Dur
12:14 PM
So, I'm at work and I log onto my warlock because I want to see something for a test I plan on doing, but it was reliant upon what my stats looked like under certain conditions... well if that wasn't confusing enough for you, I equip the pvp gear I want and look at my paperdoll, and the resilience seems reasonably low considering I am wearing 2x felweave and 3x dreadweave. So, after a little exploring I figure out that I'm not equiping the right trinkets or my wand.
Fine, so I slap my wand on and put on my trinkets for pvp and it still seems a bit low. I look at my (what I think is the) Medallion of the Horde and notice that it has a 5 minute cooldown note appended to the description, and there's no resilience on it at all. "WTF" I think to myself here at work spazzing out because I am looking through my bags and not seeing the Medallion version with resilience and a decent cooldown. "BAH, it must be at the bank... fine" So I mount up and head to the bank.
Nope... not there either. By now, I'm getting rather worried, because I did delete something the other day which required me to type "DELETE" before it would actually delete it... but I don't think it was the medallion. Anyway, after a long time agonizing over whether I deleted it or not, I decided that I may have never actually purchased it on my warlock to begin with. A 2 minute cooldown versus a 5 minute cooldown is not the end of the world, and 20 resilience will not keep me going much more than my current amount anyway, as it would knock me up to 442 resilience.
Okay, aside from that bit of shananagans, I decided to try out a crit-heavier-rapeguard spec. I don't actually know exactly how much crit I will have after a respec, but I have done some guesstimation and decided that about 11% paperdoll crit sounds about right. So, there are some talent points that I can switch around from the build. I decided that putting points into Demonic Resilience might be a waste. Don't get me wrong, that ability is glorious, however I am usually not the prime target when it comes to 2s matches, so having the ability to take less damage when I usually don't take damage until it's too late anyway seems like a waste. Additionally, the full 3 points in the talent that says "when you gain mana, your pet gains mana" might be a bit much because my pet only needs mana for cleave (maybe not... it's not a huge boost, but if he's going to have mana problems with this spec, I'll turn it off) and intercept, so I only will put 1 point in it. That will mean when I life tap, my pet will gain ~500 mana, which should be enough to continually intercepting casters and what-not. Additionally, I'll be dropping improved life tap because I'm not a healer+warlock team, so I cannot continually lifetap all the time... which is a little backwards, but I want to try sacrificing it, and I will be also dropping the two points in Suppression (the anti-resist). It only affects affliction spells, so it only affects my curses and corruption. Don't get me wrong, I need those to land, but going from 1% chance to 4% chance to resist isn't so bad considering I have ~100 spell penetration randomly.
Why am I talking about taking points out of stuff!? Okay, so I'm going to put five points into Demonic Tactics and four points into Devastation, which will add up to a hefty 9% spell crit for me (and a nice 5% melee crit for my rapeguard... which is always handy). Okay, I know this sounds weird, but it will put me at about 20% spell crit with sbolt, my primary damage bread-n-butter in the 2s arena. Basically, I lay down my dots and start dropping sbolts while trying to fear around the off-target, etc etc. I know I don't have Ruin in the build, but even without Ruin, an sbolt will crit for 2.2k, which is a nice bit better than then 1.6k it does on a hit, also it applies the Improved Shadow Bolt debuff, which is amazing on our team because as I continue spamming sbolt, they take more damage. I don't know if this will be the best setup, but I think it will be interesting with our play-style. Here is the build, for reference.
Okay, let's talk about WotLK for a bit. Man... I KNOW I said it before, but if I hit level 80 and there are no amazing talents deep in any tree, the warlock is going to have some amazing synergy builds to choose from. Essentially, the warlock has a play-style that is similar in almost all scenarios: demonology is the outlast and damage build, and it is good for all brackets of the arenas.
Here is a build that I think will play amazingly at level 80 for pvp. It has your instant cast corruption, full Demonic Resilience, Soul Link, and Rapeguard for damage and survivability, and you take the critical strike abilities with Ruin to get something that will play outlast AND drop huge sbolt crits on people. This is such a good looking build, I just cannot imagine what abilities, combos, and talent points they could add to the game that would keep me from rolling this.
This build gives the player the survivability of the demonology tree, the damage of Rapeguard, and the drain-tanking of the affliction tree. This is a shadow dot build that is not reliant on critical strikes for big damage, but might prove ineffective against defensive dispellers unless a priest is around to help by adding their 50 dots to the mix too. It will be the same story as it presently is: you can dispel the dots if you want... but you can't get them all, and we'll keep reapplying them... and they'll always get 1-2 ticks off... plus you won't be healing.
