You're gonna be losing so much more threat doing SS + hellfire that there's actually no point to even die after you LT to low hp. Not to mention all the dps lost. You're a lot better off just skipping mana pots in favor of LTs and just doing nothing for small amounts of time between casts.

I don't really think stacking mages is the big concern for locks here -- you still have a flat out guaranteed two spots with CoV/CoR. What you want to keep an eye on is all the talk about mages not being fire, which means fire destro not being an option (and the nerfs plus lack of buffs to shadow destro in WotLK make it unattractive as well.) It's unfortunate that the current state of the mage fire tree is as it is when Blizzard is pushing locks harder on fire -- we depend on a specific spec of mages for +15% damage, they just need a lock in the raid of any spec for their +10%.

If pets aren't really being touched much, demo isn't that much more attractive and will depend more on dungeon design than what the talents are. (Although if the 2pc T5 bonus stays as a talent, who knows, maybe that's enough to make demo the raiding tree.)

Leaving affliction? And so far dots aren't benefitting from crit or fully from haste yet.


Spriests at least so far look viable still, so there's no concern about losing that 10%.

I'm most excited that they seem to be trying to break DS's lock on talent specs, even though they're failing so far. It's early enough where I can still say it's the thought that counts.

I do believe that breaking the reliance on DS would open up warlock play to have a little more "pizazz". But sometimes the message out of Blizzard is really confusing, and doubles back on itself. Take the following from Kalgan...

"We definitely feel the need for warlocks to gain some sort of active defense so we don't have to try to balance them around the assumption that they're "tanking" melee classes."

Okay, what have we seen so far? A less potent Soul Link moved to third tier so every spec can choose to pick it up? +healing from fel armor moved to demon armor. Tanking melee classes seems to be assumed now.

Am I alone in assuming Metamorphosis is only going to be taken for the novelty factor? Maybe for BGs? Seems like in most cases Ruin(FG/Ruin Raid Build) or Siphon Life(FG/SL arena build) would be preferable to Demon Form. I'd imagine they would have better luck instead toning Metamorphosis down(both graphically and mechanically...) and making it a permanent form like Shadowform or Tree of Life. Something on a cooldown as significant as 5 minutes just isn't going to see a whole lot of use. Sure, it's a nice "OH $#!*" button for a nasty situation but seems like it would lack overall usability.

I don't see any problem with dps being dependent on a 5 minute cooldown, ability, it just means it has to be very carefully designed. For PvP, it's already really good as an emergency heal. However, if it's going to add significantly enough to PvE dps to be worth not taking ruin, and losing pet buffs to your group while it's up (and pet dps), it's going to be a tricky balancing act.

Earlier in the thread somewhere, I suggested strong group buffs based on hitting demon form. Maybe an aura, maybe you could make it related to the dps you put out in the form. But you could also make it far more like Illidan's metamorphosis from WC3, being a really high DPS ability. Something like a 3 second cast time (so it can be interrupted easily in PvP) very high damage spell, in addition to the other more PvP oriented spells. Enough burst damage in that 45 seconds to make up for lack of ruin for the rest of the time, the loss of pet dps for that time, and the loss of group buffs for that time.

I actually really like the idea of having more strong cooldowns we can use to mix fights up & reward good timing. Plus, it'll just suck if we're given a cool new 51 point talent, and then expected to instead spec into a boring 21 point talent for PvE. I'm pretty sure Blizzard didn't deliberately design this as a good PvP, bad PvE talent, but instead wanted to give us something really cool. So, I'm remaining hopeful that they'll make it even with / better than Ruin before release.

I can reasonably say after looking at Deathknight that I will not reroll from Warlock. The grass truly isn't greener and never really has been. It will ultimately boil down to either A) They fix Affliction's issues or B) I quit the game. There is no jealousy of other classes as I truly enjoy what I have, but if my viability isn't significant enhanced from its current position then I simply won't play WoW any longer. It's no fun being nothing but a SE/Malediction bitch. I'm pretty much just holding out waiting to press the "cancel account" button as I have no interest in playing anything other than Affliction. I remain optimistic, however, as we aren't even in beta yet and I hope the devs aren't as shortsighted as many make them out to be. =D

ISB isn't looking like a must in WotLK since it has been pretty heavily nerfed. In fact, if your uptime isn't 33% which is perfectly plausible 5% hit is looking like the way to go. Its kind of an a-holish choice for blizzard to give us though.


