Warlock Buff 3.3.2

Affliction was doing good damage before and with the buff should now be competitive with any class in the game, depending on the fight involved (and how much the mages benefit from IA). That doesn't mean *you* are going to top meters. Big difference. :) The management of Corruption rolling with NMIC isn't ideal gameplay. We generally like the kind of gameplay that lets skilled players eek out a little bit more damage, but we agree the Corruption behavior is a little extreme. That said, it's not as bad as the haste effects on rolling, and ultimately we know how to fix it with a little tech. (Which doesn't mean we can fix it immediately, unfortunately.)

I'm not sure we have enough data on Demo yet. The buffs definitely did something. Totally agree on the mana issues. That's something we want to address (standard no ponies promises applies).

We knew the buffs to Destro wouldn't be enough, but we still thought they were worth making (compared to doing nothing at all). To finish the job will require more extensive talent changes. (Don't interpret that as a complete redo of the tree though.) We think we can do some of this before Cataclysm ships, but it's not the kind of thing we felt safe doing with the kind of limited testing / non-PTR status of patch 3.3.2. We could have just thrown caution to the wind and made the Empowered Imp or Conflag changes gratuitously overpowered, but that carries risks of A) forcing all of the Affliction locks to respec, or B) breaking PvP.

It's tricky with the pure classes because a lot of players will flock to the spec with the highest dps, even if the margin is only 1% (not saying that's the case here, mind you). The risk then for us is that we force players to constantly change specs every time we make adjustments because someone else is now top dog. We screwed up and did this with hunters and mages in earlier patches and nearly did it with rogues in 3.3. Rogues aren't in a bad place now, where some players just prefer Combat over Mutilate and actually hunters aren't far from that either with MM vs. SV (yes, both of those classes have a third tree, but having two raid viable specs is still better than one or none). In any case, we still want to get Destro's dps higher.

We really don't expect the healing nerfs that affect warlock self-healing to have a huge impact on PvP one way or the other.

Q u o t e:
Didn't you post just a few weeks ago saying NMIC rolling was fine?

Without going back to find my own post and check the exact text, what I meant was that it's not an exploit and it's not the crazy advantage that stacking haste before the initial Corruption was. We don't ultimately like the gameplay, but frankly it's a little tricky to fix (or we would have done so by now) without a code change, which puts in more in the realm of requiring lots of testing and bullet-proofing. It's definitely a dps increase, but not not in the thousands of dps to where locks who can't manage it aren't worth bringing.

(And I'm using NMIC rolling as a shorthand to mean any kind of stacking.)