Balance druids, shadow priests and elemental shaman should all go in there too, but the list itself wasn't really the point -- it just illustrates the points.

More like 1.5 or so. From battle rezzes, to their crit aura, to their ability to switch out and either OT or OH at a moment's notice...and did I mention that crit aura? Since typically they're placed in a caster group to help out others' DPS, I'd say all of the above warrants a much more benefactoresque score.

What I really want to know is if they're going to do enough to make Emp imp viable for anything. I love to play destro, but I get annoyed sometimes that part of the reason I chose this class, a demon, is basically just killed off so I can become a mage essentially. So assuming Bliz actually does make pets scale well w/ gear. I would like to see some of the following changes:

1. Soul Leech (3/3) - Your shadow bolt, shadow burn, incinerate, searing pain, soul fire, and chaos fire have a 30% to give the caster hp equal to 10% of the damage done and mana equal to 5% of the damage done to both the caster and the caster's pet.

This will make it so the imp doesn't run out of mana in all of 2 seconds.

2. Give the imp a phase shift like ability that makes him immune to all AoE spells and physical damage, where he can attack. In this phase he will still be vulnerable to DD of any kind.

If DS is still the way to go for raiding as of the Xpac I will still spec for it, but I'd prefer to be a bit different from a mage, while still being a nuke class.

Soul Leech long ago should have been change to something like this:

Your Shadow Bolt, Shadowburn, Soul Fire, Incinerate, Searing Pain and Conflagrate spells have a 90% chance of returning health equal to 7/14/21% of the damage done. This effect will not occur more than once every 8 seconds or when the warlock is at full health.

That should return roughly the same amount of health over time, just have a lot less chance to be overhealing.

It would be pretty powerful in PvE and PvP if it stole mana from the target.

Warlock as it is is simply a very scaling class. Improved Shadow Bolt makes sure that spell crit is priced for its returns. Shadow and Flame guarantees proper scaling with bonus spell damage, while base damage of spells quite honestly sucks. Life Tap scaling helps bonus spell damage, while its mechanics amplifies returns from any group mana regeneration buffs.

I guess the reason is presence of "druid-only" runs. Because apparently you can do everything while having only 1 class at all.

Possibility of Mana returns from Soul Leech may be hard to balance around (just like Vampiric Touch). And since Destruction tree is as bloated as it is, best rework would be like this:
Soul Leech 2/2: Direct damage from your Immolate, Shadow Bolt, Shadowburn, Soul Fire, Incinerate, Searing Pain and Conflagrate spells heals you for 10% of the damage done. Causes a high amount of threat when triggered by Searing Pain, and reduces your threat against target when triggered by other spells.
Also, Soul Leech is very weak currently (the reason why current average 2/4/6% returns is changed to 5/10%). Think about Vampiric Embrace, even think about Siphon Life. And of course it also causes threat which is often undesireable seeing that our damage is often threat limited already.

Winners in threat department are Hunters and Rogues. If you only consider passive threat reductions, Rogues have higher damage aggro cap even despite being melee. Out of hybrids Shadow Priests are aggro bombs and they are getting extra 30% threat reduction sticked into Shadowform, which combined with Shadow Affinity almost halves threat (0.7*0.75=0.525). Back to pure DPS classes, out of them Warlocks have the hardest time managing threat. It likely is supposed to be compensated by higher DPS-buffing utility, than that of Mages, Hunters, and Rogues, and by having part of threat come from a pet, but the issue is Soul Leech really. Healing affects self-sustainability, but has nearly no effect on long-term DPS, so a raw healing effect may simply not be worth it for raiding if it's also kept balanced for PVP. Threat reduction was more of a random idea to stick something that would make the talent desirable rather than a filler. Lastly speaking of hybrids, I believe none of them is supposed to be that high on damage as to need aggro dump, they are supposed to provide threatless untility (or compensated by talents threatful utility like in case of Shadow Priests).

From how I read it in the Warlock thread 1-2 weeks ago, someone actually tested Soul Leech (live in game) and found that it already does not produce any threat.

Testing was done by body pulling a mob, the pet then picks it up with a small amount of damage, and the warlock starts to nuke nearby mobs (and life tap to drop HP) to heal.
Result was that even with his healing, he wouldn't aggro on the first mob.


On threat - in the alpha trees, moonkin get -30% in balance (they have -20% in a resto talent right now), and elemental shaman get -30% to nukes (that talent is -10% threat right now, they lose 3% hit in return), shadow priest get additional threat reduction.
I guess they'll see "less threat reduction talents" balanced by having a threat drop ability.

I know about the flaws of Soulshatter (1% unavoidable resist), Feign Death (bugging every now and then; there is also no combat/log entry to find out if your FD resisted or worked just fine) and Invisibility (5s+ downtime, interruptable by random/AoE damage).

Tested the same way, lifetapped myself to 50%, then sent a felhound to aggro a bunch of imps, while a friend of mine tanked a fel reaver guy patrolling the area. Then proceeded to unload on felreaver. Even after 4 proc heals, imps stayed on the felhound. But as soon as te healer healed the tank, all of them switched targets.

Nope. In the context of a single class Karazhan, Druids can't dispel magic effects, which would make Maiden (among other things) quite difficult unless severely outgeared. It would also make Prince hit harder than he has to, since SWP would be ticking all that time.

No fear, so Roar in the Oz event has to be tanked.

No fire spells, so Strawman has to be tanked.

No interrupts, so Julianne and Aran are both much harder.

And no, Paladins can't do everything either - no interrupts, no fears, no fire spells, no AOE (have to tank all of Illhoof's Imps) and no ranged (Enfeeble will greatly diminish DPS).

Wouldn't the S3-Gloves help here?

