The absolute only thing I can think of is that it will allow a bit more of a benefit to a PvP Affliction lock. SL/SL might be broken, but I'm sure they're looking at some form of hybrid tree possibility anyways, especially considering where it's located (same tier as Shadow Mastery.) Do I like it? Not really...but then, there's a reason I don't PvP either (namely, I suck at it.)

For PvE, it'll be something very neatly ignored, in all likelihood.


Edit: I missed that ability on Felpuppies...probably because I've largely ignored anything other than an imp for the last year and a half.

Ostensibly because the Felhunter's new Shadow Bite ability gains more damage as the target has more DOTs on it.

The Felhunter is also getting a new attack (Shadow Bite?) which increases DoT damage on a target by something like 5%. That combined with the regen from the talent should make both desirable for an affliction player as well as return the pet functionality to the spec instead of just having an incorporeal mana battery by your side for ever more.

Edit - Gosh darn it, just beaten!

In Addition, Dark Pact seems to generate threat, which Life Tap doesn't.
With DP only returning 4 additional Mana compared to improved Life Tap, I wouldn't even spec it for Affliction raiding.
Talent Points are quite short in the bottom Tiers of Afflction anyways.

So - big hug for the Felpup.

Well, that talent was apparently changed last night:

The effect of Fel Intelligence:

With 2/2 Imp. Felhunter, that's presumably an additive bonus raising it to +8% intellect.

So, first, you use him for a nice raid buff. Second, it looks as if the mana regen from Shadow Bite may actually exceed the mana cost of Shadow Bite (looks like it'll deal some 350 damage every 6 seconds with all debuffs and your DOTs on the target), which means you can use him to DPS (thus immediately adding an extra, what, couple hundred? DPS to your build), and have him regenerating his own mana so it's still available for Dark Pact.

Dark Pact generates 0.5 threat per point of mana returned. Improved drain soul, salvation ..etc should affect it so I dont think threat is a big factor. The health lost from lifetap needs to be healed up and that generates a comparable amount of aggro for your shadow priest/resto druid anyway. In addition it can also be risky to lifetap at times on certain encounters.

On a related note, if dark pact continues to scale with spell damage it will be a key talent for leveling until we upgrade our current gear with spirit based gear.

Some numbers on Chaos Bolt at lvl 70, no debuffs on the mob.


554 spellpower: Hits for 1485
948 spellpower: Hits for 1753
1509 spellpower: Hits for 2205


These aren't averages with multiple casts, so use them with a huge grain of salt, but should give you an idea of scaling.

100% chance to heal for 15% damage taken. Indeed. I am afraid the talent got a great nerf from what it was before (a t5 2/4 bonus type buff).

As a t5 bonus buff, it would be usefull in variety of raid situations that demand felguard to be up close in melee range, making demo a viable raid spec. Right now, demo is raid viable only with t5 2/4 set bonus.

As is now, it heals pet for 15% damage taken, which means it just cancels the 15% damage taken from soul link. Unfortunately, we are far past the times where we were worryng about pet dying of soul link damage. When soul link was 50%, this talent *would* be usefull... but now? That and the succubus improving talent right next to felguard makes demo an oddball tree that doesn't really know which pet it should be running with.

Why do you hate your nice small Imp so much? Why do you keep wanting it to be useless in PVP and get one-shotted there? What bad did it do to you? Imp should get its usefulness in PVP in form of something more than Blood Pact bot, because all this PVP dependancy on Felhunter and sometimes Succubus is getting a bit boring, just like Demonic Sacrifice.

About Fel Synergy - it was like that since the first alpha leak. It pretty much heals your pet back when it takes damage through Soul Link, it also helps keep it alive in PVE. No, it doesn't say PVP all over it.

I really don't think "soul link damage" is what anyone means when they say pets take too much damage in raids...

Err... Fel Synergy used to be in alpha 15% of the damage you do converted to healing for the pet. Just like the 2/4 T5 set bonus. This is by far much more useful than the current form.

And The imp suggestions are valid imho. Nobody uses imp as is right now. It's useless in pvp, other than blood pact bot, and in pve is just that - a blood pact bot. And mana battery for affliction folks.

Shai was merely trying to suggest imp changes that would make it more useful in pve for destro folks. AE immunity though phase shift, while loosing total immunity it now has, and being able to attack while phase shifted sounds like a good deal to me. This type of phase shift would be basically same as shaman's fire totem that chucks fireballs. And we all know shaman's totems survive in PvE rather well. In PvP, well, it would make imp useless as a buff bot, but usefull as additional dps that can't be killed by warrior wirlwinding. They'd have to actually target it and kill it, just like shaman's totems now...

While we don't know about WotLK encounters, I would think raid/groupwide AoE effects aren't as common as PBAoEs that obliterate pets even with Avoidance. The previous version would heal your Pet through Raidwide, Point-blank, and even Direct damage, while the new one would only heal through Raidwide AoE. The new effect is worse for PvP, too--if someone wants to focus your pet, you could previously heal it to some degree with the set bonus. With the proposed effect, that won't even be an option.

Aoe damage damages pet for 100%, damages pet for 15% due to soul link, and heals pet for 15% due to soulink.
End effect:

You take 85% aoe damage, pet takes 100% of the damage (85% with demo talents). You get healed, pet doesn't. Pet dies, you loose pet dps, and soul link.

Right now with 2/4 T5 bonus:

You take 75% aoe damage, pet takes 125% (mitigated to ~100% via talents). You get healed, your dps heals the pet. Pet lives unless AE damage is too much.

