This has been a bit in the making (ok a few weeks while I messed around with workpress, but I’ve had the domain for a while), but I’m finally moving of workpress.com and onto my own hosting!

Essentially this means that the blog is moving to velidra.com, and will allow me to have some new fancy toys, like actual wowhead tool tips!

So it would be wonderful if everyone could update those fickle things like blogrolls and RSS feeds to the new URL

The macro required is as follows:

/grid profile choose grid1
/suf profile suf1
/stopmacro [button:1]
/grid profile choose grid2
/suf profile suf2

To switch simply click either with the left or right mouse button. Here the profile names are grid1/2 and suf1/2, replace these with your chosen profile names.

This is my first attempt at a video so feedback is greatly appreciated.

Talents
The old system
What people think it is: OMG I HAVE 40? 50? Talents to put wherever I want?! AWESOME
What actually happens: Ok. I have 3 talent points I can put where I want… the rest have to go there or I’m bad.
The new system
What people hdutj it is: …. 6 choices? What the literal fuck
What may actually happens: So I can actually put any of these talents anywhere? Mmmk. ALL THE CHOICES.

The greatest weakness, and at the same time greatest strength of this system is (in my opinion) that your picking between competing talents that all do the same (or a similar) job. Like wise I think the greatest strength and weakness of the old system was that you were picking from talents that did different jobs.

I’m going to attempt to explain, with use of the disc talent tree (as I believe its one of the better if not best talent trees available about now). There are a great many talents that you can pick and choose from, and often (in HM raiding more often than not) you end up wanting to switch those talents around. For example you may want the focused will(survivability) talent on one fight, while on another you may want the veiled shadows(regen) talent , or perhaps darkness(throughput)? Do you want to spec atonement or not? It involves both play style choices and choices for individual wants.

However under the new system you won’t have to make that choice between regen, throughput or survivability, you will always have the survivability talent, you just get to choose between which survivability talent.

Which brings this down to a simple matter of execution. The choices have to be different enough that they make a difference in your game play, that having the right choice is a advantage. At the same time if the choice is to obvious then the choices will simply be boring.

Intellect (basicly) becoming spell power again.
This should be a interesting change. For those not in the know one change blizzard are “considering” and shared with us briefly in a Q&A session is making intellect no longer increase a players mana pool size, essentially turning intellect back into spell power with some crit attached. Assuming healing follows cataclysms healing model I think we’ll see healing be much more interesting. This change has been met with some level of OMG WHAT?! So lets talk about it. Right now a healers need for regen is far outstripped by a healers need for throughput. As throughput (intellect) grants a reasonable amount of regen, you will largely have all your regen needs filled by the intellect you grab for throughput uses.

What this means while mana matters somewhat at the moment, it doesn’t affect your gearing very much if at all. Sadly we don’t know to much about this change yet. If we put on our game designer hats for a second though we can draw some decent conclusions about what changes will likely support this change. In fact there is one major one I think most people are ignoring. The mana cost of spells will greatly shrink relative to base mana, either by making them cheaper or base mana larger

I like this change. A lot. Over the last 2 expansions we have stacked throughput with little regard for regen, for two very different reasons, it would be nice to see healing, and gearing of a healer, once again become a balancing act between regen and throughput.

Pandas themselves
Meh? And just because I’m not excited by pandas doesn’t mean that I hate wow now and hate everyone who likes pandas. Kthx.

This is a fantasy game, with everything from space goats (that came from in a giant crystal space ship) to cows that walk on 2 feet and turn into mutated seals at will. Your argument that pandas are to silly/cute/cuddly/weird/magical for WoW is in-fucking-valid.

My only sadness with this addition is they don’t seem to stay true to what I perceived pandas in wow to be. Eg blood thirsty attack bears that stood on 2 feats. Instead we have cute cuddly monk pandas. Keep in mind that both sides of pandas already existed in the warcraft universe, blizzard (aka Chris Metzen) just decided to expand on one side of this race and draw from it thematically than the other.

Monks
What exactly is the big deal with no auto attack? On one side I don’t think this is a huge deal, its damage you get from right clicking a boss and being able to move your character reasonably close. On the other side of this argument this is one of the “walls” that separate melee/hunters and caster DPS and make them different.

