Few wrong assumptions there (a common theme both ways!).

Fire crits at 1.5, but then after Ignite it equals 2.1 damage. Yes, since to get the Mage crit talents require 10 points vs Warlock's 21, the Mage crit talents are more common.

Mages have a bit more base int than a Warlock, but the reason you see more crit on a Mage is they gear that way. Even with D&S, 1 spell damage is better than 1 crit, so stacking crit isn't the best idea for a Lock.

Fire Mages mostly cast Fireball, with a Scorch every 8 or so casts to maintain the debuff while doing dps.


After looking at the Tier 5+ sets, once Locks start getting the sets, Destro will be the new spec of choice, mostly due to the debuff limit and the superior scaling of Destro.

I know you're just joking but this is really the point. Warlocks in their current state have three exceptionally well balanced trees with many viable specing options with choices that have a meaningful impact on play style. Any nerf of any element of the class would throw all of this out of whack. The real problem is not that warlocks are too good but that the itemization options for other classes just aren't available to most players and their trees aren't nearly was well balanced as ours. When you say 'raid speced warlock' you could easily mean shadow destruction, affliction, or even a felguard spec. When you say 'raid speced mages' everyone automatically assumes it's fire and knows what most of the talents they have are without even looking.

The only thing I believe is truly unbalanced about locks is fear and elite mobs. The number of elite mobs I can solo as a lock is roughly equal to the number of elite mobs that can be feared. For the most part this doesn't really matter a whole lot since it has nothing to do with raids or arena PvP (the two settings blizzard balances around) but it's still there.

It has nothing to do with intellect. I've got 320 INT unbuffed in my raiding gear, I'm 90% sure you have more yourself. Mages Int -> Crit modifier is 1/80, so I'm getting exactly 4% crit from my unbuffed intellect.

The reason why mages tend to have more crit, is that we have plenty of talents that increase crit. As a Deep fire mage, I get 9% crit to all fire spells from talents. My Scorch gets 13% crit from talents. Shadowbolt and Incinerate only get 5% from talents.

Deep frost mages only get 5% to frostbolt, but Winters Chill is actually 10% extra crit in typical raiding situation, not to mention shatter which increases our typical critrate in PVP / farming tremendously.

One reason why mages tend to have more crit is that we have talents that increase +hit. 3% hit from talents mean that we can focus more on crit in our gear, while warlocks need more hit rating (or lets say, benefit more from it). If I'm running with my guild Elemental Shaman, my hitcap is actually just ~120hit rating.

Regarding Affliction / Destruction warlocks. Affliction damage is not too high, especially once we reach higher gear-levels. Why? This is due to the fact that the spec suffers from itemization formulas, as stacking a single stat of +dmg is more expensive, and also due to the fact that such gear just isn't available. The problem is deep destruction, Especially 0/21/40 and 1/21/39 builds. With typical 0/21/40 build, warlock should cast only two spells. Immolate, and Shadowbolt, or Immolate and Incinerate. Now we could argue about the mana usage etc. but by sacrificing Felhunter such lock gets a) slower mana consumption than a mage, b) still scales better. Sacrificing Imp or Succubus mana usage is bigger, but Scaling is about 20% faster! Ie. if mage and warlock with +600dmg are on par in damage, moving to +1200dmg makes warlock look like +1320dmg mage. (Not to mention that warlocks have +120dmg build-in in their armor).

Having 4 firemages with shadowpriest is generally considered a great group for caster damage. However, 4 destruction warlocks with Shadowpriest sacrificing Succubus / Imp will deal considerably more damage than the mages would and don't need to worry about mana issues, since shadowpriest means incredible amounts of mana for warlocks due to VE healing and direct VT mana. Also, the fact that most fights include movement means that while lifetapping reduces the time lock spends casting much less than it would against Patchwerk like enemies.

Ok, sourcing the crit difference as being int based was poor wording on my part. The point still stands though, at least as nearly as I can tell, mages have significantly higher critical strike rates then even the most crit stacked warlock builds.

0/40/21 warlocks will receive +10% spell crit from talents.
0/21/40 warlocks will receive +8% spell crit from talents.

It's a gear thing. Warlocks that nuke are forced into stacking more hit to compensate for the lack of +hit talents.

Not true. A Warlock that goes 0/40/21 has 10% crit to destructions spells and 5% to non-destruction critable spells, a Warlock that goes x/y/33 has 8% critical to desturction spells. If the Warlock wants to get Improved Searing Pain, they can achieve 20% crit to Searing Pain using the 0/40/21 build (or 18% using the x/y/33 build).

