Talents to AvoidFollow

One thing Ive noticed a lot of on these forums is that amongst the various build requests and build suggestions being tossed around, there is often at least one choice in a build that seems a bit 'dodgy'. The warlock trees are littered with effectively useless space-filler talents left over from when we were a truly useless class, and this is intended to help steer new warlocks away from taking these choices and reducing their effectiveness. Often advice on these poor choices is found at the end of a thread, and I feel will probably not get read by the majority. So here we are, a quick guide to the warlock talents you should really NOT choose:


Affliction
The afflic tree is pretty solid all-round, but there are still some real stinkers in here;

Improved Curse of Weakness
This is the biggest waste of talent points in this tree. The increase in effectiveness is poor, costs you three talents, and to be honest its very unlikely youll be casting this a lot unless your playstyle focuses tightly around damage limitation. Avoid like the plague.

Improved Drain Soul
This talent is currently (1.8) broken and shows no signs of being fixed; the mana regen buff only procs if DL deals the KILLING blow, which for such a low dps spell is highly unlikely. Also, even if they fix this, consider that the regen boost is linked to your current passive regen, a rate linked to the Spirit attribute. As a warlock, spirit is of almost no use whatsoever, you should be wearing +sta and +int. Spirit is for druids, leave it there.

EDIT: Apparently this talent has been fixed in 1.9, but will not proc if your pet deals the killing blow. I still think it sucks thought, even if it procced on every single Soul Drain it's not worth the effort.

Improved Curse of Agony
This one is a real joke. Three talent points for a measly 6% dps boost on a powerful but not overwhelming curse. The damage increase is unnoticeably small, so dont bother. There is a lot of debate as to the worthiness of this talent, but all I say is do the math. It works out at ~50dmg per mob over 30 seconds. If you need 50 extra damage to save you, there's something wrong.



Demonology
This tree is packed with rubbish, the real legacy from pre-1.6 when warlocks were a complete laughing stock and NOBODY specced into Demonology. The worst talent available to warlocks has been removed (Master Conjuror - whisky tango foxtrot???) from the game but plenty of crap remains.

Improved Health Funnel
This is an utter waste, due to the nature of Health Funnel. Not only do you heal your pet for 20% more, you also take 20% more damage from the spell, so a bit of a two-edged sword. I personally never cast this spell as it is quicker and more resource-efficient to insta-summon a new pet than destructively heal your existing one. A poor improvement to an already poor ability.

Fel Intellect
A bit controversial as a lot of Afflic/Demon locks pick this to have a bigger mana battery, but to be honest it is just a good way to burn five talent points. A small increase to pet mana isnt what a Dark Pact lock needs as he can rely on the pet's innate mana regen outpacing his DP spell, and all other locks have absolutely no use for a tiny bit more pet mana. It usually takes my imp about thirty seconds to burn his mana at most; this talent gives him an extra four before he's doing nothing. Avoid.

Improved Enslave Demon
This is a bit strange, as it is a great help with maintaining control over the endgame summons when they break free. However, you have to sink at least three talent points into it to get a real benefit from it, and the number of times you're really going to be enslaving demons is tiny when compared to the rest of your spells. Spend your talent points elsewhere unless you REALLY enjoy using your endgame summons and enslaving random demons.

Improved Firestone
Utter, utter crap. Firestones are a joke item as it is, taking away your ability to use a staff (essential to a lock for +sta) and granting a good but not great bonus to fire damage. Unless youre a full Destro lock with Conflagrate, fire isnt a big component of your damage output, but if you're that far into Destro you dont have enough talents left to get this one. The dps boost is small even if you are some bizarre firelock, and there are plenty of powerful offhand items you could and should be using instead even if you hate staves. Complete rubbish, if youve bought this PLEASE respec.

Improved Spellstone
Yet another talent that gets you wondering where Blizzard buy their special tobacco leaves; spellstones are just as useless as firestones as your staff bonuses are gone. Its nice to be able to absorb a nice chunk of spell damage, but against most spellcaster classes we are pretty dangerous as it is. Oh, and it strips away your Demon Armour buff (thanks Blizzard) AND triggers your Healthstone cooldown, so the damage the stone saves you is taken away as you cannot cast your healthstone when you need it. The only use for a spellstone at all is de-cursing yourself if an enemy lock or two are laying DoTs on you, and this talent doesnt really help with that. Again, total crap.



