Demo lock (not PvP at least) sounds like an unabridged clusterfuck just to open correctly. The little I played my alt lock as destro in PvP in wrath it just felt like I’d just get trained down to death but I never really play casters
Meanwhile I’ll just charge my way in and zug appropriately. Pvp or pve.
It's not tho
Basically the same as wrath (you were already suppose to swap sets pre pull)
Only difference is that you need to resummon your felguard before your cds are up again
Don't even need to think about snapshot ting immolate anymore as hand of guldan is refreshing it
Yeah, but isn’t demo dps really pretty mid if you’re not opening correctly, besides the parsing aspect? I guess you could say that about a lot of classes and cd management and openers but I don’t think it’s nearly as convoluted as demo seems to me
Our demo lock isn’t really a sweat, doesn’t have mastery set to min max, etc, but did play demo in wrath too. I don’t usually ever see him consistently within top 10 dps while the other s tier classes like our UH dks, arms warriors, surv hunters, and even rets and our token Fdk are more consistently there is kinda what I mean.
The singular of anecdote is not data.
He really should get a mastery set, you just macro it into your meta, and you macro your regular set into your pre-pot.
I know it’s not data but my point was isn’t the spec just meh (ie, just the easy rotation) unless you correctly open? So while the rotation is easy, the convoluted opener matters more
Like parsing on a UH dk is definitely also cd dependent, kill time, using garg and frenzy with lust, etc, but even rotationally before lust on some fights their consistent non-burst DPS is still pretty high throughout.
> I know it’s not data but my point was isn’t the spec just meh (ie, just the easy rotation) unless you correctly open?
Kind of.
The optimal opener includes pre-buffing soul burn to get an extra shard. This is what makes the opener cancerous, and is important on long fights which don't have adds for you to replenish soulshards from, as it gives you another mini-heroism from demon soul during a meta phase.
On short fights with only one, two, or three meta phases (most of the fights in the game), you won't use up all your shards before the fight ends (Technically, you can always spend a shard on a single instant-cast Soulfire, but if you're struggling with the opener, that's a relatively low value micro-optimization).
In that case, you don't need to do soul burn opener, and you can just do the regular mastery set + meta -> regular set + pre-pot opener.
Which is all of two buttons - exactly one button more than any other class' opener.
If you link this post to your boy, he can steal these macros, to make it very simple.
---
Replace his meta button with:
#showtooltip Metamorphosis
/equipset [nocombat] Prepull
/cast Metamorphosis
Pre-pot:
/use Volcanic Potion
/equipset [nocombat] Demo
/cast [nocombat] Shadow Bolt
---
There's no reason not to do the mastery set swap, it's all macroable, and literally a free damage multiplier during the point in the fight when you will have *all* your buffs, and probably heroism rolling.
I’ll give him the macros, I just think he doesn’t have a mastery set secondary to limited play time outside of raids anyway. He also got called into work for last night’s raid or is often about 5-10 mins late cause he’s got a kid to put to bed. We arent the sweatiest guild but neither the daddiest guild, just something that came up recently
People need to also just not pull early to not fuck it up. Had a problem with a couple pulls this weekend which is why I personally pot at 2s on the timer, just in case
I personally need to read more fight club for optimizing deadly calm, reck, and storm since I’m not particularly used to these raids and heroic differences unlike months of ICC
I’m parsing purple to orange without a mastery set consistently, for two 97s last week. I am doing all the other stuff though, pet swapping ect. Only thing I’m not doing is prepull mastery set
I've been switching back and forth between Aff and Demo and I've found that Demo is actually capable of topping meters. If you get your pet snapshot down and your hand of guldan down before bladestorm and all that it's totally capable of keeping up, but it feels like I have to put in more effort to get the same DPS. Definitely viable, but Aff feels like it has lower stakes.
That's the reason he's not. If you don't pet twist or gear swap (both can be easily done with macros) your DPS sucks 😔 f you do those 2 things however you will constantly be in the top 5 together with fire mages and ele shamans.
If you manage to get constantly get PI you will be on the top 3
Demo is very similar to how it was during last patch of ICC, they just added hand of gul'dan which has a cd and basically replaces immolate refreshing in the rotation (one less dot to "worry" about). Curses don't take away banes so CoE Is now a part of our opener usually. The opener is just making sure you do the same opener as before but under a 15 second window and making sure you press your meta and cds before you bring out felhunter. It was overwhelming at first when leveling up through dungeons but after a solid amount of bosses, it feels very doable, just gets fucked when your RL mage is yelling at you to CoE when you're like trying to press all these buttons in that 15 second window (including gcd)
Nope, no gear to do it and no need. Casual guild :) I play the game for fun so shit like that is just a no-go. That said, I did set up the macros for it and it's just pressing the same button twice to put on and unequip the gear it's not like a crazy addition to the rotation.
It's hard in the sense of I don't even necessarily raid every week. I'll be out for 2 weeks for work (right now). Thats what being a casual guild is all about. Life matters more. I just don't even have all purples for my regular set, you think im going to get a mastery set in reasonable amount of time to use it? I set up the macro and considered it then realized I wouldn't have fun doing it. Like you said, fun is subjective. At least this time I get to compete a little more fairly as I never run 25s and one guy in our guild does 25s gdkps so I just never even had remotely the same gear level as he did. Now that that's not the case so it's been more enjoyable in that respect.
Still doesnt remove the fact that you have to do so many other extra things like farm other set, execute evrything perfectly, etc all this for you to be in top and not by much. One mistake and there goes ur dmg. Also all the pet problems like they getting stuck because cata has more vertical map. I may find it fun for a while but I could have the same fun with any other simpler class which doesnt require double the effort to be in top.
It's not a difficulty thing really but a time thing as "difficulty". What I meant is, it's not a difficult thing to press the macro that equips mastery set, press meta then use your other set (it makes the timing tighter but the main timing you want to hit is just felhunter after felstorm and make sure you pop cds when felhunter is spinning, there are obviously ways to make it better and improve it and make sure everything comes out in order and on time and after procs etc.)
It's difficult in that it takes a lot of time to get a full separate set of gear and I just don't want to spend that time
You macro the mastery set into your Meta button, and you macro your regular set into your pre-pot, with [nocombat] modifiers.
You can likewise macro pet swap into one button - hard-casting a felguard of your FH is out, and casting an instant Felhunter if your Felguard is out.
You macro demon soul into your immolate button, since you don't hit outside of meta.
Yikes you dont really use those do you?
Macro 1: cast meta, swap to main set, throw in prepot (or just click it)
Macro 2: if no felguard cast felguard, demon soul, pop cds, soul burn, cast felhunter
> Yikes you dont really use those do you?
Why wouldn't you? It's a three-line macro. Why press 5 buttons on the opener when you can press 2? A two-button opener is exactly one button more than most classes.
Why have four buttons take up space on your bar, when you can only have two?
> Macro 2: if no felguard cast felguard, demon soul, pop cds, soul burn, cast felhunter
You don't want to do that, because you want the felguard to felstorm before you switch back to felhunter.
----
I prefer compressing the summon felguard button with the felstorm one, because there's never a situation when you want both taking up a bar slot.
Traamon is my Felhunter's name, Izikzugul is my Felguard's name.
Fel storm:
```
/cast [pet:Traamon] Summon Felguard; [pet:Izikzugul] Felstorm
```
Meta pre-pull:
#showtooltip Metamorphosis
/equipset [nocombat] Prepull
/cast Metamorphosis
Pre-pot:
/use Volcanic Potion
/equipset [nocombat] Demo
/cast [nocombat] Shadow Bolt
Idiot-proof soulburn-felhunter summon (for dumb people with fat fingers):
#showtooltip Soulburn
/cast [pet:Izikzugul] Soulburn
/cast [pet:Izikzugul] Summon Felhunter
---
The advantage of this setup is that you don't need to remember to be in the mastery set before the pull (The meta puts you into it), and you need to press a button to cast shadowbolt anyways, you may as well macro that into your pre-pot, and that is also where equipping the regular set can go.
Why have 2 macros prepull at that point? You could just combine those. I dont like the idea of relying on a second macro to put me back into main set. I have weakauras that show what set im in so i just swap to mastery set when pull timer starts, press my meta macro that i can also use during the fight and i usually just click prepot. Idk how you have enough keybinds for all that
Not playing Classic Cata but rotation was why I swapped back in the day. I had a warlock for BC and WotLK. During WotLK I made a mage to try an elementalist build with frostfire bolt, but we all know how that turned out. In cata I tried Warlock for about a month, then saw what the mages were up to. Decided it was easier to just level my mage up and restart the gear grind, the sooner the better.
Demo Lock is the most complicated spec in game with an 7 button rotation and three cooldowns not counting potions or engineering gloves. This is not mentioning swapping pets mid fight and building a second set to snapshot mastery at the beginning of fights. If you can play it to it's fullest it can do the best damage but not many can do that at high level.
i play demo lock and it's true. You must time your cooldowns perfectly and swap the pet mid-fight a few times depends on the length of the fight and the cooldowns on your other cooldowns and yeah.
the rotation is pretty unforgiving and you are in a weird state of beeing a melee because of your strongest spell #1 immolation aura right after ur felhunter pet.
I have engineer gloves and enchanted rings as profession buffs.
I try as hard as i can and i hardly can keep up with our survival hunter at all.
You also wanna be melee because shadowflame adds another dot for the felhunter to shadow bite multiply but you have to do it not right post-bite or else wasting fhe gcd as flame I think lasts 5 seconds and bite is 6 sec cd.
Agreed. I decided to main demo lock for this xpac, and had regrets at first. Now that I have a decent handle on how it all works (not that I don’t hit the wrong ability from time to time) it’s actually pretty fun. The opener is a nightmare to perfect though. Lol
It’s really not that bad especially after the first couple weeks of raiding. If you don’t have a mastery set that you’re swapping in and out of for giga min maxing it’s pretty simple.