I hope blizzard have learnt from the mistakes of introducing death knights and hopefully makes this a far smoother introduction than that of death knights because I really don’t want to have to run lowbie dungeons with 4 panda monks that have no idea how to play their class and just ROLL INTO ALL THE THINGS. (because giving a class a no CD blink is really a good idea blizzard? Right?).

Challange mode dungeons
Out of everything that blizzard presented to us at blizzcon this idea seemed to be the least developed, but at the same time it also shows the most promise. The idea would be simple, you would be able to run dungeons in a time attack mode similar to what a lot of games offer, but all your gear would be normalized to keep the playing field even.

First up, normalization, what? This means that when you run the dungeon all of your gear will automagically have the stats of a lower item, which seems at first glance to be really stupid, really good at second glance, and again stupid at third glance.

First glance: New gear won’t actually improve my performance? WHY GOD BLIZZARD WHY?!
Second glance: Hey that means that the dungeons should be a test of pure skill
Third glance:… but now I’m below hit cap. Below that haste threshold I was able to get before… WHY GOD BLIZZARD WHY?!

And this is a sentiment shared by a lot of people, if you gear to the hit cap in raid level gear, and then enter a normalized dungeon and ally our stats are reduced by the same amount your going to below the hit cap and off any important numbers like that. This will likely lead to players having to collect specific (heroics level) sets to compete for the very top spots in these speed run dungeons, but is this a bad thing? In fact it may even entice some players who enjoy the sort of “twinking” that this will bring.

Pet battle system. Aka pokemon.
I think this is going to be brilliant, assuming blizzard can pull this off properly. What’s so brilliant about this, is its exactly what cataclysm was missing for so long: Something that players can do during down time.

What does that mean? It means that when you can’t be bothered to do a dungeon or raid there may actually be something to do in wow other than dailies. Which is something wow has been missing for a long time.

At the start of cataclysm when you logged in you had a choice between super difficult heroics, or perhaps a super difficult raid? Maybe you would want to go do some dailies with those quest mobs that hit like trucks? Yeah. It all required a large amount of effort, and was the opposite of what was the successful model in wrath which was to just put out “accessible” content everywhere.

Is it a bit silly? Yes
Does that mean it can’t be fun? No
Does that mean its not worth my time? No

This could come out really lame, or it could come out really awesome, the same as most features, its a matter of execution.

PvE scenarios
What is the purpose of these?

They seem somewhat sort like the developers went… “hey lets make something that players can run with all DPS through a LFG like queue” to just give players something to do. And then built up PvE scenarios from that goal.

In other words, they started with what they wanted this feature to be, and then made the gameplay fit the end result they wanted, not letting the gameplay determine the end result, and that doesn’t seem like its going to end well. One hand they may fill the same void as pet battles in that they should give players something to do during down time other than dailies. However if these aren’t more well thought out than they currently seem to be these may well fall flat, which would be sad as I would like some more things to do during down time.

New BGS!
Holy shit completely new BGs that aren’t rip offs of old BGs like the last 3? Fuck.Yes.

Enough said? I think so.

Resilience being a base stat
First of all, before we talk about this change, lets get some misunderstandings about this change out of the way, because many people just don’t understand what this change actually means. Some have even been running around claiming that this change will mean there will be no more pvp gear. So lets set this straight.

• Every player will have a small amount of resilience.
• PvE gear will not have resilience on it
• PvP gear will continue to exist
• PvP gear will continue to be important

This change simply means that getting into pvp won’t be so annoying as it has been since PvE dungeons stopped dropping gear with resilience on it (looking at you BC). Instead of starting out with 0% of the resilience you need to be competitive, you may start out with 5-10% instead. Certainly not game breaking.

The impart of this change will likely be 2 fold, both of which I can only see as being a positive

• PvP will be easier to get into
• Low level pvp will involve less OMG ONE SHOT AMBUSH (maybe)

Now I don’t know about you guys, but both of these seem to be positives, unless you happen to like 1-3 shotting people not in resilience gear. If your one of those people screw you.

Weapon changes
This is a interesting one. My main concern now is that instead of diversifying which class/specs can use what weapons (which has almost always been a good thing), they are now cutting down which classes can use what weapons.

