More Assorted Miscelleny

The Real ID fiasco is over, the sharks (From the EFF to the California Attorney General to the lawyers already gathering plaintiffs for a class action) are dispersing after Mike Morhaime himself made a rare emergence from community obscurity. Just like Facebook did after experimenting with universal name access, Blizzard backpedaled so hard they robbed the earth of rotational momentum and days will now forever be 0.005 seconds longer, requiring a 1.825 second lapse every year to correct the clock. This lapse shall be known as the Leap Blizzard. The average American will ask, "Why is it a blizzard if it's now snowing?"

With that behind us, we can look on to better things. Like Cataclysm blue posts. Not much in general, but more pieces for the puzzle we're all trying to put together. The only thing we can say clearly is that all classes, as they exist in beta, bear very little resemblance to what they'll look like by the time Cataclysm goes live.

Soul Link is dead, long live Soul Link

Our thought at the moment is to put Soul Link in the second tier of talents where it is accessible to any PvP-focused warlock.

Previous statements saying that the current way warlocks were dependent on soul link in PVP was seen as a flaw were interpreted to mean soul link was going away entirely. I didn't report that bit because it was a stretch to interpret it that way, and I was right.


Shard Recovery

If we find that it's super frustrating as a lock in a long encounter (including a long Arena match), then we'll look at ways to get shards back in combat. However our prediction is as soon as we do that, locks will start blowing their shards on cooldown and then getting frustrated at a slow Aspect of the Viper-like mechanic to get them back.

I'm going to edit that a bit and say, "(primarily a long Arena match)." The PVE side of shards right now is in a decent place, except for the fact that destruction has a terrible demon soul effect. Being limited to three is a moderate inconvenience, in current content only one encounter strongly supports more than three rounds of two minute cooldowns.


I also strongly disagree with the characterization of Soul Harvest being Evocation. It's not Evocation, it's Preparation. It's a cooldown reset, not a resource restore. It's hard not to think of soul shards as a resource, but they're more of a unique variable cooldown - you can use them independent 2 minute or 30 second cooldowns, but are also encounter limited.


Pet Scaling

The plan is for your pets to scale 100% with your stats. In fact, group buffs don't even work on pets any longer so that they don't double dip from those buffs.

If you look at the warlock trees, there are tons of talents that buff Corruption and add range and crit damage and whatever. A couple of those per tree are okay but clearly we need to remove a lot of them and that means adding new talents, which unfortunately is slow. 

I included both halves of this particular post. The first half is the only one I'll comment on a lot, though. Full pet scaling is compelling. Our pets, as well as hunter pets, would end up quite powerful. No buffs to pets sounds bad initially, but our pets would scale 100% from the buffs we receive, and would be stronger unbuffed than their current fully buffed forms. We double dip a lot of buffs already, especially demonology warlocks, but with this kind of pet scaling it really would get out of control.

As for the second half, it's nothing we didn't already know, really, and it still doesn't shed any light on what talents may or may not get the 4.0 chop.