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Blood Pact: Meet the minions, part 4 - the felhunter and mage-hate
Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "Ah, of course. Our latest prodigy. The real thing can't live up to the legend, I'm afraid. No matter, you've come here to learn, not to hear me make jokes to myself. ~ Strahad Farsan When Wrath first came along I wrote a piece about how warlock utility in 25 man raids had all but disappeared. I had many dissenters to that statement, using examples such as Soul Stones and the like. One that came up a few times was the Felhound and how useful he is. I have to agree, he's a regular bag of tricks, but when it comes to 25 man raiding he's been (rightly) left in the kennel for quite some time. This is about to change. "But Dominic, you seething pot of demonic mage-hating bile..." I hear you cry "...where is all the mage-hate?" Well, yes, I can imagine the title did lead you to expect an article so vitriolic and anti-arcane as to leave nothing more in its wake than quivering lumps of nerdy arcanists, armpit-deep in tears; and maybe a lost looking sheep. I'm not sure I can do that though, as I don't really hate mages -- that point is really going to need clarifying.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Fine threads and feisty pets for warlocks
Even more tweaks to the warlock talent builds made it onto the PTR's 3.3 build yesterday. This time we see more buffs for pets. The Imp, the destruction lock's pet of choice, will now benefit from the Ruin critical strike damage bonus. So instead of having its critical Firebolt hits doing 150% of normal damage this will now be 200%. This will work out as a 10 to 15% damage increase for the imp. Since the Imp accounts for a little under 10% of a destruction lock's damage I think this should be a straight buff of just over 1%. Felhunter's have also had a buff but this one seems slightly odd. On paper it looks exactly the same as the the one for the imp -- Pandemic has been extended to include Shadow Bite in dealing 100% extra damage on a critical strike. The confusion lies in that Shadow Bite seems to be doing that on the live servers already. When tested on the PTR with Pandemic, however, its criticals are looking like they are doing 150% extra damage. It seems this change is going to need some further work, even if it is just to clarify the language. With this confusion, I'm less certain what impact the change will have on affliction DPS but expect it to be something like half of that for destruction. However it shakes out, this is a further buff for warlock damage. It's certainly nice to see some continued attention being applied to lock mechanics as we progress with the patch testing.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Warlock pets bite back
I was pretty under-whelmed by the 3.3 PTR patch notes when they first came about, even going so far as to say on the podcast that I was more interested in the hunter changes. The removal of the Imp quest and the pet avoidance change made for some pretty slim pickings. The latest version of the notes is a whole other story though -- now this is interesting. Affliction This is a spec that needs some love. It had some fun times early on in Wrath with some big numbers and a lot of people flocking to its door. Not all were successful however, this was a powerful build but one that took some mastering. Many decided it wasn't worth the effort and went a hybrid demo/destro route to simpler, but slightly lower DPS scores. These days the complexity of affliction is still there, it's a fiddly build to get right -- this is both a draw for many and a turn off for others. However, the numbers just don't make it as raid viable as destruction; if you can do well with Haunt, you can probably do better with Chaos Bolt. Affliction used to be a utility build but no more, other classes and builds are either doing it better or easier. So yes, affliction needs some love and it's getting it -- puppy love.
Demonology 101: the Felhunter
I thought I'd do a Blood Pact on a Warlock's demons and how they'll be changing somewhat in Wrath of the Lich King, but considering there are two other trees to worry about, I've got the next two weeks loaded. Instead, we'll take a short look at one demon each day and see how the new talents and inherent demon abilities change the way you'll be playing with your pet. For today, we'll take a look at my personal favorite, the Felhunter. I love the Felhunter because its cute, scaly, and eats my opponent's buffs and locks them out of magical schools. Out of all the demons -- with the exception of the Succubus -- Warlocks get the most benefit from micromanaging a Felhunter. This demon changes the most significantly in Wrath owing to a few things. The bad news first: currently in Beta, Felhunters no longer confer Paranoia, so in Wrath you'll actually get stun-locked by surprise instead of seeing it coming and not being able to do anything about it anyway. It also loses Tainted Blood, which won't be missed because a Felhunter with a Rogue or Warrior on it is going to die, -475 attack power notwithstanding.
New Warlock glyphs found in Wrath Beta build 8820
As Inscription is slowly built into a viable trade skill, Blizzard sneaks more and more glyph data onto the Beta server, even if none of it is directly available thus far. This build, MMO Champion discovered a nice selection of Warlock glyphs, and I have to say that most of them look pretty sweet. Of course, it's hard to say for sure on how good some of them are until we know for sure if PvE damage rotations besides Shadow Bolt spam will be viable in Wrath's endgame, but I'll assume they will be, for the most part. Let's check them out after the break.
