ReverendSin

You must just be bad. I ran Warlock + Rogue to 2300 last season before I went into the hospital (Full S2 Warlock 24/37/0 + Mutilate Rogue in T6) and we killed the warrior first every time. Between the stuns, the wounding poison, CoT, random silences, there was no way the paladin could keep the poor warrior up.

This season I'm running with MY rogue (Preachakilla - US Horde Smolderthorn) 0/34/27 (blue's/greens and working on the Season 1 gear) and a S2/S3 Warlock and again we went 5-1 this week early in the week and faced Warrior + Paladin twice, both times we killed the warrior. The only game we lost was vs Dwarf Holy/Disc priest/NE Rogue when my cheapshot was resisted and the dwarf just took off running (I don't have run speed at the moment). I'm confident that we could have won had the cheapshot landed (he was at 7% before I got cheapshotted myself).

Depending on your spec and gear I'd go for the warrior first. A good deal of the time the paladin just cannot heal through the damage you bring to the table with this setup, especially as either Mutilate or AR-Prep. I'm confident that even at higher brackets when my gear evens out we'll still be able to take down the warrior first, even with the impending nerf to Hemo.

Is your partner using cheapshot, kidney shot and maces? Or another spec?

 

Sumie

This is probably my favorite combo to pair up with on my 2v2 team (which also includes a holy paladin and a shadowpriest).

After running it all of season 2, here's my opinion on how you should spec and strategize from a warlock PoV -- I know little of rogues, except that the my partner is mace-spec AR/Prep.

Best spec: 27/34/0 SL/SL. Opt for the more damaging variant instead of 24/37. You don't need the point in mana feed or demonic resilience since games end in the first 30 seconds of combat. 2/3 Empowered Corruption and 2/5 Shadow Mastery.

Affliction is still too squishy for this setup, especially against another double DPS team. You don't need UA's debuff protection since healers will be forced to heal with a rogue on their partner.

Felguard is alright (provides some nice burst and timely shadowburns), but I find that if they target me, I really can't do much but CoA and Corruption. No drain tanking, no extra DoT, and if you're facing an opposing warlock (which you do quite often in 2v2), your pet is more easily banishable. Moreover, a spell lock is more reliable in chaining CC on the non-focused target than an intercept stun.

General strategy: When facing a DPS/healer, go for the opposing team's DPS first, nearly always. Yes, you can burn down warriors and with 5 stacks of wound poison, any healer will have a difficult time keeping him up. Smart warriors at the top of the bracket though will go defensive and simply wear you down in defensive stance, but hey, that's why you still see warrior/druids among the top teams. There's really not much you can do against that strategy.

But generally, by going for a frost mage or rogue or SL lock, you're slowing down their DPS which is essential for your survival. And once you kill him, even if one of you go down afterwards, either a prep rogue or a SL lock can usually take a healer 1v1. That's not the case if you go for the healer first, DPS second.

When to use CC's on healers? Unless facing a priest, especially a UD priest, use your blind early to force the trinket. You can then fear that paladin/druid/shaman for the full duration. For a pally, that will force the bubble, but you want that bubble to be used as early as possible, cause you can survive for the first 15 seconds of combat with evasion/CoS and SL drain tanking. Against priests, though, you're facing fear wards, innate talent resists, shadow protection, and if UD, will of the forsaken. Blind is the more reliable CC in such a case, so try to draw out the trinket with fears and death coil, then blind the priest once his trinket is on cooldown

Against double DPS, use blind and fears early to slow down their DPS and make them waste their trinkets early. Once blind is used, you can then start dotting up both targets. Generally, they'll go for the rogue, so protect him with fears and spell-locks as long as you can till he goes down. If/when he finally does, more often than not, a SL/SL lock can easily 2v1 two DPS who are both near death and out of cooldowns.

 

ReverendSin

Ok, it's 6am, we've been playing the last 3 hours instant queue, did 18 more games, won 11 of them, lost 7 of them. The losses were either due to a gear disparity (I'm still wearing some level 60 blues in slots) or my warlock partner being half asleep.

