Warlocks of Draenor: Patch Note Updates?

I’ve decided all future warlock-related WoD posts will be called Warlocks of Draenor, ’cause heck I read Warlords of Draenor as that half the time.

Since the last blog which went over a massive glut of information regarding the state of play for us in 6.0, 2 more updates have been made to the patch notes! So shall we go over the ones relevant to us?

• Demonic Breath is going away again, and Howl of Terror is going back to being a level 30 talent. This is probably part of the CC reduction we’re seeing, but instead of flat-out removing this one, they’re just making it so you have to forego having Mortal Coil or Shadowfury. Fair enough, that tier was a choice between those two talents anyway. I used Demonic Breath ONCE. Just to see the visual. I surmise that’s the same for many people.
• They clarified points on DoT Snapshotting. Basically, it’s going bye bye. “Periodic damage and healing effects now dynamically recalculate their damage, healing, Critical chance, multipliers, and period on every tick.” The exceptions to this are DoTs that deal damage based on a %age of a previous ability’s damage (Blackout Kick, or the Chaos Bolt DoT when using GoSac).
• Pandemic is gone! But every class gets the Pandemic effect passively, but only to 130% of normal duration, down from 150%.
• Healthstones share a cooldown with health potions, seperate from other potions. This means healthstones become a once-per-battle deal, as opposed to once per 2 minutes.

There’s also datamined changes to some of our spells, however these are not 100% official yet. They’re not in the patch notes, so grains of salt are useful here.

• Corruption for Affliction (and apparently Destruction? I assume then Immolate in that case) now scales with 24% of your spell power, up from 17%.
• The Demonology level 100 talent Demonbolt scales with 400% spell power, up from 300%.
• Agony scales with 35% of spell power (was 26%), Haunt with 394% (was 263%), and Malefic Grasp now scales with 20% (was 13.2%). Its proc that forces your DoTs to tick for 30% of normal periodic damage now ticks for 40%!
• Hand of Gul’dan scales with 20% of spell power (was 14%), and Doom does 4+200% of spell power, rather than 4,004 + 93.75%.
• Chaos Bolt scales with 348.4% of spell power (was 290%), and Conflagrate now scales with 210% (was 173%).
• Glyph of Siphon Life has spec-specific tooltips, and works with Immolate for Destruction.
• Glyph of Soul Consumption also has spec-specific tooltips. You need to kill something with Chaos Bolt for Destruction, or in demon form with Demonology.

It basically looks like a removal of base damage on most abilities, with increased spell power scaling to compensate. Simple enough. These numbers are subject to change though, they were datamined, not official patch note numbers.

A potentially nice bit of news for those that lament the loss of Drain Soul:

We’re planning to merge Malefic Grasp into Drain Soul, instead of the other way around, in the next build. (Celestalon)

So hopefully we keep that iconic spell and visual. From what it sounds, it seems that Drain Soul will function as Malefic Grasp does now above 20%, then it’ll change to Drain Soul functionality in execute range (where your DoTs tick for 100% of their damage per DS tick).

For those that are wondering how Grimoire of Sacrifice will interact with your bigger, badder demons in the Demonic Servitude talent:

Planning to indeed make it a bad idea to Sacrifice your Big Demon. However, we’re working on new abilities for the Doomguard/Infer. (Celestalon)

I guess they’d rather people take the talent because they want the demons, not just to sacrifice them. Fair enough. Worried about the loss of Soulshatter, and fretting that you’ll keep ripping threat from your Voidlord?

We’ll adjust their aggro generation to compensate, so that you don’t need it.  (Celestalon)

It’d be nice if their taunt affected a small area too, so that they can taunt multiple enemies at once, but I suppose that’s just wishful thinking! Finally, Carrion Swarm’s removal prompted a couple warlocks to ask if it’s possible that it will be re-implemented, and here’s the answer they got:

Not likely. It’s power that we don’t want them to have.  (Celestalon)

Pretty straight-forward. We don’t have a “why” yet, but it’s probably part of the general CC/interrupt pruning.

Here’s Raenah and a mantid in a statue form. Look at how my Voidlord refuses to assist either of us. Bastard.

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