I’m currently running SM/Ruin for raiding and PvP, but I feel like too soft and without much stopping power. I’ve considered going deep destro, but I’m sitting at 15.3% crit and don’t know if it’s worth it until I get more BiS gear. I just know that dots aren’t feeling like they do much: neither mine nor other warlocks I fight. Shadow priest dots hit like a truck on the other hand. And unless I’m fighting a warrior or another warlock, I’ll get most of my dots dispelled. That’s my concern with going SL/SL. Siphon Life has always felt useless, and I’ll be trading burst damage for some survivability tricks. Doesn’t seem worth it.
Nightfall/SL attrition build
SL/Shadowburn attrition with a bit more burst from Shadowburn
Deep destro abandoning the safety of SL and going for full glass cannon
I personally enjoy SL/Shadowburn. You still have instant cast corruption and the safety of SL, but you gain faster shadow bolts and a nice finisher with shadowburn. Typically run Succubus default and swap as needed based on who comes around.
SL/SL doesn’t exist until TBC.
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I may try this. Thanks for the advice.
Aff is a rot spec in PvP. You arent going to burst people down in seconds. So if youre set on sticking with it you have to adjust your expectations and change how you play.
If you prefer a more bursty playstyle, NF/Conflag is likely what you want. Perfectly capable of turning someone into a pile of ash in a couple casts BUT its extremly gear dependent. The spec lives or dies by how often it crits.
Also, fair warning: NF/Conflag is almost nonviable as Alliance unless youre willing to Grenade/Mortar/LIP/Net/Rocket Helm vs every Undead you fight - which is easily 1/3 of the total Nightslayer Horde population.
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My SM/Ruin lock started to feel like a god with AQ40 gear, looked boss too. With Nax gear he became GODLIKE. Comments about SM/Ruin not being bursty is very wrong.
First, I’d invite you to come to the warlock discord, for the most part you’ll get better warlock specific info there, than here.
discord.gg/warlock-classic-253210018697052162
Onto warlock pvp specifically…
The best two specs for bgs are sm/ruin and nightfall conflag. Both specs have pretty similar overall playstyles, in that they excel at BOTH hardcast combo nuking AND dot n rot playstyles.
The reason those two specs are best, is because they both get both of the range increasing talents from the affliction and destruction talent trees. There will be people who recommend soul link because of the “survivability” it brings, but getting soul link requires missing at least one of the range talents, as well as your ability to effectively burst, or dot and cc. I’d add, that once you get better at warlock pvp positioning with the extra range talents, soul link is actually pretty dramatically LESS survivable than sm/ruin or nf/conflag.
So let’s talk positioning now. Basically, you largely want as much range as you can get. Your max range will be 36 yards, and you will nearly invariably want to be at least 30 yards from your target. Furthermore, you should get in the mindset that you have an invisible 36 yard bubble around your character at all times. Proper positioning for you means that there is exactly one opposing faction player inside that bubble, and that is your kill target. You win by controlling who is allowed in your bubble, then destroying them, over and over, methodically carving through the opposing team. Be mindful of hunters, however, since they can attack you from 42 yards, and will beat you in a nuke fight (via you getting spell pushback and him not).
Now actually killing that one target is where the fun begins. One of the greatest strengths of warlock is that you actually do full damage whilst standing and casting, or while retreating back (via dots) to maintain positioning. If you’re controlling your range to target, and the amount of targets in your bubble, you are borderline invincible in bgs.
Finally, let’s finish up with HOW to deal damage. Far too many bad warlocks out there just vomit dots all over the place with no rhyme or reason, you’ll usually see them running around with a void walker for some reason. You want to use succubus or felhunter. Succubus is easier to start with, but you being alliance she’ll be far less reliable, and you should also frankly learn felhunter too, since it’s what you’ll use in a premade/higher end play (it’s just way less forgiving of positioning mistakes). Secondly, you want to be nuking as often as you can. Dots have a place, but nukes are what win wars. I’ll continue in next post
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So warlock nuking ends up being more advanced than other casters because it’s a combo based class.
Generally speaking, you want to 1,2,3 combo for maximum burst, casting one of each in order.
- Long cast with travel time (soul fire or sbolt)
- Short cast with no travel time (searing pain or immolate) -OR- an instant cast with travel time (death coil or nightfall procced sbolt)
- Instant cast finisher (conflag or sburn)
So in sm/ruin, for example, your main burst combo is sbolt into searing pain into sburn… Where your max burst combo would be sbolt into nightfall sbolt into sburn
As nf/conflag your primary burst combo would be sbolt into immolate into conflag. Your maximum burst combo would be soul fire into immolate into conflag
So the reason for the 3 spells in sequence is because at 30 yards, all 3 spells will hit your target in the same millisecond, for BIG BURST. I’m routinely able to 100-0 opposing players in bgs with some crit luck doing those combos.
