Yet Another Warlock Nerf

A new beta build is up, bringing lots of changes to both warlocks and other classes. Now imagine a chunk of useless text as an introduction to this post, because I’m too disappointed to write it.

New warlock glyphs

I wrote about warlock glyphs before, and if you recall I wasn’t overly excited about it. Most of them were cool additions to our arsenal, but nothing too fancy like other classes got. These new glyphs however are complete bull:

• Glyph of Drain Soul - Your Drain Soul ability occasionally creates an additional soul shard.

Will it increase my damage? Will it help me kill a boss or someone in PvP? No, instead it will occasionally award me with a bonus Soul Shard, which by the way is a completely flawed and outdated mechanic and it’s time to get rid of it. Sounds like a good rant post, I’ll think about it.

• Glyph of Demonic Armor - Reduces the mana cost of your Demon Armor by 50%.

Who cares really. It’s a 30 minute, now undispellable buff and mana cost is the last thing I’m worried about.

• Glyph of Fel Armor - Increases the duration of your Fel Armor spell by 30 min.

Another completely useless glyph.

• Glyph of Kilrogg - Increases the movement speed of your Eye of Kilrogg by 50% and allows it to fly in areas where flying mounts are enabled.

Oh boy where do I start. First, I should link the actual spell because most of you probably have no idea what it is, and for a good reason. Warlocks use it maybe once in three months; non-combat pets are cooler most of the time, and at least we can play catch with them.

• Glyph of Souls - Your Ritual of Souls spell no longer requires a Soul Shard.

Wowhead is probably too busy laughing at our misfortune to even put this glyph in the database, but I have to say this is actually the best one of these new glyphs. But then again, it’s like dividing with a zero, in the end you get crap.

• Glyph of Inferno - Increases the Fire damage of your Inferno spell by 50%.

I actually had to check if Inferno is what I think it is, or did they add a new ability to our spellbooks I missed - I’m not joking. This is without a doubt one of the worst spells warlocks have (which again gives me an idea for a future post).

DoTs can now crit

I wish I knew who bribed Kalgan for this one. Shadow priests Mind Flay can now crit, and we got a new talent in deep affliction:

Pandemic - Each time you deal damage with Corruption or Unstable Affliction, you have a chance equal to your spell critical strike chance to deal 33/66/100% additional damage.

If you’re thinking how imbalanced it is, think again. With the new itemization where all clothers wear the same gear, affliction warlocks would be extinct soon enough since we don’t get much benefit from stats such as spell haste or spell critical. I am still waiting for spell haste scaling - simply decreasing global cooldown is not enough. Also, I’m sure spell damage coefficients will be changed (read: nerfed) soon, so it will balance itself out in the end.

Druids get new form skins

Blizzards way of showing some bear love

Finally some druid love. Two new druid glyphs are available:

• Glyph of the Black Bear - Your bear and dire bear forms take on the appearance of a black bear.
• Glyph of the Forest Lynx - You appear as a forest lynx while in Cat Form.

I wrote about druid form skins two times so far, and looks like it finally arrived. However, I would prefer if we could choose the skins in some way other than glyphs - I’d like both but there are other more valuable glyphs to use. Bummer.

Abolish Poison changed

I thought I’d mention it since it’s a huge change. Abolish Poison now lasts 1 minute on the target, while it previously lasted only 6 seconds. Somehow I doubt it will still remove poisons every two seconds; changing it to have charges sounds more balanced, but whatever the case this will have a large impact on rogues.

Rogue cooldowns

Sprint, Evasion and Vanish cooldowns are decreased from 5 minutes to 3 minutes. A welcome change in the rogue community, but a dreaded one in every other. Cloak of Shadows had its cooldown increased from one minute to minute and a half, however there are now talents to reduce the cooldown back to one minute.
There’s also a new spell I’d like to point out, Tricks of the Trade. It’s basically like hunter’s Misdirection, only with a decent bonus to target’s damage which will surely be useful in PvP as well.

Arena potions

Thanks to mmo-champ, we have a sneak peak in what appears to be potions usable in arenas. What kind of implications will this have is yet to be seen, but I don’t like the idea of prolonging battles even further.

When can I start to panic? DoT crits are surely a welcome change, however outshined by these new horrible glyphs. I still have no clue whatsoever what will be our cookie-cutter raiding or PvP spec. Is it just my imagination or is Blizzard taking warlocks to a new mysterious direction?