WotLK Beta Patch Notes - Warlock
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If you haven’t heard, Wrath Beta invitations are being sent, NDA is lifted, the forums are now online and patch notes are posted everywhere - now even here.
I linked some spells so it should be more clear if you’re not familiar with talent names. You’re welcome to ignore my comments.
Warlock
- Aftermath (Destruction) - Now a 2-point talent, down from 5.
- All demon abilities and spells will automatically be learned as pets gain levels. Demon Master trainers will be removed. Great news actually - unless you used addons it was a hell to find all those grimoires to learn pet skills, and it was a rather big gold sink also.
- Blood Pact now works raid-wide (not just in party). Consistent with paladin auras and shaman totems. Haven’t found anything about druids moonkin/feral form bonus, but I’m guessing it will be raid-wide also.
- Cataclysm (Destruction) - Now also increases your chance to hit with Destruction spells by 1% per point. A topic of many discussions, destruction locks finally have a spell hit talent
- Curse of Recklessness will no longer prevent Fear effects, only prevent NPCs from fleeing (e.g. at low health). It could be considered a buff to leveling but more or less useless change
- Dark Pact: Tooltip updated to be more consistent with other similar effects.
- Demon Armor - Now increases healing done by spells and effects by 20%, but no longer has in-combat health regeneration. I hope it’s a typo: should increase damage and healing
- Demon Skin, Demon Armor and Fel Armor are no longer Magic effects and cannot be dispelled.
- Fel Armor - Now increases your spell damage equal to 30% of your total Spirit, but no longer increases healing done by spells and effects by 20%. Will have to wait and see: if there’s decent spirit itemization for warlocks it could prove to be quite good for raiding.
- Fel Stamina (Demonology) has been merged with Fel Intellect into Fel Vitality. Sweet!
- Howl of Terror now costs 15% of base mana.
- Improved Curse of Weakness (Affliction) is now “Frailty” - Increases the amount of attack power reduced by your Curse of Weakness spell by 10/20%, and increases the amount of armor reduced by your Curse of Recklessness by 10/20%.
- Improved Enslave Demon (Demonology) is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 4. Useless talent, who cares
- Improved Lash of Pain (Destruction) and Improved Firebolt (Destruction) have been merged into one talent, Demonic Power. Two more useless talents merged into one even more useless.
- Improved Shadow Bolt (Destruction) - Now increases damage by your next Shadow damage spells by 3/6/9/12/15%, down from 4/8/12/16/20%. Good, should be in line with Scorch now
- Mana Feed: Tooltip updated to be more consistent with other similar effects.
- Master Demonologist – Felguard (Demonology) - Now increases all damage by 1/2/3/4/5%, and reduces all damage done to you by 1/2/3/4/5%. If they do decide to change their minds and give us proper pet scaling, felguard might again be more useful in PvP. We lost 5% less damage from Soul Link, this should help
- Master Demonologist – Imp (Demonology) - Now increases Fire damage by 1/2/3/4/5%, and critical hit chance with Fire spells by 1/2/3/4/5%.
- Master Demonologist – Succubus (Demonology) - Now increases Shadow damage by 1/2/3/4/5%, and critical hit chance with Shadow spells by 1/2/3/4/5%.
- Master Demonologist (Demonology) - Most effects have been altered.
- New Talent: Demonic Empowerment (Demonology) - Grants your Summoned Demon power for a short time.
- New Talent: Eradication (Affliction) - Your Corruption, Siphon Life and Curse of Agony ticks have a 5/10/15% chance to increase your spell haste by 20% for 8 sec. This effect has a 10 second cooldown.
- New Talent: Molten Core (Destruction) - Your Shadow spells and damage over time effects have a 5/10/15% chance to increase the damage of your Fire spells by 10% for 6 sec. This could be useless unless it increases fire damage from all sources (mages).
- Pyroclasm (Destruction) - Now also includes Conflagrate.
- Shadowfury (Destruction) - Can now be cast while moving. Stun duration increased to 3 seconds, up from 2. Nobody ever uses it these days, we’ll see how it goes
- Soul Link (Demonology) is now an 11-point talent (used to be a 31-point talent), but the 5% bonus damage from this talent has been removed. In addition, the damage absorbed by Soul Link is now 15%, down from 20%. A tradeoff I’m happy with
- Soul Siphon (Affliction): Now also increases the damage of your Drain Soul.
- Suppression (Affliction) is now a 3-point talent, down from 5. Now increases your chance to hit with Affliction spells by 1/2/3%, down from 1/2/3/4/5%.
- Unstable Affliction (Affliction): Silence effect reduced to 3 seconds, down from 5.
