The Write Up!
Main Spec: All specs viable.
Main Gear
TBC Gem Quest Gear. After my initial testing I determined I didn't need to farm much with this class, and got almost exclusively quest gear. I farmed one set of non-quest pants with sockets (you must if you want sockets). As usual I used Ghost Iron Dragonling for the side stats (10 mastery, 20 crit as well as an additional one with 10 verse and 20 haste). My main weapons were a lvl 26 epic staff, and later a Legion artifact (lvl30) as my main weapon. I crafted myself some jewelry for sockets with JC (neck, ring, trinkets) as well.
Gems
I used Steady Sea Spray during the initial startup of this run (+2 armor/+2 stam, and later Steady Talasite (+4armor/+6 stam).
Enchants: Elemental Force on my weapon, Mark of the Hidden satyr on the neck. I used typical enchants for all other slots.
Off-set Gear
I did not find much off-set gear during the run. Thankfully I crafted most of what I needed. Once I built up enough it gave me the flexibility I wanted to do more/different things. You can never go wrong with a good selection of off-sets.
Stat Priority
Armor then Stamina. Int and Mastery = Critical>Haste>Versatility. You absolutely have to stack up a large amount of Armor and Stam. They are top priority. After that, build up Intellect mostly from gear and an enchant or two. Since you essentially hit an Int wall, it is a lot easier to crank your damage output up via secondary's. Side stats are dependent on spec and gearing. Early on Versatility is desirable for your Voidwalker or other pets. Later after you build enough mitigation and survivability, you can switch it up for Critical and Mastery. Critical is important for damage, but especially important for critical ticks of Drain Life. Mastery is the bonus damage stat for all specs, but certain specs benefit more from it than others so it changes (Demonology is lackluster here for example). One thing I really want to stress here is that all of the specs are completely viable, something I can't say for any other class I tested with so far. Different specs require different secondary stats to boost them. I played all 3 specs during this run, especially switching vs particular bosses where one spec was clearly better for what I was doing.
The
most important stats for soloing are
Armor, then
Stamina. If you are low geared you want critical and versatility, if you are well geared you can go for critical and mastery. Round out other secondary's as necessary (like haste).
Armor/Stamina Threshold - I suggest about 100 armor and 3000 health as your baseline. For hard hitters like Rammstein you might want to go up to 3300-3500, and maybe 120 armor. Remember it's not really about you so much as it is the Voidwalker. He's going to get buffed by your stats, which we'll talk about later in this post.
Haste - Whatever you can net is always good without digging into your other secondary's too much. Dots no longer have breakpoints, you will noticed that if you add haste beyond 0 you will see a final tick beyond the normal allowance for less damage. For example, Corruption ticks hypothetically for 10 points every 2 seconds, I had haste of say 10%, you will see a tick for 1dmg at the end of "spare" time.
Mastery - Mastery is solid, more so for Demo and Affi. Stack it if you can, I stacked a lot of it up by the end of the run.
Versatility - Versatility is very good early on, and for hard hitters, including magical damaging bosses, however I recommend trading it out later on for Critical and Mastery. These will effect your HPS with Drain Life and severely outperform Versatility in a pve setting.
Critical - Critical is a key stat you want to stack. It helps you and your pet do more damage, and returns more life to you with Drain Life making things a lot easier.
Trinkets: I ran Ghost Iron Dragon (2 different ones with different cog setups), and Coin of Serendiptiy (+9 Mastery, procs 24 Critical for 20 seconds at least once per minute). I crafted Northrend JC trinkets in the early stage of the run for extra Steady Talasite slots, mostly for Ramstein and mega waves of trash (Strath Live).
Talents: If you like Affliction go with Inevitable Demise early on for the better heals, but switch to Drain Soul later for faster clears once gear improves. All talents for Demo are about the same, obviously if you don't use the Felguard then don't use Demonic Strength. Any of the Destro talents are fine, but I preferred Soul fire especially in touchy mob packs so I could focus one down super fast.
Professions: You do not need any specific professions to complete this challenge in my personal opinion. Warlock is that good. That being said, I recommend Jewel Crafting as the premiere one, if for nothing other than the double-socketed trinkets. When you get started extra armor and stamina are king, and you might need time to get adjusted to the voidwalker's mitigation flow, so you will have more time to drain/funnel and get used to that. I didn't bother with Engi at all, but you can never go wrong with it. I embossed my pants with 5 stam from LW, which is always nice.