yeah this is pretty much what I thought about affliction when I looked at the change. What Affliction is getting in WotLK

1) UA/ruin
2) 12 more shadowbolts in a 6 minutes fight - not having to recast corruption(sometimes a bad thing on agro wipe encounters)
3) +10% spell haste (eradication)
4) +3% crit to shadowbolt (death's embrace)

Negatives

5) +20% spell damage to affliction dots which depending on ISB uptimes probably doesn't offset the ISB nerf
6) minus 5% damage to shadowbolts (isb nerf conservative estimate since odds are ISB uptime will drop with fewer warlocks casting shadowbolts)
7) Not having enough talent points to get 5/5 SE nor dark pact

so you are looking at what? a 20% increase at best. And you are still stuck with the situation where the build scales poorly with crit, haste, and now ta da spirit.

Although if by some miracle destructions super imp can stay alive and dps then afflictions ghetto imp should be able to put out some extra damage too.

EDIT:

And really thank goodness shaman totems are going raid wide. Because the first thing that happens when you pull out the imp you get stuck in the tank group where you get zero synergies.

Eh, dismissing it as a "grass is greener" thing seems to unfairly trivialize the whole question. They *are* different classes, particularly when you look beyond the destruction tree.


Warlocks have a bunch of things they can do, but it's all tied up in their pets. Which is great if you like pvp or solo pve, since your pet is an integral part of that. Unfortunately that all goes away in raids since most of the lock pets cannot take an active role in a raid.

Mages can do many of the things locks can do (although not all; and they have some unique abilities themselves) but for mages, the character itself can do it.

You can't really make the lock-character more interesting, because that would overpower locks in the situations where they *can* get full use out of their pets.

It doesn't help that I don't really like pet classes on raids although I love them solo. I rolled this class because I came to wow to *not raid* (I was burned out on raiding from playing EQ.) This whole raiding-again thing sort of took me by surprise.


I also think the warlock class is just in general haphazardly designed. I know mages will go "OH NO DON'T BE A MAGE OUR DPS IS TOO WEAK!" but I don't really care about being top dps. That's just not that interesting to me, I'd rather have more fun playing and have a more interesting class mechanic to deal with.

When I look at all three mage trees, I'm willing to play them all on a raid. I can't say the same for lock, which is a big warning sign .



Also. I really really really hate soulshards. For tonight's raid I realized I was low on reagents and bought them. And that brought the biggest smile to my face....

I agree with your analysis, and I'm quite disheartened by it.

Cripple has no significant reason to be included into a PvE build due to a lack of application. At a guess, I'd say it has a good chance of ending up in a PvP build - simply because fear and cripple being a neat package - but that's not an improvement on current design, that's just shifting the same ol' flaw to a different talent tree. Metamorphosis will either never be useful for PvE - I'd argue that anything with a duration and that long a cooldown will always end up fairly useless in situation where it's about sustained performance, if nothing else due RNG neutralizing the duration (e.g. you're doing Illhoof, you Methamorphosis, you get Sacrificed, your total DPS is so crippled it's not even funny) - or it will end up being horribly overpowering on PvP; You push one button, go into Demonform and stuff dies. Not because you used tactics, surrondings or timed anything particularly well, but rather because it was off cooldown. Chaos bolt, unless the coeffecient gets some pretty hefty fiddling with, won't be a viable standard rotation option, and again, PvE is mostly about sustained performance.

I thought Blizzard had learned from what happened with the 41 pointers and intended to make the 51 pointers actually playstyle defining - or at the very least an asset to your chosen playstyle - but with the possible exception of cripple in PvP, they're not really doing it. This is not to say I don't like some of the other talents we're seeing, the changes they're making to affliction to improve scaling is a step in the right direction, as well as the rotation breaking talents seen in both Destruction and in entirely different classes. But the expected sensation of "Awh man, I want ALL the 51 pointers!" is nowhere to be found.

These two facts seem to be dis-jointed but in fact are artefacts appearing from the same problem: One class doesn't comprehend the other enough. I'm sick to death of mages on the WotLK thread going "qq, look at all the AMAZING lock talents", and when questioned about "would you like to elaborate on OP locks?" come up with "ISB scales too far and "we never get CoE". Some people's brains just can't combine "what do I know now" and "what do I know for tomorrow".

