Feedback: Warlock Updates

In Development The War Within Alpha Test
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In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Warlocks in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Thank You

Before we continue testing The War Within, we’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who read and responded to the Hero Talent previews we posted over the last few months.

Looking to the Alpha

In this first Alpha build, every single class has at least one new Hero Talent tree available for testing, with the rest coming in the following weeks. We’re asking testers to initially keep several things in mind:

  • There are UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
  • Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI)
  • New spell visuals and audio for several new Hero Talent trees are still a work in progress. Many trees are using placeholder assets for now that will be updated over the course of Alpha.
  • There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus right now that we are prioritizing over other concerns such as tuning or generic class updates/maintenance:

  • Finish building the remainder of the Hero Talent trees that are not yet available.
  • Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

With the Alpha build being playable and all of the discussion that will occur around the flood of data, we wanted to reiterate that the responses to our blog previews were highly valuable. The feedback we received allowed us to make some early improvements or revisions while we didn’t yet have a public test environment. It allowed us to take some big early swings on certain trees, and then react to early feedback quickly.

Going forward, we aren’t planning to publish any additional Hero Talent previews in blog form, since we’ll add the remaining classes to the Alpha as soon as they reach their ready-to-test state.

Working from Feedback

Several Hero Talent trees have received changes after reading feedback to the blog posts. Some of these were tuning changes to ensure that the Hero Talent tree felt competitive, while others were significant design changes. The feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Going into Alpha, we feel good about the shape of the Hero Talent tree designs. Keeping a consistent number of utility and defensives nodes across all trees, having parity between number of choice nodes, and the overall structure of the trees are things we’re confident in.

We’re also working on tweaking some core class designs as well. In some cases, it was necessary to make adjustments to the class or specialization talent trees before significant work was done on a Hero Talent tree. In other cases, we did work seeking to improve base class talent tree designs.

Alpha Feedback

Now that we’re in Alpha, we’re looking for feedback on how it feels to playtest these trees. We’re specifically curious about:

  • Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree.
  • Hero Talents that create frustrating or unsatisfying gameplay or rotations for your spec.
  • Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.

Throughput comparisons of Hero Talent trees are helpful, but we’re more interested in gameplay, feel, and choice feedback at this stage. Also, when possible, we appreciate it when you focus posts or articles on a single spec and Hero Talent tree, rather than combining feedback about multiple issues.

Again, Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback on Hero Talent trees and are very excited for you to see everything else we’re working on. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

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Greetings Warlocks,

We’ve been very excited to see the community’s reactions to the Warlock Hero Talents, and we appreciate all of your feedback.

In the coming weeks, you’ll see multiple changes to the Warlock class and specialization trees, and we’d like to provide some context for these changes here.

Core Goals

  • Ensure each capstone is interesting and exciting.
  • Reduce the amount of throughput talents, to free up utility choices.
  • Reduce the number of ranks for talents that don’t warrant multiple ranks.

Affliction
The Affliction specialization tree forces a choice between a single-target or multi-target profile rather than providing a viable build that is adaptable in both situations. We want to redesign, introduce, and remove talents, as well as address the tuning of Malefic Rapture to help reduce this friction.

Demonology
For Demonology, we want to address the number of long cooldowns available as well as reduce the amount of resource flooding. We’ll also look at underused talents such as Doom. The feedback provided during Season 3 was instrumental in helping illuminate a path forward for Doom, and you should expect a redesign of it in a future build.

Destruction
For Destruction, we have plans to reduce the fluctuation in power based on target count. We also want to take another look at how Destruction plays in multi-target situations and look for ways to improve underused talents such as Cataclysm and Soulfire.

More to come
As always, we’re reading feedback and discussing other changes. We’re still monitoring discussions about Hero Talents, and will make adjustments as needed.

Thank you for your thoughts thus far. We look forward to hearing more as development progresses!

5 Likes
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Greetings Warlocks,

Today, we have various Core and Affliction tree changes hitting the Alpha. We want to take a moment to go a bit more in depth as to what certain changes were made and why. As a refresher, here are the goals for our Core and Afflictions that we posted last week along with some additional goals that we can dig into here.

