3.3 Patch Roundup

I've been holding off on this, the 3.3 PTR has been breakneck in how quickly things change direction, though for most of it, warlocks have been in a fairly stable place. Many of our changes were in fairly early and stayed put.

Now, changes are trickling in much slower, loot is in, raid testing is winding down, it looks like the patch is looming. So here's a full list of what 3.3 means for us.

Threat reduction
Improved Drain Soul and Destructive Reach have both been increased from 5/10% to 10/20%. This puts us on par with most ranged spec threat reduction. Poor fire mages are still left in the cold, but I feel much less sorry for them since arcane has the second highest reduction in the game.

Affliction
Affliction's back, not just to viability, but topping simcraft and making a good showing in ICC raid testing.

The bulk of this is due to Glyph of Quick Decay, which decreases the tick time of corruption. There's a few very fun facts about this: Everlasting Affliction refreshes Corruption to 18 seconds duration, but does not change the tick interval - it keeps whatever haste you had when you hard cast corruption. The key to maximizing the talent is hard cast corruption at max haste - eradication and a speed potion will go a long way - and immediately refresh it with haunt.

Three minor additions are buffs to the felhunter. Improved Felhunter decreases the cooldown of Shadow Bite by 2/4 seconds, and shadow mastery now effects shadow bite as well. These changes solidify affliction's improvement, but they do chain affliction to the felhutner and spell the end of the doomguard's useful days. Lastly, the bonus to shadow bite from your own DOTs on the target was raised from 5% per DOT to 15% per DOT, making for a hefty 30% boost to the ability.

Destruction
Things are rough for destruction, it took a huge hit to burst damage for PVP, but in PVE, it's walking away largely unscathed.

The conflag nerf is mitigated for PVE by a few facts: The DOT portion of conflag can crit, and it crits with the same rate as conflag itself. So the average damage per conflag is the same. The DOT crits do not proc pyroclasm, and the DOT does not benefit from a pyroclasm procced off it's parent conflag (it does, however, benefit from a pyroclasm that was up when its immolate was up), which also leaves it equal to the current conflag. The only loss is that the 25% of conflag tied up in the DOT portion does not benefit from the 1% direct damage firestone increase. This means a 0.25% loss off of each conflag. The sky is not falling.

On the flip side, imps now benefit from Ruin, doing 200% damage on crits instead of 150%. Similar to the empowered imp trade attached to the last burst nerf, destruction's picked up a net DPS gain.

Demonology
Demo made off like a bandit this patch. First, a 5% spell damage increase on Demonic Pact, which means not only a direct 5% increase to personal (not pet) DPS, it also means that 3/53/15 is a dead spec - demo can't lose that 5% spell damage, even if demonic pact isn't useful.

The rest of demo's changes are tied up in complicated mechanic changes.

Decimation is the easier one: Soulfire itself now procs decimation, and it's no longer limited to your next soulfire only, so there's no spell weaving, no range finicking, once you proc Decimation, you can spam soulfire for the duration of the fight. This has a few implications: First, you can still meta>charge>immo aura in decimation range, second, you can't depend on shadow bolt for molten core procs in decimation range (though shadow bolt no longer procs molten core anyway), so your execute rotation will be corruption>Soulfire.

Molten Core is a huge clusterfuck of a talent now. The exact patch notes read:

Molten Core: Redesigned. This talent now increases the duration of Immolate by 3/6/9 seconds and provides a 4/8/12% chance to gain the Molten Core effect when Corruption deals damage. The Molten Core effect empowers the next 3 Incinerate or Soul Fire spells cast within 15 seconds (Incinerate: increases damage done by 6/12/18% and reduces cast time by 10/20/30%; Soul Fire: increases damage done by 6/12/18% and increases critical strike chance by 5/10/15%). Molten Core now has a new spell effect.

The duration increase to immolate is nice (Note that this does not increase the damage of conflag in any way), but the main attraction is the 12% proc from Corruption. This is why you want corruption up in decimation range, for the increased damage and crit chance.

Outside of decimation, Molten Core is the warlock Eclipse. When it procs, incinerate is a better filler nuke than shadow bolt, meaning you'll fire three incinerates before returning to your usual nuke rotation. And you thought meta's rotation was bloated already?

Pets
Avoidance was buffed a tiny bit - from 80% to 90%, but no longer functions in PVP. This makes very little difference in PVE, as currently any damage reduced by avoidance can be shrugged off as long as you have fel synergy.

Doomguards and Infernals now have Avoidance, just in time for neither of them to see daylight again until Cataclysm at best. Infernal cooldown was also dropped to 10 minutes, but it's still locked out of Arena use.

Level 1 warlocks now start out with an imp. This falls into the same vein as rogues starting with dual wield, it makes classes closer to their full function earlier, and combined with the low level regen changes, will greatly ease the early levels for warlocks. Why hunters still have to dick around for ten levels without a pet is beyond me, those were infinitely worse than going 10 levels with a one weapon rogue or two without an imp for a warlock.

Icecrown Citadel
Not an in depth look here, not yet. But mainly what ICC means for our newly rebalanced trees. More and more spellpower means more and more demand for demonology warlocks in raids. Even without the DPS boost this would be the case.

Affliction is barely beating Destruction in Simcraft, meaning in real scenarios it could still be run out of viability by raid mechanics. Thankfully, of the fights tested so far, this doesn't seem to be the case - affliction's lead isn't nearly as solid as it is on paper, but it doesn't vanish as it could easily have. Valithera Dreamwalker is Gothik phase 1 all over again for affliction, trash waves full of MUST DIE NOW targets. The airship battle is not nearly so bad, however, there are many adds, but they have relatively high HP and survive full rounds of DOTs, letting affliction really make use of multi target DOTs.

What's NOT Happening
None of the full pet scaling hinted at Blizzcon - no surprise to me, honestly, the balance implications mean that was pretty much doomed to be part of the big 4.0 talent tree overhaul.

While there was some promising talk about infernals and doomguards being overhauled as guardians - DPS cooldowns like a DK's gargoyle - that's not happening now. It's not promised per se for cataclysm, either, but if it happens, that'll be it.

No ponies. BUT GHOSTCRAWLER PROMISED!