Warlocks in Cataclysm

I realized that I don't know druids all that well and since paladins are gonna get hit by the "lol-revamp-bat" I should best avoid writing about them in any detail.

So, on with the Warlockness!

Leveling is going to be a whole lot easier. Affliction locks are starting by getting Unstable Affliction, great for PvP and another dot for PvE- nothing too special there.

Demonology locks start off with a Fel Guard. This is hilarious, because Fel-Guards are great. Its also going to be really weird seeing Fel-Guards all over Elwynn forest. They don't belong there!

Destruction gets Conflagrate. While it is ok without the glyph (which is available at 15) it is alot better with it. In anycase, leveling destro locks have yet another nuke in their arsenal.

Right now Affliction locks higher tiers are not that great. Nothing much has changed and there are a lot of PvP talents that are required to get to the next tier. That sucks. So- not much to see here- move along folks.

Destro locks get some cool stuff. In the first two tiers they have Bane, and Emberstorm. The first two reduce the cast time of Soul Fire by 2 second each, bringing it down to a 2 second cast (from 6).  Now, as of now, my warlock (not gemmed/enchanted for haste at all) has about 15% haste. For your knowledge, 15% of 6 seconds (original cast time) is .9 seconds. Thus, the approximate cast time of soulfire for a decently geared warlock will be about 1.1 seconds. Now, if the target is below 35% health, (and you went Demo) the cast time is decreased a further 20% or 1.2 seconds. This is silly. You'll just be slamming out Soul Fires quickly and efficiently.

Elsewhere in destro is Bane of Havoc. This ability makes the target take 15% of all the damage you do. Now, image, on Onyxia, when the whelps spawn and you can pull upwards of 20-30k on the whelps, if Ony was also taking about 3-5k dps. This could be really overpowered if you could put it on multiple targets so that in the case of Twins or Councils, you could spread your damage around.

Now onto demo. Demo is really plain for the first few tiers and there is nothing special until tier 4. In tier four you can cast Hand of Guldan, a targets aoe burst, followed by an aoe dot (as in Flamestrike). You also get ancient Grimoire, which increases the time your Doomguard and Infernal stay around, which indicates that you will be getting those as trained spells, not as quest rewards. Improved Hellfire looks really cool, I mean, right now it has a decent radius, but expand it by that much, and allow you to cast while running- thats just the peak of awesome. As mentioned above in the Destro section, it looks like Decimate is going to be completely broken- insta-cast soulfires during the execute phase? Yes please!

And then you get improved hand of Guldan which has the dot refresh your immolates, so if you spread those around first and cast Hand four seconds before they fade, you get a good deal more out of them.

Now, it is important to note that Decimate will probably be fixed, because instant Soul Fires is just too good to be true. Also, the talent mentions Soul Shards, and according to Blizzard's plan (not an official statement, but just what I think they mean) they don't want spells to have to consume Soul Shards when cast normally. Also, Nemesis mentions Fel Domination, which is no longer a talent. It may be a trained skill, but I believe (again, nothing official) that it was intended to be an affect from using one of your Soul Shards.

Lots of words. And tomorrow Blizz will probably announce that Warlocks are going to have another resource- Fel Power.