The big difference between why Demon/Destro or Destro/Demon do not have as much crit as Mages is because we have no +hit talents like the Affliction Warlocks have with Suppression for Affliction based spells. To try to achieve capped hit, Warlocks have to layer on +spell hit which Mages get some from a couple of talents allowing them to layer on more +crit.

Hmm, My initial guess was that Soul Leech would be impassable for destruction locks who seem to be concerned about their sustainability. As of 0/40/21, I believe it's non-optimal for raid-dps thus I'm not terribly intrested in it .

Seed of Corruption... Can't think of any other spells, except for maybe healthstone healing effect that shouldn't benefit from devastation...

This is the one very obvious change that really needs to be made with warlocks(and hunters?) for pvp, yet you really never hear about it over the same old nerf cries that have been around forever, and are filling up this thread. Your pet being able to follow a stealthed rogue/druid when every other pc and npc loses their target just screams broken.

We get 3% from EP. That's it.

The reason you guys don't have a lot of crit is because you get heavy damage from dots, even specced destro, and crit doesn't do anything for dots.

We don't have a lot of crit where? In our talents? In our gear? In our selections? B/c the answer should be "all of the above".

I took my "mess around" spec of 0 21 40 into kara the other night and topped my guilds meters against 3 rogues. While we had a shadowpriest, he spent a lot of the night dead (first time raiding shadow), and not a minute of it grouped with me for mana (the healers overruled my request).

At the end of the night shadowbolt accounted for 67% of my DPS, while Immolate accounted for 11%. Next closest damage spell was SoC @ 6% (I like to SoC everything I can - b/c it's fun).

Corruption accounted for 3% of my nights total damage, roughly equivalent to shadowburn. While curse of agony accounted for approx. 1% of my nights damage... with the caveat that our focus was mana regen, so my curse was either Doom or CoS for healer mana regen via our shadow priest.

So, dots really aren't doing crap for a destro lock.

Seed of Corruption, dispelled UA, and Healthstone (Demo spell) all benefit from having more spell crit.

yes, but that's 38 less Spell Hit you need that you can turn around and stack to +crit.

And I would beg to differ with you one a build that Destruction centric, having large amounts of +crit increases the overall damage of that build.

In vanilla WOW I had almost no crit because Warlock-specific gear like Nemesis and General's/Warlord's didn't have any - I think I had a whopping 17% crit when TBC came out.

Now that I have decent Destruction-worthy gear in buckets (i.e. 18-35 crit rating in every slot!) my crit % is no different to a Mage..

Do I file this under "Warlocks are fine," or "Warlocks are overpowered?"

I'd still love to hear ANY kind of response, from both the Mages and Warlocks in this thread, to how much threat you generate.

Its all well and good having a spec which does absolutely fucking ridiculous damage but if you over-aggro you're toast. Game over.

Now, again I ask the Mages, do you have trouble keeping up with the tank's threat? Do you ever use Invisibility? Do the Warlocks use Soulshatter on every trash mob? What is it that is allowing Warlocks to deal so much more damage than everyone else without pulling aggro, or for everyone else to not even keep up with the tank?

I was addressing the comment that destro warlock dots do a lot of damage. Refer back to the post I quoted.

It completely depends on the encounter and the competence of the tank in question. With either of our MTs (prot war, feral druid) I can pretty much go balls to the wall from the start, although I will scorch twice typically anyhow. For some encounters I will need to pop invis somewhere in the encounter presuming no aggro resets but it doesn't happen all the time. That's in my typical eleSham/sPriest grouping and both are really exceptional at what they do. I guess the easiest example is channeler #1 on Mag. I can and do go scorchX2, fireball, combustion fireball, trinket/berserking fireball spam and not pull off the feral that starts the encounter. On rare occasions I will spike too fast and need to toss an off fireball on #2 but it is certainly acceptable. Our scaredy-cat Shaman sometimes has TAT up for the first ten seconds though =)

On trash results vary considerably more. I may lack BoS and crits can get me in trouble on occasion but it is certainly manageable. I will splat myself once in a while if I am in aggressive mode but that's life. Where aggro issues really show up is 5-mans and especially those with less skilled tanks. In those groups I am in caster hell and easily get frustrated at the need to sit on my hands far too much.

