Warlock Speccing

Since I'm starting over, I had entertained the thought of leveling as a Demo lock. It's something I've never done and the Felguard certainly looks like it's worth a trial...

Then, while leveling to level 10, I realise that unfortunately, I'm an Affliction lock to the core and the thought of having my pet be anything except a mana battery is just counter-intuitive to me... :p

So, do I go for the cookie-cutter 41/0/20 spec? Well, the thing is, the Affliction tree has quite a few lemons in them so the decision isn't hard. But I did make some changes based on my play-style and goals. BTW, anyone looking for a good guide on Warlock talents, nothing beats Maso's guide which can be found here on the Official Warlock's forum.

Suppression

I've considered this talent as 'not bad'. I mean, your DOTs need less spell hit at 70 letting you use gear with higher stats.

But the problem is that a large chunk of your damage are still going to come from Shadow Bolts, which do not benefit from Suppression. Which means, you still need to gather the +spell hit gear anyway. So, the points invested in this talent seems wasted. While leveling, spell hit is also less of a concern. It only becomes an issue while raiding, but again, you need the hit from gear for Shadow Bolt anyway.

Besides, with Improved Corruption in the same tier, it's not like you needed the five points as filler.

Improved Curse of Agony

While this talent is generally overlooked, I tend to like it. For one, it now scales with gear as the bonus is applied after your spell damage is added. Also, I tend to use Curse of Agony a lot more often in 5-mans and solo. Mobs don't stay alive long enough for Curse of Doom and the other curses are not as effective. To spare the points for this, I gave up Amplify Curse and Curse of Exhaustion. Decent talents, but not always as useful.

If I was raiding, it might make sense to change to Amplify Curse to boost Curse of Doom, but until then...

The rest of the talents are pretty cookie-cutterish, so I basically ended up with this.