Warlocks of Draenor: Build 18738 + Patch Notes

This brings about some Demonology changes, some tooltip wording fixes that I won’t focus on, and not much else.

General Changes

• Healthstones now restore 15% of health, down from 20%.
• Soulburn: Haunt‘s damage increasing buff is now 20% on all targets, up from 15% on the one. So as long as you have SB:H on one target, all enemies you DoT will take more damage.
• Haunt‘s base damage is now 375% of your spell power, up from 295.5%.
• Drain Soul‘s basic damage is now 4+76% of your Spellpower, up from 4+60% of SP.
• Drain Life‘s damage has been massively nerfed, causing 150.% of SP as damage over 6 seconds. It was 350.7% of SP!

Demonology Stuff

So Demonology’s mastery increases damage in caster form by 8%, and in Demon Form by 24%. This is still the case, however the Demon Form damage increases are not on all spells as before, but only on specific ones.

• Touch of Chaos
• Chaos Wave
• Doom
• Immolation Aura
• Soul Fire

These are the only spells that will benefit from the 24% damage bonus. Any other spell will only have an 8% bonus.

Why? I can only think that it’s to make sure Cataclysm is balanced. For a spell that already hits like a truck (750% of spellpower!), Metamorphosis was making it hit like several trucks and a mini cooper. One shotting people on the bridge in Ashran? Oh yes. By making it unaffected by Metamorphosis, it can stay at that strong level without requiring nerfing, which would hurt its effectiveness for the other specs.

What’s confusing is that it also seems to be omitting Demonbolt from Demonology’s mastery. This is a Metamorphosis-only spell, and it doesn’t benefit from Metamorphosis?

Other changes include:

• A 30 Demonic Fury cost (plus 30 DF per second) for Drain Life.
• Glyph of Felguard now allows 2 handed maces to be used! (EDIT: This is just a tooltip update, they’ve been usable for a while now. Thanks to Dobablo for clarification)

Destruction Levelling Changes

To make the new level 15 talent (Searing Flames) worthwhile to use at level, a few spells are being learnt earlier than before.

• On live, you currently gain Burning Embers, your secondary resource, at level 42. In Warlords, you will get them at level 10, when you pick a specialization!
• Chaos Bolt is also going to be learnt at level 10, instead of level 42. Imagine the low level PVP! Chaos Bolt, boom.
• Ember Tap, the spell Searing Flames modifies, is being learnt at level 15 in Warlords, instead of 42 as on live.

Patch Note Update

Only one thing updated here.

• Seed of Corruption and Soulburn: Seed of Corruption can no longer both apply to the same target.

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Warlocks of Draenor: Grimoire of Synergy

So I wake up this morning with the full intention of taking advantage of server reset, and working on getting the Titan Runestones on my shaman. I have none so far, but then I did Secrets of the Empire in like 2 weeks so I can’t complain.

While I was asleep, however, patch notes were released, and they contain a very interesting change for Demonology warlocks! It’s not yet implemented on beta so I can’t mess around with it, but here’s the general gist.

Demonology is a spec that focuses around having stronger demons. Your mastery stat increases your demons’ strength, as well as your demonic form. A talent like Grimoire of Sacrifice, which kills your demon to increase your strength, didn’t really fit with the whole ethos of a Demonology warlock, so the team set about reworking it.

They had originally toyed with it Grimoire of Sacrifice being a sacrifice of YOUR strength to power your pet for Demonology only, in that your critical strike would be halved, and your active demon’s critical strike would be doubled, and also with it being a temporary cooldown, but in the end decided to replace it with a brand shiny new Demonology-only talent!

Grimoire of Synergy: When the warlock or their demon deals damage, there is a chance to trigger Demonic Synergy, granting the other one 15% increased damage for  15 seconds.

So basically, you and your pet can trigger this proc with your attacks. Your pet can trigger this proc on you, and you trigger it on your pet. We don’t know how often it will proc, though I’d take a wild stab in the dark at 10%. Do your wild imps trigger this on you? Or would they trigger it on your demon? Or each-other? If your demon triggers this buff on you, does it also power up your imps/guardian cooldowns? After all their stats are affected by yours.

I AM BOUND TO SERVE!

Thankfully, when it finally comes to beta, Arax’arad and I will be there to test it!

.@sampy I find it interesting how many people find the name odd. Demonic Synergy has been a Warlock talent name since WoW 1.0, I believe.

— ✨🐉 (@Celestalon) July 23, 2014

That would be Fel Synergy. And personally, I like the name. Fits the theme of the row (Grimoire of…) and describes the effect perfectly!