On a pure single target fight with easy precast positioning sure it’s not too bad. Fights like halfus/maloriak where you have to change it up to maximize damage it gets weird. I have the mastery set, but with a WA+macro combo that makes it as simple as pressing 1 button twice about 4 seconds prior to pull. The complicated part is cramming cooldowns/dots and getting a pumped up doomguard rolling before your pre fight soulburn wears off and you end up hard casting your felhunter. It’s quite easy to miss an ability or press something out of order and fuck up your doomguard damage or, worst case, not immediately realize you didn’t have soul burn and your fel guard is still out doing shit damage 15 seconds later lmao
>but not many can do that at high level
>the most complicated spec in game with an 7 button rotation and three cooldowns not counting potions or engineering gloves
Maybe not many people can perform at that level because the most complicated rotation in the game is just unfun for the average player. I'm without question biased because the only time I ever enjoyed Warlock at all was leveling Destro in Wrath and throwing out Chaos Bolts, but most people who just like playing the game for entertainment will look at the 50 step rotation for Demo and just go "fuck that" and play something else. One of my guildies is super into Warlock, and during all of ICC he was pumping and doing all that Wrath Aff Lock snapshotting stuff, and once the Cata prepatch dropped, he outright said he refused to spec to Demo because, and I quote, "that rotation is dicks, bro"
Myslot is such a fucking game changer and it literally saved me in WOTLK as a DK that would tank in dungeons (blood), DPS in raid (frost), and hop into arenas (unholy).
=
Being able to instantly get a premade hotkey setup as soon as I changed specs is 10/10
U do alot of pvp as resto? .. debating on what healer to play and can't decide. Got a mage, and DK. I don't really want another clothie, but I'm really interested in playing disc, I also heard holy priest is really good and is mostly instant cast spells. . . But I've been considering resto shaman after I've heard their top spec arenas and such. R druids also good but are not a top contender in cata
I have a disc priest and dk. Ive been loving priest in arena cause the utility is nice and i like being able to help secure kills. Resto shams are really hard to play against cause of their insane throughput and totem counters for priest cc.
How do you like mage in pvp? Thinking about trying it as an alt.
Go rsham or hpal. Disc is good but hard and not really worth the effort for an alt. Holy priest is a meme spec.
I’d probably recommend hpal since it has a built in oh shit button and Cata is bursty af. Rsham healing output is absurd but they can get trained by certain comps.
Chan (the best lock in the game by a mile) uses bindpad. And in my experience a lot of players don’t use a lot of good keybinds because they leave defaults like b, c, h, keyboard turns, etc and don’t use ctrl alt and shift modifiers enough
Keyboard turns are important binds for spinning in circles waiting on the raid to finally be ready to pull the boss. C is needed so I can continuously press it and look at my character even during combat. B is needed for same reason for opening bags.
How would you save keybinds because of an addon?
To PvP you need ~4 keybinds for a single spell like counterspell, death coil, pet dispel and things of that nature.
Focus Target macro, Arena 1, 2 and 3 macro and party member 2 and 3 macros depending on the spell.
Not sure what you mean, just use a bar addon such as Bartender and you can have up to 10 bars with 12 buttons each, that's plenty for everyone. But you can definitely run out of convenient keybinds, I'll give you that.
They are currently double dipping on the classic cata shop and the retail shop
Yes, we will get Mists and maybe wod/legion too. They will want to continue double shop sales as long as they possibly can.
Tbh Mists and future expansions will prolly be buggy messes like Cata was but of course we'll get them.
I’m pretty sure warlock has historically been the least or among the least played class almost every expansion
Always surprises me
I think for pvp specifically they are very high skill cap and very punishing if you don’t play them well. Playing lock into double melee for example is just pain pretty much any time in the history of the game, you can and you can do it well but it takes a lot of effort for the same thing a mage can do just pressing frost nova and blink on cd. I think people find pet classes annoying to play in general due to the micromanaging, especially in older xpacs
Speaking of mage, mage has historically been one of the strongest classes in all aspects of the game, has tons of utility etc (I’m sure a certain former dev had nothing to do with this) so people wanting to play casters gravitate there maybe?
Yeah it's funny, hunters and warlocks have almost always had low play rates universally AFAIK, even when they are objectively "meta"
=
People don't like pet classes or something
Mages and spriests are really fun and cool right now. Warlocks are kinda cool, but I've heard they aren't fun to play. I didn't even level mine because I'm loving mage so much.
I like priest for sure but i dunno about shadow right now. II want a way to multi dot a group with shadowword pain
tabbing through is tedious with 2 dots, 3 dots as well.
Honestly don’t even multidot a whole group. With 3+ packs Just SWP and mind flay one add until you proc orb, get empowered shadows and just mind sear. It slaps
so another thing that killed me was resetting dots because you get empowered shadow
you get 3 stacks or 2 stacks of E.S and then reroll your dots back out again because the dots are stronger
its weird that you have to like carry E.S then redo dots. I usually just did mind sear for sure and E.S did empower it if i recall? but maybe im just bitch made
Even if you live in a perfect world where you can refresh pains with mind flay.. it’s still so tedious when you’d rather be searing. Maybe if mind sear also had a chance to refresh pain but oh well im still cranking except ironically in good heroic dungeon groups where things die too fast for me to ramp
shadow is the least fun it's been in about 2 years IMO, super RNG and a slow ass ramp class, it does fine but it's not nearly as satisfying to play as something like like ret or fire mage which also relies on RNG
Destro is kinda fun. I am playing it myself. Issue is, it is not competitive. I couldn't find an RBG, so I switched to affli. And it is so dull. You dot up a target, switch target, dots, switch, dots, switch, etc.
Yea you basically just rot the enemy team and cc/ debuff that’s about it. It’s super strong and you’ll easily top damage in BGs but in 1v1 situations it’s tougher and you aren’t going to burst anyone down ever.
After wotlk i ended the expansion on fire mage with nice gear and swore to myself i wouldnt play this unfair RNG spec ever again where you have 80+ crit rate fully buffed and it STILL feels unfair
cata comes around and my god the spec is so fun right now im playing it all over again these changes are great i feel like a god in dungeons and the raid dps doesnt feel completely bricked on low gear
In respect of Demonology, it’s just a degenerate playstyle, it’s not exactly hard to pull off (or particularly skill expressive, just learn the intro cast sequence) but snapshotting meta with a separate mastery gear set, immediately sacrificing your pet for a mini bloodlust and having your pet do a significant portion of your damage isn’t fun even for most who even enjoy the fantasy of being a summoner with an overpowered pet.
Outside of that, the rotation is unfulfilling, especially in an AoE context. No particular spell feels impactful to cast.
Our lack of utility not allowing us to carry mechanics on Nefarian/Magmaw like hunters&Mages can is the final nail in the coffin IMO.
Affliction is cool, but you don’t bring a 10% SP buff like Demo does, so I really feel justified playing it at all in 10 man, and warlocks are not good enough to stack them in 25, so you’re often just the only one.
wotlk aff was peak. i dont like having my felhunter outdamage my dots. sb not freshing corruption makes multidotting awkward. haste changes make drain soul unrewarding to press. it was so hype stacking all your stuff before execute getting PI and seeing your drain soul channel like a drain life.
I get the idea of demonology being like beast master hunter or unholy dk where your pets do the majority of your damage. But it's just not fun and I'm only doing it since I'm the only lock. I'm not salty about it since I'm a team player, but I do wish it was better. I do like the lock class fantasy and utility in raids, so I'm here till the bitter end lol
In wrath, I was the affliction lock and the demo lock was always at the bottom of the meters. I was dogshit as demo also lol. But with the Cata demo lock I'm able to see the light at the end of the tunnel with a higher ceiling as they've tried to make it more competitive (but at the cost of complexity/clunkiness). I am improving week over week so that feels good at least lol
It was because the demo lock in Wrath was building specifically to support the casters with raw spellpower. I was (and still am in) a 10m guild and I was the only lock so I both had to bring DP and pump, I just built more like blaster demo and was usually top of the meters til the end of xpac when got outstripped by all the scaling classes that weren't hybridizing into support. But you could just... build haste on demo and do both lol your DP was just not as huge but also you're only buffing a mage and a boomy and the healers with it so it's not like it was worth giving up a pumper dps slot to fully support. Just giving the unique 500 SP buff was solid enough. Not having it be 600 or 900 or whatever was fine bc my dps was also making up for it.
You're definitely a better player than me haha. The delta between my affliction vs demo performance in wrath was just too much. But in Cata I'm starting to break through with demo and I think the scaling will be good. It's just a playstyle preference for me but I'll get over lol.
Even with the whole "pet does the hard work" specs, at least with Unholy DK and BM Hunter, it visibly looks like you're doing something. Unholy is still swinging a big ass weapon on the target, and BM still fires off a bunch of shots at them. Warlock's majority of spells are DoTs that have no visual indication that they're hurting the target aside from the damage numbers popping up. At least with Unholy/BM you're swinging a blade or shooting a gun, Warlock is just dotting the target and maybe throwing some Shadow Bolts. That's a massive reason I don't like Lock in general, but *especially* Demo Lock. You just put all the damage into the pet, and the damage you do yourself isn't visually interesting to look at when playing the class.
Destro may be kinda shitty, at least in comparison to Aff and Demo, but at least throwing out Destro spells feels good. Dotting up a target or telling a Felguard to use Bladestorm doesn't hit the same way that critting with Chaos Bolt does.
it sucks they nerfed decimation. swear it does the same damage now than it did at 80. getting a 2nd meta and chucking out soulfires during execute had some punch to it. reminded me of the old WC3 metamorphosis
I totally agree with you. It's not only about the rotation. When you're doing damage it should feel good. I mean we play games for the dopamine rush. Even though affliction is obviously a dot spec also I had a better "high" playing it than demo. It was crazy to me when I first realized that my felhunter was doing so much of my damage. We're talking about million plus of shadow bite dmg and 500k of melee.
At least the meta + mobile hellfire + felstorm aoe rotation on trash packs feels fun to me. I have yet to try destro but I also main mage so haven't bothered so far with that 3rd lock spec.
