Exciting 3.1 Changes for warlocks across the board

Warlock

* Curse of the Elements (Rank 5) - Increased to 13% spell damage, up from 10%.
* Curse of Recklessness has been removed.
* Curse of Weakness - Now also reduces the armor of the target by 5%.
* Enslave Demon: Spell haste penalty reduced by 10%, Melee haste penalty reduced by 10%.
* Warlocks now innately have an increased 10% spell hit chance on the Enslave Demon spell.
* Fire Shield (Imp): You can now cast this ability on raid members, rather than party members.
* Ritual of Summoning: The summoning of the initial portal is now instant cast, down from 5 seconds.


AFFLICTION

* Eradication re-designed: Eradication: When you deal damage with Corruption, you have a 2/4/6% chance to gain the Eradication effect. The Eradication effect increases the critical strike chance of your Shadow Bolt spell by 30%. Each critical strike reduces the critical strike bonus by 10%. Lasts 30 sec.
* Haunt: Now only increases your shadow damage-over-time on the target. (No longer includes non-Shadow damage over time spells.)
* Malediction: No longer increases the effect of Curse of the Elements.
* Pandemic: This talent has been reduced to a 1-point talent, now grants your Corruption and Unstable Affliction the capability to critically hit.
* Shadow Embrace: Now only increases the damage done by your shadow damage periodic spells.
* Siphon Life: The Siphon Life spell has been removed. Siphon Life now causes your Corruption spell to instantly heal you for 40% of the damage done.
* Suppression: Now increases spell hit for all of your spells.


DEMONOLOGY

* Demonic Empathy has been removed.
* Demonic Empowerment: This talent spell now has a unique spell effect and sound.
* Demonic Sacrifice:This talent has been removed.
* Fel Synergy has been moved to tier-1. No longer increases Intellect, Stamina and damage of your summoned demon.
* Improved Enslave Demon talent removed.
* Mana Feed: This talent is now a 1-point talent, down from 3-points. Now is the 21-point talent in Demonology. Now grants 100% mana return to your pet, up from 33/66/100%.
* New Talent: Molten Skin: Reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%.
* New Talent: Decimation: When you Shadowbolt or Incinerate a target that is at or below 35% health, your next Soulfire cast time is reduced by 30/60% and costs no shard. Lasts 10 sec.
* New Talent: Nemesis: Reduces the cooldown of your Demonic Empowerment, Metamorphosis, Soulstone and Fel Domination spells by 10/20/30%.


DESTRUCTION

* Aftermath re-designed: Increases the periodic damage done by your Immolate by 3/6%, and your Conflagrate has a 50/100% chance to daze the target for 5 sec.
* Backlash has been moved up to tier-5, up from tier-7. Now requires Intensity (pre-req).
* Cataclysm: Now reduces the mana cost of Destruction spells by 4/7/10%. No longer increases the chance to hit.
* Conflagrate: Spell now works similar to Swiftmend, consuming an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the target and dealing damage based on the strength of that effect. Reduced to a single rank.
* Improved Immolate: Now increases the damage done by your Immolate by 10/20/30%, rather than just the direct damage.
* Improved Shadow Bolt: Now increases the damage done by your Shadow Bolt spell by 1/2/3/4/5%, and causes your target to be vulnerable to spell damage, increasing spell critical strike chance against that target by 1/2/3/4/5%. Effect lasts 30 sec.
* Improved Soul Leech: Now has a 50/100% chance to proc Replenishment.
* Master Conjuror: Increased from 15/30% up to 150/300%.
* Molten Core: This talent has been moved to Demonology.
* Pyroclasm re-designed: Now increases your Shadow and Fire spell power by 2/4/6% when you critically hit with Searing Pain or Conflagrate. Lasts 10 sec. Also moved down to tier 7, down from tier-5.


Thoughts

GENERAL - I'm glad they're doing something now with our additional curses. It seems for a while Blizz has been trying to give warlocks the identity of having a million curses and being very versatile, but the reality is there's better versions of most of the unused mechanics we have, making spells collect dust. The changes to curse of recklessness and weakness are great, making the new single talent much more useful. Base lining Curse of weakness damage boost now also guarantees a lot more use from suborn warlocks who'd rather use agony.

With the changes to enslave demon, I'm not sure where they are going with this. Possible demons in Uldar? Or are they preparing us for icecrown?

AFFLICTION - Looks like blizz is delivering on their goal to make the affliction rotation less bloated and more streamlined. Amalgamating syphon life into corruption is just plain awesome. You can now cast one dot on multiple mobs and get your healing effect on them 100% faster. It's a nice little pvp buff to if you ask me

With the changes to Haunt and Shadow embrace, it's pretty obvious Blizz is trying to force Immolate out of the rotation, and ensuring Shadowbolt is used as a filler. I never liked using Imm as aflic anyways, and now it seems more beneficial to leave it alone.

