The past two weeks saw Blizzard announcing the class change previews to be expected for Cataclysm, of course being a dedicated lock – I read and studied the warlock changes proposed as well as several analysis pieces about them.
All in all the changes seem to me to be a major positive, but some things are still lacking and we can but hope that there will be some things coming to address them which are simply not announced yet.
Bane Spells:
The first change that I really loved was the new bane/curse separation. Essentially it means that Curse-of-Doom and Curse-of-Agony will be changed to Bane-of-Doom and Bane-of-Agony. The difference is more than a namechange, bane’s are spells, not curses and unlike curses are not limited to one-per-target. Currently CoD is the least used warlock spell even though it does by far the most damage. The reason being that CoD does no damage at all for a full minute, which ruins your DPS – even in heroic dungeons almost no bosses survive long enough for you to see any benefit so you’ll basically only ever use it when you desperately want a doomguard and in practice – that is only done if while leveling you are solo’ing and doing a quest where you really need a powerful personal tank. The exception case is raids with at least three warlocks in them. In those cases locks will generally agree to split their curses on the bosses, so one would cast Curse-of-Agony, one Curse-of-Elements and one Curse-of-Doom. Where locks by themselves will always cast CoA because it’s the only curse that does notable damage the whole time (it’s really more of a Damage-over-Time than a curse anyway) and thus doesn’t ruin your DPS score. In these raid scenario’s however the locks are essentially agreeing to combine themselves for maximum overall raid benefit rather than personal scores. Only the CoA lock will do continuous with his curse but the CoE lock is reducing the boss’s magic resistance which boosts all the casters in the raid’s ability to do damage and the CoD is providing big damage blasts once every minute.
With the new split this changes radically, a single lock can now do all this by himself. Casting Bane-of-Agony to provide constant damage, Curse-of-Elements to reduce boss resistance and Bane-of-Doom for those big booms.
Another effect of this is to greatly increase our DoT count. In vanilla WoW locks had a multitude of DoT’s which made them hard to play but powerful if done right. A series of nerfs have since reduced us to where even affliction locks (players that SPECIALIZE in this) had less DoT’s than shadow priests and thus consistently placed at the bottom of the DPS score (though their other utility more than made up for it). With these Cata changes, BoD and BoA effectively become two additional spells in an affliction lock’s arsenal that operate like damage-over-time and once more puts us in our rightful place as the masters of slowly torturing our enemies to death.
Soul Shards:
Soul Shards have been fundamental to the Warlock class from the start but in actual play have never really been more than a hassle. The idea is wonderfully in line with what locks are all about: stealing pieces of somebody’s soul and using them to power our diabolical schemes.
The practice was a resource you had to farm, that wasted valuable bag space and always ran out just when you most needed it.
The overhaul announcements are huge though. Shards will cease to be an inventory item and instead become a UI feature, hooked into a single spell called Soul Burn which will then empower the next spell (at least for some spells) in some good way – and you only get three that don’t replenish in combat.
The obvious point everyone pointed out was that this would greatly benefit locks in short fights and count against us in longer ones. It does sound like the devs are addressing that at least. On the positive side, we finally know what will become of the shard bags we needed as a survival resource until now- they become normal bags. Sounds fair to me.
I like some of the powerups already proposed but I really hope to see one that can truly benefit affliction on the kind of scale that some of the others are for demo and destro. Being able to instant cast 5 shadow-bolts would be awesome.
If soul shard usage is meant to be a special moment, carefully planned- that’s the kind of thing we afflocks would need from it.
Defense in PvP
Warlocks have always been known as having great resilience, we had to – since our killing spells are slow. Especially affliction locks had to live long enough to cast them and have them take effect. This is sadly less true now. In recent times our stamina got nerfed badly, and it’s looking like an even greater nerf coming in Cata as it’s announced that all classes will have identical health. Already locks are the first target in PvP. Other classes know that if you see a lock, you kill him right away, because he dies easy but if you let him live long enough to die cast takes you with him.
Our only real defensive move is the demonic circle which can be a lifesaver at times, for example in Arena but is really wasted in battlegrounds… just getting away doesn’t win a fight we still need to have time to cast.
Sadly, nothing promised for Cata so far suggests any improvement in this. No decent burst damage, no way to counteract that “dead before you cast the first spell” problem. Our resilience these days is based on health-leech spells, but we never have time to use them – so Cata would really need to give us something to make locks competitive in PvP again.
There are plenty of other proposals that are of less interest, a few new spells and a major change to hellfire. The hellfire change is meant to make it a kind of demonology specialty, but I rather dislike it. The self-damage from hellfire was always such a perfect warlock mentality spell. Massive power, at any cost. With that being removed (and the power reduced) it’s just a small range AoE now. Nothing all that special about it at all. That said, it should at least make our current vulnerability in melee PVP a little less hazardous… suddenly standing behind a lock could actually hurt.
All in all, I’m positive about the proposed changes. There’s lots of room for improvement but it’s early days yet and most of the proposals sound really good. Sound, in fact, like they could make the warlock class truly relevant again to many players, rather than the niche-class it has become for a few hardcore people who like it’s lore so much we just accept the fact that we’re bottom on DPS and our battleground life-expectancy is about 5 seconds.