Class

  • Ensure each capstone is interesting and exciting.
  • Reduce the amount of throughput talents, to free up utility choices.
  • Reduce the number of ranks for talents that don’t warrant multiple ranks.

Affliction

  • Address the tuning of Malefic Rapture in single-target and multi-target situations.
  • Reduce complexity and the amount of active buttons that contribute to it.
  • Erase the need to choose between a single-target or multi-target profile by adding more adaptability and flexibility.

While we cannot go over every change here, we’d like to get a bit more detailed than last week’s update and explain some of the bigger changes coming in this build.

Class Tree Throughput
We’re removing a lot of throughput talents from the class tree to allow warlocks to pick up more utility without feeling forced to take mandatory talents to be competitive. These talents aren’t compelling options when placed against utility as they will always be the right answer to have. This allows us to move that power into the specialization trees and tailor throughput-centric talents to be specific to that specialization’s gameplay.

Malefic Rapture
In addition to becoming baseline for Affliction, we are introducing new talents that will help Malefic Rapture become the go-to spender for both single-target and multi-target situations. This should also shift Seed of Corruption to being a means to apply Corruption to multiple targets rather than what you spam in dungeons. In addition, we are redesigning Siphon Life to be friendlier to Affliction’s rotation and expect that its new design will make it easier to optimize Malefic Rapture.

Affliction’s Adaptability
While we do want Affliction warlocks to have a preferred talent setup for single- versus multi-target situations, we don’t want it to feel like they are powerless if they are in the opposite situation. By focusing on Malefic Rapture being Affliction’s main spender and removing talents that are only valuable in multi-target situations (Soul Flame, Soul Swap, Doom Blossom, etc.), we’re hoping that the Affliction tree feels less punishing to fill out.

Is This It?
Not at all. We expect to make changes based on feedback and our own playtesting. We want to get the ball rolling on changes we knew we want to make, so we could start the discussion early on and make adjustments before The War Within launches.

Thank you all for the continued discussions and we look forward to your feedback!

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Affliction has changed A LOT, so I’m mainly going to talk about it, because changes to Destrution and Demonology are expected.

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  • WARLOCK CLASS TALENTS
  1. Fel Pact

You can get Fel Domination to have no CD if you pick this and the talent that reduces its CD by 2min in the Soul Harvester tree.

  1. Fiendish Stride

Now just 1 point, you go faster but take more damage than on live servers from Burning Rush. Pretty good change.

  1. Demonic Circle

We don’t have to pick Demonic Circle, so you can save up a point on certain dungeons/boss fights. That’s nice.

  1. Amplify Curse

Doesn’t fully work currently with Curse of the Satyr that you get via the Hellcaller tree that combines tongues and weakness. The amplified curse of tongue effect doesn’t work, casting speed is still at 30%.

  1. Demonic Inspiration and Wrathful minion

I think we could get rid of those talents ? They’re mandatory for pathing, they’re pretty weak, I’d rather be able to get more utility stuff.

  1. Accrued Vitality and Lifeblood

2 points talents that are very weak and never taken in any circumstances. They should be replaced because increased healing on Drain Life and some Leech after using a Healthstone that gives us back 100% HP are useless.
They should become 1 point talent that offer alternative pathing to Sweet Souls and Demonic Gateway to get to Dark Pact and Shadowfury.

  1. Swift Artifice:

New talent that’s unexpected. Reduces the cast time of create healthstone and soulstone. It’s not very useful even though there are a few fights where being able to quickly rez someone in M+ is ok-ish. Very niche.

The biggest issue is that it’s the only path to Resolute Barrier that is a pretty useful talent if you have a point to spare.

  1. Demonic Tactics

New talent that’s bugged currently. Instead of giving +5% crit to you and to your pet, it gives +10% crit to you. I suspect the +5% to your pet is also given to you.

  1. Teachings of the Black Harvest

Minor, but if you play Grimoire of Sacrifice with your Felhunter, this talent does nothing for you (not that it does a lot anyways). It’s the only pet with this issue.

It’s a remnant of early Dragonflight Beta when Spell Lock was given to the warlock and the Felhunter only kept Devour Magic.

