Official expansion talent previews

[Lissa]

If the aggro-control spell (Soulshatter) dumps 50% of existing aggro, that's pretty huge; you'd just need to use it when you have enough aggro to be worth dumping.

If it operates instead by adding a buff which reduces threat generated by 50% for a minute or two, that might have about the same effect as the 30% overall MD/imp reduction.

Anyhow I think this is basically our talent review. More mana regen, a useful DP, aggro management, better/more affliction spells suitable for PvP, a high-level pet ... it's right from the wishlist. There's some stuff Blizzard hasn't really cleaned up yet, but there's time before the expansion.

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.

Improved Drain Soul is really strong. I can see people grinding with this as their main recovery and deleting the shards produced. 15% of maximum mana for free is way better than Life Tap or Dark Pact

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.

As far as aggro goes, it remains to be seen how effective the new 41 point Defensive Warrior talent is. There's a good possibility it will increase MT threat gen significantly. On top of that, Horde guilds are getting Blessing of Salvation (keep in mind they've managed to get to Naxx without it). A 50% threat dump at will is pretty damn good for long fights, too. I may be remembering incorrectly, but wasn't the MD/Imp threat reduction additive before, now nerfed to multiplicative? The added threat bonuses (which is pretty nice gravy on the already useful talent Destructive Reach) reduce the threat gap, which is all they *should* do considering the MD/Imp requires sacrifices for that one, now smaller, threat advantage. Considering all these things, I believe there's a good chance that Warlocks will be able to get by without the MD/Imp combo, while maintaining its viability.

Mana feed looks awesome - finally a way to restore pets' MP, or get more from DP. I still would like to see pet's stats/abilities scale with spell damage or something gear-dependent though. The Soulwell looks awesome too, finally something to make Healthstones for a raid at a reasonable shard cost.

We'll have to wait and see just what exactly the Fel Guard's abilities are. It could have a large impact that we don't even know about yet. The only indication we have from the preview is that it's grouped with the Succubus in MD. It's not even listed in DS though, which is odd.

Affliction looks like it could be pretty insane for group PVP. I'm not sure about how exactly dispels work; are the debuffs on a "stack" which pops the top debuff off? If so, I expect Decursive to be updated to simply skip targets with Unstable Affliction on the top of the debuff stack. Unstable Affliction could be a "decursive shield" for the other magic DoTs, including Seed of Corruption which effectively would give you a 36 yd range AOE. Improved HoT looks awesome, too.

It remains to be seen whether Contagion's damage bonus is additive or multiplicative in relation to the Imp CoA/Corruption bonuses. Even if all of the damage bonuses become additive, you're still looking at a 1900 Corruption, 2200 CoA, and 1800 UA on a +500 SD geared lock with the new +100 SD armor buff. That's 5900 damage if they don't get dispelled - talk about lethal.

We don't yet know whether the duration increase for Lasting Afflictions is meant as a damage buff or as a counterbalance to the 30% dispel resist. If it's a damage increase, that'd boost the two instant cast spell Corruption/UA combo to 4950 damage! If the talent does not increase overall damage, I don't think it would be all that useful if UA is usable as a shield for other magic DoTs.

Of course, I have completely skipped Immolation. If the UA "decursive shield" does end up working, that would open up a new combo. Queue up an immolate, once it goes off an immediate Corruption is cast, leaving only 1.5 seconds for a safe dispel before UA comes in. So you're looking at over 4700 damage to an unsuspecting target if the dispellers are busy for only 1.5 seconds, or you're forcing the dispellers to take that 1575 damage hit and dispel anyway.

Who knows, perhaps UA's dispel damage gets increased by spell damage and SM. Talk about a hurtful dispel!
Overall, I'm pretty excited about the Warlock preview. The possibility of locks specializing in DoTs seems realistic. The Fel Guard is intriguing. There are some overall improvements, and the threat situation looks decent enough to me at this early stage. It may not have everything I want, but it's definitely something I'm excited about.

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.