More word on the new soul shard system

There’s been some talk again in the forums about the new Warlock soul shard system that Blizzard said they were working on. The idea behind the new system is to change something that’s not really necessary and possibly even annoying and turn it into something that’s cool and therefore would be used more as a core class mechanic.

soul shards

Right now it’s still very vague as to how exactly this would work. I was thinking that since the warlock is a pure DPS class, the new use of the soul shard would also be used to boost their damage. In the Warlock class Q&A, Ghostcrawler mentioned that the new soul shard system would give warlocks a combat boost and that’s why more damage was the first thing on my mind (in the form of more spell power, crit, or haste for a short period of time). But Ghostcrawler recently came out in the forums and said that the new soul shard system would indeed be cool but not necessarily a dps buff. This statement poses a few questions right away.

If it’s a combat boost but not a dps buff then exactly what is it? The only stuff that I can think of are more of the cute maintenance things that the current shard system already has. Maybe more threat management abilities or survivability abilities? Maybe they’re things like more stuns and other crowd control effects? But these don’t scream core class mechanics to me.

If it’s not a dps buff, would making it more prevalent in class mechanics actually make it more annoying? I mean, this means you’ll have to worry about shards even more than before. It’s really got to be so cool and so fun to make the extra effort worth your trouble. Somehow i wish Ghostcrawler would give a clearer picture about what he’s really talking about but I guess even giving an example would come across to other people as “this is what it’s going to do” instead of just an idea.