As a mage, when I encounter a warlock with a felhunter, i basically /cry because i know i'm not going to enjoy the fight.

The pet has high resist, so DPSing it down while getting dotted up by the lock sucks

If I just try to DPS the lock, I get chomped on by the pet which pushes my spells backs and locks me outta my schools when spell lock is up.

This in addition to deathcoil and fear kills me.

I didn't want this to be a big ZOMG NERF WARLOCKZ chain so I posted it here. I just would like to hear other mage/caster's strategies in this situation. I figure there's got to be some way to overcome it that I'm not seeing.

Having the two piece tier 4 bonus helps alot against warlocks. I'm assuming you are frost. The felhunter spell lockout does not last very long, so you could either fake a cast and make him waste it, or you could start attacking him with your secondary spell school, and once he locks that out, start nuking him with frostbolts. If the warlock is soul-link and has a felhunter out, there's really not much you can do. He can kill you completely with dots and drain life.

I used to have a 50/50 shot against warlocks with my goblin rocket helm . . . not much is more certain in pvp than warlock > mage though /shrug.

If pitted against a warlock in an arena (especially 2v2 or 3v3, as in 5v5 hopefully there's more distracting the warlock than ganking you) some things I try to do:

* Have ice block, and be smart with it - dots don't tick for a few seconds after they're cast so you can finesse that a bit
* Have your pvp trinket on
* Counterspell shadow school - shuts most warlocks down for quite a bit
* Be ready to use arcane missiles - if your main school gets locked or you're a fire mage versus a nether protection warlock, this is actually a decent backup, and it will help keep them from fearing if you spam it on them
* Be able to identify demonology locks - they will resummon their pet which makes killing their pet a poor investment of your attention
* Let your partner(s) know how vulnerable you are, if they don't already

Through trial and error, I've found that against felhunter warlocks, as a near useless fury warrior, my first goal in every arena is to kill every felhunter I see.

Basically we would play the same 2 warlock team, and win against them three times in a row, then lose the fourth, and when I try to figure out why, I realized it was because I had gotten complacent and ignored the felhunters and my paladin got screwed. Minimally, I'll make sure they're hamstrung/piercing howl'ed so the casters can just move away if necessary.

Thank you very much for your suggestions everyone, i'll definitely be trying a few of these out.

I had been referring to mainly 1v1 since I had been getting worked by them, but now that you bring up 2v2, I do it with a warrior, so melee dpsing it down would work wonders.

Melee is subject to Tainted Blood, losing nearly 500AP by attacking it.

Trust me though, it's much better for the melee to temporarily be down 500AP than to let a Felhunter live. This is from a warlock's perspective too.

Basically, you should kill all warlock pets as you see them, that is what screws me the most.

It only lasts 10 seconds, which is a MUCH preferred alternative to leaving the pet alive. Of course, it just depends on the group make up(s) as well. In a smaller setting the rogue might do better just smoking the warlock since they pretty much own us.

My team usually kills the felhunter first. Exorcism + Melee Swings usually takes him out of the game.

You have to make sure you do this out of LOS of your opponents healer. If I see melee/dps attacking our pets, I just heal up the pet while our team tees off on them. It's a poor investment to kill a pet unless you know you can do so in a short amount of time and out of LoS. To make it cake with a warrior, have him intervene to you near a pillar/LOS break and than run behind and tee off on the felhunter.

I don't think I would put a rogue on the felhunter, unless the warlock is close to the felhunter. The rogue needs to open up with a stun on the warlock to prevent incoming damage. It doesn't make sense to kill the felhunter only to have your whole team with a fresh stack of dots on you.

As another note, Felhunters can eat Fear, Deathcoil, Sheep, HoJ, Repentance, and pretty much anything that can be dispelled. It's pretty much a dispel off the GCD and on an 8 second cooldown. Oh, and it heals the Felhunter. Not to mention that it has an Imp. Counterspell ability as well.

Any good Warlock has a macro allowing themselves to or their target to be dispelled, whether friendly or enemy.

If I fight a Warlock, my first priority is the get the Felhunter off my healer in anyway. If that means CCing, killing, LoS, or anything, you should do it. A proper Warlock using a Felhunter is a deadly enemy and you need to pull out all the stops to get it down.

Depending on the bracket, this might not always be true. The felhunter becomes increasingly deadly the longer it is in the fight. This is true of Warlocks as well with Curse of Tongues. We just realized this in 3v3 with our rogue, but if we get ahold of that warlock initially and lock him down, we don't have too much to fear from the felhunter since the warlock will die soon. If the fight is going to last long (say in a 5v5) than we will kill the felhunter early of course.