Cataclysm Warlock preview - line by line

Wherein a formerly Affliction, now Demonology warlock goes over the warlock preview and is underwhelmed.

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.

Instant DD: This is great. An instant UA/Immo-refreshing DD spell is 100% win, provided it lasts past beta arena testing. Mixing up the SB spam will be good.
Green fire: Shadowfire gets to be green? Or all flame? My money's on just this one spell. Cosmetics matter, Blizzard, you know that. Make all warlock fire spells green, and be done with it. This is not a difficult change to make for the art department. Seriously.

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.

Focus Magic: this adds warlocks into the FM rotation. I'm going to bet that FM will now stack up to 3 times as well. Not a very exciting spell, but good bread-and-butter.

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.

Demonic Sacrifice makes a comeback without the sacrifice. There's too little detail here to really analyze this. I hope the art is awesome. I want to shudder when I fuse with my felpuppy.

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.

Added later: 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).

Shard regeneration will return. 15 minute encounters with a core mechanic locked out after 3 button-presses is not going to scale to end-game raiding when warlocks go up against other pure damage classes for DPS spots. Apart from that, I welcome the return of 32 bag spaces.

Sadly, I think this direction is ultimately doomed, because it falls into the PvP vs. PvE trap: Either the Soul Burn effects are worthless in PvE or they're overpowered in PvP, and never the twain shall meet. Shit, instant Soul Fire is already close to overpowered.

Let's see the Soul Burn examples:

Summon Demon + Soul Burn = summon the demon instantly.

Good for PvE combat where the pet gets killed for some stupid reason, and for PvP, too. The trick is going to be smushing critters to get the instant summon out of combat.

Drain Life + Soul Burn = Reduces cast speed by 60%.

Cast speed? What? On a channel? I guess that makes it Slurp Life, but who fucking cares. If you're having to drain life in a raid encounter, your healers are failing (see last night's shitty raid). Worthless

Demonic Circle + Soul Burn = Increases movement speed by 50% for 8 seconds after teleporting.

Yawn. OK. Whatever. Worthless.

Unstable Affliction + Soul Burn = Instantly deals damage equal to 30% of its effect.

30% buff on one dot. Big fucking whoop.

Soul Fire + Soul Burn = Instant cast.

This is nice. But over the course of a 5 or 15 minute raid encounter, so what?

Healthstone + Soul Burn = Increases total health by 20% for 8 seconds.

Whatever. Worthless.

Searing Pain + Soul Burn = Increases the crit chance of Searing Pain by 100%, and subsequent Searing Pain spells by 50% for 6 seconds.

Who fucking uses this spell? We don't even ranged tank any more. Worthless.

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.

The haste change is good. At high haste right now, it's possible to have Corruption fall off in the Affliction rotation, even with all the Everlasting effects. Removing clipping lobotomizes Affliction. Maybe there will be some complexity added later, but without it, the heart and stolen soul of Affliction is dead.

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.

All positive. It will be worth throwing CotE up, regardless, as a persistent back-up for Earth and Moon and Ebon Plague. The other curses are worthless, though, unless they start to apply to raid bosses, which will never happen. The days of putting Curse of Tongues on unruly caster trash are long over, never to return.

Hellfire will no longer deal damage to the warlock.

Added later: 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.

This does the wrong thing, IMO. We don't avoid Hellfire because it hurts us too much (that's what healers and Fel Armor are for); we avoid it because its mana-to-damage ratio is much worse than Rain of Fire and Seed of Corruption just wins right now. I would take a wholly different tack: make it burn the warlock some, the warlock's pet a lot, remove the AoE capping, and do a ton of damage. Make it a new heal/damage mechanic for trash: can you keep your demonologist alive long enough for the huge trash to die before he does?

Imps will lose Fire Shield, but will gain a new ability, Burning Ember, which is a stacking DoT.

OK. Fine. Mostly-worthless spell replaced by a damage spell. Does the felhunter still get devour magic?

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.

Added later: Whiplash works similar to Freeze on the mage’s Water Elemental. It requires a targeting reticule. It isn’t just a melee ability that the succubus uses at-will.

As a clarification, we are removing Soothing Kiss, not Seduction. Soothing Kiss increased the chance the target would attack something else. Seduction is the crowd control more commonly associated with the Succubus, and it’s not going anywhere. ;)

Yeah, nobody cares. Maybe in PvP. Whatever. The direction of "removing worthless shit" is good, though, because Soothing Kiss was worth even less than Fire shield.