So far as Warrior + <insert healer class> depending on what classes they are we almost always go for the warrior. The only time we don't is when it's warrior druid, this setup is still easy for us it just takes a bit of tactics switching, my partner can easily solo a warrior as 27/34/0 and I either pull the druid out of stealth or wait until he shows his face to fuck him down. Because of the inherent survivability in 27/34/0 the druid will not be able to save both himself and his partner. I blow my cooldowns immediately, shiv on a crippling and just rape the druid while my partner dots him up, puts the felguard on him and drains away.

Warrior vs Shaman can be a really big pain in the ass, we lost one and won one to this setup, the loss was more my fault than anything because the warrior did the little blink thing with the new intercept onto the pillar we were on and I fell over the side circle strafing so I had to immediately switch to the shaman who was on the ground. Unfortunately for me this team was "really" good, not only did they out gear us by a lot but as soon as I dropped off the edge to go after the shaman he dropped a poison cleansing totem and the warrior got on me. Because I have 9100 hp and almost no resilience at this point it isn't hard to see why we lost, BUT, I will point out that I also missed a kidney shot on the shaman when the warrior was at 8% and it allowed him to get an NS heal off on the warrior. I've only got 45 hit rating right now + precision and that is REALLY hurting me, along with the lack of Run Speed enchant/gem of any kind (I'll be picking up the S1 helm tonight though)

Priest + <insert DPS class> is incredibly difficult for us, between the gear disparity, bubble, heals and the fact that those rat bastard dwarves have fear ward they generally just take off running and manage to stay away, once their partner unloads on me it's all over, we fought Rogue + Priest W1:L1, Warrior+Priest L1 and I'd have to say this is definitely where having a shadow priest partner would come in handy over a warlock partner.

We also had some odd combos, a shaman rogue combo that got destroyed because I caught the NE rogue before he caught me, warlock warlock that we lost to because my partner not only forgot to shadow ward (ended up 1v1 warlock vs warlock at 50% hp for both of them) but he forgot to use his healthstone. Combine that with two resisted spell lock's in a row and we were out 18 points.

Did a mirror match twice, both times we fucked them down pretty hard, each time I got on the opposing warlock while the opposing rogue got on my warlock, both times I killed my my opponent before the other rogue even got my partner to half health, popped Prep, AR turned around and beat him down for a total of 36 points earned.

We ended the night 16-8 at a pretty unimpressive 1620 rating, but I'm confident that when my gear finally starts progressing beyond the 15k honor I can do in a day that we'll really start seeing this combo come alive. I'd still like to get a shadow priest partner on the team but unfortunately my server has about 2 decent shadowpriests and they're already locked into teams that they refuse to budge from.

 

Melnor

Your hit rating won't really go up much more in all pvp gear. And for the time being just get the base run speed on boots, the mats are less than 10g and any enchanter should be able to do it.

All priests should have fear ward now, but dwarves still have stoneform in addition to that which knocks off all of your poisons and is probably the reason why he was able to escape you.


It's nice to see someone resurrected this 6 month old thread

 

ReverendSin

I totally didn't notice that, I just saw it at the bottom of the page in "Similar threads" and assumed it was recent lol

 

Tower

My Spriest partner and I made a push for 1850 in 2v2 last week, boy was it painful. We played 50 games between Tuesday and Wednesday evening, I think we had 15 losses. I'd say 75% of the teams we played were Gladiator teams, hell our very first game was a Pal/War Gladiator team. Of that 75%, 50% of them were warlock/rogue teams.

Kept getting this one team of an incredibly BT geared rogue with a SL/destro lock that has 12.6khp + engineering belt + voidwalker sac. He'd get the opener on me every time with paranoia and it was a cooldown race to keep my spriest alive by killing the rogue. With AR/prep he'd kill my spriest in about 12 seconds or so, meanwhile it would take me 30s+ to kill his tank warlock. We managed to go 40/60 with them I'd say, having my spriest run around like an idiot while mounted.

People give a lot of shit to rushdown 2dps, but I at least feel Rogue/Spriest has some finesse to it, particularly against some matchups. Rogue/Lock on the other hand, ugh, feels like the warlock is this Eye of Sauran sitting in the middle of the arena shooting lasers while being indesctructable.

