Fear in 1.11

[MongoJerry]

There was an interesting post on the official Blizzard forums describing the new fear mechanic going live in 1.11. According to Putricia:

This info is for level-60 characters, because there are no low-level premades.


Fear will now break if a certain DPS threshold is breached. You have to do about 500 DPS over the span of one game tic (about 1.5 seconds) to do this. It means that one direct damage spell that does over 500 damage breaks fear. It also means that the fear-breakage criteria now implicitely takes into account the effect of +spell damage gear.

Dots work this same way. If a warlock loads up an opponent with Corruption, CoA, and Immoliate, then fears them, and then all three dots happen to do damage in the same tic that totals more than 500 damage, fear breaks.

Pet damage and damage from third-parties (like a warrior who charges you while you are feared) also figure in to the DPS threshold calculation. If a warlock fears someone and does nothing, but a hunter autoshots the feared person for 500 white damage, then fear breaks.

This is advertised as fear having a decreased chance to break from DOTs, but it's only decreased compared to direct damage because it isn't gauranteed that multiple DOTS will do damage in the same tic. Now for fear to be reliable, warlocks actually need to use *less* +spell damage to keep under the DPS threshold where fear breaks. 500 DPS in one game tic is easily exceeded by any warlock in epic gear.

Basically, expect to see seduce+nuke coming back into style big-time, especially versus healing casters where slowly grinding down health is not a viable option. If you remember warlocks in patch 1.6, this is what it will be like at level 60 post-1.11.

The secondary effect is that the PVP trinket isn't so usefull anymore, unless you want to use it to break seduce. Fear will break on its own pretty fast if the warlock is actually trying to fight you.

Finally, note that these are PVP changes. Fear doesn't break this easily in PVE -- I was able to do major DPS against mobs without fear breaking. I would guess that the fear-break threshold is calculated as a percentage of the target's total life. For players the percentage works out to around 500 damage on average, but for the mobs I tested on the percentage gave a higher DPS threshold (I tested the WS elite demons which have about 18K hp).

A CM said earlier that fear breaks three times more easily in PvP than in PvE, so perhaps you have to break the 1500 dps barrier for fear to break in PvE? How does shadow resistance factor into this?