Mage And Warlock Armors No Longer Dispellable

Some new changes were added to the patch 2.4.3 PTR notes. Among them are the entries below concerning warlocks and mages.

Mage

* Frost Armor, Ice Armor, Mage Armor, and Molten Armor are no longer Magic effects and cannot be dispelled.

Warlock

* Demon Skin, Demon Armor, and Fel Armor are no longer Magic effects and cannot be dispelled.

This change is obviously a PvP one and is probably not much of a big deal. It seems strange that these armors can no longer be dispelled since the effects they give are indeed magical. In this sense, there's not much difference that these armors have with the Inner Fire ability that priests have and yet only the mage and warlock armors have this benefit. Not all armors are mere armor giving effects either since fel armor actually gives the warlock +spell damage and this is something that an opponent would probably want to get rid of.

Perhaps this change is in line with the shaman totem change that was announced some time back wherein the act of dropping totems is in the physical school so even if the shaman is spell locked he can still cast totems. I never really thought of being able to dispel these armors as imbalanced but I'm not really complaining.

As always, the latest PTR patch notes can be found here.

New Changes Making Soul Shard Management Easier

Ever since the announcement that ammunition will no longer be consumed and that hunters will gaining their quiver/ammo pouch haste bonus through other means, freeing up a slot for another bag, warlocks have been wishing that they might get a similar treatment. They are indeed getting some help with their soul shards but it's not in the form of removing the shards altogether or going to free up a bag slot either. Soul shard farming isn't a thing of the past but it's going to get a whole lot easier and faster.

Soul shards are getting easier to get and easier to manage with the following changes in patch 3.1:

* Drain Soul: Each time Drain Soul deals damage to a target which can grant experience, it now has a chance to generate a Soul Shard.

* Soul Shard: This item now has a maximum count of 32 in inventory.

The first change all fun, making it possible to get shards while wiping on boss fights and much easier to get shards in trash fights. It seems though like the second one isn't great at all, especially if you're used to running around with more shards than that. Ghostcrawler has an explanation and it's all part of making shard management easier.

Drain Soul will produce enough shards that you should never be without them. Even if you are learning a boss through repeated wiping, you should be able to get the new shards you need each attempt.

In fact, it produces so many shards that we figured you'd end up having to delete them constantly, which would be annoying. The 32 limit will fill up your largest bag (which only holds shards anyway) without spilling over into the rest of your inventory. We figured very few locks carried around a lot more shards than that, and like I said, they are easy enough to replace now for those of you who do manage to go through them quickly. source

So basically warlocks will be getting shards out of their ears so it's just best that they put a cap to it. they figure it's more convenient to just grab the shards you need rather than having to get rid of the ones that could fill up all your bags. It's a sound reasoning especially if your factor the minor glyph, glyph of drain soul which has a chance of giving you an extra shard! What I'm wondering though is that with this change, locks will have to cast drain soul even boss fights if you're running low on shards so how will this practice affect their rotation? It might not be much of a big deal but it's something that has to be asked.

Warlocks To Get A "Blink" Spell In The Future?

The Wrath of the Lich King expansion is still a long way from coming out (no announcement yet) but the warlock class has gotten a sneak peak at what the devs might have in store for them when it does come out. Kalgan (Lead designer Tom Chilton) leaked out to the warlock forums an idea for a spell that gives warlocks a sort of "blink" ability.

We definitely feel the need for warlocks to gain some sort of active defense so we don't have to try to balance them around the assumption that they're "tanking" melee classes. For example, an idea we're running with internally is the concept of a warlock being able to cast a spell that places a circle of demonic power on the ground. The warlock would be able to teleport to this location from within a relatively short range (ie: 40 yards), and would also be able to summon demons more quickly if they're standing within the circle.

Note: this idea is intended as a sneak peek, it's not something that we're planning for 2.4, it would be more likely as an expansion ability, and may change entirely before said time. source

Having played both a mage and a warlock (my warlock is 47), my observation has always been that warlocks don't have that many escape mechanisms. As a mage, abilities like mana shield, blink, polymorph and even the frost talent ice barrier can help escape a bad situation. Ice block will do the trick too if you're in a group. As a warlock, you only have fear, death coil and sacrifice. Fear isn't always reliable and death coil is on a 2 minute cool down while sacrifice only works if you have your voidwalker out.

