The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
[WoW]More dots, more dots.... okay stop dots (Warlock thread)
Eat it You Nasty Pig.
tell homeland security'we are the bomb'Registered User regular
tell homeland security'we are the bomb'Registered User regular
Viper007Bond wrote: »
Oh God it's a new expansion what do I do!
There is good news and bad news. The good news is that each of the trees has been taken in interesting new directions, and that warlock are among the best damage dealers in Wrath PVE. The bad news is that playing a warlock in PVE has gotten significantly more difficult since level 70, with every tree requiring pet micromanagement and/or a complicated, dynamic dot/nuke rotation. Let's have a quick looksee at the three trees.
Affliction:
Affliction got a solid look by a balance team tired of warlocks that didn't use their damage over time spells. The most interesting change is the new 51 point talent, Haunt. Haunt's a direct damage spell that temporarily buffs your DoT damage and provides a small self-heal. In addition, affliction's picked up a bunch of new talents that will help it scale along with the other trees. The reasoning behind this is complicated and mathematical, but it's enough to say that affliction should be a viable pve spec for a long time. Played well, affliction will easily top the meters in T7 raiding, and still affords decent survivability and mobility in that environment.
This is the build I run. There is a certain amount of dispute among people who study these things about the opportunity cost of the two +hit talents (suppression and cataclysm.) Molten core and demonic power are decent places to put points instead, as is imp. CoA (if CoE isn't needed in your raid.) You should only put one point in eradication; again, the math is complicated, but the way the internal cooldown and the proc rate work make the second and third points almost worthless.
Destruction:
Destruction also got some lovin', and is now pretty much exclusively "the fire tree." For the first time since seducenuking at 60, conflagrate is useful, providing a nifty haste buff. Chaos bolt also provides the green fire you've always wanted. Unfortunately destro's damage lags a bit behind affliction, but patch 3.1 will add some nice utility (including replenishment!) to the tree.
Here's a pve build. Because of how topheavy the destro tree is, most of those points are non-negotiable. Yes, it doesn't have shadowfury. Sorry. Builds that go a little farther down the demo tree to unholy power do comparable damage, but increase your reliance on a potentially fragile imp.
Demonology:
Finally, demonology. Demo's basically what it always was: survivability and pet buffs. Still, there are some nice new toys high in the tree, and a lot of the silly things low in the tree can be used productively now (improved voidwalker, I'm looking at you.) The easiest pve builds to play currently are also demonology/destruction hybrids that take advantage of the scaling talents in the middle of the demo tree.
31/40 is the most popular, although some people also like 41/30.
Oh god how do I play this?
Basically, warlock dps revolves around refreshing your DoTs on time, and firing off as many nukes (shadowbolt or incinerate) as you can when you aren't doing that. The demonology hybrid builds have this the easiest; they keep immolate, CoA and corruption up, and spam incinerate. Deeper destro builds put up the same dots and also spam incinerate, but must weave in conflag and chaosbolt. Affliction has to watch a menagerie of timers, squeeze in enough shadow bolts to keep shadow embrace up, then switch to the even more cumbersome drain soul as a primary nuke once a mob is below 25% health.
PeeVeePee
Basically, warlock PvP is fucked until at least patch 3.1. Prepare to get bent over by melee, ranged, and casters (even mages! Ever think you'd hear that?) Your survivability will be low, and the only added mobility is the questionably useful demonic circle. If you're determined to step into the arena, the dominant build right now seems to be deep demonology; metamorphisis is a decent panic button that will keep melee off you for at least a little while. If you want to pvp as affliction or destruction, you're still putting 11ish points into demonology to get soul link, and dumping the rest into your tree of choice. Good luck, you're going to need it.
Bonus content: upcoming 3.1 class changes:
Blue posters have seen fit to reveal some of what will change about warlocks in patch 3.1. To wit:
Eyonix wrote:# Improved Shadow Bolt – this talent now provides a 5% spell critical strike buff (similar to Improved Scorch).
