Warlock Rating/Tips

[Seawasp]

Wobblewhoa - Aerie Peak. Link in the signature.

I've been working on building up my warlock into a half decent twink and I'm almost at the point of buying my next heirloom but I'm not really sure where to go with that. Salfir's Warlock guide was really helpful up to this point. There do however seem to be a lot of different gearing options based on the linked toons in that guide. Some stack stam, others int. Some use insignia, others don't. One consistency seems to be grandstaff of jordan so I was tentatively going for that as my next heirloom. Additionally, I found the recent healer haste discussion to be fascinating but am not sure whether, or how much, it applies to a warlock.

Any tips on spec? I've had fun with destruction and affliction but it seems like a lot of people go demonology.

Any playstyle tips? Tactics for problem class matchups? I've managed to top damage/kbs very occasionally but pretty much only when a healer has the "Ermagerd did that gnome warlock just soulstone meh. I will die for you little one" syndrome. I love those guys so, so much. Typically though, I just feel like there's this big well of untapped potential for a warlock that I'm missing.

Finally, other than the fact that I vendored Aluwyn's legs long before I knew what a twink was or had tried a bg, I'm more or less content with my hunter. I have one question though. I noticed that I had a couple pieces of dodge gear in my bank. Anyone ever tried stacking dodge? Or is that just completely stupid?

Thanks for the help. Hope you're all having a great day!

 

[Hashbrowns]

I'm not a lock expert but I'll link the haste stuff Haste Breakpoints - Ask Mr. Robot - World of Warcraft

You can get another tick in a few spells, which does amount to more damage then pure sp stacking. Bends haste guide has some nice lock stuff in there, I'm sure he'll link in a sec, I'm stuck on a phone lol. If you dot everything its probably nice but idk. Stamina locks are sexy...

 

[Seawasp]

Nice, ty! I poked around a bit and dug the haste thread up. Looks like I've got to hit 10% as destro for the extra Immolate tick. Stamina-wise I've got a couple of pieces I might look at subbing in. No AGM right now but if I have time I'm planning on snagging one for sure.

 

[LennywBT]

Im giving some tips on fighting rogues. YOu have to sue Voidwalter and make him stand always BEHIND YOU , so when th rogue ambushes he cant dodge it . THen fakecast fear ... thenFear him 2 / 3 times , because he will trinket the first one.
then you are Ok to use any Burst(Destro) !

 

[Seawasp]

Really awesome tip Lenny! I've been primarily using succubus and timing her attack with my initial burst. Hadn't even played with the voidwalker much, and, as you'd expect, any rogue that takes half a second to interrupt my fears wins in a couple of seconds max. Is there a way to set him to follow behind instead of at your side or are you saying to just use the move to command as soon as a sap lands?

Edit: I'm pretty weak at fakecasting. I've done it successfully maybe 3 times. Big thing to work on.

 

[Kibbies]

Wall of text inc, sorry if its hard to read or understand, i can clarify any point if asked ^^

ok so from your armory atm it looks like your warlock is just under the hitcap outside of bgs (about .54%) which is a real annoyance on alliance side. I would recommend looking at lils scaling guide and picking out some hit items (DPR, lavishly jeweled ring, messners cuffs, etc) Alliance casters have a really hard time hitcapping compared to horde i have found. My current setup is messners cuffs, dpr, and rune of precision to hitcap. These 3 items will hitcap you inside a bg as well as outside. My old hitcap set that was slightly more stam based (before bg scaling) was gsoj, dpr, and hovel digger bands with an agm instead of rune. This set is still hitcapped outside of bgs, but inside you are left with a .04% chance to miss (such bullshit am i right? i was pretty upset :/) So you should try different sets to get a spellhitcap inside bgs.

Ok, next there is your question of the next heirloom to get. In my opinion mark of tyranny is very good for warlocks. Why? well if you use tyranny>Dark regeneration>healthstone>lifeblood(optional) the dark regeneration restores 30% of your total health which gets modified by tyranny beforehand, so instead of 30% of 1741 hp it is 30% of 2002 hp (my warlocks stats) and then 20% from the healthstone (again modified by the new total hp from tyranny) drain life is also a % hp per second deal if you want to use that with the rest i mentioned. so i think tyranny is a worthy boa to have for a lock.

