Scoop! Leaked notes at least partially accurate!

[Malakar]

Then all you're saying is that Shadowbolt base damage is inferior to Fireball/Blast base damage, which I can tell by reading the spell statistics.

Not exactly, I took respective talent allocations into consideration.

You can't just factor out resistance-lowering curses - they are part of the class abilities.

My problem is that my warlock is not high enough level to test out the higher level curse yet, and I've not seen any combat stats on this, so while I wanted to factor that in, I couldn't.

My observations suggest that negative resistances work in a mirror image of the way positive resistances work, which is unsurprising.  In other words, there's a percent chance to take normal damage, a percent chance to take 25% extra damage, a percent chance to take 50% extra damage, and so on.  It's not an easy calculation, but the effect is very significant.

Yes, that's how it seems to work to me. I only have experience with the -45 Shadow curse, and from my inaccurate observations, it seems that normal and 25% extra damage are both very common. That is indeed very significant, but nothing absolutely huge. Just for the sake of fairly ignorant speculation, let's say the higher level curse on average gives +25% more Shadow damage. That'd take Shadow Bolt to 325dps, very close but not quite up to the mage. Of course, with estimations this close, we need some real numbers to determine the reality of the situation.

Say you run into demons and elementals.  Mages throw their hands up in frustration; warlocks have Banish.  If there's more than one demon the warlock can Banish one and Enslave another; you only need it to last five minutes, and even the current form does that.

Oh yes, that is true, I forgot about that. :blush: That does tip the scales in the warlock's favor.

The mage's AoE is better, no doubt.  But, given the comparable damage, if you can address the drawbacks, warlocks can handle the role of primary AoE just fine.  There a lot of ways to do this: have a paladin spam low-aggro heals, or drink a fire protection potion, or pick up a secondary healer.

The damage Hellfire does to the warlock is virtually negligible in a raid situation, where you might have multiple primary and secondary healers.  Hellfire's DPS is more than enough to make sure aggro stays on the warlock.

Good points, I especially like the fire protection potion idea.

I guess my main problem with warlock AOE is the interruption factor. Yes it can be dealt with to some extent by PW:S, and also by sacrifice. In fact, I am now very curious as to how these stack. If PW:S takes precedence, you could probably get off two PW:S by the time the sacrifice is done. However, sacrifice is only going to be available once per drink break usually, perhaps even twice with Fel Domination, but even then that's only once every 15 minutes. And if you have Fel Domination, you're not going to be able to get all of the destruction/affliction talents to maximize Shadowbolt. Whereas a mage can have 36 points in fire, and still have enough points for IAE.

This isn't a call to buff or nerf anything, but even those warlocks who recognize that their class isn't gimped seem to have trouble on this point.  "We aren't as good as a mage" is an awfully baseless complaint.

Again, I agree. But from my perspective it's because the classes are pretty well balanced, not because the warlock is in general better. The only big difference I feel between the classes is the soulstone rez, which is awfully nice, but not absolutely necessary. Yes, Things Go Wrong, and the soulstone can be invaluable. But in the case that I'm going into an instance with a group of friends that've done it many times, and we're going to need some AOE, I'd take the mage's AOE over the warlock's soulstone. Yes, the soulstone is still a big deal, and it's something I wish could be made up for more on the mage side considering warlocks have comparable dps to the mage in a group setting.

Anyway, my general feeling is that one warlock and one mage is better than two warlocks or two mages, and that a skilled player of one class is invariably better than a skilled player of the other. I'd call that pretty damn well balanced. Some might say "Of course, a skilled player is always going to be better"... such was commonly not the case in Diablo 2.