Other Games, Other Classes

Since getting my laptop back, I’ve not really played many other games. I was obsessed with Fallout: New Vegas and Saints Row 4 (before the issues took hold and made it unplayable) and now I’m back on the WoW they’ve fallen by the wayside again.

I have a day off work today so I may fire up Saints Row 4. I rebought the game on the Xbox 360 and it’s working fine so far, reinforcing my guess that it was the (preowned) PS3 disc  giving me issues. I’m hoping this will allow me to play this frickin’ awesome game all the way to the end!

I’ve also played a bit of Pokemon recently. There was a brief event to download the Eon Ticket allowing you to get Latias/Latios in your game, and I also went to GAME to get a serial code to download Darkrai!

Rar

In World of Warcraft news, 6.1.2 is on the PTR, introducing the WoW Token, some garrison mission changes to award 1000 gold, and probably some class changes. It’s Warrior and Paladin ones at the moment, but I assume other classes may see changes at some point. When could we see 6.1.2? I’d guess within a month?

I’ve been playing Lunchi a lot recently.

Here she is!

In terms of melee DPS, I’m finding Monks to be by far the most fun in the game. Mobile, powerful, awesome-looking (and you KNOW I’m all about the aesthetics!), the only spec that comes close to them in fun factor is Gladiator Warrior. Subjective, I know. Some of you out there may hate the Monk playstyle, preferring that of a Feral Druid, or a Rogue, or even a Paladin!

Warlock is still my favourite class, but man is the Monk catching up. As someone who favours long range classes/characters (sneaky archer assassins in Skyrim, snipers in FPS’s, etc), to find melee classes I enjoy is almost alien to me, but variety is the spice of life, I suppose.

“Now off with you, lest you feel my backhand!”

Patch 6.1 PTR is Online!

I’m not playing it though, ’cause I have stuff on LIVE to do! What’s coming in 6.1 so far? Here’s some of the key (to me!) things:

• A jukebox for your garrison! I’m guessing this is so you can customise your garrison music. Here’s hoping for the Pandaria inn kazoo music!
• New colourblind options!
• Character model changes! Obviously the Blood Elves get their updated models FINALLY, but Night Elf males get a new running animation, and there’s various fixes and tweaks to other models too.
• Heirloom tab! Heirlooms can be purchased for gold and, much like battle pets, go into a special heirloom window. This allows you to access heirlooms on any character without having to mail them around constantly! There are items that allow you to upgrade these heirlooms so they’re effective beyond level 60, all the way to 100 in fact!
• Garrison mission expiry timer! Now you will be able to see how long before an incompleted mission disappears from your mission window.
• Twitter integration! It’s broken on the PTR at the moment, but allows you to send screenshots and posts to Twitter without having to alt+tab out. Time will tell what the UI looks like and how it all works.
• Raiding With Leashes 3! These new battle pets take you to the Sunwell, Black Temple, and Hyjal Summit (*scream*).
• CANCELLING FLIGHTPATHS! Change your mind about going on a long journey? You can now cancel the flight and get dropped off at the next available flight master.
• A new 6.1 questline at the Iron Docks.
• Items that grant you garrison missions, allow you to instantly complete one, and items to instantly complete work orders! Speaking of work orders, followers assigned to a building get XP when you complete work orders there!
• Blackrock Foundry raid loot missions for your followers.
• A LEGENDARY follower! They look pretty awesome, but I won’t spoil who they are.
• Inevitable balance changes that we don’t know of yet. Those’ll be exciting, oh yes.

This is the stuff that piqued my interest most, but what about you? What are YOU looking forward to most in 6.1?

It’s the Pepe-summoning whistle, isn’t it?

#warcraft #warlords #ptr

Warlock Hotfixes Actually Happened?!

Apparently they did! Let’s start with a general hotfix (*salute*) first.

Secondary Stats

Haste is now 11.1% more effective. What this means is you need 90 Haste rating to gain 1% Haste, whereas before you needed 100. This is a boost for damn near all classes and specs, as it’s pretty much FREE HASTE RATING YAY but the warlock spec it benefits most is Affliction, Haste being one of its best secondary stats along with Mastery. It only really amounts to around a 1% damage boost that everybody gets, but hey! Enjoy it.