  1. Resolute Barrier

A second point in this talent is pretty much useless, this could be a 1 point node.

  1. Fel Synergy

Not fully implemented yet, the talent does the same amount of healing with 1 or 2 points spent in it.

  1. Soul Link

Same issue, it’s the same DR whether you spend 1 or 2 points in it.

  1. Pact of Gluttony

Amazing new talent that allows you to use your healthstones every minute, even in combat. It makes a lot of sense, it’s something that I’ve wanted for a long time.

Healthstones for warlocks are extremely powerful, this basically gives us a off-GCD lay on hands every minute. It could probably be 2min in combat maybe? I think that would be more balanced, but I don’t want it to impact the CD off combat.

Demonic Healthstones (your new HS with this talent) don’t fully work with Soulburn, you only get the +30% extra healing, but not the +20% max HP for 12s. It’s a bug.

  1. Soul Conduit

It’s just 5% chance to get a refund now. This talent is in a weird place, because shard generations for all 3 specs is kind of all over the place, so it has to be weak for now. We get more shards on alpha than on live servers. Affliction especially with the rework is just drowning in them.

  1. Soulburn

Doesn’t work properly with the new Demonic Healthstones.

Only grants 4s movement speed buff with Demonic Circle instead of the 6s described in the tooltip.

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  • AFFLICTION

The tree got completely reworked even though we kept the same structure. Most of the weak/useless/annoying stuff has been removed (Pandemic invocation, Agonizing Corruption, Seized Vitality, etc), and replaced with very powerful and/or cool useful stuff.

I’m very Glad that Dread Touch has been removed.

The best thing in my opinion is the rework of the bottom section of the tree, where all 4 branches are only 1 point node, so you can easily mix and match between them, giving you at least a feeling of real flexibility.

Obviously Siphon Life has an extra DoT has been removed. And Malefic Rapture remains as our main spender, no matter the number of targets.

I do think there’s a problem with Rapture right now on Alpha, but that’s mostly due to the issue of shard generation.
We are starved of shards on live servers, on Alpha we are drowning in them, thanks to a couple new talents (and the Hellcaller hero tree). So we’re basically spamming rapture on alpha, which devalues the spell quite a lot.

Shard generation is the first thing that needs to be tuned to be able to get a better sense of what Affliction is supposed to be like.

Also, Malefic Rapture is bugged on Alpha right now, it’s pulling every NPCs hostile and neutral within 100 yards of the warlock, even if they don’t have a DoT on them.

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  • AFFLICTION SPEC TREE
  1. Nightfall

The talent became a lot more meaningful, especially with the Soul Harvester hero tree and with the new talent Improved Shadow Bolt (SB) that’s a choice node with Drain Soul (DS).

You get many more procs and can spend them into instant SB that hit very hard. It gives you a lot more mobility, gives you something to react to. It feels very good.

With the Soul Harvester tree, there’s a bug with Sataiel’s Ambition: If you get to 2 stacks of Nightfall, casting your first buffed SB/DS will trigger the Demonic Soul and it consumes your 2nd stack of Nightfall, without casting an additional SB/DS.

  1. Absolute Corruption (AC) and Siphon Life (SL)

SL is partially bugged, the +20% damage to corruption works, but not the healing part. With Wither being OP and likely to be extremely powerful after tuning, the healing part will probably have to be capped somehow, especially for AOE situations.

AC remains the same. It doesn’t work with Wither at the time, only the 15% damage amp, but Wither isn’t permanent.

I think just a 5% damage amp difference between the 2 talents is not enough to justify having to manage an extra DoT, even though the Hellcaller tree has some incentive to picking SL.

  1. Volatile Agony

New talent, doesn’t work at all right now.

Really cool and well thought-out talent. The devs want us to refresh Agony mid-pull manually in M+, but now we get a really cool reward for doing it. It’s basically Soul Flame but uncapped when you refresh agony. The 10s threshold is very good.

  1. Dark Virtuosity

With the powerful additions to the tree, this is just too weak and will never be picked. It’s competing against much better talents for the same pathing, even if you go Soul Harvester that has a heavy focus on SB/DS.

