainly not a bad thing for now, it may be a bad thing in the future if locks are no longer the top ranged dps class.

Every class should be expecting either 2 or 3 raid slots in WotLK, no more. Given the buffs and debuffs that can be supplied by warlocks of any stripe, some of which cannot be provided simultaneously by a single warlock, do you really see a possibility that not being the top ranged DPS class is going to drive you outside that 2-to-3 range?

Going from 'top ranged dps' to 'really good, but not quite as much as class x' isn't a bad thing. You still provide more utility than certain classes, and less than others.

Being the top ranged dps class isn't necessarily a good thing either. If you have an off-night/die early/stand in fire, people are like "Hey, XYZ died! oh crap, we're screwed, our top DPS is gone". Look at it as less stress, rather than not being number one.

Besides, skill determines how well you do, given equal gear. Just l2p better.

I don't know why you would even want to raid with a guild that would get rid of you at the drop of a hat like that. What, are you just there to put a curse up and that's it?

Touching back on Cripple for a moment...

Would it be unreasonable to add an alternate effect to Cripple (as well as other similar talents like Slow) for mobs that are immune to the effects of the talent? It's frustrating to look at a talent and know it's not going to have any real effect for boss encounters. As was discussed (perhaps earlier in this thread or in the WotLK info thread) that there seems to be a disconnect between Blizzard and the players on talents that are only useful for trash clearing, or very specific purposes. There is a great deal of appreciation for straight DPS boosting talents because they're useful all the time whereas Cripple won't see much use in raiding...True, one could say "Get another 21-pointer" but neither DS (nullifies Dark Pact) nor Ruin(only effects Shadowbolt which is 50% of our DPS, with a spec that doesn't naturally gain mych from crit. All it does it take crit from a terrible stat to a slightly workable stat) are particularly conducive to working with Affliction- which is why I'm making a stink over Cripple. Cripple needs to do something meaningful to boss mobs.

Word from the wikidot forums, supposedly via the alpha forums, is that Cripple's going to be scrapped and replaced, so I wouldn't fret too much about what it does or doesn't do.

The biggest benefit from the curse combine is 10-man raiding.

While people aren't going to lose spots in raids now. It will affect things when there is a rebalance at the end of the year. Probably, the 3rd warlock making way for the death knight or some such.

No, the true benefit of merging cos/coe is that it allows more flexible raid groups. Without it, in the case of 2warlock/2 mage, the 5th player will always be a warlock first. It also means that having 1 mage alone isnt a crutch that your raid must carry because nobody can realistically give the opportunity to provide decent dps (of course, assuming here you would cos/coe over cor).

No, it's positive in the eyes of self-centered warlocks who are concerned about their own raid spot over balance and game design. If you want to keep your raid spot, earn it without the crutch of a necessary curse. The warlock class is, and by all signs will probably continue to be, able to stand on its own without needing to leech 10% of two other people's damage to justify his rDPS contribution. Needing three of a class in a 25-man raid is dumb, even if that class is my own, and I have no problem with lowering that constraint. Especially when it allows a personal DPS increase.

Personally I am happy with the current state of wanting 4-5 warlocks every raid. Only reason you don't have more warlocks than that is that you are restricted by gear drops not being token based. I would rather the game be imbalanced in my favor than be balanced. It doesn't really matter if this is selfish or not, I am always gonna look out for the best interest of my class, even at the expense of raid flexibility, personally I enjoy being sat a total of like an hour in all of TBC.

As I said before, the change is certainly a buff in the short term, and as long as we at least are near mages probably also a buff in the long term. If we end up 10-15% behind mages then this change will essentially cost us a raid slot, which i wouldn't be happy about, but it would obviously be better to complain about that change than this one.

Well, I want to stress a point. Many people scoff the conversation into a simple 'well, who cares, your guild will invite whoever of the best player is available in the case of 2warlock/2mage when needing an extra caster'. I agree with the gist of the idea, but the consequences are far bigger than that. It means that, if your guild implodes, for whatever reason, and everyone applies to a new guild, then the new guild wants 1 more caster. Who do you think they will chose between a mage and a warlock ?

What more, even myself I've been actively against EJ recruiting one more mage because, at the time, I said verbatim 'well, we might as well begin by getting COE before we even consider more mages' (for months we ran with 2 warlock every raid). And even this week, I went on my alt to do kil'jaeden. You can bet I wish I didn't have to do that. (un?)Fortunately sunflare didn't drop, that would have had gotten me pissed for a long time.

So ultimately, stacking a class has more impact that just building a better raid setup. It has a trickle down effect that isn't very good for the game.

I suppose the actual problem you mention there runs deeper, Manly - there is currently ~nothing differentiating a Mage from a Warlock (from the perspective of the groups around them).

Both are spell-based ranged DPS able to attack in multiple elements. Both bring important but (compared to their DPS) minor utility to the group/raid. Both have CC options - if different ones.

There's just nothing making someone !always! want a Mage or !always! want a Warlock. The biggest deciding factor is who's DPS output is noticably higher than the other one's - and that's not really how balance is supposed to work, if I was awake in that class


What both classes need is something to make them "more than DPS". Giving them unique and identifyable side-uses which in importance are on-par with their main-use of being a DPSer. Obvious would be debuffing for Warlocks (tough to balance for raiding) and CC for Mages (same problem).
So not easy, but doable. And would work much better than the current setup which balances classes solely around their DPS figure.



