Originally Posted by
Dierdre
Right now, when you cast a DoT (e.g. SWP, VT, DP), the damage every tic of the dot does is based on the stats you have at the moment you cast it, including trinket and enchant procs, and it will do that same damage until it expires or you refresh it. That is called snapshotting: The stats you have at the moment are "snapshotted" and applied for the full duration of the DoT.
With snapshotting gone, the stats applied to the DoT are recalculated ecvery tic, so it only benefits from trinket and enchant procs while they last, even if the DoT hasn't expired yet, and the remaining tics will be weaker than when you originally cast the DoT.
Snapshotting is (was) therefore one of the most important and interesting features of DoT classes, since knowing when to apply and refresh DoTs actually makes a huge difference between a good and a bad player. Blizzard dislikes when bad players (which are too many, me included) are too bad, because they're then discouraged from playing that spec and move on to play specs with a lower skill cap (aka arcane mage, survival hunter) resulting in spec/class representation imbalances. That's the reason for MoP's whole warlock overhaul: since warlocks had a higher skill cap and PEBCAK errors impacted greatly in a warlock's performance, their representation was very low at the end of cataclysm.
As to Mind Spike, yes we actually use it when things will die before DoTs have a chance to run their full duration.