  1. Empowered Unstable Affliction (UA)

New talent, very cool and powerful. Casting UA faster is great for target swapping, and UA generating shards like Agony is super super powerful and useful. Works great.

  1. Kindled Malice

Just a passive damage increase to Rapture and Corruption. For Hellcaller, Wither is just so powerful you want to pick this.

  1. Cull The weak

New talent, very very powerful for AOE, allows Rapture to scale on big packs even if mobs only have 1 or 2 DoTs on them.

  1. Improved Shadowbolt

New choice node with DS, really cool talent. Casting SB with it feels very good, makes the spec feel a lot less sluggish, and with Nightfall it gives you a lot of extra mobility.

This talent feels kind of mandatory for the Soul Harvester tree, as you just get a lot of Nightfall procs, and we’re drowning in shards we want to spend, so we don’t have time to fully channel DS and fully benefit from it with Nightfall.

  1. Sacrolash’s Dark Strike

Just a 1 point talent node now. It’s the 3rd talent in the upper section of the tree that buffs Corruption.

It’s hard to see why we need 3 different talents following each other buffing the same spell.

This is probably one of the weakest talent in the tree now and it’s the only path to a new very powerful (and boring) talent, Summoner’s Embrace. It feeels bad to have to spec into it.

  1. Vile Taint

Please tweak Vile Taint so that it doesn’t replace manually applied curse of tongues/weakness (especially amplified ones) with a short useless curse of exhaustion. This prevents Affliction Warlocks from using utility curses in M+, when it’s THE curse spec.

Either remove the curse of exhaustion application, or prevent it from overriding existing curses, or replace it with the old original slow of Vile Taint.

  1. Relinquished:

New talent, increases the shard generation of Agony by a lot. I wish we had that on live servers. Helps the spec not feel sluggish and every shards not feel so rare and expensive.

Contributes to the drowning in shards currently on Alpha, especially for the Hellcaler tree.

  1. Malediction

New talent, +10% crit chance on your main DoTs, really powerful, we have +5% crit chance in the class tree as well. You also get +10% crit chance in the hellcaller tree. You crit a lot on alpha.

  1. Summoner’s Embrace and Grimoire of Sacrifice

Now a choice node, either you sac your pet or you get +3% damage.

I’m glad I no longer have to sacrifice my pet as affliction. Summoner’s Embrace is just very powerful, feels mandatory, and it’s stuck behind Sacrolash, which feels bad.

  1. Contagion

New talent, +30% crit damage to your main DoTs that already have +15% (+25% with the Hellcaller tree) crit chance baseline, just good stuff.

  1. Cunning Cruelty

New talent, this talent is visually quite cool, you randommly launch extra SB, this works on DS ticks, not just DS casts, so that’s really good. Pretty cool in AOE, as it incentivizes you to use your Nightfall procs.

It also has nice synergies with the Soul Harvester tree where you get a lot more *Nightfall procs, so you get more volleys, etc.

The main issue with this talent is the pathing, this talent is the most direct way to Soul Rot. This talent is essentialy a cleave/AOE talent, but we’ll have to pick it in ST, as Soul Harvester NEEDS Soul Rot in all situations (and Hellcaller maybe too).

  1. Inevitable Demise

This talent has scaling issues, it needs something else to see some play in PVE. Either it needs to make Drain Life scale with mastery, and/or it needs to include a Drain Life channel speed bonus, and or a modifier to gain stacks faster when you just have 1 target, just something.

This talent is very cool in theory, but it’s just not competitive at all. 2 points in it is unjustifiable, and it’s the only other path to Soul Rot which is an issue. Soul Rot is the only reason why we’d want to pick Inevitable Demise in the first place.

  1. Shadow Emrabce

I wish this talent would be removed, I’d have rather kept Siphon Life as an extra DoT to manage and get rid of this.

However, its place in the tree makes a lot more sense, you no longer have to spec into it. We get a lot more Nightfall procs, especially as Soul Harvester. If you play Improved SB instead of DS you only have 2 stacks to maintain.

