When I look at my talent trees I see the stubbornness of blizz to change talents that are obviously bad. For instance Demonic Sacrifice. 99.9999999% of warlocks will tell you this talent is now dead. We don't want it and we don't need it. Yet it still there as a 21 point talent that I have yet to see in ANY build, whether for pvp or pve, affliction, demo, or destruction. Its useless. In fact I would argue that imp enslave demon is more useful than demonic sacrifice and any lock will tell you that is saying a lot.

Its not just DS but you have things like emp enslave demon and master conjurer. Both bad talents that no one will ever take for anything. I guess master conjurer is a minor dps increase but its in a tree that already has horrible dps. It would have to be a major dps increase to be worth it in pve. PvP both talents are useless.


So when the vast majority of a class' community says look blizzard these talents are bad they have been bad since release of vanilla wow can you please change them or make them useful why does blizzard chose to stubbornly refuse these requests?

For instance I have yet to find an explanation from blue why Fel Dom is still a 15 minute cooldown and a talent. Or why shadowburn still costs a shard? I guess these kinds of issues are not really that important to blizzard even though to the player base they are pretty important.

So why the stubborness. We don't want you to be our magic genni who gives us what ever we want but at the same time even if you disagree let us know why so we can at least sleep better at night.

And *I* came in here ready to read another debate involving Divine Spirit.

We should probably have that discussion again.

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Q u o t e:
I thought this topic was another on Divine Storm and I came in here ready to lock the thread. :)

When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).
Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that's vauge, and I'm reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we'll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them.

---

Go to bed =/ the forums will be here tomorrow, I commend your work ethic but I hope you're atleast working from a laptop at home.

also you'd be amazed at how much simply listing that list of things you've moved on to considering can improve the playerbases hope for the class. You don't have to answer every issue, simply acknowledging that they're there can sometimes be enough. I'm interested in what you end up coming up with for this second list.

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Q u o t e:
I thought this topic was another on Divine Storm and I came in here ready to lock the thread. :)

When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).
Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that's vauge, and I'm reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we'll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them.

---

Can you add these things to that list please

Pet Survivability
Shadowflame changed into more of a defensive tool
Pet Resistances in demo tree
Chaos Bolt being more than just a 10% more dmg Incinerate
Mana Reduction costs on our spells, because in PvP we hurt badly in the mana department since our PvP gear doesn't have the spirit for lifetap

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=12065151796&sid=1

my thread has a good amount of information about 80 arena from a top arena lock perspective

---

Q u o t e:
I thought this topic was another on Divine Storm and I came in here ready to lock the thread. :)

When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).
Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

---

With respect sir, where do you feel you've succeeded in any of these goals? Please clarify.

Where's my discussion about Divine Shield ?

---

Q u o t e:
I thought this topic was another on Divine Storm and I came in here ready to lock the thread. :)

When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).
Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that's vauge, and I'm reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we'll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them.

---

I'm pretty sure that if you added green fire, all warlock complaints would immediately cease.

---

Q u o t e:
I thought this topic was another on Divine Storm and I came in here ready to lock the thread. :)

When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).
Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that's vauge, and I'm reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we'll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them.

---

I love you and this post. I shall wait happily now that I have an answer.

---

Q u o t e:


With respect sir, where do you feel you've succeeded in any of these goals? Please clarify.

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You can wait now that you know you aren't being ignored. More interesting soul shards is going to difficult/impossible to pull off. Time to get a chair.

Lol, you stole my name again. But yeah, pet survivability should be on top of the list along with the survivability of locks.

---

Q u o t e:
Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that's vauge, and I'm reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we'll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them.

---

We've been looking for this for a long, long time. Thanks for finally posting it. Unfortunately, now that you've posted this, the community is to hold you to those words.

Mid-Demo is ugly too, btw.

[EDIT]: Here's hoping that you also meant to add pet survivability, at the very least. Deep Destruction, in particular FAB and Chaos Bolt could use a look from a PvP standpoint... though Chaos Bolt has been debated pretty strongly.

Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.

Thanks, though the tree still needs lots of work.

Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.

Didn't really work.. and now it's even harder.

Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).

Still imps in PvE, because Felhunter dies too easy, for affliction(And does absolutely horrible DPS). Same thing for destro, but they have imp talents. But Demonic sac feels really useless now.

Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.

Felguard's DPS and abilities are atrocious for it being the 41 pt talent. And thank you for the infernal and Doomguard buffs.(Doomguard is OP in raid boss fights. Cripple is crazy awesome damage reduction)

Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.

Thanks, though they could be so much better.

Get Demo back into the PvE game again.

Didn't work.

Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

WOOT!

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.

I hope so.

Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).

We still get massacred pretty easily by anyone decent.

Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.

OH GOD, PLEASE!

Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.

I would love this.

Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.

That sounds good.

Look at the dps spells that cost shards.

Please oh please oh please. Other classes having instants that don't require time-sink reagents doing more damage on shorter cooldowns etc. is REALLY ANNOYING.(Flame shock vs shadowburn, for example)

Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.

