Raid viable in the sense of "does more damage than now". Doubt out of "you still suck" unless they're some crazy good stuff when they figure out the changed pet scaling. The elemental is already up for large chunks of boss fights, heck, over two thirds of a shorty like an achievement Patchwerk. It's a DPS boost, definitely, but meh. And we lose the nova. A lot of us didn't want a permapet as the attempted fix because there'd be a downside. Sure enough!

The lance change smells like PvP. PvE it's nice but it's very silly. On live: it's a PvP talent, we don't cast lance unless moving because it's a DPS loss. The only good stat for us is haste so our bolts are screaming-fast. Changed: we take the PvP talent (we have the three points but they'll likely come from what little we have left in snaring), cast lance during FoF procs to haste our bolts which may have already been softcapped during procs, haste pots, and heroisms. My frosty's bolts are 1.8 or lower on live for large chunks of boss battles in good but not stellar gear.

I'm finally throwing in the towel and abandoning frost raid spec. Definitely going to check the PTR builds in hopes something changes but.... Make a snare/aoe spec as backup and no more frost nuking. Blizzard is so set on making this pseudo-shatter thing work in raids they just chuck more and more kludgy stuff at it. "Treat as frozen" "x4 if level +3". They can't admit it was a lousy idea and move on. Hopefully they'll start over entirely with the expansion.

Sorry to QQ about a large buff (quite obnoxious, I admit) but it's such a *stupid* buff. And ya know, much as I love my elemental to bits--I named him and I'm not a sentimental guy--if I wanted a big blue blob beside my toon 24/7 I'd load my lvl 20 bank alt warlock. What's the friggin' point if all the WE does is stand there and shoot? They could've made the glyph make my wand autofire while I cast, same damn thing.