Well, they also introduced a new ammo bag, and now they seem to be completely changing how hunter ammo works, so... the analogy doesn't quite work.

Regarding the announced changes, I agree that CoW+R and even replenishment seem to be more intended to help 10-mans than 25-mans - but, again, since they seem to be changing mana regen overall, I think it's too early to tell how useful/useless it'll be (maybe they'll allow replenishment to stack, or something like it).

And I thought our announcements would win the "vague improvements" award until I saw the mage ones I guess we'll need to wait a bit before we can actually discuss how the changes will affect us.

Until I hear otherwise, I'll assume the ISB debuf will work like this.

- an additional debuf on the boss, in -addition- to the current ISB shadowbolt damage self boost
- the amount will be similar to the mage debuf, either by having it stack or the mage debuf being lowered. Its pretty clear that they intent to make it more available to raids by giving the debuf to more classes.

I'm curious as to how Everlasting Affliction will affect the new Corruption/Siphon Life. From what I hear, you cast Corruption, and it puts up a Corruption DoT and Siphon Life DoT (whether this is the current 30 seconds or Corruptions 15 is yet to be determined). Will Everlasting Affliction also reset the duration on Siphon Life?

The Drain Soul change is very intriguing. From what it looks like, Blizzard are making Soul Shards easier to farm, especially when constantly wiping against bosses in progress raids. However, with the new Hunter Change (Ammo no longer consumed per shot) effectively giving Hunters their 5th bag back, I can't see Blizzard not doing the same for us. Hopefully this is their "quick fix" to Soul Shards they were talking about, with a full revamp still to come, possibly in future 3.1 patch notes.

And I assume the upcoming change to Eradication will probably address the current diminishing-returns issue.

Sorry but is this just speculation on your part or did you read this somewhere official?

Tremendous dps gain?!? One GCD every 30 seconds?
Or do you believe that the damage done in 30 seconds will be shrinked in 15? SL will likely do the same damage per tic it does now.

If they made all dots crit it would put all warlock numbers completely out of whack. With Immo CoA and SL all able to crit it has huge implications on our raid dps and PVP dps. Now I'm not advocating against it or saying they won't do it, I think it would help our future scaling in PvE and give us a little more oomf in PvP without giving us the crazy burst that everyone has (which is where I hope they take the class). In a system where all dots crit for 150% damage and pandemic put it up to 200% we would expect to see some nerfs elsewhere to compensate and probably see affliction type rotation bloat in other specs (i.e. keeping up corruption AND CoA in a destro rotation because of the increased DPCT).

I would like it personally but I'd be hesitant to expect it because of the sheer amount of work involved in getting the numbers back in line after the change, not that the prospect of messing up a class completely has ever stopped blizzard before

Where did you get the name "abyss bag" from? Did you make it up, or read it somewhere?


Abyss is like never-ending right? Maybe it's a bag where as long as it's equipped, you never run out of shards...

I'm sure the soul fire locks would love that!

Abyssal Bag

As for dots critting by default, it wouldn't make a huge difference at this point. As it stands ua and corruption already crit (kind of), so it would just be CoA, SL, and immolate. Just grabbing numbers from Leulier's sheet, those 3 make up about 25% of my damage, and I have 33% crit counting buffs. So 25% * 33% * 50%(crit modifier) ~= 4% damage boost, or about 230dps. Is it significant, sure, but hardly game breaking.

Thanks for the link.

Honestly, at this stage of the game, big deal. If a lock has not figured out a way to manage what we have been given, then you need to practice some more. Increasing the bag by 4 or 8 shards every 6 months is like sticking another bandaid on a bleeding artery.

Solution = Just allow soul shards to stack to 200 as you mention. problem solved. They could hotfix it the next day it would be so trivial to change.

I'm fine with Blizzard wanting to retain soul shards as part of the flavor of the class but with guns and bows no longer consuming ammo, i just don't see any reason to force us to carry special bags that hold non-stackable consumable shards for basic class-defining abilities.

The problem with the current implimentation of soulshards (needing to kill something to get them, no cap) is, in short, very similar the same problem we had with consumables back in vanilla. Classes have to balanced against their full power, so abilities had to be balanced against a bag full of shards. But it's onerous to farm 40 shards per poss attempt. So, they did the sensible thing and made it so that having lots of shards and using shard abilities didn't actually make you more powerful. That's where we sit today: they act as buff reagents, not spell reagents.

If you can get shards in-combat, then using shards is a manner of balancing various in-combat abilities, not a matter of farming. This allows shard abilities to be more powerful. Thing is, you still need to limit the power a warlock can get by bringing extra shards beforehand. Conclusion: you don't need to let shards stack, but you do need to cap the amount you can carry.

