I would really like to see some kind of stats on the Soul Bags, similar to hunter ammo pouch's as a minimum change.

or, and this is my prefered option.

A Soul Gem or some such conjured item, that stores Shards as charges and could be equiped in the Wand slot. Right now wands are rarely, if ever used as a weapon and are more of another trinket type slot.

It would be great if the "big" change included scaling of this item's effects with the number of charges on your Soul Gem. granted the scaling could not be huge so as to totally reduce it's effects when you are low on shard charges.

It's been said many times (maybe not in this thread but elsewhere) that the reason Soul Bags don't have any stats on them is so Warlocks aren't required to use them. Hunters are balanced around the assumption that they're using an ammo bag and Warlocks would be too if Soul Bags had stats.

Wands are still useful for farming, leveling, etc. A better place to place such a "Soul Gem" would be in the ammo slot, I would think. Now, would this be a conjured item, similar to the spellstone/firestone, or a piece of gear, such as totems/relics/librams? I would suspect the first would be more likely, since that way there would be no need to add them to loot tables.

I rather hope that doesn't happen; it seems like it would go against the "masters of shadow and flame" idea of the class, and the way they introduced stuff like Molten Core.

Just seems a bit silly to me to define affliction as being all about the dots, and then take a (baseline, classic) dot like Immolate away from them. Anyway, I enjoy using Immolate in the affliction rotation at the moment There's something pleasing about not only giving your enemy some nasty diseases, but then setting fire to her.

I don't know if I agree with this comment, per se. To me, it always felt odd to be casting a fire dot as affliction, since the lion's share of the afflicition tree is shadow-based damage. It also felt weird to me in BC to be casting shadowbolt spam as destruction...I always looked at affliction as the shadow/dot tree, destro as the fire tree, and demo as pet/both schools.

Maybe I'm just odd.

Is anyone else upset at the changes to Curse of Tongues? That spell wasn't overpowered and required some thought between which curse to use. Now with it gimped I don't think anyone will ever use it :-/




As for shards I would really appreciate it if they would just take off the shard requirement for Soul Fire. The 2nd conflag in an Immo rotation either requires you to cast 2 SoulFires or waste a backdraft cast on Immo again which is really a DPS hindrance.

Every other class received similar, if not identical, treatment:

From patch notes.

It's also a Survival Hunter, Shadow Priest, and Retribution Paladin talent.

You are correct, but like my guild, most don't have available 20x of every class and spec, it's rare when we have a replenishment in anything now. That alone will force most locks I know to go destro, however I never will as I hate the spec.
Ergo, no raiding for my lock. Sure I can suckle the nipple of Blizz's temporary class changes, or play what I enjoy.

Just like a Raid needs Tanks, Healers and DPS, it also needs replenishment. Anyone leading a Raid campaign who doesn't plan for that isn't leading properly.

Shadow Priests, Survival Hunters and Retribution Paladins all do good DPS at the moment, and if they are refusing to provide the replenishment to a raid, then your group isn't very group-focussed. People have always had to make compromises in spec to serve the raid - this is no different.

Personally, I love Affliction too, but come the changes I'll happily research the Destro-replenish specs to make sure I know how to spec it and how to play it. And if we are short replenishment on any given night, I'll volunteer to switch to that (perhaps dual spec will help here). I'm not expecting to need it though; Shadow Priests in particular are very strong (great DPS, replenishment, misery, etc.), so I'd look at using a Holy/Disc respec to Shadow over a Warlock to Destro.

Using them wisely? Either you use them or you dont. Ok, to be fair you can use them unwisely by putting up summoning portals when people are standing next to you, but in most cases there isnt an much of an option to not use them.

You can wisely drain every mob you can, but you may have to explain thats why your low in the dps charts as your missing out on AOE or such. This can matter when the RL is looking for low dps to kick in a pug, for example.

After some wiping, using 3 shards a fight, do you wisely not summon your demon/use HS/ SS a preist/make a summoning stone to replace someone?

Almost everything tied to shards are not optional, imop. The current changes have helped, and being able to drain a boss for shards during a wipe will help too. Im wondering if blizzards future changes will be whole new concept or only some type of stacking. The stacking would be convient, but just being able to drain a mob/boss and get shards before it dies could be enough imop.