[Quinthyll]

A simple change that would allow affliction locks to actually rely on an affliction spell in place of shadow bolting, AND push it back into the realms of debuffing would be to tweak drain soul.

While drain soul is activly being channeled, the targets attack and cast speed is reduced by 5%.

This would have very limited affect on pvp, as just like drain life/mana it yells "Hey, lock out my shadow spells!" and really, 5% wouldn't make a huge difference in fast paced pvp. Over the coarse of a long boss encounter though, 1 or 2 locks slowing down a boss's attacks would lighten the load on healers.

In addtion to this little change, perhaps the damage coefficent would be looked at. Not enough to make drain soul actually do more damage then bolt spamming, but just to make it not JUST a debuff and laughable damage.

Anyway, just a thought.