I should add in, that this team was not good. Every time we managed to catch them off guard, they lost. And they were clearly losing to other teams that we were beating. Was sad to see they were gladiators, likely from gear+class combo.

 

ReverendSin

I run SP/Rogue and Warlock/Rogue and I really enjoy both of them, there is a bit more personal survivability with a shadow priest because he can shield you and pop out to heal if things get rough, but a well played warlock can fuck shit down and stay alive a lot longer, with the stopping power of a rogues stuns and the sheer damage output and survivability afforded by a warlock it's a tough team to beat. We kill warriors faster than their partners can heal them, we kill druids so fast it hurts to laugh so hard, the only teams we really have trouble with are ones with holy priests because of the shields and heals, though I think when my gear evens out we'll do a lot better against them, even post-hemo nerf.

 

Kiriel

If you're playing warlock/rogue and you're up against a healer/dps team, do you recommend going after the healer or the DPS first? Presumably your goal will be to kill one and Sap/Fear/Blind the other.

Healer first - Pros) Will be very difficult for them to heal through, high probability of killing them early on if they're not a paladin. No chance of a heal up to full after someone dies. Cons) Their DPS partner will have more freedom to DPS, CC etc. If one of you dies, 1v1 between warlock & dps is normally harder than warlock vs healer. Likewise rogue w/o any cooldowns isn't as powerful 1v1.

DPS first - Pros) Will be much harder for them to kill one of you because the healer will have to focus primarily on heals and not mana burn/dispel etc, and the DPS should spend a lot of their time stunned. Probably easier to 1v1 a healer. Cons) Easier for the healer to keep their partner alive if they're not focused. Not taking spell pushback etc. Rogue vs healer is not always a guaranteed win in 1v1. Paladins still a pain in the butt.

I've also heard that on clothies it's better to expose armor before you start your AR rushdown because 20% extra damage for the next 30 seconds is better than a single evis.

Do people have thoughts on this, is there anything I'm missing? I haven't really played rogue/warlock except a little at the very end of S2 but I'm going to start this season, so I'm interested in any insights people have.

 

faruthia

I searched this thread and saw a little information on what I was looking for, but not too much.

I'm a rogue, respec every time for arena to ar+prep maces. His build is UA. On season 3, we are doing fairly well, but there's a LARGE abundance of Druid healer teams around the 1750 range.

Druid+Rogue: we go for the rogue and hope we burn him before he kills our lock. The lock has a hard chance surviving let alone anything else.

Druid+Warlock: Warlock all the way, however its still sometimes hard to burn the lock, specially if it is priest+lock.

Druid+Warrior: Here's the big problem. We simply cannot find anything we can do to kill this team. Poisons dont work, Druid CC's everywhere, and the HOTs easily keep the warrior up.

Anyone care to help with ideas and personal experiences?

 

Sumie

Ask your warlock to try either a Felguard drain build (20/41/0) or an offensive SL/SL (27/34). Yes, you're double DPS, but in practice, UA really doesn't do that much more DPS than the above two specs, with the exception of timely shadowburns. In exchange, his survivability goes up threefold.

Go for rogue (in general, always go for the DPS, with the exception of priest healers). Call out on vent when you're about to kidney shot the rogue, so the warlock knows he can safely fear. Make sure the warlock also keeps an eye on the druid to spell-lock his cyclone. In terms of CC, we've found the most success with using blind on the druid early, forcing the trinket, and following that up with a full duration fear. Mainly because once blind is used, the warlock can then start doting the druid up as well.

If it's a priest/lock, go for the priest. He's much squishier than a SL lock, and your warlock can keep the other lock in control with CoT, fears, and a spell-lock on his shadow school when he tries to fear the rogue off the priest. Also helps to have your warlock leave his felhunter on the priest on auto-devour. Don't DoT up the lock either. Blind the lock once he uses his trinket on a fear (in general, against priest teams, blind becomes the better CC so use fear first to force the trinket, then blind).