Demonology

• Mastery: Master Demonologist‘s effects have been increased by 33%

Whoa. 33% is a large number! Those that play Demonology are saying their Demonbolts hit like crazy now, and Demonology is a very very good turret spec, like Arcane Mages. Thing is, unlike Arcane, Demonology will also be very good at movement DPS, not as good as melee or hunters, but still a lot better than the other casters, so did we just see Demonology become the best spec in the game when you factor in every aspect of an encounter?

@gahddo @Rygarius @WarcraftDevs It's 1/3. 1% per point.

— Celestalon (@Celestalon) January 13, 2015

It’s safe to say that this is a pretty healthy buff. 10-15% higher DPS some people are saying. Gosh!

Destruction

Ah yes, my spec of choice.

• Devastation now causes the Warlock to gain 15% (up from 5%) of the Critical Strike stat from all sources.

As an example! Raenah, my Warlock, currently has 1006 Critical Strike from her gear. 5% of this is 50.3, which is rounded to 50 and added on to her total to give her 1056 Crit. It takes 110 Crit rating to give a 1% boost, which means Raenah has a 14.6% chance of a crit, when you factor in the 5% baseline Critical Strike rating.

With the new buff, 15% of 1006 is 150.9. I assume this gets rounded up to 151, and not rounded down, making her have 1157 Crit. This converts to a 15.5% Critical Strike chance, which is a boost of 0.9, which is a 6.16% increase from the previous number!

The workings out for those who care?

It’s basically nothing to be too excited about at this point, but as gear gets better and stats get larger, you’ll see more and more of an effect from this buff. Obviously it will boost Chaos Bolt damage slightly too, and higher crit means more embers and better AoEing, but for now it’s still a relatively small boost. We’ll see how well this shines when the gear scales upwards!

Merry (LATE) Christmas, fellow Warlocks!

Daily, Nightly, Ever So Rightly

Anyway, in 6.1 (as announced) we have a new series of quests–tasks, if you will–that will be daily, and also be randomized among you and your friends. So people will be able to coordinate, and visit each others Garrisons, and get these tasks. There’s a variety of quest types, and then multiple missions within each type, and so you can just do yours, or really make sure you do all of the types each day by coordinating with friends/guild mates. Rewards vary but they’re all very opt-in in nature. There are a bunch of achievements, some fun rewards, and some interactions with professions and crafting materials.

The subject of dailies popped up yesterday. Daily quests! A nightmarish subject for some who remember the gating of Mists reputations back in 5.0, and the mandatory-ness of them (want your best profession recipes? Best do those dailies!). The sheer outcry of “WE HATE DAILIES OH MY ACTUAL GOD” prompted Blizzard to adopt a more free-form style of endgame that we see now, which seems to have prompted the exact opposite reaction, of “WHERE’S MY DAILIES? THERE’S NOTHING TO DO OH MY ACTUAL GOD” thus proving Blizzard really are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Reaction to this news goes as follows:

I don’t want to have to interact with others to get quests, waah

Then why are you playing an MMO? The whole damn thing is BUILT around social interaction. Even if you DON’T want to interact with people, just do YOUR daily quest and wait for the others to be available.

BiS gear and enchants were gated behind rep and dailies, it’s going to happen again, waah

From the sounds of what Bashiok said, these daily quests will have fun achievements and rewards, making them OPTIONAL CONTENT for those min-maxers who want every single piece of gear be their best-in-slot. In other words, stop complaining, you’re getting things you can safely ignore.

I don’t like garrisons, this seems like more garrison stuff waah

Garrisons are here. They’re a feature. You don’t like them? Do the bare minimum with them and go do OTHER things. Do your profession cooldowns, which frankly you’d do anyway if they weren’t tied to the garrison, and get out into the world and do what you want. Your bank is in the garrison? There’s one in Ashran too. Herbs and ores? There’s many all over Draenor, not just the garrison. Raid loot from missions? Yeah, once every two weeks or so, and you can frankly just RAID to get raid loot.

Forced interaction with toxic people waah

Nobody’s forcing you to interact with assholes. Do you have people on your battlenet friend list? A guild you can ask? Declaring the entire community to be “toxic” makes you sound a bit like an asshole yourself, buddy boy.

