Big set of Warlock Changes

[Lissa]

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.
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No, you're missing my point. Mages using similar synergies to those of Warlocks without the benefit of negative resistance are going to do a similar amount, probably more, to a Warlock with synergies and not using CoS/CoE. The problem isn't in the synergies, it's in how negative resistance and positive resistance works.

The way resistance works is as follows. When you are hit by an attack to which you have resistance (either negative or positive), the game then weights whether you get no reduction, 1/4 reduction, 1/2 reduction, 3/4 reduction, or full reduction (conversely, no bonus, 1.25 bonus, 1.5 bonus, 1.75 bonus, 2 bonus and rarely, 3 bonus for damage increase). The server then rolls and sees which of the weight ranges you fall into based on your resistance. This is why someone with little to no resistance can completely resist the full effect of a fireball or similar spell even though the spell did hit (not the inherent 5% miss) and why someone with a high resistance may only reduce damage by 25% of total. The problem is that resistance is a crap shoot on what happens and those unusual crits Warlocks get are due to these crap shoots.

When you throw in spells that reduce resistance, like Curse of Shadows and Curse of Elements, suddenly mobs can go from having a slight positive resistance to a -50 or less resistance. Then the server weights the damage bonus and then you get an unusual roll and suddenly your damage is way up there. Case in point, I have seen where my synergies gave me about +300 damage, I have around +270 shadow damage due to items, yet have had crits over upward of 2.8k, my base shadowbolt did around 700 damage due to slight lose of 85.7%, then up to 1000 for the synergies and then Ruin would pop it up to 2000, yet I cleared an additional 800 to 900 damage...which came from the crazy resistance system (I have also seen Dem/Aff speced 'Locks without the synergies score over 2k+ crits while wearing similar +damage gear and their crits should have been around the 1.4k to 1.5k mark, so it's definitely not the synergies that is causing this huge boost, it's the way resistance is handled).

Resistance is what is borked, not the synergies and Warlocks have been pointing this out to other players on the Blizzard forums for months (myself included) yet Blizzard pays no attention. It's funny, the players know how the resistance system works better than the Devs do, otherwise the Devs would have moved to deal with this in the proper way, against the resistance system, instead of the talents in question.