There are a number of different builds to consider if one were to focus mainly on damage output. At the present, shadowbolt is really the only direct damage shadow spell that gets anything from the destruction tree, so unless they add a new better series of combos (or other damaging shadow spells), the destro tree's bulk is mainly focusing on only the fire spells which doesn't leave much synergy with any other tree. However, one CAN spec to get the most out of his sbolt spamming and still have some survivability (though not nearly as much as a soul link build). This build, for example, gives shadowfury (which gets bonus damage from shadow mastery over in the affliction tree). It gives up most the fire talents in the tree and focuses on sbolt damage and dots as the primary means of destruction. It has Ruin, obviously, but also picks up the siphoning abilities to continue draining through damage. Alternatively, this spec will yield a lot of damage output because of master demonologist, but it loses some of the better abilities in the destruction tree due to deep bloat (namely, Nether Protection). There is not much survivability with this build outside of Shadowfury, so it might only be used a defensive mechanism, but with the quick summoning, one could argue that getting out a void walker for a sac isn't a bad survival tactic... I just find it hard to spec that deep into the demonology tree without taking soul link.
All these synergy builds don't really exist for other classes or specs... there are just some specs that are bad and in need of huge improvements, so one would expect Blizzard to recognize that and fix it in the deeper talents of the trees which are expected to be released with the level cap being raised. Feral, for example, needs a couple obvious improvements: while damage output is good, and now with a healer survivability isn't much of an issue, it brings into the light the fact that druids need a snare and/or an ability that reduces healing taken by the opponent. Really, that is the only thing that scares healers is the MS-link abilities in the game. Rogues are amazing because they can keep such an ability almost constantly applied while dealing amazing amounts of damage, and warriors can keep it up and dish out decent damage but also tank a lot of melee damage better than a rogue can. In any case, there will never be a healer+feral 2s team that is amazing unless one of those two issues is addressed (and I'd prefer the snare to be quite honest).
Essentially, you can look at a spec or class and determine how "done" the class is in terms of tweaking based off of how the synergy between trees looks. Obviously, if you have to put all 61 points into 1 tree to do a certain job, that's a negative. So, we use classes like hunters or warlocks and see the amazing synergy between their various trees and notice that they don't really care what the WotLK brings in terms of talents, because they can see that if they simply had 10 more points, they would have an amazing build without having to worry about the deep talents as much (unless they are amazingly overpowered... which seems unlikely). I think I like that Rapeguard+Ruin build the best, and unless they make something amazing, or game mechanics change so drastically that crit builds are viable again and the 51 points talent in Destruction is "Your critical strikes do 50% additional bonus damage" or something that makes crits HUGE... then I expect to see a lot more synergy builds to come from classes played by players content with their current position in the World of Warcraft.
April 15, 2008 at 10:31 PM
Warriors were saying the same thing when the level cap raise was announced before the TBC trees were released. For PvP there would've had to be absolutely amazing 31 and higher point tiers for a warrior to even consider not speccing 31/30 for MS and full flurry. What ended up happening was tactical mastery was moved to the protection tree as a blatant cop-out to prevent the 31/30 spec from having viability.
Of course what ended up happening is Blizzard decided to essentially give 2 points of tactical mastery to warriors for free (remember that before you retained no rage when you changed stances without tactical mastery) and second wind ended up being an amazing ability. Other talents were later moved, but the end goal was both obvious and fulfilled: no MS build with 5/5 flurry is currently viable.
So keep that in mind when you look at some of these potential level 80 builds before the trees get released. Funnily enough, shadow builds are going to look essentially the same at level 80 with the current talent trees, with the possible exception of builds with spell warding. All that the extra points would be good for would be to fill in talents skipped for slightly better ones.
April 17, 2008 at 1:52 PM
Well, in reply to your talk about Shadow, I think that almost ALL hybrid specs (read, off-specs of hybrid classes: shadow, feral, enhancement, etc) will end up putting the remaining 10 points into their main spec'd tree, just because the synergy between the other two is usually relatively low for such classes. For instance, warriors and warlocks only have one job, which they can chose to do in many different (yet similar to one another) ways. Warriors can duel wield, or wield a big two hander. One is more viable than the other, but there are synergy talents between them.
Shadow and feral, on the other hand, really only have the one tree for support. Shadow DOES get some love from the disc tree as it is the "bag of tricks" tree, but for the most part, feral and shadow get all their abilities from their respective dps trees. While the feral build at the moment is something like 1/46/14, more than likely the level 80 build will be something like 1/56/14. Those 14 points in resto aren't negotiable in terms of dps or utility, and the 1 point in balance is really just to get pesky melees off you. You can take it or leave it, but for what feral does, going more into either tree just is not viable for pvp.