Aside from that its getting rid of a lot of stat stick weapons which are somewhat boring. But when you get down to it, isn’t every piece of gear (especially for casters) some kind of stat stick (or stat shoulder, stat wrist?). Interesting point to think about is interesting I guess.

So every class is losing its ranged slot, and hunters will simply equip a ranged weapon in the weapon slot. Wands will simply become main hand weapons with the itemization to support this (aka they’ll have more stats on them).

This means that ranged weapons will only be used by a single class. This could easily cause some frustration, especially in a 10 man raid where its reasonable to expect (especially with 11 classes) that not everyone will have a hunter in the raid team when a bow drops. On the bright side with monks being introduced and using pole arms/staves (slight assumption on the pole arm side) these weapons will stay between 2 classes.

Shaman changes?
I’m looking forward to this. Finally shamans may not just be brought to a raid for totems, chain heal and blood lust! Jokes aside, lets (once again) say what this change is and dispell some common misconceptions.

• You will still have totems.
• You won’t have any boring totems anymore that just buff things
• You’ll get new totems which do cool things

For example, imagine, if you will, that healing stream totem is no longer a totem you drop once at the start of a fight and then forget. Imagine it closer to efflorescence. Say it comes on a 20 second CD and heals 3 close injured players for X amount. Wouldn’t that be more interesting and cool than the current version where you drop it before you pull the boss and forget? Yeah I thought so.

Warlock changes?
Will get their own thread later. As you know, I like warlocks. A lot. So they get special treatment.

The great (possible) squish
This is an interesting one. It’s something that almost has to happen eventually by the nature of the game. You have one of two evils. Either your gear gets an absorb amount of stats on them, or you have to squish.

Something I think that is rather interesting, that I think a lot of people missed is that the little graph GC had showed us that, at least one of, the plans was to make raiding gear from vanilla through to wrath equal to levelling gear, perhaps even with the last tier being equal to the next expansions levelling gear. I think this is the only really major issue I see, if the bosses are equitable to the gear they drop then soloing won’t be *as* easy.

I think that unless this is handled properly it could really suck and just make people feel weak. The opposite of what the developers should be aiming for. But then again this has been iterated by many people over and over again, including in GCs blog, so I’m sure they know that. I think I would suggest that they don’t do the squish at the same time as the MoP changes. This would just be too weird for players to have both everything about their character change, and also be hitting for 10 times less.

But then again at the same you have to put players through change twice instead of just once.

So over all?
I think MoP shows some potential. Some of the potential changes show great potential, others seem rather silly. We’ll have to wait and see how it goes. As to making a conclusion about is MoP going to be a total fail, or a epic win? We don’t have enough information yet. As such its rather pointless to start screaming that its already doomed.

Like most things in wow not everything here excites me. But that’s ok. Its ok not to have everything about an expansion/patch be exciting to everyone. I think that’s something a lot of people have lost sight of.

So today I’m going to attempt to look back at DS10 and give it a review of sorts. Does the instance hold up? Is it any “good”? Which bosses are boring and annoying? Which are decent? Which are actually enjoyable?

A popular comment a lot of people have made about the dragon soul raid encounter is its lack of new boss models. For the first 6 bosses, and that the setting for most of the instance are all reused from various places (Dragon Blight, Eye of Eternity, the tentacle things from Twilight Highlands, the maelstrom). I don’t have much of an issue with this, not everything needs to be fresh and brand new in order for me to have fun in an instance. I raid for various reasons, and oogling boss models isn’t one of them.

And honestly who apart from arcane mages and tanks have the time to look at a boss model that much during an encounter?

The next major thing I wanted to talk about was the difficulty curve throughout dragon soul. I felt like the difficulty curve in dragon soul was about right. The beginning bosses were relatively easy, while the end bosses were challenging comparatively. Though while Morchok has been called a glorified trash mob by many people, he does offer a decent gear check and a struggle for those groups not running around in 391′s from months of farming Firelands. If you take a pug into dragon soul you will have as “interesting” time taking on Morchok, and almost certainly stone wall on the next few bosses.

Morchok
According to some people this boss is little more than a glorified thrash mob, and yet he still required some level of paying attention and ensuring that you knew where you were meant to be. He offered a decent challange to entry level raiders, while offering something of a speed bump to more experianced guilds.

