If you were really hardcore I guess you could respec every match and put a talent point into it while buffing pre-match, but I can't imagine many people willing to go that far for such a slight advantage.

It's not really a question of how often it occurs quite as much as it's a question of how large an impact it has when it does occur. Two healthstones in a 6 min 5 man arena fight for every player is a pretty noticable jump vs. two healthstones for the one or two people per encounter per 25 man raid that are placed in a position to make full use out of a second stone. The first could make or break the match when it happens, the second will make or break a raid encounter very very rarely.

Still, this really only distracts from the larger point that the talent merely serves as a way to ignore the 'unique' tag on the stones and should be replaced or revamped.

Not only that circumventing the unique tag is possible, but that the exploitative use generally overshadows the intended bonus of 240 health per 2 minutes per talent point, non-scaling, which is crappy even for a first-tier talent. Crackpot suggestion: how about a 3/6-second -10% damage recieved buff on eating a healthstone instead?

Must Master Conjurer, Improved Enslave Demon, Improved Curse of Weakness et al. be mentioned while we're at it?

For Curse of Weakness, current Alpha information suggests it's getting -20% attack speed in addition, so it'll be useful if you either don't have a Warrior, or have one who doesn't feel like keeping TC and DS up. 2/2 CoW gives the benefits of both 3/3 Improved TC and 5/5 Improved DS, and CoW is currently innately better then DS as it is. All in all, not bad.

The others are excellent points of things that could use a change, though.

It didn't actually reduce the dps of the nukes though, just made the increase less substantial, there's a difference.

The best analogy really is Playing With Fire, which increases your dps at the cost of your survivability. DE increases our survivability at the cost of our dps.

My main complaint, outside of it being an odd talent to suddenly gain a negative effect (outside of the small effect it has now on IDS) and therefore smacks of them not thinking it through, is that there really is no other option for some of your locks given how healthstones are set up: they will have to take a dps loss.


I don't really see a need, by the way, for DE in any raid build. It's just convenient and has a small enough cost now. To some degree I suppose it offsets the "cost" of not having dark pact in a demo and destruction build.

DE has a use for 0/50/21 raiding builds (yeah, yeah, you don't like demo raiding), it increases pet stamina which would contribute to it's survivability and very very slightly contribute to DK spell dmg (in addition to your survivability). Then you have Demonic Empathy which would completely negate the spirit hit from DE. Also like Lhivera has already mentioned, stamina stat would be worth more, so you wouldn't have to get as much as a requirement for an encounter, if you really do want to go with bare minimum (then stack a slightly undervalued spirit).

As for myself, I really don't like going bare minimum, I do plan on going 0/50/21, with Demonic Empathy which would negate the spirit loss. Either way, I'm used to having 2k extra hp, I happen to think people really underestimate how often that kind of hp saves you from dying, most likely because you cant quantify it into a WWS parse.

Anyways, the talent was always meant to have a somewhat significant drawback, because as of right now, it is just a tier 1 15% stamina buff.

Negating the spirit loss is the wrong way to look at it, because you could skip DE and still pick up Demonic Empathy, so either way DE is just a loss of spirit.

Demonic Pact increases your spirit by 5% when your demon is out, so if you go that deep, you should be able to negate it. If Warlocks actually get a Holy Priest/Resto Druid's level of spirit, then 5% could be worth it, but I really am worried about how the 30% regen while casting isn't a buff, rather then 5% more spirit when Life Tap is available. With the regen factored in and the mana increases to our spells from 70 -> 80, our spells are supposedly equal in cost at 80 in relation to 70. But this is a chunk of itemization that's denied to us. What's the point where we actually start making gains, with spirit?

Maybe an inscription that gives us a constant effect similar to improved Divine Spirit? IDS has considerable value if we have large amounts of Spirit on gear. And really, if they just chop like 30% of the stamina off our gear and make it spirit, it doesn't hurt anything. Heck, that would probably be an improvement even now (57 stam on T6 gloves? seriously, wtf?).

