Warlocks and Wotlk (Our Future)

Part 1 of 3

Tab dot tab dot tab dot. Something all warlocks are familiar with. We’ve all grown accustom to our current state in arenas, unable to kite, unable to cast, relying almost entirely on our high hit points and resilience, praying to whomever that our healer doesn’t run out of juice or fall asleep before our dots slowly whittle the opposing team away. So what exactly do we gain in wotlk and what do we expect to get nerfed? Lets take a look at the demonology tree to start.

Demonology: Turning into Illidan for 45 seconds has to be the purest form of ownage known to man right? WRONG. While I wouldn’t say the demonology tree is awful, it certainly is going to need some major fine tuning in order to compete with Haunt/SL or even be a viable spec in the arena. Blizzard put way to much emphasis on crit. 10% more spell damage when my pet crits, 3% more damage when either my pet or myself crits, my pets gain 30% of my crit, or 5% crit to both my pet and I. Wow. That’s 16 worthless talent points in my tier 8+ talent choices. Crit does 100% nothing for a warlock. When we do get a chance to cast its almost always a fear and there is no possible way we are going to be turreting shadowbolts except maybe in 5’s.

Metamorphosis itself is alright, Increased armor by 600% is around what plate armor would give. Movement impairing effects and stuns durations are reduced by 50% kind of like toughness. Shadowcleave does do some damage when it crits, but its on a 10 second cooldown so you can only use it 4 times per 5 minutes, Similar to Demon Charge (which can only be used once per 5 minutes and basically works exactly like a warrior intercept). Overall Demonology might be alright for 5v5’s and potentially for 2v2’s but never for 3’s being that most warlocks wouldn’t trade their defensive/offensive dispel for a pet that’s more than likely going to sit in CC 90% of the game and barely does more damage than curse of agony.

From what I’ve gathered from playing beta, casting is nearly obsolete and unfortunately for us to do any real damage as demonology we would need to be casting. Warlocks are still the most viable target to train, we still cant get away. And without curse of exhaustion we would be doing any kiting even with the reduced duration on slows there’s so many pull back/intercept like abilities we aren’t getting away for more than a few seconds, leaving fear/deathcoil to be our only defensive ability(quite the change from 70 huh?). Some people might argue that the new demonic circle would add to our survivability and although it may come in handy on maps like blades edge, I don’t see this becoming the godsend to the warlock class. Mainly because it doesn’t remove slowing effects nor can you use it while stunned/incapacitated. It also has a 40 second cooldown.

Pros:

-Consistent damage with very little extra to cast.

-Lots of damage when you can cast

-Added survivability with metamorphosis.

-Might potentially be able to get away from a melee train for a few seconds before they’re back on top of you again. Even a few seconds should be able to get you toped back off with how well healing has scaled.

Cons:

- Pets still don’t scale properly and felguards are just going to get demolished even faster than felhunters with the increased wotlk damage.

-Awful talent support for both the warlock and pet with useless crit talents. IE.

0/3
Demonic Empathy Rank: 0/3 Requires 40 points in Demonology Talents When you or your pet critically hits with a spell or ability, the other’s damage done by their next 3 spells or abilities is increased by 2%. Lasts 15 sec. Left Click to Learn Right Click to Unlearn

Suggestions to blizzard:

-Metamorphosis needs to be reworked, Instead of a 5 minute cooldown make it similar to druid forms. For example it could instead of 600% only increase armor by 360% like it was originally and despawn your pet. You would still be able to cast all your abilities and it would only increase your damage by 5%. 15 second cooldown. Maybe add after a certain amount of time demonform hurts you. Perhaps decreasing attributes after 20 seconds or so.

- Get rid of all these crit talents, and add some that a warlock might get without being forced to. Im all for proc based damage increasing talents but crit is not the way to go.

Part 2 (Destruction) is soon to come, if you have any suggestions or want to see anything reviewed specifically in my next entrée please let me know.