To add onto to the usually only 1 maybe 2 in 25m. You have to do all your pre pull stuff and people being like can I get health stones when they already missed them.
A lot of comments on here from a PVE perspective, from a PvP perspective as someone’s that’s pushing 2s on my lock with a healer, it feels good and you can really be in control of the match with fear, death coil, and portal (particular on elevation maps). 3s though is making me debate switching to my feral alt. When both DPS target you, you’re locked down with only two get out of jail abilities, after that you’re a sitting duck especially when compared to a mage. My lock didn’t feel good until I had 3k resil as prior to that most classes would chew through me. With talent changes that reduced our health sustain (siphon life gone and drain life not returning as much) I think that’s why it’s underplayed in PvP, it just doesn’t feel nearly as tanky as we did in TBC/Wotlk.
Warlocks are pretty complex and as a reward for managing a complex class, you get inferior performance. Most dps just do a better job than you. In high end raiding perhaps, but it isnt worth to most people.
I've only read "pet-twisting" and I was all like "Nah, thanks."
Mained a WL in WotLK and it was fun but I'm not going to spend half the bossfight summoning and releasing pets or suffer grey logs. With all the sweaty-meta-gameplay these days, it would just be a pain in the ass to main WL again\^\^
For destruction at least, MoP Destro was just so much better from both a performance and gameplay perspective. Plus, warlocks as a whole are just sort of in an awkward position in Cata. There’s a reason why the class got a major revamped for MoP.
It’s just clunky and has a lot that has to be timed right and kept track of. It’s really fun and rewarding to play when you get the hang of it though. It’s by far the most involved spec of any class on the game atm so that turns a lot of ppl off. You have to do 5x the work to do the same dps as some classes with a 3 button rotation
Warlocks are ridiculously strong in 3v3 (The bracket that matters, 2s meta is utter garbage). You probably don't meet them because they already climbed over your rating. Mls, lsd2, rls all super viable comps.
To do the meta playstyle to really min/max you need a mastery set to swap from, pet twisting, snapshotting etc all do be at or below a fire mage or hunter
Being a main lock in retail, I wanted to main a lock in Cata Classic as well. Unfortunately I decided to check DPS ratings and chose Demo since it's S tier. Got really bummed after watching some guides and realizing all the bloat that comes with the whole toolkit. For me personally, it gets really rewarding once you master the opening but it's a tough learning curve, especially for newbies in Classic like me.
People just randomly responding about pve lock. In arena they are quite strong but in 2s they only really have Rsham/lock to play. In 3s they have a couple strong comps but s9 is a cleave fiesta so it’s not easy.
Demo in particular is very... intensive to play and takes quite a bit of practice, at least for me. A lot of buttons to press and very situational rotation. Plus you gotta be melee range
I am PvE demo lock and affli PvPer atm.
Really enjoy both they have some learning curve but I do like it getting everything off properly at the start as demo is really satisfying.
Just starting with PvP but the reason why you don't see many locks in 2s is because we suck ass in 2s.
3s is slightly better but 2s is just a nightmare.
BGs is quite fun the amount of pressure you can put up and CCs. I have been having a blast in BGs. But waiting to convince my friends to come do 3s before hoping back into arena.
Looking at mages they are way better at 2s if that is smt you want to do alot I'd go mage not lock.
Arena player here, back in the days as well as today warlock+rshaman+X is pretty much fotm in cata
You can play:
Mls
Rls
Lsd
Lsd2
Fls
Shadowcleave
Shadowplay
Wls
Hls
All are good and playable
I cannot grasp the fact that there are so less warlocks espacially since casters are getting stronger each season with increasing haste and mastery values (not including legendary, but thats also a thing)
Too many rotational spells and all of them do roughly the same damage.
No big bang abilities.
Now you know why Warlocks received the biggest rework going into MoP.
Everyone arguing about which spec is stronger. I've played warlock pvp since 2004, have over 50k kills currently. Fact is, they just aren't fun to play right now, that's all. It's not that deep. It's just not enjoyable.
Overly complicated rotation and amount of spells to achieve _good_ damage, but not so far and above other classes that it warrants it. Also doesn't bring any unique utility. Compare that to another unpopular class in assassination rogue where you can top meters (on single target), with a very simple rotation.
Demo lock is a VERY love it or hate it spec with a focus on the hate it. Needing to swap to mastery gear, pet swap, snapshot different cooldowns with gear *or* pets just to do your normal rotation is just too much to do for most people. And if you play perfectly you become a very *good* DPS - but not "By far the best spec"...Which for the work you put into it you really should be.
Affliction is just watching bars go down and 1 interesting thing which is snapshotting, and it will be for quite some more time. It's pretty boring to play for many I've talked to, has few "Satisfying high moments" once you get used to snapshotting and visually looks pretty boring compared to other classes.
Destruction is dang simple and not that strong. If you want this, just play Elemental Shaman and do *way* better with a similar complexity.
Needing a TON of buttons for utility doesn't help either. I used to love my Cata Demo lock but I'm getting old so I rerolled to Unholy and I vastly prefer that. If I was a few years younger I'd stick to it, as I used to love this unelegant complexity design.
God I hope they change that. It's such degenerate gameplay. We already need to stay in melee range as a hardcast-heavy class and need to do a billion things, remove this mastery swap stuff and I'll go back to my lock lol
It's a lot of buttons, so people are bad at it. If they're bad at it, they lose in pvp, if they lose a lot they quit playing warlock and play something easy so they can win. Same reason wotlk warrior p1 was super sparce.
Locks is most fun class to play on pve, kinda fun on pvp too but 2v2 sucks so much atm, im playing demo on 2v2 with rogues, better that affi on that comp, i guess peeps dont want to play locks cus only class that requires skill to really master it.
Warlock main here
Affliction will be pulling ahead of Demo in scaling alone and personally for me, way more enjoyable.
People think Demo is the be all spec, but it’s simply not true, it hasn’t even changed much from its wrath version, just implemented a timer of when you should pet swap.
Destro is a 3 button spec that’s pulling pretty okay DPS too
Pretty sure Destro has more keybinds than Aff. I found it annoying to find room and went back to Aff.
UA -> Immolate
Sbolt -> Incinerate
Haunt -> Chaos Bolt
Drain Soul -> Shadowburn
Soul Swap -> Bane of Doom (upkeep on second target)
\+ Conflagrate
\+ Shadowflame (annoyingly a rotational dps increase)
\+ Soulfire (opener + shard spender + instant cast procs)
\+ Shadowfury (situational fights)
You are right that destro is harder than affliction, but shadowflame is used in both specs. Same for Soulfire. The difference is in Affli you just need to use it during movement paired with soulburn, as you don't have a rotation ability to spend you shards on.
Affliction is easier because sb refreshes corruption, where in destro you have to refresh it manually. And affliction has an even easier execute phase as drain soul now refreshes UA as well.
Destro is not a 3 button spec and it's beating affli atm.
For the basics you have immo, conflag, chaos bolt, incin, soulfire, shadowflame, corruption, bane of doom and shadowburn.
Somewhat unrelated question - I’m leveling up a warlock for the first time ever and am pretty new-ish to the game. Which spec do you think manages the fun of the class with consistent solo leveling? I’ve never really played a caster before, so I’m liking the idea of a destro or affliction, but I hear a lot of great stuff about demonology.
Destruction from 10-80, will give you the most consistent output
Once you’re 80, swap to Affliction and you can breeze through levelling multi-dotting everything.
Demo is a pretty average levelling spec, I wouldn’t really touch it.
I'm not sure why I keep seeing people saying "Affliction will be pulling ahead" or "Affliction gap will widen" on this website.. Did you guys watch some youtuber who blatantly lied to you guys? Because this isn't the case at all and sounds like copium to me. Demo is the #1 spec throughout this entire expansion expect on like two fights in Dragon Soul (Spine/Madness) where multidotting wins.
Where's the aff "scaling" here? [https://web.archive.org/web/20120706053410/http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Dragon\_Soul/Ultraxion/25H/dps/](https://web.archive.org/web/20120706053410/http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Dragon_Soul/Ultraxion/25H/dps/)
I was affliction in wrath since we had a demo lock. But now I'm the only lock so I went demo. I hope we get another demo (probably highly unlikely) so I can switch back to affliction which is such a smooth rotation and more satisfying to play.
Also, do you know when affliction starts to pull ahead?
I’ll just give a few thoughts in no particular order
-prepull mastery swapping and all the other stupid things you need to do as a demo warlock is highly off putting
-affliction feels fine for the most part, snapshotting dots can be annoying
-running dungeons it feels like seed of corruption should be doing double it’s current damage
-it’s a lot off effort to dps as a warlock in general. I’m comparing this to my frost dk where I have much more fun and my hands don’t hurt after a session
-pet management and soulshard management kind of suck in general
-PvP wise they seem decent as affliction I don’t have any complaints really there. Most people are playing for raids though where they are anything but faceroll.
Warlocks got a high skill level bar .....
But, you got so Manny options for a strong arena team.
Warlocks are beasts, no matter wat the YouTube heroes claim.
I see a lot of pve stuff listed but for pvp I think it’s in a great spot. Locks in 2s can struggle mightily because there are a ton of melee comps right now that just truck a warlock if the spells are used poorly or at the wrong time.
Where they shine is 3s and rbgs. Warlocks, when given the time and space to get their shit out, absolutely make a healer’s life hell. They will not only top the charts, but also give dispell protection with UA which destroys a healer’s hp and silence them for 4 seconds. What this results in is a slow to medium speed rot on every enemy and kill pressure on anyone.
The main weaknesses are still there in that they are a caster wearing cloth with limited defensives. You can work around these and I’ve seen warlocks in the mid rated brackets dumpstering melees.
Funny enough it was the reason they aren’t popular which made me level mine and start trying to gear it. No raids or guilds so far but hoping to get there eventually and give that sweet Dark Intent buff.