(sorry, rambling :X )

I would argue that the Mage brings a fair bit more control in CC to the table than the Warlock does, especially against humanoids (Polymorph lasts twice as long as Seduce, and for trivial talent points it can be made to never heartbeat resist, so the Mage doesn't have to worry about fiddling with it as much once the mob is poly'd, whereas anyone who's tried chain-seducing knows how agonizing THAT can be), and better control over AoE, while Warlocks have a bit more single-target damge scaling control (with wise application of DoTs they can throttle their DPS *very* well) and are a bit hardier when soloing with a few more escape mechanisms.

They do play rather similar in raid situations (which I know is what ninety-nine percent of the people here care solely about), but the two classes do have some rather substantive differences. I think the Warlock has still ended up rather more similar to the Mage in raid situations than Blizzard first intended (we have to remember that in the way, WAY back Warlocks played far differently than they do now), but there are enough substantive differences that there are reasons to bring both to a raid, especially depending on the nature of the fight and if there are adds, and what kind, and the like.

The best interest of our class is not to cram as many warlocks into a raid as possible. The best interest of our class is to be balanced enough with other DPS classes so that skill alone (well, that and group synergy) decides who gets into the free slots available.

I love my warlock, don't get me wrong...but I never want to walk into a raid where it's 1 of every class, enough healers to heal the raid, and after that nothing but warlocks. There is too much of a good thing, after all...and actually preferring that the class be overpowered, and acknowledged as such, than be balanced is just asking for trouble down the road. What happens when now that you're down to having just one of every other DPS class in a raid (at best), that person doesn't show up for a fight that requires that class? That's what you're looking at in the extreme end of what you're wanting.

Go take a look over at this thread: http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t26275-c...vulnerability/

It deals with a lot of the issues regarding group and raid synergy, and stacking warlocks 7-9 high goes directly against that grain. I'm sorry...but actually wanting warlocks to be imbalanced is just wrong, in my opinion.

I'm sorry Flaming, but if you can't see this as a clear design flaw then you're clearly not looking at things imparitally. 25 slots, soon to be 10 character classes. That does not make 5 slots per class. And your reasoning indicates that if it were not for loot-rot you'd have a positive warlock-fest in your raid, according to your opinion.

Where I come from, we call this "faulty game design" and "imbalance", it is something we try and avoid in the same way that you don't play aim-bot counter-strike, or we don't play chess with the white side playing with no peons. It's not fair and hinges on mechanics abuse.

Nobody was amused at 2.2 MSD arcane abuse, and any mage with a brain instead of a mushroom in their head was happy to see it removed and nerfed to the ground. I don't see why you seem so righteous about demanding to be the one class that dominates everything, particularly in light of a change that doesn't affect your class mechanics at all, but instead gives the raid one more CoD.

If you're earning spots by virtue of some other class not having enough synergy from you, and thus dropping from 2.5+ spots per raid to 1 while you go up from 2.5 to 4-5 per raid to replace said class, I expect you to accept that you must provide said synergy and stop being greedy.

My concern is something like this:

- If a class is desired in a raid because of synergy that is great - unless you come up with a raid design that doesn't need that synergy then you don't have a lot of fall back on.

- The top DPS class is always useful just to produce DPS.

So the worry to me isn't about getting warlocks to the "correct" 2.5 warlocks per raid. It is if warlock DPS is straight up less than mage DPS and the synergy doesn't work out then you quickly go to one warlock per raid being optimal (for either Maledicted CoE or CoR).

In order for a 25 man raid to go with just 1 warlock something is going to have to be drastically wrong with either all your caster dps or all your melee dps. I'm having a hard time imagining this actually happening.

Certainly a legit concern. However, this is more granular than class-v-class. Yesterday, when bored, I did a quick analysis of how much each warlock/mage tree provides to other classes/specs vs. how much it receives from other classes specs. I won't go into the analysis itself, because that'll just start a lot of arguments that won't really be useful to anyone. Specs that provided more than they received I labeled as "benefactor" specs, those that received more than they provided I labeled as "mooch" specs, and those that were pretty close to balanced I labeled as "neutral" specs. I wound up with:

Ranked from Most Benefactorish to Most Moochy
1.0: Affliction Warlock
1.5: Frost Mage w/other Shatter-spec mages, Frost DK's, pets, dual-wielders
2.0: Demonology Warlock
3.0: Destruction Warlock
4.0: Fire Mage
4.5: Frost Mage w/only pets/dual-wielders
5.0: Arcane Mage

Now, please don't worry about the actual placements. We could argue about those all day. The points I'm trying to make are that:

- Everyone's going to wind up with a list similar to this one, even if the actual order differs. Some specs give more than they take, others take more than they give.

- However, the utility of a given spec can vary greatly with raid composition (the Frost Mage's utility, being so dependent on specific specs of specific classes being present, is the strongest example)

- Given that higher utility mandates lower DPS, else the class with higher utility is always the preferred class, but given also that utility is variable, how exactly do you balance DPS against utility? (I do not have an answer.)

- And just for one wacky example - you don't do it the way a Frost mage works, whereby the composition that results in his strongest utility also results in his best DPS, while the composition that results in his weakest utility results in his worst DPS.

- "Moochy" is a fun word.

I'd put balance druids in there as well, Lhiv. 3.5ish?