As part of the World of Warcraft Talent System Panel held at BlizzCon 2011, Ghostcrawler introduced details of the Warlock talent trees.
Level 15
We’re going to see a lot of healing and a lot of survivability in here. You’ll want to emphasize that a little bit as kinda push the differences between the Mage and Warlock a little further apart in the design space.
So start right off in different ways to get health. Dark Regeneration just click to get some of your health back. It takes a little bit of time to build up here, so it’s not an instant burst of healing.
Soul Leech lets your Shadowbolt, Incinerate and Malefic Grasp (oh, what is that?) heal you.
And Harvest of Life drains life from a target and other targets in the area. You can see in the blue text of the tooltip Empowered Channel.
This is a cool thing we’re trying with the way the Warlock channels. If you cast the channel again before it’s finished it increases the duration so is rather than sitting there and channeling the whole time, you channel, channel, channel and then you have a nice long duration spell.
Level 30
Here three different ways to control the bad guys. You can have an AOE fear, or an AOE stun, or you can have Mortal Coil.
A new design on Death Coil. Not about doing damage, but it’s about making them run away, and healing yourself.
Level 45
Level 45 is about Survivability. Hour of Twilight returns some health back when you get hurt, it’s a passive, not like the previous generation one.
Soul Link shares damage with your pet, but your demon has to be alive.
And Sacrificial Pact is the kind of existing Voidwalker ability. Your pet sacrifices itself, but also makes you immune to damage for a short period of time.
Level 60
Level 60 has three ways to heal yourself or avoid damage.
Bloodstone is an instant heal. Spell Drain is cast on yourself, and the next single target attack spell that hits you, heals you for half the damage it would have dealt instead.
Nether Ward transforms your Twilight Ward into Nether Ward. We combine a holy shadow ward into one. You have your ward up and another ward replaces your Twilight Ward and makes you reduce damage to that school you get hit by for 12 sec.
Level 75
Level 75 is about your pet, and you can do three different things here.
Grimoire of Supremacy basically replaces your demon with a more powerful demon. This is a permanent passive. If you take this, you can have a Shivan or an Abyssal as your pet instead of the current run-of-the-mill warlock pet.
All of these are more powerful. They are slightly more powerful versions of their current abilities.
Grimoire of Service is a 30 sec cooldown that lets you have two pets out at the same time.
And then Grimoire of Sacrifice is something else we’ve heard a lot is we never really liked the idea of the Destruction warlock that gets rid of the imp, and then doesn’t have a pet the rest of the time.
But players would tell us, you know — “I really liked that mechanic. Is there any way to bringing it back?”
So we thought, if the pet wasn’t gone permanently, that could be a cool thing. We really like the feel like the Hunter really cares about his bear and his rabbit (rabbit?) — err, his tiger — (jokingly Ghostcrawler says: Make rabbits tameable pets) — whatever.
But the demon, the warlock doens’t care about the demon. The demon is a tool for the warlock. If it makes sense to kill the demon to burst your DPS for a little time, the warlock will probably take that trade.
Level 90
And then level 90 is themed around demons. Not your demons, but really more powerful demons from Warcraft lore. All of these do some pretty crazy, crazy things.
Archimonde’s Vengeance let’s you curse an enemy which will also take damage you do to that enemy.
Kil’jaeden’s Cunning lets you cast while moving. Straight up! Doubles the cast time, or the period of the spell that you’re casting while you’re moving.
And Illidan’s Guile lets you do a little bit of splash damage to other enemies in the area with your three main nukes there.