# Improved Soul Leech – this talent now provides Replenishment (similar to shadow priests)
# Drain Soul now has a chance to produce Soul Shards even if the target doesn’t die.
# Siphon Life no longer as an active ability but the talent grants the old Siphon Life effect to Corruption.
# Curse of Recklessness and Curse of Weakness have been combined into one spell
# Consume Shadows – this Voidwalker ability is no longer channeled but has a cooldown.
# Several other warlock talents have had their ranks reduced, their effects changed or removed. This list includes but is not limited to Demonic Empathy, Shadow Embrace, Eradication, Suppression, and Pandemic.
# Additional new talents have been added.
Is that vague as fuck? Yes it is! But 3.1 will hit the PTR soon, so hopefully we'll know more then.
Further Reading
If you're interested in the reasoning behind most of the braindump I've just tossed up here, the warlock class forum at ElitistJerks is a good place to start. This page has a broad breakout of how various specs stack up, as well as some fun destruction-related graphs.
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
0
Posts
It has no crit that I can remember off the top of my head. This is a bad thing yes?
Xbox Live: Kunohara
Most likely worse damage than UA/shadowbolt, but as mentioned above, valuable for shadow vulnerability if you have other warlocks and shadow priests, and the threat should be a bit lower I think since a higher percentage of your damage is covered by your threat reduction talent.
Just don't forget to keep using immolate and corruption.
I'm affliction specced, at the moment.
Unless you have absurdly good gear you should probably spec soul link.
Our resident incinerate spammer does decent DPS but it really is just for the pretty graphics at this point. :P
Edit: 5v5 advice from the noob ranks (we hover at 1650-1700). You're there to mess up the other team's shit. Instant DoTs while your teammates do the real burst damage, make sure you're doing the important things like Curse of Tongues where applicable, fear a healer, iHoT when things get crazy, spell lock, etc...
Heres my armory profile if anybody cares, my 2v2 team isnt doing so hot, and my 3v3 team was up to 1600 (again nothing great, but if we win we tear through the opposition and if we lose, we're making them work for it)
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Smolderthorn&n=Lokthaar
Yeah, I'd say if you absolutely must go only partially into affliction(and more than imp. lifetap) then you stop at SM. Otherwise, you get UA because it's just that damn good. There are so many boss fights where you have to move around, every bit of DoT damage is great.
I'd rather pair a demonic sacrifice build with destruction. Even SM/DS didn't do enough damage compared to DS/Ruin, way back then. I can't imagine raiding without certain destruction talents either.
If you are anti-Affliction, a deep Demon with the rest in Destro makes for a "OMG JUST DIE ALREADY" Warlock. These are the best to have in an Arena group as they can get in the mix without having to worry so much.
Worth it though.
Games: Ad Astra Per Phalla | Choose Your Own Phalla
One important thing to note about warlock 5v5 (and 5's in general) is that very nearly every spec can find a useful place in arenas. However, you can't just throw a team together and expect to find your happy place, how well you do specifically as affliction can and will change depending on the class makeup of your group. Affliction, in my experience, works fairly poorly in a 3 dps attrition setup, you're an amazing damage soak for the other team to pour fire into while your poor healers will have to chain heals to keep you up, which kind of hurts the idea of an attrition setup.
I played war/pal/priest/sham/affliction lock (I'm at 11k hp and 470 resilience, for reference) for a good long while, and while we did okay (ended at 2k for season 1, got to 1900 before changing team makeup for season 2) every single game was a struggle, mostly because I just didn't fit with the team design. You can't have such a weak link and expect to wear teams down. However! We decided to change the team up, using alts (very well geared alts) of the same players that were in my original 3 dps setup, and the team became rogue/pal/shadow priest/ele sham/affliction warlock. Suddenly, not every match is a struggle to win, certain team makeups we simply trounce every single time (just about anything with a warrior in it dies horribly.)
