Totem of Wrath Under the Dev's Hammer

I keep wanting to do an opinionated post regarding the changes going on, but before I get the chance more news comes out. The latest batch, regarding ToW vs. Demonic Pact (both by Ghostcrawler, by the way):

September 15th:
"Strawberry makes great posts, as usual.

We want to solve the discrepancy between ToW and DP before Cataclysm.

Demonology needs to be brought because it does competitive dps, not because it has an awesome buff. Or even better, you should want the Demo lock because the player playing it is someone you want to play with. Nobody should get brought because they have an awesome buff but are otherwise a liability. You should be able to get most of the buffs and debuffs you really need in a number of different raid configurations, and ideally even taking two players of the exact same spec won't feel like a mistake. The game should be in defeating the boss, not assembling the group."

Then, the next day on the same thread:

September 16th:
"I said ToW vs. DP is a problem that we want to fix...

...We don't think Elemental (or Shadow for that matter) are as low as a lot of players of those respective specs seem to believe, but both received small buffs. While it wasn't necessarily our intention, both of those tweaks happen to be relatively tricky to theorycraft out, so the jury is still out on what kind of buff they will provide or if they will be considered "enough." Some posters then tried to justify Demos's low dps because of their great buffs, but that isn't the way we actually want the game to work.

All classes should have buffs. All damage specs should do competitive dps, with the exception that the four pure classes should do slightly higher dps. Different versions of the same buff should not feel wildly different with regard to talent expenditure, personal dps loss, up time, duration or scaling. We will continue to work to improve all of those issues. However, in almost all cases, individual skill, gear and group coordination will have a larger effect on your performance than anything we can do to buff your class.

P.S. I feel the need to reinforce that "should not feel wildly different" does not mean "identical." We generally don't like things between classes that are identical."

From the looks of things, ToW has finally caught the attention of GC and the rest of the Development Team. More changes are coming, and this patch looks to be the biggest for Elementals in quite a while...

Thoughts?

-Puut