Well, invis is not perfect by any means. Sure, it will be ungodly powerfull on something like void reaver or gurgtogg bloodboil. Unfortunately, the spell loves to fail for random reasons on felmyst (and no, its not related to getting the dot or not, sometimes it just breaks without reason). It almost always fails to work on twins. Sometimes you get a badly timed burn just as you pop invis on brut, although that can be worked around. Oh its also impossible to use during entropius.

No threat wipe is perfect. I think invis is what I am looking for for most case, but it just so happens that the fights i want invis most is the ones I can't use it.

Thanks for the update. Explains a few things i was seeing w/ regards to mage threat, when they said they only got a few seconds of Invis.

(in my opinion, .9 per second really sucks, by the way...)

Well invis is 3 seconds in wotlk so it is gonna be better than soulshatter on many fights in the future.

The thing about percentage mechanics is you get better threat reduction the longer you wait to use them. Maybe changing it to 1 minute cool down that removes 25,000 threat. we would still get around 150k threat reduction out of a 6 minute fight and wouldn't be playing Russian roulette. Although that might make it too over powered on trash particular AoE pulls. Also might be OP for bosses with aggro dumps as well.

One of my points exactly, in wotlk invis is getting tweaked to basically be a non instant but still short intro time version of vanish. Warlocks are getting 0 threat tweaks, in fact in changing master demonologist they are taking away one of a demo locks ways of never really possibly hitting the cap without soulshatter being ready (especially for those demo locks that were demo but not felguard). Shadow priests are getting another 30% reduction tacked onto shadowform, balance druids are getting 30% tacked onto their spell range talent (20% more than ours). So given major dps classes either already had a better threat management system than us or are getting tweaks to obtain one, shouldn't we get some sort of tweak, even if it is just something as small as a feint mechanic on lifetap or a buff to soulshatter?

If you use a build that uses an imp to dps, that would lower your threat.

Not that it matters, but if threat is a common issue for warlocks in wotlk, then it will simply become commonplace to use TA, in which case it will be moot.

I don't really consider off-loading threat on to my pet as a good reason to have a broken active threat-drop. IMO, Warlocks (of every single spec) should have their pet contributing damage and thereby acting as part of a warlock's total threat reduction package. Soul Shatter makes a good addition to that package. If all warlocks start using pets for DPS (because they live long enough and do enough damage) then will Soul Shatter be too powerful? Quite possibly, and I'm okay with it getting toned down if that turns out to be the case. But having a fixed 1% auto-resist is stupid and that design feature makes Soul Shatter impossible to balance.

Skill components are good. Random uncontrollable ones generally are not, especially on 5-minute cooldowns that might as well kill you if they come up.

I don't see why everyone's going overboard with Shatter's low percent to miss. Currently it's at 1%, if it doesn't change to a destro/affli spell it'll be 6%. Is that really such a horrific deal? Feign can fail by virtue of nor registering your tic. You need to in fact -stay down- for a measurable amount of time for the boss to count you as "dead". Vanish, as has been said, can not be resisted because it's a physical effect.

I understand 6% resist is a lot more than 1%, but I get more than 15% of my invis wasted. And by 15% I don't mean "85% through the channel, it breaks" I mean "15% of the time it breaks around tic number 1". Be it ambient damage, DoTs, tics of auras, shitty silences, the sudden need to blink, direct targetting, whatever. It does not have to do with player skill, manly mentioned it can fail on Twins for no reason at all. The bosses use an invisible debuff to register/check/target/do other administrative boss shit, this registers as "targeting" and wastes your spell. This waffle, is not to point out it's a good thing, or to point out you're better off than we are, or any other shit like that. It's to demonstrate: Yes, it's sub-optimal. Yes it sucks. No it's not game-breaking and no your experience with the game will not change drastically.

Having said that, the solution is really easy. Just make Supression affect affli too. Enhances desto-affli synergy, induces demonology synergy (for those rediculous times you -do- enslave/banish) and does not create a too-powerful talent, as it would if it affected Cataclysm.

