Let's talk warlock tanks in PvE

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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I like my warlock. I like his tank build. Tank warlock is something I’ve wanted to do for most of my WoW career and it by itself got me to give Season of Discovery a try and drag one of my friends into it as well.

I want to discuss PvE builds for tank warlock. My current one is aimed toward open world questing and casual (non-AoE spellcleave) dungeons. Talents are 21/7/3 (instant corruption, +life tap, +drain life, Nightfall, +curse of agony, +drain soul, Amplify Curse, Siphon Life, and some other talent I’m forgetting in Affliction / +healthstone and +stamina in Demonology / 3 points in Shadow Bolt crits in Destruction) with plans to put the other 20 points in Destro once P3 and P4 release. I won’t make it to the +shadow damage or +fire damage nodes, and I’m OK with that.

Runes are Metamorphosis (of course), Everlasting Affliction, and Master Channeler in the P1 slots. Still need to obtain most of my P2 runes, but I currently have Dance of the Wicked and lolInvocation in those slots. Stat priority is stamina > intellect > spellpower; with buffs I have over 3.5k mana and almost 3k health with my current (mostly “of the Eagle” greens) loadout.

This build does exactly what I want it to, and that is that I basically never have to stop pulling. Not only can it 1v1 an at-level elite, but I come out of that fight with mostly full health and mana and can immediately go pull something else. The health and mana of the rest of my party is irrelevant; if they need to eat or drink, they can do so and I’ll be fine in the meantime.

This build’s weaknesses entirely have to do with AoE situations. I’ve been telling my party members that warlock tanks live and die by a Rule of Three; as long as the target count is 3 or lower, I can hold aggro just fine, and if we pull more than three at a time, it’s gonna be a cluster. This is partially because Shadow Cleave is target capped at 3 (and it’s not like we can use Shadow Bolt Volley to “adjust” that, because it uses the same rune slot as Meta :upside_down_face: ) and partially because I’m using a very DoT-heavy build.

My damage comes primarily from Corruption and Curse of Agony, and secondarily from Siphon Life and Drain Life. This works just fine in open world situations, but in dungeons, especially dungeons with packs where we can’t pull 3 or fewer mobs at a time without employing CC, I just don’t have enough globals to apply everything to every enemy before most of it gets pulled off of me by trigger-happy DPS.

In a world where I’m able to set up on a target, I hold aggro just fine. Never had any issues with boss fights or the like. It’s just AoE that concerns me, because my DoTs set up too slowly and both of my main AoE buttons are channels (Rain of Fire, Hellfire) and those don’t play nice with getting whacked by multiple mobs at a time. Sure, I can use those to try to reclaim aggro, but as soon as I get it, the channel gets interrupted and then I just immediately lose aggro again.

So I’m looking into alternative builds to put together for if/when they add dual spec, and the two main ones I’ve seen floating around are 0/31/0 and 0/0/31. My issue with the 0/31/0 one is that, sure, it’s tanky beyond belief, but you can’t DO anything with it beyond Searing Pain and Shadow Cleave. 0/0/31 is good for damage and conveniently includes a bunch of talents that make RoF and Hellfire not perpetually awful to use while tanking, but that build’s ability to do anything is tethered to my healer’s ability to keep up.

And I’m not sure what else to consider. I want to be able to enable the 10+ mob uber AoE pulls I keep seeing shaman tanks do when I’m running SM as a DPS, but it seems like warlock as a class just isn’t capable of that.

I think that about wraps it up. Thoughts?

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One thing to keep in mind when tanking is that you don’t always need to have aggro on every mob, you just need to mitigate damage both to yourself and the group. There best way is to hold threat on everything, but in lieu of that there are other options to help make up for threat shortfalls.

If I can’t hold everything and there is a melee taking threat on one mob, let them. Mark it as skull and hopefully everyone else focuses it down while you focus gcd into the rest. If a caster takes aggro, let the mob start moving toward them a bit and then taunt it before it’s out of range. Curse of exhaustion can increase the time that takes if you have it. When you taunt it, move away from the casters as far as you reasonably can so that when taunt wears off it has a farther distance to run again.

You can also ask your party for support. If you have a hunter they can put a frost trap down for every pull, and any mobs that get away will take 60% longer to reach your casters. Shaman can use earthbind totem for the same purpose if needed.

I think it’s important to keep in mind, though, that affliction warlock is at its weakest in 5 man content as things generally die too fast for the dots to be worthwhile, as you’re noticing with your groups. You’re focusing on raw stats to increase your longevity, but by losing control of mobs you force the healer to use more of their mp. You also force DPS to use gcd to mitigate damage on them, like HoJ, nova, cheap shot, etc, which costs then resources of their own while not doing damage. That results in group dps going down and resource use of everyone else going up.