So basically, we’ve gone from having FAR TOO MANY dailies and huge amounts of people complaining, to getting ONE daily and huge amounts of people complaining, to getting SOME dailies and loads of people complaining again. Complaining about having to interact with other people in a game where MILLIONS OF OTHER PEOPLE PLAY? Complaining about content that ISN’T EVEN MANDATORY. Isn’t even IMPLEMENTED yet.

Yes, I am fully aware that the groups that complained about too many dailies are most likely not 100% the same people complaining about too few, but why on Earth does it FEEL like it is?

Basically, stop fucking whinging about getting content you DON’T HAVE TO DO. Don’t like it? DON’T DO IT. Don’t ruin it for the rest of us who might WANT to.

ROAR

#warcraft #warlords #garrison

Warlocks of Draenor: Twitter Edition!

@jvzr …change in Mists, and so are getting less that others in Warlords. So, less to talk about. Happy to answer questions; not ignoring.

— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 9, 2014

Well, that may explain why we’re not getting much warlock information, and to be honest I think we were all expecting it. We received a MASSIVE overhaul going from Cataclysm to Mists, with each spec becoming massively different from the other, so naturally because of this, we’re not being seen as a class that needs too much done to it. Other classes won’t be overhauled to the extent we were, but will receive things to make each spec more unique (something I feel rogues and hunters desperately need!).

@Dakirokos We've got some new abilities for them planned, but haven't built or tried them out yet, so holding off on sharing info yet.

— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 8, 2014

Ah, an answer to an oft-asked question! It was a worry among some players that the permanent doomguard/infernal would not receive any new abilities, but it seems this is not the case. Huzzah! Why have we heard nothing? Because they’re not ready.

@Quaero3 No; it was just too powerful/problematic.

— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 8, 2014

Seems Mannoroth’s Fury is staying as a once-a-minute deal. I don’t personally use it (it seems to be the go-to talent for Demonology and I play Destruction/Affliction), but I must admit I do miss the permanent version of it. It made killing the elementals on the Lady Vashj encounter a lot easier.

@izbanblade No current plans to, no. You already have a stat that does that, and Multistrike has enough inherent value for Demo, so far.

— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 7, 2014

In further Demonology-related news, when you proc Multistrike (one of the new secondary stats) on one of your spells, it doesn’t provide bonus fury. I’ve never really had a problem building fury on the few times I’ve played Demo, but what do you think? Any Demo experts out there?

No?

@CJcomplex @alessio_amici Yep. Changes required to make Prot a real DPS are trivial compared to what's required to make Demo a real tank.

— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 3, 2014

All those people wanting warlocks to have a tank spec will probably have to keep on waiting, apparently a LOT of work would have to go into it. Sadface!

@YuliEle1 Warlocks we're considering the fate of KJC still. Hunters, we tune differently, more like Melee DPS. Mages have a few tools…

— Celestalon (@Celestalon) April 28, 2014

Finally, we have some word on Kil’jaeden’s Cunning. Could it see a reworking? Could it be removed entirely? If so, what would replace it?

Personally, I’d like to see Fel Flame make a comeback as the potential replacement. That way, each talent in the level 90 tier would be directly linked to DPS still. Archimonde’s Darkness affects burst DPS, Mannoroth’s Fury would be for AoE DPS, and Fel Flame would affect movement DPS.

All of us lamenting a lack of warlock-specific information should just be relieved we’re not getting another massive overhaul, causing us to have to learn to play our class again!

In other news, here’s my shaman Shamwhoa chilling with her homies from the Shado-Pan, Taoshi and Nurong, watching Niuzao obliterate a raid group.

(no really, they all got to close to him when he started charging and they all dropped like flies. It was glorious to watch.)

 

WoD Raiding: A Personal Story!

Going into Warlords, we’re getting a new raiding structure. I think the popular image from the Blizzcon slide can explain it better than I can. 1000 words and all that.

