The Great Return of Forgotten Specs

In 3.2, Blizzard brought back to the limelight a few specs that were underperforming. The Mage's Arcane spec was greatly improved in many aspects. the Predatory Swiftness change has made Feral Druids a viable Arena class. The Threat of Thassarian talent has reintroduced Dual-Wield for Frost Death Knights. The Beast Within change has begun to bring Beast back into the DPS game.

All these balancing changes show how much Blizzard care nowadays about spec viability. Although there will always remain some differences between the maximum dps of a class in PvE, the gap is getting a lot smaller. This was my introduction before beginning to look at major revamps to 4 caster specs in 3.3.


The PvE Frost Mage

Two major changes are affecting how Frost Mages do in PvE.

- The first and most fun one is probably the new [Glyph of Eternal Water]. With it, the Frost Mage's Water Elemental will no longer be able to cast Freeze (his Frost Nova ability), but will instead become a permanent pet. In order to make him a viable PvE pet, he has also been granted 90% AoE mitigation, and a 90% reduction in his Water Bolt mana cost.

- The second and most unexpected one is the change to [Deep Freeze], the 51 point Frost Mage talent. Obviously, when looking at a 51 point talent that was a Stun, it was clear that Frost was meant to be a PvP spec. This is changing, as the talent will now inflict a large amount of damage when used on ennemies that are permanently immune to stuns. That obviously means bosses. To fully understand how this will work, you need to know that Frost Mages are able to gain Frozen benefits from Frozen-immune target via the [Fingers of Frost] talent. Chill effects such as Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt (even glyphed) have a 15% chance to proc the 2 charges of this talent.

Some pretty funky combos will be possible with this spec. You need to know that the [Shatter] talent increases by 50% your critical chance agains Frozen targets. Also, [Ice Lance] deals triple (or quadruple when glyphed) damage to Frozen targets. So the idea is this : when Fingers of Frost procs, you keep casting your Frostbolt for the first charge. On the second charge, you also cast Frostbolt, but immediately follow it with either Deep Freeze if it's off cooldown, or Ice Lance. Because the second Frostbolt has a long traveltime, all three spells in each cycle should receive the bonus, even with just two charges. The fun has been restored to the mage class.


The Affliction Warlock

It was all quite strange. Affliction Warlocks had a talent to improve their Felhunters, but it was very weak, and the dps provided by this demon was a lot lower that that provided by the Succubus. This patch brings back the Felhunter as the main affliction pet, via a few changes. [Shadow Bite], the main Felhunter damage ability, is getting buffed from 5% per DoT to 15%. The [Improved Felhunter] talent is reducing the ability's CD from 6 to 2 seconds. And finally, [Shadow Mastery] now also increases Shadow Bite damage by 15%. Shadow bite deals on average 6.5% of your spellpower + 120. If Unstable Affliction, Corruption, Curse of Agony are up on the target, and saying that you have about 2500 spellpower, the Bite should deal about 500 damage every 2 seconds.

Another major change is the fact that [Glyph of Life Tap] now also affects [Dark Pact]. This glyph is what prevented Dark Pact being used over [Life Tap], but no longer. Life Tap scales with your spirit, inflicting ( 1500 damage + 3*Spirit ), and gaining exacly that as mana. Dark Pact on the other hand scales with your Spell power, taking ( 1200 + Spellpower ) mana from your pet. For a Warlock with 500 spirit and 2500 spellpower, Life Tap grants 3000 mana, and Dark Pact 3700 mana. Dark Pact also has the major advantage of not dealing damage to you. And since the CD of Shadow Bite was reduced, your Felhunter should always be mana-full.


The Demonology Warlock
coming soon

The Shadow Priest
coming soon

I've been willing to start a wow-themed blog for awhile, so there we are.

I've been playing on the french EU servers ever since release, a good old 5 years ago. I played a resto Tauren Shaman through Vanilla, a Feral Tauren Druid through the Burning Crusade, and am now playing a frost-dps, blood-tank Orc Death Knight and a resto-pvp, balance-pve Tauren Druid.

I also know a lot about Warlocks, and have basically tried all classes in the game.

I've always been a high-level raider, though never really hardcore. I've also always enjoyed PvP, especially Arenas, where i tend to play around the 2000's.

This blog will look at coming changes, PvP and PvE, analysing what patches bring. This involves trying to evaluate the impact of changes in the short term, but also trying to understand the greater picture of what Blizzard are trying to do to the game. World of Warcraft is an ever-evolving MMO, and so much has changed since the beginning. And yet it keeps on evolving, and patches 3.3 and 4.0 promise to bring their own little loads of change.

Stay Tuned.