Zon’ozz
This is an interesting encounter, with a new set of mechanics that havn’t really been seen in a raid instance before. If you don’t know essentially you play pong with the boss for a while, which leads into a high damage taken/dealt phase. Its a refreshing set of mechanics, if a little buggy, encounter.

The idea of a encounter that throws players into a high damage taken/dealt phase is nothing new, though (I could be wrong) I don’t think we’ve ever been thrown one where we’ve had this much control over it, which gives the raiders a interesting conflict, healers want to keep the stacks as low as possible to avoid the high damage (and thus higher chance people will die) while DPS want to jump straight into the high damage phase for somewhat obvious reasons.

Yor’shaj
This encounter promised much, but in the end didn’t deliver as people had hoped it would. When people first heard about this boss it sounded like a fun and engaging boss that would require people to think on their feet and to react dynamically to the different oozes that the boss summoned at any one time. Instead we just followed a list some guy came up with in LFR.

As DPS this is an interesting encounter, but not a particularly fun one. It doesn’t live up to the hype and that’s never a good thing. Even if an encounter is brilliant if its hyped up to be the best thing since sliced bread it won’t live up to that, and it’ll simply feel like a failure to a lot of people.

Hagara
This is one of my favourite encounters in dragon soul thus far. Its relatively easy, but still offers some challenges at specific points (how many people have seen tanks go splat in a few seconds flat here?). Its mix of mechanics is unique and offers a fun challenge. Sadly, at least on normal, the enrage timer isn’t terribly strict so you can brute force these challenges, eg you  can have everyone run as a massive blob between totems over carefully chaining lightning.

Ultraxion
A tank and spank boss the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time.

This boss offers a refreshing change of pace, and instead of asking players to just about do acrobatics while doing a little DPS to down a boss, just asks us to do a lot of DPS, while paying attention to some debuff thing and press a new shiny button at the right time in order to down him.

I think its good that this boss doesn’t share the failings of Baleroc in that it that it doesn’t let players kite the boss after hitting the enrage timer, instead he just kills you.

Gunship
This fight should not be confused with its counter part in ICC. It’s not a faceroll encounter, presenting the raid the DPS check of getting all the adds down in time for the next wave.

The second phase introduces a fun raid awareness check with the combination of void zones, shock wave and spell lockouts testing raiders positioning and awareness, at least until the raid chases away the drake.

Spine of Deathwing
I have one major problem with this encounter. I can position my camera to see what’s going on with the fight, or I can position my camera to see the sky and tell when we’re rolling. I can’t do both at the same time. It feels like a fun encounter, it just doesn’t feel like a fun encounter that’s on deathwings back. It feels like I’m on a little platform with some clouds over yonder if I position my camera just right.

He’s just been shot at by a weapon that he realizes can kill him, he’s running away from that weapon, and he just happens to ignore the 10/25 heroes on his back and talk to them with over confident talk? He simply fly’s on and leaves us to our own devices.

Madness of deathwing
I dislike this fight, but in its own way it is a epic fight. My problems are two fold. Firstly, its a long fight, sitting at roughly 13-14 minutes for a decently geared out raid team. Secondly, it never feels like we’re actually fighting deathwing until the second (or last/5th?) phase when he kneels over, squirts out some blood and lets us chip away at him until thrall decides to pick up the dragon soul and do away with him.

But the fight still feels like it wants to be epic, I mean. There’s deathwing, and he has a fucking hole in his chest, and he’s pissed, yet by the time your through 10 wipes each platform feels like muscle memory, like you’ve done it nearly 50 times and you just want it to be over so you can get to the interesting part.

Though I will say this, this fight did give me nerd chills when we got to phase 2 the first time, for that this fight gets points.

In conclusion
But when looking at the instance as a whole its hard not to say it feels like its missing something. It seems to miss the sweet spot between fun and epic that blizzard were aiming for. I think a lot of the raid instance has great, if not brilliant ideas behind it. The instance just feels like it fails in execution, that there’s something missing from some encounters that just stand as glaring holes in the instance.