So, I guess what I'm saying is that you can't expect to go into arenas with just any team and expect to have the same results as someone else with the same spec/gear. If you want to do 3 dps, you basically have to be an SL build of some sort. If you want to do 4 dps however, affliction is lovely, especially paired with a shadow priest, lots of instant ways to shut down healers, and excellent passive dot damage makes fights go smoothly.
For your question specifically, warlocks are absolutely a denial class, you can very easily shut down one player for extended periods of time, and using a simultaneous spell lock + death coil, you can have three people being useless for 4 seconds at a time. I've won many games by keeping two healers locked down long enough to take out whatever their squishy happened to be.
IHoT is not particularly raid-useful (though HoT might be, situationally). Instant HoT finds more use in either 5-man work or PVP.
With 42 points, you can get everything that would really matter (except Nightfall/IHoT, which isn't crucial), and 44 would get you one of those if you wanted to lose Intensity. 42/0/19 only loses 1% crit versus 41/0/20, and that's not particularly important to you if you have 42 aff to start with.
Games: Ad Astra Per Phalla | Choose Your Own Phalla
This is about 2v2, and mostly about warriors, but hopefully some of the information will be useful in 5v5. It comes a warlock from our guild that had three 2000+ teams last season.
Firstly, the arena preparation phase:
I very rarely see locks handle this properly. The arena prep phase is a very hectic period if you do it correctly, since you should be summoning 3 pets, giving out 2 healthstones and 3 trash buffs, and 3 self buffs. Here's how I do it:
1: join the arena the INSTANT it pops
2: pop fel armor
3: conjure healthstone
4: summon imp, trade healthstone to partner during summon
5: conjure healthstone
6: buff myself and partner with unending breath and detect invis
~should be around 30 seconds left~
7: summon voidwalker, during summon cast fire shield on myself and partner
~wait for 15 second warning~
8: summon felhunter, sacrifice the voidwalker just before the end of the cast
9: cast shadow ward and mount up
The trash buffs DO make a difference, every little bit helps. If you want to be crazy anal, you can pop tainted blood on your felhunter too before leaving the gate. Your felhunter should only be in danger in 2v2s if he's mishandled, though.
General point #2, a felhunter should have neither spell lock nor devour magic on autocast. Both spells need to be micro-managed; they're just too important. I occasionally switch my felhunter to autocast dispel if I'm about to finish someone and I want to eat a ProM or nature's swiftness before they get the heal (which can't be done manually with any reliability), but not very often.
Now, against warriors.
The most important thing at the beginning of the match is to prevent a charge. If I deprive the warrior of his charge by putting him into combat before he can get within 25 yards, he'll be at a massive disadvantage. Secondly, after depriving him of charge, I force him to intercept me, not my partner. My means of kiting are all insta-cast, my partner's won't be. For this reason, your partner should stay far enough from you that the warrior can't intercept him, nor simply run over to him after intercepting you.
I typically encounter two openings from a warrior team. The bad ones usually rush straight at us; a quick curse of exhaustion as soon as they're in range will stop any potential charge. My partner should stay far enough away not to be intercepted.
Top warriors will hide behind an obstacle and wait; thankfully this isn't an option in Lordaeron as long as you made it out the gates quickly. In nagrand, I can often make a mad dash around the pillar they're hiding behind and drop a howl of terror (should be instant). A quick warrior will zerker rage/DW out of it, so I always run in the opposite direction asap and CoX him as soon as my global cooldown is over. I should end up just out of melee range, with my finger hovering over will of the forsaken (or trinket if I were a smelly orc) in case he intimidating shouts.
Blade's edge is much worse, as there's no good way to approach if they're hiding behind the post on their end of the bridge. If I'm up against a team I know to be one of the best, I'll just wait them out. otherwise, I'll run back and forth near the two pillars until I can drop a CoW on the warrior, then just run in. With a priest partner, this difficulty is counterd by the awesomeness of MCing the warrior off the bridge. Top teams will counter this by hiding underneath the bridge, turning it into a nagrand fight.
