Long delayed Cataclysm Roundup

Cataclysm information has been very thin so far. Most of it has been about the decision to drop path of the titans (a shame, though it sounds like Archaeology will still do some cool stuff) and reforging (less of a shame, for reasons I'll explore in another post most likely).

Affliction Shadowbolt is Fine
This is a pet peeve of mine that people get so bent out of shape about affliction using shadowbolt. Spec trees within each class aren't discrete things. If they were, there wouldn't be a Warlock option at character creation, there'd be Affliction, Demonology, and Destruction options. Affliction and Demonology both relying heavily on destruction spells is neither unusual or uncommon in the game, self-contained trees are quite unusual for that matter, restricted to a couple of the hybrid DPS specs, druids with their spell limiting forms, mages, and almost (but not quite) destruction. There's even extreme examples, like Death Strike - an unholy ability that only sees DPS use by blood, and is improved by a talent so deep in blood that you can't have improved death strike and still call yourself an unholy DK by any argument.

The general improvement of talents could at least break affliction's ties to the 15 points in destruction, which isn't a bad thing. 200% crit talents are going away, which means they may be baseline or simply gone, but either way, that's 5 points out of destruction for affliction. With 5 more talent points, all it takes is 3 points out of affliction (a heavily bloated spec likely to see a few talents get the cut) to allow a 51/13/10+2 build - improved shadowbolt/bane (actual spell altering talents that aren't sure picks for the cut), Demonic Aegis (free spellpower, a hallmark of destruction, and very attractive but out of reach for affliction), and still full mastery in affliction.

Caster Legendary
While casters are still officially "next up," the Blizzcon mention of a first-tier caster legendary have been redacted. This is, I think, a good thing, provided we get a second tier legendary as suggested.

The reason I think it's good is simple: Look at Val'anyr. It's damn powerful, but compared to the current BIS epics, it's getting tighter. DPS is a lot easier to quantify than healing, too - throughput is everything for us, but not everything for healers. A tier 11 legendary runs the risk of becoming outdated by tier 15. I assume 15 will be the end of Cataclysm, since vanilla, BC, and Wrath all had four levels of raiding, though vanilla and BC both had one tier without a true tier set, Wrath had tier 9 with a pretty short loot list besides the tier sets.

Threat Talents go Bye-bye
I mentioned this is what I thought should have happened instead of the buff to warlock threat reduction a while back, but I'm fine with the buff - a buff to one class goes down a lot better than nerfs to the other nine. If necessary, they'll build a bit more into tanking mode threat boosts like they did for blessing of salvation, but they think (and I agree) that it won't be needed. Vengeance will be a nice threat boost for tanks, and returning to a first-tier situation, tanks generally outperform DPS anyway, so it'll probably be tier 13 or so before we see threat problems again, and without gross discrepancies in threat reduction between specs, they'll be universal threat problems, not warlock specific ones.