In other news:

• The animation for Incinerate has changed! It seems wildly unpopular.
• Infernals and Abyssals summoned through Demonic Servitude stop their pulsing AoE when out of combat.
• Fel Flame is still gone.
• Health Funnel is removed from Destruction. Presumably because with Soul Leech, Soul Link and our HUGE damage numbers through Chaos Bolt, we don’t NEED Health Funnel anyway.
• Garrisons are still fun.
• You can solo anything in Cataclysm at level 100 with EASE, bar Warmaster Blackhorn (I keep falling through the floor, glitch?) and probably Spine of Deathwing (RNG, pshaw). Yes, even Conclave of Wind, Ultraxion, Majordomo Staghelm and Cho’gall become absolutely trivial. You’ll be able to farm those transmogrification pieces with absolute ease! Unless you want ones from the latter part of Dragon Soul. Have fun with THAT one.
• LFR Stone Guard solo is pretty easy.

 

Yes I was playing a warrior in that last picture. I wanted to test Gladiator stance. My point is, anything you can solo now, you will be able to solo in 6.0 so don’t worry about it!

Until next time, kids!

#warlordsbeta #wow #warlock

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.

News for Warlocks in Warlords!

So it’s been a busy week! We have a first look at the 6.0 patch notes, and a crap-ton of other news that popped up too, like the Draenor Perks, glyphs, talents, etc. Let’s have a look at what some of that means!

(note, all of this is subject to change, especially datamined stuff! With that in mind, I wanna say a BIG thanks to Wowhead for all their datamined info, it proved so useful in making this blog)

REMOVED ABILITIES

• Soulburn: Unending Breath. No more water walking for us! Unless we take Glyph of Nightmares, of course.
• Soulburn: Health Funnel. That might hurt the affliction soloing potential somewhat, as the damage reduction is a great help to them.
• Soulshatter: Apparently it’s scarcely used. I use it a lot in soloing, but hey ho.
• Rain of Fire: For affliction, that is. It’ll be replaced by Seed of Corruption (much like Hellfire replaces it for demonology).
• Pyroclasm: Its effect has been baked into Backdraft.
• Metamorphosis: Cursed Auras: Now curses affect a 10 yard area around a target, this is slightly un-needed.
• Fel Flame: The controversial one! How will affliction deal with totems now? The removal of fel flame is a very sore point at the moment with most of the warlock community. Almost as much as…
• Drain Soul: Its basic damaging effect is being baked into Malefic Grasp (courtesy of a Draenor Perk), and the soul shard regeneration is going to be balanced around Nightfall procs (which are boosted by 5% courtesy of another Draenor Perk). Upsetting though, as we lose the awesome visual effect, and classic warlocky-sounding name that conjures the images of you DRAINING YOUR ENEMY’S SOUL.
• Soulburn: Drain Life: Again, Draenor Perks are modifying this spell. It’s generating embers?!
• Metamorphosis: Void Ray: Well, nobody used it anyway, to be honest.
• Metamorphosis: Carrion Swarm: Aww. What’ll Demo do for an interrupt now? They don’t use Feldogs/Tentacle Eyeball Monsters.
• Curse of Enfeeblement: They’re removing cast speed slowing abilities because it makes caster PVP terribly unfun.

So the two major ones there are Drain Soul and Fel Flame, ones everyone suspected would get cut, but few actually wanted them to. Personally, I don’t use Fel Flame as I take Kil’jaeden’s Cunning, so I just Incinerate spam when I need to move, but on occasions when I take Archimonde’s Darkness, it’s nice to have the option of using Fel Flame!

In terms of Drain Soul, if they’re dead set on removing it, then if they made a minor glyph that replaced the visual of Malefic Grasp with that of Drain Soul, I’d like it, even if it only worked in execute range. As for having our in-combat shard regeneration depend entirely on the RNG of Nightfall, they really need to make it a reliable source. If we’re sitting at 0 shards for an extended period of time because we’re not lucky enough, then that’s bad. Maybe make a passive that regens a soul shard every 15 seconds in combat?

The loss of the soulburn abilities is no great loss, bar Health Funnel for a soloing warlock. The loss of Soulshatter though is not fun. Manage my own threat?! I think not!

CC Changes

• Blood Horror’s cooldown is now 60 seconds. Shares diminishing returns with other Mesmerize effects.
• Spell Lock only interrupts spellcasting, no longer silences.
• Mortal Coil shares DR with other Mesmerize effects.
• Optical Blast only damages and interrupts, not silences.
• Sear Magic’s cooldown is now 30 seconds.
• Seduction and Mesmerize have a 30 second cooldown.
• Terrorguards no longer cast Terrifying Roar when they die (I never even knew they did tbh)
• Unbound Will’s cooldown is now 2 minutes.
• Voidwalker/Voidlord’s Disarm is removed. Seems to be replaced with Suffering at the moment?

