I have run about 12 heroic instances sofar in Heroic Ramparts, Heroic Slave Pens and Heroic Steamvault. I wanted to share my findings and hear what other warlocks felt about heroic instances.

My normal group setup is

Warrior Tank (arms or hybrid spec)
Druid Healer (resto spec)
Frost Mage (41++ frost)
Frost Mage (40 arcane, 21 frost)
Demon Warlock,me (17 Aff, 44 Demon)

Sometimes we shuffle in
Feral Druid instead of the 41++ frost mage or the Tank
Healing specced Priest instead of the Druid Healer

In my view, CC is king for Heroic Instances. Our experience has been that you really only want to tank 1 mob pr pull, tanking 2 is doable but risky and i dont want to try tanking 3. When our tank is tanking 2 mobs, he has so much incoming dps that the healer normally gets aggro eventually. So we keep a finger on the panic buttons for the running add. Death Coil, Frost Nova or a fast fear can save a healers life. We try to control the pull by always marking all targets in a pull and deciding pre-pull who gets killed in what order and try to CC as much as possible. And for CC, a warlock definately has a place.

Fear
Fear is a lifesaver and can even prevent wipes. We had a bad pull in slave pens once, where we ended up with 4 mobs left, dead healer and 100 hp tank. We still managed to kill them all thanks to:
2 Sheeps, 1 seduce, 1 feared add. We fear kited it while nuking from the lock, mage, mage.
Being able to nuke and fear at the same time can be a very powerfull tool.
And of course when using fear, i always have a finger on the CoR button, if the mob is headed for another group.
Fear seems to work for all mobs that are CC-able.

Seduce
I'm pussled by seduce, it seems to only work on about 25% of the humanoids i have meet sofar and the selection of who it works on seem to be random. Examples
It works on Dark Casters in ramparts, but not on the Destroyers, Hungerers or the Archers.
It works on Soothsayers in Slave Pens, but not on the defenders, Enchantresses or Bogstrok.
I cannot find any system to when seduce works or not, but after a run or two, you get the feeling for it and can start planning pulls around seduced mobs.

Banish
And Banish of course works great on the Elemental pulls in Steamvault or Omor in Ramparts.

In my experience there should always be room for a warlock on Heroic runs, but fitting two would probaby be pushing it, since pulls almost never have more than 1 mob you can seduce.

About trash DPS i find im a behind the two mages we run with, since im using Seduce/succubus and concentrating on fear/CoR over dps. And not using the Imp costs me the -20% threat MD buff.

On bosses i bring out the imp again and i do compareable to the mages, ending up just a little lower, which i normally do on raids as well.

Id like to hear how other warlocks do in heroic instances and what your experiences are.

How often are you finding seduce breaking? I find it breaks very, very often which makes DPSing extremely hard on trash. A number of times seduce has broken early, as I frantically mash reseduce macro the first reseduce gets resisted and my pet is killed and now the mob is running to me or the healer.

run with a feral druid (tank), warr (OT/MT swaps dep on trash/boss), paladin healer, mage or hunter, warlock. We've muddled through most of coilfang heroics (slave, bogs, steamvaults) and durnholde. Interestingly enough I played my friends mage for a few heroic runs (druid/paladin/hunter/mage/mage) and it was 2-3x easier, easily. No fears needed, just tons of simple CC. My sheep broke early maybe twice in 5 runs, compared to dozens of times with my warlock.

So far I am extremely disappointed with warlock utility in heroics. There are maybe half a dozen pulls where warlock is clearly superior choice to a mage. And there are literally a hundred pulls where the mage is the better choice.

Of course I'm affliction speced right now, perhaps some of the demo talents help seduce stay up longer. I do agree however that CC is king, its just that I feel a mage or hunter provide much more reliable CC than a warlock. Even a rogue, with imp sap, is better if you have very high focus fire DPS.

I can remember maybe 1 or 2 instances of seduce breaking early, but it has never wiped us. More often than not, the focussed target is dead or well under control and about to die, before seduce even has a chance to break for us.

I agree on the mage vs lock comparison. For all the love i have for fear/seduce they are not nearly as good as polymorph. Bringing a second mage instead of a warlock is probably always a valid option and even some places a superior option, but ill still argue for bringing warlock :D

I have not yet tried a heroic run without a mage, and im not rushing to trying either. And this i think is sad, because Mages shouldn't be the "must-have", that they currently are.

Improved Howl of Terror. Curse of Exhaustion.

i do heroics with,

1 warrior
1 hunter
1 warlock (me)
2 priests

we make sure to pull the mobs far back into a clearing. 3 aoe fears (+intimidating), freezing/slowing trap, misdirection, feign death, warlock fear, shackle (ok not a huge amount of areas to use this). Aslong as theres a lot of space... aoe fear is sick. With 2 priests and a warlock we can pretty much keep them aoe-feared while cooldowns reset on each other.