DEMONOLOGY - Being a Demonology warlock, I was anxious to see the promised love we where supposed to get this patch, and so far, I'm liking it. The removal of demonic empathy is a downer, but some of the new abilities gained make me happy. The loss of demonic sacrifice will not be mourned by me, as it's a relic of past gameplay styles anyways. It's far to situational now to invest any points into. Improved enslave demon has been blended into the baseline spell as well, trimming even more fat in the tree.

Molten core is moving in to the demo tree down to Tier 6. Kind of a strange move if you ask me. It might just be a specific buff to the soulfire changes below...

Let's have a look at the new goodies we're getting in the tree
# New Talent: Molten Skin: Reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%.
With some of the extra points you'll have freed up now, this isn't such a bad one to pick up, especially if you plan on doing any warlock tanking, ha ha

# New Talent: Decimation: When you Shadowbolt or Incinerate a target that is at or below 35% health, your next Soulfire cast time is reduced by 30/60% and costs no shard. Lasts 10 sec.
Yes. HELL YES. Time to get soulfire back on the bar ladies and gents. Back in the wrath beta, they had a similar buff to this for chaos bolt called chaotic mind if you remember. When they removed it, they said they don't want it there, but probably somewhere else, and here it is reworked. Although I still think they should remove the soulshard cost of the spell entirely, it will at least make a comeback for this tree. How cool is it going to be to nuke bosses with Soulfire while in meta form? The answer is VERY

# New Talent: Nemesis: Reduces the cooldown of your Demonic Empowerment, Metamorphosis, Soulstone and Fel Domination spells by 10/20/30%.
This is just sexy. Most people would get this just for a reduced meta CD, but it also buffs an array of other useful spells to. Soulstone especially, this should equal much less run backs while the locks SS is on CD. There's also word of a new glyph in 3.1 to "Glyph of Metamorphosis *new* -- Increases the duration of your Metamorphosis by 6 sec." Though this is not the perma meta some warlocks are selfishly asking for, this talent coupled with this glyph will greatly increase your demon uptime which should be a scary nice DPS boost. Looks like we're headed back to the top of the charts again folks

DESTRUCTION - Looks like a lot of shuffling and moving for my old lover, destro. With Molten Core moving to Tier 6 of the demo tree, it seems they are trying to compensate with improving the improved immolate spells, and improved shadow bolt. Why they are moving it in the first place I have no idea, probably part of some master plan.

The nicest change I can see so far to destro is the addition of a replenishment ability. I've said before, the spreading around of replenishment is a sneaky tactic by blizz to convince more priests to spec holy, but conspiracy theories aside, this is great for not only a mana starved tree, but any raid that has a destro lock. With the changes to mana regen hitting healers hard, replenishment is going to be an absolute must for any raid. We'll see how all the changes to destro translates to numbers, It's hard to judge at this point if it's a nerf or not. It's definitely more useful in a raid setting then it was

Puging it, and loving it

A few weeks ago, I decided to /gquit one of the best guilds I'd ever been in.

It was sad really, things where excellent. I could hop into raids here and there which worked around my random schedule. The people where friendly, and most of them found their way on to my friends list. One day though, half the officers decided to up and transfer servers, without telling anyone, which fatally wounded the guild until it eventually bled out the remaining raiders.

Rather then start looking for another guild, I've decided to return to my own guild of friends, and access to my own storage shed, aka guild bank. I was depressed about it at first, but then realized, a great deal of my gear has come from pugs anyways. I didn't get much gear at all really from this guild, most of it also coming from badge grinds I did pugging heroics. So why stop there? It might just be my server, but people are LFM for naxx, OS and even mally in both 10 and 25 man flavours. I have yet to come across a bad pug here, as loot seems to be distributed fairly. (Moto seems to be, dice don't lie)

Best part is, you get in a group that doesn't know what they're doing, you have no allegiances to them at all, you can quit any time. You pug often enough, and other guilds get to know you and look for you when they can't fill a raid. You might even say being in no guild can be like being in every guild. The downside tot hat though is loot. You have to make sure you ask ahead of tiem whether pugs get a chance at loot. It's a real jerk thing to not let pugs roll, but that's just how some guild roll, and you have to respect that, it's their run. Just don't do it, and maybe after they get a rep for being unfair to pugs, they'll change their ways

Pugging isn't for everyone, but it can still get you the gear you want... eventually. If you're patient, can listen and take directions, and are really flexible, you can still enjoy endgame raiding without the life stealing commitment a guild can require some times.

