More WotLK Pet Changes!

[Hestocklem]

Not sure if we're going to keep this or not. I was toying with it's cast time because there was a huge discrepancy in the Imp's regen/throughput when you a 2.0 cast time vs a 2.5. So much so that you'd you want to have a 2.5 cast time instead of the improved 2.0 because it would run OOM.

Looks like a higher spell coefficient on imp's fireball?

Source

[Ethellion]

Coefficient wasn't changed for Fire Bolt.(Source)

Unfortunately no. Personally I wanted 0.5s casts (with tallents) but the same mana and damage efficiency.

[palsbjørn]

Doesn't sound too promising for the talent "Improved fireball", though ... basically they are saying that this talent would only burn the imp's mana ... unless they gimp the talent with improved mana-regen ofc

... and before you start flaming that only noobs would use "improved fireball" I'd like to wait and see the actual coefficients in final patch...

[Thrinwizzle]

In Wrath of the Lich King, it looks like for people who are heavily destruction that keeping your imp in mana is going to be VERY important. While the Imp's personal DPS contribution is supposed to be improved (they talked about making a warlock+pet the real deal when they talked about why they nerfed DS and how the various classes should matched up), right now the Imp's main contribution is through the Empowered Imp talent.

Empowered Imp gives you a 100% crit chance on your next spell after the imp crits. This is huge, since the crit rate of that imp can easily be above 20%. It's like stacking 10-25% more crit chance on you, but it only works while the imp has mana. So personally, I'd take a 20% reduction in the imps overall DPS if it meant the imp had enough mana to blast for 20% longer. Up to limits, of course, but the idea is that you want your imp to last for most of the fight.

[palsbjørn]

... my point exactly, Thrinwizzle... currently it seems to me that imps, felguards and felhunters will be the best fitted demons for each of the three trees and yes, like hunters we will most likely need to keep them out after the expansion (personally I'm very happy that they somewhat reversed the DS-nerf, so 'locks can remain somewhat viable on AoE fights).

We get to boost the utility of our imp by going deep destro and actually making it viable as a phased-in pet (more stam, int, less susceptible to aoe etc.), but the boost of the fireball itself through "Improved Fireball" will be unviable because it will just burn the mana.

That could of course be said to just be a way of giving you the opportunity to boost the imp without going so deeply into the destro tree - and balancing it out so you can't get both (which could have led to OP'ed imps) but I can't see any talent combination (at all) where I'd want to take improved fireball while going deeply into another tree (with felhunter now being the mana-battery for afflic-locks and felguard forever being the choice of demonology) - so like I said above... if they don't choose to boost the mana-regen (or reduce the mana cost of imp fireball) then the talent will be largely unusable imo and they might as well delete the talent.

Of course you can argue that it may be viable for some really odd hybrid spec - but my claim is that with the new 51-point talents almost everyone will be going to those (they look very viable in both PvE and PvP, with the possible exception of demon form, which looks to me as a pure PvP talent).

Oh... and btw... the the damage drop from not having imp fireball is not 20%, it is 33%

[RomaGoth]

Originally Posted by palsbjørn

Doesn't sound too promising for the talent "Improved fireball", though ... basically they are saying that this talent would only burn the imp's mana ... unless they gimp the talent with improved mana-regen ofc

... and before you start flaming that only noobs would use "improved fireball" I'd like to wait and see the actual coefficients in final patch...

Just an FYI that this isn't the WoW forums, we are actually courteous to each other here and refrain from flaming and calling each other noobs....not saying you are doing anything wrong but just thought I would point that out .