The warlock changes soiund great but they really need to give felguard some sort of defense against magic/casters. As it is now, my level 80 demo warlock while in Mount Hyjal - by the time she casts all her dots and soul fire her felguard is dead from ONE firelord, also level 80. I've dropped soulfire form my rotation and just using instants and a couple 1.3-1.5 sec cast spells. Also now using Curse of Tongues as well. It *seems* like I am taking less damage than my felguard when they cast at me. The felguard is dropping in mere seconds. When I ran my bm hunter thru the same area he had no troubles at all keeping his pet up with little or no effort.

Now the felguards' defense against melee feels right on. He needs a heal but not spammed in a panic and still not enough. I sure hope blizz will give them some sort of magical defense. Otherwise they aren't tank pets against casters.

I am wondering what they are going to do with affliction. In that the removal of ISF as calculated to be a 10% dps loss by the people on mmo champs. I really do wonder since I love playing affliction so much.

Math's a little off there, mate.
3% of 10,000 is 300, not 3000.
*Huge* nerf.

They just made it work the same as Vampiric Embrace. It just won't restore health after you killed everything, when you might actually need it.

Health restored every 5 seconds via the "old" Fel Armor = 4,000 health at 100k HP (w/ full Demonic Aegis).

Health restored via the "new" Fel Armor = 20,000 DPS x 6% (w/ full Demonic Aegis) x 5 seconds = 6,000 health.

Looking at it strictly from a DPS-focused standpoint, this change is a buff. However, considering the fact that the health regen will be completely dependent upon damage done, there will be far more variability in the amount of health actually restored as Destruction and even Demonology 'locks. Affliction 'locks will see less variability than the other two, but a LOT more survivability in group PvP settings with this change.

Warlocks in PVE are unstopable gods. I'm demo and i absolutely shred stuff (i'm 83 atm). If your pet is dying then you are doing something wrong (try healing them). I almost never have to heal my pet. Further with the mechanic of 'draining soul from dead corpses' (sorry the name is not coming to me, we basically never run OOM. I have not once eat or drunk anything since I stepped foot in cataclsym. My lock was really poorly geared too, i mean, she still had stuff from BC, poorly geared. Yeah that bad. I still blew through things.

If you have a lock sitting on the shelf collecting dust, now is the time to bring them out. They are seriously seriously OP, especially while leveling.

@Jagoex

I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, but thats hardly a reasonable example. 20k single target dps? Really? Who's pulling that? Maybe the top locks across the servers, but that's hardly the main playerbase. Decent expected dps these days is around 9-11k (entry-level Argaloth expects ~10.5k). From your math, it looks like 15k is about the threshold of making this change a buff/debuff. Anything below that is giving you less health regen than before, while anything above that mark *would* be giving more regen, but as Jorge said, thats only during combat - not afterwards when you're probably lower on health.

@drtongue

I don't have an average ilvl above 350 (rocking only 3 epics atm), and am pulling just shy of 20k when raid-buffed. Top-geared warlocks are pulling somewhere in the neighborhood of 22-24k DPS. If a warlock is in full Heroic gear, itemized properly, and not getting remotely close to that number or breaking 14-15k DPS, something is wrong.

If the warlock is geared and played well, this change will result in a fairly decent buff. Also, since our damage will likely be increasing faster than our stamina, the new health regen model for Fel Armor will scale better over time, resulting in an even greater buff. Of course, that is based on an assumption (a pretty safe one, though), so we'll just have to wait and see.

And why are you worrying about health AFTER combat? We have Soul Harvest, which is one of the best ways to regen health in the game right now and is on a very short cooldown. If it's unavailable, there's always food or a healer to help you out, too. There has never been a good reason to wait for your health to regen via Fel Armor, ever, and it's a little ridiculous to cite that as a reason to be upset over this change.