NURF MY WARLOCK!

With arena representation hitting an all-time low and the population of the warlock community melting away faster than a snowman in the desert blizzard is presented with the very rare opportunity to phase out an entire class in favor of the death knight population.

Since the day that Kalgan has started his blizzard sponsored vendetta against the warlock class a great many of strategic direct and indirect nerfs to the warlock class have resulted in the complete and utter loss of OPness, utility and survivability...

And yet a handful of warlocks still remain.

Having failed miserably Kalgan was executed and sacrificed to the lich king forever to roam the lands as a scourge warrior and a replacement was appointed to finish what Kalgan could not.

With the promise of being the only warlock to remain I have taken upon me the task of the eradication of the warlock class and as a result I propose the following changes to be patched in with 3.0.8. 3.1. or otherwise 'soon' (tm).


Fears

It has come to my attention that despite the dozens of hard counters that other classes now have against fear some classes are still unable to interrup the fear casts timely and effectively. To avoid further issues with fear the cast time will be increased to 4s and the effect's duration will be shortened to 5 seconds. This will ensure that even the most dimwitted keyboard turner will have ample time to interrupt the cast with minimal consequences if they fail to do so.

- The fear effect will be removed from deathcoil to be more in line with the Death Knight's death coil.
- Instant howl of terror will no longer be instant cast.


DoTs

To prevent the warlock from being overly dependant on dot timers the next patch will ensure that any and all dot-timer addons will cease to work. A new generation of dot timers will be prevented from working by removing all public methods related to reading out dot times. This will be a warlock only change as to not affect healers.
Individual dot times will also be adjusted to ensure warlocks spend 99% of their time attempting to keep dots up.

all dots will furthermore instantly be dispelled upon the untimely death of the warlock.


Drains

Token buffs will be given to drain mana. These token buffs will look good on paper but will not effectively change the spell to prevent warlocks from using it more than once.

The mana cost of drain life will be increased with each token buff to drain mana to compensate for the (non)buffs.

Drain spells will also check LOS every tick and be interrupted (with no mana refund) if LOS is broken.


Demonic circle

Due to the nature of this spell in 'certain' arena's and the potential use of this spell for exploiting terrain bugs the following changes will be implemented:

Demonic teleport will no longer work if the warlock is out of Line of Sight from his circle.
Demonic teleport will also teleport any melee currently attacking the warlock to the demonic circle.
Demonic circle now requires a soul shard as reagent.


Soul shards

To address complaints by warlocks of having soul shards take up all their bag space soul shards have been added to all cast-time spells in the warlock arsenal. This will ensure the quick removal of soulshards from the warlock's bags thus leaving him with significantly more bag space.


Pet survivability

Rather than addressing the low HP, terrible scaling and useless pet abilities warlock pets will now only last 1 minute after being summoned.
This is more in line with lore and will prevent warlocks from confusing their demons with actual pets like a hunter's pet.
Demon abilities will be set to autocast to circumvent discussions about spell-lock resistance and other similar problems.


Curses

Warlocks have long since complaint about the useless of curses outside of curse of agony. As a result all curses will be rolled into a single much much weaker curse providing: 10% movement speed reduction, 10% slower cast times, 10% attack speed reduction.


Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis has been reworked. While in demon form the warlock's movement speed is reduced by 50%.
immolation aura has been redesigned entirely to provide a blastwave like attack without the knockback that does damage to the demon in equal proportions to the damage done to others.
The warlock will not be able to cast any spells in demon form other than the new immolation aura and 'cleave'.


Other

- Seering pain is now instant cast but causes 25% more threat
- Soul linked warlocks will now be connected to their pet with a clearly visible bright pink line
- Due to the lack of banishable mobs in Northrend this spell has been removed from the warlock arsenal.
- Several warlock talents have had their talent point cost increased (particularly affliction talents)
- Lifetap had it's scaling adjusted and will now give 5% of max mana for 10% max health and no longer scales with spirit.