"Siphon Life" Changes. Damage Loss?

Q u o t e:
With the change to Siphon Life will it add the damage siphon life currently does and a life leach effect to corruption or are we just losing a spell?

I'm hoping that Corruption will apply a second debuff that is siphon life so Drain Soul doesnt lose more of its power as an execute? Currently whats listed up there looks to be an affliction warlock DPS loss at first glance. I realize it is a first glance and nothing is set in stone and I would really appriciate it if you could clairify this.

Basically, what this means is that warlocks who choose to take Siphon Life will be able to activate the full existing effects of the talent by simply casting Corruption.

Q u o t e:


I'm reading this as: you cast corruption, and it applies the SL debuff, which does the SL damage and returns health appropriately. Basically, it's one cast for 2 dots.

Correct.

I am breaking one of my rules here and responding before I finished reading the entire thread because it is growing so quickly. I will go back and read it all after posting this.

1) The change to Siphon Life just adds a healing component to Corruption. It does not inflate Corruption's damage and it does not add a second dot to Corruption.
2) Protecting debuffs with junk debuffs is not a part of the game we want to encourage, and in fact will probably spend more effort to prune.
3) Losing Siphon Life alone would be a damage loss of maybe 6 to 8% in an ideal raid setting. However you have to remember that you are buying time to work in say additional Shadowbolts.
4) In addition, other changes in the tree should buy you some free talent points (in Suppression perhaps) that you can then invest in dps.
5) All in all it should be about a wash or possibly a small nerf. Affliction dps is very high in most raid settings, particularly once so many other classes get brought under control. So we weren't at all trying to buff Affliction with these changes, and all in all a small nerf is probably fine.

P.S. Calling us liars is a great way to get banned. The purpose of these forums is not to have a platform to voice your outrage. If you have intelligent feedback on changes coming in 3.1, even if you disagree with they changes, we have no problem with you expressing them.

Sorry, many many questions and many other classes have them too at the moment. Patch day FTW. :)

I will try to hit several that came up a lot:

1) Affliction required Siphon Life for PvP. Without it, Affliction is doomed.

First, we are making many changes to warlocks for 3.1. We can't be too scared to make a change we think is needed because of the status quo. We thought Affliction had to maintain too many dots, which did bad things to the class, such as making them feel underpowered in short PvE or PvP fights. Along with these changes come many other changes that are going to make players rethink the builds they are even using for PvP. Second, we don't believe dot (or buff or debuff) protection is a fun mechanic. If your dots are too easy to dispel and that hurts locks, we would rather solve it in other ways than to give you more protection dots. Third, Arena matches can't just be about instant cast spells or a whole lot of spells in the game are going to have to be re-designed.

2) Warlocks are still terribad in PvP so why nerf them?

I don't want to derail the entire thread here, but we don't believe the entire success or failure of Affliction in Areas was dependent on Siphon Life. Abilities, especially on-demand ones, tend to have a much bigger effect in PvP than just raw damage, unless it is very bursty damage, which Siphon Life wasn't. I'm a little skeptical that SL was 30% of dps for too many Affliction locks in Arenas, but even if that were true, it doesn't mean the only solution is that SL is somehow sacred. If warlocks aren't competitive in PvP, we will buff them. Perhaps we will even juice Corruption through the Siphon Life talent if that's what it takes. But we have to be able to change spells and rotations in order to move the game design forward. "You can't cut Siphon Life -- we need it," is not a very strong argument. "We want to be competitive in PvP, and Siphon Life helped to do that," is totally valid, but we care a lot more about the first part of that sentence than the second.

3) We don't want to spam Shadowbolt.

I think this is just trying to be argumentative. In BC, warlocks spammed Shadowbolt the way Frost mages spam Frost Bolt. It was dull and we tried to fix it for LK. Our intent is not that you take Shadowbolt off your bar. Our intent was that it doesn't become the centerpiece of your entire rotation, and I don't think it is any longer. My point was actually that you can't just subtract the Siphon Life damage and call it a nerf because you are going to end up using the time and mana on another spell.

4) But I liked Siphon Life!

WoW has a huge and vocal community. Almost no matter what change we make to the game, somebody is going to disagree. Even the most annoying and weak spell in the game probably has a few fans who would be sad to see it go. We just didn't want to keep Siphon Life as an active spell any longer. We wanted to reduce the number of dots Affliction had. I'm sorry if it was a spell that you really liked for whatever reason.

5) You lied to us GC! You lied! Why? Oh why?

Be reasonable. We change our minds. Stuff can change very fast when it is in iteration mode sometimes. We sometimes mistate things or have mistaken assumptions about how things work. I know the spells and abilities very well, and still I do it all the time. We try to always be very, very careful in our correspondence with players to caveat the heck out of anything we say. "Assuming nothing changes. At this time. For now." Those get tacked on to everything we say just to avoid players freaking out if we are working on A ,and A ends up getting cut or we do B instead. WoW is a living game. It's going to change over time. You have to give us room to manuver and not try to nail us to the wall anytime something changes. The only thing I am ever going to promise with a capital P is that we will do the best we can to make WoW a great game, and that we will listen to your feedback and take it seriously.