I want Kalgan... *Updated 10/4*

#0 - Oct. 4, 2006, 4:10 a.m.

So, I had this fairly long post about how the mages keep getting their questions answered (by Kalgan) and that we have no such Blue representing us. And I made a plee for someone to come answer our questions and after about 15 minutes of writing the post, it turns out the forums had logged me out, and after requesting I login my post was missing. So here I go trying to ask them again:

1. Why was Lasting Afflictions removed? Its was a very nice boost to the Affliction Warlocks repertoire and I'm just curious as to why the Devs felt it needed to be removed.

EDIT: Kalgan has informed us that indeed the Affliction warlocks had too high of a damage to mana ratio and that Lasting Affliction's removal succesfully corrected this balance.

2. What is the role of the Fel Guard? Will he replace any current pet or simply be a "do everything" pet? Will he be a viable and useful pet in raids? Will there be a Demonic Sacrifice added for the Fel Guard?

EDIT: Kalgan has claimed that the Fel Guard will replace the voidwalker but will add a much higher amount of damage. He has not yet commented on how the Fel Guard will perform in raids (or rather how well the raids will be designed to allow the Fel Guard).

3. Can you tell us more about how pets will scale with gear? Is the scale perhaps a percentage of certain stats, like stam, int, and +dmg?

EDIT: Kalgan confirmed that pets will scale according to an as-yet undefined percentage of stats, among them all three listed above (though I am dubious about the effects of +dmg).

4. How will the new Crit Rating and Resilience system work? How will talents that increase Crit chance and bonus damage be affected by this?

EDIT: We can assume that the +crit chance will react the same as before the expansion. The change comes in the Resilience system which decreases the chance an enemy will critically hit you, be it with spell or weapon, and once you are critically hit also reduces the damage bonus of the critical hit.

5. With the changes to the Crit system, will there be any other game mechanics altered that we should know about, like resists?

EDIT: Resists (and presumably other game mechanics) will remain the same.

6. How do the devs feel the new Destruction tree and the addition of Incinerate will affect Shadowbolt? It seems that some of the higher talents in the Destruction tree affect Shadowbolt, yet incinerate is arguably more powerful than shadowbolt with those talents. The only point I can see using shadowbolt at that point is against enemies with high fire resists.

EDIT: The Developers intended Incinerate to be a viable fire alternative to Shadowbolt, but have yet to comment on the actual balance of the spells in the current testing phase.

7. Why do the Devs insist on keeping the Improved Firestone talent? I understand that firestone can be useful somewhat when leveling up, but at level 60 there are much, much better items to use in its place. It just seems to me that it would be a waste of talents and I doubt very many warlock use it.

EDIT: They do intend to alter this talent, however, the Developer team is more worried with other talents and has this talent low on the priority list.

Kalgan

#30 - Oct. 5, 2006, 2:11 a.m.

Q u o t e:
So, I had this fairly long post about how the mages keep getting their questions answered (by Kalgan) and that we have no such Blue representing us. And I made a plee for someone to come answer our questions and after about 15 minutes of writing the post, it turns out the forums had logged me out, and after requesting I login my post was missing. So here I go trying to ask them again:

1. Why was Lasting Afflictions removed? Its was a very nice boost to the Affliction Warlocks repertoire and I'm just curious as to why the Devs felt it needed to be removed.

2. What is the role of the Fel Guard? Will he replace any current pet or simply be a "do everything" pet? Will he be a viable and useful pet in raids? Will there be a Demonic Sacrifice added for the Fel Guard?

3. Can you tell us more about how pets will scale with gear? Is the scale perhaps a percentage of certain stats, like stam, int, and +dmg?

4. How will the new Crit Rating and Resilience system work? How will talents that increase Crit chance and bonus damage be affected by this?

5. With the changes to the Crit system, will there be any other game mechanics altered that we should know about, like resists?

6. How do the devs feel the new Destruction tree and the addition of Incinerate will affect Shadowbolt? It seems that some of the higher talents in the Destruction tree affect Shadowbolt, yet incinerate is arguably more powerful than shadowbolt with those talents. The only point I can see using shadowbolt at that point is against enemies with high fire resists.

7. Why do the Devs insist on keeping the Improved Firestone talent? I understand that firestone can be useful somewhat when leveling up, but at level 60 there are much, much better items to use in its place. It just seems to me that it would be a waste of talents and I doubt very many warlock use it.

1. After considerable testing, we found that it was one compounding factor too many. Affliction build damage and efficiency was too far beyond the balance point we were trying to achieve. Sometimes we go too far. =[

2. I suppose you can think of the Fel Guard as a replacement to the Voidwalker (for the most part). We've given him the key tools the voidwalker, and more. As one would expect, his damage is also pretty impressive with the new pet scaling.

3. Yes, the pets scale as a percentage of key warlock stats (like the ones you mention).

4. Resilience decreases your chance to be crit, and reduces the amount of damage crits do to you (both effects apply to spell and melee crits). Talents that affect crit chance still do what they always did, they increase your crit %.

5. Resists haven't been changed.

6. Incinerate is intended to be a viable fire alternative to Shadowbolt in terms of dps and efficiency. We're ok with it if one turns out a bit stronger than the other if you're specce'd more in one direction than the other.

7. Yes, Improved Firestone needs help. It hasn't been a high-priority issue though, if you don't like the talent, don't spend points on it.

Kalgan

#43 - Oct. 5, 2006, 2:31 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Thanks for the update Kalgan. One thing though, why was the cast time added to UA?

There was too much of a disparity between cast time requirements for affliction warlocks versus destruction warlocks. So, although affliction locks still have far less of a stand-still requirement relative to destruction locks, increasing the UA cast time and adding the backlash talent to destruction helps reduce the discrepancy somewhat.

In addition, we felt that UA's side-effect was strong enough that without a cast time an affliction lock could too easily keep an enemy team peppered with UA's with little risk to themselves.

The above were contributing to a trend we were seeing in our alpha test toward mostly affliction locks(particularly for pvp).