It's incredibly difficult, even for people who have been playing affliction a while. I've already mastered the rotation, but doing it while paying attention to everything around me is difficult. Raid leading while affliction is absurdly hard. It's like doing differential calculus while calculating the movement of all the bodies in our solar system.

Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

This would be very helpful.

I will be rerolling death knight when the game is out honestly the devs will not fix the warlock class untill 1 year + down the road.

edit: the devs wont fix the class they will put a series of gimmicks and false hope for the remaining warlocks.

sorry but the truth had to be said.

---

Q u o t e:
I thought this topic was another on Divine Storm and I came in here ready to lock the thread. :)

When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).
Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that's vauge, and I'm reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we'll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them.

---

This is the post I've been pouring over the forums for weeks to read. Thank you GC.

Can you please also look at backdraft and find a way to make it not affect spells at a 1.5 sec cast such as immolate so they don't get clipped by the gcd. Can you please fix fire and brimstone so it's not just completely horrible? Compare it to empowered corruption for example, a spell that doesn't get clipped by a talent right next to it (backdraft) and is 4x as powerful per point investment. And can you please allow molten core to proc off immolate ticks so there's SOME synergy with the fire tree and it procs just a bit more if I keep up a shadow dot or 2 as well.

Destro is hurting more from talents all being contradictory with other talents than for any other reason, please review the new talents in this tree.

Oh and btw, DS may not be useless, I can barely get my imp to do more than 10% of my dps in raids the way it is now, and if there's aoe it's not doing 10%. I may still end up saccing it ...

Thanks,

Arioch/Verement

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Q u o t e:

Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).

---

First, thanks for the list. It's definitely nice to see what direction the developers are working with regard to our class and their thought processes.

With regard to the bold part. I'm a straight up PVE person on my lock and I don't see how you want to get us to sac our pets as often as possible with Fel Domination at 15 minutes yet. From the talent builds I've been messing around with if I'm going anything deeper than 13 in demo(to get Demoic Aegis), it will be to just put enough in to get Unholy power for my imp. And that is only if it truly is worth the talent point investment for it. Now I wasn't lucky enough to get a beta invite so I have no idea what is going to happen at 80, but from past experience I really don't see why I would want to sac a pet on a boss fight, which would be the only place you would sac a pet in a raid setting now.

Looking at my WWS parses from BT post patch 3.0.2, my imp does anywhere from 11-13% of my damage on boss fights, so sacrificing him would be a dps loss. Again I have no idea what percent he will be doing at 80.

Could you please elaborate on that statement a little more maybe? I know it must relate to PVE, because in PVP we are so dependant on our pets for soul link for survivability that it would make no sense to sac them in PVP.

He meant that they do NOT want locks to sac their pets as often as possible, as was done pre-3.0. Now if only the pet were buffed a bit so that bothering to keep it alive is worth more than 1-2% dps, and that only for single target it'd be nice.

This is the Holy Grail of all warlock threads, much <3 to GhostCrawler... I'm only gonna touch on the things I know about considering I am deep Demonology and don't plan to change just because I'm stubborn.

Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).

You succeeded but in a limited way, unless you increase the benefit of each pet, or reduce the cooldown on Fel Domination I'm never gonna change my pet mid fight or use another pet then the one I use by default, making my utility rather sad when actually considered in that aspect, compare it to druids who can instantly change between different forms, plus they can heal on top of that. I don't mean to make an unfair comparison but it holds true in a small way.

Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.

Great job, my felguard being the highest DPS at 180 I use it in most PVE situations for DPS, also it is better than the voidwalker when soloing. I love using the doomguard and infernal now!

Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.

Thank you I do use them, they could be a bit better and I'm not specced into improved conjurer because it just feels a tad subpar compared to my other talents.

Get Demo back into the PvE game again.

I was in the PVE game before but now I have a 100 spellpower increase for the raid and also am an able offtank when needed.( which will likely change after the bug fix. ) I am in the PVE game.

Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Success!

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.

I don't know what our DPS is like at 80 but right now Demo DPS is lower than before, and much lower than other classes.

Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).

I have survivability in PVP, but only because I only use the voidwalker in PVP now... It keeps me alive long enough to cast my fears and dots. Also it can see stealth rather well when I use Consume Shadows.

Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.

That would be nice...

Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.

I look forward to seeing what you do with this.

Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.

I have my Voidwalker out when group tanking in PVE and when in PVP, but very much yes to bringing the Succubus back out, my favorite demon and I never use her.

Look at the dps spells that cost shards.

Interesting, perhaps an increase in damage or reduction in mana in exchange for the shard cost?

Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

Interesting...

I haven't seen anything addressing this, so I might as well ask you here. What are your plans to address the 40 debuff limit impacting affliction locks? My guild has 4 raiding locks, and currently we are farming BT. Three of the locks were affliction and we noticed when the third one joined the raid all of the locks' dps went down.

On the next boss I had the "Demon" mod running and saw that we were capped at the 40 debuff limit. So I went and respeced to demo. The next boss we were sitting around 36-38 debuffs and the locks dps went back up. Seemed like our dots were being knocked off early.

My problem is I would perfer to play as affliction, I don't like the thought of sitting out, or playing a spec I don't want because of a game mechanic limitation. Do you have any ideas how this will be addressed?