It feels a lot less punitive and annoying to maintain than on live servers.
So pretty good changes, I don’t mind Shadow Embrace on alpha as much.

  1. Tormented Crescendo

Minor, but this talent still has the visual effect from the Sepulcher tier set, glowing yellow glitter, it’s just completely out of place with the esthetics of the spec.

Also Tormented Crescendo procs also consume Feast of Souls procs (and vice versa) from the Soul Harvester tree, clearly a bug, needs to be fixed. It’s not a big deal to be robbed of a few free Rapture currently on alpha, but when shard generation will be tuned, it will be one.

  1. Death’s Embrace

It’s very weak. The drain life healing bonus part to it feels out of place, and should probably be added to Inevitable Demise. The damage amp below 20% HP is very low.

This talent is mandatory because we want to get to Soul Rot, so it feels bad to have to spend a point into this (and Cunning Cruelty or Inevitable Demise).

  1. Soul Rot:

This talent is too hard to reach given its importance

I know the devs want 4 nice symmetrical branches at the bottom of the tree, but it shouldn’t be the priority.

We have to spend points in 2 talents that we don’t really or always want to get to it.
Soul Rot should at the very least swap places with Death’s Embrace, ideally with Inevitable Demise.

Dark Harvest could then take Soul Rot’s spot. And maybe a super powerful Inevitable Demise where Dark Harvest currently is.

→ Soul Rot is still not listed in the Affliction Mastery tooltip as benefitting from the stat.

  1. Withering Bolt

It makes a lot of sense where it is, after Shadow Embrace, clearly a very ST focus branch of the tree, but no longer mandatory, very nice.

  1. Haunt

Becomes a lot more relevant with the Soul Harvester tree, since Haunt will grant you Nightfall, which is fantastic to apply Shadow Embrace on pull, and easily maintain it without thinking about it.

  1. Oblivion

First this talent is bugged, it’s a 3s channel that is not affected by haste, it has to be.
I think this talent is meant as a bursty target swapping tool for affliction, which is really nice and convenient and could have a place.

It’s something that affliction could use in M+ especially, but it’s at the bottom of the ST focused talent branch, so IDK if it’s in the right spot.

This talent will probably need to scale with mastery or something, or in the long run casting 2 raptures instead of this will just do more damage in the same amount of time for the same amount of shards.

It has no interactions with spec/hero talents, maybe it should have the same than rapture?

  1. Haunted Soul

No longer stuck behind a 2 point talent that does nothing. Basically you’ll always want this and it’s really easy to get to.

  1. Malevolent Visionanry

You can now spend 1 point to make your Darkglare feel a lot stronger, but only in ST damage.

I think this talent needs to have a small AOE component to it as well. For example the main target takes the big damage proc and other targets with a DoT take a fraction of that damage when you summon it.

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  • Main issues with Affliction in my opinion
  1. Shard Generation

We have too many of them, we’re just spamming Malefic Rapture, which just devalues the spell and we don’t really know what Rapture is anymore, a spender? a filler? In AOE we’re just swimming in shards.

More shards than on live is very very welcome, it’s very important, but this is too much, especially for Hellcaller. It’s a first draft, I don’t expect shard generation to remain as it is.

  1. Soul Rot position in the tree

Soul Rot is too hard to reach, should be higher up the tree or stuck behind better talents.

  1. Multiple talents doing the same thing

3 different talents in the spec tree buffing corruption following each others for slightly different values and a different amount of points.

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Overall the spec doesn’t feel sluggish like it usually does, with faster UA, faster SB, more procs to react to, less DoT refreshes. It feels a bit too spammy because of the shard generation and constantly spamming rapture, but that will be fixed.

There are tons of good options in the tree, you almost want to pick everything. Flexibility in the bottom of the tree is fantastic. No longer have to play without a pet, spec is a bit simpler which is welcome.

The spec feels a lot more flexible, I’m overall very happy with this first iteration.

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  • HELLCALLER HERO TREE
  1. Wither

Wither is bonkers powerful, especially for Affliction as it scales with your Mastery. As Affliction on alpha, you can just spam Wither to pull and kill everything. The initial damage on application probably needs to be tuned down.

