So I made a raiding warlock to do damage, ok, so as people were telling me I was working agaisnt the odds, but hey I though a shadow bolting demon summoning purple mage would be fun so I tried it.

After the mage buff people started to claim that warlocks can in no way compete with mage dps, and that besides 2 warlocks for coe/cor warlocks were a waste of a raid spot. Having finally raided now into the ealier bosses in Naxx I must say that I havn't quite experianced this.

I parsed the first few Ravious kills of our guild with synced meters, the first 7 places were held by rogues and warriors, then next by me, then some hunters and below them mages, on that fight healers are ordred not to give a single heal to warlocks so I was going all out solo with bandages, but in the end I pumped my damage hard and beat all the mages consistantly on all three of those kills.

I also found that on fights like Anubrekhan I was very usefull as a dpser thanks to high hp pool (as to not die to impale) and dots that work well with the movement oriented fight, I lack efficent aoe to kill bugs, but as targeted safe dps on anub I was a usefull addition.

Now mages do very good damage, and I have to keep dot efficiency, pump my shadowbolts and move around right but atleast 50% of the time I come out top ranged dpser, over and above mages, when I have unlimited access to healer mana with the new lifetap changes no mage can really compete with me over a decent span of time.

Now considering I can provide imp, healthstones, soulstones ect I feel I am quite useful as a whole to the raid, and my dps is of a high quality in terms of ranged dps. Sure mages do good damage too, but as a warlock who tries hard I'm right up there too.

I am an alliance warlock, and used to be a horde one, I can imagine horde locks still girping about the lack of BoS, which does often cripple dps capabilities.

However I can quite easily see how warlocks get thier "bad name" so to speak, most of the other warlocks in my guild have little care about thier dps, they only see thier role as the imp giver, one is specced Soulink and the other Dark pact and thier dps is awful compared to mages, but surely people can realise this is not always the case.

I know that on the whole mages vs warlock debate you can argue about other things like aoe ect, but I don't see how a warlock can be placed into the small corner of a "useless dps class" considering my personal experiance aleast.

Naturally a Warlock can beat a Mage on Razuvious, I'm sure a halfway decent Shadow Priest could as well. Our Tauren Hunters are also able to out DPS the mages thanks to being able to outrange his Shout (they claim tauren get a bit of extra range due to their size ... but they also claim that LR is *always* superior to TSA)

I really don't think it's so much that Warlocks can't beat mages on DPS consistantly, as that Warlocks shouldn't be beating the mages constantly. On Horde, you need 2 warlocks with an imp out on fights with tanks spread apart, you need CoE, CoS, and sometimes CoR up often, Warlocks have to hold back on the DoTs on fights like Noth where they'll die on a bad blink. Your DoTs are likely to be bumped by procs and Deep Wounds or stings (lol). And even with it's new buff, Lifetap still requires a larger time investment than a Mage chugging pots/gems.

Instructor is a bad fight to try to measure your DPS on anyway since anyone who sets their mind to it can have a little fun with the meters, like so:



If your Mages have the gear and the spec though they should beat you on Instructor anyway. When Fireball is hitting for 2000-2100 and you're chain casting it, I don't see what class actaully CAN beat Mages. For Patchwewrk we have to bring Major Mana Pots, Mageblood Pots, Nightfin Soup and Demonic Runes, but it's a small price to pay for top DPS (you can Flask, Greater Arcane Elixir, Greater Firepower pot and Blessed/Brilliant Wizard Oil and increase your spell damage by 50% for more fun).

For anub, no caster should be hit by impale. If you don't have range talents, you should be timing it. Efficient AoE? The least efficient AoE is when some people aren't doing it and mages have to cast 5-6 AEs instead of 2-3. If your positioning is right, you should be able to nuke anub and the adds, as well as aoe bugs without moving more than 10-15 yards max. Perhaps your dmg on anub was increased in comparison because mages were OOM from warlocks not using their AoE.

