I'm not getting this. 3.1 is supposed to be our "Changes are coming" patch, but these are just small quality of life improvements. I hope this is just the unobjectionable taste of what is to come and not the "tada!" list.

• ISB and Improved Soul Leech changes - Utility. It's nice, but you still move through three worthless PvE points to get ISL. Nothing too shiny for the individual.

• Drain Soul - We use 0-3 shards every boss, more often 0-1. Shard management is requires far less planning in advance and making every trash mob count and now just topping off your bag when you feel like it. This is a nice change, but, as a blue stated earlier, they have a band-aid solution to shards and a sweeping revamp on the horizon, and they went with the unnecessary band-aid for now. Underwhelmed. There is little hassle to shards anymore, it is just wanting a fifth bag that makes me want change.

• Siphon Life - That's nice for Affliction.

• Curse consolidation and Voidwalker - Like we use either one. Whoop de frekn do.

• Reducing talents and adding new ones - Best change I saw, but obviously too vague to comment on.

This all seems not very helpful for PvE or PvP performance and mundane, like it could be tacked onto a bug-fix patch. I really hope there is far more to our changes or I will be severely disappointed.

I'm speaking a bit in the theoretical at this point. You're right that shards abilities are not currently powerful. What I'm saying is that the reason soul shard abilities aren't powerful, is because we can bring a stash of forty of them to a fight. If shard abilities were powerful, there's too much difference in power between a lock with 4 shards and one with 40, so we would be required to farm 40 for every fight, which is silly. Given that we're allowed to have a large amount of shards, the only way out of this is simply that they don't do much, which is the situation we're in now: they have no optimal in-combat use, basicaly serving us only as a unique class-defining replacement for a priest's candles.

The only way out of this is to slap a Unique(5) on them. Soulshards can be allowed to be used in-combat for a damage boost IF the damage boost you get from them is capped. This means either restricting them with cooldowns (in which case the cooldown balances them anyways and the shards are just onerous), or restricting the number of shards you have altogether.

Being able to get them back in-combat is really just gravy but I'm personally a huge fan. In terms of restrictions, it means that it caps your DPS boost rather than your static damage boost. In terms of gameplay, it lets us ebb and flow our DPS, letting us burst in a much more organic manner than other classes' cooldown system.

Delete me

I'm going to surmise that...

1) Siphon Life duration gets changed to match that of Corruption to allow for reapplication of both at the same time with the announced change to Siphon Life.

2) Everlasting Affliction gets changed to refresh UA instead of Corruption. EA won't be able to refresh Corruption anymore because then it would also have to refresh SL, which would be way too powerful being able to eliminate recasting 2 DoTs in our arsenal. And it can't refresh just Corruption because then how would you get Siphon up on the mob without casting Corruption manually whenever Siphon falls off? It would totally defeat the purpose of having EA refresh Corruption (if you're gonna cast Corruption just to get Siphon up, you might as well not have EA outside of the bonus to other dots, making half of the talent useless). Also, making EA refresh UA instead addresses a much needed PvP concern for Affliction Warlocks in that we have too many spells with cast times that we need to constantly get up on people. It would also help massively with keeping your "rotation" tight on movement fights in PvE, only ever having to stop to cast Haunt instead of Haunt and UA like you do now.

3)- Haunt and Shadow Embrace will no longer boost Fire damage-over-time effects, Immolate base damage will get nerfed, but Immolate will be brought back up to current levels of power through some deep Destruction talents. This goes along with what GC said in the past about them wanting to remove Immolate (along with Siphon Life through the already-announced change) from Affliction's arsenal and helping to simplify Affliction's "rotation".

4) They'll either increase the duration of the Shadow Embrace effect to something like 15 seconds, or allow Drain Life to stack it as well. Or possibly both.

5) Suppression gets changed to increasing the spell hit of your Shadow spells. This would enable Affliction to only have to spec into one hit talent and enable the hit to work on Soulshatter (if it can still be resisted right now, which I'm entirely unsure of).

6) Cataclysm gets changed to either Fire spells only, or it gets changed to all spells and moved deeper into the tree (perhaps swapping places with Improved Immolate?) out of reach of Affliction Warlocks.

7) Eradication gets changed to a a percent spell haste talent similar to Netherwind Presence in the Mage's Arcane tree.

If they removed shards from the game as they exist now it would be very difficult to notice a difference. Virtually every spell with a shard requirement has a significant cooldown or other drawback on top of shard use. The biggest offender and often used example is shadowburn.

I personally wish shards were more like energy. A flat non changing base rate of which they are generated and that we are balanced around. Combat abilities such as drainsoul could be used temporarily increase gain. Of course we still need a max number and we could use the existing bags that could hold X shards and shards only fit in the bag.

Maybe with an idea such as the one above the class becomes too difficult to balance. We are already balanced with the assumption that we have near infinite mana. Our resource management is often global cooldowns more than actual mana. Having to manage shards and mana does start to feel too much like a DK with runes and runic power. At least we wouldn't need to farm for shards for certain builds.

Since Siphon Life currently isn't a "Inflict X damage over Y Seconds" spell, but instead is worded "Transfers 81 health from the target to the caster every 3 sec." my guess is they are simply going to make Siphon Life an untimed debuff that stays on the target as long as corruption is on the same target.

Demo Empathy better be 20/40/60% haste buff for 15 seconds

This is what they mean for sure, I really don't see how people think its a nerf at all, in fact its such a huge buff. I still think they should just change FnB to make immolate get refreshed upon dealing fire damage. It would then keep pace with the whole burning concept and would save 1 gcd every 15 seconds, and still doesn't remove your need to cast COA/Corr. We can pray, Im just hoping for some good destro changes as affliction is snorefest gaming. Right now warlocks are just being punished for having 1 button shadowbolt spam during bc, now we got probably the hardest rotations.

And I belive supplication mentioned, for DS affliction isb buff will in fact drop if your not shadowbolting at the end of the fight. But well see, and I hope ISL doesn't loose its mana and just gains the replenishment buff.

Any thoughts on how the mentioned changes to SiLi and ISB will affect the viability of a 31/0/40 shadow destro hybrid?

QFT, it does feel like a punishment, and it's finally getting to the people in the raid that being a warlock isn't all surfing porn and hitting one button, it takes some competence now to achieve top damage against equally skilled players of other classes. If they buff Destro, and change or add some good talents to make it less black hole-esque then it would be the most attractive to me, I personally don't like the way it plays now and feel like I'm watching just as many cooldowns and DoTs just at a faster pace doing less damage on most boss fights.

Although they compared the 5 percent crit buff to imp scorch it sounded more like it will be similar to elemental oath and moonkin aura since they said buff and it's 5 percent crit rather than debuff and imp scorch is 10 percent.