You shouldn’t Soul Link though for PVE even tanking. It’s not “real” damage reduction. It’s redirection. The healer still has to heal it because if they let your pet die you’ll lose your 10% DR from the void AND the 30% from the soul link, and it’s harder to heal two things taking damage than it is to heal one taking all of it.
It’s a PVP ability because you don’t really care about the damage going to your pet in PVP and if it dies, oh well you’ll summon another one after the fight, it’ll have done its job.
If you soul link, you’re like 10x more likely to lose your pet.
If you have soul link, you don’t have ruin.
MD/Ruin is a better tanking spec than SL if thats what you wanna try to do. Just slam a stoneshield if you absolutely need more DR. If you need more DR than the stoneshield plus void gave then you shouldn’t have been tanking it anyway and SL wouldn’t have helped cause your pet would drop like a rock.
I did a scholo this weekend and we had a naxx geared lock. Tank had to AFK a few and the lock tried his blueberry out to see if we could nuke down a pack or two.
We failed. Hard.
Warlocks aren’t tanks and aren’t suddenly tanks because one specific fight requires a caster tank. It’s just a unique boss encounter that allows them to be a tank. That’s it.
I would never consider a warlock a tank. Lack of Taunt, and of course the cloth armor. With that said, yes i’ve tanked Twin Emps on numerous occasions and to be fair I’ve even tanked Onyxia the entirety of her phase 3 a few times, and commonly tank Sulferon in MC. These are the only ones I’ve done on purpose, the rest can be chalked up to overeager dps
Now this is with ds/ruin as a spec. Sure if you went more demo you can take more of a beating but you’d miss out on searing pain crit threat /shrug
I get that, but we’re already talking about a taking a very squishy situation where you need as much help as you can get. Soul Link is funneling 30% of the damage you take to a separate health pool which can take a separate set of HoTs, as well as direct Heals of course. I get this is unnecessary in resist-exclusive damage sources, like Twins tanking, but if you’re trying to do legitimate Tanking, you’d be using a Void Walker for the physical DR and you’d need all the EH you can get.
True, but if we’re talking face-tanking melee mobs while Searing Pain spam, how much crit are you even going to have? Threat is of low importance if you have enough of it, and sufficient SP gets you over the hump for just about anything you’d be capable of face-tanking anyway.
Just saying. Ive done this as both the healer and the warlock, multiboxing. For things that hit hard enough that you actually want the SL dr, they hit hard enough that your pet goes pop super fast and its annoying to heal.
Its a practicality thing. SL looks nice on paper but in practice its very lackluster except for PVP where it rules.
The Soul Link just doesn’t make the difference, for things a Warlock can actually tank anyway. Its either, I can heal it, or I can’t. For things I can’t, the pet basically dies in a matter of seconds and hots alone are not enough. And if I can heal it, its far less annoying to just pump the lock instead of trying to heal multiple targets.
