Would be nice if they did a reverse attack power conversion for caster buffs on our melee pets. Right now since both the hunter and the pet benefit from a melee enhancing group they have everything they need. Our choices are either caster enhancing group for us or a melee enhancing group for the pet. Overall if he had spell power buffs converted into attack power buffs that would benefit him greatly.

As it is now a hunter pet can benefit from its own ferocious inspiration, however our main demo pet cant benefit from the demonic pact that he himself puts up. Now one can say that demonic pact is more akin to expose weakness, but even then the hunters pet still gets the benefit from that.

I'll suggest it in game tonight and on the beta boards as well.

Well in beta the felgaurd would maybe do more with the new talents.The way i come to the dps i said is through a spreadsheet with ur pet at 2k AP and from personal exp when i raided with him in Begin of hyjal/bt and all of SSC/TK.

The thing is BM hunters without their pet in a good grp atm can do a lil less then a stacked warlocks dmg.But then their pets gets thrown into it and become on top of it.I mean i use to see off spec BM hunters pets like survival hunter's pet doing as much dmg as my felgaurd. Im not saying our demon tree should be the BM tree where its the best dmg spec we all know atm destro is.But god dang when i have to spec 41 points for a pet and an no BM hunters pet can do its dmg there is something wrong imo.

Also its not like they can say well your pets brings a raid buff so more utility=less dmg cuz felgaurd brings nothing to the raid where imp and felhunter bring some little buff.A hunters pet now even if not BM brings grp buffs.A felguard brings nothing to the table.I know we get the new inc spell power when our pet crits but any pet can do that its not a felgaurd ability.Even so a hunter can still bring EA and then on top of that some more AP to the melee depending on there pet they have.I cant see how warlocks are ok with the diff in dmg our pets do comparied to hunter pets.Seems like the demon tree needs some more Personal dmg increases for the warlock to.The 20% faster attack speed for their weapon and for their pet is a ridiculous dmg inc for them and their pet when pretty much all we get is 5% more dmg with felgaurd out and some more spell power.

I begin to wonder after reading this, if some level of equality could be put between hunters and locks. One giant advantage hunters have over locks is that they are constantly shooting in addition to using abilities. This fact has always made me wonder, what if casters could keep wanding while casting spells? Pretty much like a hunter with steady shot still auto shooting while he is casting.

No, because Blizz has stated that there will be spirit on all caster/healer gear (remember there's just "spell power" now, not "spell damage" and "spell healing," so healer and caster gear is the same). So if they don't use it, it's just their loss. One pot per fight too.


Yea but in general physical abilities hit for far less than a raid buffed nuke.

BM pets also got the +hit talent, that's another 4% right there. In wotlk I was about to say that won't be the case again, but since we won't have to hit cap all our spells to get capped on immo and sb, we'll either have to "waste" item budgt on hit for fg's or we'll lose some fg dps and demonic pact uptime.
Seems like an unintentional nerf to demo...

I would think that so long as Soulshatter remains classed as a 'Demonology' spell, you'd need the full 9% hit from gear anyway to avoid missing with it in tight spots. Still, I'm really hoping Blizzard finally gets rid of or changes the Improved Enslave Demon horseshit into something similar to the BM talent.

I believe Blizzard said pets will share their master's +hit from gear, so since all specs are going to have a pet that is dealing damage it is likely they will all want to cap hit for that reason anyway. Unless Suppression and Cataclysm increase pet hit as well which they could, but the tool tip does not say they do.

No, not wanding, better auto-repeat spells that would replace current spam spells (e.g. Shadow Bolt, Incinerate, Searing Pain), manually only inserting other spells. Wanding would be just a possible manaless alternative. While it sounds good as casters could focus on more interesting tasks than spamming their filler, it would require quite a massive rework so I think it isn't happening any time soon.

I think gears are still pretty different. I think there are healer-oriented pieces without Stamina, some variety in Hit/Crit/Haste/Spirit, that's what some people said too.

White attacks use single roll (that is crit chance percentage is over all swings, not over successful hits) so Demonic Pact uptime won't suffer.