They haven't really said how the new ISB will work. If it's a debuff, I really don't see blizzard letting it stack with scorch. Pretty much defeats the purpose of their new philosophy. I don't really like to speculate, but I think there's a chance they're going for deep demo to be a replacement for an elemental shaman. Providing the spell power and 5% crit buffs.

You know, I like this idea, but here's the thing.

Totem of wrath's crit is replaced by Ret pallies and rogues, The damage buff is Some what replaced by other shaman (to a lesser extent) or deep demo warlocks.

Scorch is replaced Only by other mages who either spec into it in fire or in frost. There is no other way to bring that particular buff besides bringing a mage, which goes against blizzards current plan of bring the player not the class, because clearly you do need a mage Specced into a non optimal spec to get that ability. If, as has been theorized, that scorch is brought from 10% spell crit to 5% spell crit that I get what they are doing they are balancing the class. The problem is that while scorch is an optional thing to put up, Shadowbolt is a main stay of 2 talent trees, (deep demo and deep aff). The problem comes that when you turn to deep affliction Shadowbolt gets dropped for DS so a mage will have to scorch at this critical time in the fight. It's Unfortunate that they chose this particular route to apply this debuff.

The other thing to consider is they may not drop the 10% of imp scorch to 5% and then once again, warlocks are stuck with awkward and semi half-assed version of the utility spells other calsses bring, not that that will change anything for a 25man raid but it's unfortunate that we still don't bring much utility.

I'm not getting this. 3.1 is supposed to be our "Changes are coming" patch, but these are just small quality of life improvements. I hope this is just the unobjectionable taste of what is to come and not the "tada!" list.

• ISB and Improved Soul Leech changes - Utility. It's nice, but you still move through three worthless PvE points to get ISL. Nothing too shiny for the individual.

• Drain Soul - We use 0-3 shards every boss, more often 0-1. Shard management is requires far less planning in advance and making every trash mob count and now just topping off your bag when you feel like it. This is a nice change, but, as a blue stated earlier, they have a band-aid solution to shards and a sweeping revamp on the horizon, and they went with the unnecessary band-aid for now. Underwhelmed. There is little hassle to shards anymore, it is just wanting a fifth bag that makes me want change.

• Siphon Life - That's nice for Affliction.

• Curse consolidation and Voidwalker - Like we use either one. Whoop de frekn do.

• Reducing talents and adding new ones - Best change I saw, but obviously too vague to comment on.

This all seems not very helpful for PvE or PvP performance and mundane, like it could be tacked onto a bug-fix patch. I really hope there is far more to our changes or I will be severely disappointed.

Destruction isn't a 10-man spec in its current form since it is more reliant on other classes for buffs, and odds are the lock needs to throw down CoE anyway. Giving it replenish makes something worth specing for 10-man.

Yeah SL going from 30 second to 18 is a pvp "nerf" but pvp is measured in terms of GCDs which this saves you plenty. In 3v3 its 4.5 seconds to have SL AND Corruption on the opposing team.

If they want to limit our soul shards per encounter. They could make a soul shard spell like spellstone. Give it say 15 shards and toss a 10 minute cool down on it. I do see Shadowburn making it into rotations if we are talking trivial shard counts though. Grob, OS, Malygos, Sapph, KT, 4H, heigan, thaddius are all fights that you are moving on.

Shards are still an issue in pvp since you can blow through 5-6 a fight easily. With burst being king in pvp shadowburn should almost be a base ability and have no component cost.

As for the VW with Spriests getting 30% damage reduction and having similarly craptastic escape abilities it wouldn't surprise me to see Soul Link buffed back to 30% again. If thats the case the VW would be a solid pet with 22k hp to start, high armor, the ability to see stealth and pop a 5k instance heal on itself.

I'm speaking a bit in the theoretical at this point. You're right that shards abilities are not currently powerful. What I'm saying is that the reason soul shard abilities aren't powerful, is because we can bring a stash of forty of them to a fight. If shard abilities were powerful, there's too much difference in power between a lock with 4 shards and one with 40, so we would be required to farm 40 for every fight, which is silly. Given that we're allowed to have a large amount of shards, the only way out of this is simply that they don't do much, which is the situation we're in now: they have no optimal in-combat use, basicaly serving us only as a unique class-defining replacement for a priest's candles.

