You might have heard that Chaos Bolt now deals Fire damage instead of the nebulous "Chaos" damage, which was actually an amalgamation of all schools of magic. On one hand, this is good news because getting Kicked or Counterspelled while casting it won't lock Warlocks out of every spell. On the other hand, this means Fire immunities will stop it cold. This makes the spell easier to implement or work with, and further enforces the use of Fire spells for Destruction. It's not even a Shadow and Fire version of Frostfire Bolt. It's just... a bolt Fire that looks like Alien larvae.

Now, the coolest thing about Chaos Bolt was how it conceptually penetrated through immunities. Ghostcrawler explained that making immunities have vulnerabilities would only create a vicious cycle. Now, the spell only goes through absorption effects -- which is fine, really, but makes Chaos Bolt merely another direct damage Fire spell. Is it a great 51-point talent? I don't know. It deals pretty good damage, I'll give it that. But I'm not sure it's worth 51 points.

Curse of Doom can now only produce Doomguards from targets that yield experience or honor, which was a necessary change considering it's now a 100% chance if CoD delivers the killing blow. It still can't be cast on players, though, which is a bummer. Haunt was retuned to heal for 100% of the damage it deals, which isn't so bad considering the 200% I raved about last time was bugged to hell, anyway. Oh, and Everlasting Affliction affects Haunt instead of Shadow Bolt, which is excellent because it relaxes Affliction's already complex rotation.

Inferno now grants only one minute of control over the summoned Infernal, down from five. Blizzard has been see-sawing the duration of this throughout Beta, which really confuses me. It's still a crappy spell because the demon just isn't any good, so the duration doesn't matter. More often than not, because the demon doesn't do anything, a Warlock is likely to release it, anyway. And since Demonic Pact doesn't work with enslaved demons anymore... what's the point, really?

What else? Oh, Conflagrate now works on targets afflicted by Shadowflame, which makes the baseline spell slightly more attractive. The whole conical target thing is still pretty strange, specially if you play Affliction, but Destruction Warlocks should have a better feel for the spell. It's solidly a Destruction spell, after all. More good news -- Drain Soul deals four times normal damage against targets at or below 25% health. It'll still be tricky to pull off in PvP or against trash when everybody is focusing fire, but it's a great change considering how collecting shards always dropped Warlock DPS. And lastly... Demonic Circle lasts 6 minutes now. I don't know if that was even worth mentioning since it lasted long enough before, anyway.

Tags: 9014, Beta, Beta-Build-9014, Build-9014, Chaos-Bolt, Conflagrate, Curse-of-Doom, Demonic-Circle, Demonic-Pact, Drain-Soul, Everlasting-Affliction, Haunt, Inferno, Warlock, Wrath, Wrath-Beta, Wrath-of-the-Lich-King

Filed under: Warlock, Analysis / Opinion, Talents, Wrath of the Lich King