All I am saying, is that in WotLK pet will be reliant on the AE heals to keep it's HP up... and the Fel Synergy change is a straight up nerf over what it was in alpha.

EDIT: and as novashpere pointed out, PBAoE damage bosses do won't damage us, while anihilating the pet. So this talent no longer helps keeping pet alive in raids.

Let's start with the fact that you probably don't need Soul Link in the first place. Then with the changes to Circle of Healing, the pet will actually eat some of those coming around melee area, it will also get some Chains Heals and Prayers of Mending from time to time.

If your pet gets PBAoE, maybe you should move pet away from boss when he is about to do that evil PBAoE? Does it have too low health even considering all improvements? Well, hopefully too low health won't happen for any pets any more, if they do what they promised.
And when your pet is focused in PVP, you might as well use Health Funnel, which has a lot higher base value on new rank and may likely gain increased benefit from spell power, since it is scaling with healing on live realms.

I'm assuming you have emberstorm so the pretalent damage of those Bolts are 1350, 1594 and 2005 respectively. I dont think anything else you would have talented would cheat the damage more. (if you don't have emberstorm, that means the coefficients I came up with are significantly on the low side)
Base damage of Chaos Bolt lists as 990-1256 damage

At 554 spell damage, 1350 pre-emberstorm means you gained between 94 and 360 damage from you spell damage, or a coefficient between 17% and 65%
at 948 SD you gained between 338 and 604 damage, or a coefficient between 36% and 64%
at 1509 SD you gained between 749 and 1015 damage, or a coefficient between 49% and 67%

If I'm interpretting this right, that means that the coefficient for Chaos Bolt is 49% - 64%, which is interesting as thats larger than 1.5/3.5. (note, obviously we need lots more data. Also some of Roywyn's posts indicate that we may not even have 10 levels before we see downranking penalties, which further muddles things Wrath of Lich King Stuff (was 'Blizzcon' thread) )

Involving healers in healing the pet can be done now just was well. Still, it doesn't change the fact that we don't have a passive way of healing an ailing pet without completely stopping dps. We have one way now - the t5 bonus. And if you go over to current raiding warlock forums, the general consensus is - Demo is simply not really viable end game raiding spec *unless* you got the bonus. What does that say about pet viability over all? Not much good I assure you.

Some PBAOE damage is avoidable, some is not. Telling people to pull out your pet is like telling a rogue to move out to avoid the damage. It is done on certain announced PbAOE that are meant to kill, it cannot be done on regular basis though, otherwise it's a dps loss. (why bring a rogue who can't dps 50% of the time cause of aoe... why bring a pet that has to be pulled out 50% of the time... same question really...). Difference is - rogue will get heals if healers aren't busy, and a pet isn't even on the healer's overview usually.

Hunters get a simple solution to aoe - 50% avoidance on all their pets, and a hot that is meant to heal them while hunter does his dps. Does that mean their pets don't die in raids? No. They die all too often too, if hunter is not careful. But at least when hunter pulls out, his pet will get back to full just from the hot. A warlock pet gets 50% avoidance (felguard), and no passive healing while you do your dps.

New Demonic Sacrifice - Fel Guard now gives 10% to Shadow AND Fire spells, with 2% mana regen.

It's a little disappointing to see the cast time on Haunt increased, even with the fel conc changes. Affliction has always had an advantage in mobility, but between UA and Haunt, now half our aff abilities are on cast times (siphon / corruption vs haunt / ua).

ok, 5% knocked off the TBC Imp and Succy sacrifices. Will that be enough of a nerf to let us pick our specs again and allow the use of the 51s?

EDIT: backdraft also seems to be back to just boosting the crit rate of Immo/Conflag/Shadowflame. Pity about that, but we all knew that 1.5 Soul Fire couldn't stay. Unfortunately, its current for make it (and Conflag for that matter) useless once more. looking at WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Warlock -> Talent Calculator for Fire Destro now

I've looked and haven't seen this addressed, so question... In the Alpha, I know Imp Shadow Bolt was changed to affect non periodic damage only. But right now the WoW Beta talent tree, and the various ones pulled from the client don't specify non periodic damage (except for eating charges) How does it currently work on the beta? Does it boost DOTs?

uggggh.

So frustrating. Some scalebacks don't make a lot of sense. Aftermath? Haunt 2.0 sec cast time?

I figured our dps would be scaled back in WolTK..and hunters too. They were performing even better than us in Sunwell. But are hunters seeing scale backs? I know they have concerns over their pet trees, but I haven't seen any gnashing of teeth over any existing talents that were downsized unless I missed it.

The problems with removing inate DPS from the warlock and transferring it to the pet is that the PET WILL NEVER SCALE!. The imp at T7 will have the same crit rate as the lock in T9! If anything, it might have negative scaling, in that a lock with 20% crit will see a bigger +crit % from empowered imp than a lock at 30% crit because more of the "free crits" from the imp would be have been crits anyway. Yes, we would have higher intellect in T9 and some of that does go to the imp (like 30%), but it won't boost the imp crit rate much.

I'm not seeing a cohesive plan for how the destro lock is supposed to DPS...for instance, last build it looks like they were making conflagrate profitable to cast in PvE, but in doing so it would diminish the benefit of Eternal Flames. Now they have gone back to the Eternal Flames idea of 1 button spamming again.

I'm not so much defending new Fel Synergy, as attacking old one. The old one either would be not enough, or most of it would be overhealing, amount of management involved in keeping your pet alive against unavoidable damage is zero. I agree that situation with pet healing is not as good as in case of Hunters, but free sufficient healing is a bit too much.