WoW - World of Warcraft Beta: The Pandaria Warlock Changes - Demon and Spell Overhauls

The Warlock has been one of my favorite classes for the last few years. Though it has gone through its ups and downs, I believe that in Pandaria they have made the Warlock gameplay the best it has ever been, even better than my favorite time for them - Burning Crusade.

Warlocks are getting a (much needed, in my opinion) overhaul in Pandaria. With Talents being not specific to specs you get a much more diverse, enjoyable playstyle that matches your needs and wants as a Warlock. If you like demons but still like Destruction, you can grab the Grimoire of Supremacy which gives you 6 new demons to choose from, all of which are pictured and described in this article.

An interesting change is that there is a secondary resource now for Demonology, Affliction, and Destruction - Demonic Fury, Soul Shards, and Burning Embers. This is mostly a good thing, allowing you to use secondary spells not by cooldown but by energy gain.

For a complete list of talents you can look at the Blizzard website, but I would like to mention some very exciting talents that I was blown away by.

Harvest Life:
Do you like Drain Life but feel it is too... small? Single target is for wusses. Lets make it all enemies within 15 yards! Seriously. All enemies within 15 yards are effected by your drain life now with this Talent.

Grimoires!
This talent trio is at 75; you get to choose between Supremacy which gives you 6 different demons, Service which summons a second demon for 30 seconds on a 2 minute, and Sacrifice which empowers spells by 15% and regenerates health for you for 15 minutes - keep sacrificing demons for 15 second doubling boosts of this spell.

Mortal Coil.
Okay, this was more of a pet peeve of mine; Warlocks and Death Knights having the same spell name/graphic. This is Death Coil but different looking.

The Final Tier of Talents:
Archimonde's Vengeance causes enemies to suffer 30% of the damage you take for 10 seconds every 1 minute.
Kil'jaeden's Cunning gives you the ability to cast and channel while moving for 10 seconds every minute, but to make it less overpowered it slows your movement and cast speed slightly.
Mannoroth's Fury increases the radius of your area of effect spells by 200%.

There are a plethora of new spells and glyphs for Warlocks. Some are really good spells, some are just handy things to have such as the Warlock Mount Water Walking pictured below.

Spells:
General: All pets do the about same amount of DPS, leaving you to choose your pet based on personal preference and utility

General: All specs use Shadowbolt, which changes to a new spell based on your spec choice at 42, now a 1.7 sec cast with slightly less damage than the 2.5 version

General: Curse of Tongues and Weakness have been combined

General: Soulstone is a targeted spell not spell to summon a Soulstone anymore, and Healthstones have 3 charges like a Mana Gem.

Demonology: Wild Imps summons a wild imp when you use Shadow Bolt with an internal cooldown of 18 seconds. Every imp casts about 10 firebolts before disappearing.

Demonology: Hand of Gul'dan changed. It now summons a meteor on the target area and inflicts them with Shadowflame, reducing movement speed and doing damage. Depending on the energy you have the more times you can use it in a row without waiting on a cooldown.

Demonology: Metamorphosis. Same transformation but it slowly consumes Demonic Fury, which you can keep gaining while in this form.

Destruction: Chaotic Energy passively regenerates mana 625% faster.

Destruction: Overall, the rotation has been simplified and depending on the Embers you have the more damage you can slap people around with.

Affliction: Soulburn was moved into this school.

Affliction: Malefic Grasp is a nice channeled DoT spell.

Glyphs:
Nightmares: Steed can water walk, leaving a trail of flames on the water.

Soul Swap copies DoTs to next target rather than transferring, but gives a 30 sec CD to it.

Verdant Spheres: Soul Shards are changed into Verdant Spheres.

Misc: There are a ton of glyphs but they are changing so often.

This is pretty much everything on the beta for Warlocks right now. Having condensed spells nicely and smoothed out some problem areas Warlocks were complaining about before, spell rotations are looking a lot better and I find myself enjoying Warlocks a little more than I have recently. I hope that they continue to work on warlocks, as some of the work has been lackluster at times (for instance, Destruction Warlock and Elemental Shaman had the same rotation and spells for a while..) and it is good to see things moving on and moving up.