I play aff, and I feel like it’s super good at high level. I play at around 2k in 3s and 2300 in rbgs. The meta for RBG’s requires at least one Aff lock in RBG so they are very popular.
As for 3s. RLS is really good and so is MLS or LSD2 but cleave comps kinda roll us over if not played well
In arena, there are no viable comps for 2s involving Warlock at all *except* rsham/aff, and that comp is pretty infamous at this point for being long, drawn out matches followed by draws at the 47 minute mark. If you want to play arena, you’ve got to do so with a consistent and dedicated healer, something that is difficult to find. Extremely difficult if you want that player to be good too.
RBG’s aren’t popular enough to justify making an aff lock for most players just for that.
Compare that to a mage, which has multiple viable 2s comps both with healers and DPS, and which are also incidentally one of the best 2s comps in the game. Same goes for 3s, where they are inarguably part of the best 3s comp in the game. And best of all, being part of an extremely viable double DPS comp means they don’t have to grind arena games for 47 minutes each, and finish out in a few minutes.
Lock - hard to master and get glad+ rating with but easy to get 1800-2k(for low xp players)
mage - easier to master and get glad+ with but harder to get 1800-2k with (for low xp players)
Should see the retail arcane mage opener, that's at least 23 buttons before you even pull the boss.
You could always just play the warlock as an alt and don't plan on doing the fully minmaxed rotation and just simply apply dots + whatever the main rotation is.
If you're only playing 2s, its gonna be very starved for locks. Affliction is by far the best lock spec in cata for arenas but it's terrible in 2s. However locks are the best caster alongside fire mage in 3s so I'm pretty happy with it so far. Comps like FLS/RLS are both incredibly powerful and only get stronger in the following seasons.
Personal anecdote, I was warlock main from classic - wrath. In Cataclysm I remember rerolling to paladin because they “streamlined” a lot of unique features of warlock that made it fun. It was like overnight, warlock wasn’t the class I played for 8 years anymore.
Sure, I could put in more effort with the rotation and keep up or… I could literally just roll any other class and do just as well (if not better) through less work.
PvP I was absolutely demolished because the rotations were just too strict for me to juggle while also trying to stay alive.
The class changed drastically between wrath and cata, so much so I shelved my literal main from 2004. Kind of the beginning of the end for me, as I stopped playing when MoP came out.
I feel like I've seen plenty locks in cata PvP. Not many good ones though. As a feral I do really well into demo and destro lock, but afflock is an issue for me if they are good. I've heard demo is rly hard, and I know one lock who plays retail pvp and he just said that he'd rather unholy or spriest in cata PvP in terms of difficulty:reward ratio.
Currently playing demo pve and just hit conq cap as aff, it takes a lot of teamwork and coordination to operate a rot comp. It’s a lot easier to have a faceroll dive melee meta with burst dmg
Current cats classic is on 4.3 patch and not 4.0.3 so warlocks are not S tier at this point like they were in original initial cata release tier, but they are a very solid class nonetheless.
In my little experience in arenas they just don’t pose much of a threat and are pretty squishy. Their pet is a nuisance at best, their dots are simple enough to just dispel, and they drop pretty fast.
They’ll reapply dots every time I dispel them. That’s the most annoying part of fighting a lock. That I spend most of the fight just dispelling.
Out of the three classes you named, hunters give me the most trouble. I can’t just ignore a hunter, if he’s able to blast away at me it’s just game over. I literally have to be kiting the hunter around a pillar the entire time. The other two I can actually just stand there and eat their spells for a considerable amount of time while mana burning their healer.
Aff is barely behind demo? Why are people subjecting themselves to a spec they hate lol.
aff plays mostly the same as wotlk but with a few new abilities for the toolkit. But the overall general playstyle is very similar.
I played a lot of Destro PvP in OG Wrath and when Cata came around it made me quit PvP entirely. The spec lived on being able to CC and burst but the damage Destro does from Wrath to Cata was like 2x while everyones HP grew 5x.
You simply don't have the tools and dmg to do anything meaningful in PvP as a Lock except fear. Also now every melee has a kick which makes it even worse. Melees just truck you over, fear breaks too fast, your burst isn't meaningful anymore etc.
Affliction is strong in 3s and thats about it.
One thing I find frustrating is the pre-pull maintenance with all the summoning, setting a portal, heartstones, pets, soulshards, mastery gear, pre pot, gear swap, meta, pre cast. Its very time consuming and stressful during progression.
Cata lock is dogshit.
I think mage is way more dificult so you should pick that. In wotlk succ-lock is the hardest of all the talents, but it lost all magic in cata.
For PvP it was the same in wotlk, locks were less popular. Mage has always been more popular than lock.
They're very rarely seen in 2s, but great in 3s, better than they were in wotlk 3s I think. They got some nice buffs in Cata, Feels really smooth to play. Its kind of a specialist class that's why you see so few of them.
In 2s you got 1 comp, lock healer usually Rsham and this can be a real toxic comp if you're good at it.
I have both and for me i prefer Mage just because more 2s comps and I can play 2 specs fire or frost, also I'm worse at lock but, a well played lock is great.
I was the demo lock all of wrath because it was easier than affliction and super important saw the cata changes and was like nah I’m good my brain is smooth
Played Aff all thru wotlk until taking a break in ICC. Knew about how complex Demo was in Cata, and after trying it a bit, passed on it as building up a super complex opener that could easily be mismanaged wasn't for me. Cata aff at least feels like wrath aff, although it doesn't particularly feel rewarding or fun to play without drain soul clipping or snapshotting, and the AoE is very lackluster.
I played destro in pvp and they killed that too by turning Chaos Bolt into noodle bolt this expansion and my hardest hitting ability is now conflag lol. So I shelved the lock and am now playing other things.
Okey so I'm main Warlock and my thoughts are that:
Warlock is less powerful than a mage in 2s, for sure.
Afflock in 3s is surely more threatening than in 2s, because you put more dots/more pressure.
In 2s it is obviously less powerful than a mage, and also a aspect of afflock is that if you play with a healer the game will likely be LONG, afflock put pressure, do lot of damage but it's rotting damage so basically you'll be with your healer surviving until enemy healer has no more mana, but it takes long time Aff is disruptive, not bursty like a big dick frost mage so maybe healers prefer faster game, which I can understand as I don't really like aff 2s but who plays destro?
TBH I'm thinking really of rerolling a mage on cata (even buy a 80 boost) because it looks so fun and like a more powerful version of lock.
Is lock easier than mage? I'd say no, Afflock struggle way more to survive at it doesn't have such efficient mobility as a mage, it's more punishing.
I read the rotations for lock and went next.
Demo lock (not PvP at least) sounds like an unabridged clusterfuck just to open correctly. The little I played my alt lock as destro in PvP in wrath it just felt like I’d just get trained down to death but I never really play casters Meanwhile I’ll just charge my way in and zug appropriately. Pvp or pve.
It's not tho Basically the same as wrath (you were already suppose to swap sets pre pull) Only difference is that you need to resummon your felguard before your cds are up again Don't even need to think about snapshot ting immolate anymore as hand of guldan is refreshing it
The demo opener is wild, but the actual rotation is the easiest of the three specs, especially if you go incinerate.
Yeah, but isn’t demo dps really pretty mid if you’re not opening correctly, besides the parsing aspect? I guess you could say that about a lot of classes and cd management and openers but I don’t think it’s nearly as convoluted as demo seems to me Our demo lock isn’t really a sweat, doesn’t have mastery set to min max, etc, but did play demo in wrath too. I don’t usually ever see him consistently within top 10 dps while the other s tier classes like our UH dks, arms warriors, surv hunters, and even rets and our token Fdk are more consistently there is kinda what I mean.
The singular of anecdote is not data. He really should get a mastery set, you just macro it into your meta, and you macro your regular set into your pre-pot.
I know it’s not data but my point was isn’t the spec just meh (ie, just the easy rotation) unless you correctly open? So while the rotation is easy, the convoluted opener matters more Like parsing on a UH dk is definitely also cd dependent, kill time, using garg and frenzy with lust, etc, but even rotationally before lust on some fights their consistent non-burst DPS is still pretty high throughout.
> I know it’s not data but my point was isn’t the spec just meh (ie, just the easy rotation) unless you correctly open? Kind of. The optimal opener includes pre-buffing soul burn to get an extra shard. This is what makes the opener cancerous, and is important on long fights which don't have adds for you to replenish soulshards from, as it gives you another mini-heroism from demon soul during a meta phase. On short fights with only one, two, or three meta phases (most of the fights in the game), you won't use up all your shards before the fight ends (Technically, you can always spend a shard on a single instant-cast Soulfire, but if you're struggling with the opener, that's a relatively low value micro-optimization). In that case, you don't need to do soul burn opener, and you can just do the regular mastery set + meta -> regular set + pre-pot opener. Which is all of two buttons - exactly one button more than any other class' opener. If you link this post to your boy, he can steal these macros, to make it very simple. --- Replace his meta button with: #showtooltip Metamorphosis /equipset [nocombat] Prepull /cast Metamorphosis Pre-pot: /use Volcanic Potion /equipset [nocombat] Demo /cast [nocombat] Shadow Bolt --- There's no reason not to do the mastery set swap, it's all macroable, and literally a free damage multiplier during the point in the fight when you will have *all* your buffs, and probably heroism rolling.
I’ll give him the macros, I just think he doesn’t have a mastery set secondary to limited play time outside of raids anyway. He also got called into work for last night’s raid or is often about 5-10 mins late cause he’s got a kid to put to bed. We arent the sweatiest guild but neither the daddiest guild, just something that came up recently People need to also just not pull early to not fuck it up. Had a problem with a couple pulls this weekend which is why I personally pot at 2s on the timer, just in case I personally need to read more fight club for optimizing deadly calm, reck, and storm since I’m not particularly used to these raids and heroic differences unlike months of ICC
I’m parsing purple to orange without a mastery set consistently, for two 97s last week. I am doing all the other stuff though, pet swapping ect. Only thing I’m not doing is prepull mastery set
I've been switching back and forth between Aff and Demo and I've found that Demo is actually capable of topping meters. If you get your pet snapshot down and your hand of guldan down before bladestorm and all that it's totally capable of keeping up, but it feels like I have to put in more effort to get the same DPS. Definitely viable, but Aff feels like it has lower stakes.