Actually, not taking DE and taking Demonic Empathy nets you with a 5% spirit bonus. Doesn't matter if you're a "glass is half empty or half full kind of guy", the reality is, if you take both then you negate the spirit penalty/bonus.

Anyways, wether we like it or not, DE was always meant to have a slightly meaningful penalty, since it's a big stam bonus, on a tier 1 talent. As it is right now, it's just a free 15% stamina bonus.

Also for what it's worth, with Demonic Aegis, it's going to be 39% regen during spell casting, so that's something rather significant to consider in any future discussion about in combat spirit regen in this thread.

I'm curious how interesting downscaling might become to DPS, if at all. If you don't get a massive DPS penalty from using rank 11 there I could seriously see myself using that.

I was also thinking that in WotLK a DoT+Destro build would probably be best due to talents like Molten Core, and the reduced cast time of "Demonic power" might actually be interesting in combination with "Empowered imp".

I'm not convinced that it'll be worth it to spend 5 points in Eternal flames, and I'm unsure of wether Chaos Bolt would be worth it; the base damage is incredibly high for a spell you'll be able to get at level 60. It means you're either sacrificing siphon life or demonic sacrifice, and right now I'm not convinced either of those 2 would be a mssive improvement (Demonic sacrifice mostly because it costs 21 talent points to get while not getting much else, siphon life because the cast cycle would already be quite complex without it.

Talent tier has nothing to do with its power. Talents in all tiers should be sufficiently powerful to have reasons to trade deep talents in one tree for early talents in another tree.

The comparisions like Playing with Fire are of course valid, but dealing more damage is very versatile bonus, while taking damage is somewhat situational. Stamina and Spirit both have situational usefulness, and actually their usefulness is in different game situations. I don't think you will care about Spirit loss in PVP, but you won't care much about Stamina bonus outside PVP. Purely positive effect for PVP and purely negative effect for PVE, sorry, but it's just strange.

Lastly Stamina isn't all that useful stat. It yields no sustained long-time benefit. It helps with spikes between heals, but that's all really.

Incinerate R2 is always better than R4 if you have to Life Tap at all.

If DPS casters show a need to down-rank, then Affliction might be more viable then originally considered. Without Fel Armour's 20% bonus to healing effects, Life Tapping will become more expensive (admittedly, a Lifebloom from a druid isn't that bad), and Affliction might be the Frost spec of Warlocks.

The idea of downranking DPS is somewhat unintuitive and counter to what's expected of the role. At the same time, it's entirely viable.

The formula for the penalty for downranking is Multiplier = Min(1, (sLvL + 11) / cLvl), where sLvl is the level that the spell is learned and cLvl is the level of the character. So the level 69 Shadowbolt will receive the full benefit of your spell damage, barring a change to the formula.

The new rank of Shadow Bolt will have a base damage of 690-770, versus 541-603, for a ~27.5% increase in base damage, we see a ~70% increase in mana cost. What's more, the difference between the two ranks will always be static as they scale the same. Barring fights like Brutallus where every DPS is absolutely paramount, there doesn't seem to be much impetus for using max rank spells.

It may be that the Int/Spi synergy starts to get absurd relative to current mana consumption around level 80, and Blizzard is compensating, but what Paladin and Shaman spells we've seen so far also bear the massive mana cost increase. It's tough to tell whether we can simply expect more mana regen, or if we should expect to be downranking damage spells often.

I'm thinking that since they are basically lowering the DPM for our spells that demo might be a more efficient build. I noticed that the felguard's cleave is a base mana cost that doesn't seem to be changing and the imp's firebolt's mana efficiency actually went up by about .3 DPM, as did the succubus's LoP by the same amount. So the more dps of yours that is intended to come from them will overall be more efficient than our new ranks, at least when comparing lock and lock+pet efficiency from TBC to WotLK.

