Life Tap hotfix

Warlock’s using a lower rank of Life Tap will receive a reduced benefit from their shadow spell power.

 Pretty simple one, just adding the downranking penalty that most damage and healing spells have, I was kind of surprised this wasn't in out of the gate.

The thing to remember here, this doesn't penalize low level players. Downranking penalties only kick in on a spell rank 11 levels after you can first train it, at which point your spellpower is multiplied by (spell level+11)/caster level for that spell. A low level warlock will always have full scaling on his current top rank of life tap, but a level 80 warlock will only have full scaling on rank 8. Rank 7 will have an extra (68+11)/80=0.9875 spellpower multiplier, and down hill from there. Rank 1, which was getting full scaling before the hotfix, will have a 0.2125 spellpower multiplier.

Fel Armor hotfix

About a week prior to 3.3.3, someone reported that fel armor was keeping talented improvements when swapping specs. I tested, and posted screenshots in the official forums showing that, at the time, it wasn't - within 2-3 seconds of swapping spec, fel armor and your weapon enchant updated to their new talented (or untalented) forms.

Tuesday and most of Wednesday, however, that was actually happening - fel armor would retain it's improved form when changing spec, but weapon stones would not. A hotfix went live at some point Wednesday to address the matter, however, changing specs now wipes out armor enchants.

Told ya' so

Known Issues


Life Tap: The tooltip for this ability incorrectly states that the health lost is modified by spirit. Health loss is fixed and does not get increased by the Warlock's spirit.

Well I did.

3.3.3 Checklist

3.3.3 is a bit patch for warlocks, but surprisingly very little changes. So, what do you want to do as a warlock in 3.3.3? Read on...

Dark Pact range fix

Dark pact no longer has meaningful range (or line of sight) restrictions on the PTR. This is another kick in the nuts for life tap affliction, but also a very important change if dark pact is going to be a consistent contender as a raid spec in cataclysm. The general theme of the next expanion means we can likely expect a lot more dragons, and that's the main type of boss where that 30 yard limit becomes a serious issue.

Life tap coefficient, future of Dark Pact

Life tap is now working on the PTR, and the conversion is... strange.

Cost: 1490+1.5*spirit
Return: 1490+0.5*spellpower (untalented).

I'm assuming the cost is in error, as this will cause a much larger cost at lower gear levels when the return is much lower. However, our primary concern is the return. To that extent, note that the scaling coefficient IS indeed lower than 0.8, meaning dark pact will outscale talented life tap with sufficient gear.

As currently, the main consideration between DP affliction and LT affliction is which one returns more mana.

Dark pact: 1200+0.96*spellpower
Life tap: 1.2*(1490+0.5*spellpower)

Math after the break...

Oh PTR, you're so funny

On the PTR currently, life tap is converting 0 health into 0 mana. That's some damn good spellpower scaling there, even the base conversion isn't working.

This of course means that right now, all 3.3.3 sims must be taken with a huge grain of salt. Life tap assumptions right now are based completely on conjecture, there's no way to test in game to confirm assumptions.

On the bright side, this does seem to be the first PTR since the conflag redesign on which conflag actually worked correctly.

No spec change for Demo 3.3.3

The immolate change is big for demo, no denying, and at first glance it does look like a good trade to drop improved demonic tactics for aftermath to increase immolate's periodic damage. IDT already serves a very small role in demonic pact uptime, and that role will be effectively ending in 3.3.3. The damage from IDT isn't that impressive...

However, a look at immolate as demo isn't heartening either. Demo is a very nuke-favored spec, it gets even less direct benefit from it's DOT effects than destro. Corruption's role is as a proc generator, and immolate's DPCT is propped up primarily by it's very long duration and locked in by 4pt10. Ënmity of Mal'ganis, among others, have already tested the change, and despite the huge buff to immolate, demo's immolate is just too weak for Aftermath to pay off, even against the small benefit of IDT, changing the spec for aftermath works out to a loss of over 100 dps in helter skelter mode, higher yet in patchwerk mode.

EJ's current round of tests agree, and have some other interesting notes. While Destruction's buff is also huge, it's still hampered by it's poor crit and haste scaling. It performs very strongly in T9 gear profiles, beating out affliction and demo, but falls behind even demo in T10 profiles. Right now, what destro needs doesn't look to be simple damage buffs - the things that will keep it up there in T10 gear will disproportionately buff it in lower gear. Cataclysm will require some very wide spread work to address haste and crit difficulties suffered by a number of specs, not just destro. The mastery system may be a strong route of this - for example, propping up a spec's crit scaling is often as simple as increasing it's crit bonus. Some of the mastery previews included crit bonus as a mastery spec effect.

Life tap change

As of the latest PTR update, Life Tap is being returned to spellpower scaling. Note no changes are being made to glyph of life tap or our other spirit scaling options, just the size of life tap.

Short story, assuming life tap is being returned to it's old status (which was equal scaling pre-talents to dark pact), this basically marks the end of dark pact affliction. Life tap's higher base (1490 vs. 1200) and 1.2x multiplier from talents will keep it ahead of dark pact at all gear levels. The tired "less healer pressure" argument is as invalid as ever - affliction can life tap four times more than it's mana use, and still get immense overhealing just from corruption.

Even if it's not equal, if life tap's coefficient is greater or equal to 0.8, life tap affliction will remain ahead of dark pact affliction at all gear levels.

Immolate critting: It's that big

I don't actually mean big in terms of DPS. It's actually kind of medium at that, but I'll cover that momentarily.

It's big because it's a significant design decision by Blizzard. Immolate, as it stands on the PTR, does not require a talent, glyph, set bonus, or any outside utility. It is capable of dealing critical hits in its BASE FORM. If that doesn't excite you yet, read on for the implications for other specs as well.