NS is off the GCD but it also has an animation, and you can't cast the followup heal until the animation finishes. It's short, maybe 1/2 a second, but it's long enough for a felhunter on autocast to eat the buff even with a macro.

What weight do other Arena Locks give each stat? I noticed there is a web page that will take your item weights and give you a list of items + gems to match your weights. I think it was wowlooterz.

Here are my weights:

Stam = 1
Int = 0.5
Resilience = 0.8
Damage = 0.75
Shadow Damage = 0.68
Spell Crit = 0.25
Spell Hit is ignored due to having 3% hit cap

With those weighting, all of the Arena/PvP gear comes up top (with exception of the healing PvP trinket which is the best, since the website ignores use effects and Trial-Fire Pants, but those will drop down once the site gets the updated Arena gear)

Hi all,
As you can see from my info, my main is a rogue. A bunch of people with alts in my guild decided to form some alt arena teams, and we're not doing too badly. My alt is a warlock, currently specc'd 5/45/11. I use a felhound quite a bit more frequently than I use a felgaurd, though, as we've found its usefulness to far outweigh the felguard's.

In general, we're not doing too badly. Our 3v3 team is rated nearly 1800 and our 5s team is at about 1650. My warlock is currently severely undergeared (about 9.3k hps, and 60ish resilence), but I would like to move away from such a deep demonology spec once I am able to attain more gear. It seems clear that the most popular demonology hybrid spec is 23/38/0 or some variation on that. I was curious if people had any thoughts on a spec of 0/33/28. I can still do all of my CC/healer lockdown that i'm able to do currently, but my ability to help with burst dps is quite a bit higher, along with nether protection for those pesky lock/shadow priest combos.

I definitely do not have the gear to get out of the demonolgy tree yet, and I would be surprised if I ever will (just not enough time to gear this guy up), but I was curious what people's experience is with something like this. I had already started to gear myself in this direction (the felweave shoulders instead of dreadweave) and would love some input.

This is wrong.

If you are standing still and use a NS->Heal macro, there will be 0 delay between your NS and heal. The problem is latency, when your moving and try to NS->Heal you will notice you cannot do it in one button press, this is because even though you send both commands at once, the client will stop you from casting your heal because it hasn't recognised you have the NS buff, showing you the "Can't cast that while moving" error message.

Geekboys.org has the top Arena player's specs. 24/37 is the hybrid Demo build since you get demonic resilience (very powerful talent). 33/28 is a weak build because instant corruption is that good, and you don't shouldn't have time to cast that often to take advantage of 28 Destro. However it may be nice in 2v2, where there are a lot of Locks around.

That said, since this is just an alt, play what you think is fun, certainly don't need to have the optimal spec.

I think that's Unstoppable of Crushridge, right? I've been following some of his posts on the WoW forums, and it sounds like his strat is to suck the opposing healers dry of mana using mana drain. He has a holy paladin and fel concentration, so it's 100% resistant to pushbacks.

I mention that because this thread had very little to say about mana drain, and most of what was said was dismissive of that spell. With soul siphon (if the pally doesn't cleanse), you mana drain can take away up to 1200 mana (I think I added up all the affliction debuffs right) in 5 seconds.

I just hit 70 on my lock and I'm busy grinding honor gear before heading into the arenas. However, one trick I always used to do for PvP was to use rank 1 corruption against dispel spammers. Not only does this waste their mana, but it gives you the occassional nightfall proc.

I use a macro to make rank 1 corruption spam relatively easy. It looks like this:
/cast [modifer:shift] Corruption (Rank 1); Corruption
So I just start holding shift as I hit my regular corruption key.

Hit doesn't help against the partial resists of shadow protection. Spell penetration does.

I know Priests have Shadow Protection and Pallys have Shadow Aura for 70 SR, but spell hit should do nothing against that stat, as well as having no effect on a Priest's 15% to resist Fear/Silence.

I have done little testing on that once (I casted Fear with 3% to hit then later 9% to hit with no noticable difference), but only casted about 10 fears with each set of gear.

Spell pentration does have a noticable effect when the baddies have SR but I don't want to socket in 10 spell pen gems; at least one serious player (Tiz) has started using those gems.

Spell hit is useful against the Fear/Curse resist talents of priests and pallys.

I have also read that spell hit is also applied to resistance. The post was from one of the high ranked warlocks (Tiz maybe) on a comment on one of Ming's articles a month or so ago. Whoever it was claimed to have done hundreds of test cases.

Basically the statement was something like, for a binary spell such as Fear, if your target has 70 spell resist (i.e. 15% average resist), then your chance to hit is 85%, but your +hit is also added onto this number directly, and only a single roll is performed on the server to determine the outcome. If you had +6% hit, that scenario would be a 91% chance to hit.

I can believe spell hit reduces a Priest's 15% resist fear talent, but there is little reason how spell hit could reduce resistances of your target. There is a seperate spell pentration stat for a reason.