If you sacrifice stats for spell damage, you’ll have an easier time holding threat. You will do more damage, killing things faster, and your group will be able to focus all their gcd and resources into DPS as well. Your healer will use less mp and be able to use some for DPS instead. Saving the healer mp is especially important because you don’t need to be self sufficient if you make them efficient enough they can afford to heal your life tap.

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A lot things to debate here:

  • As i know nightfall with meta doesnt have any effect.

  • Everlasting affliction is very good in trash/aoe situations, for single target is always better incinerate for the 25% more damage in searing pain.

  • In general all the tanks have good aggro in pulls of 4 adds, molten blast, thunder clap and shuriken toss hits 4 targets. idk why warlocks tank ability just hits 3 targets.

  • IMO soul syphon hits very low (needs a buff / rework), most of the time is a waste of GCD becuse the pull die so quickly.

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I can comfortably do 5-6 with just shadow cleave and searing pain tab spam. If one mob gets lose you can move the pack over to it and taunt it. By then if your DPS are doing what they are spose to be doing the mobs should be dying pretty quickly.

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@Taylorshift: You have good points all around, I think. I’m from retail, the land of “tanks are 100% in charge of aggro always and forever and losing it at all means you are bad”, and I’m still trying to get used to classic’s style of “tanks can handle a lot of aggro management but are reliant on some combination of their teammates’ abilities and ‘wait for 3 stacks of Sunder before starting DPS’ strats to get it 100% under control”.

Curse of Exhaustion? Good point, though I’m still learning how to tell which mob(s) specifically I’m about to lose. I intentionally play without addons, though I guess a threat meter of some sort would probably solve this for me.

Taunt? Mine’s limited to melee range. (WHY?!!) By the time I realize I lost something, it’s already run off and I need to reposition in order to taunt it. Fair point with “move it away from your casters” otherwise, though as a caster DPS on the side myself, I’m of the opinion that once the tank has pulled and grouped mobs, it’s the caster’s job to position themselves safely from there.

The way I’ve been resolving the “losing control of mobs” thing has been to just pull less at a time. I didn’t exactly have that option during the RFD run the other night (lots of 5-6 mob packs in there), but I did have two hunters that could offtank the non-elites with pets while I solely worried about the elite mobs, and that plan worked just fine.

Spell damage is the single most likely solution to my number problems. I’m just not entirely sure how much I should be investing in; I don’t know the coefficients, I don’t know if there are any breakpoints I should be trying to hit, and I don’t know how much stamina or intellect I’m comfortable with giving up. I do have SOMETHING that offers spell damage in every slot (aside from rings and trinkets), so plugging some stuff from my DPS set into my tank set won’t be an issue once I know what I’m going for.

@Razh: Good points here too. Nightfall does nothing for me whatsoever; Shadow Cleave does not benefit from it in any way and if I’m going DPS, it’s Incinerate/Chaos Bolt for single target and Incinerate → Rain of Fire spam with Hellfire added if it’s safe. Shadow Bolt never actually gets used any more, so I’m very strongly considering respeccing Nightfall’s points and putting them in the one that makes my affliction spells get resisted less.

Everlasting Affliction VS Incinerate… the math here is in your favor. I just prefer EA because Drain Life’s reapplications trigger it (no need to use a global on Shadow Cleave in single-target), there isn’t a hardcast for buff upkeep involved, and I’m typically wanding instead of Searing Pain spam in order to conserve mana anyway.

I’m not 100% familiar with the other tanks and what they can or can’t do on paper, but if all the other tank AoE buttons hit 4 targets… Shadow Cleave is in line for a buff.

I also wouldn’t be opposed to Soul Siphon buffs. No idea how it performs at 60, but at 40, it’s 22 per 3s baseline and I’m not sure how much that is or isn’t helped by spellpower. The heal is nice in prolonged fights; if I’ve got 3 mobs on me, that’s 66 per 3s in addition to whatever Drain Life is doing, and I keep wanting to believe that it should double as a tool to reclaim aggro eventually (DPS pulls aggro → I Soul Siphon mob → DPS stops hitting mob [this is the step where my plan falls apart] → heal aggro from SS pulls mob back to me), but it never actually does that in practice.