Offloading threat on your pet means you can further delay soulshatter, which will make soulshatter more potent. I realize that a resist will still mean that you will have to halve your dps for the following 2-3 minutes, and that ultimately it won't fix that 'issue'. However, contrary to previous claims, its still a gain compared to right now.

Say I'm speccing Destro for Raiding, but I'm regularly threat capped. If I can go Demo and have Demo's damage do more damage then I was before, I've found a better spec. EVEN IF Destro has more DPS potential, if the threat ceiling laughs at it, Destro isn't as viable as it looks. That's what can make Demo better. But who knows how scaling will work or will the Demonology 51 pointer be better then Ruin, and so on.

From current discussion, we've found a sore-spot. Some people feel that Soul Shatter's 1% miss rate can screw with things. Well, who wouldn't, it's a 1% chance plus any hit rating you're missing to have the game say to you, "Sorry, but my dice say you can't play as well as others for 5 more minutes." Who else would like to experience this?

Edit: For Clarity with the Demo 51 pointer and some Soul Shatter thoughts.

I can count the number of times a soul shatter resist has thoroughly disabled me while raiding on one hand. It certainly does suck when it happens, and it probably should not be a demonology spell either, but seriously, you are blowing it way out of proportion. If you are having consistent threat issues, start talking with your tanks.

The Critical Failure or Fumble has a longstanding tradition in RPG's, and of course there are all sorts of other ways for a low-probability miss or resist to cause you hugely disproportionate problems and possibly death. We've all had a situation where a very unlucky roll has meant the difference between victory and a corpse run. I really don't think there's a problem with it.

And so are wipes? Tradition is a fine things, but what about having an enjoyable game? Yes, challenge is important, but challenge is something that challenges you. What does the 1% chance have to do with challenge? I know I've moved the argument from the Fumble, but what strikes you as a better mechanic, a Fumble on a boss you're working on, or possibly a static/scaling challenge that makes the game interesting?

It's not necessarily that the Fumble should or shouldn't be there. It's just like a bigger fumble. It's a fumble for perhaps 50% of the combat.

Now I'd agree with you if we didn't have a thing called omen that would tell us when soulshatter was successful or not. W/O it and a critical failure like that would go unnoticed and you'd most likely wipe the raid cause you wouldn't know that it failed.

But personally I like the fact that all spells *can* fail. It brings a little bit of enjoyment from having to always be on top of things... yes, if soulshatter fails, you're basically useless for dps for next 1-2 minutes, and can forget about top dps spot, but hey, you are not there to compete for dps spots.... only for the boss kill.

A enh shaman can have a worse luck with a windfury +6 crits in a row.... also with their crit chance, a less than 1% chance of happening... but in their case this equal to boss turning around and slapping them dead. What can you say to that? And unlike soulshatter that you can expect a chance of failure, they don't get to press anything for it - it's just 2 autoattacks (main + offhand) + a WF + their instant 2 hand attack critting.... RNG is a bitch sometimes...

Static and scaling changes are good. The challenges of dealing with and recovering from the effects of bad luck are also good. So, yes, you get very unlucky and roll a natural 1 and now your damage output is hamstrung for the rest of the fight -- well, you'd better let the raid know, and they'd better try to compensate. Unpredictability is one of the challenges in the game. The random element is part of what keeps bosses challenging even after we know the strategies.

That arguement is basically predicated on the idea that, somehow, you can deal with it. If your raid is already pushing as hard as it can (threat/consumables/attention/whatever), there's realistically nothing they can do to make up for your bad roll. What basically happens is that, either for yourself or possibly the raid as a whole, the fight has a random chance to be completely different. And what's more you can't plan for it ahead of time, nor should you when the chance is normally so small. The comparison to a random 1% wipe chance is pretty valid: while you're technically not dead, you should still turn your character around and take a sandwich break. It's not interesting and it doesn't add depth to gameplay because there is no recovery. A warrior that gets crushed could hit Last Stand; a warlock that gets his soulshatter resisted can't do anything, because that actually was his one big red button and now he's flat out of tricks. Our only Big Trick that we can pull is the only thing that can have a critical fumble result that would require us to use a Big Trick: catch-22.