I dont care about the whole instance and what not.When ur on a Stand and nuke fight You really get to see the dps diffrence on hunter pets and felgaurd. Leulier had pally buff on him and Demonic Frenzy in their dps category.We dont do hyjal anymore but this upcoming week i will go felgaurd to test it but i dont see on fights like teron the felgaurd even coming closs to the hunter pet.

THe main problem about Beast Mastery versus Demonology is that Hunter pets get substantially more benefit from Beast Mastery. There's also the matter of Focus regeneration versus mana regeneration, but I won't get into that particular discussion here. Anyway, here's the difference. I'm also ignoring Destruction's boosts to the Imp and Lash of Pain (Improved Felhunter doesn't really factor into things), as I haven't really taken statistics (yet) so I can't speak for how much of a difference that would be.


Beast Mastery
^ +10% health
^ +20% armor
- +20% damage
- +20% ability crit chance under Kill Command
- +10% crit chance
- +100% focus regeneration
^ regenerates 2% of max health every 10 seconds (Spirit Bond)
- Intimidation (3 sec stun every 42 sec*)
- Beastial Wrath (50% more damage, anti-CC every 84 sec*)
- +30% attack speed when it crits for 8 sec
- +20% attack speed
^ +9% chance to dodge
- 30% more special abilities over time
^ +10% damage when far from the hunter

* post-Longevity
^ talent granting this also benefits the Hunter


Demonology
^ All: +15% Stamina and Intellect (health/mana boosts vary)
- All: +20% damage
^ All: +5% critical chance
- All: +30% of Warlock's crit (about 8% for Sunwell, wasn't it?)
^ All: +6% damage (Demonic Empathy)

- Imp: +35% Firebolt damage, +5% Firebolt crit chance (25% with Empowerment)
- Voidwalker: +30% abilities; -10% physical damage received
- Succubus: +5% Lash of Pain damage; +5% Lash of Pain crit chance
- Felhunter: -10% magic damage received
- Felguard: +5% damage; -5% damage taken; +20% attack speed with Empowerment

^ talent granting this also benefits the Warlock


So as you can see, there's a huge disparity in favor of hunter pets in terms of DPS contribution, and that's NOT counting pet scaling.

They could work demonology spell pushback resist/hit/pet hit into master summoner, and it would make a lot of sense, especially if they made it a 3 point talent and just made fel domination trainable, or just shifted the tree a bit.

On top of their Beast Mastery tree, their pets now have their own talent trees as well for additional increases/abilities.

Well... That's not entirely true. Hunters already have access to many if not most of those abilities on live, with a few exceptions. The only change for them is that these abilities are not found on a talent tree rather than a Beast Trainer, and use talent points rather than training points. The shiny new system is very nice, yes. But that doesn't mean everything on it is also shiny and new.

I'm not going to disagree that our own pets could use some serious help, but the few new utilities from the pet talent trees that weren't already in place from Beast Trainers are almost entirely irrelevant to the discussion of Beast vs. Demon DPS scaling. There are surely a few nice DPS enhancing pet talents, that goes without question. However, we also have a very nice one on the Felguard. IN fact, from when I used to raid as FG spec, my pet did a larger portion of my own damage than the hunter's pets did of their's. That trend will continue to hold true in Wrath... Why? Serpents Swiftness.


If you look at the issues with Affliction, you can see. Spell damage = linear scaling, haste/crit = multiplicative scaling. Our "pet tree's" passive player scaling buffs WERE 5% added damage (removed) and Demonic Knowledge. DK is spell damage - Linear scaling. Serpents Swiftness is haste - multiplicative scaling, and does not require a pet out to be active. In terms of total DPS, this is why BM hunters can do 300-600 DPS more than an lock/mage or rogue on Brut.

What demo is lacking is the same problem as affliction. Extremely low access to multiplicative scaling via talents. TBC's spec was 6/44/11, wrath's will likely be 0/50/21 due to a reliance on the only talent available to all locks that provides any worthwhile multiplicative DPS scaling - Ruin.


