Played a Lock in Vanilla. Leveling is easy with the VW. You will have utility that makes your desirable in dungeons/raids. Your damage will not be up their with fury warriors, rogues, or mages. Threat has to be managed or you are the new tank.
You will feel kind of weak to certain classes while leveling. Alliance has it worse having to deal with all of the forsaken. Farming soulshards can be very annoying. If you log on right before the raid you are not going to be in a good spot with everyone wanting a summon and you being unable to do so. Summons and healthstones are expected. Remember to get a soulshard you have to drain a target of close level at the time of their death to get one. They go fast so have a ton for raids.
Bag space is a premium on a lock, they do not stack. One shard = one bag slot. Tons of utility, curse of tongues, curse of recklessness, seduce, healthstones, soulstones, curse of agony pissed off rogues.
Eventually you will feel badass, but there is a lot of shard time spent. Mage is a superior farming class and money making class.
SO MUCH THIS. 30/0/21 is the best DPS spec for locks in vanilla. Imp. Shadow Bolt with a spriest in the group makes for some nasty numbers if you have the crit to proc it reliably.
Eh, not really. You just make sure to hit drain soul to finish off the mobs you are grinding on anyways, and you should stay topped up on soul shards. And because they are easy to replace, they’re the first thing you toss if you need to free up a bit of bag space.
A warlock with Tailoring can make bags, which not only helps get space for shards, but they also are able to make money. Making bags is a license to print money in classic. Throw in Enchanting, as well, and you’ll be able to do all kinds of things.
Our raid leader forbade locks summoning folks to raids, unless the summon was preapproved. He felt everyone needed to be responsible enough to arrive on time. He also felt the locks were not a taxi service for every member to be lazy and not get to the raid entrance especially since we were handing out health stones.
I loved Warlock’s DOTs for almost passive killing. They seem great for multitasking.
Send your Blueberry to attack mob 1, DOT it up, have Blueberry attack mob 2, DOT it up. Then go pick flowers or mine ore. Both those mobs should die while you’re doing something else. The more I played with it the more I think it might be a pretty fast leveler.
Full naxx gear and you got a CoA doing 3k+ damage with amplify curse. Add corruption and siphon life and not many people can live through that without heals or dispels.
The key piece of info that people keep ignoring. Your raid will have room for about one SM/Ruin lock. The other locks will likely be asked to play DS/Ruin… and not used dots.
I mained a warlock in vanilla. It was a blast to play. Great solo/farming potential. Very good raid utility. Ok DPS, 16 raid defuff slot does hamper dps, but 40 man raids are not strictly about dps. Could hold my own in pvp.
We should talk about the reason warlocks are low dps until phase 3, when BWL is released. Its the lack of spell hit talents. Against mobs and bosses 3 levels higher than the player. The chance to miss with spells is 16%.
Mages get +5% spell hit with talents, another 2% from Pre MC BiS, and 1% from a tier 1 set piece. That’s 7-8% which halves their chance to miss. Warlocks only have %hit talents on their DoTs when they cast shadowbolt all raid long. A measly +2-3% spell hit is all they can muster from the 2 pre MC BiS and a piece of tier 1, fel heart robes,.
Until you get a large shard bag your bags are mostly full of soul shards.
The large one’s come later in game, and I’d carry 100+ shards at any given moment considering how stuff eats them up all the time and getting KB drain soul is hard in groups.
#2
The 16 debuff limit in raids means running something like soul ruin and maybe, just maybe one of your spells. Essentially a shadow bolt bot and utility.
I like / love locks, but for a ranged caster with more Plus than minus I think I’d look at mage. Even hunters bags needs pale next to locks in vanilla.
OTOH< if you are willing to be a guild pet, they can sure enough keep you busy and help you gear on up.
You don’t need to have the killing blow on a mob to get the shard. You simply need to have Drain Soul on it when it dies. If you start it when it gets down low, then getting the shard isn’t that hard.
Clearly you had no clue of the SM/DS build. I could grind better than any class in the game, without even stopping once to drink. Well played SM/DS can constantly DoT without stopping, just need to have someone loot all the things and you are golden.
Absolutely untrue. DS/Ruin is terrible DPS and no lock doing Raids would ever touch it. It was great when the succy could be ressed while you still held onto the buff, but after that it was terrible DPS. You never use Agony, that’s it. Corruption, shadowbolt x 6 and rinse repeat. The lowest dmg lock gets to put up CoS.
I rarely had anyone out-dps in fights, it was simply a given that locks would topping the meters, provided they could play well and knew how to off-DoT the other targets while burning MT targets. On large trash pulls, a lock dominates by standing there and pushing the hellfire button.
Warlock are alot of fun, but you have to like dots and pets or you prob won’t like the class too much, also if you really really really don’t like soulshard farming you really really won’t like the class.
They are strong in pvp with the caveat that you are using the right pet for the right opponent, ie succubus and seduce nuking for warrior, felhunters for mages, etc.
Its fun to have a pet tank a mob while you fear juggle 2 more and never stopping to drink though, but if you want to do the most damage in raids or dungeons your gonna wanna roll a mage and spam a different bolt than shadow, but the utility is fun, until you get a lazy group where 2 people refuse to run to the dungeon because a lock and 2 other will summon them now, so they can run.