Crap, that's a great point. The name was popinski. I'll have to go back this evening w/ another one of our shaman and try again - I'd pretty much gone back to manually clicking them >_<

Thanks for the feedback - didn't even think to try with another shaman.

I would get S2 dagger because it is a huge gain over a blue and then a off-hand from PvE, there are many that will work like 25 badge items and the Mag off-hand, or even the Oga'la exalted one. Next get the S2 Dreadweave set to work towards the soon to be sexy 4/5 bonus on Fear.


For PvP the dagger and offhand is king, at least for Locks/SP. The staff has more stamina and spell crit at the cost of the off-hand's spell damage and resilience, which is the opposite of what you want.

Especially for Locks, you only need around 12,000 health, then you stack up resilience and damage.

If you're using a 5 man weapon, the arena weapons are definitely a solid choice for upgrades.

However, the 4 pc bonus is about to become indispensable though (0.2 seconds off fear), so you might want to go 4 pc arena and then save points for a season 3 weapon if you consistently have access to Kara for potential weapons (the curator staff is nothing to sneeze at, in addition to the Nathrezim Mindblade).

Tailored gear is very much lacking in the stam/resil that are so vital in pvp (especially as a warlock).

You're not alone in having trouble keeping healers from healing, but between spell lock, devour for HoTs, fear, deathcoil, tongues, plus wound poison on the target and blind+HoJ to allow fear DR to reset, you SHOULD be able to get the killing blow. My hunch is that you (and your teammates) might benefit from more planning with regard to your use of CC.

I do have access to a weekly Kara clear, but that is about it as far as raiding. Unfortunately I'm a benchwarmer in my guild.. I'll have to go Tonya Harding on someone.

There will be one more trip to Kara that happens before I'll get the remaining points I need for a S2 weapon. If I get the Nathrezim Mindblade then I will likely be re-thinking getting the S2 weapon first, and opt for the Robes instead.

I'll have to do some homework on the comparisons between the Staff vs Dagger&Offhand for resilience. I'm currently using the Infinite Possibilities offhand and was saving up badges so that I could convert to the 51 dmg / 18 stamina offhand for PvE once I was able to get hitcapped on other gear.

Prior to the responses I was thinking the Staff would be better for PvP due to the stats and resilience... I was not thinking that there would be an offhand / dagger combo that would beat it for PvP.

Thanks for the input guys.

Ok so i have been browsing through this and I thought I would inquire about our arena teams problem. We are using a holy priest and two shadowfury locks. We all have decent pvp gear with around 200ish resilience and I have 11k hp unbuffed. We are experiencing huge issues with melee groups as expected using 3 clothies. My question is: Are we totally screwing ourselves with this group build or is it salvageable? I have considered speccing UA and allowing the other lock to keep shadowfury since our immolates and such keep getting dispelled. Any tips would be much appreciated.

Re: Armor vs Weapons first, I'm getting 4pc Dreadweave before I'm saving for Spellblade and Endgame. I started at the very end of Season 1, only getting Gloves when S2 came out. The Armor/Stamina/Resil boost from the armor set is entirely too valuable as a soft target and the upcoming 4pc bonus will be essential. The damage boost from Weapons is great and all, but as a soft, no-escape, target you're forced to take survivability first - unless maybe you're on a 4dps zerg team with Shadow Priests to tank for you.

My tests weren't exactly 100% conclusive, I'll admit. What I did was this:

-Baulthus(Paladin) using only imp. conc aura with no necklace or arcane resist
-Toss 40 CSes at him while he's healing. The result was 5(I think? maybe 6) resists, and the rest were either half resisted(silence resist, interrupt hit) or full hits.
-Baulthus(Paladin) using imp. conc aura + necklace, no arcane resist
-Toss 40 CSes at him while he's healing. The result was 16(I think?) resists, and the rest were either half resisted(silence resist, interrupt hit) or full hits.

All tests were performed with me wearing +16% arcane hit. The crux of the issue is this:
If +arcane hit affected "Chance to resist silence/interrupt" his 15% resist in the first test from imp. conc aura would have been entirely negated by my spell hit. If that were the case and he had only the 1% base chance to resist, the chances of him resisting 5 or 6 out of 40 are very, very low. Also in the second test, the chances of him resisting that many with only a 14% chance to resist(after spell hit) would be quite low as well.

From this albeit limited testing, I concluded spell hit had no effect on that mechanic. Nowadays the entire point is moot, though.

meh, i'm getting felweave, silk, and staff, because i really don't want to limit myself specwise... i don't mind sacrificing a bit of stam/damage/whatever for crit, so if i ever want to spec destro i'll have the gear

Dagger, simply for the fact that you can stab totems that much faster imo.

but totem stomper macro should be more than enough!

A 1.3 second fear is worth the 35 resilience hit. The loss of the resilience will be at least partially mitigated due to the dreadweave items having more stamina than felweave, also.