The instance trys to be epic, and the ideas behind it really are epic. Had you told me a year ago that the final confrontation with deathwing would involve us fighting on his back to expose a weak point so thrall could shoot deathwing with the mother fucking dragon soul, and that even then he’d come up out of the maelstrom twisted and deformed even more so than he already was and we’d have to beat him back again with the aspects held, I’d be like “Fuck yeah that sounds epic”. But in actual execution it feels… meh.

Another problem with the instance, isn’t a problem with the instance at all, but rather a problem with our expectations. After having come of the back of the most difficult encounter possibly ever put into WoW ever our raiding skills as a player base are more highly tuned that ever before, so when the best of the best ran headlong into dragon soul they barely skipped a beat when running over the first bosses. Are we as a player base meant to be surprised or dissapointed in this?

I think the another problem is it never feels like we’re fighting deathwing. We’re fighting tentacles on his back, we’re fighting his tentacles again by the maelstrom, but we’re never actually up against a giant dragon whose sole mission is to destroy us and everything. Hell we’re never even up against human form deathwing, which I thought would of been somewhat epic (and made use of a very under used bad ass model).

And to say hey blizzard, be cool and put more tools into WoW to support these tournaments with better tools. At the moment player runs tournaments with everything they have done we can run 2v2 and 3v3 tournaments with commentators and spectator mode, or 5v5/BG tournaments, but we won’t get any commentators or spectator mode.

And to be candid, for these tournaments to gain any kind of traction in the community, and to get on to the big stages like SC2, we need commentators and (flying!) spectator mode. Commentators need to be able to cut their teeth on player run tournaments before its pushed to the main stage.

My belief is that BG tournaments could be very very popular, but it needs your support blizzard.

1 tank
2 healers
1 melee soaker
1 generic DPS

This kind of makes it annoying to put together groups. Not even 10man has access to 3 healers let alone 4. Especially after a tier that required almost every fight to be 2 healed.

Thank you very much Blizzard.

As a side note to my aboe rant. I’d like to point out that H morchok FEELS like it could, and is meant to be 2 healed, and a very challanging 2 heal. However the enrage timer is so lax that you can drop 50% of your DPS and still kill it in time with a required DPS of roughly 14,000 from each DPS raid member.

So in short the DPS seems far under tuned, and healing seems far over tuned.

Or better put, the DPS enrage ends up feeling ok if you 4 heal it atd the healing required is a joke. The healing is VERY challanging if you 2 heal it and the DPS requirement is a joke.

>:|

(welcome back to blogging to me?)

Need new tier set for Warlocks?

(many thanks to @whitepandamedia for shopping this for me >.>)

I also think that while all of our specs pull “respectable” DPS numbers, that doesn’t mean we aren’t “broken” and don’t have issues pertaining to the class. To quote a blue from some time ago (I believe it was GC at last years blizzcon, but I could be wrong), if the best rogue spec was to sit at range and spam knife throws/fan of knifes to do competitive DPS, that would be broken and in need of being fixed. While I don’t think we are in quiet as a extreme case as that, I believe we do have issues that could be looked at.

Also, in advance, I’m sorry, this sorta ended up being a bit of a wall of text, possibly the biggest I’ve ever written on here.

General

Each rotation is very similar, they all focus around

• Bane of doom
• A 15 second fire or shadow dot (immolate or UA)
• Corruption

With various nukes in between. Granted this issue is slightly better now that demonology’s immolate is longer than 15 seconds, but this is little more than a band aid fix. The rotations all focus around this, so they almost can’t help but feel similar (as opposed to say mages who have 3 very different rotations).

Shadowflame is a odd spell, its in all of our rotations in some form or another, and seemingly pushes warlocks to almost be the melee caster DPS. This forces us, if we want to make use of this spell, to suffer some of the downsides of being melee. While at the same time, we can step out and take a minor hit to DPS. It gives warlocks a choice, a “interesting” choice I guess. In a world where free (mostly melee) cleave damage (eg doing the same rotation, but getting extra damage from cleaves) is meant to be at a end, but this spell has taken a jump up to being one of the few left.

Soul Shards

Soul shards are our new mechanic we got in 4.0. The generic idea is you have 3 soul shards and burning a shard does something cool. But so far we have had limited uses for this, and even fewer than we actually want to use in pve.