Toughest matchup to face, especially if the warrior knows he only needs to play defensive since we only have healthstones as our heals. Best thing to do is get a chain CC going on the druid from the very start. Blind him to force the trinket, followed by a full duration 10-sec fear, followed by a spell-lock as he runs back to the warrior, a death coil after the silence, and another fear. By this time, the warrior should be low on health with a full stack of wound poison if not dead. Make sure your lock devours druid HoT's (and abolish poison) as often as he can. It's rough cause if you don't get abolish poison off and the druid NS heals without wound poison up, you're generally going to lose. That or the warrior is smart to go sword and board, spell-reflecting and intervening to druid until our CC is wasted.

 

Sumie

double post

 

Spheniscus

I ran 2v2 with a rogue last season and we achieved Gladiator ending with a 2320 rating (currently 1900 this season)

The best spec by far for a rogue/warlock combo would be the rogue being ar/prep/hemo 0 / 33 / 28 with the warlock being SL/SL 27 / 34 / 0

It offers great burst by the rogue while a combination of good damage and great survivability by the warlock, because more times than not they will focus on the warlock.

As for stamina, you want to stack it until about 10.5-11k unbuffed then go for resilience and your other key stats.

With full season 3 you should be pretty close to 11k anyway, it wouldn't be a real good idea to stack so much stamina that it will gimp your damage, to get a good look at what you should be aiming for, look at Treflip (my partner) on Andorhal or Neilyo and Happyminti, both on Tichiondrius, both also partner with warlocks.

 

faruthia

I'm shadowstep at the moment, I like it a bit better because i dont get kited around as much, but i do see the bonuses of going ar/prep to help with the initial burns. And the warlock went drain tank spex, and that definately helped us out. However, warlock/rogue has for some reason, became a big problem. we have tried many types of strats. If we attempt one strat, the other team seems to do the opposite. I get on lock, they get on me. I get on rogue, they get on lock. or, both rogues on lock and then its a burn fight. I simply cant decide what would be best for rogue/lock vs rogue/lock.

ahh, one last thing, priest/rogue. we usually beat them under the new drain tank/sub rogue team, but they do tend to give us a hard time here and there.

 

Morgaroth

Ineed.

 

Shinanigans17

rogue/warlock is still a pretty strong combo but most of your success depends on how well the rogue can keep people off of you so you can kite, and how coordinated your cc is.

 

Shinanigans17

p.s. - the HARP nerf weakened the combo a bit so you may have a hard time vs warlock/druid and warrior/pally.

 

Weezilkwik

Ive been playing rogue/lock with my buddy since he hit 70 like three months ago. Against a lot of match ups its incredibly strong. Against others, its a loss. Like Druid/anything. ugh. Some things i've learned(and apologies for the rambling tone of this)

Get used to being focused.
The rogue is going to be in stealth to begin with, and youre playing a class everyone loves to hate. youre going to want to max out your survivability as much as you can so farm BGs like mad.


You should spec Soul Link/Siphon Life ASAP if youre interested in arenas. Something like THIS to start with.
As your gear improves and you get more health and resil, say around 200 resil and 10k health you can start pulling points out of Demonic Resilience and Shadow Embrace and putting them into more damage talents but for now you need to do everything you can to make yourself less squishy. Once your stats get a lil further up there you can spec into a more damage oriented build like THIS.

Your job is going to be primarily CC. The fire-and-forget nature of DOTs means you can dot up their dps and then get back to the buisness of ruining their healer's day. Pallies and Resto Shams in especially vulnerable to Curse of Tongues, so make sure you keep it on them As much as possible.

Against the Palladin/Warrior combo:

This is going to be rough. Really rough. At least untill you and your rogue's damage output get up there. We usually try to burn the warrior down ASAP, with my lock going Amplify Curse -> Curse of Agony and Siphon Life the focusing on keeping the palladin from healing while I go for the warriors back.

Druid/Other:
God i hate these fights
Try to fear the druid out of healing range and pray hes a noob.

In general i think sl/sl lock and rogue is a pretty decent pairing. I'll edit this as i think of more stuff to pass on. Im a tad spacey right now.