Part of the problem is that you generally have one soulshatter per fight, and using The Soulshatter is a big deal, so it's a rather important part of knowing the encounter. This is what makes feign death qualitatively imcomparable: when a spell is part of a rotation rather than a special event I'm fine with it having a fail chance. I don't have philosophical issues with a FD resist or, say, scorch fallling off because it's a recoverable short-term effect, whereas a Soulshatter resist means you're playing a different game. Bringing soulshatter to, say, 2 minutes, 20% reduction would turn resists on it from catastrophe to annoyance.

As far as vanish and invisibility... this is why I also think they should fix those abilities. Comparing a soulshatter resist to Vanish breaking is not a fair comparison at all, because that's a goddamn bug. Invisibility could do with an interruption talent, it already has some disadvantages that make it compare to its greater threat reduction.

Everyone talks about Soulshatter having 1% chance of getting resisted not being a big problem. Soulshatter only has 1% chance of being resisted if the Warlock is hit capped, this completly nuliffies both lock hit talents in WoTLK, because Warlocks will still need to be hit capped.

Or anyone thinks is acceptable to have 3 locks in raid, each with 6% completly random chance of being forced to stop DPS in the middle of a fight.

I agree with you, this is, if anything, the real issue. Our Hit Talents are still worthless, because of this minor fact but someone already pointed this out before if I remember corretly.

I think those +6% hit talents are more catered towards pvp than pve, since pvp gear has little to no spellhit at all ( not counting gemslots )

You might even say this is a bandaid/hotfix for 'pvp balance'.

Except that anything above 3% hit for pvp is beyond retarded.
In any case, I am pretty sure you guys are making a big deal out of it. I hardly ever got a soulshatter resist. In comparison, I've had an astronomical amount of invis failures, and you know what, it never caused a wipe.

Totally in the same bandwagon. Too many of you equate Shatter to Can DPS and Failed Shatter to Zero DPS. This is utter bull. Throttling your output is something we, as casters, may not be familiar with but it's terrifically apparent to other classes. Retadins, Rogues and Hunters all at some point need to throttle. All of them will take a BoS over a BoM or BoK, that in it's self, is throttling. Going overboard and claiming the 6% you don't wipe half your agro on a class which has a very linear threat generation, like all casters, will shut you down is calling a mole-hill a mountain.

As for unpredictability, it doesn't matter what you think; the game's direction is taking a decidedly solid turn towards more unpredictable game mechanics. Tanks focusing their whole class around being Uncrushable and negating certain mechanics has driven the devs to alternate methods of tank survival, with different mechanics to help them survive like proc-based abilities. This has nothing to do with progression, with low % wipes on raids, with any TC you may or may nor prove it to affect. It simply has to do with eradication of game mechanics and how this is something that's undesired.

The devs don't spend their whole lives devising interesting, complex mechanics with the intention to have us work around half of them by making them impossible to proc. Having SShatter as the only tool that's 100% effective in any scenario is dumbing-down your options and from a game-design perspective it's stupid.

"Yea, you could manage your agro creatively in several different ways, but don't bother because it's one button-press anyhow"

If there's any time for us to get new threat management abilities and techniques, it's at an expansion. So what if Soul Shatter has a tiny chance to fail? I don't like that it's our only option in the first place. I'm all for integrating pet usage into all our raid specs to mitigate some of the threat issues that cause people to call out for a perfect Soul Shatter. Demonic Sacrifice might be an interesting choice if a Warlock + pet could do nearly the same damage; then you're trading threat for pet micromanagement.