• Instant soul fires, primarily used by destruction to keep ISF rolling, but also the highest DPS use of a shard for all classes
• A miniature last stand, for moments in pve where you wouldn’t live other wise
• Instant pet resummons, if our pet happens to take a hit for whatever reason
• A sprint when combined with teleport. Has limited uses in all of one encounter in pve.

Most of the time you end up saving your shards in case your pet dies to something silly (a common example, standing in bad on nef, phase). This ends up with soul shards feeling more like a band aid fix to our pets being stupid, rather than something cool.

Utility spells

There has been some concerns raised about the number of utility spells that warlocks have. While I don’t think this is a issue personally, its still worth covering. On a average fight a warlock will use a numerous set of utility spells, that don’t fit into the DPS rotation directly.

• Teleport
• Shadowfury/soul swap
• Soul shatter
• Pet summons as needed
• fear as needed
• Banish as needed
• Howl of Terror as needed
• Soul stone as needed
• Drain life
• Deathcoil
• Shadow ward
• Soul burn + other spell

Personally I think a great selection of utility spells, or situational spells are a good thing. They allow players to differentiate themselves from someone else who just does good DPS. When people say know your class they are typically referring to these utility spells, and knowing when/how to use them.

Cool downs

Our cool downs are in a good place, no longer are we stuck with a 30 minute cool down Doomguard and not much else for increasing our DPS. We have our new Doomguard and infernal that we can use when we want without replacing our current pets. Meanwhile demon soul not only gives us a shorter CD (2 minutes) but also serves to help make our pet choice more interesting. No longer do we just have to look at which pet does the most raw DPS, but also which cool down is best.

On this topic, there has been discussion of making demon soul spec specific instead of pet specific. I dislike this idea, not only would it diminish the void walkers usefulness even further, but would greatly reduce the amount of thought that goes into pet choice. As it stands now pet choice in a combination of both the raw DPS of the pet, and how much DPS the cool down gives us.

Pets

Over all I believe our pets are in a good place. While each spec has a pet to use, its not a horrible DPS loss to switch pets if you require a specific buff or utility spell. More on fel guard in the demonology section.These abilitys being on our pets give us a somewhat unique ability in wow shared only by frost mages and hunters, though nether class approaches our level. We can do things while incapacitated. Dispel that important frost mage debuff, dispell the innervate on the enemy resto druid who’s LoS, or seduce the rogue that’s stun locking you. But I’m trying to look at pve here, not pvp.

Void walker

What is his purpose these days? With demon soul:VW we can now use him effectively for soloing bosses, however without a true taunt (for bosses) this can make things somewhat tricky. Also when soloing, his threat isn’t brilliant by any definition, his best use seems to be holding a mob(s) while you kill another as opposed to actually tanking a mob your beating on.

Succubus

The succubus makes a nice appearance as a optional pvp pet with both whiplash and seduction having some obvious pvp benefits. Though these days her pve uses are fairly limited, usually being brought to CC an additional target on difficult trash pulls, or as a “ghetto” interrupt on cho’gall now that 4.1 has allowed her whiplash to break the MCs.

Imp

The imp takes its place as destructions pet. He brings with him both a friendly dispel and the raid stamina buff. This pet has been the constant companion of destruction for a while now, and is often refered to as a little “machine gun turret” or some equivalent there of.

Fel hunter

The fel hunter takes its place as both demonology’s single target pet pet, and as afflictions pet. He brings with him both a tasty intellect buff, a MP5 buff, and a spell interrupt tied to a offensive dispel. While he faced a sad start to the expansion, being discarded for the succubus (and who would want to run with her? >.< The sounds bytes are annoying.Very.Annoying.). With 4.1 this pet has been pushed to the top, and hasn’t yet been challenged for his dominance.

Fel guard

The fel guard is our AE pet, who’s felstorm can easily keep pace with other class AE ability’s. This pet not only serves to reinforce demonology’s AE dominance but also serves another important function, it allows demonology to do AE dps where hellfire/immolation aura may not be viable. This allows demonology to a respectable level of AE DPS in both magmaw and cho’gall (essentially half the AE DPS encounters of this tier) even if the player can’t manage to pull of helfire.