All classes are getting changes to their CC to tone it down in PVP somewhat. I’ll miss being able to disarm Warbringers though!

Warlock Patch Notes

So what else did the 6.0 patch notes bring for us? Not much else, but here goes.

The cooldown on a healthstone will no longer begin until the player leaves combat. This is making them a once-per-battle dealy, and can no longer be a critical heal. It’s effectively merging them with health potions.

Demonic Gateways no longer have charges! Yay! Unfortunately, you can only use them once every 90 seconds, and the gates can only be 40 yards apart. Ouch.

Drain Life heals for 30% less than before. The Glyph of Drain Life doubles healing from Drain Life.

Shadowburn no longer generates mana. Not a good change, as even though our mana regen is high, there are still times when we run low. We cast a Chaos Bolt at this time, and most of our mana is back by the time the LOOOOONG cast is done. With Shadowburn being an instant cast, we don’t give our mana a chance to regen in execute range, which’ll encourage either “wasting” an ember on Chaos Bolt during execute, or literally standing and doing nothing as our mana regens to a comfortable level. This was an issue in the MoP beta, and it was fixed by making Shadowburn generate mana in the first place.

Draenor Perks

I’ve mentioned these a few times already, what are they? When levelling from 90-100, you randomly get one of these perks when you level up, appropriate to your class/spec. At level 100 you will have learnt them all. They basically act to augment your current abilities, rather than grant new ones.

Affliction Perks

• Improved Demons: Increases all damage done by demon pets by 20%.
• Empowered Drain Life: Health gained by this ability grows by 10% each time it heals you.
• Improved Life Tap: Life Tap grants 20% additional mana.
• Empowered Agony: Agony now stacks up to 12 times.
• Enhanced Haunt: Haunt lasts 2 seconds longer.
• Improved Corruption: Corruption deals 20% additional damage.
• Improved Unstable Affliction: Unstable Affliction deals 20% additional damage.
• Improved Malefic Grasp: Malefic Grasp deals additional 100% damage on targets below 20% health.
• Enchanced Nightfall: Nightfall is 5% more likely to proc.

The affliction perks seem pretty straight-forward. Damage boosts on your main spells, stronger demons, stronger life taps. Malefic Grasp becomes your execute, Nightfall is your only shard builder.

Demonology Perks

• Improved Demons: Increases all damage from demon pets by 20%
• Improved Molten Core: Molten Core reduces cast time and mana cost of Soul Fire by a further 25%
• Empowered Demons: Grants your demons additional 10% haste and 10% crit chance.
• Improved Shadow Bolt: Shadow Bolt deals 20% more damage.
• Enhanced Corruption: Corruption generates 1 additional Demonic Fury per tick.
• Empowered Doom: Doom has 20% increased crit chance.
• Enhanced Hand of Gul’dan: Hand of Gul’dan’s radius increased by 2 yards.
• Improved Touch of Chaos: Touch of Chaos deals 20% more damage.
• Empowered Drain Life: Health gained by this ability grows by 10% each time it heals you

Again, improvements to your main spells, and also further improvements on your demons! Makes sense, Demonology is the demon-empowering spec after all.

Destruction Perks

• Enhanced Chaos Bolt: Cast time of Chaos Bolt is reduced by 0.5 seconds.
• Empowered Immolate: Immolate deals 100% additional damage on the initial hit on the target.
• Improved Conflagrate: Conflagrate deals 20% extra damage.
• Empowered Incinerate: Incinerate has 20% increased crit chance.
• Improved Ember Tap: Ember Tap heals you for an additional 20%.
• Improved Shadowburn: Shadowburn deals 20% more damage.
• Enhanced Backlash: Physical strikes against you have a 15% increased chance to trigger Backlash.
• Enhanced Drain Life: Drain Life now generates embers.
• Improved Demons: All damage done by demon pets increases by 20%.

Ah, the one I most care about! Destruction sees some nifty changes. Our ember spenders improve slightly, our ember generators do too (and with that 20% increased crit on incinerate, we may well be swimming in embers!), and Drain Life actually becomes somewhat useful! Will I put it on my action bars? I may well do, watch this space.