There are other combos to work on, particularly as nf/conflag but that 1,2,3 system should be a baseline thing taught in the warlock academy.
I’d close out by really trying to highlight the importance of that “2” in the 1,2,3 combo, particularly as sm/ruin… I almost never see other sm/ruin locks hitting that searing pain after sbolt, and they instead opt for a 2 spell sbolt into sburn combo. While there is a place for that combo, this is largely bad and for two reasons:
First: Searing pain can crit for 1.1k in my gear. That’s a 550 hit… 550 extra damage effectively added onto your sbolt… That’s like if your sbolt has another 600+spellpower behind it… It’s MASSIVE.
Secondly: simple timing makes you want to hit that searing pain… If you just sbolt into sburn, the burn will land before the bolt does by almost 1.5 seconds… This desynchs your burst AND robs you of damage in case sbolt crits (since a crit sbolt would leave improved sbolt debuff on the target, your subsequent sburn would get +20% damage)
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Warlock can definitely burst people down in seconds in duels. I killed R14 warriors with only T2 or T2.5 on my lock.
One of them literally said, “Wow locks do too much damage” as he lost to me.
You need to go SL with shadowburn. You can shadowburn 2 times in a duel usually and that’s a lot of extra damage.
The only downside of lock PVP is the dumb shards. If you have shards you can kill anyone. If you don’t you probably will lose to many classes.
Rogue is by far the hardest for lock. They do so much damage you have to have a void out and sac it and then feldom another.
Warriors are actually easy by comparison.
Some great info in this thread!
Would love for @xfour to join in this discussion. He runs a really mean lock with crazy burst. I’d summarize what I think he’s running but I’m sure I wouldnt do it justice.
This is what I really needed to hear. I’ve always been torn between whether to go single-target or tab through and throw corruption, agony, immolate, and siphon on everything. I’ve found that at best, I make make enemy healers go through more motions and create a distraction. I always end OOM in less than a minute though. Then there’s the question of what dots to throw. Sometimes I’ll put all of them on as many players as I can, and other times I’ll just go for corruption and agony (tongues on casters) or even just corruption and hope for NF procs. I’m changing to a more single target mindset now.
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Yeah it’s really tempting to piss dots on everything, but just remember it breaks a lot of CC and makes team play pretty difficult if your up against competent players.
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Dot cleaving itself isn’t inherently bad, but it’s far more situational. You gotta kinda scan around for potential healers/dispellers so you can prevent them from just dispelling everything. It CAN be done right, and it can be extremely potent when done well… however like the guy right below you points out, it also is effectively making that target immune to half of the ccs in the game, which can get SUPER tilting for classes that might depend on a breakable cc (mages, warlock, rogues)…
I’ve seen warlocks (voidwalker user, go figure) putting AGONY up on every target in 40 yards, and that’s by far the worst. The way agony does damage is VERY VERY backloaded, so just agony on a target is not only making a target immune to half the ccs, but also barely doing any damage for the first like 18+ seconds…
Generally speaking for dots, I might predot a kill target or two with corruption… as NF/Conflag I might also preload an immolate for a slightly larger burst combo (immo->sbolt—>searing pain—>conflag)
Other than that, if I’m dotting a target, I’m often FULLY dotting them with all of immo/corr/siphon/agony with the intention of the dots killing teh target outright, or at least hurting them severely…
One of the main targets I’ll primarily dot is actually hunters… specifically because they outrange you and will usually win a nuke fight (you have pushback, he doesn’t… and they also have high hp)… They have 42 range, so you run into 36, dot them up, then run back out… limiting your exposure to them, but letting you put some pressure out… That said, other ranged really aren’t often your target, because both raids typically have melee between them… for the hunter to hit you on the backlines at 36 yards, he basically needs to be 6 yards from the melee scrum himself.
EDIT: I’d also add, dotting pets tends to be worthwhile too… the damage per global cooldown spent for dots is very high, and you can often 100-0 a pet outright with a full 4 dot setup. It costs you very little, and can give you something to do while trying to find better targets.
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Not sure what XDrain is doing in BG’s for a spec, I know he’s fairly well into Destro, but he flat deletes fools in seconds. If you see him around you should ask, it looks very effective.