next patch, the ner-dot keeps ticking, or...?Follow

There is nothing really good there.



You think it *might* be a nerf to PVP'ers? Think how much health you drained from a rogue. Now cut that in half. Same deal with warrior fights. Now soul siphon only scales at 4% per affliction effect instead of 5%. Of course its a nerf. And it doesn't affect drain mana, a huge utility of warlocks in arena.

I don't arena, I don't care personally about the changes, but I can clearly see how they're all nerfs. I'm more pissed about (A) the ridiculous change to hellfire (makes 0 sense), (B) the PVE nerf to soul siphon.

Edited, Oct 11th 2007 5:14pm by mikelolol

They added another nerf just now



Specifically this means you won't get the 5% bonus to drain life through soul siphon. Well actually it would be the 4% bonus since they nerfed that too.

So 5v5 arena - you get hit with a mortal strike, immediately cutting any form of your heals in half. I'm not complaining, but I'm pointing out why SL/SL locks are alot more screwed now. Mortal strike or a 5x stack of wound poison (easy with shiv) will cut your heals in half. Drain life, healthstones, siphon life etc.

Not only that, you're buffs to drain mana from soul siphon are gone. Non existant. Theres no way to drain more then what the base tooltip says. You're buffs from soul siphon to drain life are cut pretty dramatically. Shadow embrace doesn't give you the buff anymore, all other buffs are cut by a (stacking) 1%.

So you used to drain 500 health per second from that warrior you were drain tanking. Now its more like 215 per second. You pop a healthstone which doesn't crit, and the 2/2 stone heals you for 1248 instead of 2496. Clearly the survivability of this spec takes a huge hit, basically all your healing is cut in half in any form of 3v3 or 5v5 arena. I mean what teams don't have a rogue or warrior these days?

This is retarded. Drain Life is not affected by any sort of +healing, yet somehow the healing gets a shaft. This is a nonsensical game operandus.

I'm fine with the no-interrupt crap, but this flag capture crap confuses me. Maybe they mean nodes, since nodes are channeled?

Why not just halve the amount Drain Mana receives from the talent, instead of an outright removal? And now Shadow Embrace will be pointless to PvP'ers. I dislike how Blizzard has been ruining creativity. The game's becoming more and more straightforward...

The small, small, small buffs we received was for show.

OK, picture me dense like concrete but how does spell haste help drain life? It's an instant-start chanelled spell. What am I missing here?

Spell Haste makes channeled spells channel... faster. Drain Life, Arcane Missiles, Mind Flay, whatever... they all take less time to complete the channel but get the same number of 'ticks' in of their effect. Spell Haste works _best_ on channeled spells.

EDIT: Considering that competent PvP Warlocks more or less autowin against any melee class currently, I don't think it's quite as bad as you think it is.

Edited, Oct 11th 2007 8:23pm by RPZip

I'm confused. You get the same damage and healing with spell haste, but faster, which not only is better DPS/HPS, it also makes you less open to interrupt.

I believe spell haste does work best on channeled spells, not for the damage, but because channeled spell's cast is badly open to interruption. Spell haste is useless if it lowers a spell beyond 1.5, due to GCD, but channeled spells have long casts and detrimental effects to your enemies.

3.2 is 4 ticks with the hypothetical haste we mentioned, and that's definitely better. If a Warlock spams it instead of waiting for it to pan out, it's the Warlock's fault, not spell haste's.

Mortal Strike affects potions and even Bloodthirst. I see no reason at all why warlocks should be exempt. Its still a healing ability, non-affected by +healing is irrelevant.

Its not game-breaking ffs.

Wonderful. Even before this patch rogues and warriors were tough to kill in pvp. After all this my warlock is going to be destroyed by them. Guess it means I go back to Destro... Maybe a searing pain/crit build...

Never realized that it was a "leech" ability, rather than a "heal" ability, my apologies.

Im sure you realize that there are other abilities in the game that restore health, are not affected by +healing, and are still halved by mortal strike and wound poison?

All I'm saying, is that just because an ability that restores health (leech or not?) is affected by MS doesn't mean it should be affected by +healing.

IMO, this is a fix, not a horrendous nerf. Besides, if all those oodles of spell damage increased healing along with the damage, that would be a buff far too in-balancing.

Editted for grammarz.

Edited, Oct 12th 2007 2:43pm by greenroom

This sounds like a lawyer using circumstantial mechanics to try to sway a jury.

+healing can be double, sometimes TRIPLE +damage. Life Drain is considered one of the primary bag of tricks, as well as Siphon Life for its respective build. It takes +shadow damage instead of +healing, NOT both +healing and +shadow. Not all +damage mechanics have +healing too, and by your logic, damage AND healing should effect both ends of the spell, and therefore the spell shouldn't be hampered down by being a "drain" effect. I call BS.

It's affected by Shadow Resistance, Nether Protection, Shadow Ward, Shadow Resistance Aura, Dampen Magic, special -spell damage effects... Which in return it's helped by Curse of Shadows, shadow debuffs ranging from Warlock to Priest, and Amplify Magic. But in return for these HEALING DEBUFFS, Drain Life and Siphon Life get NOTHING in return! Base game mechanics should not be affected by PvP alone! It's OBVIOUS that Blizzard wants to make Warlock's less viable in 2v2, because they said so! To reduce Warlock's effectiveness OUTSIDE the arena, and affecting their performance ABOVE 2v2, is a quick-fix made by Blizzard to not RESCALE Warlocks, but to DESCALE them, lowering them to a less-than-fit form until they eventually decide they are balanced. Deliberately, Blizzard makes Warlocks weaker than the balanced classes because they don't know what to do.

I would think they would've learned from Shaman.

Is Warlock going to be shoved in a file cabinet like Shamans?

Edited, Oct 12th 2007 3:06pm by Ignuus

That's what I've been worried about for months. We've been in the grip of a nerf-dot for a long time. It seems to be getting worse.

I don't see in those notes that this nerf is PvP only. As a matter of fact, I don't see PvP-only on any of them.

Its not the mortal strike nerf, its the damage reduction from the shadow embrace/soul siphon changes. A single lock used to put up UA + siphon life + corruption + curse + shadow embrace, each giving +5% damage to drain life, ie: 25%.

Now shadow embrace doesn't count so its 20%. Now they're worth 4% instead of 5% so its 16%. Now to reach the 60% cap you need 4 affliction locks with UA in a raid. When farming you're drain life will definately do less damage, not a huge amount, but this is a nerf to PVE.