All other things not changing, ~130dps gain.

GCD/sbcasttime *sb_dmg / duration

1.5/2.5 *6500 /30 = 130dps

That would be downright heavenly

/fingers crossed

Mmmm. If they're going to hand Affliction, which didn't need it, a 130dps buff, I wish they'd shown the same kind of love to Demo or Destruction.

Ah, well. If they change Demonic Empathy to proc off any crits and affect Felguard base melee, that'll have about the same effect for us. Please?

But mostly, I'm just waiting for more details.

P.S. 130dps? For Affliction? Sheesh.

What I know so far:

Mage 10% crit being nerfed to 5%
5% crit added to Imp SB
Pandemic being (likely) reworked to benefit from all crit increases, as they have recently made the mechanical changes for this to work
SL/Corruption rolled into one spell (but you guys have this) (still counts for 2 Soul Siphon debuffs)


What I'm guessing at:

Suppression will grant the +hit buff
Eradication reworked to be a consistent dps increase
Demo buffed via empathy somehow
Shadow Embrace easier to keep up, nerfed to compensate for SL/Corruption buff and crit buff

Didn't really see people mentioning these two points, which I thought were by far the most interesting. Seems like Blizzard isn't trying to get rid of "bloat", but more trying to make room for more talents in all trees.

100% true, they are trimming the fat for a new wave of goodness. I know there are a lot of people used to the old school Blizzard policies, but I'm thinking a new sheriff is in town, and his posse wants Big Bad Bloat out of the town, and his brother Crappy Rotations out by noon.

What I personally find very interesting is the replenishment attempt.
If replenishment stays as it is and requries you to bring 2.5(rather 2) replenishers with you - then that frees up 5 talent points in a destro specc.
Who would want to specc soul leech when its effect is not even needed for the raid...

The mentioning of the possible change or removal of pandemic is interesting, because two things GC had mentioned at different times:
This leads me to believe that the changing of Pandemic may signal a potential change to allow for DoTs to crit. This is just speculation, but who knows?

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - "Siphon Life" Changes. Damage Loss?

Nice, so it will leave the debuff as well. This is a pretty significant DPS boost.

Only 2 people in the raid are required to have replenishment because most likely you will have a combination of five rogues, dks, or warriors which do not consume replenishment because they do not use mana.

In regards to the ISB change:

If the wording is changed from

to

it will most likely compensate for the tremendous dps gain by removing SL from the casting chain.

The addition of Replenishment seems to encourage bringing different specs to the raid. Affliction may bring superior dps, but Destruction will bring regen for the raid. It also seems to advance the idea of 'bring the class, not the player' and at the same time 'bring the player, not the class' as it offers one more viable option for optimal raid comp.

Not far off from the mark IMO. Entirely speculation here but...

-DoTs will be able to crit.
-Pandemic will increase the critical strike multiplier of DoTs.
-Suppression being changed leads me to believe they may be taking on the (long time coming) task of consolidating the hit/range/pushback talents. IE Suppression is the anti-pushback for every spell school, Cataclysm is the +hit for every spell school, and maybe a new talent in tier 1 demo could be the range talent for every spell school.

I won't venture beyond those three, but they all sound fairly plausible.

On the other end of the spectrum, maybe Pandemic is just going down to two points from three. It's easy to read between the lines but it's hard to do it accurately.

i wanna see destruction get buffed or scaling better after this patch...

There's also a bit of inferred information to be had from the Hunter changes. Ammo is going non-consumable, which among other things means that Hunters are getting back the bag slot that's been devoted to an ammo pouch. Since I try and keep a good opinion of Blizzard, I don't think they'd do this while leaving Warlocks still hauling around a Soul Shard bag.

So, strong circumstantial for Soul Shards stacking or getting a similar overhaul that frees up our fourth bag slot.

1. Imp Soul Leech is bad - 5 points to get it and you don't need it raiding. Soul Leech and ISL are PVP/solo. ie. this is a DPS loss to destro to have it.
2. Siphon Life - I find it hard to believe that for 1 talent point you get in effect a 1 button uber corruption that causes corruption to do a heap more damage and heal - that seems to OP in PVP. Although being able to dispel both corruption and SL in 1 cast isn't so great either. This won't go thru unchanged imo.
3. I read the ISB change as being 5% additional raid crit debuff in addition to proc chance of shadow damage to your own spells. I expect it to not stack with scorch or for scorch to be reduced to 5%.
4. The drain soul change means you can expect spells like soul fire and shadowburn to continue to use shards. Probably only affects destros that wish to soul fire during backdraft as a 'negative' thing.
5. CoR+CoW will still not be used imo.
6. Consume Shadows - the VW is useless and will remain a levelling pet only until they give it some threat.

