Big set of Warlock Changes

[savaughn]

The system that Blizzard has for how resistance effects damage is what's borked and Blizzard has to go back and relook at that (and the fact that there are Warlocks out there that are Affliction/Demonology spec that have no Destruction talents can regularly put out 2k+ crits with about +300 damage with the curses pushing resistance negative should show why the synergies aren't as powerful as people think).  Warlocks have been saying this for months on end, yet Blizzard continues to ignore us.
[right][snapback]90561[/snapback][/right]

But you're listing synergies right there. It's not JUST the fact that when you hit a negative resist roll you do double damage (at least, I think it doubles the base when you hit a negative crit roll). It's negative resists stacked on top of massive +damage, stacked on top of a 20% improvement from ISB, a 15% improvement from shadowweaving, a 10% bonus from shadow mastery, and a double damage crit from ruin. I haven't a clue how all those bonuses relate, but I suspect several of them are multiplicative instead of linear. For example, +damage and shadow mastery increase the base damage of the spell which is then doubled by a resist hit and effectively quadrupled by a ruin crit.

I've seen the argument on resists and it may just be that I'm misunderstanding something but I don't know if it fixes the problem. I don't know the formulas but lets say for example, that you have enough negative resists that you have a 10% chance to get a negative resist hit that doubles your damage. If you change that so that you have always do 10% more damage your DPS doesn't really change. It's just not as obvious because you don't see the large numbers pop up as often.

If Blizzard truly believes what they're saying on the forums, to wit: that in raids Warlocks are using combinations that are creating excessively high damage... my point is that changing Ruin does not fix this problem. It nerfs Warlock damage across the board. If Blizz is stating that synergies are excessive, nerf the synergies. If shadow weaving didn't increase shadowbolt damage and ISB was tracked on a per warlock basis you've eliminated the bonuses inherent to a raid without significantly reducing overall warlock damage. This is not the solution that was chosen. Instead, it was decided to reduce warlock damage across the board rather than correct the specific raid based condition.

Suffice to say, Blizz has made it known that this is the way they're handling this stuff. Paladins take heed: if they're consistent on this, your Blessing of Salvation is history.