Even if it does only last for 3 seconds, that's a moot point: bosses usually can't be school-locked like casters can, even if they cast multiple types of spells.

The cooldown is also moot, as a rogue's kick is 10 seconds, so it's not like the druid interrupt is worse than everyone's interrupts, just the shammies.

In terms of difficulty, full pally raids would only have problems on jullianne, as Shade can be done w/o interrupts at all. Jullianne is just a pain, as we have no interrupt, no MS ability, so no way to stop heals. We are really enduring, as far as healing goes, but i wouldn't want to take 30 minutes to kill opera, just because we don't have an interrupt.

Pre-TBC Horde somehow raided without Salvation. If damage outscales threat by some ridiculous amount again, aggro wipe abilities will become commonly needed by classes with low threat reduction. And viability of Soulshatter and Invisibility is lower than what Rogues and Hunters get. Soulshatter problem is not only chance to fail, it's only 50% of threat removed as well. Before you use it you suffer because passive reduction is lower, after you use it it's good (unless resisted), but again, when cooldown is almost ready SS returns related to total threat are very low. Of course actually DPS-ing pets would help the issue as allowing us to move some of our threat to them.

Druids do have Interrupt on Feral Charge


Also, thanks for information about threatless Soul Leech. This way it can at least be filler, but still, only a filler.

I was giving some thought today while driving home on how they tried to improve life tap for PvE but the PvP crowd saw it as a total nerf. What if, since they dont seem like they are going to improve our soulshatter like they are improving the mages invis (both classes only aggro drops), they just added a feint mechanic to life tap? In game world sense (loreish wise) it would make some sense as we are essentially killing ourselves. Please tell me if im missing anything that would make this way too overpowered or something.

Also on a seperate note I was also giving some thought to the 51 point talents. Thinking upon the hunter allegory of them and us, what if for say affliction's 51 point talent we basically had a spell damage version of TSA? It would be both useful in PvE and PvP with less possibility of being overpowered for either, and frankly that would give me a clear decision of choosing between that or DS and/or ruin as it would also help the party. Again please tell me if im overlooking something.

The main issue with LT being -threat is it is something we do a lot anyway. Effectively threat management would become entirely passive. I think I'd rather SS have 1-2 minute CD, no shard cost, but cost us half our current health. The low CD makes resists recoverable, and the health cost keeps it from just being mindlessly spammed once/minute without regards to the circumstances.

But that's just a minor modification to SS. Potentially more interesting would be a cross between Iceblock and Invisibility. Halves threat (and life possibly), but self-banishes (uncancelable) the warlock for 3-5 seconds (since everyone seems to really want warlocks to be able to do this). So it trims our DPS time a little, but in exchange it works as utility to "immune" key enemy abilities (and possibly even allow activation of SS to break CC). There would always be that toss-up of using SS to avoid (or even break) a debuff/damage versus the optimal time to use it to maximize threat reduction. And of course it would be pretty amusing in PVP as well.

My big thing currently is "Demonic Circle" teleport, i am unsure if it will act like a blink by breaking stuns and following LOS or if it will not break stuns but ignore LOS or do something else totally off the map.

Its a long overdue defense spell though coupled with some other talents that will allow us to finally avoid melee to some degree. Does anyone have any interesting thoughts on the demonic circle's implications?

I know this goes back about 20 pages, but I wanted to chime in on the Demonic Sacrifice topic. I believe that Blizzards design intent in it was that it was an option for Demonologist warlocks when their pet was not a viable option and an oh crap button when their pet was close to death. I do not believe that it was intended as a talent that other specs were meant to get. The first 20 points in most trees have good synergy with other trees and 21 points and past are generally of a more narrow design. The developement of the 0/21/40 build seems to be an oversite as its scalability was not understood by any one for months after level 70 raiding began. I can completely understand if they wish to make Aff and Destro specs sacrifice more than just a gimp pet to get this talent.

Although it is not a talent that someone will design their demonology build around, it is a usefull one for any demonology spec. In a destruction build it has been used to take warlocks away from their dot centric/pet class design into a direct one-spell spam class. Clearly Blizzard did not intend for Warlocks to play with on theme for 69 levels and then completely redesign them at the 70th level. No other class does.

Putting threat reduction on life tap would be like putting threat reduction on slice and dice. Something analogous to feint would be a mana-free spell costing 1 GCD that removed about 1k threat (yes, there's a reason no rogue uses feint unless their tank is terrible or it's Gurtogg, etc.).

Well given that logic it should have been deeper in the tree. In the 21 point slot it can be gotten as long as you only spend 30, 40, 50 (vanilla and each expansion respectively) points in any of the other trees.

Exactly. That last point in your given main tree is intended to be the most powerful tool in your arsenal or, at the very least, a skill that fills a whole that your other abilities cannot cover. And all of them fit with the basic design of the tree. The 21 point talent in an off tree is not intended to be the end-all-be-all of your build. The only one that comes to mind that is even close to the effectiveness of Demonic Sacrifice in the 21 point slot, is Hemo.

*Edit: Postitioning further along the tree means that it would fall in the 31 point slot or nearbye. When you get in that range you are looking at your build defining talents...it could be placed in that range as a utility talent. But that does not change the fact that it was not intended to be the focus of a build that uses a different tree for most of its talent points.

Aran can most certainly be school locked. Whole stratergies revolve around interupting different schools depending on different situations. Most of his specials are not school dependent though so he can cast those regardless.

The real test of this is when you lockout all his schools and he goes and melees someone for more than 2 seconds.

Encounters are either designed that you're supposed to eat the spells, or you're supposed to interrupt them. The majority of encounters, you're supposed to eat them. Aran is a noteable exception, but he's a notable exception to just about every aspect of encounter design, including the general principle of having a tank. He is not representative.