Cataclysm - The Warlock Edition (Unlocked)

[gherkin]

Copy/paste of the previously existing Cataclysm thread. I will unlock this when new information is presented as I am attempting to keep this organized nicely.

New Warlock Spells

Fel Flame (level 81): Quick-hitting spell dealing Shadowfire damage. This is similar to the mage ability Frostfire Bolt, in that the lower of the two resistances (in this case shadow and fire) on your target will be used for calculating its damage. Additionally, Fel Flame refreshes the duration of Immolate and Unstable Affliction. Our goal for Fel Flame is to provide a spell that's good for mobility and for use by Destruction and Demonology specs. Also, did we mention it uses green fire? Yep. Instant cast.

Dark Intent (level 83): Increases the target's chance for a critical effect with periodic damage or healing spells by 3%. When the target lands a crit, you get a buff to your damage for 10 seconds. This effect stacks up to three times.

Demon Soul (level 85): Fuses the warlock's soul with his or her demon. This provides warlocks with a self-burst cooldown to use. The specific effects granted by Demon Soul depend on the demon chosen. Demon Soul lasts for a certain number of charges or until it expires (around 20 seconds), depending on the demon used. 2-minute cooldown.

Soul Shard Overhaul

This major change regarding Soul Shards was previously announced at BlizzCon 2009. Soul Shards will no longer be inventory items, but instead a new UI resource mechanic. Warlocks will have 3 Soul Shards that can be used during a fight and will not be able to gain additional shards during combat. Soul Shards will not be required outside of combat. Soul Burn will consume a Soul Shard resource, thereby allowing you to use the secondary effects of some spells. Soul Burn has no mana or health costs and is off the global cooldown. Planned secondary effects are outlined here.

• Summon Demon + Soul Burn = summon the demon instantly.
• Drain Life + Soul Burn = Reduces cast speed by 60%.
• Demonic Circle + Soul Burn = Increases movement speed by 50% for 8 seconds after teleporting.
• Unstable Affliction + Soul Burn = Instantly deals damage equal to 30% of its effect.
• Soul Fire + Soul Burn = Instant cast.
• Healthstone + Soul Burn = Increases total health by 20% for 8 seconds.
• Searing Pain + Soul Burn = Increases the crit chance of Searing Pain by 100%, and subsequent Searing Pain spells by 50% for 6 seconds.

Next you will find a list of some of the warlock spell and talent changes for the release of Cataclysm. There will be further changes, but those revealed below should offer some insight into our goals.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

• All warlock damage-over-time (DoT) spells will benefit from crit and haste innately. Haste will no longer act to reduce the DoT's duration, but rather to add additional ticks. When reapplying a DoT, you can no longer "clip" the final tick. Instead, this will just add duration to the spell, similar to how Everlasting Affliction currently works.
  
• Curse of Agony and Curse of Doom will be converted into Bane of Agony and Bane of Doom. Bane spells are considered magic instead of curses. This means you will be able to cast one Bane (e.g. Bane of Agony) and one Curse (e.g. Curse of Elements) on a single target.
  
• Hellfire will no longer deal damage to the warlock.
  
• Imps will lose Fire Shield, but will gain a new ability, Burning Ember, which is a stacking DoT.
  
• The succubus melee range will be increased. The succubus will no longer have Soothing Kiss, but will instead have Whiplash, which knocks back all enemies within 8 yards.
  
• Voidwalker Torment will do increased damage and generate a lot of area-of-effect (AoE) threat. Suffering will become a single-target taunt.

New Talents and Talent Changes

• Pandemic will now cause Drain Soul to refresh Unstable Affliction and Bane of Agony on targets below 25% health.
  
• The ability Fel Domination will be removed (because Soul Burn accomplishes the same effect).
  
• Demonology will gain a new direct-damage spell, Demon Bolt. Demon Bolt will add a debuff that improves the damage done by the demon to the target.
  
• We plan to add a new talent, Impending Doom, which will give certain spells a chance to reduce the cooldown on Metamorphosis and Bane of Doom.
  
• Metamorphosis will no longer be subject to demonic crowd control. Furthermore, abilities available only while under the effects of Metamorphosis will be altered to put more emphasis on the warlock's own spells.
  
