Warlocks to the Rescue
As I mentioned yesterday, I was bored with the hunter grind and fancied taking Maexyn the warlock out for a spin so I ran her around Westfall for the first time in months. When I started I had forgotten my key assignments and had to practise killing things warlock style. However I soon got up to speed:
- Pet (voidwalker) attack
- Cast Incinerate DoT (damage over time): takes time to cast so should hit mob just after voidwalker has agro
- Cast Curse of Agony DoT (instant cast)
- Cast Corruption DoT (instant cast)
- (now essentially we are waiting for target to die. What to do? How about:)
- One or two Life Tap's to turn warlock's own health into mana and recoup mana spent thus far
- Drain Life to suck health from target and into warlock to recoup health spent on Life Tap
The end result is a dead target, a Warlock with 5% mana spent and 100% health.
If the warlock does get agro during the fight then normally by the time it starts hitting the warlock the DoT's (especially Curse of Agony) really kick in and with a bit of wanding the thing's dead, it's not as painful as when a Hunter gets agro (he says now).
I had read about warlock strategy and the whole thing of converting health to mana (Life Tap) and (effectively) mana back to health (Drain Life) and it makes the warlocks quite interesting. After a tough fight with health and mana low you can fight some easy mobs and build up both health and mana from them: Drain Life to top up the health and Life Tap to turn that health into mana.
Maexyn was getting quite efficient and was taking mobs down in 12 seconds, hunter territory. She had full rest bonus but dinged the two levels to 16 in as many hours. She could grind for protracted periods with continual killing, no mana breaks required.
I'm debating whether to level up her first aid. As a tailoress she would really use the cloth elsewhere. I have a feeling that she could get by without it, the main use for it would be to heal the voidwalker after a fight.
It was fun, a nice change and I'll be running her some more.
Other things to note:
- Gave her a final Netherweave bag so she has full capacity of 80 slots compared to Maezyn's 64 (because of the quiver). I don't think I will bother with a Soul Shard bag, it's not like a quiver that gives a dps boost.
- Bought her a 16 slot enchanting bag to store all her stacks of enchanting materials in the bank. These are only 4g compared to 7g for a Netherweave bag.
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Still kept running out of bag space
- Still have the bug where she cannot vendor some items. I must look into fixing this.
- Losing the voidwalker in a fight isn't so bad as for a hunter losing a pet: when you summon a new voidwalker it already has max health and mana, you don't have to heal it and feed it to make it happy.
- When the warlock dings and gets the yellow glow, the pet dings in the same way.
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How I hate running at normal speed, no Aspect of the Cheetah
- At level 16 Warlock gets an underwater breathing spell so murlocs beware.
Peter's Moblog
Definitely level bandages. In the rare cases where you end a fight with either low health or low mana it's nice to be able to tap to full mana and then bandage (8 seconds) to full health.
The only time I eat on my warlock is when I want to use stat food.
There's an affliction talent that makes it so that if the mob dies while you're draining their soul you get mana back. In solo this makes it trivial to end the fight at 100% health and mana and with an additional soul shard (I recommend the addon eeShard to keep the number of shards under control. You set the limit and any shards above the limit are destroyed).
At about level 30 if you're affliction spec you'll be able to start "drain tanking" or "drain hunting". The idea that you set your pet (succubus) onto the mob dot it up to grab aggro and then drain it's life away. Affliction spec makes it so the more dots you have running on the mob, the more health you get back from drain life. It's easily possible to drain more life from the mob then they can hit you for.
See article here: http://altitis.blogspot.com/2007/11/shadow-compendium-warlock-playstyles.html
Eventually the Demon trainer will teach your VoidWalker to "consume shadows" which is the pet out-of-combat heal. Eventually he'll also teach you "Sacrafice" which allows you to sacrafice your demon for a bubble. The bubble last just about log enough to summon a new (at full health) demon. :)
Nibuca http://warcraft.fibergeek.com