Well, after review, those numbers are actually incorrect. That's what I get for doing napkin math for them. I'll edit in the correct values in the original post, and put the work for those values here:

6/7 Spell Power = 1 Combat Rating (Any)
15.76 Haste Rating = 0.01 Haste
22.06 Crit Rating = 0.01 Crit

1 Spell Power = 7/6 Haste Rating
1 Haste Rating = 0.01 / 15.76 Haste
1 Spell Power = 0.01 / 15.76 * 7 / 6
h = 0.00074027p

1 Spell Power = 7/6 Crit Rating
1 Crit Rating = 0.01 / 22.08 Crit
1 Spell Power = 0.01 / 22.08 * 7 / 6
r = 0.00052838p

After correcting with those values, and fixing a few other issues, I've revised the conclusion in the original post.

I hope to have some time to apply TBC and WotLK talents to the formula and see how they match up with our TBC experiences and what they might predict for WotLK. I'd also like to try it with 4p=2r=h instead of p=r=h since the former is a more accurate picture of the gear we have, at least in TBC. Factoring in gems would be nice too.

Most of the lock changes are disappointing. even with new talents the FG can't keep up compared to a BM Hunter and metamorphosis looks cool, but is underwhelming.

So it's really a choice of Affliction or Destro. I really hope the new talents don't come out before we down Brutallis or we may have issues. It just feels bad that you expect your DPS to tank with new talents.

Fourth situation: affliction starts out balanced with destro, with early raiding gear containing plentiful spell crit, haste, and damage. At the middle level of raids, affliction keeps up with destro because of the incredible scaling of dark pact and lack of downtime while destro worlocks are forced to bandage to cover lifetaps in single potion raids. At the end of the expansion, affliction is still balanced with destro because so many fights require mobility that the advantage of instant cast dots and free mana through lifetap outweighs the better scaling of destro.

Considering neither of us could possibly know the details of WoTLK raids, I think my theoretical situation is just as much a possibility as yours.

Since you didn't specify what raid format you're talking about, I'm going to assume a 25 man. If that's the case, you must not be considering the impact of the Tier 10 talent Demonic Pact. As long as you're running 5 casters or more, it equates to more raid DPS than any warlock spec with the WotLK talents presented to us at the moment. Again, depending on your group setup, a 0/50/21 spec is going to increase your casters damage by something like 4-6%.

If your raid composition was very physical damage oriented, I could see a spec with Frailty contributing more raid dps but haven't really run the numbers to confirm this. If you're worried about threat, yet again Demo will allow you to do the most damage without going over the threat threshold due to your Demon doing something like 20% of your dps (therefore decreasing the threat you put out by 20%)

If you're referring to a 5 or 10 man raid, then yes I wouldn't recommend a heavy demonology build as the raid support you provide would be less than with an affliction or destruction build.

You are forgetting that FG gains 20% melee haste, battle shout, 5% crit, 10% attack power, ret paly aura, agility/str totems and more(possibly trueshot aura, dk buffs, etc)

Now what spec will we be at 70 when the patch comes out(Though you can't tell for sure until fire & brimstone/chaosbolt are done).. Options are

typical 0/21/40..Obviously fire with the emberstorm and isb changes. Losses 5% fire, gains 0.25 faster base incinerate, 3% hit, etc

51/0/10 haunt/isb/bane Trades ruin & 5% sb crit for eradication, ua, haunt, improved fel intellect


0/51/10 demonic pact/isb/bane Trades ruin & 5% sb crit for demonic pact, demonic empathy, improved tactics, felguard


All three of those specs are in my opinion better than the current 40/0/21, 0/40/21, and 0/21/40.

The last set of spec to consider is the more than 40 destruction specs...

7/0/54 casting coa/corruption and incinerate no immolate... This is currently the best spec in my opinion though that depends heavily on fire & brimstone changes.. If it ends up good than the best spec will be the last one I posted.