Everything’s going flex bar the hardest difficulty, and various modes are consolidating into 4 types of raid. LFR, Normal, Heroic and Mythic. Each of these will be on a separate lockout, blah blah, this is stuff we already know. What has been revealed recently is that while LFR has higher item level loot than heroic 5-man dungeons, it won’t have tier set pieces or the same trinkets as the higher difficulties. What it WILL have is unique-looking loot with no set bonuses, and trinkets more akin to basic dungeon ones, as opposed to game-changers like the Purified Bindings of Immerseus and its amplifying brethren.

5.4 introduced to us the new Flexible difficulty. A step up from LFR, but not as punishing as normal, it was a way for guilds who may never have raided before (like mine!) to organise a group, chat rubbish on Mumble (which has now spilled to outside of raid times, which is fantastic for us!) and just generally be more social. The fact it was flexible difficulty meant you didn’t have to exclude people if you were a 10-man guild and 15 of you showed up, and if you were 25-man but only 22 showed up, you didn’t have to cancel.

Why do I bring up what is common knowledge? Well, in terms of myself and my relationship with raiding, I was exclusively an LFR raider. LFR Hero, I think we were called (disparagingly, like we weren’t as worthy as the hardcore heroic raiders and whanot). I’ve been in the same guild since the end of Wrath of the Lich King. We’ve always been a social, casual guild. We first raided together as a guild in the first week of patch 5.2 (when Throne of Thunder was introduced), and even then it was only Mogu’shan Vaults.

We got stuck hopelessly on Elegon. Stupid see-through dragon.

The next time we raided together, it was in 5.4. The introduction of flex raids excited us! It pushed us out of just doing LFR alone, seperately, into doing this awesome new content together, as a guild. It also created a fairly good PUG mentality on my server (at the time, a low-medium population one called Nagrand. We’ve since been connected to Runetotem and Kilrogg, and if anything the PUG scene has exploded into life), so if we were short a player or 6 (we were always short!), we could always grab one off /2, or even through OQ.

The gear we got through Flex allowed us to attempt to tackle Normal Siege, and we’re so far 4/14N! For all of us, on our mains at least, we saw LFR not as a method of gearing this time around, like we had done previously, but as a sort of training ground. Our tanks learnt the mechanics for the fights there, the tank swaps and whatnot, our healers learnt the best ways to heal fights, when the heavy damage was coming in, and when they could ease off and conserve their mana. Us DPS learnt not to stand in fire, and that’s pretty much it. Any gear we got in LFR was a small bonus, quickly replaced by superior gear in Flex or Normal (and as we gradually acquired our legendary cloaks, from Ordos too).

I suppose my point is this. You can see the removal of tier gear and uber trinkets as gutting LFR if you wish, a slap in the face to those who can only do that. I personally feel it’s Blizzard trying to get people into doing what will soon become Normal and Heroic raids instead, if not as a guild, then as a PUG through OQ (or their new spangly group finder, which personally I cannot wait to see), or even through trade chat. The introduction of flex raiding in 5.4 was the catalyst my guild needed to get into raiding together, beforehand we had thought it impossible! We all kept different schedules, we were free different times, but splitting the raid into several wings meant we could do it as bite-size chunks when we all had an hour or two to spare.

Now, the raids of Warlords are supposedly going to be less linear than the raids of Mists.

If, say, you get stuck hopelessly on boss #2 of the Iron Assembly, then there’s always bosses in the Slag Works or The Black Forge for you to go and try. Currently, if you get stuck on, say, Norushen in Siege, you’re there bashing your head against him for hours until you beat him. Sure, if you’re Flexing it, you can just go onto wing 2 and Galakras, but really, if you’re struggling with Norushen, it’s doubtful Galakras will give you much more joy.

I’d imagine at first, we’d be able to do a wing a night. As we gradually gear up, maybe we’ll do two wings, then eventually we’ll get the whole place done in a few hours. Currently, we can get to Malkorok on Flex in under 3 hours. When we first did Flex, we couldn’t get past the Protectors!

People who want to raid only LFR, they’ll probably stay there. That’s fine, that’s their endgame. It used to be mine. People who want to go on to do the more difficult content will have a multitude of ways to do it. The fact that Normal and Heroic’ll be cross-realm will mean that you’re not restricted to only grouping with people on your server, meaning more opportunities to raid those difficulties in times that suit you. Yes, random PUGs can sometimes be horrendously painful, but honestly, for every time I’ve had a bad group, I’ve had about four brilliant ones.

