#1 - April 3, 2012, 8:07 p.m.
Limitations:
In the beta we can’t use dot timers which given the current UI is a handicap. Numbers are being tuned so, while I will be talking about them in general, they are not the main focus.
The warlock rotation (well, the way the prioritization worked) in Cataclysm was fluid and smooth, while DPS was lower than it should have been for all specs and the lack of burst REALLY hurt us, the rotation itself was solid.
The MOP structure attempted to “spice things up” by making shards a mandatory DPS resource but unlike most resource mechanics the only way to get back shards is using our low DPS execute spell Drain soul. This leaves us in a bad state, as we never have shards for QOL issues such as instant pet summoning.
1. Mana regen is badly bugged ATM, or is wholly unacceptable.
2. Warlock health regen is basically gone; our normal methods for gaining health in combat are tuned far too low or are bugged.
3. I feel like I am always out of mana, shards and often low on health (not ‘or’). This doesn’t feel like resource management so much as constant resource starvation and it’s frustrating in the extreme.
4. Drain soul still conflicts with Soul swap, is really awkward to use, and barely qualifies as a marginal DPS increase in the best of cases. – Can’t blizzard come up with something better than this?
5. Not being able to regen shards between fights is really, really, painful – we need soul harvest back desperately
6. Shard management simply isn’t fun, it feels like a complete and unnecessary hassle.
7. Given nightfall’s mechanic if we have full shards the proc is wasted…. Completely. This is rarely an issue but can be annoying when it occurs on the first few ticks.How to fix it:
1. Get rid of soulburn haunt and make it a normal spell with a long CD that can also proc as an instant from nightfall. Malific grasp should also proc nightfall.
2. Warlock self-healing and mana regen needs to be increased from the current levels immensely
3. We shouldn’t need to refresh dots as often as we have to, I play a shadow priest as well and the mind flay interweaving was (in Cat) far more fluid than dealing with DOT’s in MOP
4. We are over penalized in movement fights given MG’s mechanic.
5. Switching from one channeled filler to another based on a resource or the target mobs
health feels awkward. I’m not sure Drain soul is worth using as we loose 100% haste on 3 Dots.
6. Targets dying under soul swap or drain soul should allow us to soul swap the dots on that target (at death) to our next target automatically. This keeps our execute mechanic (if it makes DPS sense to use it) and allows us the same benefit of soul swap.
You are always out of shards for haunt or don’t have them for other things and switching to Drain soul for shards is an awful mechanic. I don’t feel like I’m managing a resource so much as feeling like I don’t have enough – ever
Overall I see blizzard moving to a dual resource system for most classes (dk, Pally, Shadow priest) and I'm not sure I really like it. On my DK it seems to flow pretty naturally, on the affliction lock it feels like its a forced imposition and doesn't fit well.
With destro, while we need more ways to generate embers it's an interesting change, but I'm not liking it for affliction.
