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Affliction and Destruction Warlock Tree Changes in War Within Alpha: May 29th

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This week on the War Within Alpha, Blizzard focused on updating the structure and pathing for both the Affliction and Destruction specialization trees.

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Greetings Warlocks.

In today’s new build, we’re focusing on the Affliction and Destruction specialization trees. We’ve changed the structure and pathing of both trees and would like to provide context for some of the other changes you’ll see in this build.

Affliction

We’ve moved Darkglare upwards in the tree to make it much easier to get. We’ve shifted talents to the third section and added new talents to increase how many options are available. We’re evaluating how many two-point nodes are available and are looking to revise in a future build.

We’ve also looked at Haunt and increased the amount of damage it does baseline to make it feel more impactful upon cast. We’ve introduced Improved Haunt as well, which is a new talent that further expands upon Haunt. Lastly, we’ve moved Haunt to the second section of the tree to make it easier to pick given how much it adds to Affliction’s single-target toolkit.

Destruction

We’re trying something new and moving Dimensional Rift, a powerful tool that gives Destruction warlocks a bit more mobility, to the center of the tree and returning Infernal to the bottom section. Infernal serves as a powerful cooldown that leveling warlocks can look forward to unlocking, but during playtesting it felt that Dimensional Rift served as a much more impactful tool.

We’ve trimmed the number of talents available and moved around so that the second and third sections feel a bit closer in terms of the number of talents available.

We appreciate the feedback and will continue to watch for discussions as they happen.

Here are the latest Warlock changes taken from this week's dev notes:

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  • WARLOCK
    • Hellcaller
      • Wither damage dealt over time reduced by 30%.
      • Wither application damage reduced by 80%.
    • Affliction
      • New Talent: Improved Haunt – Increases the damage of Haunt by 35% and reduces its cast time by 25%. Haunt now applies Shadow Embrace.
      • New Talent: Malign Omen – Casting Soul Rot grants 3 applications of Malign Omen. Your next Malefic Rapture deals 20% increased damage and extends the duration of your damage over time effects and Haunt by 2 seconds.
      • New Talent: Malefic Touch – Malefic Rapture deals an additional Shadowflame damage to each target it affects.
      • New Talent: Infirmity – The stack count of Agony is increased by 4 when applied by Vile Taint. Enemies damaged by Phantom Singularity take 10% increased damage from you for its duration.
      • Haunted Soul has been removed.
      • Haunt damage increased by 230%. This change does not affect PvP.
      • Cull the Weak has been moved to gate 2.
      • Summon Darkglare has been moved to gate 2.
      • Malevolent Visionary has been moved to gate 2.
      • Haunt has been moved to gate 2.
      • Shadow Embrace has been moved to gate 2.
      • Empowered Unstable Affliction has been moved to gate 3.
      • Relinquished has been moved to gate 3.
      • The following talents are now 1 point:
        • Empowered Unstable Affliction
      • The following talents are now 2 points:
        • Withering Bolt
    • Destruction
      • Reverse Entropy and Internal Combustion have been moved to gate 2.
      • Explosive Potential has been moved to gate 2.
      • Scalding Flames has been moved to gate 1.
      • Dimensional Rift has been moved to gate 2.
      • Dimension Ripper has been moved to gate 2.
      • Infernal has been moved to gate 3.
      • Crashing Chaos has been moved to gate 3.
      • Infernal Brand has been moved to gate 3.
      • Rain of Chaos has been moved to gate 3.
      • The following talents have been removed:
        • Flame Rift
        • Lessons of Space-Time
        • Unstable Rifts

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