In the vast majority of raiding situations though, I could produce far more than my present damage and still deal with it through more aggressive Invisibility use. It is an excellent tool for predictable aggro situations and complete ass for fights with aggro wipes or sometimes avoidable deaggros on the tanks. I am the number one mage on the majority of fights and typically top three in my guild for overall caster damage production for reference.

Anyhow, this is about Warlocks so </derail>.

Oh please, over the entire run? Of course it doesn't do crap on trash mobs that die in 5 seconds. You're also not having to lifetap most of the time, too. That metric is completley skewed.

I use a water elemental so my threat is split. Agro is never really an issue except on trash mobs occassionally.

Swore I wasn't coming back to this thread... not sure I'm glad I did return.....


Anyways: a lock posted on another thread that 85% of his dps on some TK or SSC boss was shadowbolt. And he was assigned a damage curse rather than CoE/CoS/CoR.

I find I'm usually doing 60-80% of my damage from shadowbolt depending on what spells I'm casting and what curse I'm doing.

You forget that, if you only have 2-3 warlocks, we lose out on about 15% of our damage because we put up CoE for you nice mages (rarely do you have to talk at least one warlock into casting CoS... CoE can be another matter though) -- which doesn't leave a destruction warlock with very many dots. Corruption, if you don't mind having to be far closer to re-cast it (most do mind, and it's not instant for a destro lock) -- and Immolate, which, well, on the last Gruul for us was a whopping 12% of my damage, and the initial cast of that can crit so benefits partially from crit.


I'd kill for 3% +hit from talents by the way. You dismiss it as if it's nothing, but it's huge and opens up more gearing options that warlocks don't have. (remember: our deaggro which you guys are jealous of is quite resistable by the mob and we have no talents to reduce it: so we can't even opt to "just" take a few more spell resists to pile on more crit gear or whatnot, I wear some lower-dps pieces just because I can't afford a soulshatter resist.)


And to whoever said "all raiding mages are fire and there's no other options" -- i've seen plenty of very solid frost mages. You act as if all warlock specs produce identical dps but mages have these huge vast differences in the dps of their trees. Fact is the warlock specs vary also (someone listed deep demo as on par with affliction earlier? heh... no.)

It's just dps for us. 3% hit is roughly 3% damage and a tiny bit of mana efficiency. Not the best return for your talent points. Combined with the mana cost reduction it's a pretty good talent, but don't act like elemental precision is something uber anymore because it's not.

Immolate should be a good bit of damage for a destro lock. As for corruption, back when I was a warlock at 60 corruption was still worth maintaing no matter how few points you had for it. It was 2 second cast and dealt more overall damage than shadowbolt. Perhaps with talents and critical modifiers that changes. Though I don't know what side talents a 41+ destro lock would pick up anymore, improved corruption seems a common choice. At any rate, if it's even 10% of your damage, that's still a significant amount that cannot crit. Also consider that perhaps some warlocks get low percent of damage from their dots because they dont cast enough of them?

Kyth, pardon the interruption but I really hate this metric. You do not lose overall damage by casting CoS or CoE presuming you do so intelligently. You lose personally-assigned damage perhaps but no officer worth his salt looks at personal WWS stats in a vaccuum. I look at marginal value and frankly, I can't see why anyone would look at a raid slot for other purposes. If there were a class that increased all damage to the target by 50% and did no damage or healing at all themselves, they'd still be the best raid class in existence.

"I'd kill for 3% +hit from talents by the way" seems to be a little disingenuous to me. Warlocks enjoy +10% for Suppression and while that is not applicable to every spec, I think that Mages moving from +6% to fire/frost from talents to +3% is still non-trivial. Even deep destro warlocks normally cast an affliction spell on occasion.

Lastly, you may well raid with solid Frost Mages but I guarantee that they are not producing damage on +3 targets at a competitive rate with Fire Mages of equal gear and skill. Look at the spreadsheets and look at the actual parses, there is no way a frost mage is coming close to fire mage numbers, nevermind the numbers some warlocks can produce. I apologize if that seems combative but it is just math and reality on boss targets. It isn't a question of opinion, it isn't a question of playing smart, it is simply a fact that damage is delivered through set mechanics. I'd be equally as foolish saying that a warlock spending only 51 points can outdamage a warlock spending 61. Can it happen ever? Sure. Is it viable? No.

Anyhow, this topic is obviously one that will either get me censured eventually or just cause my blood to boil. Well intentioned or not, I'll take my leave.