Are you kidding? We get guardians, pet abilities, Hellfire-whilst-moving, and now an improved Soul fire/Mana Feed actually being useful...

Demo looks to be one of the more changed lock specs on beta right now, I'm expecting to have a blast with it as my main spec when Cata's released

I dunno, I think I have to go with Bonham on this one. The changes to demonology are by far the most exciting, and the demo rotation feels the smoothest of the three trees. Hell, the changes to the Felguard alone (turning him into a pocket arms warrior) are impressive in their own right -- throwing everything else on top of that (Hand of Gul'dan, Aura of Foreboding, Cremation, etc) is just icing on a cake of mage corpses.

i'd say it looks pretty meh for destro, with afflic a close second.

demo has a whole rework coming for damage i assume, but it does have some nice tweaks. afflic is getting a coat of paint, and destro, well, it's probably still there.

biggest problem i have with cata is that warlocks don't feel useful or unique anymore. there's no evil, no good, it's rapidly becoming mediocre and second-hand to upgrades given to mage / priests / death knights, sic.

each time i see the cata warlock changes, almost makes me want to delete my warlock.so far, with the changes in spec, it might make me fall back to afflic or demo. i do miss the felguard, so, maybe demo/afflic will be the new vogue cookie-cutter spec.

destro, the one thing that still bugs me is the lack of variation, apart from soulfire being moved into the rotation, everything seems ... dull. genuinely lazy copy-pasted mage talents, compared to the thousands of repeatedly demanded user-posted changes to destro, arguably, is wrong.

IMO destro perhaps needs something with a bit of a boost to the mundane burden of DPS, i.e. procs, charges, something 'good', or in this case, suitably more evil and obvious to everyone that it's a warlock in the group, apart from glyphing the healthstone portal into a chocolate fountain, etc.

Do you actually play or know anything about Fire mages?

The Fire mage rotation is actually more like the Demonology execution rotation or even Affliction (read: Shadow Trance) than it is like the Destro Rotation. You're just seeing Fire and Fire and crying foul. Fire mages stack up scorch then apply Fireball until they get 2 crits in a row, then they use an insta-cast Pyroblast.

Destro locks, on the other hand, apply the Immolate DoT, hit their Conflagrate (which requires the DoT), which procs Backdraft and gives them 15 seconds of 30% extra haste, using Chaos Bolt, Soulfire, and Incinerate.

Exactly how is that similar to ANY mage spec? Arcane spams one spell until they get a proc, then they hit another spell, then start over. Fire I talked about. Frost pretty much just spams Frostbolt and Ice Lance.

The only big change to Destruction I see coming is the loss of the Conflagrate Glyph's function. Ghostcrawler posted a while back saying that they were moving away from the idea of glyphs altering rotations, so I have a feeling we're going to see Conflagrate's glyph change somehow, and we're once again going to be waiting until Immolate is almost off before hitting it.