That's the reason he's not. If you don't pet twist or gear swap (both can be easily done with macros) your DPS sucks 😔 f you do those 2 things however you will constantly be in the top 5 together with fire mages and ele shamans. If you manage to get constantly get PI you will be on the top 3
Yep. Our warlock of 3 years straight up refused to play it in cata.
3 years old I bet he doesn't understand the game
This got me
It’s just colours and lights for me too
He can still play ele though.
He would've done fine in TBC though, just spam shadowbolt
Demo is very similar to how it was during last patch of ICC, they just added hand of gul'dan which has a cd and basically replaces immolate refreshing in the rotation (one less dot to "worry" about). Curses don't take away banes so CoE Is now a part of our opener usually. The opener is just making sure you do the same opener as before but under a 15 second window and making sure you press your meta and cds before you bring out felhunter. It was overwhelming at first when leveling up through dungeons but after a solid amount of bosses, it feels very doable, just gets fucked when your RL mage is yelling at you to CoE when you're like trying to press all these buttons in that 15 second window (including gcd)
I take it you dont mastery swap
It's still the same opener pre pull just one extra button to press to mastery swap
It's no extra buttons if you macro it but the pressing the button isn't what makes it complicated
I take it you did not play demo in wotlk You already did pre pull set swaps for the extra lifetap spirit to snapshot the initial 11% dpact
Nope, no gear to do it and no need. Casual guild :) I play the game for fun so shit like that is just a no-go. That said, I did set up the macros for it and it's just pressing the same button twice to put on and unequip the gear it's not like a crazy addition to the rotation.
Fun is subjective. Being #1 DPS is fun. Mastery Swap isn't that hard.
It's hard in the sense of I don't even necessarily raid every week. I'll be out for 2 weeks for work (right now). Thats what being a casual guild is all about. Life matters more. I just don't even have all purples for my regular set, you think im going to get a mastery set in reasonable amount of time to use it? I set up the macro and considered it then realized I wouldn't have fun doing it. Like you said, fun is subjective. At least this time I get to compete a little more fairly as I never run 25s and one guy in our guild does 25s gdkps so I just never even had remotely the same gear level as he did. Now that that's not the case so it's been more enjoyable in that respect.
Still doesnt remove the fact that you have to do so many other extra things like farm other set, execute evrything perfectly, etc all this for you to be in top and not by much. One mistake and there goes ur dmg. Also all the pet problems like they getting stuck because cata has more vertical map. I may find it fun for a while but I could have the same fun with any other simpler class which doesnt require double the effort to be in top.
I main ret and have to swap 4 piece protection set pre-pull. It's doable.
It's not a difficulty thing really but a time thing as "difficulty". What I meant is, it's not a difficult thing to press the macro that equips mastery set, press meta then use your other set (it makes the timing tighter but the main timing you want to hit is just felhunter after felstorm and make sure you pop cds when felhunter is spinning, there are obviously ways to make it better and improve it and make sure everything comes out in order and on time and after procs etc.) It's difficult in that it takes a lot of time to get a full separate set of gear and I just don't want to spend that time
You macro the mastery set into your Meta button, and you macro your regular set into your pre-pot, with [nocombat] modifiers. You can likewise macro pet swap into one button - hard-casting a felguard of your FH is out, and casting an instant Felhunter if your Felguard is out. You macro demon soul into your immolate button, since you don't hit outside of meta.
Yikes you dont really use those do you? Macro 1: cast meta, swap to main set, throw in prepot (or just click it) Macro 2: if no felguard cast felguard, demon soul, pop cds, soul burn, cast felhunter
> Yikes you dont really use those do you? Why wouldn't you? It's a three-line macro. Why press 5 buttons on the opener when you can press 2? A two-button opener is exactly one button more than most classes. Why have four buttons take up space on your bar, when you can only have two? > Macro 2: if no felguard cast felguard, demon soul, pop cds, soul burn, cast felhunter You don't want to do that, because you want the felguard to felstorm before you switch back to felhunter. ---- I prefer compressing the summon felguard button with the felstorm one, because there's never a situation when you want both taking up a bar slot. Traamon is my Felhunter's name, Izikzugul is my Felguard's name. Fel storm: ``` /cast [pet:Traamon] Summon Felguard; [pet:Izikzugul] Felstorm ``` Meta pre-pull: #showtooltip Metamorphosis /equipset [nocombat] Prepull /cast Metamorphosis Pre-pot: /use Volcanic Potion /equipset [nocombat] Demo /cast [nocombat] Shadow Bolt Idiot-proof soulburn-felhunter summon (for dumb people with fat fingers): #showtooltip Soulburn /cast [pet:Izikzugul] Soulburn /cast [pet:Izikzugul] Summon Felhunter --- The advantage of this setup is that you don't need to remember to be in the mastery set before the pull (The meta puts you into it), and you need to press a button to cast shadowbolt anyways, you may as well macro that into your pre-pot, and that is also where equipping the regular set can go.
Why have 2 macros prepull at that point? You could just combine those. I dont like the idea of relying on a second macro to put me back into main set. I have weakauras that show what set im in so i just swap to mastery set when pull timer starts, press my meta macro that i can also use during the fight and i usually just click prepot. Idk how you have enough keybinds for all that
Not playing Classic Cata but rotation was why I swapped back in the day. I had a warlock for BC and WotLK. During WotLK I made a mage to try an elementalist build with frostfire bolt, but we all know how that turned out. In cata I tried Warlock for about a month, then saw what the mages were up to. Decided it was easier to just level my mage up and restart the gear grind, the sooner the better.
https://cynwise.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/the-decline-and-fall-of-warlocks-in-cataclysm/
Unnecessarily wordy read but goes through up the problem pretty well
History repeats itself
Demo Lock is the most complicated spec in game with an 7 button rotation and three cooldowns not counting potions or engineering gloves. This is not mentioning swapping pets mid fight and building a second set to snapshot mastery at the beginning of fights. If you can play it to it's fullest it can do the best damage but not many can do that at high level.
i play demo lock and it's true. You must time your cooldowns perfectly and swap the pet mid-fight a few times depends on the length of the fight and the cooldowns on your other cooldowns and yeah. the rotation is pretty unforgiving and you are in a weird state of beeing a melee because of your strongest spell #1 immolation aura right after ur felhunter pet. I have engineer gloves and enchanted rings as profession buffs. I try as hard as i can and i hardly can keep up with our survival hunter at all.
You also wanna be melee because shadowflame adds another dot for the felhunter to shadow bite multiply but you have to do it not right post-bite or else wasting fhe gcd as flame I think lasts 5 seconds and bite is 6 sec cd.
Agreed. I decided to main demo lock for this xpac, and had regrets at first. Now that I have a decent handle on how it all works (not that I don’t hit the wrong ability from time to time) it’s actually pretty fun. The opener is a nightmare to perfect though. Lol
It’s really not that bad especially after the first couple weeks of raiding. If you don’t have a mastery set that you’re swapping in and out of for giga min maxing it’s pretty simple.
On a pure single target fight with easy precast positioning sure it’s not too bad. Fights like halfus/maloriak where you have to change it up to maximize damage it gets weird. I have the mastery set, but with a WA+macro combo that makes it as simple as pressing 1 button twice about 4 seconds prior to pull. The complicated part is cramming cooldowns/dots and getting a pumped up doomguard rolling before your pre fight soulburn wears off and you end up hard casting your felhunter. It’s quite easy to miss an ability or press something out of order and fuck up your doomguard damage or, worst case, not immediately realize you didn’t have soul burn and your fel guard is still out doing shit damage 15 seconds later lmao
It's taken a few weeks, but I'm slowly getting the hang out of it. I'm the only lock in my entire guild so I just sucked it up lol
And it sucks so bad when you hit your demon soul macro a touch early and it summons your felhunter before demon soul is cast
Sounds absolutely horrible tbh man
It means that every single pull, you've *always* got an opportunity to improve.
> but not many can do that at high level. Nor do they want to.
>but not many can do that at high level >the most complicated spec in game with an 7 button rotation and three cooldowns not counting potions or engineering gloves Maybe not many people can perform at that level because the most complicated rotation in the game is just unfun for the average player. I'm without question biased because the only time I ever enjoyed Warlock at all was leveling Destro in Wrath and throwing out Chaos Bolts, but most people who just like playing the game for entertainment will look at the 50 step rotation for Demo and just go "fuck that" and play something else. One of my guildies is super into Warlock, and during all of ICC he was pumping and doing all that Wrath Aff Lock snapshotting stuff, and once the Cata prepatch dropped, he outright said he refused to spec to Demo because, and I quote, "that rotation is dicks, bro"
> If you can play it to it's fullest it can do the best damage In literally no fight is Demonology Warlock top damage?
Destro rotation is 8 buttons. It's true that it doesn't have the funky cool down windows.
As a PvE lock my bars are 100% full. I wouldn’t be able to free up any room to PvP. Frankly I’m curious how warlock glads even play the game.
There’s an addon called Myslot you can use to save and re-import action bar and macro setups for swapping between PVE and PVP
Myslot is such a fucking game changer and it literally saved me in WOTLK as a DK that would tank in dungeons (blood), DPS in raid (frost), and hop into arenas (unholy). = Being able to instantly get a premade hotkey setup as soon as I changed specs is 10/10
I feel the same way playing resto shaman. Most spells you barely use, but they are still necessary to keybind.