• Shadowburn will now do additional damage to targets below 25% health.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Affliction
Spell Damage
Spell Crit
Shadow DoTs

Demonology
Spell Damage
Spell Haste
Demon Damage

Destruction
Spell Damage
Spell Critical Damage
Fire Direct Damage

Shadow DoTs: The damage caused by Shadow damage-over-time spells is increased.

Demon Damage: The damage caused by pets and Metamorphosis is increased.

Fire Direct Damage: The damage caused by Fire direct damage spells is increased.

Well that concludes this Cataclysm preview for the warlock class. The development of these changes will continue to evolve in the coming months. Please be sure to provide any feedback and thoughts you might have on what was covered here.

Edit:

Warlock Cataclysm Class Changes -- Clarifications
Here are a few points of clarification on some of the popular questions or concerns we're seeing.

• On regenerating shards in combat, we will add a mechanic to regen shards if we find that we need to in order to handle variable combat length. We haven't added one yet because we really want to emphasize locks using shards at the right time and not as fast as they can with then an Evocation-like spell to bring them back again. These are supposed to be special moments in a fight -- think Bloodlust perhaps -- and not used every 20 seconds on cooldown (or whatever the cooldown ends up being).
• Demon lovers, we haven't ruled out adding a new demon, but we want to be very careful here. We've had a hard enough time finding niches for some of the current ones. So we first want to make sure existing demons are cool before we're faced with Q&A several months from now asking why the new demon either isn't cool enough, or why warlocks no longer use, say, their felhunter because of the new demon.
• The intent for Hellfire is for it to be a specialty of Demonology warlocks. Affliction would use Seed of Corruption and Destruction would use Rain of Fire.

and a couple of things from the shaman Q & A I thought worth emphasising:

Q: How can Elemental Overload proc Lava Burst when Lava Burst already hits so hard in PvP?
A: We’re going to change almost every number in Cataclysm to adjust for everything from single ranks of spells to larger health pools to new combat ratings. With much higher health pools, hopefully burst damage will go back to being a tool and not the only way to win matches.

...

Q: You didn’t address Enhancement survivability or mobility or X and Y!
A: This was just a preview and is not a comprehensive list of every change. Much more will be revealed in beta and much will change during beta.

[gherkin]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/1125

Now unlocked.


---------- Post added 2010-06-30 at 05:14 PM ----------

Post away.

[Deleted]

removed due to gherkin's is abusing his admin powers to delete posts that dosnt mean the same thing as he do.

[gherkin]

I've editted this. No direct linking like that unless its a thumbnail.

---------- Post added 2010-06-30 at 05:33 PM ----------

And yes, they're valid/safe/allowed. Just as links, not as full size images

[nazrakin]

I was in the Alpha also. There really isn't much to talk about since very little work was done to Warlocks, and what was there was only partly done and/or buggy.

Soul Shard System - Not much else to say about it that hasn't already been said. I don't like Soul Harvest as it is, it just felt more like a a chore while leveling. I'd prefer if the Shards just auto regenerated out of combat.

Fel Flame - This has the potential to be Shadowflame 2.0. It does very little dmg and feels like a recycled Ice lance. Unfortunately, it feels like we're getting a lot of Mage-like spells. Soul Harvest feels/looks like Evocate, Dark Intent sounds a lot like Focus Magic, and (currently) the most fun thing to do with Soul Burn is to use it like a POM+Pyro w soul fire.

[sugarfree]

I hope shadowflame remains sucky so i can replace it with fel flame in my already crammed keybinds. Lol, just kidding. I hope they buff the damage on shadowflame or at least have the slow effect baseline and not to glyph for it.

But wow, I never expected Soul Harvest to be that tiring. I was picturing it with destro never having to eat after combat during leveling. Not much on aff since it's like always full after ever grind...

Bane of Havoc is really promising. I don't know how it will stand up to curse of elements, but it certainly has a lot of deadly potential.

[Sedryn]

I hope shadowflame remains sucky so i can replace it with fel flame in my already crammed keybinds. Lol, just kidding. I hope they buff the damage on shadowflame or at least have the slow effect baseline and not to glyph for it.

