Will Deep Demonology ever receive something that doesn't primarily boost a hybrid spec? I like running as a Demonology warlock in raids - but the primary point of it is simply to provide buffs for the other caster classes at this point (Improved Shadowbolt and Demonic Pact).

Decimation and Molten Core were added, but Decimation is used by demo/destro hybrid builds as an execute and Molten Core is lackluster at best for a warlock using improved shadowbolt. Demonic Pact still provides no selfish bonus to the warlock (and is a personal DPS loss given that skipping DP provides better personal results).

Once again, demonology locks have fallen to the bottom of the heap and haven't received anything unique or fun (other than Meta, which is a nice boost, but essentially just a trinket). Why must demonology languish at the back of the line in order to bring two buffs that other classes can provide as well (albeit in a slightly more cumbersome fashion).

- Give Demonic Pact some personal utility.

- A new demon is needed at this point as well, particularly for those who go to end of the demonology tree.

- Curse of Elements is an outdated mechanic. There was a long thread where warlocks detailed all the spells they never used (and it was a very long list). Curses are still worthless and unusable, save for the damage dealing ones. Death Knights and Moonkins can apply a 13% spell damage buff for free.

- Improve pets. The voidwalker was nerfed into oblivion because of one particular boss-fight and will never see the light of day in PvE again unless he gets some attention.

- Better threat drop with a lower cooldown.

- Please stop balancing specs with major glyphs. I certain set of glyphs should not be required to make builds and certain spells viable.

- Shards still take up bagspace. The fancy new equipment manager is not nearly as useful when I don't have any space to carry more than one set of gear.

- Everything (save two DoT's) has a cast-time, making PvP and movement based fights painful. Give us at least one instant cast spell that is not a DoT (and hopefully doesn't burn a reagent).

- Do something about stuns, especially in light of gimping fear. I only participate in PvE really, because every time I consider getting into PvP I a met with a stun/interrupt fest that scares me away once again.

ok so yeah maybe im undergeard and need to level but in pvp can i get a fear that works


immune

resist

resist

when are the (good) questions on this thread going to be answered?

Why did you buff the health gain for Death Coil when a lower cooldown would have been more appropriate?

Is the Lifetap glyph functioning as you intended? I don't enjoy tapping every 20 seconds whether I need it or not.

Are there plans to make demon summoning in PVP less of a choice during the match? Example: I summon my felhunter but fight a double dps melee team, now I have to waste a shard to get out the voidwalker.

Besides the podcasts, are there any other ways I could find out more about game programming and the math behind it? Um.. warlock question... because... my succubus wants to know. Yeah, that's it.

1) It was mentioned about a year ago that you want to put spell penn on pets, but could not do due technical difficulties. Has any progress been made on this in the past year? Do you foresee pets getting spell penn any time soon?

Assuming you can't put spell penn on pets, would it be possible to make spell lock unresistable ala Chaos Bolt? I and most other warlocks who arena seriously run with enough spell penn to negate mage armor + talents. It is very frustrating to constantly get resists, especially against Mage/Rogue where it usually ends up costing me the game.

2) What is your opinion on the current survivability of pets in PVP (too little/just right/too high)? If it isn't at a good place, what steps are you thinking of taking to fix it?

3) Same question as above, but for Warlocks.

4) Warriors currently counter warlocks very, very hard in arena. In 2v2 a warrior will have close to 95% uptime on me while doing almost double my damage and having the mortal strike debuff on me. Not to mention I am 70% snared so I can't realistically chase the warrior's partner (typically healer) around. Is there going to be anything done to address this?

5) What are the developers' view on counters in arena? Right now warlocks are heavily countered by Ret paladins (almost instant pet killing and huge burst), rogues (huge burst + tons of CC, but ironically one of the most manageable melee), warriors (mentioned above), and DKs (huge burst means very fast pet kills). I believe that these counters are too strong (ie: counter us too much), similar to how warlocks countered mages too hard in TBC (imo). Is anything being done about these class dynamics?

