ISF: 8% damage boost instead of 15% spell haste.

[Damosapien]

locks are top of damage on WMO on most fights so i doubt they will give any compensation, its probably why the blues didnt mention locks dps being out of line because they already had a plan in action to counter it

[Imbashiethz]

I really didnt have any problem with the old ISF, but Im happy you whined your way into getting it moved to t3, i guess.

[Deleted]

Thank you for qq. Cuz maintaining the buff was hard.

[Deleted]

Am I the only one glad its changed to 8% damage buff instead of haste? This likely means it will stack with power infusion and more important bloodlust/timewarp/heroism. On some fights that may even amount to a dps increase for me at least.

[Ludovician]

Am I the only one glad its changed to 8% damage buff instead of haste? This likely means it will stack with power infusion and more important bloodlust/timewarp/heroism. On some fights that may even amount to a dps increase for me at least.

This is actually an excellent point. Thanks for bringing this up.

This will give us even more damage where it is very important (when hero/bl/tw is up)

[Deleted]

Great change. The previous installment was horrible design mostly because Affliction and Demonology had no choice; they had to take it to stay competetive, leaving absolutely no free points after their main tree was filled.

also problems with scaling etc etc. cant remember what all of Jessickas points were on this in another thread, but it was a long post which nailed all the many problems with it.

to the people who say qq moved it, if blizz really thought that it was a good talent, they wouldve kept it.

[Jessicka]

Glad to see it out of Affliction and Demo, and also glad to see it nerfed somewhat making it less punishing if it drops for those of you playing Destruction.

There will I'm certain be compensatory buffs elsewhere for Affliction and Demo - they know how much it was impacting these trees and it's a huge part of the reason for the change, and there are plenty of things they can do to tweak trees individually.

---------- Post added 2011-01-11 at 09:33 AM ----------

also problems with scaling etc etc. cant remember what all of jessicas points were on this in another thread, but it was a long post which nailed all the many problems with it.

to the people who say qq moved it, if blizz really thought that it was a good talent, they wouldve kept it.

Here are those reasons.

Well let me explain:

- It's too valuable. For the two talent points it costs, and where it is in the tree it should be no more powerful than other talents on that level - Doom and Gloom, Emberstorm, Improved Immolate for example.

- It's poorly designed and implemented. It was originally meant to be an 'inverse' execute, and only operate at >80% of the target's health. For whatever reason, that proved not terribly useful - I'm guessing it not stacking with Heroism was the big downer, since Heroism is so frequently used at the pull that it basically rendered the talent effectively useless. They realised it wasn't working very late, didn't have anything in mind, nor the time to test it even if they had a replacement, so they just removed the limitation, realised it was now massively overpowered and had to nerf everything we have to compensate.

- It's mechanically awkward. Any kind of haste proc, be it from a trinket, enchant, eradication, can mean that 'perfect' timing on the start of a cast means it ends up hitting the target too soon and leaving you with a full, unbuffed hard cast to fix it.

- It makes us scale badly with gear. It effectively haste caps us at the end of this tier of content; which means by the end of the next tier we'll be massively underpowered since we stop scaling with gear as well as other classes.

- It's frustrating. Knowing how important it is makes it stressful when it drops. Do you really care when any of your DoTs drop or miss? No, you recast and get on with it. This leaves you scrabbling for Soul Burn or leaves you stood in a stupid place for three seconds while you desperately try to rectify it.

- It gives us a massive ramp up. Running through Heroics, you have to Soul Burn on every single pull to get ISF up to do something resembling competative damage. It's annoying, and when Soul Burn is on cooldown, or you're out of shards you damage is absolutely terrible and it makes you look bad. Maintaining it on trash packs is also a pain in the ass once Soul Burn is on cooldown too, as stuff tends to die in the eternity it takes to cast the spell.

For these reasons I'd be happy to see something in the next PTR notes along the lines of 'We buffed every damaging Warlock ability by 12-13% and replaced Improved Soul Fire with a placeholder called 'Black Hole' which does absolutely nothing while we try to think of something worth putting there.'

There was also Gherkin's point about casting a dot between the buff dropping and ISF landing and thus not benefiting from the Haste.

