Hot on the heels of Blizzard asking Warlocks for feedback on Metamorphosis, the Wrath development team shows how amazingly fast they work and how they actually listen to players. Koraa and Ghostcrawler materialized into the Warlock Beta forums to announce -- simultaneously on separate threads -- that Metamorphosis was going to change significantly in an upcoming Beta build, with the changes happily incorporating most of the feedback that players threw in.

First of all, Metamorphosis will no longer replace a summoned demon -- a no-brainer feature that should have been there from the start considering that most talents in the tree buff up the Warlock's demon! It will also now increase armor by 600%, up from 360%, a coefficient that scales better with a Warlock's base armor of... cloth. Significantly, the demon form will now also increases all damage by 40%, after players realized that turning into a demon with many melee abilities and being cut off from normal spells actually reduced their DPS. Speaking of normal spells, Warlocks in demon form can now cast those, too. These changes come in addition to a few others that Blizzard is working on such as a few demon form-exclusive abilities -- and it seems like Demonology will finally be truly, diabolically fun. [EDIT: In my excitement I forgot to mention that the spell was reverted to a 5-minute cooldown and the form lasts 45 seconds. Still awesome!]

I griped about this on the last Blood Pact along with a throng of other Warlocks, and it seems like Blizzard has heard us -- Corruption will now be baseline instant cast! It's a change that has been a long time coming, and it's finally turning real. Improved Corruption will instead increase the damage of Corruption by up to 20%, effectively negating Empowered Corruption and hopefully freeing up space for a new, exciting talent or at least more points to use in an already bloated tree.

As Inscription is slowly built into a viable trade skill, Blizzard sneaks more and more glyph data onto the Beta server, even if none of it is directly available thus far. This build, MMO Champion discovered a nice selection of Warlock glyphs, and I have to say that most of them look pretty sweet. Of course, it's hard to say for sure on how good some of them are until we know for sure if PvE damage rotations besides Shadow Bolt spam will be viable in Wrath's endgame, but I'll assume they will be, for the most part.

Let's check them out after the break.

When I rolled my baby UD lock (now 52 and lost somewhere in Feralas), my warlock friends told me that my first five talent points MUST be spent making Corruption instant cast. "Everyone does that," they said.

Well, apparently not everyone. There's a 22-page thread on the General Forums arguing for a trainable instant Corruption. A lot of endgame locks spec 0-21-40, and don't have the talent points to spend in Affliction. But Corruption's spell damage coefficients treat it as an instant DOT, even though it's a two-second cast without talents. Most locks don't consider Corruption worth it without the talents because of this.

The thread quickly degenerates into mage vs. warlock fighting, but it does raise an interesting point. A lot of other "essential" talents have become trainable -- Innervate, Evocation, instant Arcane Explosion. Should the locks get the same benefit, or are their dots already powerful enough?

Hortus has answered some important questions about what happens to the guild bank when something happens to the guildleader or the guild, and the answers will be of interest to anyone planning to put deposits in a guild bank after they get released with 2.3.

First of all, guildleaders apparently can't transfer or delete their characters (news to me), so there's no way they can exit the game that way without giving up the bank. A guildleader that transfers leadership of the guild also transfers leadership of the bank (makes sense). If a guildleader gets banned from the game, a GM will have to be contacted to get the bank back (so you GLs out there, don't get banned). But here's the kicker: if the guild gets disbanded, the GL will receive all the banked items in their mailbox.

I guess that's not too surprising-- if a GL had access to the bank in the first place, they can still ninja it anyway. So the lesson here is: don't put anything in the bank that you're not willing to lose to your guildleader on a bad day. It's a little strange that they put the /gdisband power in the same hands that they mail all the items to when the guild shuts down (maybe they should require a guild banker position, just to keep the GL away from the money?), but then again, if you trust your GL with your life during a raid, shouldn't you trust him or her with your hard-earned cash?