Consumables: I went with the +5 Mastery food as my main food. Greater Arcane Elixir on key fights. I used +5 Armor elixirs (1% mitigation) as well, and Lesser Sage Elixir for +7 Verse, and Lesser Mana Oil for +6 verse. I did not need Drums of Haste for any fight at all 0_0! Wildvine Potion for Healing and equal Mana regain (superior to Iron Horde Potion for casters, as well as healing for slightly more).
Quality of Life: I used mount shoes (20% speed boost when mounted), Goblin Glider, and Water Walking Potions. +2 Mastery and +10% movement on boots. My Voidwalker IS quality of life, and the sheer ability to switch around from minion to minion, and spec to spec for whatever I needed was amazing. Warlock's over-poweredness is a tremendous quality of life. Drain Life/Health funnel are insane.
DPS and Damage Set: I only put together one basic set from almost all quest socketed gear for this run with a few sidepieces as they came. That being said I did manage to push my DPS up to 200-220 on single target mobs with bursts well over 300. This let me clear most bosses without unusual mechanics in less than 3 minutes. If you have a lot of gear and get used to playing the lock I would highly recommend adding Deadly Pyrstones (+2Int/+2Critical) into some of the gear for even greater damage increases, just be careful not to nerf your Voidwalker too much.
VoidWalker, and Friends.
Yes, he gets his own section. What prompted me to really look into doing warlock was my last run on DK, it was horrible and I felt like I was drowning during the challenge that took well over a month for me to complete. The other was blips on my feed in these forums and in the main forums that despite having all the tools to tank (taunt, threat, and multi-mob tanking) how weak Voidwalker is and how he folds like a wet paper cup. I decided to test this myself. I leveled up my warlock to 20, with his heirloom gear and a few lvl 25 pieces I had floating around to cover my bases. I marched right into stockades and tested him against the 3 packs of elite humans in there to see how he fared. This is a good test to conduct, the mobs have stuns, poisons, and a +20% dmg taken debuff, that can stack from separate sources. I managed to carefully defeat the 3 pack, and then a 5 pack of the other gnoll mobs. Right then and there I decided to finish the run, clearing my way to Hogger. The fight was very easy, however my dps was only about 100 so it took about 6.5 mins.
So what's the secret here?
Well first things first - the parts that aren't secrets.
Curse of Weakness - You want to make sure to
always apply Curse of Weakness. This is massive and can't be understated. It affects every mob and most importantly,
every boss.
Drain Life/Funnel Health - Make sure you are good about watching Voidwalker's health. Let's say I have 3000hp, when I do a full channel of health funnel I heal my pet for 1500 by sacrificing 25% of my total (potentially). Based on my current gear I lose 750, but heal back 600 after a channel not counting ticks (almost no versatility). Usually there is at least one crit and I heal back a minimum of 750 in one channel. Therefore my life lost to heal my pet vs my life gained is 2:1. My Voidwalker has about 2000hp in my current setup, so i'm healing him 75% of his HP for a temporary loss of 25% of mine, which I get back after a few seconds. If you are good at watching this rate of change, you are on easy street. Based on his life total and mine, and these numbers, every 3% of damage he takes is 1% of your life. I hope this makes sense! These numbers can go up and down based on your own gear, so don't take it as a cannon, just watch the rates and arrive at your own figures. I provided these here as an example
.
Curse of Exhaustion - A must use on some fights, you can separate adds that are problematic and kite them away if you need to while maintaining dots. Very good on some boss fights, like Wyrmthalak who summons extra troublesome adds.
Fear - Not always the best to use, but sometimes good in a pinch or emergency. Best used when there are not any other mobs to worry about.
Stamina - Yes you need a lot of this. The Voidwalker receives around 77% of your stamina as it's own based on my testing. I could be wrong, but it seems to follow suit with older models of them having anywhere from 75-80% of the master's stamina.
Avoidance - Your walker negates 80% of AOE damage. I did a few fights that were AOE heavy like Reaper in DM w/o a single heal on the voidwalker, that's how good this ability is when the situation is just right.
Shadow Shield - Negate 40% of physical damage. Hmmm that sounds a lot like...
Armor - The biggest mystery stat as of right now. I did a lot of testing and arrived at the following results:
Voidwalker Physical Mitigation
- 42.85% at 0 armor on owner.
- 57.15% at 30 armor on owner.
- 61.43% at 35 armor on owner
- 65.72 at 40 armor on owner.
- 76.12 at 91 armor on owner.
Despite numerous tests, I will not say these numbers are perfect, although I did run long strings of attacks. It took me about 3-4 hours to collect all the data for this.
I ran around with about 100 armor at all times, and had maximum armor values of 124 at some points of the run.
So what does this mean?