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I have said it all over the place, but I will say it again… I really do not like Spirit for warlocks! What an empty stat to make us stack. Perhaps this is Blizzard being super lazy and having itemisation the same for all classes (since we will all share alot more now with the new ‘Spellpower’ or whatever it’s called). The changes to CoR are also unfortunate for people who enjoy using fear as a form of CC - without the CoR to control it, it will be much less viable. Cheering about the Destro hit talent though - about time!!!
You’re right, fear will be a problem now in instances since you can no longer break it.
I don’t like spirit either, warlocks never had it nor wanted it. It probably means we will get that Life Tap nerf afterall
The main thing about Spirit, I’m sure we’re going to see more of it—because of gear consolidation (like Spell Damage and Healing being combined into Spellpower, Melee Hit and Spell Hit being combined into Hit), I’m sure Locks will be rolling on “generic” cloth gear with the Mages and Priests—which will have the usual STA/INT/SPI stats.
Agreed about Spirit. I know why it’s there, but I really don’t want it.
Haunt looks like an excellent talent for Affliction… maybe cool enough to pull me away from Demonology for the first time since Feb ‘05.
what if u knew that they were nerfing meta?
Great summary of the notes, Horns. Always a stellar job.
The Spirit issue, as Megan pointed out, will be resolved with the new focus devs have taken when designing items and gear sets. We’ve already seen a taste of the “generic” with the S4 gear, to a certain extent (more cosmetic than stat-based), and I can only imagine that while pushing for an even greater E-sport status that the classes will only become more and more alike.
Unfortunately, as an after-effect, what was a great talent in Demonic Embrace now becomes strictly PvP-oriented. It pretty much was leaning in that direction already, but this change pretty much solidifies it as such.
The Recklessness change is a PvP-oriented change. What it does is allow Warlocks to CC with a quick cast of Fear, interrupting spells and other “casted” abilities, while melee hammers away on their target. The hope is that Recklessness will be more widely used outside of the PvE realm. The change, to me, seems a bit messy still, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more tweaks to the mechanic before Wrath’s release.
Fuck the damn PvP ruining raiding specs.
Loose 5% on soul link = less “tanking” capabilities for locks in some situations.
Loose 5% damage = less overall damage for raiding Demo spec (wich atm is viable), and for that? for uber destro/affly spec for PvP? Fuck it’s a nerf!
I doubt warlocks will tank much in Wrath. If I understood correctly, Death Knights will be the anti-caster tanks.
Still, moving Soul Link to 11 point talent is a huge buff, simply because other specs can then be viable in PvP - more about that in a post coming soon
well demo was supposed to be a survivability spec.now what is it?it has nothing other than a better pet and buffs for it.if everyone gets soul link then demo will have 0 appeal
Agree. 0/40/21 is atm a working raid spec, and dropping Demo features to enhance destro and specially affli PVP is stupid.
Ye as if the destro lock and afflylock were not enough good in PvP. And anyway the game needs to be balanced for PvE, not for PvP, since 75% of the content is PvE.
Debuffing soullink means a loose of dps, and watching the new demonology talents, the nerf of shadowbolt improved and so on, seems to me that a demo spec is no more viable for raiding. For sure we will need to see testing, but if a caster class looses dps, it means it’s usually less viable in PvE raids, even if it has good debuffs, unless Blizzard gets rid of “enrage timers”
The Recklessness change is clearly to eliminate griefing.
Herbing ‘locks will be familiar with the practice of other-faction ‘locks throwing a Recklessness on your Forest-Rager up in Skettis in hopes that you’ll get killed when you can’t fear it and they’ll get to ninja…
It’s one of the only ways in the game that you can “buff” a mob that is claimed by somebody of the other faction.
“Shadowfury (Destruction) - Can now be cast while moving. Stun duration increased to 3 seconds, up from 2. Nobody ever uses it these days, we’ll see how it goes”
I use it
“Unstable Affliction (Affliction): Silence effect reduced to 3 seconds, down from 5.”
Doesn’t really matter, Priests now adays are smarter, this small nerf might actually be good when people saw it and think that the punishment is worth taking if it saves somebody’s life in some critical situation. e.g. Arena.
Sorry I’m a bit late to the party. But doesn’t this change:
Curse of Recklessness will no longer prevent Fear effects, only prevent NPCs from fleeing (e.g. at low health).
Also mean that we can no longer yoyo a target that we’ve feared that’s running in the wrong direction?
No more yo-yoing.
Nibuca
http://chicanery.fibergeek.com/
The most retarde thing blizz is making is forcing us into fire builds. Shadow dmg will die with wotlk. Why are they even saving the ISB when no one gets a chance to use it..? Thanks blizz! Well done once again.
3 life taps to fill up an empty tank, 4.5 secs of instant mana regen > stacking spirit
I’d also like to add that I got my warlock friend to help me do my hunter quest waaaay back, and tbh was ingenius of me to use CoR to eliminate fear debuff from the silithus boss ^^ so ‘:<’ to the debuff tbh