→ The affliction mastery tooltip needs to be adjusted when playing Hellcaller and mention Wither as being affected by the stat.

Instant Immolation for Destruction feels really good.

Wither doesn’t work with Internal Combustion nor Channel Demonfire in the destruction spec tree. It does work with all other talents that buff Immolation.

  1. Xalan’s Ferocity

I understand this is a tuning knob kind of talent. It’s very weak when you compare it to the sheer power of the other talents in this tree.

  1. Blackened Soul

When you cast Seed of Corruption/Rapture or Chaos Bolt/Rain of Fire, your targets with Wither gain a stack. Above 8, it becomes “acute” starts consuming 1 stack every second until it reaches 1, dealing additional damage on top of the Wither ticks.

The “acute” part often bugs out. Very often I can go wayyyy above 8 stacks and it doesn’t start consuming stacks. If I just build stacks with wither, I can build stacks forever. Also sometimes it randomly stops being acute even when it’s not down to 1 stack, usually when I can maintain 10+ stacks.

It’s not a big deal, it’s not game-breaking, but it makes the stack system a bit confusing.

Affliction generates a lot more stacks than destruction, due to the insane shard generation. I can keep Wither acute as affliction for a whole minute if I get a bit lucky.

  1. Xalan’s Cruelty

Tuning knob talent, this is extremely powerful. This is +10% crit chance. We have +5% crit change in the class tree. Destro has +3% in the spec tree. Affliction now has +10% for its DoTs in the spec tree.

It will probably get nerfed.

  1. Curse of the Satyr

Basically this saves us 1 keybind, and your curse of tongues now lasts 2 min, which is nice in M+.

It does work with Amplify Curse, though the curse of tongues part doesn’t work yet. It’s not a great talent, it’s not bad either.

For Affliction, Vile Taint removes it and replaces it with a short Curse of Exhaustion. Please fix Vile Taint so that it stops replacing manually applied curses.

  1. Aura of enfeeblement

Probably one of the few bad talent in the warlock hero trees. This is not well thought-out. At best this is a PVP talent that got lost on its way.

It will be completely unnoticeable in PVE, and you will NEVER use Unending Resolve to trigger this effect. No interaction with ampliy curse either.

The first version of this talent, where casting curse of tongues/weakness on a mob also affected surrounding NPCs was much much better, and should be brought back.

  1. Hatefury Ritual and Bleakhart Tactics

Wither does a lot more damage than Blackened Souls, so Hatefury Rituals is just a lot better right now, especially for Affliction, but I suspect for Destruction too.

Destruction can pick talents to extend Wither, and Wither being instant instead of Immolation, it’s not too bothersome to refresh it more often.

Wither doesn’t work with Absolute Corruption in the affliction tree yet.

  1. Zevrim’s Resilience and Illhoof’s Design
  • Zevrim’s Resilience

It’s just bad right now. The healing is insignificant. if you play well you use your Dark Pact before a big burst of damage that will likely consume the whole shield, so the healing would be nonexistent.

The healing needs to be buffed massively and probably last 20s, no matter if Dark Pact is still active or not.

  • Illhoof’s Design

It’s bugged right now. It just removes 10% of your HP without increasing your Soul Leech shield. So you actually get less HP and less shield.

In theory this is a cool talent, but when i think about it, I think it’s actually a survivability nerf more than anything:

This talent gets us a bigger shield pool to fill. Only the warlock can fill it. This talent doesn’t increase our ability to fill that shield.

So it means that on pull yes we’ll have 5% more HP in shield, but for the rest of the fight, where our Soul Leech is constantly being consumed and never allowed to build up, we’ll just have 10% less HP.

This talent also needs to buff our Soul Leech shield generation, double the passive regeneration we get from Demon Skin, and or double the amount of shield from dealing damage, from 3 to 6%.

  1. Mark of Xavius

Very powerful for both Destruction and Affliction. It’s +25% damage to Wither for destruction, +20% to Agony for affliction.

The combo part of the talent is bugged and doesn’t work. Casting back to back Wither or Agony doesn’t apply them to an additional target.