The devil is in the detail and those last 2 lines are the real stuff. After 3.0 and 3.0.8, I don't expect anything particularly good, sadly.

Is there any official word out wether haunt will refresh Siphon Life as well?

I'm curious as to when this new drain soul will randomly give you soul shards. If you have to sit and channel the spell for the full 15-second duration... that's as useless as a poor analogy to something useless. It could be by tick or DR could be revamped to a 5-second channel like the other drains.

I was going to type up a defense of Replenishment and CoW+R, but the more I think about it, the more I think that we're still not the ideal sources for those buffs. CoW+R negates the use of a very high-damage spell in addition to costing a global cooldown, whereas other people applying similar debuffs only use the global. It's more a 10-man thing. Meanwhile, if the current ISL remains the only 'greedy' effect, we'll be sitting on one of the less useful versions. Retadins get huge amont of mana back, shadow priests get another DoT, hunters are getting some unannounced greedy effect... we get a very small amount of mana that usually isn't worth the talent points (who knows what mages may get). While having more people able to bring more raid de/buffs is always a good thing, and I do think it's good for the game that something as significant as replenishment gets spread around, warlocks do not stand to be a very good source of it.
(What if it proc'd soul shards?)

Personally I think that Siphon Life was not the thing making affliction complicated or modilicious. Even though it's a really nice buff I'm lukewarm about it. On the other hand it increases farming speed by 50% (2 GCD per mob instead of 3!).

Regarding DPS, based on warlock DPS calculations right now, without knowing changes to talents etc, it looks like:

ISB: -170 DPS : new ISB will reduce our DPS for 170, since when mage present it will be useless
SL: +105 DPS: SL fusion to corr will increase our DPS due to saved CDs

That may seem like -65 DPS drop for Afflic locks.

But we should not forget 5 points from ISB that we can put to Cataclysm and Molten Core (probably only there if we want Ruin, since 10pts is requirement). Gains look like this:
Cataclysm(3pt)+MoltenCore(2pt): +95 DPS if you are not hit capped
Cataclysm(2pt)+MoltenCore(3pt): +50 DPS if you are hit capped

In total, change in DPS would be +30 DPS if not hit capped , or -15 DPS if hit capped.

Those are results based on my gear, so it may be slightly different for other locks, but general conclusion should remain same - it will not be large DPS gain on itself for Afflic.

And I didn't do math for demo/destro, but since no SL gain there it looks like demo will have around -80 DPS drop, while Destro do not use SB nor SL so no change.

I really do not like this potential drop to Demo DPS - it would hit again build that is even now least desirable for DPS. Of course, other changes could probably influence DPS much more than this so its too early to know for sure - which should not stop us from guessing ;p

I hope this patch will make a 51/X/Y spec possible.

Anyway, changes that should be implemented to free some talent points:
1. As someone wrote here, a hit debuff from Suppression would be nice (for any spec, being a T1 talent) to remove the need for Cataclysm.
2. Reach talents should be merged somehow, as well as threat reduction ones (with an increased threat reduction maybe to be on par with other classes similar talents. A new T1 destro talent for that would complement the hypothetical hit debuff from Cataclysm)
3. Shadow Embrace should be 3 ranks down from 5 (likely as SE is the only 5 points talent in the sentence containing "talents have had their ranks reduced")

# Improved Shadow Bolt – this talent now provides a 5% spell critical strike buff (similar to Improved Scorch).
# Improved Soul Leech – this talent now provides Replenishment (similar to shadow priests)

That could mean that in a 10 man raid, the warlock will have to supply both of these effects. Which would mean that the lock will be destro and has to add shadow bolt to the already complex destro rotation.

Besides that, I would assume that destro get the "-5% hybrid damage" malus for Replenishment.

# Drain Soul now has a chance to produce Soul Shards even if the target doesn’t die.

I was really hoping they would remove the shards. I don't think that changes anything because if you "waste" shards for things like Soul Fire for additional damage you are not going to "loose damage" by using Drain Soul. We can stack up faster, which is nice but it sounds like a band aid to me.

And we can still hope for shards to become stackable.

[quote=Scrufola;1091247
And we can still hope for shards to become stackable.[/QUOTE]

I very much doubt that, since a new shard-bag has been implied with WOTLK.