At this point +crit is unavoidable and almost entirely useless for anything other than Destro or Destro hybrids. Its simply too important to have a 200% crit modifier in WoW. The problem I see is that ours (like Shaman) is only ONE talent point. So it's value for that single point requires it to be buried 21 points into a tree. I think that needs to change.



I propose Blizz that do the following:

Remove ISB - It's entirely useless for Destro now, as the spec has gone so far over to the fire side.
Move Cataclysm back down to Tier 1.
Move Aftermath down to Tier 1.
Move Ruin to Tier 2 and make it a 5 point talent - 20/40/60/80/100% +crit damage
Come up with a NEW 21 point Destro talent (Crit on Demand perhaps?)

Then with ISB removed take a look at Death's Embrace.
Use Draele's idea:
Replace Death's Embrace with a "new" version of ISB with "periodic damage only" at 20/40/60% for 3 seconds following a crit of any Shadow Spell.


What this does is makes +Crit scaling far more valuable for specs that are in DIRE need of it, as well as removes the 21 point pinhole for Demo, allowing you to spec for Meta without gutting your ability to DPS in yet another tree (Demo) which is emphasizing crit.


Another option is to change Ruin to "Fire Spells" only, and add a Shadow version in Affliction. However, I'm more interested in the former.

Great post hit everything on the nail that I wanted to say. I have even talked to hunters in my guild and in others and they feel themselves that BM in its current form is OP. I dont see any nerfs or tone downs in the exp atm to make it seem that Blizzard knows this and will work on it all. All I see is talents and changes that increase their dmg. So hopefully when blizz does its dmg walk through and stuff it will catch them but who knows seeing how they didn't catch warlocks going to crazy land in BC or that hunters would scale this well either.

You're forgetting one thing, and this is a very important one: the location of Mortal Shots versus Ruin. Even heavy (51) Beast Mastery can still have their cake and eat it too, in other words. We can't. I'm not exactly suggesting we put Ruin higher up in Destruction (not without significant adjustments), but it does matter highly in the grand scheme of things. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what moving Ruin up, even at a penalty, would even do for the DPS numbers. It may end up being that we "should" get Ruin equivalents in each tree that play to the strength of that tree. For instance, a talent that makes Shadow Bolt behave like Shadow Bite (+% damage for each Affliction), +crit damage while you have a demon out, whatever.

I think that would be a good solution. The problem I see with Wotlk trees in general is that they're very bottom heavy. You want to spend a lot of points in one tree to get all the goodies, but not all classes can get away with spending all/most of your points in a single tree wihthout missing must-haves (I believe frost mages can get away with it, not sure who else). I'd like if the trees felt a little more self sufficient, instead of feeling like you had to spend x points in y tree to be raid effective.

Exactly. You end up with only part of the tree being useful, and it makes your build dependent on another tree, rather than building on and becoming more synergistic with itself. It worked fine in vanilla wow, remember how common hybrid builds were for most classes? They weren't necessarily optimal, but they were usually viable. The gap between a modern hybrid and a heavy investment in a single tree is growing, so they should work on the crap talents still lurking in trees and make each tree able to stand on its own.

When I first started playing with the alpha calculator, I had a hard time making a spec I liked, I felt like I ran out of points too soon. I realize they can't simply scrap the whole talent system and rework it from scratch, but I feel its getting harder to balance as time goes on.

That's exactly what they want.

Problem I have with our talent trees is they don't offer that freedom of choice. A deep Destruction PvE build has to spend points in Molten Core, ISB or Aftermath to proceed, a Demonology build (PvE or PvP) spends 20 straight points on the same crap every time (with 2 'useless' points right now which will end up going in Master Conjuror if they make it half decent).

I like putting points in my Shamans Elemental Tree, my Mage's Fire/Frost trees and my Druid's Balance tree. I have to make difficult decisions and may end up putting more than 41 points into the tree to get everything I want. The current Warlock trees are lowsy. There's no choice whatsoever, and that's not because its been so long that we've discovered how good/bad talents are. We already knew from the word go. My builds haven't changed a smidgeon since TBC came out.

