08-29-2006, 06:30 PM
Quote:The problem that I see with the way they're handling threat is akin to taking away Feint from the Rogues and telling them to use Vanish to deal with threat or take Hemorage to get a threat reduction for raiding purposes. They need to make threat reduction more viable for Warlocks and only a 10% reduction for Affliction and 10% reduction for Destruction still forces Warlocks to go to MD if they want serious threat reduction. Why is it that all the other classes have threat reduction talents that give them 20% reduction at lower tiers in the trees, but still force Warlocks to go deep into one tree to get 20% reduction? This shows that they looked at the "wishtlist", but didn't understand what Warlocks were talking about.
The fact that they also continue to add more and more DoTs shows that they fail to realize how a soloing Warlock plays. As it was before, a Warlock had to lay down their DoTs in a very specific order with very specific timing for Blueberry to hold aggro. With the increase in the number of DoTs, they effectively will force the Warlock into Drain Tanking and thus relegating Blueberry to being a shield.
This will only be useful to a soloing Warlock. To a raiding Warlock, the chances of getting the killing blow will go down significantly. Case in point, during a run on any given raid instance, I maybe get 5 to 6 killing blows out of a couple hundred kills. Overall, that's not going to help that much in maintaining my mana.
Threat reduction for MD has always been multiplicative. So there has been no change in threat for Warlocks in that sense. Blizzard hasn't understood what the real problems are for Warlock, they're just making changes to make it look like they understand.
The other problem, as I stated above, is there are too many DoTs now. For a Soloing Warlock, this is making it nigh impossible for Blueberry to hold aggro and for the Raiding Warlock, this means that they've practically doubled the number of slots that they can take up in debuff slots. I can pretty much guarentee with the DoT happiness that Blizzard is going through there will be another call to increase the number of debuff slots. Prior to coming out with these talents and spells, the 40 debuff limit looked like it was going to be perfect allowing for all classes to put up their debuff on the mobs without anyone really fighting over debuff real estate, now with the number of DoTs Warlocks are going to have along with the various Debuffs other classes are getting as well, everyone is going to be fighting over who gets how many DoTs.
The other problem that Blizzard hasn't tackled at all is the fact that the demon talents don't scale. Once you top out at 70, your pets don't improve while you do through gear. In effect, the demons just become an extension of spells with not real purpose outside those spells they have (Blood Pact, Seduction, Sacrifice, Devour Magic, and Spell Lock). Instead they should roll all the demon talents into one talent making it require 5 talent points and make it improve all demon powers by 5% per level starting at 10% (so 10, 15, 20, 25, 30) and thus allow for a little more creativity in the Demonology tree.
I just look at the Talent layouts and the new spells and think that Blizzard really didn't put much thought into the Warlock talents at all like they did with the other classes.
Soloing with the Voidwalker? Hmm. Isn't your basic grinding build either Dark Pact or Demonic Sacrifice(VW)? I just open with Shadow Bolt, Immolate, and 3x DoTs and ignore that mob while I put 3 DoTs on another.
It's my opinion that the Voidwalker can't hold aggro against any mob you're actually damaging fast enough to be 'grinding' and his only use is to hold off a mob you've left basically untouched if you pulled one mob too many.
Anyhow your post does remind me - what about the poor Succubus and Voidwalker? The Imp is made more viable with Mana Feed (OOM being his main problem) but if there's something that makes the Succ and Voidwalker good pets for solo-60-farming (let alone instances) I missed it. I guess Mana Feed helps there too, but Blue is just not well suited to his ostensible role, tanking. Neither is the Succ's DPS significant post-60, even though she is the melee-DPS pet.
One thing that Demonology needs is something that improves pets with your gear, somehow. A talent or
talents that adds a % of your HP and/or some of your +dam to the pet.
I agree that the 2 new debuffs will probably not find a place in raids. Can't have a Warlock using 5-6 debuff slots out of 40, really. But each Warlock should be able to get a Curse and Corruption (or other magic debuff) on the target, and that's a good thing.
....
Random thought: Maybe Curse of Weakness is somewhat overlooked. One CoW is somewhat pathetic (30 dam out of 900 = 3% dam red), but have 3 locks doing amped CoW and you've taken almost 150 from every hit. Healers should be able to appreciate that.