Casting Agony/Wither also lights up those spells on your action bars, which is confusing more than anything.
In Affliction it lights up Agony AND Wither, when it should be just Agony.
Casting Vile Taint or Cataclysm also lights up Agony and Wither in your action bars when it’s not supposed to.

  1. Seeds of their demise

Incentivizes you to refresh Wither very late. 4s is actually lower than the actual Pandemic window of the DoT, with or without Hatefury Rituals, so I wouldn’t mind the threshold be raised to 5/6s remaining.

It’s the main incentive for Affliction to play Siphon Life instead of Absolute Corruption with this tree, as this is a very good source of Blackened Soul stacks. Will blackened soul deal enough damage compared to Wither to justify it?

  1. Mark of Peroth’arn

Insanely powerful talent, Wither for Destruction and Agony for Affliction dealing damage 40% faster (but still the same DoT duration) is very very good for shard generation and for damage.

This talent is one of the reasons Affliction is drowning in shards as Hellcaller. Affliction got 3 talents that increased its shard generation, which is awesome, but tuning is required there between the spec and the hero tree.

Destruction is also swimming in shards in AOE with this, whether you play Inferno or Cataclysm, as it is a lot simpler for destruction to spread Wither, since it’s instant.

The Blackened Soul damage increase seems meaningless, especially for Destruction that’s struggling to build up stacks (in ST at least).

  1. Malevolence

Amazing looking and powerful 1min CD. You get a shadowy appearance with the horns from the old metamorphosis form from before Legion.

The damage you deal to target with Wither is good for burst, 15% haste for 20s helps both Affliction and Destruction not feel sluggish. It’s great.

It doesn’t have a sound effect and no clear visual effect on targets it hit when you cast it, so the fact that it costs a GCD feels bad.

I think this would be better if it was off the GCD, but we’ll see.

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  • SOUL HARVESTER HERO TREE
  1. Demonic Soul

It looks really cool, big shadowy figure that spawns above you very often.

For Demonology, I think it spawns too often, to the point where it just gets annoying. It kind of bugs because it hasn’t finished its animation and yet it’s supposed to respawn already.

It’s also quite big, you can’t see through it, it has a portal on the ground effect that hides what’s below/behind you. I don’t know how to solve this (or if it needs solving), it’s not as big a problem for Affliction as it doesn’t spawn so often, but this could create issues I think.

So sometimes when you generate a shard as Affliction or Demonology, you get a proc, your next Hand of Gul’dan or Rapture costs 1 shard less (so it’s free for Aff), and the figure spawns and deals a big burst of damage to your target.

This proc also consumes Tormented Crescendo proc that you might have, and vice versa, it’s a bug that needs to be fixed.

  1. Necrolyte Teachings

For Affliction it’s a big buff to SB/DS and Nightfall, a point further down the tree makes Haunt give you Nightfall so there’s a nice synergy, a bigger emphasis on your filler where Hellcaller was more about your DoTs.

For Demonology it’s a bit less interesting, bonus damage to SB, and the 2 Demonbolts from Power Siphon deal a bit more damage. It’s fine, but no extra synergy. Some incentive to go get Sacrificed Souls at the bottom of the demonology spec tree (if it remains).

  1. Soul Anathema

When you get demonic soul and cast a spender, the ghost/figure/demon/soul also applies a dot on all targets hit by Rapture/Hand of Gul’dan

The DoT doesn’t do a lot of damage. HOWEVER, this DoT counts towards Malefic Rapture Damage, which I imagine is a bug?

Also, since Malefic Rapture is bugged on alpha and pulls everything 100 yards around the caster, it also applies the DoT to all those mobs.

  1. Demoniac’s Fervor

Demonic Soul deals more damage to your main target. It does a ludicrous amount of damage.

  1. Gorebound Fortitude and Friends in Dark Places
  • Gorebound Fortitude

It’s very good and even better now that we have pact of gluttony in the class tree and Healthstones usable every minute in combat.

Very often we pick Soulburn just for its Healthstone benefit, with this talent we might save a point in the class tree if we want to.

  • Friends in Dark Places

it’s a +25% buff to your ark Pact shield, which is amazing, however it’s bugged on alpha and doesn’t work.