I recall that post on Worldofming and I didn't believe it due to no screenshots or data. People have claimed a lot of things at that site, the comments section is almost a mirror of the official forums.

Been planning ahead to season2. My current mage partner is going back to a pve raiding spec so i need to find a new 2v2 partner. I originally planned on playing with a good friends mage alt, but with the upcoming iceblock nerf im no longer sure the mage/lock combo in 2v2 will be as successful. I forsee him being focused every game, forcing an early IB, and then he is pretty much left without any real defense.


So, to my question:
Any warlocks here who 2v2 with a holy (well the typical arena holy/disc priest build) priest?

I see alot of the top (world ranked, according to geekboys) teams are this combo, and im just wondering how they deal with combos such as war/pala and rog/priest?

Id imagine the combo would focus around the mana-burn subgame, essentially putting pressure on the opposing healer by dotting up both targets and then proceeding to mana drain and mana burn them. All the while trying to outlast their opposing dps.

Also how would the upcoming fear nerf effect this combo? the way i understand it dots break fear quite easily now.

your thoughts?

Rogues can blind through blessing of protection. This is really effective at throwing off a paladin, especially when you add an offensive dispel to the mix.

Slightly off topic however I feel its still in an interesting issue.

What kind of macro's if any are the warlocks out there using? Some of the ones that I have been using are;

/clearfocus [target=focus,dead]
/clearfocus [target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/script SetRaidTarget("focus", 1)
/cast [target=focus] Spell Lock(Rank 2)
/stopmacro [nogroup]

This one allows me to keep spell lock on the person when I need to without having to target them again. I also have a similar one for seducing if ever applicable. I also have been using some Castseqence macros with some success.

Comments queries concerns? Things to add.

Most of mine are for PvE, but the ones that have PvP functionality - C&Ped from my guild forum:

Fear: Similar to the Banish macro, but slightly different, since it's possible you will have to Banish and Fear at the same time, and you only get one Focus (which I prioritize to Banish/Seduce). Dead/non-existant Focus target will be cleared, and then it will cast Fear on the current target, and set it to be focus if there isn't already a focus target. Holding Control will force it to fear the current focus target. And if you are in a group, it will attempt to set a target icon on the fear target (in my case, the moon).
Pet Control: If using Succubus, it will cast Seduce, using the same logic as Banish. If using Felhunter, it will cast Devour Magic on current target normally, or Spell Lock when holding down Control. And if using Voidwalker, it will Sacrifice him.
DoTs (PvP): Casts the most oft-used DoTs, Corruption, Siphon Life, and CoA, in that order. Resets sequence when changing targets or after 6 seconds. CoA is last so you can choose not to press it a 3rd time if already using another Curse.

I currently run a 5/35/21 spec (much like cobweb does --- he's #1 2v2 on BG9 w/ a resto druid). I run with a resto druid as well and I had tried the 24/37 spec before, but it just isn't that good of a spec without a pally that can outlast.

The lack of Demonic Resilience kind of bothers me since my gear is so bad. 7/43/11 is similar, but I really never liked using felguard over felhunter except vs the dual melee teams, so I decided to make sure my shadowbolts are near interruptable.

Does anyone have any insight as how to autocast on Devour Magic works? Will it only Devour the target it is attacking, or will it search all nearby targets (enemies only? allies as well?) and randomly Devour them? Also, does anyone know if Devouring UA causes the proc to go off on the Felhunter?

How do you all use Devour Magic in the different brackers? Recently I've been microing it a lot more often (especially in 2v2 and 3v3) to remove things like fear/trap/polymorph from my teammates. Every now and then it is on cooldown from an autocast use during a critical time when I could really use it to remove a CC from my healer. I'm not sure if it's worth taking it off autocast to prevent that as it would add yet another thing I need to keep track of.

Same here re: Auto-Devour. However, in my 3v3, if the opposing team has a Mage, I turn it off auto. It's too crucial for our Warrior to get out of Sheep right away. I hate the micromanagement, but some group setups just require me to help defensively dispel.

I do the same thing in 2v2 versus hunters. Get up in their grill so they can't range you, then devour the inevitable ice trap. Is there anything else notable worth taking it off auto devour for?

It's good for all kinds of CC: fears, silence, HoJ, roots etc.

You know I've never actually seen the Felhunter get hit by a UA proc. Maybe he's just resisting it, but I've never seen his health drop like a rock after dispelling a UA.

It's listed as the same mechanic as Dispel Magic just 1 removed instead of 2, is it resisting it maybe?

Felhunters have like 200-250 Shadow resist (it gets 40% of your resists), so that is a good chance the doggy will resist the UA bomb, assuming it even ate the UA or did not fail.

Last time I tried to remove UA in PvP the devour was resisted and then I died, and my memory is fuzzy on the few times the doggy removed UA (I usually use FG).