Terwaar

I just have a question some more advanced raiding warlocks out there. Here is my situation:

I play a Priest in a reletively new raiding guild (Rag down, working on Vael). Recently our active warlocks have been complaining about the lack of heals the recieve in a number of boss encounters. While we as healers have worked out what I believe to be a very strong rotation, it leads to warlocks being low priority targets (other than HOT effects). My gut feeling, as well our druids and paladins, is that tanks and non range DPS get priority over warlocks for heals.

I have never personally played a warlock but my impression from raids is that it is a very powerful class. Its just that once our warlocks burn their mana pools (often early into the encounter) lifetapping leads to quick death. I am assumming are warlocks are of average skill and theres possibly a dynamic that I am not seeing. Other than the heavy use of consumables by the warlock or giving them their own dedicated healer (not possible under most circumstances) what would be the ideal solution?

Our warlocks seems to easily rival our mage and hunter DPS in longer raid encounters but the actual efficiency seems lacking. Does the efficiency get better with gear or will the danger of AOEs/temp aggro draw be a constant threat to warlocks? Maybe theres something I am missing as a dedicated raid healer?

 

marketa

I make druids heal me. With regrowth+rejuv I know roughly how much I can lifetap so that I'm full life when the heals finish ticking.

Basically I sit around 80% until the druid regrowth+rejuvs me to full and then I tap my mana back up.

 

Chmee

IMO, warlocks should lifetap early and as often as possible in order to maximize the effect of HoTs. By beginning lifetaps early warlocks can also reduce any chances of pulling aggro. Also, going from no mana to low life is NOT efficient and potentially problematic for the raid as a whole.

If you don't get HoTs then as soon as you hit -2000 health you can just bandage.

That said, I really don't see any situation where warlocks would need anything beyond HoTs to maintain their mana pools, barring aggro problems, AE, etc.



Also, a shadowpriest alone can keep my mana up just fine, depending on how long his mana lasts that is.

 

Mimesis

use your most efficient heals on warlocks. on aoe fights they should be making sure they dont lifetap too low in one shot. But yes they do need heals to dps, and the more they dps the faster things die, meaning the less you have to heal. (common sense i know)

 

Fira

We usually don't have more then 3 in our progression raids. So keeping them up/topped off isn't to big of a problem. A rejuv or a renew is usually all they need, regrowth seems a bit much to me since it cost's so much mana to cast. Also I myself occasionly use like a rank 5 healing wave to keep them topped off. We have pretty aggressive healers, with 14-15 on average per raid. We do like to bring a shaman heavy raid though, with like 6shamans, 5priests, 3/4druids, so chain heal owns for keeping melee up.

 

Chiquihuite

HoTs should be more than enough for them. Proper use of consumables and bandaging with HoTs ticking on you should mean you never have any issues with mana, even on fights with environmental damage. That said, do try to keep the HoT love flowing. It helps a lot :)

What encounters are we talking about, exactly?

"They're Dragon Kill Points; not Dragon Feed Points"

 

Jaithra

I don't know if I qualify as "advanced" (raid experience: ZG/AQ20/Ony/Rag) but unless I'm hellfiring I don't expect anything more than the occasional HoT. As the others said, you lifetap a little bit, then watch for someone to throw a HoT on you and lifetap through it so you end up with decent amounts of both health and mana afterwards. If the HoT never comes or if it isn't enough, you bandage (I go through ridiculous amounts of bandages on some fights). In desperate cases you drain life (not a whole lot of damage compared to shadowbolt spam, but it can keep you from dying...). I don't need anything more than HoTs most of the time - if I do, it's probably because I pulled aggro, which shouldn't be happening anyway, or else something really unusual is going on.

In short, I've never played a healer, but from a warlock perspective it sounds like you and your healers have the right idea and your warlocks need to stock up on bandages ;)

 

◊ Oggie

Pace everything said above, warlocks are the highest non emergency priotiy heals of the dps classes.

Tanks, Healers, usually warlocks at a healthy #3.

Edit
Above is my guild only, and possibly my perception only. I do not disagree with anything said above my post.

 

stop

Heal your warlocks.
If your warlocks get heals, they can top the DPS charts in almost every fight you will see for a long while.
If your warlocks aren't going to get heals, don't invite them as they are wasting space.

It's a bit out of date, but here's a link that shows the difference.