At the risk of getting flamed and getting told that warlocks are overpowered and that this shouldn't happen, I actually have to say that this "blink" spell is actually a great idea for the future. I'm thinking a spell like this would have a cool down of at least 1 minute although I'm guessing it would be more like 2 or 3. Of course, if this happens I'd really wish mages got something equally as cool!

update: Kalgan assures mages that they'll get something cool in the expansion too.

Mages will get new abilities in the expansion too, believe it or not. In fact, we intend to tone down how strong of a counter warlocks are to mages through the wotlk spells/talents. source

New (?) Drain Animations

OMG New Drain Animations! Or is it actually old? I don't really know...

This is something I just noticed earlier when I was playing my warlock. It's possible I never noticed it until today because I haven't really been playing my warlock much. For some of you, this might not really be very new since I've seen videos of this as early as September from the beta and I've also read that it might have been implemented when Patch 3.02 came out. As for me, I never noticed it until today and I'm very fascinated by it since it looks awesome!

Instead of looking like a colored lasso connecting drainer to drainee, it actually looks like something could be getting drained there! The new twisting animation makes it look more classy and believable Drain Soul, Drain Mana, Drain Life or Health Funnel share this cool new animation with the appropriate color of course. Pardon me for being excited about this just now.

Below is a video of the animations in action.

New Ritual Of Summoning To Make Life Easier For Warlocks

In an effort to help warlocks in their soul shard usage, one of the changes coming in the next patch has something to do with their Ritual of Summoning spell. In the pre-TBC days warlocks had to stockpile loads of soul shards to summon every member of the 40 man raids twho were not present. While the move to a smaller 25 man raid was a lot of help, what really made it easier for warlocks is shift to using meeting stones to summon people. This way any two members of the group could summon the whole party.

The new change coming to the Ritual of Summoning is in effect something from the pages of the Mage Ritual of Refreshment spell or the Warlock Ritual of Souls spell where a tangible object is summoned for the rest of the group to benefit. In the case of Ritual of Summoning, the warlock creates an object that acts like a meeting stone. For one shard, the warlock can summon the whole raid from anywhere where summoning is allowed. In fact, since it acts like a meeting stone the warlock doesn't even need to be there. H e just creates the object and can leave the summoning to the rest of the group present.

Just like Ritual of Refreshment frees the mage from having to do the hard work of conjuring so much water and trading it to the party, this new change to Ritual of Summoning frees the warlock from having to do so much clicking to summon people.

Locks Say RIP To Demonic Sacrifice

the PTR patch notes for patch 3.1 listed in MMO Champion features a lot of changes for locks in all their talent trees. There are some cool changes and a lot nerfs in other areas. But right now I want to talk about the demonology talent Demonic Sacrifice because when the patch rolls in, we won't see it anymore.

According to the patch notes, Demonic Sacrifice will be removed from the game. Obviously the patch notes are incomplete since we still don't know what's replacing it, even if some new talents have been revealed. This is sort of the same fate of the paladin talent Blessing of Kings (which will be made trainable in the patch) and still no announcement of what will take its place.

The removal of Demonic Sacrifice from the game is a bit of a toss-up for me. On one hand, a lot of Demo warlocks didn't take the talent anymore since it seemed like having your demon up is nice even in dungeons because of the buffs from Master Demonologist and Demonic Empowerment. Keeping your pet up has been made easier by the new Fel Synergey talent which was moved to the first tier and has a 100% at max rank to heal your demon by 30% of damage you deal. It doesn't help the cause that Destruction warlcoks like having their imp out because of the increased crit chance given by Empowered Imp.

On the other hand, Demonic Sacrifice was introduced to the game to allow warlocks put their demons to good use when they're better off gone than there. As I stated above, perhaps this thinking is obsolete but there could be instances when it could still be useful. The most obvious one I could think of is the Heigan dance in Naxx where a pet could be at high risk of dying and thus be off no use to the raid, so a sacrificed demon would probably be better. Perhaps the Sapphiron fight is also another instance where it's better to have a sacced pet because of the air phases where you need to get behind an iceblock or die.