Spec Overviews

Destruction

Destruction’s problems stem from the fact that after the dots and ISF, it is essentially a FCFS (first come first served) in the same way ret was for most of 3.x. You smack which ever of 3/4 buttons is of CD without much thought. If none are on CD you smack incinerate. This leads to a overly simplistic, but long and annoying, rotation, instead of a interesting and engaging rotation. Granted this is what destruction has always been known for, a simplistic CD based rotation.

ISF while much better in this iteration than the original, still has its issues. Are these issues a matter of taste (not everyone has to like every spec), or rather a result of a convoluted mechanic? At this stage I’m fairly certain that any mechanic that requires you to judge how long a missile takes to get to a boss is relatively convoluted, this becomes even more obvious on a fight like Al’akir where the boss is a long way away. But at least its not as bad as the old ISF where your DPS would take a huge plunge if you didn’t account for ony being turned and had your SF hit the boss early (and then ISF drop). While I think adding extra mechanics to destruction to make it more interesting (and giving it more gradient between good and bad players) is a good idea, I’m still not sure if this is the way to go.

Affliction

Affliction’s problems stem from there just not being much to do. During execute phase affliction warlocks have 4 rotational buttons,

• one you once a minute.
• One low proc chance button
• Haunt every 8-10 seconds
• Drain soul, your filler
  • Important note, with drain souls 15 second length, you only need to cast it once to fill any amount of time, haunt will always be of CD before drain soul ends

This can, and does often end up with affliction warlocks sitting around for up to 8 seconds (some times more) doing nothing while drain soul ticks away. While its nice that the rotation gets somewhat simpler once you reach 25% HP, this is at a absurd level. On the flip side of this, multi doting as affliction is at times silly. The timing required to maintain 2 sets of shadow embrace is horrendus, and suffers from some of the same problems as ISF does. You have to judge how long a shadow bolt will take to get from you to each boss, and who’s shadow embrace needs refreshing when. If you get it wrong you suffer a horrible DPS, as so much of our DoT damage is tied to SE.

Movement as affliction, for any significant amount of time, appears to be a issue. As affliction you have no way to reliably keep SE/haunt rolling on the boss while moving, without praying for a nightfall proc. While this is a issue on only 2 encounters at most in T1, we shall have to see what T2 brings us.

Our DoT damage is low when compared to both balance druids and shadow priests. With both balance druid and shadow priest dot damage being seemingly nerfed, rather than our dot damage being brought up, this should seemingly balance it out.

The affliction rotation itself seems somewhat counter intuitive. Its main filler is shadow bolt, which in itself is fine, there is a massive precedence for this. Destruction has to sub spec to demo to make it mana efficient (and hence viable), affliction has to sub spec destro to make its filler viable, there are numerous cases like this in other talent trees. However the tree has a huge number of talents that boost drain life, and the spec description itself doesn’t mention shadow bolt, but rather drain spells. It seems intuitive that drain life would be the filler spell of choice. The tree works in a counter intuitive way, you take talents to boost one filler (because you have to) but use another filler, this is something blizzard wanted to get rid of in cataclysm but has seemingly failed here.

Demonology

Demonology’s issues are more so along the lines of it not having as much pure oomf as the other 2 specs. It can’t keep up in single target DPS, 2 target DPS or mobility. It is, for all intents and purposes, a one trick pony when compared to affliction and destruction.

A important question that should be asked for demonology (and potentially combat rogues) is if its ok for a signature ability to only be used for AE/multi target situations? As far as I can see combat is the only spec in even close to a similar position as demonology regarding its signature ability. The majority of the community tends to err on the side of this not being ok. Personally I have to agree, its counter intuitive. “Hey look, have this awesome pet! But you can’t use him all the time, sorry”, but it could go either way.

A lot of demonology’s damage is tied to hard casted spells, and as such suffers badly during movement heavy encounters. Similar to affliction this is only a issue during 2 encounters in T1, and we will have to see what T2 brings us.

Demonology also features metamorphosis, a extremely strong cool down, and the main focus of demonology’s mastery. This cool down also has a interesting interaction between mastery and haste through the talent “impending doom”. As we get more haste, we get more nukes of and more changes for impending doom to proc and lower the cool down of metamorphosis, which increases its uptime and thus mastery’s value. Although the random element of impending doom both work for the spec and against the spec. It helps makes the spec more dynamic. At the same time with so much of our damage tied to this cool down the random element of this talent is sometimes resented.