You’re entirely right that it’s a waste of a global in short fights though. Drain Life has the same problem; even with the appropriate talents, it doesn’t become a baseline gain of resources until much later in the leveling process, and then only if I get to channel it in full. Spellpower can fix that on paper, but, again… I don’t know how effective that will or won’t be.

@Renotarshil: I assume you’re a Destro tank, then? I have to admit I’m not fond of that style of tanking, but if there’s a way to consistently hit the same 3 mobs with Shadow Cleave, your GCD math checks out (Shadow Cleave → hit the other 3 mobs with 1 Searing Pain each → SC is now off cooldown → repeat) and it’d probably be the easiest way to at least get my average pull size up to 6.

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Not 40 yet, just hit 31 today (Warrior took priority) but as of the time of my post I was a mix of Affli and Demo. I currently respecced to full Demo to get a rune. But with Shadow Cleave and Searing Pain tab spam, I treat Shadow cleave as a half circle I imagine in front of my character and spin my Lock for when I want Shadow Cleave to hit others.

I also make sure Drain Life is going out on a mob with High HP on CD, while watching what the dps are fighting and if I try to make sure majority of my SP is hitting that while tabbing thru.

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Destro tank here -

Yeah, it can even be a pain for us even with higher snap threat. If I’m playing with a guild group, I can usually hellfire for instant aoe threat into SP spam and SC. This does leave the window open to getting clapped if you lag or your healer (especially mage) is caught off guard, so I wouldn’t do it in a pug.

Shadowflame works alright as well, but if you have an aoe heavy team, it will not compare and is a waste of GCD in my experience. It’s mostly useful to prevent healers from getting instant aggro on pull with a mistimed heal and can crit above 100, which isn’t too bad if unreliable.

The thing I was most curious about was if you can still hold ST threat with demonology because I absolutely love the defensive utility it provides. I just don’t want to jump into Gnomer and have to fight for my life lmao

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I’d like to try out Shadowflame as I level to 40 but when I looked into it, it just seemed very convoluted to get for not a great trade off.

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Yeah, it’s kind of underwhelming tbh.

I have used it on occasion to some success… some. I’ve also used it as part of my dps rotation on aoe just before i hellfire, but I’m not sure if it scales the fire dot with the fire damage buffs or if that wasted GCD is worth the effort since things die so quickly.

Maybe worth it in Gnomer since the mobs tend to live for 100 years.

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I wish Immo Aura had been added this phase.

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Why Nightfall for Tanking? It’s useless in Meta.

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Now that I think about it. Why wasn’t Hellfire just transformed into Immo Aura? It would be the perfect ability to do so.

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Heck I’d even still be okay with the self damage as long as it wasn’t channeled lol

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@Renotarshil: Regarding Shadow Cleave, I have noticed that, although it requires the primary target to be in melee range to use, it is capable of chaining to targets that are outside of melee range. How exactly it picks the additional targets is what I’m still trying to figure out. Though now that I think about it, if I don’t move and the mobs don’t move, hitting the same primary target with it will probably cause it to chain to the same additional targets. Unless it’s completely random, at least.

Also, can confirm that getting Shadowflame was a pain. I died like 8 times and wasted as many of my mage duo’s Scrolls of Reintegration before I did my research and found out that they stealth nerfed Sacrifice as a way of mitigating the channel damage, and that was why I kept dying. Shadow Ward + Spellstone + gear cheese was how I managed it in the end, no respec needed.

@Beradus: I’ve tried opening pulls with Hellfire before and it always ended the same way: my channel gets canceled and then I immediately lose aggro because the DPS started damage. I don’t have the Destro talents that make me 70% resistant to channel interrupt on damage, but even considering that, I can’t help but think that unless they add a rune that grants 100% resistance to channel disruption upon taking damage, Hellfire (and Rain of Fire by extension) just aren’t going to be consistently usable by tank warlocks.

Also tried Shadowflame. It’s just plain undertuned and I’m not sure if adding spellpower will help matters any. The concept of a target-uncapped AoE DoT is solid and I’d love to use it more, but it has a 50% uptime at best and does next to nothing while it’s ticking.

I’m not super excited about respeccing to 0/31/0 just to see how ST threat works with that build. Soul Link by itself is insane defensive utility, not to mention what the rest of the tree provides, but I don’t see deep demo being viable until at least Phase 3 because it can’t really DO anything aside from Searing Pain spam.

Regarding Immolation Aura in general… yes please. That’s an instant priority rune slot for me as long as they don’t do something phenomenally stupid, like put it in the glove slot.

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Aoe threat isn’t worth. Dps can tank 1-2 mobs fine. Tab searing pain still is bis