During the scheduled server maintenance on the week of February 28, the “Power of the Aspects” spell will grow more powerful, reducing the health and damage dealt of all enemies in the Dragon Soul raid by 10%. This spell will grow progressively stronger over time to reduce the difficulty and make the encounters more accessible. The spell will affect both normal and Heroic difficulties, but it will not affect the Raid Finder difficulty.
Don’t need the help of the Dragon Aspects? The spell can be disabled by talking to Lord Afrasastrasz at the beginning of Dragon Soul.
We hope you continue to enjoy Dragon Soul, and that these changes encourage you to attempt a higher difficulty, or just keep pushing to down that next boss.
How does Destruction’s Ember system work?
Basically, you build embers with some spells, and then spend those embers with Soul Fire, Ember Tap, or Fire and Brimstone.
Internally, this is how it works:
Immolate – DD + DoT on the target
Incinerate – generates 1/10th ember, or 2/10ths if it crits an immolated target.
Fel Flame – generates 1/10th ember, or 2/10ths if it crits an immolated target.
Conflagrate – triggers Backdraft and has a 12 second cooldown.
Soul Fire – consumes one ember instead of mana.
Fire and Brimstone – costs 1 ember and has no cooldown.
Ember Tap – costs 1 embers.
Each full ember costs 0.33% of your maximum health per second. If you stay below 1 ember, you take no damage.
How does chaotic energy work?
We are experimenting with a resource-driven, rather than time-limited, caster model on the Destruction warlock.
In a nutshell, Destruction warlocks are not GCD locked. In fact, chain-casting spells as a Destruction warlock is less important than spending all of your resources.
Keep in mind this is all subject to change, but here is how Destruction flows at the moment:
• Start of Fight: Full mana bar, Empty Ember bar
1. Immolate the target
2. Conflagrate to trigger emberstorm
3. Incinerate to generate embers
4. Continue until you are low on mana
• Middle of Fight: Empty mana bar, ~2 Embers
1. Soul Fire
2. Soul Fire
3. Mana bar is mostly full (Soul Fire costs embers, so your mana refills during the Soul Fires)
In addition to increasing your base mana regen, Chaotic Energy increases mana regen even more with Haste. This means the ability to cast spells scales smoothly with gear.
As long as the warlock never lets her mana bar fill up and burn her embers, she's maximizing damage. This is very different from the standard caster model where priority is placed on casting at all times and ordering spells based on cooldown.
Our hope is that the Destruction Warlock will attract players who are interested in a playstyle that rewards spending resources at the right time, rather than constantly casting.
How does Destruction’s Mastery work?
Emberstorm increases the effectiveness of all Ember consuming spells. Soul Fire deals more damage. Fire & Brimstone deals a higher % of the base spell’s damage. Ember Tap heals for more.
There is a lot of solid, in-depth responses here, and I wanted to chime in that in my own experience. When transitioning from clicking to using keybinds, don’t feel the need to transition too quickly. Give yourself time to learn, adjust, and experiment.
When I decided to study up and learn keybinds, I tried to look at what abilities I used the most, and started out by keybinding those. I didn’t want to overwhelm myself, so I tried to learn only about 2 to 4 new abilities a week, followed by a few more the next week and so on. With time and practice, I was able to commit them to memory, and in time it’s become second-nature to press the corresponding key rather than to click the abilities with my mouse.
If you are finding that you keep clicking them rather than using the keybind, you can also temporarily move the ability’s action button somewhere else on your UI so that when your mouse's cursor goes searching for it and finds it missing, you’ll be reminded to use the keybind you assigned it instead. Doing that sort of thing “forced” me to learn the keybinds rather than relying too heavily on clicking on them, as I was accustomed to doing. Don’t be afraid to experiment with what works best for you.
For me, the transition was a bit challenging starting out, but as I progressed and gained confidence with using keybinds, I really dug in and enjoyed it. As others have mentioned: make sure that the keybinds you choose are comfortable to press. This is doubly true if you are looking to frequently press keys in tandem with each other. For example: Shift + F is likely a lot more comfortable than Shift + U.
Don’t forget that you can also keybind your mouse’s scroll-wheel in both directions! Once I discovered that, I frequently bound abilities to it that I tended to spam-click otherwise. :)