I must be missing something here because it doesn't appear that this helps us mush in PVP and knowing blizzard I will not be surprised if these changes actually nerf PVE some. There defiantly is potential.

I don't know if I agree with this comment, per se. To me, it always felt odd to be casting a fire dot as affliction, since the lion's share of the afflicition tree is shadow-based damage. It also felt weird to me in BC to be casting shadowbolt spam as destruction...I always looked at affliction as the shadow/dot tree, destro as the fire tree, and demo as pet/both schools.

Maybe I'm just odd.

Is anyone else upset at the changes to Curse of Tongues? That spell wasn't overpowered and required some thought between which curse to use. Now with it gimped I don't think anyone will ever use it :-/




As for shards I would really appreciate it if they would just take off the shard requirement for Soul Fire. The 2nd conflag in an Immo rotation either requires you to cast 2 SoulFires or waste a backdraft cast on Immo again which is really a DPS hindrance.

Every other class received similar, if not identical, treatment:

From patch notes.

I am saddened that my lock won't get invited to raids now that replenishment is not a warlock talent but "desto' talent.
Guess it's back to healing.

It's also a Survival Hunter, Shadow Priest, and Retribution Paladin talent.

Just like a Raid needs Tanks, Healers and DPS, it also needs replenishment. Anyone leading a Raid campaign who doesn't plan for that isn't leading properly.

Shadow Priests, Survival Hunters and Retribution Paladins all do good DPS at the moment, and if they are refusing to provide the replenishment to a raid, then your group isn't very group-focussed. People have always had to make compromises in spec to serve the raid - this is no different.

Personally, I love Affliction too, but come the changes I'll happily research the Destro-replenish specs to make sure I know how to spec it and how to play it. And if we are short replenishment on any given night, I'll volunteer to switch to that (perhaps dual spec will help here). I'm not expecting to need it though; Shadow Priests in particular are very strong (great DPS, replenishment, misery, etc.), so I'd look at using a Holy/Disc respec to Shadow over a Warlock to Destro.

I am surprised at how often people have stated that shards should stack to 200. This would really take away the uniqueness that soul shards give the class and completely eliminate the need for shard management at all. The most shards I have ever carried at one time was 50 back in the good old MC and BWL raid days. With all the changes to summoning you never need that many anymore. I understand going through a bunch in PvP but I think the balance of farming shards and using them wisely is part of playing the class in the first place. All this being said I do feel like something needs to be done with shards and shard bags but we should use more realistic numbers. I am confident that with the announced change to ammo blizzard is working on a fix for us as well. I just hope that it doesn’t take this unique part of the warlock class away.

Using them wisely? Either you use them or you dont. Ok, to be fair you can use them unwisely by putting up summoning portals when people are standing next to you, but in most cases there isnt an much of an option to not use them.

You can wisely drain every mob you can, but you may have to explain thats why your low in the dps charts as your missing out on AOE or such. This can matter when the RL is looking for low dps to kick in a pug, for example.

After some wiping, using 3 shards a fight, do you wisely not summon your demon/use HS/ SS a preist/make a summoning stone to replace someone?

Almost everything tied to shards are not optional, imop. The current changes have helped, and being able to drain a boss for shards during a wipe will help too. Im wondering if blizzards future changes will be whole new concept or only some type of stacking. The stacking would be convient, but just being able to drain a mob/boss and get shards before it dies could be enough imop.

I too don't understand what you mean by using shards wisely, Tovya. I always used one piece of the largest available shardbag and it never went empty in standard raids.
Rarely, in no-trash tries like Malygos, you will encounter a lack of shards - but that is a very rare case and can be treated as exceptional in my opinion. So, there is no "loss" of any gaming aspect by getting rid of a nuisance.

Everything would change, if using shards became an active stratagem in gaming, such as use of soulfire and other possibilities we have been musing about before.

Addendum: could someone please explain why ImpSL (Replenishment) ist Destro-Only? What did I miss?

How are we supposed to understand that question? Blizzard announced that in a future patch Replenishment will be added to ImpSL. The only viable spec at the moment including that talent is a deep destro one. Question answered?

They are giving deep affliction and deep demon +5% raid crit which is just as useful if not more so as replenishment. I guess if you roll 0/40/31 or 0/31/40 you are out of luck, but its probably the price you pay for having good dps and an easy rotation. Anyway they aren't done with the changes.

Allowing shards to stack to 200 or whatever eliminates a large PITA factor to the class without removing the "flavor" in the same way the ammo changes will affect hunters.

Sure i can manage my shards right now, and I will still need to farm them and manage them if they stack to 200. The only difference is I get a bag slot back. basically, post-hunter changes, we're going to be unique as a class in that we're the only one that will in effect be required to use up a bag slot to play effectively. Lovely.