now for your next question! different gearsets. Stam stacking and int stacking are both viable for different scenarios imo. if i have zerking and i need to nuke down an efc or if im in a teamfight im going to have my all out offensive int+crit set. If the pug is not so good and i need to do 1v1 fights the more beefy stam set is what i find most useful, especially against rogues and warriors who just rip you apart if you cant build distance. The question of using an insignia or not is a very good question for a warlock, and kind of goes into your last warlock question for tips. If you didnt already know, the warlocks 3 pets have different gimmicks. the imp has a dispel (on a 7 second cooldown or something, i forget) the void has a disarm, and the succy has lash of pain burst and seduction. Now if you want to use a beefy setup like tyranny+agm or rune+agm etc, you can usually pull this off using an imp. The imp can dispel any spell (hoj, fear,poly, etc.) the only things you wont be able to remove is warrior stun, conc shot/scatter, and poisons (not a problem with antivenoms though!) but seeing as you are a gnome this is ok since you have the gnome racial thingy! The succys seduction is an automatic cast like the imps dispel, and happens under any stun/cc condition. This can be a real saving grace if you need to escape a paladin, or if the paladin/priest wants to hoj/fear you and heal up the succy will seduce so you have time to escape the cc and apply pressure for the kill. It also has a powerful ability called lash of pain that can be put in a macro (ex: /cast conflagrate /cast lash of pain) lastly, your void can disarm (works like a hunters bird or scorpion disarm) which is extremely useful vs those armswars/rogues/hunts.

now as far as spec goes, its all pretty much down to preference. Destro gets shit done and is a really good offensive caster that can apply alot of pressure. It tends to get a bit boring after awhile since its pretty spammy with the incinerate but its pretty fun overall. Afflic is what it is, pretty weak overall with the pathetic dots, but does have the silence if a pala or sham dispels your one curse (i cant think of the name) Demo is fairly strong and can 1v1 melees alot easier due to demo leap. it doesnt have great burst like destro but it can do decent burst with hand of gul'dan.

Vs rogues youll have to fakecast the fear if you arent demo, otherwise demo leap then fear
vs hunts theres not much you can do vs a good hunt, but keeping in los until you can get a void disarm is usually your best bet
vs paladins try to fight them until they are about 60% then unload your burst. they will probably hoj and heal at this point where your succy can seduce and then you can finish him off generally. Paladins like to pop cds in 1v1 fights unfortunately so if he bubbles and you are low theres not much you can do unless you are good on hp. do NOT go into demon form if you are demo vs a prot because their one move can stun undead/demons and if timed with hoj they can almost global you

i could go on but those are the 3 classes that are most likely to hunt your sorry ass down and this post is already so huge omg O.O

edit: i forgot to rate (lol) 9/10 well done its all good except its missing the hitcap, sexy mtb but too bad its ally side and takes the place of a would be hit item :/

wall of txt hits u for 2.7 k hp

 

[Seawasp]

wall of txt hits u for 2.7 k hp

Thank goodness for soulstone.

Amazing, beautiful wall of text Kibbies! A big reason I was leaning toward gsoj was to bust over that hitcap. I'll look into those other sets you suggest to fix my hit. Might have a few of those pieces just sitting in the bank. I had also thought about tyranny but didn't realize that popping them in order like that would help dark regen. Great to know!

I've never run with a group yet but part of the reason I rolled on AP was to hopefully try that out at some point. So point well taken on variable gear sets. I had started with imp but once I discovered that warlocks actually had seduction at this level, I kinda just switched to succubus at all times. I see there's a huge value in each though. Do you recommend switching pets out over the course of the bg or sizing up the competition at the beginning of the bg and making a judgement call on a persistent pet?

Oh and thanks for the matchup tips and rate. Probably won't save me in the near future as I'm kind of a slow learner but I'm going to try and apply strategies wherever I can and these will help me realize exactly what my mistakes are in those matches.

 

[Kibbies]

I've never run with a group yet but part of the reason I rolled on AP was to hopefully try that out at some point. So point well taken on variable gear sets. I had started with imp but once I discovered that warlocks actually had seduction at this level, I kinda just switched to succubus at all times. I see there's a huge value in each though. Do you recommend switching pets out over the course of the bg or sizing up the competition at the beginning of the bg and making a judgement call on a persistent pet?

i like to evaluate the matchup beforehand and stick with the pet through the bg generally, but if i need to go in and burst down an efc ill generally use succy over anything else. For example, the imp dispel is pretty much unnecessary if your team has a good hpala dispelling hoj/fear/poly off you.

another point i didnt make about demo locks, in demon form they can insta summon a pet which can be great if you want to disarm then go right into a succy for burst, or even burst with succy then resummon it (it resummons with full energy) to keep the pressure up. so theres a bit more to think about (if there wasnt enough already <.>)

 

[Seawasp]

Awesome. Another reason to give demo a shot sometime soon.