6) With the nerf to fear affliction cannot CC effectively with fear AND apply pressure to both targets. If an affiction warlock does not apply pressure to both targets, however, he greatly falls behind in damage. Would it be possible to make fear break instantly on non-Warlock damage (similar to the DK AOE iceblock ability) and return the damage cap to 20%? If not, could affliction warlocks get some more burst?

* Mainly I want to know what sort of general changes you have planned to fix the abyssmal pvp situation vs. melee.

* I know you guys refuse to give specifics because then if you change your mind, the forums are flooded with qq threads and gg blizz etc, but at least give us some general idea of what sort of buffs you guys are planning to fix us in pvp, if anything, other than a potential nerfing of pallys HoF.

* Nerfing pallys is long overdue, but it doesnt really address our lack of escape mechanisms versus all the other stuns, intercepts, fear immunities, etc. or the lack of pet survivability, or how quickly we die to melee even with tons of resilience, demon armor, soul link, etc.

edit: Yay for bullets, lol.

are warlocks supposed to tank in pvp? (demon armor, molten skin, glyphed soul link) if so why is it so hard to do anythign when focused? vw sac

or are we supposed to be slippery like mages? teleport, shadowfury, shadowflame glyphed, conflag snare

it seems to contradict what we should do

is there a reason pets dont scale with ALL the master's stats? like hard to code in or something?

pets NEED spell hit/haste/resil

• Has there been any progress toward improvements in demon/pet pathing that would allow them to follow us down the long drops that are part of some boss fights (e.g., Thorim and Gluth)?
  
  We lose all party/raid buffs to our demons when we have to resummon them because they won't follow us down, in addition to the fight time we lose (depends on our spec and whether we need to move during summoning).



• Could you comment on the current demon summoning system and how that might be a more active and fun feature of the Warlock class? Currently, we seem to be a class geared around our pets, but have the least flexibility in bringing out the right one to match the situation.

Thanks,

Also, where is the A in this "Q&A" thread?

@Eyonix, should we avoid repeating questions that have already been asked, or are you looking for a consensus among us in terms of which questions are most common, in order to select which will be answered?

In no particular order: (All PVE Questions.)

• Is it intended that warlock threat is so high compared to our DPS? It's common for all 3 of our warlocks to be barely beneath our tanks on threat and yet not all of us are even in the top 5 on damage.



• All warlocks rely on the same core blend of Affliction and Destruction spells to deal damage. This significantly diminishes the benefit we get from taking threat reduction and range increase talents in our chosen trees. Are any changes likely to be made?



• The manareturn from Imp. Drain Soul is extremely negligible in a world with 5k lifetaps. Any chance of reworking this, even if you don't rework the threat talents?



• Drain Soul execute is very powerful, but was really the most complicated part of our Affliction rotation even before the simplification in 3.1. Because it's a 15 second effect, we need to constantly break it to reapply dots, haunt, to move, to dodge interrupts (a la ignis), but there's no mechanism in game for tracking when the next tick is going to occur. So we rely on addons to ensure that we break it at the most optimal time (immediately after a tick) instead of just before one. Any chance the imp drain soul talent could reduce both damage-per-tick and time-between ticks, to reduce this clipping?



• Is there any possibility of a repeatable quest chain to rename a specific minion of our choosing?



• Any chance of a glimpse behind the curtain at the upcoming shard changes?



• Any chance affliction could get a talent to apply a CoE effect on top of CoA, or even to remove the 1 curse per target limitation entirely? These would make suitable replacements for Amplify Curse, though are perhaps too powerful for so low in the tree, and would restore some potential (optional) complexity to the affliction tree.



• With exceptional execute talents/abilities in both the affliction and demonology trees, I find that destruction falls behind significantly on longer fights. Is this a potential concern?



• Any potential changes to Chaos Bolt such that it doesn't feel like a slightly harder hitting incinerate on a cooldown? My vote? Refreshes corruption on your target, detonates CoD, or bring back Chaotic Mind.



• Could Demonic Empowerment (Felguard) be re-examined and perhaps boosted for PVE DPS purposes? As a DPS talent it falls behind placing an additional point in Molten Core, which is to say that it's rather low. I believe it's worth roughly an extra three white attacks per minute.