If we're going to be forced to keep the Abyssal bag, at least have it give us some buffs of some kind. How about haste similarly to the current hunter ammo bags.

those buffs stack, be it crit or replenishment. since those changes are scheduled for 3.1 or later, we can assume they are targeted at Ulduar. As we have no idea what kind of encounters will await us in there, it very speculative to assume a raid crit buff will be better then replenishment.
considering blizzard already stated replenishment is expected and is figured into raid encounter design, with 4 or more classes able to provide replenishment there will probably (edit)be encounters in Ulduar which in part based on that specific ability/buff. a more readily available replenishment buff will also allow blizzard to figure replenishment into 10-man raids more easily.(edit)

@shard discussion: shards should really only be an issue in non-trash fights and for deep destro warlocks (soul fire at backdraft); with the current bag size i never run out of them. and seriously, who has issues with bag space anyway? i agree that _in principle_ its annoying we are the only class (after the patch changed hunter ammo) with this kind of "limitation", but does it really matter in practice? i think not.

I think it does matter. I can live with a bag less, but life would be a lot easier with 22/20 (21/19 assuming some kind of shard stack/device) slots. Think of the forthcoming dualspeccs and the needed equipment.

i stronlgy quote Chinsaw
we need more summoning spell, we are warlock, and we should have more demons to deal with.

we have like 6 demons, 1 is only with the talent, 2 are with a long cooldown, 1 (succubus) has no utility....

Since 3.0.8 Succubus DPS is higher than Felpuppy's
And if you can spare the points, DP costs only 2 - opposed to no way to boost Felhunter without going out of the way of common Aff specs.

Im not sure what to think about Blizzards idea of what a Warlock should be. I see some subtle changes that are making our class more homogenized with other casters like Mages and Preists (Gear and spec sharing). One aspect that I loved about the class was it's ability to bring some utilities to the table that were needed in certain raid situations (CoW, CoR, Fear, Banish, Enslave Demon) while still being a high DPS class. What I'm finding is that I rarely if ever use these abilities and have removed them from my hotbar. It's a shame that we have these abilities but don't have the need nor desire to use them.

I am most curious about the impact the spec changes will have on our class for both PvE and PvP. One example is the merging of Corruption and Siphon Life. I see it as both positive and negative, on one hand it will ease our DOT rotation but on the other hand, it might not be as high DPS or benifit if they gimp the Siphon Life portion of it. The changes to the talent tree has me a bit nervous as it will take some of us some time to work out what the best spec is for both PvE and PvP and I'm sure we will have to revisit the geaar and glyph choices as well.

This is my first post on here, but I'm just gonna copy and paste my first post on the Blizz forums so I can get some better opinions and feedback.

"In regards to the changes coming to soul shards in 3.1 (Drain Soul has a chance to generate a shard whenever it does damage to a target that grants experience/soul shards are limited to 32 in the inventory), I was wondering if Drain Soul could be changed into a buff/aura that has a chance to generate a shard from any spell that does damage? I know that doesn't solve the inventory management problem, but it would help out the problem of running out of shards constantly. Perhaps all shards could be put into a special slot separate from the inventory, like the key ring.

Reply from Bazeel on Darkspear: [Warlocks Drain Soul. A chance to get a shard on any damage would turn the shard system from an active system to a passive system and that would be bad imo. There are ways to tweak Drain Soul to give enough shards and indeed that is what they are doing. There are a very limited number of situations where we can't get enough shards anyway... unfortunately one of them is pvp/arena and that is pretty big.

As for inventory space, I wouldn't be surprised to see them eventually give Warlocks something similar to a key ring or extra slot on the character pane to equip their shard bags. They seem to be relaxing inventory restrictions all around.]

My reply: Yeah, you're probably right. I was thinking maybe there would be a penalty to having the buff up, e.g. it would replace your demon/fel armor, but that would probably be a step back in usefulness and create its own problems."

This is my first toon. I've been playing for about a year now but I just ding'd 70 last week because I couldn't play this summer.

Keep in mind this is only a bandaid. There is a major overhaul of the shard system coming. I'm sure we're all wanting the new content a bit more than the shard overhaul. We've gone this long with our current shard system, no reason we can't last a bit longer.

I'd be *very* surprised 2 crit raid buffs can stack, I suppose the intention is not to absolutely require a moonkin in the raid to get it. Dual specs will also alleviate the problem, but since to my knowledge only shadow priests have a 3% to hit buff raidwide, they are the logical choice for taking replenishment since you really can't raid (read "raid seriously")without a SP at the moment. If the Shadowpriest is not there a warlock can switch to destro+replenish for a raid, etc. But it's a bandaid more than anything.

Actually, Boomkin get it too: Improved Faerie Fire