Destruction
The popular destruction tree is again fairly well-rounded, but blessed with a few rubbish talents.

Cataclysm
This is a badly thought-out talent on Blizzard's part, considering it's place in the tree. If you assume that a Destrolock is going to be using (say...) destruction spells, this talent gives you an effective 5% increase to your mana pool. That's about one Shadowbolt, if you're lucky. Also, consider that sitting across in the Demonology tree at the *same level* is Demonic Embrace, which gives you a whopping 15% more health. For a warlock HP=MP, so whenever you need some more mana to cast with, just lifetap from your extra health pool and there you go. Bad talent, do not take.

Aftermath
A lot of people seem in love with this talent, but I personally consider it a bit of a waste. Daze is the least disrupting status effect in the game, slowing your enemy a bit and thats about it. Spending five points on a low chance at a minor disruption seems like insanity to me with Bane sitting right next to it in the tree. Leave it alone, increase your dps with Bane.

Improved Firebolt

<- Deleted ->

I've totally changed my mind on this talent, I have the first point with my 7/31/13 lock and it is a huge help in many circumstances. It's hard to give up 1% spellcrit but the boost to Imp DPS actually compensates nicely. Tis good, take this one, but not the second point as it's still bugged and doesnt help.

Improved Lash of Pain
This one I dont hate so much as it does increase your succy's dps by a noticeable amount and gives her something to spend her mana on. I just think there are better choices in the tree for your talent points, this is a very specific talent.

Ruin
Hehe... just kidding. Ruin rocks :P

Pyroclasm
Again a popular talent and in theory quite powerful, but in my personal experience it doesnt seem to proc all that often. With this one I suggest you give it a try and really try to see how often it helps you out, I suggest a combat log tracker and a bit of math. I wouldnt take this, but Ive been wrong before.

EDIT: Apparently Rain of Fire will properly trigger this effect now (1.10), after having been broken in one way or another since beta. On the test realm it was only useful in Arathi Basin for nuking brawls around flags, but nobody lets you do it for long enough to ensure a proc. Try it, but I still wouldnt touch it with a barge pole.


So there you have it, hope this helps you budding locks out. If you dont agree with something Ive written here please feel free to say so, but unless Ive made a glaring error Ill leave the post as it is. This is from my experience only, so its almost certain there is an Improved Spellstone fanatic out there who's based a build around it.

~sin

EDIT: 1.9/1.10 update

Edited, Wed Apr 5 20:16:49 2006 by Sinstralis

Edited, Dec 27th 2007 7:14am by Kaolian

Doh! Edited =). Always one mistake that slips by. I've added your imp advice, and I can see your point on it actually. Against rogues especially I have trouble if they have fear-breaking PvP trinkets, so having an imp bash firebolts into them would probably help a lot. In that situation I tend to use the succubus and her seduce/lash of pain though. Wouldnt your points be better spent on Improved Lash of Pain, as the dps boost is also very nice and you have the option of Seduce as a panic button?

~sin

awesome post :)

about pyroclasm
i read somewhere it was 26 spread over the length of the spell.
so with soulfire youl have 26percent at once. and with rain of fire and hell fire its 26/total number of tick=
percent chance to stun each tick

Hey thanks man its funny as hell.....lol special tabbaco leaves....(thanks bizzard) LOL thats so funny....also most of its true except Imp.succ...i have it and 3 seconds each point is alot! also the succubus can be used as an all around PvP monster except in a lil of BG....i use the succubus an extreme amount because of seduce and agianst ay class its useful


also your right about pyroclasm but i was thinking i was in AV and i kept being a suicide bomber with hellfire....when the two large groups of people fight u can get a good 10 seconds into dmging the whole group or until im dead lol and it does monsturous amounts of dmg to the whole squad

its not a good talent interest but just using it for awhile would be good and fun in AV

Oh, my mistake. I'm very sorry, i thought you wrote Improved Curse of Exhaustion, not weakness. =)

Thanks for the link Kiggulak, glad you liked the writeup. I got so sad always seeing "and I took Improved Curse of Weakness cos like every little bit helps right??"-style posts. A bit of class pride going on :). For the Warlocks!