The only way out of this is to slap a Unique(5) on them. Soulshards can be allowed to be used in-combat for a damage boost IF the damage boost you get from them is capped. This means either restricting them with cooldowns (in which case the cooldown balances them anyways and the shards are just onerous), or restricting the number of shards you have altogether.

Being able to get them back in-combat is really just gravy but I'm personally a huge fan. In terms of restrictions, it means that it caps your DPS boost rather than your static damage boost. In terms of gameplay, it lets us ebb and flow our DPS, letting us burst in a much more organic manner than other classes' cooldown system.

I'm going to surmise that...

1) Siphon Life duration gets changed to match that of Corruption to allow for reapplication of both at the same time with the announced change to Siphon Life.

2) Everlasting Affliction gets changed to refresh UA instead of Corruption. EA won't be able to refresh Corruption anymore because then it would also have to refresh SL, which would be way too powerful being able to eliminate recasting 2 DoTs in our arsenal. And it can't refresh just Corruption because then how would you get Siphon up on the mob without casting Corruption manually whenever Siphon falls off? It would totally defeat the purpose of having EA refresh Corruption (if you're gonna cast Corruption just to get Siphon up, you might as well not have EA outside of the bonus to other dots, making half of the talent useless). Also, making EA refresh UA instead addresses a much needed PvP concern for Affliction Warlocks in that we have too many spells with cast times that we need to constantly get up on people. It would also help massively with keeping your "rotation" tight on movement fights in PvE, only ever having to stop to cast Haunt instead of Haunt and UA like you do now.

3)- Haunt and Shadow Embrace will no longer boost Fire damage-over-time effects, Immolate base damage will get nerfed, but Immolate will be brought back up to current levels of power through some deep Destruction talents. This goes along with what GC said in the past about them wanting to remove Immolate (along with Siphon Life through the already-announced change) from Affliction's arsenal and helping to simplify Affliction's "rotation".

4) They'll either increase the duration of the Shadow Embrace effect to something like 15 seconds, or allow Drain Life to stack it as well. Or possibly both.

5) Suppression gets changed to increasing the spell hit of your Shadow spells. This would enable Affliction to only have to spec into one hit talent and enable the hit to work on Soulshatter (if it can still be resisted right now, which I'm entirely unsure of).

6) Cataclysm gets changed to either Fire spells only, or it gets changed to all spells and moved deeper into the tree (perhaps swapping places with Improved Immolate?) out of reach of Affliction Warlocks.

7) Eradication gets changed to a a percent spell haste talent similar to Netherwind Presence in the Mage's Arcane tree.

Aah ok, thank you for your re-explenation, this train of thought leads me down interesting places my self. Like what if you could soulfire for 30k, once every fight?

See things like this To me could be done with a shared cool down, For instance:

If you had a 30k Direct damage ability, (that's too much because of pvp but you see my point) the ability to summon your infernal ON TOP of your existing pet, and throw in some survivability stuff or raid benefit spells and they all shared a 2min cool down, this to me would bring the same effect.

the problem with having only 5 reagents for a powerful spell at a time, is that each fight/arena/BG what have you you would need to farm 5 more shards, while a cooldown removes shards all together but ties that same thought into it, it also allows lots of planning and interesting strategies, and Could potentially bring in some of that utility I'm always whining about.

If they removed shards from the game as they exist now it would be very difficult to notice a difference. Virtually every spell with a shard requirement has a significant cooldown or other drawback on top of shard use. The biggest offender and often used example is shadowburn.

I personally wish shards were more like energy. A flat non changing base rate of which they are generated and that we are balanced around. Combat abilities such as drainsoul could be used temporarily increase gain. Of course we still need a max number and we could use the existing bags that could hold X shards and shards only fit in the bag.

Maybe with an idea such as the one above the class becomes too difficult to balance. We are already balanced with the assumption that we have near infinite mana. Our resource management is often global cooldowns more than actual mana. Having to manage shards and mana does start to feel too much like a DK with runes and runic power. At least we wouldn't need to farm for shards for certain builds.

Since Siphon Life currently isn't a "Inflict X damage over Y Seconds" spell, but instead is worded "Transfers 81 health from the target to the caster every 3 sec." my guess is they are simply going to make Siphon Life an untimed debuff that stays on the target as long as corruption is on the same target.

Demo Empathy better be 20/40/60% haste buff for 15 seconds

On the subject of soul shards, I doubt we'll be seeing a replacement for the SS system until after Ulduar. Though the hunter fix looks promising, the shards-in-combat should be a decent band aid for the time being.
On the forums a month or so ago, GC promised a fix that would change gameplay in a good way, but that it would take time.
My prediction: look for it by the first major patch after ulduar