Warlock Tank Spec Idea

Make a spec where you play as the demon (possibly a pit lord so as to differentiate it from the Felguard of demo and Infernal of destro) and your character follows you around as the pet.

You could even have it so that you can freely switch from Demon perspective to Caster perspective. Could be a really interesting way to handle the Warlock tank spec that we all desperately want that doesn’t just focus on them buffing a pet the whole time.

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I’d always wanted this but don’t see it happening since specs are basically reskinned from other classes with some minor adjustments here and there.

Would love if locks could either tank with a pet or by becoming a demon. The latter is probably even less likely since we have DH’s, but one can still dream.

If pets tanked it would be cool to have a setup that revolved around either one big tank (like summoning a pitlord) or swapping/summoning demons (like opening a dark portal).

If it’s a single pet tank then the focus is around juggling the funneling of health & aggro to the pet while keeping yourself alive. If it’s a bunch of demons then the focus is around getting the right kind in the right positions/situations (e.g. you can call on a bunch of imps to pull a large group of adds off of casters or summon a tyrant to absorb a big-hitting boss)

I don’t think we’ll ever see an actual pet tank spec. Not without a complete revamp to the entire pet system. It’s too clunky, too unwieldy. Pet AI is too dumb and with the way pets work they would end up being either objectively inferior or objectively superior to actual player tanks depending on the fight.

For example, the Aggramar fight in Antorus, his weapon combo mechanic has absolutely no effect on pets at all. This means if you have a pet tank him, then everyone could just stay behind him and ignore pretty much the entire combo. This is because pets, by design, avoids most AoE effects, which is entirely what Aggramars combo is comprised of. The same would very likely be true of the Jailers combo.

You’d also, of course, need to vastly improve upon the ease of controlling pets, as spending a second trying to tell your pet where to go just won’t cut it in a raiding environment where positioning and rapid repositioning is vitally important.

I imagine a few problems trying to tank a dungeon as the demon with a warlock pet.

“Uh oh, who pulled? Was it the warlock?”
Pet gets curbstomped by the accidental pull
Demon tank despawns, because now the warlock is dead
“Quick! Rez the tank!”
“It’s ok, I soulstoned myself!”
Warlock stands back up, and starts 6 seconds of summoning the Demon tank

Ai tank is not so smrt

They had something like this in cata, but it was scraped and turned into demon hunter.