[clyne]

I love this news. Hopefully affliction will be compensated in some way, cuz affliction is not the specc that needs a 10% dmg nerf

[Evereghalo]

If this is accurate it is dumb,

1. The drop in tier does fix it from being picked up by all there specs per what was said in a blue post before.

2. But it does not solve the always up mechanic that they talked about.

[Killora]

locks are top of damage on WMO on most fights so i doubt they will give any compensation, its probably why the blues didnt mention locks dps being out of line because they already had a plan in action to counter it

Yes, they will. They're not simply taking ISF away from warlocks, they're centering it on one spec, if they dont compensate for the other two specs, this will cause a fairly large spec imbalance, and won't change what you said ( true or not i do not know ) it will make it worse.

[lightgil]

Glad to see it out of Affliction and Demo, and also glad to see it nerfed somewhat making it less punishing if it drops for those of you playing Destruction.

There will I'm certain be compensatory buffs elsewhere for Affliction and Demo - they know how much it was impacting these trees and it's a huge part of the reason for the change, and there are plenty of things they can do to tweak trees individually.

---------- Post added 2011-01-11 at 09:33 AM ----------


Here are those reasons.



There was also Gherkin's point about casting a dot between the buff dropping and ISF landing and thus not benefiting from the Haste.

/sadface am I the only person who liked having this talent as demo? the haste really helped idk where im going to put those 2 talent points now

[Angelic]

I will miss it too as affliction.

It was an awesome talent and it was raising the warlock skill cap by a lot. Now affliction rotation is 100% the same as it was in Wrath of the Lich King, keep those dots up and spam shadow bolts.

Very interesting, "thank you" Blizzard.

[Killora]

I honestly had 0 problems with keeping this buff up. And enjoyed the use of it. Playing well does wonders.

[Jahrastafari]

Wow, a flat 15% nerf for Demonology and Affliction, with no compensation. Get ready to see every single warlock in the game rolling as Destruction.

[Jessicka]

Wow, a flat 15% nerf for Demonology and Affliction, with no compensation. Get ready to see every single warlock in the game rolling as Destruction.

If you don't think there wont be compensation in Demo, Affliction, and in fact Destruction since the talent's power itself is being nerfed then you're just being rediculous. They know it's worth across the trees, that's why we got hit by a 12% flat nerf in 403a, and they know how much impact changing it will therefore have now.

[Deleted]

I will miss it too as affliction.

It was an awesome talent and it was raising the warlock skill cap by a lot. Now affliction rotation is 100% the same as it was in Wrath of the Lich King, keep those dots up and spam shadow bolts.

Very interesting, "thank you" Blizzard.

literally, the single affliction lock ive seen that liked the talent. there will be more of course, but you are in the minority. and theres nothing wrong with that, but it seems blizz also fell into the majority category and its going byebye. i cant imagine enjoying the feel of that in affli, and worse that affli and demo had zero choice in the filler tiers (ie, where you are supposed to have wiggle room and pick what talents you like) and had to fill 7 points in destruction. good riddance IMO :s

[nocturnus]

This change is a positive one for destro locks. There will still be a challenging buff to keep up, so the difference between a good and an average lock will still be large. Even if this is a nerg to our current damage, this nerf will result beneficial on the long run. Now we will benefit from BL accordingly and haste in higher tier content will still be valuable for us. 15% haste from talents would undoubtably result in scaling issues.

I just wonder how they will balance aff and demo, if they're even considering it.

[Loveletters]

They'd better buff the everloving shit out of felpuppy and felguard...

This x1000000

[Jessicka]

I just wonder how they will balance aff and demo, if they're even considering it.

The nerfed the shit out of Affliction and Demonology to cover for the bullshit talent in the first place, buffing them in return now we no longer have it isn't likely to be overlooked.

Quite how they'll do it however remains to be seen - the rediculous ramp up ISF hit us with actually kept Affliction and Demonology sane in PvP, so a flat damage buff is highly unlikely since it would likely lead to serious issues that side of the fence. Buffing Masteries would probably remove Shadow Bolt from Affliction's rotation and fortunately that also means more SE stacks are unlikely for similar reasons. It would also make Demonology obscenely overpowered while in Meta, but otherwise horribly weak just as it suffered in Wrath.

This change is just the beginning. We're going to be the DKs of Cata with new talent builds in every patch at this rate.

[tizlol]

I hate this change, Blizzard just wants this game to be fucking faceroll really, it wasn't THAT hard to keep a very high uptime on ISF, it was just a matter of using your brains, this will make it impossible for warlocks to outplay other warlocks, and they'll all do the same dps, nothing evolving around skill in this game anymore, you can even clip the last ticks of dots, a lot of dots gets refreshed by themselves etc, i trying not take it too hard as it's not live yet, but it probably will be as all the fucking noobs are whining, so you can't max your dps? Well go practise on a fucking dummy or something QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