Hey, sorry to keep bombarding you with questions [MENTION=15173]Kibbies[/MENTION] but I was thinking some more about the tyranny/DR/HS/lifeblood thing. In your experience is it more valuable to macro that all together and use when close to death or to pop each gradually between spell casts over the initial/middle part of a fight?

 

[Kibbies]

Awesome. Another reason to give demo a shot sometime soon.

Hey, sorry to keep bombarding you with questions [MENTION=15173]Kibbies[/MENTION] but I was thinking some more about the tyranny/DR/HS/lifeblood thing. In your experience is it more valuable to macro that all together and use when close to death or to pop each gradually between spell casts over the initial/middle part of a fight?

Since they are all 2 min cds i like to keep them together so i macro them all together. Id pop it when you are anywhere from 75%-40% because if you pop it close to death you dont get the full effect from dark regen

 

[Mesikämmen]

I'd like to give out some tips, I did read through the thread earlier but do not remember what has been said so apologizes if I seem to be repeating stuff that has been said. As a disclaimer, I would like to say that I'm by no means a veteran of warlock pvp at any level, but I've played around 8k hks on my f2p one and it's been a very viable and fun class Take everything I say as just things that have worked for me, not as an absolute fact. Also some things I mention could be very basic, but as I do not really know what kind of skill level you play at, I decided to include them aswell. Try to bear with the huge post =P

1. Curse of enfeeblement: Very powerful and somewhat overlooked spell. Definitely keep this up on as many targets as possible, especially for casters. 25% casting speed reduction is amazing, and that 10% physical damage reduction will help you survive, and eases the pressure on your healers! Destruction also gets half the GCD for this spell I believe (may not be exactly half, but it is a very fast gcd compared to others), so it is very easy to spam this on many targets in a short amount of time. Should always be keeped up as much as possible in a 1v1 situation imo.

2. Critical rating: Some like to stack stam for extra survivability, some like haste, some like pure spellpower builds. What I think is very useful for a destruction lock though, is crit. Most of the times it is essential to get a few crits in in order to burst through a healspamming opponent, and around 15-20% crit will help you get those crutch crits in at a pretty steady rate. I'm not trying to say that you should only focus on stacking crit, stamina and spellpower are just as important in order to have a good dps and not get oneshotted 24/7. About haste I really can't say much as I haven't experimented with haste stacking very much at all. Fast fear casts can be very nice, but overall I'd value crit/sp over haste due to them providing more bursty damage than haste.

3. Succubus pet: I think this was already mentioned in the thread, but figured I'd give a few thoughts about it aswell. Like has been said, it is wise to macro lash of pain into your conflagrate. Spamming this macro will give you instant damage where you need it, when you need it. Even when your conflagrate is on cooldown, you can smash this macro to get through those last few hundred hp your opponent has left before he is able to heal back up I would not, however, set lash of pain to not be cast automatically, as this will make your succubus stay at full energy a lot and make you miss out on overall damage. (A more experienced warlock or someone who wants to take his gameplay to the absolute max could maybe find a better solution, maybe another macro for only lash of pain and use it manually for maximum efficiency, this is however too hifi for me )

4. Fear: One of the best crowd control abilities in the bracket imo. Can be cast 3x before DRing to immune, and lasts some damage before it breaks. Amazing, right?! To be a decent warlock, you definitely need a mouseover focus macro (one that sets the target you're hovering with cursor as focus) to keep changing focus targets for fearing. For example, fear a healer twice or optionally until fear DRs, change focus to another healer and start fearing him, etc you know the drill. Also spam fear on healers your team is bursting, interrupting their heals while your teammates burst him down. When you're at EFC who is standing on capspot and you know your FC is dying very soon, get on capspot and cast fear, this will hopefully make him run away from the capspot and you or a teammate can get a repick and save your team from getting capped against Fear is a great spell which has a shitload of uses, never neglect using it!

5. Fakecasting: Simply said: learn to fake cast. This was discussed before, but I decided to add this here as it is an absolutely critical skill to have. Learn to fakecast a rogues kick and you will pretty much never lose to an average f2p rogue in a 1v1, except of course if he crit's ambush and literally globals you before you can do anything.

Standard rotation vs a rogue should be: 1. Fear (fakecast this one obviously), start casting fear again (most of the rogues will trinket first fear if they have trinket up). If he doesn't trinket until about halfway your cast, you can interrupt that and start going through your normal dps rotation. If he trinkets, finish your second fear, and after that start going through your dps rotation. Not going to go through that though, as I'm pretty sure you know it by now

6. PvP trinket: I would definitely use a PvP trinket. If a paladin hojs you 1v1 and you don't trinket it, there is a good chance he will kill you no matter what you do unless he's a complete retard, and that if something is pretty damn frustrating Obviously it has a lot more good uses aswell!

