Each week Dominic Hobbs brings you Blood Pact. "Oh how I love the feel of it, the way it burns your skin and weaves evil thoughts through the mind..." ~ Impsy

With patch 3.3 looking evermore imminent and the changes to warlock talents and spells seeming to have settled down, it's a good time to take a look at what we can expect from the next expansion. This isn't going to be a review of the fights and encounters in Icecrown -- though I'm sure we'll get to that at some point -- this is a look at how our various raiding builds have changed.

I've already reported on most of them as they hit the PTR in previous articles, so I'm not going to dwell on the changes themselves. You can read up on this detail here, here, here and here. I wouldn't say that lock talents are broken at the moment but it certainly seems as if we're left little option when it comes to raiding. You have destruction for damage and a demonology bi... err... buff spec. The overriding impression I have looking at the patch 3.3 changes is that there will be more choice to play the spec you like. Something we've not had for a very long time.

After the break I'll list the changes from the patch notes for reference and then we'll get down to how that shakes out.

• Create Soulstone: The cooldown on this spell and duration of its buff have been lowered from 30 minutes down to 15 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
• Affliction
  • Improved Felhunter: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the felhunter's Shadow Bite ability by 2/4 seconds.
  • Pandemic: This talent now also increases the critical strike damage bonus of the felhunter's Shadow Bite spell by 100%.
  • Shadow Mastery: This talent now also increases the damage done by the felhunter's Shadow Bite ability by 3/6/9/12/15%.
• Demonology
  • Decimation: Redesigned. When Shadow Bolt, Incinerate or Soul Fire hit a target that is at or below 35% health, the cast time of Soul Fire is reduced by 20/40% for 8 seconds. Soul Fires cast under the effect of Decimation cost no shards.
  • Demonic Pact: This talent now also increases the warlock's spell damage by 1/2/3/4/5%.
  • Molten Core: Redesigned. This talent now increases the duration of Immolate by 3/6/9 seconds and provides a 4/8/12% chance to gain the Molten Core effect when Corruption deals damage. The Molten Core effect empowers the next 3 Incinerate or Soul Fire spells cast within 15 seconds (Incinerate: increases damage done by 6/12/18% and reduces cast time by 10/20/30%; Soul Fire: increases damage done by 6/12/18% and increases critical strike chance by 5/10/15%). Molten Core now has a new spell effect.
• Destruction
  • Conflagrate: Redesigned. This talent now consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 9 seconds of Immolate or 8 seconds of Shadowflame, and causes additional damage over 3 seconds equal to 3 seconds of Immolate or 2 seconds of Shadowflame. In addition, the periodic damage of Conflagrate is capable of critically striking the afflicted target.
  • Ruin: This talent now also increases the critical strike damage bonus of the imp's Firebolt spell by 100%.
• Pets
  • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
  • Doomguard/Infernal: These pets now innately have Avoidance like all other warlock pets.
  • Inferno: The cooldown on this summoning spell has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
  • Shadow Bite: This pet ability now provides 15% increased damage for each of the warlock's damage-over-time effects on the target.
  • Summon Imp: This ability is now available from the trainer for level 1 warlocks and no longer requires a quest to learn.
• Glyphs
  • Glyph of Life Tap: The effect of this glyph now has a chance of activating when Dark Pact is used.
  • Glyph of Quick Decay: This glyph allows for the warlock's haste to reduce the time between periodic damage effects of Corruption.
• Bug Fixes
  • Curse of the Elements: Rank 4 has been increased to 11%, up from 10%.
  • Drain Soul: This spell now deals 4 times the normal damage for all ranks. Previously it was only ranks 6 and above.
  • Glyph of Conflagrate: Now updates the tooltip of Conflagrate to remove reference to Conflagrate removing an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the target.
  • Glyph of Siphon Life: This glyph will now modify the tooltip on Siphon Life correctly.
  • Glyph of Unending Breath: Now updates the tooltip on Unending Breath to indicate it increases swim speed.
  • Hellfire: Dealing damage to another player with this ability will now put the Warlock in combat.
  • Improved Shadow Bolt: This talent no longer causes a bug that removes all resilience from pets.
  • Suffering (Voidwalker): Ranks 5-8 had the incorrect taunt radius of 5 yards and have all been adjusted to a 10-yard radius.

That's quite a bit to scroll through but there are possibly more, and more significant changes to locks than any other class. The first thing I want to do is look at how their theoretical maximum DPS values compare, before and after the patch. I've drawn heavily on the work done by the SimulationCraft guys so many thanks to them. You can read a lot of detail in the SimulationCraft Elitist Jerks forum thread for warlocks. These simulations have been run using the best gear for that spec that is currently available in the game. They have been tweaked so that the optimum rotations and buffs are used. They are also modeled on a static, Patchwerk-style fight. This brings out some very high numbers so don't be dismayed if you aren't seeing your DPS reach these values, what we really want to focus on here are the relative differences between the maximum values of each build.

So, I've grabbed the figures from the SimulationCraft output and put them all into a handy chart. This includes the ten builds simulated which accounts for the main ones used today as well as those that deliver more DPS under the patch 3.3 changes. The builds in the chart are:

Affliction

A1: 55/00/16
A2: 53/00/18 using a Doomguard
A3: 53/00/18 without the Doomguard

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