  1. Shared Fate and Feast of Souls

Those are 2 on-death effect when killing something, but the talent just below allows you to proc them even when nothing is dying.

  • Shared Fate

It’s extremely powerful in AOE, but it’s not clear when it activates, there is a visual effect (Soulflame pulsing effect on a mob), but there’s no debuff you can track or anything.
It needs something that we can track to see that it’s activating.

  • Feast of Souls

It gives you the initial buff of the tree, more cheaper or free spenders, so more occasions to spawn the demonic soul, deal more damage, etc.

  1. Eternal Servitude and Spirited Away
  • Eternal servitude

It’s ok, the only real scenario where you want to be able to summon yout pet again and again is if you’re constantly dying, which is not a great sign. It’s just a bit of QoL.

The funny thing is if you pick that and Fel Pact in the class tree, Fel domination has no CD. Time for pet-weaving???

  • Spirited Away

This looks more like a trap than anything else? Burning Rush is amazing BECAUSE it has no CD, so 1min CD is very hard to swallow. The damage part of Burning Rush is very often insignificant.

To justify a 1min CD, the movement speed bonus should be bigger (it’s barely better than Fiendish Stride), would probably have to be off the GCD, maybe last longer than 6s, and/or allow casting while moving.

Or you can keep it at that power level, but then the CD needs to be drastically reduced, 30s grand maximum, even above 20s CD is hard to imagine.

→ There are situations where warlocks don’t bother taking Fel Domination, so you could end up with a talent node where either you pick a CD reduction for a spell you don’t have, or pick a nerfed version of your main mobility tool.

  1. Sataiel’s Ambition

This talent is heavily bugged for Affliction.

It works as intended for Demonology, every time you consume a Demonic Core proc, the soul appears and does an attack, that’s why it feels very cluttered visually for Demonology.

For Affliction, it doesn’t work at all with Drain Soul talented.
It only works with Shadow Bolt IF you have 2 stacks of Nightfall queued up, then the first Shadow Bolt triggers the Soul and your 2nd Nightfall stack is erased.
If you cast Shadow Bolt and only have 1 stack of Nightfall, it never procs.

  1. Quietus

Nice synergy with the talent choice node 6, consuming Nightfall or Demonic Core has a CHANCE to trigger Shared Fate (AOE damage) or Feast of Souls (cheaper/free spender + big demonic soul damage).

No need to kill stuff to get the benefit of those talents, really nice.

  1. Mantle of the Harvester

For affliction this talent is your nightfall proc generator. Corruption deals damage 25% faster (but Dot duration is the same), and casting Haunt also grants Nightfall.

So you get a lot more procs, more demonic soul procs, etc. This also means that Soul Harvester affliction is constantly reacting to procs, and it makes Improved Shadow Bolt a lot more attractive than Drain Soul because you don’t really have the time to channel a full Drain Soul with everything going on.

Your SB/DS also trigger Tormented Crescendo, so free raptures, etc. sometimes you’re just alternating between instant SB and and instant raptures for a few GCDs. It feels cool, it’s also something we’re not used to.

You also trigger SB volley with the new spec talent Cunning Cruelty, etc. Just a lot of synergies all around.

Playing Absolute Corruption as Soul Harvester Affliction seems like a no-brainer, to give you a lot more GCDs to do what you have to do.

For demonology it’s just imp damage and bit more chance to get demonic cores when imploding imps.

  1. Shadow of Death

When casting Demonic Tyrant/Nether Portal for demo or Soul Rot for aff you get a 15s buff, nice Dark Soul purple effect on you.

All your spenders spawn the demonic soul, but the weaker version of Sataiel’s Ambition, which really needs a tooltip clarification about which soul we’re spawning.

It makes Soul Rot mandatory for affliction with this tree, and Soul Rot is currently too hard to get to in the spec tree.

You just want to spam HoG or Rapture as much as possible during those 15s as the demonic soul deals massive damage. You’ll want to cast 1 or 2 shards HoG during those 15s for additional procs.

This talent might make Soulbound Tyrant (gettting shards when summoning the tyrant) a lot more attractive.