• Aside from one really cool but still of very limited use glyph (kilrogg), our minor glyphs are really pretty bad. Any chance of tweaks?



• Glyph of Green Fire?



• Any chance of baseline pet crit and haste scaling?



• CoDoom does not, and has never benefited from Shadow Mastery, Haunt, or Shadow Embrace. It was formerly affected by Shadow Weaving, Misery, CoS (now CoE) and ISB, and is now affected by any of the 13% spell damage buffs. This means that on non-gimmick fights, CoD hits for barely more than it did at 70. Is it intended that CoD does not benefit from shadow damage talents and shadow periodic damage increasing effects? If so, why?



• Any chance of reworked or additional threat dumps?



• Original design intent on Demonic Circle included some secondary buff to the warlock if he stood in it. Maybe it could reduce our total threat by 1% per second we stood in it? Or reduce our threat dealt by an additional 10%?

Are there any plans to give Affliction an optional burst element, which would not otherwise impact the overall damage capabilities of the spec? Basically something allowing us the option of front-loading some damage instead of being the slowest spec/class to ramp up damage on time sensitive fights.

Any plans on making Minor Glyphs actually worth selecting?

Will there be any attempt to balance the relative usefulness of our pets in relation to how useful they're supposed to be for us? Our "tank" pet has been consistently singled out for being used to tank some encounters in exceedingly slim situations, and aside from those specific situations, is largely useless beyond a very minimal damage output. It's great that the Succubus is making a small come-back, but are there any plans on making her Soothing Kiss a viable PVE or PVP option?

Any possibility we won't be balanced around a pet that's on an excessively long cooldown? Either make it compelling to use and viable in any given situation (e.g., no cooldown, actual pet type), or opt it out of the balance equation.

Is there any plans to improve Soul Shatter or passive threat reduction? While, I think its good for each class to be unique, of the classes with threat reducers, we have the longest cooldown. It'd be nice to see a reduced cool down, even 3 minutes could mean a lot. An increase of passive threat reduction from 10% to 30% would amazing, especially when running with newer tanks. Or are you happy with current Warlock threat (in which case. I'll just keep throttling back my DPS as needed)?

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Q u o t e:


yay for bullets! :D

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i thought you guys were removing consumable ammunition from the game!

along with "the cool idea with soul shards" ghostcrawler mentioned early in 3.1 will we see that implemented in wrath or will we have to wait for a further expansion?

1. What is being done about the SERVERLY hard counter of rouges over locks ?

Suggestions:

A. Can we get Demonic Teleport to be usable while stunned ?

B. A Self Banish for 5 secs that is usable while stunned ?


That is my biggest question, thanks for reading.

PvP Issues only....

Is there any serious thought to changing the casting mechanic (possibly arena only) to allow for easier toe-to-toe combat? (interupt/pushback mechanics, facing requirements, etc.)

Since the gap closers have well out-paced the escape mechanisms, what tools/utility do you plan on giving locks to improve effectiveness? Any thought to the following: an MS effect, some sort of melee range dmg/debuffing aura, short range instant cast spells with CD's, etc.

How will you address the "viable tactic" of GCDing our pets? Will they receive more of our stats and, in general, significantly higher survivability?

Will the outdated shard requirement on Shadowburn ever be re-evaluated?

Any chance of a pvp skill of the felgaurd to make demo less useless without seduce/dispel/spelllock? Pummel/Cripple/Stun?

Will the FelDom 15 MIN CD be brought down to a reasonable number? Compare to DKs for instance.

Will the 2min CD Death Coil ever be re-evaluated? It's a 3 sec "stun" on a 2min CD. Hunter and DK Pets have better spammable CC than this. 30 sec CD? 1min CD / 5sec duration? Improvable through talents or glyph somewhere? etc

I know better then to PvP with my lock, but i do PvE, and the biggest problem I have is threat, what i think would be nice, something like a pet sac (because that all we have) for a threat dump, or just give us 30% threat reduction like every other dps class