New Glyphs

• Glyph of Curses: Increases the radius of Curse of Elements and Curse of Exhaustion by 10 yards. Double radius! Woop.
• Glyph of Dark Soul: Reduces duration and cooldown of Dark Soul by 50%. Ergo, we use it more often for a shorter period of time? Sounds good to me.
• Glyph of Flames of Xoroth: Flames of Xoroth is now free to cast. Great for those “oh shit my pet’s dead” moments, but as it stands we all use GoSac anyway. Maybe that’ll change?
• Glyph of Life Pact: Mana costs on all spells reduced by x%, Life Tap can no longer be cast, and your health will drop by x% per second. You health can’t drop below x% from this effect. Sounds like healers are gonna hate warlocks this time around! We don’t have the exact numbers for it yet (tooltip shows 159677%!) but it sounds really interesting! Hoping for more info on this soon.
• Glyph of Metamorphosis: When you activate Metamorphosis, you no longer transform into a demon, but instead grow wings on your normal form. Cosmetic glyph yay!
• Glyph of Shadowflame: Increases the movement speed reduction on the Shadowflame effect from Hand of Gul’dan by 20%. PVP benefits I’m seeing here, but also useful for slowing dangerous adds in PVE.
• Glyph of Soul Swap: You can hold inhaled period effects from Soul Swap for an additional 27 seconds. Oh look, reverting that change are we?
• Glyph of Twilight Ward: Twilight Ward now absorbs damage from all magic schools. Awesome! I love this spell, and making it apply in more situations can only be a positive in my book.
• Glyph of Strengthened Resolve: Unending Resolve reduces damage by a further 20%, but the cooldown is increased by 60 seconds. A more powerful effect, but less often, basically. Great for predictable periods of heavy damage.

Datamined Warlock Stuff

Again, a massive thanks to Perculia and Wowhead for this stuff. As usual, take it with a massive grain of salt, datamined information isn’t exactly gospel! A lot of changes can and will occur between now and when Warlords comes out.

Our Command Demon ability for our voidys seems to be Suffering, so we get an on demand taunt! This makes the binning of Soulshatter slightly better, as we can manually get our pet to taunt crap off of us! Does this mean that Suffering will no longer be able to be autocast though? This’ll also solve that little problem in dungeons of people using voidlords that taunt off the tank, similar to the “HUNTER TURN OFF GROWL!” problem.

Enslave Demon sees a change too. When you enslave something, its haste is reduced by 32%. This is a 2% decrease in haste, but we’re likely seeing a boost in damage by PvE sources, as our health pool is effectively doubling in size, so the reduction in haste was a necessary evil to keep things getting too outta hand. The increase in monster damage was to balance out the increase in health in PvE, which was implemented to increase survivabilty against other players in PvP.

Glyph of Siphon Life sees a change too! Instead of Corruption/Immolate healing you for 0.5% of your maximum health per tick, it’s now 0.35%. Small change, will it have a big effect? We’ll see.

Pandemic by all accounts seems to be gone! We’ll have to be refreshing our DoTs more often I guess.

Grimoire of Sacrifice is getting changed too. Demonology gets a spec-specific version that halves your crit chance, and doubles the crit chance of your minion. How useful that is remains to be seen, but it kinda makes thematic sense that Demonology retains the pet in all circumstances, even when taking the sacrifice talent!

Grimoire of Sacrifice for Affliction and Destruction is also getting changed. It retains the health regen, and health boost with Soul Link, but instead of a flat damage boost on some of your spells, it increases the critical strike chance of them by 35%.

This means your incinerate, with the perk Empowered Incinerate, has a 55% crit chance. 55%! That doesn’t take into account Dark Soul: Instability (making it 85%!) or your own personal crit rating! If you’re taking the Charred Remains talent, then HELLO EMBERS! You know what, I’m very excited about that. It also gives a 35% boost to Chaos Bolt damage, and Charred Remains doesn’t reduce CB damage. Looks like 6.0 is gonna be the day of the Chaos Bolt! BOOM!

Mortal Coil and Dark Regeneration are seeing reductions in their healing, presumably to balance out personal survivabilty (of which warlocks have a crapton) and make healers more aware of how their raid’s health is. Users of that Life Pact glyph may well tax their healers, which for some reason amuses me.

The healing reduction may also be a necessity because of how our health pools will be different. You have no base health, and all your health comes from Stamina. Base damage and base healing is also gone, and all damage will be scaled to whatever stat you use for it (in a warlock’s case, Intellect!).

Metamorphosis is getting an armor boost of 35%, and reduces the duration of stun/snares by 35% too! This isn’t a buff though, it’s a baking of the passive ability Nether Plating into Meta.

Fel/Wrathguards seem to be losing Pursuit, Axe Toss and Wrathstorm? A bit of speculation on MMOC says they may be changing the level the abilites are learned at, so they come with the pet and not as seperate abilities in the spellbook. It’s either that, or they’re removing the abilities of the Demo-exclusive pet. Wait and see, again.

Glyph of Drain Life increases healing by 100%, up from 30%. An attempt to make a rarely-used spell more useful?

Well, all in all, a large number of changes in store! And the coming weeks/months will only bring more. Exciting times, that’s for sure.

And I promise I’ll start on the ICC solo guide soon.