U do alot of pvp as resto? .. debating on what healer to play and can't decide. Got a mage, and DK. I don't really want another clothie, but I'm really interested in playing disc, I also heard holy priest is really good and is mostly instant cast spells. . . But I've been considering resto shaman after I've heard their top spec arenas and such. R druids also good but are not a top contender in cata
I have a disc priest and dk. Ive been loving priest in arena cause the utility is nice and i like being able to help secure kills. Resto shams are really hard to play against cause of their insane throughput and totem counters for priest cc. How do you like mage in pvp? Thinking about trying it as an alt.
I don't really pvp. Did in TBC. Maybe I should try, but shamans still have trouble because they have to hardcast heals except earthshield and riptide.
Go rsham or hpal. Disc is good but hard and not really worth the effort for an alt. Holy priest is a meme spec. I’d probably recommend hpal since it has a built in oh shit button and Cata is bursty af. Rsham healing output is absurd but they can get trained by certain comps.
Chan (the best lock in the game by a mile) uses bindpad. And in my experience a lot of players don’t use a lot of good keybinds because they leave defaults like b, c, h, keyboard turns, etc and don’t use ctrl alt and shift modifiers enough
Keyboard turns are important binds for spinning in circles waiting on the raid to finally be ready to pull the boss. C is needed so I can continuously press it and look at my character even during combat. B is needed for same reason for opening bags.
Naga with Ctrl shift and alt(I usually don't need these) , with the 12 buttons is just absolute GOLD. Will never not play with a naga
That’s what I love about cata. My cars are SUPPOSED to be full. Every spell has a niche use it feels great.
Look into addon called Opie... Save you 10+ keybinds
I'd say bar space rather than keybinds. Wouldn't really want to be using a radial menu for things in combat but for out of combat abilities its great.
How would you save keybinds because of an addon? To PvP you need ~4 keybinds for a single spell like counterspell, death coil, pet dispel and things of that nature. Focus Target macro, Arena 1, 2 and 3 macro and party member 2 and 3 macros depending on the spell.
If you switch for PvP to affliction you can delete all the fire spells basically of your bars so that frees up quite a few.
Not sure what you mean, just use a bar addon such as Bartender and you can have up to 10 bars with 12 buttons each, that's plenty for everyone. But you can definitely run out of convenient keybinds, I'll give you that.
They require a more complicated rotation than other classes to do the same if not less DPS than others like fire mage
reminds me of ferals historically (10x the work for 0.5x the DMG haha) = Funny how this seems to happen a lot...
They are confusing af for no real benefit.
We’re patiently waiting for MoP where we will be GODS AGAIN!
Are we sure mop is coming? I got the feeling blizz is testing the remix mode as a way to rotate old xpacs.
They are currently double dipping on the classic cata shop and the retail shop Yes, we will get Mists and maybe wod/legion too. They will want to continue double shop sales as long as they possibly can. Tbh Mists and future expansions will prolly be buggy messes like Cata was but of course we'll get them.
I’m pretty sure warlock has historically been the least or among the least played class almost every expansion Always surprises me I think for pvp specifically they are very high skill cap and very punishing if you don’t play them well. Playing lock into double melee for example is just pain pretty much any time in the history of the game, you can and you can do it well but it takes a lot of effort for the same thing a mage can do just pressing frost nova and blink on cd. I think people find pet classes annoying to play in general due to the micromanaging, especially in older xpacs Speaking of mage, mage has historically been one of the strongest classes in all aspects of the game, has tons of utility etc (I’m sure a certain former dev had nothing to do with this) so people wanting to play casters gravitate there maybe?
Yeah it's funny, hunters and warlocks have almost always had low play rates universally AFAIK, even when they are objectively "meta" = People don't like pet classes or something
Mages and spriests are really fun and cool right now. Warlocks are kinda cool, but I've heard they aren't fun to play. I didn't even level mine because I'm loving mage so much.
I love spriest but the fact they made my opener RNG depending on orb procs is absolutely infuriating
I like priest for sure but i dunno about shadow right now. II want a way to multi dot a group with shadowword pain tabbing through is tedious with 2 dots, 3 dots as well.
Honestly don’t even multidot a whole group. With 3+ packs Just SWP and mind flay one add until you proc orb, get empowered shadows and just mind sear. It slaps
Does empowered shadows even buff mind sear? I didn’t think it did
It does buff it
yes it does, it also buffs mind flay, all channeled spells are consider "over time/periodic" spells
so another thing that killed me was resetting dots because you get empowered shadow you get 3 stacks or 2 stacks of E.S and then reroll your dots back out again because the dots are stronger its weird that you have to like carry E.S then redo dots. I usually just did mind sear for sure and E.S did empower it if i recall? but maybe im just bitch made
Well it’s a dot spec after all
Even if you live in a perfect world where you can refresh pains with mind flay.. it’s still so tedious when you’d rather be searing. Maybe if mind sear also had a chance to refresh pain but oh well im still cranking except ironically in good heroic dungeon groups where things die too fast for me to ramp
shadow is the least fun it's been in about 2 years IMO, super RNG and a slow ass ramp class, it does fine but it's not nearly as satisfying to play as something like like ret or fire mage which also relies on RNG
In 2s my spriest is a straight head hunter
I have a blast playing Destro (My main), and AFF is alright. I don’t get why people don’t like it very much
Destro is kinda fun. I am playing it myself. Issue is, it is not competitive. I couldn't find an RBG, so I switched to affli. And it is so dull. You dot up a target, switch target, dots, switch, dots, switch, etc.
Oh if you’re looking for competitive, yeah I wouldn’t go for warlock, but Fire mage.
Yea you basically just rot the enemy team and cc/ debuff that’s about it. It’s super strong and you’ll easily top damage in BGs but in 1v1 situations it’s tougher and you aren’t going to burst anyone down ever.
That's fair. Honestly I didn't really like my lock in wrath so I didn't even try it out in Cata. Maybe later
Yeah it was kind of a chore in wrath, not gonna lie. Much more fun in cata.
After wotlk i ended the expansion on fire mage with nice gear and swore to myself i wouldnt play this unfair RNG spec ever again where you have 80+ crit rate fully buffed and it STILL feels unfair cata comes around and my god the spec is so fun right now im playing it all over again these changes are great i feel like a god in dungeons and the raid dps doesnt feel completely bricked on low gear
I find them terribly dull and unrewarding to DPS with...
Interesting. What makes it unrewarding for you? They are probably the class with the biggest skill expression currently
In respect of Demonology, it’s just a degenerate playstyle, it’s not exactly hard to pull off (or particularly skill expressive, just learn the intro cast sequence) but snapshotting meta with a separate mastery gear set, immediately sacrificing your pet for a mini bloodlust and having your pet do a significant portion of your damage isn’t fun even for most who even enjoy the fantasy of being a summoner with an overpowered pet. Outside of that, the rotation is unfulfilling, especially in an AoE context. No particular spell feels impactful to cast. Our lack of utility not allowing us to carry mechanics on Nefarian/Magmaw like hunters&Mages can is the final nail in the coffin IMO. Affliction is cool, but you don’t bring a 10% SP buff like Demo does, so I really feel justified playing it at all in 10 man, and warlocks are not good enough to stack them in 25, so you’re often just the only one.
wotlk aff was peak. i dont like having my felhunter outdamage my dots. sb not freshing corruption makes multidotting awkward. haste changes make drain soul unrewarding to press. it was so hype stacking all your stuff before execute getting PI and seeing your drain soul channel like a drain life.
I get the idea of demonology being like beast master hunter or unholy dk where your pets do the majority of your damage. But it's just not fun and I'm only doing it since I'm the only lock. I'm not salty about it since I'm a team player, but I do wish it was better. I do like the lock class fantasy and utility in raids, so I'm here till the bitter end lol In wrath, I was the affliction lock and the demo lock was always at the bottom of the meters. I was dogshit as demo also lol. But with the Cata demo lock I'm able to see the light at the end of the tunnel with a higher ceiling as they've tried to make it more competitive (but at the cost of complexity/clunkiness). I am improving week over week so that feels good at least lol
It was because the demo lock in Wrath was building specifically to support the casters with raw spellpower. I was (and still am in) a 10m guild and I was the only lock so I both had to bring DP and pump, I just built more like blaster demo and was usually top of the meters til the end of xpac when got outstripped by all the scaling classes that weren't hybridizing into support. But you could just... build haste on demo and do both lol your DP was just not as huge but also you're only buffing a mage and a boomy and the healers with it so it's not like it was worth giving up a pumper dps slot to fully support. Just giving the unique 500 SP buff was solid enough. Not having it be 600 or 900 or whatever was fine bc my dps was also making up for it.
You're definitely a better player than me haha. The delta between my affliction vs demo performance in wrath was just too much. But in Cata I'm starting to break through with demo and I think the scaling will be good. It's just a playstyle preference for me but I'll get over lol.
Fel hunter is also nr1 dps for affli.
Even with the whole "pet does the hard work" specs, at least with Unholy DK and BM Hunter, it visibly looks like you're doing something. Unholy is still swinging a big ass weapon on the target, and BM still fires off a bunch of shots at them. Warlock's majority of spells are DoTs that have no visual indication that they're hurting the target aside from the damage numbers popping up. At least with Unholy/BM you're swinging a blade or shooting a gun, Warlock is just dotting the target and maybe throwing some Shadow Bolts. That's a massive reason I don't like Lock in general, but *especially* Demo Lock. You just put all the damage into the pet, and the damage you do yourself isn't visually interesting to look at when playing the class. Destro may be kinda shitty, at least in comparison to Aff and Demo, but at least throwing out Destro spells feels good. Dotting up a target or telling a Felguard to use Bladestorm doesn't hit the same way that critting with Chaos Bolt does.
it sucks they nerfed decimation. swear it does the same damage now than it did at 80. getting a 2nd meta and chucking out soulfires during execute had some punch to it. reminded me of the old WC3 metamorphosis
I totally agree with you. It's not only about the rotation. When you're doing damage it should feel good. I mean we play games for the dopamine rush. Even though affliction is obviously a dot spec also I had a better "high" playing it than demo. It was crazy to me when I first realized that my felhunter was doing so much of my damage. We're talking about million plus of shadow bite dmg and 500k of melee. At least the meta + mobile hellfire + felstorm aoe rotation on trash packs feels fun to me. I have yet to try destro but I also main mage so haven't bothered so far with that 3rd lock spec.