WOTLK Affliction is looking pretty good all over, there's lots of choice in there, but Death's Embrace is still just absolutely terrible for PvE and PvP compared to Eradication.

WOTLK Demo is still god awful from top to bottom.

WOTLK Destruction still has little choice in the early end (PvE Deep Destruction even has to spend 2 points in Aftermath, Molten Core or ISB to proceed - what do they need those for?), is great for PvE in the deeper end (its hard to get everything you want with just 51 points), but lacking in choice for PvP in the top end (you can TOTALLY skip Soul Leech, Emp Imp and Fire & Brimstone in a PvP build).

Another flaw with our talent trees is they all require a spammable filler spell in between DoTs, and that spell is a Destruction spell, which causes both Demo and Affliction to spend 10 points in ISB and Bane, and if you can afford it, even more up to Destructive Reach.

Another intergalactic space-flaw with the trees is Ruin. 21 pointers preclude final-talents in another tree, so every time they release a new 51, 61, 71, 81 point Affliction/Demo talent, we have to compare it against Ruin in PvE. Fortunately they did something about DS and buffed the Imp so that the deep Destruction talents are pretty much safe (although a Siphon Life/Backdraft build could be good if Molten Core turns out pretty powerful), but something has to be done about Ruin.

Ever notice that we're the only DPS class in the game who's 21-point talents aren't significant cooldowns. We have a spammable Siphon Life and 2 DPS boosts in DS and Ruin.

Intimidation, Scatter Shot, Counter Attack, Cold Blood, Blade Flurry, Preperation, Presence of Mind, Blastwave, Cold Snap - these are all PvP oriented cooldowns. Even Deathknight's current 21 pointers are 2/3/5m cooldowns. They don't have significant enough PvE use that really screams out at you to only take 40 points in another tree just so you can get these.

The only other classes whose 21 pointers aren't cooldowns are the hybrid classes, but fortunately for them, whatever tree they're in promotes a certain style of play. Are you a healer, a caster, a tank or a melee DPS? A Moonkin won't feel compelled to drop Starfall and some of the really nice deep Balance talents for Nature's Swiftness in a PvE build. The only other class that has the same problem is an Elemental Shaman being forced 20 points into resto for 5% more crit, which precludes more of the deeper Elemental talents.

Its like we're a DPS class stuck in a hybrid-class' talent tree. Where are our several-minute long cooldowns? Where's our fun buttons like an auto-crit? An instant-cast? An AOE bomb? You know, something where the other guy goes "Aww, if he didn't blow X on me, I would have won". Nobody has said that about Warlocks since the days Deathcoil was changed. Now its kind of expected for a Warlock to use Death Coil in a fight.

And now we're getting Haunt, Chaos Bolt, Demonic Circle and Shadowflame, all of which are short-cooldowns which turns them into regular combat abilities. Metamorphosis is the first really significant cooldown we've EVER been given since the Death Coil change.

Is this an intentional design philosophy for Warlocks? That we're a 'continuous combat guy' who sacrifices the ability to drastically alter a situation every few minutes for the ability to recycle the same abilities over and over very quickly? Or is this an unintentional side effect of the developers going through ideas, choosing one and it just so happens that nearly every single one is a recyclable spell?

And for the record: I was really looking forward to Decimate.

Is the fact that CoA doesn't proc Molten Core intended or a bug? The talent would be fine if that was changed.

No idea. They really need to change the tooltip, if just for the fact that the buff is 12s long and not 6s.

Yeah I think we're on the same page Bibdy. I understand the need for bloat to some degree, but our trees are a mess. We shouldn't feel like our talents are useless, and there should be a clear focus/theme to each tree. Demo has long been confusing, and I'm not sure what they're trying to do with Meta. I'm afraid they put it in because people were clamoring for it, rather than putting more thought into it and giving us a real pet based skill. As of now, losing the pet for 45s would be killer on your total dps.

Hehe I was playing with the talent calc and just made that when I read your post. http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...00000000000000
Interesting at least. With siphon life and corruption ticking, if Molten Core stays 12 seconds long that could be some serious 10% fire damage uptime.