“just lump curse of agony on top of all our other curses”
lol… stopped reading there.
Ok i checked some logs and you are right. I took the damage of 2 ticks of UA +2 ticks of Corruption and they are about equal to the damage of 1 shadow bolt… so it is no chance that invocation is a dps increase with 17/3/21 spec.
Maybe with deep affli (i use 28/2/11 sometimes) there is a small chance because the average shadow bolt damage is 15-20% weaker here (no Devastation +ruin)
Yes asking for making it possible to use his spells is clearly going too far!
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Yes my (crappy) calculations were based on 30/0/11 spec…
With 17/3/21 there would be no siphon life you know.
But yes the situation is worse than i guessed.
Ok so the only use where invocation can possibly compete with the other 2 runes is when you are not using devastation+ruin talents. Which is obsolete with lvl 60 because 100% of affli players will use these.
So Invocation rune is pretty useless today and totally useless in 5 weeks. 
Yes i know i am asking for totally unrealistic things … they making it possible to use a basic spell. I am an absolute psycho 
Thats why I suggested it before that invocation should trigger always when dot is reapplied or even refreshed.
That way non meta lock will get some instant cast spell comparable to searing pain for high movement situation and PVP when melee player or pet is hammering you down and you cannot do any hard cast (it will still be inefficient in terms of mana when comapared to direct damage spell but at least you will be able to do something). On top of it, if it synergizes with Everlasting Affliction (by trigerring always when refreshed) we might have actually viable affliction build and alternative tanking build.
Frankly I dont think everlasting affliction is worth it at the moment either, at least vs single target, you save one GCD every 18 seconds at best, which means 60% of Shadow Bolt or 66% of Incinerate or one Searing Pain - so in ballpark of 500-700 damage, +600 damage every 18 seconds = +33 DPS.
Instead Demonic Pact will provide 30-60 SP to entire party (including your imp which has 65% SP coeficient on its firebolt from his own spellpower), that alone is at least +30 DPS for you alone (maybe up to 200 for entire caster party!).
Incinerate without its own buff is almost as good as bane SB in DPS and much more mana efficient. It is not even contest with its fire damage buff /which applies to other fire spells as well. SB is comparable only if you can keep up the debuff 100% of the time and even then it is much more mana hungry.
Demonic grace - overally poorly designed spell, does not work when your pet dies, has a GCD with 6 seconds duration and 20 seconds CD, despite all that it still might be worh it with pandemic for affli lock, you trade 60% of SB (so 600 dmg) for +15% damage for your imp (because he crits for 150% damage) for 6 seconds (some 120 damage in total) and for +30% crit (roughly 27% damage increase if you have 10% crit chance on your DOTS prior to grace) for 3 of your dots thats +665 damage for debuffed UA (with 500 SP), +468 damage for Corruption and +608 damage for CoA (assuming you are not interrupting your ticking agony) and +275 damage with Siphon Life. So +928-1261 damage every 20 seconds, which equals +46-63 DPS (though you gonna loose a bit of uptime if you want to time your dots for grace).
So in short, Evarlasting Affliction is the worst rune in that slot and I suggest that Shadow Bolt, SB valley and Shadow Cleave, and maybe Haunt as well should apply Corruption when it is not already present on the target and refresh it when it is present (maybe even Unstable Affliction if you take the rune). That way this rune would be very good for AOE situations with volley and would allow lock in PVE / META to apply corruption without taking improve corruption talent.
Yes it is clearly too weak. But i think it is good this way because it makes demonic pact feel less like a punishment.
Imagine the raid forces you to take demonic pact and this would lead to a massive dps loss for yourself because there are far better options, but your party wants spellpower buff for good logs… we are already going through this with curse of recklessness.
(And then they secretly judge your dps and parses not knowing that you could easy do >10% extra dmg with agony instead of these utility curses )
Fully raid buffed (so demonic knowledge + all the world buffs and enchanting buff / flasks etc) you could have up to 600 SP with good “damage gear” which would result in 60 SP demonic pact that is worth roughly 80 DPS or so if you use machine gun imp. So outside of playing with build that uses incinerate it is probably a best choice anyway.
Yes and it should keep that way.
It would make me mad if demonic pact would be another “you lose dps but overall the raid gains dps” ability.
If they improve everlasting affliction and/or demonic grace, then they should at least listen to my idea to make demonic pact self bonus +15% instead of +10
Or make it like in WOTLK where you gain +10% spell damage bonus to your damage and provide 10% SP with your crits.
Would be ok i guess if this version was already uses in one version of retail wow
welp evocation is still a worthless rune
Seems there was accidently placed an “i” in BS (=bullsh**) 
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Affli is generally treated as a PvP spec in SoD, so Invocation provides additional burst which can help. I don’t think they’ve updated it for PvE usage. It’s also a logical choice if the rest of the boots runes are just RNG buffs, which don’t typically excel in PvP
With the damage reduction that was present for few days, maybe. But without damage reduction PVP is way too bursty for your dots to run near its full course. You would need extreme niche situation, like fighting SL lock with felhunter + immo aura that is being healed by a healer in order to get some delayed burst use from invocation.
its supposed to be a choice. otherwise agony would be attached to all curses from the start.
the general rule of thumb is that support/utility = nerf personal dps output or otherwise sacrifice something equally important.
this is the case across the board, in the majority of cases - getting utility and not having to sacrifice personal gain to provide it is rare.
shaman gives WF = he gives up agi.
feral gives wf = gives up something else (i dont play druid but i know they give something important up to provide wild str-i mean wf).
warlock provides useful utility curse = no agony.
priest provides caster utility (shadow) = can’t heal.
priest provides caster utility (power infusion) = can’t dps - heals less powerful than holy spec
this doesn’t mean there isn’t utility which flat out always benefits the user of it in all situations, but most of it is limited in this way - as a rule of thumb.
having to make a choice is an important aspect of classic.
not happy because you can’t use two curses? get more warlocks then. thats the solution to your problem. if you refuse to make use of that solution then that’s (again) a choice you are actively making and you’ll have to live with the benefits/drawbacks of that, which is how it should be.
As a cat wild strikes is the only option.
Only if you play tank then you have to choose.
Hunter is not giving anything up for heart of the lion because with the self bonus of another 10% then all the other runes are weaker anyway.
What does a warrior give up to provide battle shout?
What does a moonkin give up to provide spellcrit aura?
A shadow priest does not give up the ability to heal for the raid. It is his own choice so you cant compare it to the warlock curse situation.
And your argument “a shaman gives up agility for windfury totem”… didn’t you just say just bring more shamans if you want both?
It is more like we would say now Vampiric embrace and shadow word pain are now exclusive, you cannot use both debuffs on the same target. How happy would you be with this, sacrificing a basic damage spell for the raid support?
like i said, there are exceptions, and one of those is a 31 point talent, so it better be free.
WF is a lot better than battle shout though.
priests have a higher curse rank than warlocks, so for maxx parsing you want priest to curse unless its multiple mobs like atal’ai defenders
yeah me and my lock buddy talked about that. its bonkers they gave priest of all specs access to Curse of elements/shadow/tongues, the only other rune competing for that slot is a garbage rune as well, so every priest is running eye of the void.
the only downside to the priest curse is that it has a 3 minute shared cooldown between all of them meaning they arent really useful outside of bossfights and pvp… the crazy part is that those curses also last 3 minutes… and they are higher rank than the warlock curses… i mean thats just… i dunno, not fair lol.
so i guess thats another way you get to throw curse of agony, because 2 priests can cover the 2 damage buffer curses lol.