That's all I could think of, if anyone feels that my points need correcting, please be my guest always open to learn stuff about the class myself also! Stay brave and keep playing what I think is possibly the most fun class to play right now in the 20-24 bracket! If you have any more questions, I will try to check back on this thread to answer, or optionally just throw me a PM. My lock is in my sig if you'd like to check it out

 

[Goesid]

Wall of text inc, sorry if its hard to read or understand, i can clarify any point if asked ^^

ok so from your armory atm it looks like your warlock is just under the hitcap outside of bgs (about .54%) which is a real annoyance on alliance side. I would recommend looking at lils scaling guide and picking out some hit items (DPR, lavishly jeweled ring, messners cuffs, etc) Alliance casters have a really hard time hitcapping compared to horde i have found. My current setup is messners cuffs, dpr, and rune of precision to hitcap. These 3 items will hitcap you inside a bg as well as outside. My old hitcap set that was slightly more stam based (before bg scaling) was gsoj, dpr, and hovel digger bands with an agm instead of rune. This set is still hitcapped outside of bgs, but inside you are left with a .04% chance to miss (such bullshit am i right? i was pretty upset :/) So you should try different sets to get a spellhitcap inside bgs.

Ok, next there is your question of the next heirloom to get. In my opinion mark of tyranny is very good for warlocks. Why? well if you use tyranny>Dark regeneration>healthstone>lifeblood(optional) the dark regeneration restores 30% of your total health which gets modified by tyranny beforehand, so instead of 30% of 1741 hp it is 30% of 2002 hp (my warlocks stats) and then 20% from the healthstone (again modified by the new total hp from tyranny) drain life is also a % hp per second deal if you want to use that with the rest i mentioned. so i think tyranny is a worthy boa to have for a lock.

now for your next question! different gearsets. Stam stacking and int stacking are both viable for different scenarios imo. if i have zerking and i need to nuke down an efc or if im in a teamfight im going to have my all out offensive int+crit set. If the pug is not so good and i need to do 1v1 fights the more beefy stam set is what i find most useful, especially against rogues and warriors who just rip you apart if you cant build distance. The question of using an insignia or not is a very good question for a warlock, and kind of goes into your last warlock question for tips. If you didnt already know, the warlocks 3 pets have different gimmicks. the imp has a dispel (on a 7 second cooldown or something, i forget) the void has a disarm, and the succy has lash of pain burst and seduction. Now if you want to use a beefy setup like tyranny+agm or rune+agm etc, you can usually pull this off using an imp. The imp can dispel any spell (hoj, fear,poly, etc.) the only things you wont be able to remove is warrior stun, conc shot/scatter, and poisons (not a problem with antivenoms though!) but seeing as you are a gnome this is ok since you have the gnome racial thingy! The succys seduction is an automatic cast like the imps dispel, and happens under any stun/cc condition. This can be a real saving grace if you need to escape a paladin, or if the paladin/priest wants to hoj/fear you and heal up the succy will seduce so you have time to escape the cc and apply pressure for the kill. It also has a powerful ability called lash of pain that can be put in a macro (ex: /cast conflagrate /cast lash of pain) lastly, your void can disarm (works like a hunters bird or scorpion disarm) which is extremely useful vs those armswars/rogues/hunts.

now as far as spec goes, its all pretty much down to preference. Destro gets shit done and is a really good offensive caster that can apply alot of pressure. It tends to get a bit boring after awhile since its pretty spammy with the incinerate but its pretty fun overall. Afflic is what it is, pretty weak overall with the pathetic dots, but does have the silence if a pala or sham dispels your one curse (i cant think of the name) Demo is fairly strong and can 1v1 melees alot easier due to demo leap. it doesnt have great burst like destro but it can do decent burst with hand of gul'dan.

Vs rogues youll have to fakecast the fear if you arent demo, otherwise demo leap then fear
vs hunts theres not much you can do vs a good hunt, but keeping in los until you can get a void disarm is usually your best bet
vs paladins try to fight them until they are about 60% then unload your burst. they will probably hoj and heal at this point where your succy can seduce and then you can finish him off generally. Paladins like to pop cds in 1v1 fights unfortunately so if he bubbles and you are low theres not much you can do unless you are good on hp. do NOT go into demon form if you are demo vs a prot because their one move can stun undead/demons and if timed with hoj they can almost global you

i could go on but those are the 3 classes that are most likely to hunt your sorry ass down and this post is already so huge omg O.O

edit: i forgot to rate (lol) 9/10 well done its all good except its missing the hitcap, sexy mtb but too bad its ally side and takes the place of a would be hit item :/

wall of txt hits u for 2.7 k hp

dpr and rune is enough hit for cap.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Kibbies]

dpr and rune is enough hit for cap.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

