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Blood Pact: The future of affliction warlock balance
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology and destruction warlocks. For those who disdain the watered-down arts that other cling to like a safety blanket ... For those willing to test their wills against the nether and claim the power that is their right ... Blood Pact welcomes you. As a pure DPS class, warlocks have something of a unique flavor all of their own, which brings along with it several different balancing challenges that hybrid classes generally don't face. On the surface, spec balance is a fairly simple concept. All specs should deal relatively within the same level of damage then you're basically golden. Alas, that's just not how it does. Raw damage is only a single factor in the equation. There's raid utility to consider, how the spec interacts with encounter design, and how complex a spec is to play. We've spend a large amount of time focusing on raw damage over the years, yet when push comes to shove, it is only a minor fraction of the whole. In the new age of Cataclysm-styled DPS where damage balance is closer than it's ever been, the secondary factors of balance are becoming more and more important. This week, we'll talk a bit about the future of affliction and how it can fill in what major roles still remain.