So, I've been giddily reading patchnotes for 3.3 and have been quite excited, if a little scared about the complexity of the turn Demo is taking.

Demo changes are what have me excited/anxious, so I thought I'd throw this topic out there to talk Warlock raid/specs.

Based on the latest simcraft numbers it appears that the affliction tree is winning in 3.3 by a nose, this makes sense to me given the buffs specific to the demo tree as well. Now, demo will never compete for numbers, but it's starting to look like the raid might be a little less dependent on SB spam if there are aff-locks out there too.

Here's the issue: It used to be the case that a demo lock would hop into a spellweaving rotation of SB and SoulFire when the target was at less than 35%. A SB hit would enable the decimate buff (causing a faster soulfire cast speed and making soulfire not cost a soulshard), and the ensuing SoulFire hit would eat up that buff. Patchnotes seem to indicate that soulfire is going to refresh the decimate buff, making it possible to spam soulfire for the last 35% of boss health. At about 18K - 20K crits and approximately a 1.5 second cast time, that's a big damage buff for the demo lock.

However, there's a rub. Casters in the raid (at least in salmon) have been relying on my 5% crit debuff applied by improved shadow bolt. It's been nice not to have any mages have to play "scorch bitch". However, keeping up the 5% crit debuff would require a hit to a demo-lock's (read: my) dps when the boss is sub-35% health as every few soulfires the demo-lock will need to toss in a shadowbolt...not the end of the world (especially since the demo-lock's role is raid rather than personal dps), but a dps hit nonetheless. And, perhaps it's a dps hit that wouldn't need to be...

Here's the thing though, IF affliction is going to be the top dps tree anyway, AND we have enough warlocks in raid it seems that getting an affliction lock in raid would keep up the 5% crit debuff AND not sacrifice any dps.

Whaddya think?