Voidwalker Torment will do increased damage and generate a lot of area-of-effect (AoE) threat. Suffering will become a single-target taunt.

Levelling. Whatever.

New Talents and Talent Changes

Pandemic will now cause Drain Soul to refresh Unstable Affliction and Bane of Agony on targets below 25% health.

Affliction: now comes in retard, too. One of the things I absolutely fucking loved about raiding Affliction was that it was hard to do it well. It took a lot of concentration to juggle a mobile fight with spike damage and positioning priorities while juggling DoTs and rolling crit on Corruption. The below-25% Drain Soul tick management was harder, still, and that's where Affliction's biggest numbers came from.

This direction is into the short bus, and I do not like it.

The ability Fel Domination will be removed (because Soul Burn accomplishes the same effect).

Makes sense. Giving that capability to all warlocks in raid combat is a good thing. We're often fucked without a pet.

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.

Good. Name's a bit lame, but filler nukes that match the different trees are necessary.

We plan to add a new talent, Impending Doom, which will give certain spells a chance to reduce the cooldown on Metamorphosis and Curse of Doom.

Dear Warlock developers. Please go talk to the guys who are fixing Eclipse, and make sure you don't make the same mistake with Impending Doom (which sounds neat, at least), as they did. Reducing the cooldown on CoD is pretty worthless, though—it's the 60s duration that needs a reduction.

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.

This is the biggest missed opportunity ever. Just make Metamorphosis a permanent change to the warlock. You are now, always, metamorphosed in combat. Same code as worgen. Balance the new tree-specific nukes and mastery around the purple pantsuit. While your at it, take the effect that happens when a priest levitates Lollidan, and apply that to be the Demonology-tree's flight form.

Shadowburn will now do additional damage to targets below 25% health.

Presumably no longer using a soul shard? Putting it in a rotation? There's so little context to this change it seems worthless. I'm guessing it's all about the PvP

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.

Nothing surprising here.

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.

I know this will change over the next few months, but I have to say that I'm disappointed. I'd also say that there's one thing they could do to make 99% of the tweakable mechanical changes entirely palatable: demonic flight form. Fuck it, go for three of them: Affliction—an eyeball demon grabs you in its tentacles and carries you around; Demonology—Lollidan's wings work; Destruction—you turn into the Infernal ball.

Added later:

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.

We did mean to cover doomguards and infernals, but they didn't make it into our preview. Our plan is that you can summon a doomguard or infernal as a cooldown-based pet, much like the shaman elementals, without having to give up your current, permanent demon. If we add a new demon it will likely be one of these cooldown-based ones, and not a permanent pet like the imp, voidwalker, succubus, felguard or felhunter. We’re just not convinced there is a niche for a new permanent demon (and perhaps not even a temporary one).

This makes sense. 2/5 pets are inevitably unused at end-game. I would still like to call up an eyeball demon that shot lazer beemz.

Flying mounts and female Metamorphosis forms are great ideas and something we’ve had on the wish list for a long time. We can only create so many new creatures during a single expansion, and getting one of these might mean fewer new creatures in outdoor worlds or dungeons. It’s just a trade-off and sometimes you have to make hard calls. We’ll keep them on the list though.

Honestly, I don't buy it. Lollidan already flies when levitated. The wings don't flap when he moves... but I don't buy that it's a comparable level of art development.

We do like the idea of allowing warlocks to re-skin their demons and have been talking about possible ways to implement this. I have no concrete information for you at this time beyond that.

Let druids re-skin boomkin and trees first, IMO. Then again, how hard can it be to switch the texture?

When it comes to naming demons, this has always been one of those sacred cows, where the hunter gets to name their pet because he loves his pet bear, but the warlock considers the demon to be something disposable -- a tool.

Yup. This warlock agrees.

The Demon Bolt debuff will only affect the warlock's demon, not other demons. We wanted a Demo-themed nuke that made it feel like the pet was part of the damage.

Good.

For Soul Shard bags, we will probably do something like remove all the shards, reduce the bag size (a little) and convert it to a normal bag. This would be a one-time conversion. We'll probably get rid of the recipes, as we wouldn't want other classes to go out and get shard bags just to get a free bag.

Don't care. Bags are cheap.