Posted by Aphroditi | 11 comments
Rogues Nerfed, Locks Buffed, Wut?
Yay, I don’t care the magnitude, any buff is good in my book. Ghostcrawler recently alerted the community that there would be some minor buffs to warlocks raid dps across all specs. A review of our raid dps has been long over due, and I’m sure all of you have been frustrated with rogues and mages dishing upwards of 7k dps in 5m pugs, and you left somewhere around the 3-4k range 
Zarhym has even gone so far as to elaborate what some of the proposed changes might be, however keep in mind these changes aren’t %100 guaranteed.
And what makes these buffs even sweeter, is the fact that Rogues are getting NERFED! Warlock Buff + Rogue Nerf = WIN. I will relish this moment, short though it is, and start to dance uncontrollably, that is until a rogue comes up behind me and proceeds to stun lock me without the courtesy of one defensive gcd. 
Essentially Rogues dps is a little high and Warlock dps is a little low, and by little I mean a lot. Source here. I was theorycrafting in my head some ideas that could work for PVE dps that wouldn’t throw PvP numbers out of whack, then, Enter Zarhym.
As Ghostcrawler mentioned in the “Balance Adjustments” thread for 3.3, we would like to buff warlock PvE damage for all three talent trees. We have a few changes in mind we can share with you and welcome your feedback. That being said, of course these changes are not yet implemented and are subject to revision or reversal before the next minor patch.
Affliction: While some warlocks will no doubt disagree, we think the damage output of Affliction in PvP is pretty good. Therefore, we want a buff that will increase sustained damage after a ramp-up period. The specific change we have in mind is to allow Shadow Embrace to stack up to 3 times for a total of a 15% damage bonus. The current healing debuff would change to 10% per stack.
Demonology: We want to double the damage bonus of Demonic Pact granted the warlock. To avoid making this an all-around buff to raid damage, however, the damage bonus provided to other players would remain unchanged.
Destruction: We want to double the damage bonus provided by Empowered Imp.
As a further buff to both Demonology and Affliction, we’re testing out the effects of doubling the damage bonus of Improved Shadow Bolt in the Destruction tree.
Again, these are preliminary ideas. These changes might be revised or reverted before going live. Just the same, these are not necessarily the only changes we are willing to make and your feedback is appreciated.
Empowered Imp Buff
The talent would increase the imp’s damage by 10/20/30%, up from 5/10/15%. The other effect of the talent would remain unchanged.
Demonic Pact Buff
At top rank, Demonic Pact will provide a base 10% spell damage increase for warlocks. The buff applied to party or raid members remains unchanged.
Changes in the next minor patch
One thing to keep in mind is that these changes are intended to be made in the next minor patch. It’s much more risky to make drastic changes in a minor patch when we’re concerned with it being released in a very timely manner. We’re allowed to experiment more in major content patches when we have more testing time, including by the public.
Smaller tweaks to particular coefficients are better, more immediate adjustments we can make to improve the performance of a specialization without more drastically altering talent functionality with little testing. Taking that risk tends to lead to bigger adjustments in the other direction in the future, which is almost always perceived very negatively by the community — as I would assume could be demonstrated by what you’ve written in quotes.
We try to avoid the practice of “the devs giveth and the devs taketh away” whenever possible.
Another thing to consider is that we’re talking about taking steps to keep all three specializations of a pure DPS class viable in PvE, even if it means some of these steps cannot, unfortunately, be taken in the next minor patch. There are other pure DPS classes a lot further away from having three viable PvE specialization choices.
At a glance, these look like changes that will definitely keep the PvP damage the same as most of the changes are to talents usually only included in PvE builds, with the exception of Demonic Pact, which is sometimes included in Demonology PvP specs.
Overall, this is a straight buff, no hidden nerfs here. However I’m not sure if these will be enough. I’m not big on crunching numbers, Ill take a peek over at EJ for that later, but for now it seems like these changes are.. Meh. They don’t really make me feel cool, all they are, are double damage added to a few only partly fun talents. I guess that is just me being picky, In reality I am just glad we got something, and it will be cool to see how these buffs turn out.
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