0/1/60 full blown backdraft fire destro



Regardless, I think we will be doing more dmg(and that is ignoring new raid buffs which is obviously going to increase our damage) after the changes come out than we are doing now.. Pretty much the only spec that goes down in dmg is the 0/21/40 shadow destro. Hopefully tanks can keep up with 4000+ dps I think it is possible we will all be demonology or affliction until wotlk just to not be threat capped.


Edit: It would also not surprise me if we started to see level 80 raid makeups happening. 1 Afflock, 1 Demolock, 1 Destrolock for the first 3 warlocks.

Fifth situation: Affliction starts off behind destro, with early gear containing spell crit haste and damage which benefit destro more. Many of the raid wide buffs that give haste and crit (moonkin and imp moonkin aura) further boost destros lead. At the middle level of raids, affliction lags even further behind because of a lack of scaling with the large amounts of crit and haste found on gear. Destro locks have no problem with mana regen thanks to all of the various raid wide mana buffs (BoW, JoW, mana spring, vamp touch, elemental shaman buff) and the mana regen power of the new fel armor and imp soul leech. What little life taping that is done is either healed with a soul leech proc or healed by the hots of a druid who is mathematically incapable of running out of mana. At the end of the expansion, destro is once again one of the top 2 or 3 damage dealing specs thanks to its glorious scaling from crit/haste and the scaling of the emp imp. At this point, no one even raids with affliction anymore. The shadow embrace and malediction CoEl debuffs are both provided by other classes (priest and DK) and the warlock who used to be token affl lock is now token demo lock for the stacking spell power buff the pet gives.

I assume you're talking about Disc Priests' Grace replacing Shadow's Embrace? Has that been confirmed that they don't stack?

I don't think gear is homogenized that much. They've mentioned the return of 8-piece sets. Destruction crit support will be lower than in TBC, because all we get to benefit from crits is Ruin, I'm actually wondering how ISB compares with Ruin, assuming that one will be Affliction/Demonology crit boost and other will be Destruction crit boost. I think there will be some basic choice around, it's just that when a "Holy Priest item" drops, other clothies won't find it useless.

Shadow Embrace is nothing anyways, it is severely overrated, it is especially bad late expansion when tanks are near/at armor cap(tanks take 75% of 95% for a total of 1.75% less per hit). It is about the improved fel intellect and malediction, and if you have an unholy dk(unholy dk looking like the worst dk spec still, so I wouldn't call that likely) you could always get frailty instead. Fraility is pretty good and affliction is the best candidate to fit it in their spec.

Anyways you won't have dks at 70 with the new talents. I am uncertain if destruction can perform at 70 so much better than affliction(especially considering threat) that it would be better than +3% for casters(also affecting your ele shamans aswell now) and extra 5% int and spirit(Affliction is really the only spec that doesn't lose tons of dps having a felhunter out) Affliction is already arguably good enough that one should be in every raid on live, and it is gaining a new raid buff, and getting a lot more personal dps.

I’m not forgetting the current talents, this is based on playing in the beta.

Pets don't live very long in the beta even with the new talents, I've not done anything raid buffed, but based on having been FG up through TK and the current beta. There is talk of the hunter pets tanking instances that isn't something that my pet in the beta can even come marginally close to doing based on what I see thus far, but scaling may change (taunt needs a MAJOR buff).

Based on what I see currently and the lack of substantiative warlock changes in the last few builds, We will not be kings of the DPS heap in WOTLK. I think we are where blizzard wants us more or less, though I hope I’m wrong. Right now the titans Grip Fury warrior will be #1 DPS (yes, it will be nerfed, the DPS fury does at the moment is beyond insane).
I’ve never been a fan of Destro, though I am playing it due to the DPS disparity between Destro and afflict. Our pets need more longevity and frankly better buffs in our trees (talent trees of their own would be nice)