I am still a little miffed that they’re not including tier sets in LFR. While I still believe it’s intended as a push for people to do the harder stuff, for the people that don’t WANT to, it basically means “you see all this cool-looking armor? You can’t have it. Have this rubbish-looking LFR armor instead.”

Like, seriously, have you SEEN the LFR sets? Here’s a link to (hopefully) the Wowhead preview of the LFR Plate. Look at it, then look at the warrior tier set above it. The LFR set is crap compared to that! That warrior tier set is goddamn BEAUTIFUL, whereas the LFR set elicited a “meh” response from me. The only LFR set I like is the red/blue cloth one.

On the whole though, I feel that this change to the loot system can be the push for even more people to move into “organised” (or in the case of my guild, disorganised!) raiding. Not only that, but for people like me, who don’t see themselves as LFR heroes anymore, but nor as an organised raider (is Flex Hero a thing? Let’s make it a thing), it’ll be more incentive to get into PUGs, maybe even make new friends! There are naturally some downsides; the people who only ever want to run LFR may see the removal of tier pieces as being treated as second-class citizens by Blizzard itself, who can’t have the nice-looking armors. In the first tier, the “hardcore” people will still feel obligated to run LFR, as well as Normal, Heroic and Mythic for upgrades, though this “obligation” will lessen as the expansion wears on (Watcher stated that the first tier’s Mythic items will be of a higher item level than the following tier’s Normal items, therefore people who will be raiding Mythic won’t ever need to do LFR or Normal as it won’t drop ANYTHING worthwhile for them once they’re Mythic geared).

That does bring up another interesting point though. When LFR Siege or Throne first opened, how many of us read the tactics beforehand? I did, though there really is a massive difference between reading about a fight, and actually experiencing it! The first time I did Durumu? Lei Shen? Garrosh? Galakras? Nazgrim? Heck, Garalon way back when? I, and many others in my group, were dependent on those who had already run it on Normal modes to help us through. Now, in the first tier, we’ll get those people. They’ll be looking for upgrades to their quest/dungeon gear that they haven’t replaced doing the other modes. In later tiers? Well, they won’t need to run it. Why would they? No tier sets, no broken-ass trinkets, they’ll be Mythic geared from the previous tier, and won’t see the need to run LFR, so you won’t get that contingent of people who know the tactics inside-out because they’re run it several times already. You’ll have a split of people who have read up a little bit, and the people who haven’t looked at a thing, both running it for the first time.

I predict those first couple weeks of LFR, just like the first couple weeks of Durumu, Garalon, Elegon, et al, to be rather painful, as people get used to the fights.

But hey, isn’t the struggle what it’s all about? If we struggle together, we can get through it together, and next time, we’ll be stronger, and we’ll be ready for it.

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.

Warlords of Draenor: Warlock Racials and Ability Bloat

Well, the other day we had an influx of information from the Blizzard devs about the new racials in WoD. Most of them have been redesigned, as hit and expertise are going away, and various racial bonuses are to those two stats. Also, we have a bit of information about what abilities may be going away in order to reduce ability bloat (and also to reduce the amount of CC in the game!)

So, let’s have a look at the racial changes first shall we? Starting with:

BLOOD ELF
Arcane Acuity is a new passive racial that increases crit by 1%. That’s a pretty simple bonus, and while it currently benefits Destruction only (mastery and haste benefit Affliction and Demonology WAY more than crit), we’ve been assured that ALL secondary stats will be made more beneficial for ALL specs, so this is a wait-and-see if this is a benefit.

Arcane Torrent is still a silence and interrupt (the latter only on non-player units), but the 2% mana restoration is now a 3% restoration! I’d treat it as a second life tap, I guess, though not as powerful. It’s good for the interrupt though, currently we only have Spell Lock from our feldogs (or Optic Blast from the upgraded version, the observer). Of course, Demonology also gets Carrion Swarm, but frankly I forget I have that sometimes.

DWARF
Might of the Mountain is a new ability that replaces the mace specialization of old. It’s a pretty powerful new passive ability, being a 2% bonus to crit damage which Destruction warlocks will absolutely love but other specs might not be raving about. Still, any bonus is a good bonus, right? It’s important to clarify that this is crit DAMAGE, not crit CHANCE.