They have introduced their nice little "spell power model" so they could merge all gear for priests, mages, and warlocks. This speaks nothing to spell hit that is a worthless stat for healing, and the fact that healer/mage gear current is light on stam and heavy on spirit. As we are getting spirit regen, I think it is reasonable to conclude that we are going to be walking around with 9-10k hp raid buffed without DE. Thats kind of a scary number when your life tap is going to hit you for 25% of your health.

Given that I walk around *now* with around 10k HP raid buffed, I somehow doubt we'll be at around the exact same level of stam come 80 - if for no other reason than this: we simply won't be able to survive hits while questing / soloing. I'm estimating tanks will come in around 22-25k at beginning of T7, and we'll see them range up to around 35k by the time we're staring the Lich himself in the face. For DPS'rs, I'd guess around 12-13k at T7, ranging up to around 15-18k, roughly.

Having said that though, I think the stam increase won't come at level 71, it'll come around 75-76 instead, and ramp up considerably in the final few levels before raiding. This will allow people to get acclimated somewhat to the zone, and allow Blizz to allocate fresh lower level gear to other stats that will be important right off the bat - increased spirit (as a replacement for current gear which doesn't sport any), and increased spell power, for instance.

Looking through the destro talents leaves me with questions regarding the immolate refreshing part of the Eternal Flames talent...

Given 5/5 Emberstorm and approximately 150 haste rating, incinerates would hit the target every 2.1 seconds or so, does that mean that immolate would fail to tick? How would the refreshing mechanic work? If the duration is constantly refreshed to the extent that it will never actually tick, what is the point to EF stacking immolate damage?

I hope it does mean spamming causes it to never tick. I'd love to see the skills mean that you have to weave multiple spells in order to maintain maximum dps. Does anyone seriously enjoy just pressing shadowbolt for 5 minutes straight? Even something as simple as having to alternate incinerate and shadowbolt would be an improvement in my opinion.

If every Incinerate reset the DoT tick timer then the talent would be borderline useless. I imagine the DoT will continue ticking every 3 seconds, it just bumps the max duration timer back up to 15s every time Incinerate lands. It completely devalues the point of Improved Immolate, since in an ideal world you'd only be casting Immolate once and keeping the timer going with Incinerate so you'd only get that bonus once during the entire fight.

What you do after you have 5 stacks of Eternal Flames going, and barring the one Incinerate every 15 seconds to keep Immo going, is anyone's guess. Do you fire Shadowbolts to get Molten Core and ISB procs? Or do you just spam Incinerate? There's really no other options as all our other spells would decrease DPS. Shadowflame and Shadowfury are AOE and Conflag will lower your DPS.

I wonder what's the point of having Conflag in the tree if Eternal Flames is there. They don't function together whatsoever. Are you really going to Sacrifice your rolling, EF-stacked Immolate for a little bit of damage that lowers your DPS? I can't imagine instant burst damage being so important that you'd do that. I used to have Conflag in my pre-TBC build and even then it wasn't great for burst on things that MUST-DIE like C'thun little eyestalks. It still took 1.5s to get Immolate on them. There's no synergy between the two (EF and Conflag) at all. Conflag is PvP and EF is PvE and never will you want the two in the same build. Unless you're, you know, nuts.

More to the point, I wonder if Joe McCasual is able to figure that out. You see some whacky-ass builds out there because talent descriptions can be pretty vague. The lack of Conflag and EF synergy isn't very obvious.

Edit: Saying that, being able to skip EF in a PvP build let's me go back and grab more PvP oriented talents like Molten Core and Aftermath. Meaning I get all the good stuff for 54 points (well, besides Backdraft - hah! What a piece of junk). Thankfully Chaos Bolt doesn't require EF.

What baffles me, though, is why Shadowfury requires Shadow & Flame.

This has been rehashed before. It's been confirmed, and mentioned several times, that the refresh talents in both trees do not currently refresh the tick timer, just increase the duration.