Also CoEx + conc shot, can solo any slowable mob in heroics if you have the space to manouever, as can the hunter. Ofcourse its better to direct dps at tanks target, but if things go wrong its entirely possible to whack CoEx on the mobs and dots / hunter doing the same with his mob.. taking them far away... and leaving them there (fear/trap).
Mages are the same aswell with their slowing effects.

I'm a firm fan of affliction, especially in heroics.

Well, from the perspective of a deep frost mage, I love working with a warlock. I'm pretty egalitarian though and won't deny for a moment that I prefer to work with another deep frost mage or a spriest too.

Poly has the same issues on heroics that seduce does (or at least I would presume they are the same targets... might be amusing if they were not) in that some humanoids and beasts are simply Immune, no discussion allowed. The only way to figure out which are tagged this way is to pull and experiment.

Presuming both classes are present for CC/damage/utility, I think both do quite well although in very different ways. Fear is my favorite CC right after tanking and although it makes for longer pulls, when you can use it nothing else compares in my opinion*. Close behind is positional CC through root, fnova, snares and so on. It's not as effective as banish/poly/sleep/traps of course but it is vastly more fun in my opinion. Sadly there is always a transitional period for many healers and tanks to learn when to stick and when to move and a little bit of lag or bad resist tends to translate into a mageplosion. Done properly however and in a team that is used to working together, snare and root effects are stunningly potent where they can be used. In heroics I actually never bring out my water elemental unless the pull needs that second nova right off the bat and he's saved my group many times already just for the ability to emergency CC. If only the damn thing was a little more reactive as soon as summoned I'd be even happier.

I'll admit I'm terribly biased and my alts are not in a position to be running heroics yet so obviously there has been at least one Mage on every run I've done. Still, I am far from sold on the idea that they are needed any more than warlocks are 'needed' for the instances that they make vastly easier. It certainly doesn't hurt that free water is much enjoyed by all though. I'm not upset with my mage's role in 5-mans right now, in fact I'm having a blast. Still, warlocks are not so bad at all and in most situations I think a Mage can be replaced cheerfully with a warlock, spriest or hunter. The mythical Rogue that can pull it off happens occasionally but even though I love Rogues, the toolbox seems a little lighter than it might be ideally. I definitely agree that heroics are centered on CC at present and likely will be for a while yet. It's really a shame what it is doing to our tanks though when they just can't tank 2-5 mobs at all.


(*- Mind Control/Enslave is actually my very favorite CC but that is another thread entirely I think. If I could form a heroic with sPriest, sPriest, Tank, Healer, Offtank/Dps... damned if I wouldn't. People would kill me for hogging all the sPriests though and I think the officers don't want to encourage too many priests to tread on the darkside.)

Typically, there are more polymorphable humanoids than seductible (sp?) ones.

Seduce and Mind Control are on the same "Can be Charmed" list with respect to humanoids. This is a small subset of the ones that can be polymorphed.
Many pulls have only one target that can be charmed but more than one that can be Poly'd.
Fear works on almost anything (undead, mechanical, and a few odd others can't be)

Multiple AoE fears rock when the Shattrah hits the fan.

I have also seen the immune message for Seduce, very disappointing.

It is good that fear is useable as long as you pull back and are ready to cast CoR(rank 1). The advantage of fear over Poly is you can put DoTs on the Feared mob and not have to worry about it breaking fear.

Fear > Seduce. I don't know how you got so lucky man, but my expereience with seduce has been along the lines of spronk's. It breaks too often and one resist means the succubus is down and you have confusion in the ranks.

Little tip, if you cast CoS on the seducable target (preferably before seduce hits) you will keep aggro over your succubus for at least 2 seductions. Should help if you have trouble with your pet dying right away.

However, this does nothing for cleave.

And Soothing Kiss is pretty cool now with the reduction to hit.

I am aware of this already. It's also in the order of a Big tip. Still does not change the fact that one early break or resist means a dead pet and or an annoying mob beating on you. Not being refreshable in the same way that Poly, Shackle and Hunter traps (to an extent) is the issue that I find most annoying.

How so? You can simply re-seduce, not really that much different from poly or shackle. Are you referring to the mana costs?

Well, in the case of Poly and Shackle you can recast it before it breaks and renew the length. With Trap you can place a trap at your current location and then when it breaks and comes to you it retraps. Seduce you have to watch a bit more carefully, and if done a couple of times especialy have to watch the Succubus getting hit (as it cannot get a lot of range on the mob).

Unless I'm severely missing somthing the succubus cannot cast seduce again without the original one breaking. Do clue me in if I'm wrong as it's be a big help.

No you have to wait for seduce to break to recast

Sorry, very true indeed. This largely does make seduce vastly inferior to even hunter traps :/

I'm going to try the new mouse-over commands for my pets, see how that works out in these kinds of situations.