Voidwalker Tanks 3D OS 10man

This is just cool. It's genius really, he's great for taking flame breaths, and it frees up a tank to control the adds better and deal with the drakes, which is essential really in 10man 3D, as there's a lot to control. You're also pretty much leaving sarth alone until the other drakes are down to, so he's got lots of time to build agro. There's a discussion about it over on the warlocks Den about how this is done, and what you need to be able to attempt it yourself if you are so inclined.

Don't be a fool and think you can do this in your normal gear, you need to stack Stamina like no tomorrow. It's possible it seems to get your VW to around or above 65K health. On top of that, you must be properly Speced and Glyphed.

When Duel specs drop however, I might just make this my other spec

Warlocks aren't broken, just undergeared

Maybe it's just our server, but we have an abundance of very active, very powerful warlocks. The average warlock lately has been outputting most of the mages I've run with on many things. I don't think warlocks have been broken all this time, I just think warlocks are starting to get geared out, letting the numbers catch up. Let me explain

Last night, doing a heroic OS, I crit a shadow bolt for 10K. Now if you check my armory, I'm not maxxed out yet (still sporting T5 shoulders due to mega unlucky drops) The scaling works exponentially though as you gain more and more SP with abilities like

Demonic Empathy
Demonic Pact
Metamorphosis

The more spell power you're packing, the hard your going to hit when these light up. From Hateful Gladiator's Felweave Raiment to Heroes' Plagueheart Robe alone, I gained I'd say another 1500 to 2000 damage on shadowbolts. Later on down the road, there is some serious potential for greatness if you think about the math

I've failed you

I feel that I've failed you. The one or two people who where interested in my ask a warlock series, I have failed you. Truth is, I am the laziest warlock you will ever see. There's tons of unanswered questions out there, most of which still deserve answers, but damn this game for being so addictive.

You see, the project started more toward the end of BC. I had already pretty much taken my warlock as far as I was going to, and was working on a Paladin. BC endgame was boring the hell out of me, and I was playing much less. The result in free time was, ask a warlock. With the release of Wrath however, even while I was beta testing, I haven't played my warlock this much since I was leveling through Tarren mill.

Time has floated by while I clear Obsidian Sanctum and Naxx over and over while all the time forgetting much about this blogg, and this project, and for that, I am sorry.

I won't say I'm going to work on another video, because every time I do I never get around to it. But this certainly won't be the end of it, I can promise you that much

After jumping around all over the place trying this build or that, I've settled on 0/30/41 as both the biggest damage output (for my current gear, before you start arguing) as well as being probably the simplest to play.

This build is also designed to take advanced of the changes to glyph of conflag, which will make it so it does not consume immolate anymore, allowing for a lot of fast casts. My rotation usually consists of the following

Immolate -> Corruption -> Curse of Agony or COE (depends on other warlocks) -> Incinerate spam until Immolate is almost up -> Conflag, then reapply Immolate, coruption, and Curse of Agony if needed, and continue with incinerate spam

You also will have to have your imp out, and attacking to maximize dps. Just be warry of where you leave him, especially on fights like OS. If he happens to die though, you can instantly cast a new one quick enough

You'll want some nice crit with this spec. Even with the mediocre gear I have right now, my incinerates are critting for around 7K with full raid buffs. If you can get haste to, it increases your DPS by quite a bit, but don't sacrifice hit or crit. When a shaman uses blood lust, just watch your dps soar through the roof with this to.

I feel like a real warlock again

Back in BC when I started raiding, I thoroughly enjoyed being Affliction. Not only did the play style challenge me enough to keep me interested, but it felt much more evil watching my foe slowly tick to death as they run around helpless. It was really disappointing when I got pigeonholed into Destruction to stay competitive on the damage meters. Times have changed though, the game has evolved. Where an affliction warlock used to be the utility bitch, it's now possible to pump out some great DPS to, along with all the affliction perks. Really though, and I think I've gotten this comment before, Destro warlocks now are just Mages using fire and all. It just doesn't feel right...

This does of course completely unlegitimize my previous posts though, something about 'best builds' I recall. And while you can still get some really nice biiig numbers with that spec, I'm finding good old sl/sl Great for just about everything right now. It's not raid optimized right now, but I'm a ways from raiding anyhow. Demonology has never heald any sway on me beyond felguard pvp, where he's just used as an intercept tool for me, and I've had my fill ov old and new destruction, and it still doesn't wow me. There's just something compelling about weaving in and out of all those spells in perfect clockwork. Keeping your eye on every timer to make sure all spells are up, and working the perfect rotation to keep them up while letting them run their course.

You can click my signature image above this here to check out my armory. Just dinged 80 today, so no scrub gear comments. Been really busy ;)