4.06 on the PTR: Changes to Improved Soulfire

     Of all the wacky changes on the current PTR, undoubtedly the most talked about is Improved Soulfire. On live, Improved Soulfire grants 15% haste after the cast of Soulfire. This is an enormous damage boost, mandatory for every raid spec, and of the highest priority in any rotation. In Patch 4.06, Improved Soulfire will be redesigned to give an 8% boost to fire and shadow damage (do warlocks do other kinds of damage?), and will be moved from Tier 2 of Destruction, reachable by all specs, to Tier 3, and only available to Destruction warlocks.

   The loss of 15% haste is devastating to warlocks across the board, as haste remains our most advantageous secondary stat. Affliction and Demonology in particular will feel the loss, as they both scale better with haste than Incinerate casting Destruction. While it looks like the buffs in other areas will actually keep all three specs competitive, the new design of this talent was unexpected.

     The redesign does not address the fundamental problem with Improved Soulfire: casting soulfire is fucking annoying. Soulfire has a really long cast, and it is not a part of anyone's normal rotation. (Well, okay, except Decimation.) The annoyance of taking so much time away from, you know, important things, is made worse by the fact that Improved Soulfire has an internal cooldown exactly equal to its duration -- you cannot refresh it, you have to wait for it to fall off before you can put it back up. For maximum uptime, warlocks would attempt to time the new cast to finish at the same time the previous effect fell off. Going through the effort of a hard cast of soulfire only to miss the refresh by a tenth of a second --and lose more time -- was frustrating to say the least. Was it an overall damage increase? Yes of course, otherwise we wouldn't bother. But it was awkward as hell.

    This is being addressed in part by reducing the internal cooldown to six seconds. Refreshing the effect will be much easier, and it should have a much higher, if not perfect, uptime throughout the fight. However, stopping to cast soulfire will still leave the Destruction rotation feeling clunky. We can only be grateful they pushed the talent deeper into the tree, and most of us won't have to bother with it.

   My hope for that talent had been that it would become a proc. Say, for example, that the haste buff could only be procced from Empowered Imp Soulfires, which could perhaps be procced from Imp Firebolt crits. It would throw our theorycrafters into chaos, of course, trying to determine how the uptime affected the optimal haste thresholds, but ultimately, warlocks would be stacking crit, to proc haste. The very idea is delicious. But alas, we are left with our silly long cast times and basically the fire equivalent of Shadow Embrace.
 
  There were a few other wonky changes. Fel Armor will soon no longer return health to us, which isn't too strange a change in and of itself, but instead, it will return mana, which is just...weird. Warlocks have never needed to worry about mana regeneration in the slightest -- that's what Life Tap is for. We understand that the less we need to Life Tap the more time we can spend casting, but even so, this is an odd addition.

     Demonlogy AoE has been nerfed (unsurprisingly) but their single target damage has been buffed. At time of posting, Demonology is sitting at the top of 4.06 simcrafts. We'll see how that goes.