 

doogless

The specs you posted have some significant flaws. Not taking Demonic Knowledge is a bad idea, and you shouldn't drop Shadow Embrace because it improves the damage done by Drain Life.

 

Mistaken

You really should take 2/2 Nightfall, it's one of the best warlock talents out there and you miss a lot by skipping it. Shadow Embrace is good not to reduce damage taken, but for increased Drain Life ticks and dispel protection (especially valid against paladin), you only need 1 point in it. Demonic Knowledge is another talent that is pretty much a must have. That's why most popular SL/SL builds include all those: 24/37, 23/38, 25/36.

 

Kshaja

I have had warlock rogue setup s2 and now s3, recently I have taken on a new lock and now we have some problems. I'm Shadow step, lock is sl/sl.

Basically we mow down through anything except druid-warrior and lock-priest.

With Druid warrior we have basically tried everything, from simply nuking down the warrior and cc-ing the droo to nuking droo, to spliting control and target switching.

Well I must say that purely nuking down the warrior has shown to be the worst of lot when dealing with teams with a clue. Droo's range of heals exceeds fear range and a lot of pillars make sure that even none pummeled fears do not land on target. Basically warrior droo teams that play defensively own us since we don't have healing and not enough burst damage.

Nuking the droo is just based on a lot of luck (warrior missing spamstring, resisting stun, droo making some mistake.) Basicall what happens here is i wait for droo to pop up and start to heal and then start locking him down and killing him along with some dots, problem is warr that doesn't waste his trinket on anything but blind, and we sure can't fear him, so if we don't kill the droo fast we're dead meat, recently with s3 gear addition I find that almost impossible.

Well I'm left with some tricks like having to be in paranoia range and if i'm lucky I might see droo in stealth, then spam sap over him so once he enters caster form he gets a sap and we get cc initiative for fear cycles and finally blind. If I don't find him however I still need to stunlock until fear lands or ootherwise he will just hug the pillar.

If anyone has any idea on how to deal with warr-droo plz do comment.

Priest warlock, well it's just hard, I believe undead racial has a huge advantaged when dealing with us, since controlling one will just make u go into dr from start. Basically the biggest problem is cc-ing the priest next to warlocks spell lock, even if it lands if u don't dispell shadow resistance u will be resisted a lot not to mention u need to clear the fear ward and then there's always wotf thing with ud priests.

 

Vo0

I have not that much experience with this combo. But I played this setup last night with my roommate and while he is in some S2/S3 gear I am mostly in S1 gear and S3 gear from honor. We played this setup few weeks ago and didn't think it was any good, we were hitting a wall at 1700 and just stopped playing.
Yesterday we started playing again at 1630 and we played from about 4pm to 3am and finally got over 1850. We actually have a positive win ratio against warrior/druid, a team a lot of people have problem with. What I would do is sap the warrior, have my teammate trinket+dot the warrior full up and I would then either cheap shot the warrior or wait for the druid to come out of stealth and we would then go all out on druid. I would have to use every single cooldown to get the druid down as fast as possible. Stunning him in travel/caster form is extremely important, as you will do alot more damage in that phase. Vanish/shadowstep does do wonders against a druid running away.
We also are fairly confident versus rogue/mage, but it's still pretty hard. A warlock/priest is basically impossible. We tried going on the lock pain surpression just stops us. We tried going on priest and sometimes it works but mostly they just outlive our "nuke" (it's kinda hard to nuke with sl/sl and shadowstep ). Priest/rogue is hard too but we just have to go for the priest in that case and I have to try to keep the rogue away from warlock as long as possible. We did not meet many warlock/druid teams.
Hunter/druid is also tough but he would again dot everything up and we would focus on the druid if the hunter is BM. If the hunter is MM or Survival we would focus on him and maybe get a good fear/blind/vanish->sap going on the druid or we would switch target if the opportunity arose. Shadowstep is amazing for a fast swap.

I know see the power of this combo and will enjoy playing it alot more. Kinda undergeared for 1850s atm with 4/5 S1 and 1/5 S3 with S2 mainhand and S1 offhand, but in a few weeks it will be different I hope . Also, being in the same room as your partner helps a lot