Demo:
1. Demonic Pact Needs to apply to a warlock when in demon form meaning our melee attacks should reapply it.
2. Our DPS should be HIGHER when metamorphisised it was only useful for the heal and that is gone. We need to (based on current gear) have more armor. Heroic leap is cool looking, but really not that useful. When we are shape shifted people should dread us closing to melee not say, "Thank God he’s not going to run."
3. Pet scaling still stinks and we have less options than a hunter (but more flexibility) Taunt/Suffering needs to scale better with gear
4. Imp needs more HP and faster cast speed
5. Pet healing shouldn’t be channeled
6. Give up on master conjurer it is useless
7. Demonic empathy is useless in raids as any crit will probably kill you or your pet, yes, even in demon form.

Affliction:
1. The imp fear talent should increase the DPS a PVE target can take before fear breaks, and remove PVE heartbeat resists, to make it useful in PVE when hit capped.
2. Haunt needs to be affected by bane and refresh corruption as does SB
3. Haunt should be a spam-abe affliction replacement for SB
4. Nightfall should work with Haunt
5. Doom should out DPS COA, COD should benefit from the imp COA talent
6. We need a curse that removes fear or bring back the old version of COR in PVE and remove the fear piece from PVP (add it to the new COW so when it breaks you aren’t 1 shot, I can’t recall the new name, still never use it) and make the spell useful. Fear juggling is something only locks can do and it’s gone.
7. Dot ticks should benefit from IMP SB proc again.
8. Drain soul needs to tick faster to make sharding easier for all specs or changed to a short term aura that affects all targets in range. Currently sharding as destroy with a high crit rate is annoying.
9. Shadow embrace should effect Soul siphon again
10. Dots should prevent rogues from vanishing
11. Unstable afflict should detonate on a pally if he bubbles, the DK’s anti magic field, or a rogues ClOS (without reduction/immunity) or DPS should be increased.
12. Crit haste needs to affect affliction as with homogenized gear we will waste a lot of item points on crit/haste


Destro:
1. Chaos bolt is too situational and should pierce a pally shield.
2. Forced synergy between spell types FEELS forced
3. To me playstyle is still dull
4. More mana regen options
5. See Imp’s cast speed above

Other

1. Our glyphs aside from the nightfall clone really need to be redone
2. Green fire glyph is missing
3. Shard bags need to give bonuses like hunter bags or shards need to stack to at least 3
4. A lot of our spells could use better graphics

Wrong. 5% is 5%. It's always 5% of the damage that the tank would have taken.

5% of physical damage, which really isn't a concern after brutallus.

Re: Curse of Doom being superior to Curse of Agony:
It should. Improved CoA is not really a great talent anyway, so if talented CoA is > Doom than untalented CoA is going to either also be superior to Doom, or it's going to be so close you could barely detect the difference. Curse of Doom has numerous drawbacks- delay before damage, a long cooldown which hurts on resists, inability to use it in PvP. It needs to have at least somewhat of a DPS advantage over CoA or it should just be removed.

You cannot overrate Shadow Embrace. It's 5% reduction no matter what, it's extra 0.95 multiplier to boss damage. It does exactly that, saves you rougly 1 hit worth of damage over 20 hits. It doesn't matter what armor mitigation or other mitigation there is, but only amount of damage tank takes. If tank takes more damage (and boss damage scales up to catch up with tank armor if you want to look at it that way), Shadow Embrace is better, if boss doesn't hit hard, Shadow Embrace isn't really needed.

As for Malediction, it's changing multiplier from 1.10 to 1.10, which is a 2.727% increase and not 3%.

More to Armor and Shadow Embrace, I think that's the reason why going from 50% reduction to 55% reduction through Armor takes as much extra Armor as going from 0% to 18.18%

It also has a higher risk if the boss does an aggro drop or can also do no DPS if the boss an immunity phase.

I disagree. It is more like CoA does 85% of doom, the talent bring them almost equal, and then shadow mastery/contagion both only affecting CoA bring CoA to being better. Though the glpyh kind of changes this balance and makes CoA significantly better than doom.

