WoW Legion Warlock class preview

Another day has arrived and so another class preview is upon us — this morning we have Warlocks, whose former mastery of all things demonic in World of Warcraft was rather left in question with the announcement of of Legion‘s Demon Hunters. With the game’s latest class taking ownership of signature abilities like Metamorphosis, just what is Blizzard planning to do to give Warlocks their own, equally fun class fantasy? Here’s what they say about the fantasy of the Warlock:

Warlocks peer into the Void without hesitation, leveraging the chaos they glimpse within to devastating ends in battle—their greatest abilities are fueled by the souls they’ve harvested from their victims. They exploit powerful Shadow magic to manipulate and degrade the minds and bodies of their enemies. They employ Fire magic, dropping hellish rain from the sky, to immolate the opposition. They summon and command indomitable demons from the Twisting Nether to do their bidding, or even to be sacrificed as the Warlock sees fit, empowering and protecting the dark caster from harm.

The biggest changes will be coming to Demonology, which Blizzard feels has strayed from its original fantast, while Affliction and Destruction will be further “accentuated” according to their fantasy. Resources, too, are getting streamlined, with Warlocks returning to using simply mana and Soul Shards. Let’s dig in to what Blizzard has in store for each class.

Affliction

These warlocks delight in using fel forces to cause intense pain and suffering in others

The focus of Affliction has always been DOTs and debuffs, and Blizzard wants to make these even more important to the specialization. Your DOTs will become stronger with other skills becoming more secondary — you won’t see non-DOT fillers as your primary source of damage (which they are now) — so Affliction ‘locks won’t feel like they’re just using DOTs to buff up other spells in their rotation. Soul Shards will have a chance to be generated each time Agony causes damage to a target, encouraging multi-dotting, with Shards being spent on stronger DOTs like Unstable Affliction (which will refund a Shard if the target dies).

Drain Life will become Affliction’s primary filler spell, with its damage increasing depending on how many DOTs are on your target.Blizzard also feels that the self-healing aspect of Drain Life fits well with the Affliction motif.

Demonology

The demonologist has mastered harnessing the power of malefic beings on the field of battle

While Warlocks have been concerned over the loss of one of their signature abilities, Metamorphosis, to Demon Hunters, Blizzard’s spinning it as an opportunity to refocus Demonology on its class fantasy: mastering control of demons. Demonology is undergoing the most change here, with Blizzard stating “gameplay will feel quite different in Legion” and Beta feedback will be important to make sure the redesigned spec works.

Demonology will be receiving a host of new, demon-centric abilities, including Call Dreadstalkers (summon 2 ferocious Dreadstalkers to attack the target for 12 sec), Hand of Gul’dan (which uses a varying amount of Soul Shards to dish out higher or lower damage, dealing up to a strong amount of Shadow damage to all enemies within 8 yds and summons up to 5 Wild Imps), Demonic Empowerment (empowers up to 3 of your active demons with dark energies, increasing their Haste and health by 50% for 12 sec), Demonwrath (every 1 sec, all enemies within 10 yds of any of your demons take minor Shadow damage, with a chance to generate a Soul Shard on damage), Implosion (a Demonlogy talent that causes your Wild Imps to be violently yanked toward the target, and then explode, dealing moderate Shadow damage to all enemies near them).

Still, we’ll have to see just how the class plays out when the Legion beta arrives.

Destruction

Warlocks who command the power of destruction favor incantations of pure chaos and aggression

Blizzard primarily wants to improve existing Destruction gameplay. As part of simplifying Warlock resources, Burning Embers will be replaced by Soul Shards, leaving skills that previously generated Embers to generate Shards instead.. or just dish out damage. Because of this, too, Destruction’s Mastery is changing to Chaotic Energies, which will cause your Destruction spells to randomly do more damage (up to 40% more in typical gear, Blizzard says) — this sounds like a new form of crit, but we’ll see how it plays out in action to increase Destruction Warlock DPS.

You can read the full Warlock class preview on the WoW official site. You can also read previous class preview blogs here on Blizzard Watch. Today’s class preview release schedule is:

• 11am PT: Death Knight
• 5pm PT: Shaman

After this, we have Death Knights, and Shamans on the 10th; Warriors, Monks; and Druids on the 11th; and Rogues on the 12th. We’ll see you back here with another preview at 11am Pacific!