Quick Thoughts.

I tried out the new 51-point lock talents but haven’t really played with them outside of the Undercity training dummies.

So far I really enjoy the heavy fire Destruction build but can’t seem to stick Conflag anywhere in my rotation where it doesn’t cause me to lose 200+ DPS. My lock has 1300ish Spellpower so I tried to pack as much punch as I could before I respecced. I dropped 5/5 in to Improved Corruption, 3/3 Improved Imp and dumped the rest in to Destruction. 3/3 Imp Imp was sort of a test to see how much damage the little bastard could push out with Empowered Imp and Demonic Power maxed out.

I kept up Curse of Elements, let the Imp go nuts and repeated Corruption (for Molten Core procs), Immolate, Chaos Bolt, Incinerate X times, Conflag with less than 5 seconds left on Immolate, repeat, and pushed about 1080 DPS until I was OOM. The second time around I still kept up Curse of Elements but left out Corruption, saying screw Molten Core, and also leaving out Conflagrate. Letting the Imp go crazy, I put up Immolate, Chaos Bolt, Incinerate X times, repeat and pushed about 1300 DPS. I don’t know if it was because I felt more comfortable with the rotation but I just couldn’t seem to make Molten Core or Conflag worth using.

After about 6 or 7 goes I logged back in to my Undead Warlock and specced heavily in to Demonology. So many tasty appealing talents at the bottom made it hard for me to put anymore than 9 points anywhere else. I put 4/5 Imp Corruption and 5/5 Bane with the rest packed down the middle.

First thing first, I feel Metamorphosis is lacking and needs to be reworked. It doesn’t have it’s own shapeshift bar so you’re forced to put all 4 Demon Form-only spells on your bar to take up space (like we can spare any). The melee damage output is horrible, critting for a whopping 90 with about 50 average white damage. Cleave is on a pretty hefty cooldown for something that is already on a 3 minute cooldown with a 30 second duration. Immolation Aura was pretty sweet but by the time you click it to get it going and get in to a good range you’ve already lost about 5 or 6 seconds of your 30. It has a decent radius so you tend to pull more than you intend on and once the 30 seconds are over you’re surrounded by pissed off mobs at 70% health. Overall, it felt very clunky but I could see it working out fine in a raid environment using it more like a 30 second trinket every 3 minutes for the 20% damage boost.

My opinion is to make Demon Form much like Shadowpriests Shadowform, reduce the bonus damage to 10% and remove the demon specific spells altogether. The Demonology tree shows a lot of promise and was really fun to dick around with but it still needs polish. I like the proc talents (Demonic Pact and Demonic Empathy) and Fel Synergy helps keep the Felguard alive, which was an issue raiding as Demonology in TBC. You were pretty much forced to have 2 pieces of T5 and the Void Star Talisman from Solarian to raid as Demonology. Demonic Empowerment (The Warlock Beast Within) was just icing on the cake. I could be content going 50 in to Demonology and skipping Metamorphosis altogether. Overall DPS for this spec was a tad over 1000.

Lastly I headed back to the trainer and specced heavy Affliction with only 5 points in to Bane. Haunt is an amazing 51 point talent as long as you keep it up every cooldown. I love the overall DPS of the Affliction tree now and have really high hopes that it’ll be the next big thing for raiding Warlocks in WOTLK. The only part I found difficult was finding time to throw a Shadow Bolt or two. I’d like to test it out more in PVP with Improved Fear and Curse of Exhaustion but the testing dummy got the shit kicked out of it .

Side notes for Affliction – The patch notes say that Dark Pact returns 200% of the mana gained which is false. The tooltip still says 100%. Dark Pact + Felhunter = Endless mana. I went as far as to max out Improved Felhunter and plan on using him as my primary pet from 70-80.

Super Imp/Chaos Bolt was probably my favorite so far with Haunt coming in a close second. Demonology shows a ton of promise if Blizzard works out the kinks for Meta but until then I’ll be staying away from it. On a completely seperate note, the new “beam” animations are sexy. Drain Soul looks amazing, as does Drain Life/Mana. I checked out Mind Flay on Abigore but wasn’t as impressed. It’s an asthetic improvement but not as good as the Warlocks.