I'm not knocking warlock dps. With the new tap they can stop wasting 8 or so global cooldowns getting mana back, so we've seen a noticable increase in DPS on straight up nuking fights like patchwerk. They're also great and usually #1 on Noth where you can have them dot up all the adds and just have mages assist during blinks. This is all not to mention that they increase the entire raid's damage with CoS, CoE, and CoR. We usually bring 4 warlocks to naxx.

Once you guys get to patchwerk, if you're beating mages there's something wrong with your mages and it'd be interesting to see just who the hell is doing all the dmg in your raids.

It's not that you can't beat mages...I beat mages all the time on damage meters... it's that you can't beat "good" mages that are "trying" And against some of our warlocks I'm doing between 2x to 3x the damage they are doing with very similiar gear. (or even worse gear than one)


But that's because skill isn't equal in the real world... and unless you're in one of the top tier raiding guilds and can afford to not bing any "slackers" to your raids, then you're probly just a better player than your mages. If you were a mage you'd probly be outdamaging by a larger percent.

All mages in my guild are frost...I guess fire has a much greater damage potential. And I don't expect to outdps mages on a flat out nukefest on patchy, but I expect to come really close, and with added utility of curses ect I don't see me doing a bad job at all.

I just find myslef that warlock dps is alot closer than people think it is to mages, and when you have unlimited mana (from healers) the new lifetap really allows you to push a very very high dps.

Correct my if I'm wrong but Anubs implale is 40 yards, since talented SB is 36 I find there is little way I can avoid impale (I tested sitting at max range and still got hit by impales)

On my guilds tires on Noth I dont touch him, yeah just dot adds like an ealier poster said.

On the theorycrafting side a warlock with a 7/DS/ruin build with a sacced succi, all the usual crazy buffs, using Coa and a healer keeping his hp going could probally post quite a competitive total vs a mage on patchy (again firemage im unsure of, never seen them preform in a pve context) On fights that we have 4 warlocks and I can use CoA I can get very good DPS rates. Luckily... I have good communication with the hunter class leader and can ask him to stop stings if needed :P (Hate deep wounds... hate)

I guess another aspect is my server is very new, and as such we are positively undergeared for Naxx, I think our MT had 2 pieces of wrath on Anub, many casters have a couple of epics but many blues too, I am assuming the gap between mage and warlock grows bigger with gear, or does it?

You right that Ravious is a nice fight for a warlock.. dots ticking while you hide from shout allows you a greater advantage over dps vs a mage, but I'm just pointing at the fights I have done so far.

Anub took us 20 mins to kill, we had warlocks only dpsing anuib and mages only aoeing... we have low dps so we needed the locks dpsing Anub really.

The twenty min kill time is due to us having only killed Nefarion 4 times before we killed Anub, as such you can imagine our total raid dps is low due to weak gear ( One of our rogues has a green sword ;P )

I'll try that hitbox thing on our next anub kill I guess, though I kinda liked the fun of getting implaed and hitting healthstone midair to survive :P

And once me and a equally geared mage tested our dps on nefarion (nice long static fight without many other variables, parsed only phase 2) and I did beat him by a decent margin with healer heals, keep in mind the new lifetap changes and CoA, makes a big differance. This dosnt happen all the time granted but I seem to be posting a competitive dps in such a situation (granted not all situation, often healers cant spare mana for warlocks)

Well I don't know what to tell you except that in my experience that hasn't been the case. Grobulus is ranged DPS only fight in Naxx, and you've got time to Lifetap while repositioning as well as no Deep Wounds screwing with your DoTs, so that's pretty good fight to gauge Warlock vs Mage head to head I guess.

