For those who can't access at work:

I had a great time doing the Q&A this past weekend, and look forward to more opportunities to speak directly with the community and field your questions. I wanted to take some time to clarify a couple of my responses. I’d also like to address several questions that were in the queue, but which we weren’t able to reach before we ran out of time.

The infamous Demonology warlock response: We’ve heard from many players that they don’t enjoy the spec but feel pressured to play it because it has so clearly been the all-around best warlock spec in current raiding, and we’ve seen masses of warlocks who started out favoring Affliction or Destruction migrating steadily towards Demonology. We feel the spec has several elements that are awkward and unintuitive (it’s not just a matter of sheer “complexity” – it’s fine for some specs to be more challenging to play optimally, especially for pure DPS where players can choose to opt into that complexity while having alternatives available), and we have plans to rework (and hopefully improve) the spec, but those changes are beyond the scope of a patch. In the meantime, we want to make sure we’re alleviating the pressure to play Demonology over other specs, which means making sure that it isn’t the best warlock spec. The goal of our 6.2 changes is not to make Demonology terrible or unplayable, and I’d expect Demonology to still be quite competitive on some types of encounters, and viable everywhere. If it isn’t, we’ll make further adjustments to compensate. But we did intentionally make changes to ensure that it isn’t the single best warlock spec in patch 6.2, and I wanted to make it clear that this was our intent, rather than simply a mathematical error.

Healing priests: In the Q&A, I fielded a question about absorbs, and have seen feedback about a seeming contradiction between our stance on Demonology warlocks (“we don’t want all warlocks to feel obligated to play Demo, so we’re nerfing Demo”) and my comments about Disc (“you’re probably doing it wrong if you only have one priest in the raid and that priest isn’t Disc”). To be clear, we don’t think the current state of priest healer representation is a desirable one – I was describing the present reality, not stating our design goal. But the Discipline problem isn’t one that is solvable with simple numbers changes – we’d have to nerf Discipline to the point of complete uselessness in order to meaningfully affect their representation. The issue lies in their nature as an absorb-based healer, offering a unique benefit that neither Holy priest nor any other healer can provide, and often doing so at the expense of the fun of other healers (whose core gameplay lies in refilling health bars that now empty less, or not at all, due to absorbs). Absorbs are still interesting as a mechanic, and we’re not looking to prevent Disc from feeling unique, but the spec’s niche in multi-healer situations probably shouldn’t be mechanically blanketing allies with absorbs. In short: we acknowledge that there is a problem, but we don’t have a solution to discuss just yet.