Stoneform removes magic and curse effects, in addition to what it could before, but you can’t use it when CC’d. Seems pretty simple to me. Something you’d use to remove a nasty debuff. Dwarves look pretty good at the moment!

GNOME
Expansive Mind is unchanged for warlocks.

Escape Artist‘s cooldown is down to 1 minute. Useful for breaking out of those slows!

Shortblade Specialization has been replaced with Nimble Fingers, which is a flat 1% increase to haste. Again, a pretty simple benefit. All three specs’ll be happy with that, as haste is brilliant for Demo and Affliction, and shares honors with crit for Destro.

GOBLIN
Time is Money used to increase spell haste, now it’s a flat 1% increase to haste. What’s the difference? Well, you’ll cast slightly faster, as before, but all the other benefits of haste will take effect, namely shortening your GCD, affecting RPPM benefits (usually trinkets), and suchlike. Haste also increases the mana regen of Destruction!

HUMAN
An interesting one, this. The Human Spirit used to increase the spirit stat by 3%, which is pretty straight forward, though useless for a warlock. In Warlords of Draenor, it’s a passive bonus to two secondary stats of your choice. This is pretty damn cool! The EXACT numbers are unclear, though apparently it scales with your level. Whether it’s a competitive-enough bonus remains to be seen.

ORC
Hardiness reduces stun effects by 10%. It used to be 15%. Pretty self-explanatory. They have a 2% pet damage boost, but they had that anyway. Axe Specialization is going bye-bye, but warlocks don’t use axes, sadly.

TROLL
Ah, the race everyone seemed to want to be. The race that seems to have the most severe changes! Berserking sees a 5% drop in power, to a 15% boost to haste. Still good, still stacks with Dark Soul, and still useful for Affliction and Demonology. It’s not a crippling drop by any stretch. With haste breakpoints gone, it might not be a massive deal, but 15% is not anything to turn your nose up at.

Beast Slaying is changed. Trolls had a massive benefit to their performance thanks to this talent, which increased damage against beasts by 5%. A number of bosses, adds and trash packs were beast types, and though 5% doesn’t sound much, over the course of an encounter it adds up. What’s it changing to? A 20% bonus to experience gained from killing a beast. Yay for levelling, boo for when you get to max level. Does this mean we’ll see everyone race change to orcs? Maybe even DWARVES? Probably not.

UNDEAD
Will of the Forsaken‘s cooldown has been increased to 3 minutes, up from 2. Simples.

At the time of typing, WORGEN racials are unchanged, and while the human racial Every Man For Himself sees no changes, it’s not that they’re not looking at it, it’s that they’re unsure of what to do with it. Watch this space?

WARLOCK ABILITY BLOAT
To be honest, thanks to the revamp warlocks saw at the end of Cataclysm, it’s unlikely we’ll see too much upheaval in our abilities, as our 3 specs are pretty streamlined anyway. We are seeing some changes though.

• Disarm abilties are gone. This means our Voidwalker/Voidlord’s Command Demon ability is gone. We don’t yet know what it’s being replaced with; maybe its Grimoire of Sacrifice ability?
• Pet-cast CC is more limited, and in some cases has been removed. This probably affects the Succubus/Shivarra abilities.

This is all we know for sure so far. What could we see removed from warlocks though? Bear in mind this is pure speculation on my part!

• Curse of the Elements. Perhaps it could be baked into one of our abilities, like how rogues apply it? I’d lump it in with Immolate/Corruption. While it’s active on a mob, they take extra magic damage.
• Create Healthstone. We have Create Soulwell, just summon one and click it, and watch as others try to do the same, despite not being in a group with you! Hilarity ensues!
• I’m clutching at straws here. As I mentioned before, we were pretty streamlined back when we got revamped. Perhaps Malefic Grasp could change to Drain Soul when your target is 20% health? Obviously, this would mean you wouldn’t be able to regenerate soul shards at will, so maybe introduce a passive that grants us a soul shard every 15-20 seconds or so?

Well, that’s enough speculation on my part. As a reward, have a picture of my panda!

She’s now level 90, so perhaps my next transmog post will be about her?