Well no matter what you think about the talent, it's no question that it was a cool concept while it lasted and I hope that it's replacement will be something just as cool and hopefully something that could be an integral part of a demo build and others like destruction as well.

Warlock Metamorphosis Video

Ever since Blizzard announced that Warlocks will be able to turn themselves into a demon, I've always wondered how that would work out and what it would look like. This video gives a nice idea of both. In my opinion, the demon form looks pretty imposing but still I feel like it could use a bit more work on the scary look. It would probably be awesome to see a gnome warlock go from a small little thing to that huge demon a kick some ass. That leap ability definitely looks pretty imposing!

The one thing about this video though is that it gave me the impression that you could use the ability often but the reality is it's on a 5 minute cool down and it only lasts for 45 seconds. For a 51 point talent that's not very impressive. In fact, as I look at the Demonology tree as it is now, there doesn't seem to be any synergy between this skill and the rest of the tree. That's not good for the talent at the very bottom of the tree.

Affliction Locks Can Crit (Sorta)

The warlock community got excited ever since the announcement came out that affliction warlocks would get a similar treatment to the change shadow priests got that allowed mind flay to crit. I was a bit skeptical about allowing warlock DoT's to crit because warlocks do so much damage already and they're well off with their non-critting DoT's. But the announceent was made that said a new affliction talent would be implemented and the keywords would be "Dot's" and "Crit". There was a lot of speculation exactly how this would be implemented and the affliction warlock inside of me (currently level 56) was hoping that at least the basic DoT's would get even a small chance fixed to crit. To some extent, that's what eventually happened.

The new talent is called Pandemic and it's on the same tier as Unstable Affliction and also has UA as a prerequisite. basically what it does is that every time your Corruption and Unstable Affliction spells damage a target, it has a chance equal to your crit chance to deal 33%/66%/100% more damage. At max rank, every time this procs means it's like actually critting. It's one of those talents that's nice to have and definitely has that coolness factor too see it go off especially since Corruption and UA are two of the hardest hitting DoT's around. But it also is a poor reason to start stacking as much crit as say mages, in my opinion. Spell hit is still king for PvE affliction warlocks and Pandemic is just like an icing on the cake. I shudder to see this talent in action for PvP when UA gets dispelled. Whammo!

Why The New Metamorphosis Design Ideas Make More Sense

As a warlock, the idea idea of turning yourself into a demon and gaining demonic powers just like your trusty minions seems like a dream come true. Unfortunately, the whole ability was not at all worth getting since it was too underwhelming for a very bottom of the tree talent. The nice thing about seeing talents like that in their beta stage is the fact that they are in no way final. Blizzard poster Ghostcrawler released some great ideas about Metamorphosis the design team are thinking about that would definitely lift the ability up to a status worthy of a real 51 point talent.

While this is not final and could absolutely change, here is what we're thinking about for the new design:

You keep your pet.

You keep your spells.

It buffs spell damage (for that "blow your cooldowns" feel).

It buffs mitigation (you could even tank for a bit).

It provides the current snare reduction for PvP.

You'll still get a few fun demon abilities, but you can just use your normal spells if you'd rather.

The most important thing about these changes for me is that you get to keep your pet. The whole Demonology tree is about you and your pet giving each other benefits. Aside from the occasional times when you use Demonic Sacrifice, Demonology is all about keeping your pet with you and the talents are all about exactly that. So the current design of metamorphosis doesn't make sense at all since the whole duration you're morphed all your other talents are worthless since your pet is not there.

The other problem I had with the very first version of the talent was that the cooldown was 5 mins. For a then underwhelming talent that was too long long especially for something that lasts just 45 seconds. The current 3 mins is much more sensible.

Being able to have your pet with you while having all your regular spells at your disposal and having increased spell damage, increased mitigation and snare reduction while morphed - that's what I'm talking about when it comes to a 51 point talent and i didn't even mention that you still get to have cool demon abilities. Now it feels like it's a celebration of what the Demonology tree is all about. I really hope these changes make it to live and I know a lot of warlocks who would be happy to see them too.