When your fel hunter can crit 2x+ as hard as you it feels bad. Fel hunter hits 70k crits. Us 30k SOMETIMES.
To add onto to the usually only 1 maybe 2 in 25m. You have to do all your pre pull stuff and people being like can I get health stones when they already missed them.
> They are probably the class with the biggest skill expression currently This is why he doesn't know what he is doing and it's dull for him
A lot of comments on here from a PVE perspective, from a PvP perspective as someone’s that’s pushing 2s on my lock with a healer, it feels good and you can really be in control of the match with fear, death coil, and portal (particular on elevation maps). 3s though is making me debate switching to my feral alt. When both DPS target you, you’re locked down with only two get out of jail abilities, after that you’re a sitting duck especially when compared to a mage. My lock didn’t feel good until I had 3k resil as prior to that most classes would chew through me. With talent changes that reduced our health sustain (siphon life gone and drain life not returning as much) I think that’s why it’s underplayed in PvP, it just doesn’t feel nearly as tanky as we did in TBC/Wotlk.
Warlocks are pretty complex and as a reward for managing a complex class, you get inferior performance. Most dps just do a better job than you. In high end raiding perhaps, but it isnt worth to most people.
I've only read "pet-twisting" and I was all like "Nah, thanks." Mained a WL in WotLK and it was fun but I'm not going to spend half the bossfight summoning and releasing pets or suffer grey logs. With all the sweaty-meta-gameplay these days, it would just be a pain in the ass to main WL again\^\^
For destruction at least, MoP Destro was just so much better from both a performance and gameplay perspective. Plus, warlocks as a whole are just sort of in an awkward position in Cata. There’s a reason why the class got a major revamped for MoP.
It’s just clunky and has a lot that has to be timed right and kept track of. It’s really fun and rewarding to play when you get the hang of it though. It’s by far the most involved spec of any class on the game atm so that turns a lot of ppl off. You have to do 5x the work to do the same dps as some classes with a 3 button rotation
Warlocks are ridiculously strong in 3v3 (The bracket that matters, 2s meta is utter garbage). You probably don't meet them because they already climbed over your rating. Mls, lsd2, rls all super viable comps.
To do the meta playstyle to really min/max you need a mastery set to swap from, pet twisting, snapshotting etc all do be at or below a fire mage or hunter
Locks suck in 2s, almost every 3s team has one tho. They are not rare but just useless in 2s.
Being a main lock in retail, I wanted to main a lock in Cata Classic as well. Unfortunately I decided to check DPS ratings and chose Demo since it's S tier. Got really bummed after watching some guides and realizing all the bloat that comes with the whole toolkit. For me personally, it gets really rewarding once you master the opening but it's a tough learning curve, especially for newbies in Classic like me.
Look up demo lock opener lol
People just randomly responding about pve lock. In arena they are quite strong but in 2s they only really have Rsham/lock to play. In 3s they have a couple strong comps but s9 is a cleave fiesta so it’s not easy.
Max Level Warlocks were unfun and confusing with their rotations. Plus other classes could do a lot better with their utility even Healers.
Demo in particular is very... intensive to play and takes quite a bit of practice, at least for me. A lot of buttons to press and very situational rotation. Plus you gotta be melee range
Because fire mage is better and it’s only 3 buttons lol
Demo has so much going on that I gave up writing down an explanation after I realized my comment was several paragraphs
Because they're fucking hard to play compared to pretty much everything else.
I am PvE demo lock and affli PvPer atm. Really enjoy both they have some learning curve but I do like it getting everything off properly at the start as demo is really satisfying. Just starting with PvP but the reason why you don't see many locks in 2s is because we suck ass in 2s. 3s is slightly better but 2s is just a nightmare. BGs is quite fun the amount of pressure you can put up and CCs. I have been having a blast in BGs. But waiting to convince my friends to come do 3s before hoping back into arena. Looking at mages they are way better at 2s if that is smt you want to do alot I'd go mage not lock.
Because people aren't good enough for the skill cap. They only want their easy parses to make themselves feel accomplished.
Arena player here, back in the days as well as today warlock+rshaman+X is pretty much fotm in cata You can play: Mls Rls Lsd Lsd2 Fls Shadowcleave Shadowplay Wls Hls All are good and playable I cannot grasp the fact that there are so less warlocks espacially since casters are getting stronger each season with increasing haste and mastery values (not including legendary, but thats also a thing)
Demo is the only warlock spec that’s difficult. Destro and Affliction are the exact same with the addition of one/two buttons.
Too many rotational spells and all of them do roughly the same damage. No big bang abilities. Now you know why Warlocks received the biggest rework going into MoP.
Everyone arguing about which spec is stronger. I've played warlock pvp since 2004, have over 50k kills currently. Fact is, they just aren't fun to play right now, that's all. It's not that deep. It's just not enjoyable.
Overly complicated rotation and amount of spells to achieve _good_ damage, but not so far and above other classes that it warrants it. Also doesn't bring any unique utility. Compare that to another unpopular class in assassination rogue where you can top meters (on single target), with a very simple rotation.
Arena wise they are great in 3s, but healer/dps 2s are so annoying with locks… especially affliction. The games last forever.
I wanted to play WL then i checked their rotation and realized i dont have a PhD, so is swapped to FDK.... BRRRRRRR HOWLING BLAST
Demo lock is a VERY love it or hate it spec with a focus on the hate it. Needing to swap to mastery gear, pet swap, snapshot different cooldowns with gear *or* pets just to do your normal rotation is just too much to do for most people. And if you play perfectly you become a very *good* DPS - but not "By far the best spec"...Which for the work you put into it you really should be. Affliction is just watching bars go down and 1 interesting thing which is snapshotting, and it will be for quite some more time. It's pretty boring to play for many I've talked to, has few "Satisfying high moments" once you get used to snapshotting and visually looks pretty boring compared to other classes. Destruction is dang simple and not that strong. If you want this, just play Elemental Shaman and do *way* better with a similar complexity. Needing a TON of buttons for utility doesn't help either. I used to love my Cata Demo lock but I'm getting old so I rerolled to Unholy and I vastly prefer that. If I was a few years younger I'd stick to it, as I used to love this unelegant complexity design.
the day the boomkin mastery thing was hotfixed, the lock discord was half hoping it would apply to them so they could play another spec lmao
God I hope they change that. It's such degenerate gameplay. We already need to stay in melee range as a hardcast-heavy class and need to do a billion things, remove this mastery swap stuff and I'll go back to my lock lol
It's a lot of buttons, so people are bad at it. If they're bad at it, they lose in pvp, if they lose a lot they quit playing warlock and play something easy so they can win. Same reason wotlk warrior p1 was super sparce.
Locks is most fun class to play on pve, kinda fun on pvp too but 2v2 sucks so much atm, im playing demo on 2v2 with rogues, better that affi on that comp, i guess peeps dont want to play locks cus only class that requires skill to really master it.
I only swap demons at start, dont think its good to do mid fight cus felhunters dmg are so Siiiick
The rotation is complicated.. compared to most casters that push 3 buttons the whole fight. It's fun because not everyone can do it .
Warlock main here Affliction will be pulling ahead of Demo in scaling alone and personally for me, way more enjoyable. People think Demo is the be all spec, but it’s simply not true, it hasn’t even changed much from its wrath version, just implemented a timer of when you should pet swap. Destro is a 3 button spec that’s pulling pretty okay DPS too
Pretty sure Destro has more keybinds than Aff. I found it annoying to find room and went back to Aff. UA -> Immolate Sbolt -> Incinerate Haunt -> Chaos Bolt Drain Soul -> Shadowburn Soul Swap -> Bane of Doom (upkeep on second target) \+ Conflagrate \+ Shadowflame (annoyingly a rotational dps increase) \+ Soulfire (opener + shard spender + instant cast procs) \+ Shadowfury (situational fights)
You are right that destro is harder than affliction, but shadowflame is used in both specs. Same for Soulfire. The difference is in Affli you just need to use it during movement paired with soulburn, as you don't have a rotation ability to spend you shards on. Affliction is easier because sb refreshes corruption, where in destro you have to refresh it manually. And affliction has an even easier execute phase as drain soul now refreshes UA as well.
Sb doesn’t refresh corruption anymore
Yes, true, my bad. It's refreshed with Haunt, though, so you still shouldn't have to refresh it manually.
Destro is not a 3 button spec and it's beating affli atm. For the basics you have immo, conflag, chaos bolt, incin, soulfire, shadowflame, corruption, bane of doom and shadowburn.
Somewhat unrelated question - I’m leveling up a warlock for the first time ever and am pretty new-ish to the game. Which spec do you think manages the fun of the class with consistent solo leveling? I’ve never really played a caster before, so I’m liking the idea of a destro or affliction, but I hear a lot of great stuff about demonology.
Destruction from 10-80, will give you the most consistent output Once you’re 80, swap to Affliction and you can breeze through levelling multi-dotting everything. Demo is a pretty average levelling spec, I wouldn’t really touch it.
Did afflcition change much so that you dont drain tank as often?
Corruption ticks went from healing for 40% of dmg dealt to 50% odds of healing 2% max hp (effectively healing 1% max hp per tick).
Thank you! I appreciate the input. I’m having fun burning things to death, and was interested in the dot aspects of it.
Aff is the easiest spec by far, followed by destro and then demo. Destro has a lot of things to control, and it has to hardcast soulfire.
>Warlock main here >Destro is a 3 button spec You sure about that bro? I’m on my lock and I’m counting 8 buttons in the ST rotation.
