To add to whi's observations, I was fooling around with Demo in between the still-present client crashes.

- Doom lasts longer than 1 minute baseline, unless haste is affecting it in some manner (I haven't done "naked" tests on it yet to see if that's why). It pulsed 5 times roughly every 14 seconds, so the duration was around 1:10. The tooltip says 1.16min which is close to that. Doom also generates 60 Demonic Fury every time it deals damage, keeping it at almost the same Fury-per-second generation Corruption has.

- Breath of Gul'dan and Hand of Gul'dan both generate the same Shadowflame dot, and share the same two charges. Having both feels a touch redundant, though, and makes me wonder if we'll end up seeing Breath become the demon-form version of Hand.

- Molten Core has some wonky behavior. First, the buff stacks, yet the stacking behavior seems to contradict the "guaranteed" 50% reduction advertised by Molten Core's tooltip. Specifically, when you consume stacks via Soul Fire, the cast time and mana cost benefit also decrease, and this is reflected both by Soul Fire's tooltip and Molten Core's buff tooltip.

- Decimation appears to trigger Molten Core as its behavior now, as displayed in Soul Fire's tooltip. (Decimation's own tooltip has @spelldesc12345 @spellname12345 blah in it.) I'm not sure how I feel about this, yet, given that it seems much more expedient to simply have Breath/Hand of Gul'dan do the Molten Core work for you.

I don't mind a ranged and melee version of them either, but I think they need to be castable in Meta. Right now being in Meta has no point but to cast Immolation Aura. I'm sure a more finalized version of the spec will appear in a patch or two, what we are seeing now is a midpoint in an overhaul.

Well this quote from GC fills me with unease:

(Source)

This suggests to me that (just like now) we'll require melee range to reach an appropriate level of DPS, but aren't really given proper tools to achieve it, and certainly not any compensation for encounters that don't allow it.

If you'll permit some griping, I'm not really sure why they're shying away from making us a more honest melee spec: played properly we must be "near-melee range" anyway, it seems odd to give us melee-range abilities, balance us around using them, and then tell us that they're simply "fun toys" that we don't "need on a challenging raid boss". Ah well, I suppose that we have the luxury of two DPS specs as warlocks, and no longer need to provide 10% spellpower as demo, so we can probably gear for a spec that works on all serious encounters and use Demo for when we'd like to use our "fun toys".

It all seems very troublesome at the moment but with the removal of Shadowflame and Immo Aura not being a single target DPS increase I don't think we actually will need to go into melee range. Except if we want to use our "fun toys" tanking glyph to save the raid from a 1% Chimaeron wipe.

Ghostcrawler is giving me a strong Abashi vibe as of late (those who played EQ1 will know what I'm talking about). If the class design doesn't fit with 'The Vision' (ie, anything outside the box), it is clearly unintended and will need to be removed post-haste.

He outright posts that they wanted demo to feel different from affliction and destro, then they seem to revert or nerf every change that would actually make the spec stand out as something truly different.

It's called lack of direction, and they've lacked it since mid-WotLK. Check out Cynwise's excellent treatise on The Decline and Fall of Warlocks in Cataclysm.

Griping about devs flip flopping on class design is all well and good and a long-standing warlock tradition, but let's try to have a little more constructive substance going forward.

Edit: ^^^ is an awesome link by the way!

After doing some leveling and testing on a couple locks myself demo's new direction is a positive one BUT I would recommend:

*HoG/Shadowflame-Guldan both useable in meta form
*Fel Flame renewal of Doom/Corr while in meta form
*40 yard range on slash
*Melee autoattack fury geneneration needs to be removed (bug?) so we aren't married to melee range.
*HoG needs to be single target spell which centers itself on the targeted mob, recticle seems buggy or makes /targetlasttarget type macro's needed and shadowflame already covers aoe version of the spell mechanic.

As for the damage difference between HoG/Shadowflame I'll hope that gets covered in a numbers tuning later patch. I also think pets need a bit of balance work but are probably on the same number balance fixing schedule. Overall though I feel the Wrathguard/DG needs to be a bit better than it was in cata. As a premier or special pet it should at least match what baseline pets do in terms of single target with its aoe being its utility. Perhaps 90%'ish as tanky as VW and 100-110% of succy/shiv damage as a ballpark target? I will write off wild imps as just bad AI right now but they also need a look before going live.

Has anyone been able to figure out exactly how soul fire scales? The tooltip says it scales with crit chance, but with the limited testing I've had time to do I couldn't figure out in what way. None of the formulas I tried added up to the damage amounts I was seeing in the beta.

Does anyone else have the time and inclination to do some controlled tests with varying amounts of crit and spell power?

By taking out the 3% critical effect meta gem and just testing the difference in soul fire tooltip damage (doesn't show the increased damage it gets from crit, tested by reforging from 600 to 1300 crit tooltip damage stayed the same) I was getting a 7% damage increase from 14% crit chance, so I am guessing it is pretty much 1% damage every 2% crit chance.

I will test more in a bit.

EDIT: It can't be that, beucase at lower crit ratings it was doing more like .4% per 1% crit instead of .5%

EDIT2: It appears that crit strike chance gained from intellect doesn't increase the damage of soul fire, when I took the Soul Fire tool tip damage x my crit% gained from gear and my crit% that I have with no gear (1.2% crit chance) it was pretty accurate at all crit rating amounts.

So its looking like 1:1 damage increase to crit chance except you can't count the crit gained from intellect.

Thanks - I did some further testing of my own using dark soul to easily achieve different crit levels, and my numbers seem to confirm your theory.

Very significantly, however, it appears that currently soul fire does *not* scale with crit when cast using a burning ember. This may be a bug, I'm not sure. I'd also like to see that conclusion confirmed by independent testing.