Warlock Races, Cataclysm Itemization, random miscellaney

Troll and Dwarf Warlocks official
Trolls aren't much of a surprise, but dwarves are. Not sure what the lore there is or will be, but not sure there has to be any. After all, there's a good number of warlocks within the Dark Iron warlocks and the other dwarven races. "Bad guys do it," is pretty much the lore for Troll druids, and given troll NPCs penchant for shapeshifting nobody questioned that. Note this is in addition to both new races, as both worgen and goblins can be warlocks.

Steeper Itemization Curve

Since we're only raising the level cap to 85 in Cataclysm, one of the goals is to pack as much content and gameplay as possible into the new 78-85 zones and dungeons. We don't want the leveling experience from 80-85 to feel as if it's only half of the content we've provided in the last two expansions. So, with that comes more substantial scaling of items and character power with each level gained. A level-82 character should feel significantly more powerful than a level-80 character, for example. There are some epic and legendary items from Wrath of the Lich King raid content which may take a while to replace, but chances are most of your gear will be replaced by the time you start running level-85 normal 5-player dungeons.

The net effect here is less that you'll feel more powerful or your gear will be upgraded sooner and more that the steeper gear progression means much more pressure back to the normal>heroic>raid progression than Wrath's truncated progress. The dungeon/raid honor style point system still means that the vast majority of raiding will happen at the current top tier with less at the next down, so in the grand scheme of things this isn't a radical shift from Wrath. It might, however, keep all the world firsts from being over and done with within the first 72 hours.

Soul Burn/Demon Soul
Pretty much the conclusions level heads drew the last couple days, but empowered spells and demon soul are two sides of the same coin. Soul Burn empowered spells are very momentary and situational, with a focus on immediate effects and gameplay, but they're not terribly beneficial in a situation where you care about sustained damage output like your typical raid boss encounter.


Demon Soul, however, is a large passive damage increase (except for the imp version, which here's hoping gets changed somehow). It uses a shard, but has a 2 minute cooldown instead of 30 seconds. The 2 minute cooldown basically negates the PVE need for an in-combat shard recovery, as few fights allow, let alone give opportunity for more than three rounds of such cooldowns.

The previewed Unstable Affliction soulburn may not go live because of it's effect duplication with fel flame. Seems like an odd reason, since the empowered UA would be vastly more powerful, but this could just be the sugar coating on the "Holy shit that's a lot of damage" pill.

One last bit of soul burn blue text:

Ideally, we'd like to educate players on Soulburn effects through quests. Listing the spells it effects in the main tooltip is also an option, our only concern is it just becoming a short novel. When you cast Soulburn, it should change the tooltip of spells it effects. In a future build it will also “highlight” the icon of your spells which it affects. 

Quests won't really work, I don't think. It's hard to go back and review them, and I promise you every major patch from Cataclysm onward will change at least one of them. It might be some nice (and sorely missing) flavor to discuss class mechanics in quests, but not an ideal method of player education. Not sure what I think about changing tooltips only while soulburn is active. It works, but it's inconvenient to review. I was thinking empowerable spells would have an extra line of yellow text at the bottom of their tooltip listing their empowered effect.