Warlocks are Overpowered

| Friday, February 22, 2008
I've barely played my paladin for the last week because my warlock suddenly became fun to play again. It took me about 12 months to get from 60 to 62. In about a week I got to over halfway to 68.

I'm affliction right now and it has some elements similar to protection. Grinding is very efficient; DoT up a mob, fear, DoT the next one, fear, first mob is dead, use drain soul and dark pact for regen. In comparison a prot paladin is more like this: pull everything, kill individual mobs fairly slowly (like DoTs) but have a steady stream of mobs getting attacked to create a high overall damage output. Use SoW for regen and figurine of the colossus for health, resulting in no downtime. In instances I often find myself in a similar role of keeping clothies from getting squished. Fear, seduce, deathcoil, and howl of terror make for a lot of control.

The Alliance does seem to be different than the Horde. I hate to start factional bashing, but more often than not they are noobs and are terrible at listening to directions. Having no Barrens results in Barrens Chat everywhere.

Being back on a PvP server was a huge change for me. It's not a constant gank-fest, but you definitely have to stay alert. I've learned to always have a healthstone and to not use deathcoil on a mob unless it is life or death. When I was destruction I ran with a succubus almost always, an invisible seducer is a valuable thing to have; but I don't use her against mobs to prevent her getting killed first. She's turned around ganks several time, pinning my new enemy in place long enough for a soulfire to deliver a lot of pain.

My biggest adjustment so far has been not tanking. It's so slow! People are taking half their time marking, CCing, I can't believe people consider such a tedious process to be normal. I ran into one paladin tank, but he told me to not tell him how to play his class when I pointed out that it would be faster to AoE pull. He was afraid to lose aggro on extra mobs and got offended when I said that's what holy shield and consecration are for. It just seemed silly to make a paladin and then tank like a warrior.

That leads me to my next rant; what is it with people not wanting to be told how to play? I'd love to have a warlock explain a better spec or cast sequence. So why would someone get offended by advice? Many people are so busy making themselves feel better that they never get around to actually being better.

5 comments:

Treat said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lukian said...

I lost interest in my warlock too, but they are an exceptionally fun class to play sometimes. As a PvE player on a PvP server however, you are targetted to kill quite a number of times, just because you are a scrub warlock! :)

Barrens chat everywhere is actually quite amusing, it can be quite boring having nothing to do sometimes! You can do some fantastic trolls, like convince people they are actually going to add night-elf mohawks.

If you don't like it, particulary in raid instance general chats, you can just toggle it off! Trade sits nicely in a seperate chat tab for me.

Ah succubus, what a wonderful pvp pet, three horde surprise your group of three, you turn around and your lovely Mirwena has already saved your squishy little tush from a Tauren warrior.

Blizzard are making some very nice changes in the demonology tree, which attempt to make a succubus more viable in pvp/arena, hopefully it will work out (a health/armor buff would be handy though).

Rules of pvp servers: stay at high health, if you are sitting at low health, you are probably asking for it! ;)

Marking *is* a terribly tedious process and it's actually one of the main reasons I became disinterested in my feral druid.

On the other hand, my housemate (usually the healer) considers protection paladins who zerg through an instance, with no regard for any form of cc to be jerks.
I disagree, but am having trouble convincing her how much better/faster a lack of marking and crowd control is.
That said, it's good to mark one to focus DPS one.
I personally LOVE the few runs my alts have had the privilege of running with such an enlightened paladin tank.

Lukian said...

Warlock Spec/Castsequence comments:
ElitistJerks forums are the best resource on the internet for all your theorycrafting needs.

Basically, you want to maintain DoT uptime and shadowbolt until your next DoT sequence (as affliction).

/castsequence reset=6/target Siphon Life, Unstable Affliction, Corruption, Curse of Agony
and then shadowbolt until you are ready to reapply your DoT.

When I don't need to use Curse of Elements (rarely, since blizzard combined this spell with Curse of Shadow), I aim to allow Curse of Agony to tick it's full duration, and reply it just as it drops off, otherwise the same applies to Unstable Affliction.

Shadowbolt should be about 50% of your damage, with your dots dealing about 12% each (except siphon life, which is quite weak due to the health return).
Also see, maxdps.com

Now with Shadowbolt being 50% of an affliction warlocks damage, where does this theory come from that we should maximise spell damage and completely forget about spell crit?

Personally, I stack haste, it's a fantastic and fun stat! I hate missing out on that last Shadowbolt just as the mob dies, although, I really should be using life drain for instant/sustained DPS, or drain soul if I need the shards at this point. ;)

Enjoy the warlock nerfs when 3.0 hits (particularly the buffs to melee classes that will increase our squishiness!). :) Although, those 51 point talents = wow.

Lukian said...

Succubus: Health increased by 20%, armor increased 22%.

Well would you look at that!

Kiryn said...

You can do some fantastic trolls, like convince people they are actually going to add night-elf mohawks.

This made me laugh SO HARD now that barber shops have done just that. Seriously.

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