This is 1.12 with no flasks on anyone, everyone in great gear, and I think Sprok died early due to a mistimed cleanse:



Most people report Warlock and Hunter DPS being lower than Mages, Rogues and Fury Warriors, it's not really a myth =/

With the new life tap changes I can keep up with mages more easily, and sometimes do more damage as long as my DoTs don't get bumped off. It doesn't happen very often though, and more often than not I'm still doing crummy damage while requiring mana from healers.

Am I correct in thinking you’re the same Eternal Guardians on Aerie Peak, a server that’s been up 2 months? I imagine the main reason for your comparable damage is your gear disparity.

Lanlaorn that myth might not always be true, i've seen screenshots of Alliance Warlocks doing over 600dps on Patchwerk, just depends on the availabilty of said warlock's mana regen.

Generally, we don't permit locks (or anyone else) to use debuff slots that endanger ignites.

While you might argue that a theoretical lock with access to lots of healing and lots of debuff slots would do crazy damage, this is generally not practical or ideal for overall raid DPS.

The divide between the hybrids' DPS (hunter/lock) and the pure DPS (rogue/mage...fury war) becomes significantly noticable on DPS encounters (Loatheb).

Raid composition has moved away from 5/5/5 etc types of raids to raids with 2-3 locks and 2-3 hunters because its just more effective to stack the other DPS classes right now. When you only have 2-3 locks per raid, they're generally required to perform their non-DPS role a lot more, and this further widens the damage gap. So, I wouldn't say that lock damage is WAY below mages, its just that since it is somewhat lower, it creates a feedback loop that further widens the damage margin.

With that many locks, there wont be spare debuff slots, you'll just be knocking off each others dots.

Uhhhh why wouldn't you use melee on Grobb? The tick on the cloud is so slow you'd have to be afk to take damage.

I don't see why some guilds use no melee dps on grob, the fight is over so much faster if you have all your melee stabbing his bum. (in between slime slayings)

aye, slime -> grob -> out of cloud -> new slime. That you can have 6-7 more dps on him isn't to be snobbed at, just see it like venoxis but even slower ticking.

in the expansion warlocks will come to the fore in dps if played well. 40 debuff limit, +god knows how many dots a warlock can throw out will amount to some serious damage, especially with less dps available to a raid leader than now

Fight duration has a lot to do with how well we're seen to be DPSing. If it's a medium-length fight, where we can drop our dots and start Bolt spamming, sure. We do decent to very good damage. On very short fights where we don't get off more than one Bolt per mob, we suffer some. Long-distance AE isn't nearly as good for us as point-blank, so that makes a difference too.

As for boss fights, whether or not we can keep up with mages depends mostly on whether or not we get some down time during the fight. Razuvious is a great fight for warlocks, but not just because we can tick dots while hiding from the shout. That shout timer also gives us the perfect time to Life Tap. Even with the Tap changes in 1.12, this is a big limiting factor on our DPS. In any long fight that doesn't have an "out" time for us to tap (i.e. Patchwerk), equally geared mages who don't drool on their keyboards easily outdamage us.

We'll see how things play out in the expansion. I won't be surprised (or even particularly displeased) if warlocks still take a close second in the DPS category to mages. After all, warlocks are a lot more fun to play. :)

I don't know how other guilds do it, but we cleanse the Injection in a path parrallel to the trail of clouds made by Grobulus. I don't know, it just seems like it would be a hassle to dodge that second cloud, and the melee DPS might even be in range of the AoE from cleansing it, too.

You know how it is, you find something that works and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

Grobbulus is such a poorly designed encounter that any half-baked strategy can be used to beat him. Oh well, I guess it is kinda fun in that regard. :O

Tauren get +4 yards of range.

I still don't get why people think this is a problem. Yes, providing extremely large buffs to raid damage is going to cost you personal dps. If those Warlocks WERE capable of matching Mage dps THAT would be a problem, because it would mean that Warlocks who can use Agony + non-imp would /outdamage/ Mages and Rogues, and that would be absurd.

You...cleanse...the debuff? Such a waste of mana. It has the same effect whether its cleansed or expires.