Too many mages are debating what to spec and never in their thoughts does "what warlocks do we have" come up. Synergizing with DKs for frosts is regularly considered but synergy with Firelocks simply isn't there because in their mind Lock=SB. I for one don't even bother with specs which include fire without including imp. scorch. Just as I rely on a lock to provide the new CoE, I expect it'll be part of my class's expectation (barring full frost spec) to supply i-Scorch to the locks.

Isn't this the problem though? What type of warlock does a mage consider in wotlk for fire damage? Is there a shadow damage affliction lock throwing up improved CoE? yes... okay they are good to go. Fire locks don't add anything to raid fire damage in WotLK so why should the mage consider one. And really blizzard needs to do something about that. Having a fire lock should make mages want to be fire spec. Like molten core should increase all fire damage on the target for 6 seconds.

Anybody seen the mana costs on these new spells. They are way up. SoC nearly twice as much, right now I get 2 seeds per life tap, unless they give life tap a major bump I am going to have to tap after every seed. the other spells are up 60% as well. Does this mean that we are going to have 20k mana pools with 300 mp5 while casting at 80? Cause if not we are going to spend more time life tapping than we do now.

It seems pretty clear to me that they're trying to get away from the "if your raid composition is X, then go respec Y" thing. They're instead trying to make it much more reasonable for you to keep your current spec and remain effective without nearly as much impact from raid composition. In some cases (Frost Mages, Arcane Mages, maybe Demo 'locks) this means making the spec more self-sufficient. In others (Destro 'locks, a newly-viable Elementalist mage spec), it means making the spec function in two school so that it can adapt to raid composition. In still other cases (Fire mages, Afflction 'locks), things are just too badly messed up to be sure what the plan is.

My rough estimate is that the increased mana cost almost exactly cancels out mana gained from spirit regen on fel armor. If my spirit/int/regen coefficient estimates were off by much, it could swing either way, more life tapping or less.

Raidwide totems, unleashed rage, battleshouts(maybe Lotp and maybe more) also wf change(feral can get it so pets too?), moonkins viablity change(imp FF).
I added str and agi totem, unleahed rage, imp FF and imp battle shout to fel guard spec. Spreadsheet give +200dps to
pet. If Wf work for pets it's add up +80dps. This give 200dps edge over shadow destruction. Spreadsheet dosn't even model every physical buff or debuff. I could add expose weakness, tweak armor value, raidwide Lotp? raidwide TSA? Dk buffs? Imp JotC? Put you get the point. Felguard with melee group synergy is killer. If it only could survive well enough.

As someone who has been raiding as Felguard spec from Karazhan up through (as of now) Felmyst, I'm really liking the demonology changes thus far. My big hopes for WotLK were:
1) Some sort of passive pet healing talent - Check!
2) A change to Health Funnel - Check! (I'd have preferred it become a hot like Mend Pet, but a massive boost in base healing SHOULD help too)
3) Pet Scaling for Crit/Haste/Hit/Resil - Boo
4) Some sort of group buff - Check!

3 out of 4 isn't bad. And the change I'm most excited about is actually the Soul Link "nerf." One of the biggest drawbacks to current demo raiding is that you NEED to have SL active for that extra 5% damage in order to stay viable with 21/40 and the like. That means SL has to be on and your pet takes a pounding on any AoE heavy fight. When I do a fight with SL off, my pet's survivability takes a HUGE upswing, but I lose that DPS. Not having to worry about absolutely needing to have SL active anymore is a real blessing in disguise. Sure, that's a 5% hit to my damage, but the group buff helps to offset it and raid wide totems and the possibility of my pet getting WF shouldn't be discounted just yet either.

Yeah, Death Knights.

When it comes to being a Warlock in a raid I think I would have to agree with Kyth. There are heaps of fun things about the class and some interesting things added in WotLK, but for the most part there does not look to be much of a change from the basic raid behaviour we're used to. It looks like Blizzard is trying to open up the talent specs but I'm not entirely sure that it's possible for them to be that successful.

There is still a whole beta process to go, though.

The summoning circle looks like it will be heaps of fun.

Well, just came back from the WWI ( living in paris has advantages I guess :p )

The only warlock available for wotlk testing was a full T4 orc with a 0/51/10 spe so sadly I wasn't able to test much stuff ( not allowed to respec). The spe is going to be downright amazing for leveling. With a felguard up you can just throw dot on a mob and watch it dies while your pet stay at 100% health from the 15% health talent.

Now for the demon form well.....