Conclusion

In conclusion I feel pve warlocks are in a good place numbers wise, mechanics wise there a lot left to desire. Each spec has its flaws and ussues, some more than others, some of these may be intended, some may not. Could improvements be made? Yes. We are not perfect, and I doubt we ever will be. 4.2 isn’t bringing us any fixes, perhaps 4.3 or 4.4 (and so on) will? Or will we have to wait until the next expansion for any major over haul?

I would also like to mention that I think there are a lot of “perceived” issues with warlocks. An example would be ISF, it was very convoluted in its previous form. However since being fixed its somewhat palatable now, however people still reiterate the same arguments from 6 months ago about it. This tends to happen for every class though (see holy priest mana from cataclysm release to now, and people still quoting people like aliena saying holy priest mana isn’t fine), which is part of the reason I’m doing this post. To help lay out what I feel “are” issues now.

Lastly, I think that sites such as stateofdps and raidbots (which collate WoL’s reports to provide statistical averages) don’t help the situation, in that they are heavily effected by popular opinion, showing nerfs were there are none, and buffs that come from the community simply thinking one spec is better than the other. They give valuable information, but theres many forces that effect the outcome that we have to take into account before we can make use of the numbers.

Drain Life now deals 25% less damage.

This essentially ended the reign of the drain life spec. But why? Was this a pvp nerf? A pve nerf? I’m going to delve into it, and try to figure out why this was so urgent that it has to be hot fixed NOW (well then) instead of waiting for a patch

Self healing
Drain life afflictions self healing was ridiculous,  especially for the amount of damage it put out. Compared to most other classes (bar sub rogues, who it can be argued that already take a damage hit over all) who have to take a damage hit to self heal. Is this a good thing? Yes. I believe it is. It raises the skill of the class to some degree. When is it ok to self heal? When can I drop my damage a bit to self heal? It will reward players who can watch their health, know the encounter and damage outputs at various times of the encounter.

Homogenization
Theres already a caster DPS, focused around DoTs and a channeled filler, the imitations, the shadow priests. Our main points of difference were soul swap, dispersion, and a casted vs channeled filler. By allowing drain life to be a competitive spec, if not the top affliction spec, this removed one point of difference between our specs. This is something the developers have to be very careful about. They are trying to bring everyone in line, and make every class equal, but different. These two specs may have just been a little too similar.

Using drain life as a filler in pve is somewhat convoluted
To put this simply, having a spec that required interrupting a channeled spell with near perfect timing, and near non-existent lag, and the typical player just doesn’t have those.

Drain life, when played correctly (to the best of my knowledge) would require players to interrupt the drain life spell to recast dots, haunt, or even instant shadow bolts. But in order to pull this of you would want to interrupt drain life the instant a tick was done. While perfect interrupts may be possible in a simcraft, in real life we have reaction times, and latency, both of which would mess with our ability to interrupt this perfectly. Interrupt it to early? Sorry you might as well have sat around for the last second doing nothing. To late? Sorry you just sat around for the last half a second doing nothing. Doing this once or twice may not be horrible, but if this were to happen every time you start looking at a significant amount of lost time, which equates to lost damage and DPS.

Scaling
Does drain life just scale to well? Even with the nerf it appears that drain life affliction is the top spec (by all of 300 dps) in 372 gear. Where will it be in T2 gear? T3? Deathwing gear? Will we see tier by tier nerfs (similar to warriors in general in wrath) just to keep drain life in check? If so this is a mistake on blizzards behalf. This is something that they wanted to avoid for cataclysm. We will have to wait and see what happens on this one, if they continue to nerf drain life, or simply change it.

A popular argument for why this is so, is that drain life scales with mastery while shadow bolt does not. Assuming they both scale with haste and crit equally, they both scale differently with spell power, the “almighty” stat. Its also easy to look at the stat priority’s for drain life affliction and see that mastery isn’t all that great for this spec.

But why couldn’t this change wait?
This is where I felt blizzard screwed up. Why couldn’t this change wait for the patch? As opposed to putting it in the patch and then jerking us by taking it out. Only to see it in the hot fix notes a few days later. We don’t like being jerked around blizzard.