If I successfully deprive the warrior of his charge, the next step is to waste his first intercept. My favorite way to do this is simply to watch his rage bar. I always open with CoX (or HoT if he hides in Nagrand) which gives him 0 rage. He needs 10 to intercept me. If he's out of melee range (which he should be in the beginning), he's going to pop bloodrage so that he can intercept. As soon as he does, I throw death coil. He hits intercept, and due to latency and the travel time of death coil, I get stunned for three seconds from the intercept while he eats a 3s horrify. He ends up out of melee and has no intercept; I refresh my CoX, start running, and he's out of the game for 15 seconds.
Even if something goes awry, my trinket will give me those 15 seconds. After I'm intercepted and immediately after he hamstrings, I pop my trink, CoX, and run. If he has gotten a BoF from his pally, I devour it before trinketing (I'll always get it unless he resists, as a warrior-pally team will only have 1 magic buff)
Now that I've bought 15 free seconds (sort of free, anyway, I still have to keep moving), what to do with them? The most important thing I need to do is to pull the warrior away from his healer. The warrior has no choice but to follow me, or I'll be able to stop and get a UA on him. His healer has to follow, or I can just wear the warrior down while kiting. Once his healer is stuck in the open, we strike back. If my partner is a priest, it's mana burn time. If my partner is a druid, then he needs to cyclone the warrior, then root his healer, whom I then wail on. If I have a pally, then I just kite forever and wear them down; with BoF on me, and no offensive dispels on their team, I'll only ever take damage during intercept stuns.
Ok, now for some random things.
Always always always kite. if I'm hamstrung, and both trinkets and death coil are down, then I need to rely on my partner to help me, NOT by healing, but by helping me kite. If the warrior is on me, he's not on my partner, so my partner has all the time in the world to root/whirlwind/MC/HoJ/whatever the bastage. Trying to heal through an MS warrior is an exercise in futility, and will result in the opponent easily outlasting your mana pool.
Paladins scare easily, a couple dots and a CS on a heal will send them running for an LoS spot. I only pursue a little bit, then focus on the warrior.
If the warrior switches to my healer at some point, it's often a very bad idea to let my partner fend for himself, I simply don't have to burning power to kill one of their guys faster than the MS warrior will kill mine, assuming equal gear. It's time to pay very careful attention to his fear breaks. Most warriors pop DW early on, and if I didn't let him intercept my partner at the beginning, it will probably be down before the warrior is on him. All I have to worry about, then, is berzerker rage. I use natur enemy cast bars to keep an eye on this, and fear whenever it's down. One unbroken fear, and my partner should be able to get far far away, fully heal, and likely drink before meeting the warrior again.
Lastly, I never keep my pet next to me against warriors. If I'm doing any dps to the warrior, he's going to easily have enough rage to be spamming whirlwind and cleave. Thus, if my pet's near me, he'll not only be eating lots of damage (and will likely die), but he'll be feeding the warrior extra rage. Siccing the pet on the caster as soon as the warrior uses his first intercept works out pretty well. It prevents the healer from ever drinking, and ensures he's always in range to spell lock. The only problem is that he may end up out of range to quickly dispel BoFs from the warrior and HoJ from me or my partner, but there really isn't any better alternative that I've found.
I have 1083 shadow damage compared to 799 fire damage.
So, is it even worth using Immolate in PvE? Or should I just skip it and move right onto shadow bolts?
Raid buffed, my shadow bolts hit for around 3k non-crit and 6k crit. The initial hit of Immolate hits for about 1000. So I mean, I guess I answered my question right there (I'd do more damage just doing a shadow bolt), but I still thought I'd ask to be sure. heh
I have played, since beta no less, exclusively melee classes. Warrior, Rogue, Paladin and Rogue again all to 60 (second Rogue to 70)
How do I do this?
Can anyone steer me in the direction of a few good upgrades?
Quick and dirty guide to how you play an affliction warlock:
Stat preference on gear: Spell damage > Stamina = Intellect (show a preference to stamina at later levels) > everything else >>>>>>>>>>> Spirit.