 

dakalro

At their level, bandages should be a lock's best friend. At better gear healers can afford to throw some more heals on the locks. And melee dps shouldn't be 2nd priority. They're doing smth wrong if they take dmg in a non AoE fight. All dps taking dmg is equal in AoE fights.
In non AoE, locks should be higher than melee, they are forced to lose life, melee isn't maybe. But still, bandages and HoTs ftw.
Imo, locks need to learn how to survive in a fight by themselves before deserving heals. It's a way to learn how to balance Life Tap according to the difficulty of the fight on healers. Played a healer too (5 man stuff) and locks that life tap to 10% during a fight then go all out and take aggro are really annoying, esp if they shout for heals. If you do smth like that you are signing a contract where you agree to die willingly :D

 

Dakous

With my incredibly limited raid warlock experience, I'm throwing this up for community correction as much as anything, but, and absolutely guessing in the dark having not seen your warlocks in action, I would lean towards blaming the human tendancy towards modality. That is, "I'm in SB spam mode, SB to empty!" *gearshift* "I'm in lifetap mode, lifetap to empty." *gearshift* "I'm in SB spam mode..."

To you, experienced and spreadsheet-prone warlocks of this forum, is there a compelling reason for doing more than one lifetap as necessary? Is there something to the optimal DPS cycle of a warlock that makes lifetapping repeatedly optimal?

Even if it's not your issue at hand, I figure I'm sufficently close on question (and also play a raid healer too, so maybe a response will raise my healing sympathies) as to not be stinking up your thread ~

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

Northerner

We run a warlock/spriest pack often but far from always. Locks come in many flavors and need healing or don't (sacced VW being not so evil sometimes).

The thing in general with healing non-tanks/non-melee is that it goes from "oh god, why did I have to heal XX!" to "the entire raid needs healing, and in different ways" pretty quick in terms of WoW's raid progression. If locks are sucking heals for no good reason (you've got 60 water and you are not pulling, but still tap between pulls) then that's no good. If they are doing the job and dying, that is bad. Meh, no rocket science there.

 

dakalro

Dakous, it's not that easy to SBx3, LT, SBx3, LT in the middle of a first kill/attempt. And in the end it still results in low hp :). And yes, for +600 dmg, 1 LT gets me enough mana to SB almost 3 times. Full mana bar => 16 SBs, less if you account for curses/Corruption (40 seconds and oom).

Warlocks just need to use common sense. Can the healers afford to heal you? Can you afford to lose all that hp?

My advice to healers, if you can spare a HoT/small, fast heal to locks, do it, it will up their dps a lot, but keep in mind that LT is not something that kills a warlock; make priorities according to fight, not general ones. And sometimes we need to be taught the hard way how much and how often we can LT so we learn to always go on with the assumption that we will get 0/minimal heals.
Eventually they'll learn in what fights they can rely only on heals, what fights they won't have all the healing they want and what fights they just have to suck it up and use those bandages, HSs, HP pots.

 

• Maels

Your warlocks should be getting heals throughout MC and BWL.

 

Dakous

Well, I didn't mean for my question to emphasize "one" as a number as opposed to, say, "two", but rather "few" as opposed to "maximum."

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

dakalro

Erm, in fights where I might take damage there's no way I'm ever gonna LT to lowest hp possible. Me surviving with lower dps > me dying with higher dps. It all depends on the fight. For example, in fights that are over-farmed I just go all out if there's no enviromental damage and the healers do heal me but if I do a LT to low hp I still use my healthstone (alt tanking not that great for going all out sometimes :D). I don't like very low hp just like I don't like 100% hp :).

When I might need that hp I just LT to not start wanding and try to use that mana until the next bandage cooldown/HS cooldown/heal. When I don't I try to LT to max mana but still depends on the bandage/HS/pot cooldowns more than heals that I'd like to receive.

Having had to learn all MC/BWL fights where healers are focused more on keeping tanks up compared to doing a farmed encounter, I learned not to ask for heals. Healers should know when they can afford to spare a heal and if they can, they should. That is what I expect from healers, to heal me when they can not when I want. Not healing locks if you can heal them is a waste of raid dps though.

 

Vytae

Melee gets WF
Healers get Innervate
Mages get PI,innervates and self buffs from simply stacking themselves.

Warlocks/Hunters often have such low dps because they are prioritized that way,good money after bad is the common theme.

A few Renews when possible will go a long way towards big boosts towards warlock dps.

Obviously you don't give it to them on fights your learning when they dont need it (ie no aoe from bosses) if its mana intensive,but otherwise yes.