Welp realms offline for maintinance atm but im 99.9% sure last time i checked that in bgs i had a super small misschance, ill doublecheck in a few hours i guess

 

[Goesid]

Welp realms offline for maintinance atm but im 99.9% sure last time i checked that in bgs i had a super small misschance, ill doublecheck in a few hours i guess

Hit cap is 6% or 12 rating outside bgs or 15 inside bgs excluding racial expertise/hit. Rune is 10/12 (outside/inside) and dpr is 3. So no you didn't have a small hit chance.

 

[Seawasp]

Thanks [MENTION=10714]Mesikämmen[/MENTION]! You don't have to be a veteran to teach me or to have great ideas.

Enfeeblement, check. I've definitely noticed the spell speed reduction as particularly powerful in a few situations. I've been working through Lil's scaling index to set up some more effective gear sets. Will give a crit and balanced/crit set some experimenting in the coming weeks when I nail down my hit deficit.

Very good point on the succy macro. I was using it manually, but on it's own. Especially while I'm learning, that'll be really helpful. Fear, yep, I've always felt most useful to the team when I'm smart/lucky on fearing rather than when I put up any particular damage numbers. I've only recently discovered how powerful a well used mouseover macro can be. Really valuable suggestion there for sure.

The strategy suggestions are great. I'm always going to be looking for new ideas/ways to address 1v1 and group situations. Having not really seen a whole lot recently written about warlocks regarding their being either valuable or worthless, it's really awesome to hear of some other players, albeit at much higher skill level than myself, having as much fun or more than I am with the class.

 

[Seawasp]

Yeah Goesid, those numbers jive with what I had originally thought. Do you see misses for races with spell family resistance? Or is that simply a flat damage reduction. That was the only thing I could think of from what Kibbies had seen. Else some scaling numbers might have changed.

I don't mind fishing so I'll keep going for the ring when I've got some time on the weekends. It goes fast on AP though so we'll probably see account-wide heirlooms long before I get lucky on that one.

 

[Goesid]

Yeah Goesid, those numbers jive with what I had originally thought. Do you see misses for races with spell family resistance? Or is that simply a flat damage reduction. That was the only thing I could think of from what Kibbies had seen. Else some scaling numbers might have changed.

I don't mind fishing so I'll keep going for the ring when I've got some time on the weekends. It goes fast on AP though so we'll probably see account-wide heirlooms long before I get lucky on that one.

Well, spells that doesn't do damage can be resisted entirely but those that do just get a withdrawl, like: You hit "that dude" for 450 (37 resisted).

 

[Mesikämmen]

Well, spells that doesn't do damage can be resisted entirely but those that do just get a withdrawl, like: You hit "that dude" for 450 (37 resisted).

To elaborate, full spell resists only occur against targets that have the grandfathered +1 resistances cloak enchant, or gain resist from pieces of gear. The resist racials used to work similarly before, but in MoP the stat 'resistance' was "removed" (at least from racials): the resistance racials now only give flat 1% damage reduction from certain spell schools. However, any other resistance gained through gear (firebane cloak, resistance rings, +1 resists cloak enchant) still work the way that resistance used to: It grants a chance to fully resist a spell that doesn't cause any damage, and resist zero to a small number of spell damage.

TLDR; resist racials only give flat 1% spell school damage reduction, whereas resist from gear can cause a non-damaging spell to be fully resisted as well as grants spell damage reduction.

 

[Hashbrowns]

Yeah Goesid, those numbers jive with what I had originally thought. Do you see misses for races with spell family resistance?

DPR and Rune equates to 6.09% hit in BGs, which is the perfect way to hit cap without destroying your stats. My mage never misses. My pet's Freeze on the other hand misses a lot. But I won't gear for Blizzard's retardedness lol. They are having pet trouble, it should be 6%. It might be worth testing if your Seduce or Disarm miss and gear hit accordingly, since locks are rather limited on cc.

Here's the pic I submitted to Blizz

 

[Hashbrowns]

Ok very very early math is in, stack SP and Stamina over all. I won't post yet because I'm a little fuzzy (had some tasty drink of sorts when I got home) and I want to check over everything tomorrow. But so far SP is king. Which I was expecting, you get huge amounts of damage from high % sp in your spells. Add in the fact Dark Regeneration works off 30% of your maximum health and that Fear DRs after 3 and you need something to survive the down time, sp and stamina is fucking tasttyyy.

You are destro, this world will burn.