Patch Notes 3.3.2

[Affliction Boosts]

Warlock

Affliction

    * Shadow Embrace: Now stacks 3 times. Healing reduction effect reduced to 2/4/8/10% (down from 3/6/9/12/15%).

Demonology

    * Demonic Pact: This talent now increases your spell damage by 2/4/6/8/10% (up from 1/2/3/4/5%). The benefit to party/raid members remains unchanged.

Destruction

    * Conflagrate: Periodic Spell damage increased to 40% (Up from 20%)
    * Empowered Imp: Damage done by imp increased to 10/20/30% (Up from 5/10/15%)
    * Improved Shadow Bolt: Now increases Shadow Bolt damage 2/4/6/8/10% (Up from 1/2/3/4/5%)

Affliction Boosts

* Shadow Embrace: Now stacks 3 times. Healing reduction effect reduced to 2/4/8/10% (down from 3/6/9/12/15%).

Current

Your Shadow Bolt and Haunt spells apply the Shadow Embrace effect, increasing all shadow periodic damage dealt to the target by you by 5%, and reduces all periodic healing done to the target by 15%. Lasts for 12 sec. Stacks up to 2 times.

Extra Shadow Bolt in the rotation to start it appears, but a 5% dot damage increase effectively.

    * Improved Shadow Bolt: Now increases Shadow Bolt damage 2/4/6/8/10% (Up from 1/2/3/4/5%)

5% Filler Increase, life is good.

Demon
Straight DPS boost with the extra spell power, as well as the 5% Shadow Bolt increase makes this a very big patch for the raid demonology spec

Destro

* Conflagrate: Periodic Spell damage increased to 40% (Up from 20%)
    * Empowered Imp: Damage done by imp increased to 10/20/30% (Up from 5/10/15%)

More imp damage = more easy damage, he just stands there anyway, so this should be a solid increase
Conflag dot increase will make glyph of immolate > glyph of imp for destro now, for those choosing this over glyph of lifetap (Should depend on how much spirit you currently have, gotta find the exact numbers but less than 600 spirit they are better than lifetap.
 

Update from blizz

Affliction was doing good damage before and with the buff should now be competitive with any class in the game, depending on the fight involved (and how much the mages benefit from IA). That doesn't mean *you* are going to top meters. Big difference.  The management of Corruption rolling with NMIC isn't ideal gameplay. We generally like the kind of gameplay that lets skilled players eek out a little bit more damage, but we agree the Corruption behavior is a little extreme. That said, it's not as bad as the haste effects on rolling, and ultimately we know how to fix it with a little tech. (Which doesn't mean we can fix it immediately, unfortunately.)

I'm not sure we have enough data on Demo yet. The buffs definitely did something. Totally agree on the mana issues. That's something we want to address (standard no ponies promises applies).

We knew the buffs to Destro wouldn't be enough, but we still thought they were worth making (compared to doing nothing at all). To finish the job will require more extensive talent changes. (Don't interpret that as a complete redo of the tree though.) We think we can do some of this before Cataclysm ships, but it's not the kind of thing we felt safe doing with the kind of limited testing / non-PTR status of patch 3.3.2. We could have just thrown caution to the wind and made the Empowered Imp or Conflag changes gratuitously overpowered, but that carries risks of A) forcing all of the Affliction locks to respec, or B) breaking PvP.

It's tricky with the pure classes because a lot of players will flock to the spec with the highest dps, even if the margin is only 1% (not saying that's the case here, mind you). The risk then for us is that we force players to constantly change specs every time we make adjustments because someone else is now top dog. We screwed up and did this with hunters and mages in earlier patches and nearly did it with rogues in 3.3. Rogues aren't in a bad place now, where some players just prefer Combat over Mutilate and actually hunters aren't far from that either with MM vs. SV (yes, both of those classes have a third tree, but having two raid viable specs is still better than one or none). In any case, we still want to get Destro's dps higher.

We really don't expect the healing nerfs that affect warlock self-healing to have a huge impact on PvP one way or the other. (Source)