~sin

EDIT: PS, you might want to change your FAQ to reflect that Pyroclasm was NOT fixed in 1.8, and isnt on the patch notes for 1.9 either.

Edited, Tue Nov 22 00:36:10 2005 by Sinstralis

i jus want to know why everyone says to avoid suppression 'like the plague'.. i mean isnt the goal of most affliction spells to land and do max damage over time? i don't see any of the other 'filler' talents in that tree doing that. the alternatives? um...improved un-used curse of weakness, improved shard farming drain soul, improved 5 more damage/tick & l60 drain life? improved life tap is probably the only 2nd line talent that has long-term worth. which you need points in suppression anyways to get the other 3 at least, for 10.(unless you have found a long-term use for curse of weakness or put drain life or drain soul on your main dot list(then you'd be full of soul shards with no inv space, though drain life is nifty for you drain 'tanks' out there.) even still suppression helps them to land...i can solo reds & level 31 because my spells dont have to be cast 3 times just to land once, and the damage would not be as resisted as if i had not put any points into it. now i know we get a curse that lowers shadow resistance and all...but that one has to land to work too.

now...max 10% to you all might not seem like much...but then again you all strive for that +10% crit chance(subsequently also unresisted damage) but...affliction dot spells can't crit, only land, fail, or land/w resisted damage so the less the better.. :p

oh and...yer all right about nightfall...only really useful on supporting a destruction build, if you ask me.

Edited, Tue Dec 27 14:24:22 2005 by Gukagim

Oh. My. God.

Anyone got a few hundred gold so I can respec please?

WONDERFUL post, thank you. My lock has a load of useless talents, it seems (he *was* my first toon, in my defense). Time to go farm some money and redo it all.

Well I'm going to guess that you havent gone too far down the warlock path if youre only referring to the first two pets you acquire. The Succubus is often better than the imp for grinding if you arent a Dark Pact lock, as her damage isnt mana dependent. You dont have to stop and wait for the imp to regen his mana, you can just keep on grinding. The *first* point into Imp Firebolt is definitely worth it but the second point is bugged and will not grant any more damage. Additionally, Im not sure why you're telling us about using DoTs and Fear, since presumably everyone reading this knows what his Warlock is for.



Thanks for that, I was hoping someone else would point that out. From the tone of the post he didnt even read most of the OP, and obviously didnt read the correction afterwards either. Ah well.


I didnt advise people against taking Suppression, I have a few points in it myself. Quite the contrary, Suppression is a great endgame talent when high-level raid mobs start to resist your curses and spells a great deal, that extra 10% will seriously improve your mana efficiency from reduced resists.

Can you be a bit more specific on this please? If they've genuinely fixed it then its definitely worth taking, could you detail how you came to this conclusion? Although you might want to start a new thread for it.

~sin

I actually do agree that firestoning is a fun thing to do with your lock, I actually burned quite a lot of gold on a fast and powerful proccing sword for just this purpose. I find its a nice backup for battlegrounds when you're flat out of mana, equipping the firestone and charging in with your Mageblade is a nasty surprise for any melee class. I included it as a *Talent* to avoid because I dont consider it worth the cost in overall HP, but whatever takes yer fancy :)

~sin

Great post was really helpfull wen i re-specked, 1 thing tho and this isnt me slating ur work or advice its something i genuinely dont quite get,

Im a 40 lock an jus finished my points in destruction so as u can imagine im a destrolock, but with my points from now on im goin for affliction which will complement my destruction talents nicely,thing is and heres where i come un-stuck the talents that u said to avoid are pretty much second tier talents and by avoiding them i cant see any way of gettin to the l8r good affliction talents,

The way i see it ur gonna need to plumb some points into a "rubbish" talent like improved CoA am i wrong or is it taken as said that some points will be kinda wasted. Like i said im not dissin ur work at all im jus worried that im missin something and want to get it right b4 i start spending points in affliction,

Ive used a calculator and was pretty happy with wot i got but any advice would be great as you obviously know the Lock,
cheers m8


Edited, Sat Feb 25 03:19:00 2006 by RisingDawnMist