1-10, just nuke mobs down. Use your imp to help you out.
10-30, send in your voidwalker, let it get in a few of its aggro moves, then put on your dots and then wand/Drain Life it down. Once you have 5/5 Fel Concentration, move onto drain tanking. The higher you go, the less you should worry about the Voidwalker holding aggro.
30-70 Drain tanking:
-Have out a succubus (or voidwalker or phase shifted imp, at later levels you should know what you should have out), send it in against a mob.
-Wind up an immolate (or Unstable Affliction at 50+) at the same time, and it should pull aggro off the succubus and onto you. This is good (you're much more durable and much easier to heal than the succubus).
-Put the rest of your dots on.
-If you have a reasonably high health, life tap, then drain life the mob to death at point blank range. You should be able to out-drain the damage most normal mobs do to you.
-Once it's dead, loot, then do a move that regains you mana (life tap + bandage/cannibalize, Dark pact), and as long as you're reasonably full on health and mana, move onto the next one. The more spell damage you have, the easier it is to keep constantly full on mana and health.
Prior to level 62, Try to never have completely full health while grinding, if your health is ever higher than your mana, life tap till they even out (this is so your health regen from demon armor is always doing something). At level 62, you get Fel Armor, and at that point trumpets should start playing and a message should pop up that says "You win the game," because once you start breaking the zero-sum nature of draining, it's just stupidly easy to keep yourself alive. Oh, and the extra spell damage isn't too bad either.
You're pretty well set up for not having any raid/herioc gear. Do you raid? If so, just check out the Karazhan loot table on Wowhead and work it out for yourself.
Otherwise, there a couple good instance drops. The rest of the Oblivion set is good, and the two piece set bonus is hard to beat for grinding. You can finish up the shadoweave set, which will serve you well for a good long while. The other tailoring sets are good, also.
I'm going to give you the same advice I took to heart on my own warlock: run shadow labs. Over and over. Aside from the D3 pieces (dirty murmur) there's the greatsword of horrid dreams, and a nice wand. And probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. I think at one point, about half of my pre-raid gear was from that instance.
Heroic badges will get you a good offhand and a trinket. Also, nethers for the really good tailoring stuff.
Edit: also, all the Honor reward dreadweave is pretty good, and not very hard to get these days. Just grind AV.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Hydross wipes aggro each phase transition; Lurker loses all dots when he dives and you want to burn down the adds real quick; Spitfire Totems need to burned down too; Leo has aggro wipes all over in human form, making dotting a PITA and Inner Demon requires favours burst damage. All this means your dots fall off or aren't being renewed at some point. Doesn't help that T5 pieces are a loss in pure shadow damage from FSW but a gain in Crit, which is of marginal value to affliction.
I've been informed that on the lurker fight, while the lurker is below water DoTs will continue to tick, they just expire while he's down there.
This is assuming someone else put up CoS. And doom will probably generate more damage then shadows will if it's just you.
I recently levelled my Warlock to 54, and on this forum and many others, I've read over and over again people talking about using the Succubus with Affliction spec and 'drain-tanking'.
The question I have about this tactic is... why drain-tank with a succubus, when a Void Walker will tank for me and let me DoT and wand and drain to my heart's content? Yes, he does lose aggro a bit more often nowadays because I do a lot of damage, and yeah I know a VW is not a good idea for PvP.. but for regular ol' PvE grinding... why use anything but a VW?
I've found that even in doing 5-mans, which are always PuGs, I still keep my VW out most times because I just don't trust most tanks to keep aggro, much less to actually notice when either myself or the group healer is under attack. The VW is like a safety net for getting aggro quickly off squishies.
So.. what am I doing wrong?
Also I'd rather look at my succubus's ass than a blue blob.
>.>
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
No great gems in the Oblivion. Both have a +150 hp enchant on 'em.
Not to mention that if you get 2 pieces of the set and have dark pact, it owns all until you get T4 or so.