Money is not happiness. Yachts are not happiness. Hot women are not Happiness.
Being stinking rich on a yacht with hot women sure as hell is though.

 

Lumi

There are few fights while learning that healing is really an issue anyway. Patchwerk (while learning) and Loatheb (can't heal em anyway) are the only two that come to mind.

 

Vazu

A few of our problems will be solved soon.

..2 piece Plagueheart + Soul Leech is going to be pretty GD nice for raiding.

Edit: For the time being though, just throw us a HOT. Honestly, with decent gear, 1 HOT = 1.5k - 2000 mana for us.
(Most of our Druids/Priests HOTs are like 400+ / tick..)

 

Krpyton

As a general courtesy I consider it quite inappropriate if I demand heals from our healers;they certainly have better things to do than to keep a puny warlock alive!

That being said,there have been multiple occassions where healers(paladins especially) will whisper me "tap all you want I've got you covered" and then,I will go all out-and it's usually not a bad thing other than Loatheb.More dps certainly never hurts!A general rule of thumb I will use when gauging how far to push my lifetaps is based on the extent of collateral damage(Rags etc)inflicted as well as how alert my healers are.

I guess to answer your question specifically,the ideal solution would be to stack your warlocks into the same group as a shadow priest(assuming you have one).And since your in mc/bwl,a build which I fancied for self-sustance is the "old school" sm/ruin-siphon life is just wonderful.Also,another trick which I still use until today would be to swap another version of healthstone with another lock-most encounters usually allow both HS's to be consumed.

Not to be taken as a rant but warlock scaling currently in live is nothing compared to mages;despite having vastly better gear my mana pool is emptied in ~16 shadowbolts.There are alot of game mechanics hindering us from achieving our full dps potential;inaccessible aggro redux talents/nemesis bonuses,debuff slots yada yada.Hopefully all this will change come patch 2.0!

 

Seniath

What spirit keke? But like someone said earlier, often I'll get told on TS by our friendly druids to "tap a bit, I'll heal you up". Which is very nice of them indeed.

"We all make our choices, but in the end, our choices make us."
Andrew Ryan

 

spronk

if your guild is in the mode where most groups have a healer and little x-group healing, warlocks should ask the healer in their group to HoT them once in a while when the healers main target is ok.

if your guild x-heals (better tactic for most of mc/bwl/aq, but have to work out overall healing assignments every boss) then assign the worst geared priest/druid (or someone who is tired or w/e) to toss off some HoTs on warlocks, rogues, etc. They can drag out warlocks into a seperate group and use emonitor to toss off occasional heals.

 

Tuco

Using renew rank 3 on our warlocks and having it consistently up gives them more life than they can lifetap away on a fight without heavy AE (like patchwerk for example).

 

dakalro

Well, healers will learn what a lock can do when healed for lifetap eventually.
First pwerk kill (where all healers were told not to heal anyone but tanks) I got a renew, wow; missed it though cause i had like 19 buffs on and didn't pay attn to anything but the boss and yellow sct messages to see if Corr/Siphon was resisted.
2nd kill, 1 renew again. Saved me from having to bandage a 2nd time (3 major rejuvs, 2 HSs, 1 bandage, 1 renew, Siphon Life) and I ended up with 30-40 more dps :D

 

Terwaar

Not any specific encounter, just ones where splash damage can catch people off guard. I find our warlocks often die during Ony as one of us is running across the room to wind up a heal. As healers we do still throw HOTs towards locks and the occasional lower rank healing touch/greater heal. What is comes down to is that when healers are in short supply (as is typical on my server is seems) prioritization works a little differently. I guess the DPS=health factor of warlocks is something we as healers will have to cope with. Generally we don't raid with that many locks (4 at the most in any given raid).

Definitely some good tips here, and I'll make sure they bring bandages to fights (I almost never see the bandage debuff on them). The shadow priest suggestion seems like it would work. Having been full shadow before I am aware of the amazing efficiency of VE heals. Although its doubtful I can convince my raid leader to allow a shadow DPS priest over a much needed healing one.

One other question: what exactly is a optimal raid build for a warlock? We have a soulink one who is generally lower on the DPS charts but almost never draws threat. The contrast to this is one of our founding members who is something like 5 affliction/46 destruction. I also now understand that its more optimal to weave lifetap into a nuking rotation rather than lifetap 20 times after going OOM. That is probably key to why are warlocks have the highest death rates on farm status encounters.

On a side note we got vael the other night after about 17 tries over the course of 3 weeks. Its very different fight, I will give it that.