Armor is the key stat. From what I'm seeing, and I have seen this on every twink I've used to do the SCD challenge, armor is not scaling linearly, and is instead still scaling with DR, like in BFA, for us at level 20. This is not super important, it's just a note. The important part however, is that the data says voidwalker gets exceptionally better with even small armor gains on the owner. An Armor value of 30-35 on the owner already hits the benchmarks I suggested for the other tanks I used for the challenge thus far. On top of that, those numbers are arrivable at with just basic TBC gem gear and ilvl 28 stuff. You have a lot of easy ways to get armor as well via gems. The armor conversion for your Voidwalker is so good, you can do this whole challenge with only Steady Seaspray if that's all you can get ahold of. It might take a little longer than if you had Steady Talasites and some mix and match off gear and/or Deadly Pyrestones, but it's completely doable. I did several lesser dungeons completely with 0 Gem gear.
What about other stats? Based on my tests they are yielding roughly 80% of the owners gains. Nothing new here.
What about other pets? Other pets are completely useable. You can go demo and use Felguard. He takes a lot more damage, but b/c the pets gain so much more from the armor stat, he can take on several elite dungeon mobs by himself as long as you babysit him.
How did this class stack up to Paladin, Druid, and Death Knight? Or "How Overpowered is this class exactly"?
Aside from being a pet using class with a permanent pet (always a major benefit), you have answers for almost anything that comes your way. If you go demo you can use felguard to get interrupts. Some bosses are better handled with different specs. Guess what, you can easily switch specs with this class, trivializing spec related issues. If you need to pinch hit a mob that's troublesome in large packs, Destro all the way. Need a lot of bodies? Go Demo.
You have the ability to reduce all physical damage by 20% with Curse of Weakness, you can control most mobs that are too much with Curse of Exhaustion or fear in a pinch. Your ability to heal yourself is ridiculous. Drain life and funnel health are completely over the bar. You basically have to stop paying attention to let the VW/Yourself die in most situations. A properly twinked lock can void tank as many as 7 or 8 elite mobs at a time, and keep aggro on all of them. If you do a boss that is immune to taunt, just watch your threat and keep it low with dots, drains, and funnels. Is the Voidwalker going down slowly, in a way where you know he can't be healed even with your awesome funnels, or b/c you took too much damage to heal him? Well since he's a boss at keeping aggro, just resummon it (make sure to turn his aggro buttons back on). Your pet has more Lay on Hands then a Paladin could ever dream.
Don't forget you get free cookies (healthstones), and a nice 20% damage reduction cooldown for when the going gets kind of tough.
Are you bored and want to push yourself? Try face tanking. Yes, face tanking. I did it on several bosses and small trash packs (3-4 elites). No pet, just me, myself, and I. Do you want to feel like the Voidwalker and let your Imp think he's the boss? Grab an Imp and tank for him. It's hilarious and fun.
Final Thoughts:
I think you know what I'm going to say. It's S+ Tier. The only downside in my book is no speed boosts. I honestly think once properly geared it outperforms hunter due to Voidy being able to tank multiple mobs with ease, and having easy answers to almost any conundrum that appears. You also self-heal incredibly easily while dealing damage... It easily pulls 200+ dps while keeping the stats relevant to keep Voidy healthy and tanking for you.
Case in point, I died 11x during this whole run. Some of it happened due to bugs, some b/c walker went out of control, some b/c I was falling asleep and getting sloppy haha
. I one shot every boss except for Ramstein (2xshot due to a bug), and Roogug (3xshot), and Ambassador Flamelash(3xshot).
Lastly, it's extremely easy to gear, and you don't need insane stuff for it. You can get all quest gear with sockets, the legion weapon, and simple Steady Sea Spray Gems and make it happen. Every spec is viable! I really needed a run like this after my painful DK run. I highly recommend the class to anyone wanting to start a Classic Solo Dungeonmaster achievement. This is very easy to do, along with Paladin and Hunter, and honestly I feel it's top tier right now based on my experience. Give it a whirl and let us know how you do friends!
I hope you all enjoyed this read and found it informative! I am still continuing a few more challenges with other classes, and am planning on building the Solo Classic Dungeonmaster Guide for the community. I am sorry to keep you waiting, I just want to do a few more attempts with other classes. I promise it will be worth it!
In the meantime, God bless, Good luck, and Happy Gaming guys!
PS. I want to once again give a shout out to my friend Optimus. He stocked me so well from my last run I was able to use my overflow to conduct this run. I also want to thank my friends Alysium and Dragonmaze for their thoughtful contributions to theorycrafting these runs. Thanks guys! Also, thank you guys for your interest as well!