Also I would argue that CoA is harder to use than CoD due to watching timers more carefully etc, as well as unwanted aggro being harder to avoid after an aggro reset. Also it isn't like CoA having a higher dps would make you never use CoD, you would still use it on fights that have break periods where a boss becomes immune(najentus) or bosses go out of range for a period of time(Felmyst) or on fights where the boss has a vulnerable period that you can time(curator).

Anyways I am tired of using doom, I think an expansion with CoA as the damage curse is not a problem.

If I am not mistaken I believe the CoA glyph is good enough to make CoA the best curse for every spec regardless of any talents, and certainly good enough to make it blow CoD away with just the 2 points in tier 1. Even if the last two ticks don't build I believe it is around a +20% dpct increase. 2.15 of these new CoA would do more dps than 2.5 CoA in a minute, and require 0.35 less global cooldowns to do it. With the glyph, the talent, shadow mastery and contagion a single CoA is going to do around 70-75% of a doom.

With amplify curse(assuming it doesn't bring the global under 1 second) it becomes even more warped. You are looking a 2.15 CoA vs 1 Doom and 1.15 seconds of a shadow bolt(54.5% of a bolt at 300 haste). On live at 300 haste you were looking at 2.5 CoA vs 1 Doom and 1.92 seconds of shadow bolt time(90.9% of a bolt). On top of all these things there is the fact that shadow bolt most likely won't have ruin because you have haunt, bad shadowbolt is better for CoA. There is pretty much 0% chance that affliction will be using doom when they have a dps curse opportunity.

Wasting a major glyph slot, not to mention two talent points on a spell you will only be casting situationally kind of sucks thou.

Has blizzard said anything about changing ISB? I can't imagine the debuff staying up for even close to what it does now if you have even a single DK in your raid.

Well consider that you won't have near the level of shadow bolt spamming that you had before since you'll have less locks per raid on average (2-3 being the norm imo), and the ones you do have probably won't be spamming shadow bolts in the first place (seems to be a notion floating around that 1 lock per tree could be the norm soon). You also have to consider the fact that the number of shadow priests per raid will probably drop as well since their buffs will be raid wide and Survival Hunters and Ret Paladins can also act as mana batteries. With Fire Destro already being better personal DPS than Shadow and with the other changes that are coming, I have doubts about if ISB will even be something people want anymore. I guess we'll see soon enough.

There will still be enough Shadow Damage flying around raids to make it a significant debuff, it just won't be as overpowering as it once was. The Demonology Warlocks will be the ones picking up the torch Destruction Warlocks are dropping.

Why get improved corruption? With Everlasting affliction, you put it up once the first time, and you're good to go. Even if you are in a fight where you have to run around a lot, you have 18 seconds to refresh. Seems the point would be better spent in suppresion.

I'm not sure I care for eradication, myself. I figured out a rotation for 100% dot uptime, and with the spacing of gaps for you filler, 20% doesn't seem all that beneficial. It reads "cast time", not haste. Does it effect the GBD? If not then it means nothing to a set of 5 1.5 cast spells. which make up 49% of your cast time. If the proc happens in the middle of your dot/haunt refreshing, you lose half of it.

I think eradication would be a good place to help with our filler. Make it similar to nightfall, and give your next drain life a crazy haste boost or something, so it can fit more often in between dot refreshes.

Granted, that doesn't help the lack of haste/crit scaling.

Apparently the disc priest talent "grace" (their heals reduce damage target takes by 2% and increases healing taken by 2%, stacks 3 times) does not stack with shadow embrace. Add to that the 13% spell damage increase debuff that a dpsing death knight will place and I have a hard time seeing why you would raid as affliction at all. Malediction and Shadow Embrace were really the only 2 reasons - are we gonna see 1 demon lock for demonic pact + rest destro the way we currently see 1 aff lock for SE and maledcition + rest destro?