Originally Posted by Lhivera

Well, again, you need to compare utility. Even if we discard soulstones, healthstones, food/water, portals, cc, etc, none of which are really reasons to bring any particular class, we have the following non-personal-DPS utility:

Fire Mage: Imp. Scorch
Arcane Mage: Focus Magic
Frost Mage: Winter's Chill, Improved Water Elemental
Elementalist Mage: Imp. Scorch, Winter's Chill
Affliction Warlock: Curse (enhanced), -5% damage to tank, ISB
Demonology Warlock: Curse, Demonic Pact, ISB
Destruction Warlock: Curse, +173 stamina (raidwide)

They're assuming 2 of every DPS class, so we expect that both Warlocks will be using a Curse; that's utility. Somehow we need to rank the relative value of all these utility functions, which is going to be a great source of argument; what's clear, however, is that even a Destruction Warlock brings a curse which is more powerful than Improved Scorch, plus a stam buff, and thus should be behind a deep Arcane Mage and a deep Fire Mage. He should, however, be ahead of a deep Frost Mage, and an Affliction or Demonology Warlock. That's just one example, and I'm sure there's going to be as many opinions about the value of each spec's utility as there are people. But the argument that a Destruction Warlock is bringing no more utility than an Arcane Mage is really no more valid than the argument that all Mages bring less utility than any Warlock and thus all Mage specs should always out-DPS all Warlock specs.

In other words, yes, they're in the same boat in that Arc/Fire/Destro bring less utility than some other specs and thus need to do higher DPS than those other specs, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Arc/Fire/Destro should be equal to each other, because their utility is not equal.




WC is probably better than CoR, but CoE? Not so sure about that. It's approximately equal to +10% damage for Frost, worth more than +10% damage for Fire, and worth less than +10% damage for Arcane, Destro, and Boomkin (due to either lower crit modifiers or a percentage of damage being incapable of critical strikes). Is it good enough to be mandatory? Yeah, and that may be as granular as the analysis needs to be.

Regarding Imp. WE, I think they just don't know what to do with it. They want to improve the Water Elemental. They know the duration increase isn't enough value per talent point. They figured out health regen was essentially useless. Mana regen is too strong. They apparently really do not want to improve the WE's DPS, so it's got to be a utility function, and I'm not sure what else it could do.