I'm going to assume you meant "two seconds" there, and not 2k seconds. While I admit such a burst is powerful, you can do this only once with NS, and it's still reasonably easy to screw with (unless you mean 3.6k to the first target and the lesser amounts to the others adding up to 8k... if you do, you're being silly as this is hardly burst) as you have to cast one of the spells (either LB or CL) not Nature Swiftnessed. In the meantime, Pyroblasts can hit for 6-7k with a single spell. Not to mention... most people on serious PvP teams that I know have 14k+ health. 8k is hardly "unhealable" in that context.

Powerful? Yes. Overpowered? I think that that's hard to argue. If they are out of line power-wise, it seems that it is a very slight thing, and there are many better ways to alter this for PvP without affecting PvE so heavily. LO not critting does much more to affect overall dps than max burst, and if it were burst they were targetting it'd be more logical to simply have CL trigger LO lightning bolts instead of LO chain lightnings (flight time).

I think it's become pretty obvious that these notes are fake however, so I won't be continuing this discussion here.

Assuming again that these patch notes / meeting notes / internal theorizing notes are accurate, one kernel of actual interesting thought that emerges here is Blizz's general intent (no matter how broken/damaged their implementation of that intent turns out to be).

I think all of the theorycrafting warlocks had the same reaction I did when the ISB "nerf" was brought out -- that it's intended to lessen the power of 0/21/40, which is a fairly tedious but 'optimal' build to play, and that it reduces the power of warlocks. The fact that it's been theorycrafted to actually moderately improve the (individual) lot of the 0/21/40 player is probably no surprise given, e.g., the debacle that was rolling ignites proving that theory at Blizz often happens in a vacuum.

The key point though is that Blizz appears to be interested in taking locks down a power level, reducing cross-shadow synergy, and additionally making fire valid, rather than an RP choice, in endgame raiding.

Power level - I'm already seeing warlock influence waning at the 4/5 4/9 gear level. Where previously we were the top of the charts, now I see a lot of BM macro hunters, mages, and great-weapon rogues starting to challenge us, even on lock-friendly fights. It'll be interesting to see where we fall. Given that we're *also* having our synergy evaluated for reduction, that suggests pretty strongly that we're going back to the Naxx days of small numbers of affliction warlocks being brought for primarily CoE/CoR debuff purposes -- as most other classes now have significant synergy gains as well.

Synergy reduction - This is a little surprising given that Blizz has made a lot of pro-synergy moves at and since the release of BC. Whether this signifies a general reversal of policy or particular problems in the shadow area it's hard to say. About all I can guess is that perhaps shadow is getting some interesting top-end talents for warlocks and priests at 80 that would make this sort of synergy completely unfair. Still, it would be nice for Blizz to come out with some proactive pro-synergy moves for what is currently trending towards a selfish one-dimensional class.

Fire - Fire is interesting, but it goes against a fair amount of decent mid-game gear, and it runs into the same sort of scaling/synergy problems that ISB has. If Blizz makes fire viable I suspect most warlocks will switch over to it, leaving the shadow priests high and dry, if only because it's different and has a cooler graphic. But casting two different schools (shadow for curses + dots, fire for nuke and one dot) opens up gearing and resist questions that might prove hard to balance (cf. elementalist mages).

Keep in mind that mage dps really goes by cycles. Our base dps is relatively poor, however, our cooldowns (of which I include: icy veins, combustion, water elemental, cold snap, arcane power, presence of mind, molten fury (!)) allows us to get very good dps. Problem is, the longer the fight takes (particularly when learning new bosses), you will see a sharp decline in mage dps. Destruction warlocks have no cooldowns, thus I do expect somewhat linear DPS, whereas I know for mages the longer the fight lasts, I am far more likely to take a severe dps loss because I need very precise cooldown timing to sustain my dps.

I've been pushing for this for probably 8 months now, and I think it's a very valid improvement to the Balance spec. It could be tuned such that it wouldn't be overpowered, and would provide some much-needed utility.

@ Blizzard - I hereby release my rights to this awesome idea, under the singular condition that you use it.