But wow, I never expected Soul Harvest to be that tiring. I was picturing it with destro never having to eat after combat during leveling. Not much on aff since it's like always full after ever grind...

Bane of Havoc is really promising. I don't know how it will stand up to curse of elements, but it certainly has a lot of deadly potential.

What is Bane of Havoc? I haven't seen anything about that at all? What does it do?

[Deleted]

removed due to gherkin's is abusing his admin powers to delete posts that dosnt mean the same thing as he do.

[nazrakin]

I hope shadowflame remains sucky so i can replace it with fel flame in my already crammed keybinds. Lol, just kidding. I hope they buff the damage on shadowflame or at least have the slow effect baseline and not to glyph for it.

But wow, I never expected Soul Harvest to be that tiring. I was picturing it with destro never having to eat after combat during leveling. Not much on aff since it's like always full after ever grind...

Bane of Havoc is really promising. I don't know how it will stand up to curse of elements, but it certainly has a lot of deadly potential.

Admittedly, it was probably my own fault. I don't think Blizz intends for you to constantly burn through the shards.

[Xorn]

So, I understand what happens if you put Bane of Havoc on something that isn't your main target, but what if you BoH your main target, like on a patchwerk type boss? Does it do nothing or does still direct 15% of your damage onto the boss? This seems to be the ideal sort of ability they could use to tune destro dps, like when the increased the flat damage % increase on talents in the other trees. It seems logical that this would be their way of building in that sort of mechanic to easily adjust destro dps they way they can affliction and demo.

[wasniahC]

Bane of Havoc is really promising. I don't know how it will stand up to curse of elements, but it certainly has a lot of deadly potential.

Its a bane, not a curse. The idea now is that you can use one of your curses to put up the raid debuff, without giving up your damage spells, which are now banes; so you can use both curse of the elements and bane of doom, for example. Or elements and havoc

[Repo123]

Just an observation - demon soul is useless for a destro lock in pvp. I am disappointed about that.

I haven't seen any information on succubus whiplash. How far does it knock them back? If there is a cool down, how much?

[Santiago]

I doubt you can put Bane of Havoc on a boss and then nuke the boss. But where you are expected to deal with adds it will be a nice thing to stick on the boss first. Especially if you need to AOE lots of adds....

So it will have uses on specific boss fights, but overall it feels like a spell aimed at pvp?

[EradicatorSanctuary]

I just hope we dont become useless due to the soul harvest. It says it only regenerates one shard over the 9 sec or a shard each 3 sec for the duration ( 9 sec which = 3 shards ) What happened with the out of combat instant regeneration , or w/e fast. And if u run out of shards in a pve fight , u cant use soul harvest. ur still in combat , so how are u sopoused to regenerate it. Overall , I just hope warlocks dont become ... nyagh :P Cant wait to see what happens in the upcoming weeks! BUFF LLOCKS! :O RAWR xD

[VoltusV]

Wait i just went over all our cloth items and it looks like we would be using "Mastery" is this somenthing new?

[AcidTiger]

Can anyone confirm if this procs off periodic damage or just periodic spell damage?

[vkei]

BoH on a player , SoC on a group of mod , GG and nerf comes ?

[sugarfree]

Its a bane, not a curse. The idea now is that you can use one of your curses to put up the raid debuff, without giving up your damage spells, which are now banes; so you can use both curse of the elements and bane of doom, for example. Or elements and havoc

Lol, my mind kinda jumbled when I posted that. Hahaha, i got confused with BoA and BoD being banes now instead of curses. So yeah, this is actually a passive dot for destro, certainly like a reverse Vampiric Embrace. This is going to be pretty powerful. Especially in PVE with a lot of adds on a boss and in bgs.

[Metaslave]

So I was reading wow riot's look at cataclysm so far and I see this:

"Warlocks: Death Coil has a 1.5 second cast time"

Could be a bug but still. What's next, will it share dr with fear?

[nazrakin]

So I was reading wow riot's look at cataclysm so far and I see this:

"Warlocks: Death Coil has a 1.5 second cast time"

Could be a bug but still. What's next, will it share dr with fear?

I just checked, its still instant cast.