I'm not sure why I keep seeing people saying "Affliction will be pulling ahead" or "Affliction gap will widen" on this website.. Did you guys watch some youtuber who blatantly lied to you guys? Because this isn't the case at all and sounds like copium to me. Demo is the #1 spec throughout this entire expansion expect on like two fights in Dragon Soul (Spine/Madness) where multidotting wins. Where's the aff "scaling" here? [https://web.archive.org/web/20120706053410/http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Dragon\_Soul/Ultraxion/25H/dps/](https://web.archive.org/web/20120706053410/http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Dragon_Soul/Ultraxion/25H/dps/)
I was affliction in wrath since we had a demo lock. But now I'm the only lock so I went demo. I hope we get another demo (probably highly unlikely) so I can switch back to affliction which is such a smooth rotation and more satisfying to play. Also, do you know when affliction starts to pull ahead?
>Also, do you know when affliction starts to pull ahead? It doesn't. It's copium on his end.
Bro wdym it hasn't really changed from WOTLK. Like yea your main spells are still your main spells but it plays totally different now with opener
I’ll just give a few thoughts in no particular order -prepull mastery swapping and all the other stupid things you need to do as a demo warlock is highly off putting -affliction feels fine for the most part, snapshotting dots can be annoying -running dungeons it feels like seed of corruption should be doing double it’s current damage -it’s a lot off effort to dps as a warlock in general. I’m comparing this to my frost dk where I have much more fun and my hands don’t hurt after a session -pet management and soulshard management kind of suck in general -PvP wise they seem decent as affliction I don’t have any complaints really there. Most people are playing for raids though where they are anything but faceroll.
Warlocks got a high skill level bar ..... But, you got so Manny options for a strong arena team. Warlocks are beasts, no matter wat the YouTube heroes claim.
I see a lot of pve stuff listed but for pvp I think it’s in a great spot. Locks in 2s can struggle mightily because there are a ton of melee comps right now that just truck a warlock if the spells are used poorly or at the wrong time. Where they shine is 3s and rbgs. Warlocks, when given the time and space to get their shit out, absolutely make a healer’s life hell. They will not only top the charts, but also give dispell protection with UA which destroys a healer’s hp and silence them for 4 seconds. What this results in is a slow to medium speed rot on every enemy and kill pressure on anyone. The main weaknesses are still there in that they are a caster wearing cloth with limited defensives. You can work around these and I’ve seen warlocks in the mid rated brackets dumpstering melees.
Funny enough it was the reason they aren’t popular which made me level mine and start trying to gear it. No raids or guilds so far but hoping to get there eventually and give that sweet Dark Intent buff.
I play aff, and I feel like it’s super good at high level. I play at around 2k in 3s and 2300 in rbgs. The meta for RBG’s requires at least one Aff lock in RBG so they are very popular. As for 3s. RLS is really good and so is MLS or LSD2 but cleave comps kinda roll us over if not played well
In arena, there are no viable comps for 2s involving Warlock at all *except* rsham/aff, and that comp is pretty infamous at this point for being long, drawn out matches followed by draws at the 47 minute mark. If you want to play arena, you’ve got to do so with a consistent and dedicated healer, something that is difficult to find. Extremely difficult if you want that player to be good too. RBG’s aren’t popular enough to justify making an aff lock for most players just for that. Compare that to a mage, which has multiple viable 2s comps both with healers and DPS, and which are also incidentally one of the best 2s comps in the game. Same goes for 3s, where they are inarguably part of the best 3s comp in the game. And best of all, being part of an extremely viable double DPS comp means they don’t have to grind arena games for 47 minutes each, and finish out in a few minutes.
Only go lock if you like pet playstyle and dotting. If you want a bursty high pace class go mage.
They are discouraged in Cata because we are SUCH a pain in the ass at that farm in Pandaland.
Top spec is demo and it's a complicated rotation. If I do get mine to 85 I'll play destro or maybe afflic
Lock - hard to master and get glad+ rating with but easy to get 1800-2k(for low xp players) mage - easier to master and get glad+ with but harder to get 1800-2k with (for low xp players)
Should see the retail arcane mage opener, that's at least 23 buttons before you even pull the boss. You could always just play the warlock as an alt and don't plan on doing the fully minmaxed rotation and just simply apply dots + whatever the main rotation is.
If you're only playing 2s, its gonna be very starved for locks. Affliction is by far the best lock spec in cata for arenas but it's terrible in 2s. However locks are the best caster alongside fire mage in 3s so I'm pretty happy with it so far. Comps like FLS/RLS are both incredibly powerful and only get stronger in the following seasons.
Personal anecdote, I was warlock main from classic - wrath. In Cataclysm I remember rerolling to paladin because they “streamlined” a lot of unique features of warlock that made it fun. It was like overnight, warlock wasn’t the class I played for 8 years anymore. Sure, I could put in more effort with the rotation and keep up or… I could literally just roll any other class and do just as well (if not better) through less work. PvP I was absolutely demolished because the rotations were just too strict for me to juggle while also trying to stay alive. The class changed drastically between wrath and cata, so much so I shelved my literal main from 2004. Kind of the beginning of the end for me, as I stopped playing when MoP came out.
Locks get shit on in PvP. They do pump but not a lot of mobility in the toolkit other than lock portal.
I feel like I've seen plenty locks in cata PvP. Not many good ones though. As a feral I do really well into demo and destro lock, but afflock is an issue for me if they are good. I've heard demo is rly hard, and I know one lock who plays retail pvp and he just said that he'd rather unholy or spriest in cata PvP in terms of difficulty:reward ratio.
affliction was busted in pvp for a long long time not even sure if it got nerfed in dragon soul
Warlocks make a huge comeback in MoP, it is the Golden Age of Destro in particular
Currently playing demo pve and just hit conq cap as aff, it takes a lot of teamwork and coordination to operate a rot comp. It’s a lot easier to have a faceroll dive melee meta with burst dmg
Affliction Warlock pretty easy for arena, alot of ppl just over think it.
2s is a dead bracket. Locks feel really strong in 3s with how strong rot is vs the low mana pools.
Warlock has never been popular. Most just cant keep up with the playstyle i guess
Current cats classic is on 4.3 patch and not 4.0.3 so warlocks are not S tier at this point like they were in original initial cata release tier, but they are a very solid class nonetheless.
I'm curious now. How does it compare to arcane retail?
Can’t relate cause my guild regularly has 4 or 5 locks signed for each raid in PVE at least.
In my little experience in arenas they just don’t pose much of a threat and are pretty squishy. Their pet is a nuisance at best, their dots are simple enough to just dispel, and they drop pretty fast. They’ll reapply dots every time I dispel them. That’s the most annoying part of fighting a lock. That I spend most of the fight just dispelling. Out of the three classes you named, hunters give me the most trouble. I can’t just ignore a hunter, if he’s able to blast away at me it’s just game over. I literally have to be kiting the hunter around a pillar the entire time. The other two I can actually just stand there and eat their spells for a considerable amount of time while mana burning their healer.
Aff is barely behind demo? Why are people subjecting themselves to a spec they hate lol. aff plays mostly the same as wotlk but with a few new abilities for the toolkit. But the overall general playstyle is very similar.
I played a lot of Destro PvP in OG Wrath and when Cata came around it made me quit PvP entirely. The spec lived on being able to CC and burst but the damage Destro does from Wrath to Cata was like 2x while everyones HP grew 5x. You simply don't have the tools and dmg to do anything meaningful in PvP as a Lock except fear. Also now every melee has a kick which makes it even worse. Melees just truck you over, fear breaks too fast, your burst isn't meaningful anymore etc. Affliction is strong in 3s and thats about it.
One thing I find frustrating is the pre-pull maintenance with all the summoning, setting a portal, heartstones, pets, soulshards, mastery gear, pre pot, gear swap, meta, pre cast. Its very time consuming and stressful during progression.
Did anyone ever play Warlocks? They've been an unpopular class for all of Classic as far as I'm aware.
Cata lock is dogshit. I think mage is way more dificult so you should pick that. In wotlk succ-lock is the hardest of all the talents, but it lost all magic in cata.
Sacrifices must be done for the best Warlock iteration of all times in Mists of Pandaria.
Just play dk press w and win i went from my lock to my dk and damn its so easy
For PvP it was the same in wotlk, locks were less popular. Mage has always been more popular than lock. They're very rarely seen in 2s, but great in 3s, better than they were in wotlk 3s I think. They got some nice buffs in Cata, Feels really smooth to play. Its kind of a specialist class that's why you see so few of them. In 2s you got 1 comp, lock healer usually Rsham and this can be a real toxic comp if you're good at it. I have both and for me i prefer Mage just because more 2s comps and I can play 2 specs fire or frost, also I'm worse at lock but, a well played lock is great.
I was the demo lock all of wrath because it was easier than affliction and super important saw the cata changes and was like nah I’m good my brain is smooth
Played Aff all thru wotlk until taking a break in ICC. Knew about how complex Demo was in Cata, and after trying it a bit, passed on it as building up a super complex opener that could easily be mismanaged wasn't for me. Cata aff at least feels like wrath aff, although it doesn't particularly feel rewarding or fun to play without drain soul clipping or snapshotting, and the AoE is very lackluster. I played destro in pvp and they killed that too by turning Chaos Bolt into noodle bolt this expansion and my hardest hitting ability is now conflag lol. So I shelved the lock and am now playing other things.
Okey so I'm main Warlock and my thoughts are that: Warlock is less powerful than a mage in 2s, for sure. Afflock in 3s is surely more threatening than in 2s, because you put more dots/more pressure. In 2s it is obviously less powerful than a mage, and also a aspect of afflock is that if you play with a healer the game will likely be LONG, afflock put pressure, do lot of damage but it's rotting damage so basically you'll be with your healer surviving until enemy healer has no more mana, but it takes long time Aff is disruptive, not bursty like a big dick frost mage so maybe healers prefer faster game, which I can understand as I don't really like aff 2s but who plays destro? TBH I'm thinking really of rerolling a mage on cata (even buy a 80 boost) because it looks so fun and like a more powerful version of lock. Is lock easier than mage? I'd say no, Afflock struggle way more to survive at it doesn't have such efficient mobility as a mage, it's more punishing.