1) you get to look like illidan sooo for the L33T factor its great I suppose.

2) you get the following abilities: full heal ( I mean if you were at 10% health point you go back to full same for mana) and 360% armor. The spells are modified by your equipement ( SB, aoe sb, hellfire) but not the charge/cleave ( at least I couldn't notice any difference with or without stuff)

Regular shadowbolt ( level 70 one)
Aoe shadowbolt (on CD, like 20sec I believe didn't really look closely)
Hellfire aoe but you don't lose HP using it and on top of that its passive once activated so you can use your other stuff. 600 dmg a tick in full T4
Frontal cleave with short cd to 3 targets did 1500 dmg ( 3K crit) when I used it ( special mele attack so I m going to assume stuff wont affect it).
Charge like the warrior's one ( short cd) except it did around 1500 dmg when I charged mobs.

After 45sec you go back to your regular form with current hp and your pet comes back.

Conclusion? In its current state its completely and totaly useless for pve raiding ( no power up basically, you don't hit harder with your SB in demon form) but awesome for pvp ( kinda like the 2 other 51 points talents, what a surprise...). The only thing I didn't try is sacrificing my pet and watching if the buff stays up when you go demon. Not that it would change anything anyway.


Ps: you can't use any warlock spell in demon form xept the ones listed above.

Many people have said that you return to your pre-demon form health/mana -- is that the case? Or am I reading you correctly that if you're at 10% health/mana, you use Demon Form and get full health/mana, burn half your mana without taking any damage, then when the demon form wears off you'll be at 100% health and 50% mana?

Full damage of regular shadow bolts? Were you able to tell whether other talents apply for both regular and AOE shadow bolts (such as ISB procs happening)?

That's pretty excellent.

Well, isn't it the sort of thing you might use during the weapons phase on Kael, for one example?

Compare it against Ruin. Would you rather have a static damage boost, good for sustained fights, or a 5m cooldown that helps you AOE on very specific boss fights?

I m pretty sure ISB did work on regular shadowbolt ( I remember seeing the debuff after a crit 150% crit btw) not sure on the aoe one but I don't see why it wouldn't seeing as you basically throw one SB to every single mob around you ( 15 or 20 feets I think? grr should have spent more time checking that stuff but I was visiting the zones at the same time). Soooo my guess is talents work on them ( equipement already does).

And thinking about it I believe you get to keep your current hp. Hard to say because when it faded I was at the same level as when I used it. If you went back to your old HP that would basically means you're dead when it fade ( say you use it at 10% HP in pvp, the opponent will OS you as soon as its gone). You can probably find some really really situationals uses for it but all in all its really for pvp.



Ps: For the hp stuff. I meant when I used it I was at 60% HP and while in demon forms the mobs took me down to around 60/70% HP sooo hard to tell

By "consider" they're talking about if you look at your raid as a whole, what spec do you go? e.g., even if arcane was better dps than fire, if it required all innervates, our mages wouldn't spec it for progression content because we want innervates to be available for our healers.

Not going "oh goody, a fire lock now my dps will go up!" Fire has always been a fully leeching spec, it's just that with Wrath it's far better, and they seem to be mucking up the mage fire tree.

Amusingly, with locks as fire, mages are have a very powerful raid buff: giving +15% to 5 people (2-3 each of mages and locks) is far stronger than the dps boost of any of the warlock curses.


So if the difference between the mage specs is 50dps in favor of frost. And the difference between the lock specs is 100 dps, it's better for your raid for everyone to be fire even if the mage dps is a bit lower as fire. Just as a random example.

Similarly, while it might be great for one guy's dps now to put him in a group with an eleshm, spriest, moonkin, and BM hunter -- that's not the best overall raid dps so it's probably a bad idea.

That said, everyone likes to epeen, and even if we're lucky and the right answer is for mages to go fire, they may be unwilling to in some/most guilds due to what the highest personal dps spec is. (or if we're unlucky and they be asked to go frost because it synergizes with DK tanks -- but if that's too strong it'll probably be nerfed since it'll push DK's to be too good a tank in raids.)

Except of course that you're ignoring the extra threat generation the Frost mage can provide the DK tank who happens to be MT tonight (10% crit chance on all his Frost attacks, and frequent Freeze debuffs that permit him to use Howling Blast for triple damage), thus increasing raid DPS as a whole. There's a lot of interaction here in all sorts of directions. There's going to be room for pretty much every spec.