I haven't posted a thread in a while but this is something that I've been thinking about. As a class warlocks are very versitile in 1v1 combat and can put up a good fight against most other classes. Some matchups depend upon spec but I've found I don't have problems with most classes. So out of curiosity, which matchups 1v1 do you think are just unfair (oponent doesn't have a chance). Which produce good matches? And which are just trouble.
For me the biggest one in the former category is a druid. No matter what spec he is and what spec I am he is effectively a chew toy. Healing spec druids aren't worth mentioning, but moonkins are cake. A really good feral druid with obscene gear can have a small chance if he gets really lucky. Unless I am guard spec then it is just unfair. I'll pop perception then charge him out of stealth 49 times out of 50.
The two things I can have trouble with are bm spec hunters, and rogues. Rogues aren't bad if I am guard but can be trouble if I'm not.
Generally the best matchups are rogues, and mages.
I find that rogues are by far the most difficult and they often just blow me up. I trinket the kidney shot but if I'm crippled with no way of breaking it, it seems like game over. Combined with sprint and cloak of shadows to catch up I find warlocks have very few tools to control rogues, I think the original poster said breaking them out of stealth is the key. Very good warriors can be tough but escape artist puts you out of reach, just need to make sure to get them in combat before they can charge so they have to use intercept. BM hunters can be tough but I think if you try to stick as close as possible, live through the beast within, death coil right after and AOE the snaketrap (if there is one) it should be in the warlocks favor
Mages and Paladins I think are the easiest.
Depends upon the warlock's spec, however felguard is easily the most powerful in 1 on 1.
The classes that would normally remove DoTs (and thus give reason to use UA) are priest and paladin (and warlocks to a lesser degree), however in a 1v1 I don't think I've ever had problems with either of these classes, and the felguard is just more efficient to kill them and other classes with in a 1 on 1 setting.
A well geared and well played ice mage can be a good fight if the warlock is UA, however if the warlock is any variation of MD/soul link the fight is pretty much a joke (even easier with felguard).
As a felguard warlock I have the highest win rate in 1 on 1s against other warlocks, while as UA spec I have quite a struggle to kill an equally geared felguard warlock.
(The best 1 on 1 spec I've found is something like 20/41/0 or slight variations because this allows drain life tanking and gets the felguard, whereas 6/44/11 isn't as useful 1 on 1 because you give up drain tanking).
As a 44/6/11 warlock, a really really good frost mage is a fun fight, but yeah if I went soul link it would make it much easier. Rogues are also very hard, especially undead. However, if it's 1v1 in a place like Blades Edge Arena, or anywhere with lots of places to LOS and cut corners, rogues and mages are a lot easier.
Druids and pallies are a complete joke 1v1, along with most priests. Really well geared warriors and hunters can be iffy when they get lucky with crits, a good snake trap, etc. Shamans are usually tricky for me if they are good at planting totems unless I'm using a pet totem stomper macro.
Against other warlocks... it depends. Full destro with their immune talent can be annoying as hell, and variations of SL/SL are pretty tough too. Other affliction warlocks I typically beat just due to gear/experience/skill, but Felguard warlocks I can usually dominate... CoS+Banish the Felguard and it's all over. I'd still say a Felguard Lock is the strongest all-around 1v1 spec in the game though.
Being 24/37 with good pvp gear i find only 3 combinations of classes/racials/builds difficult:
undead combat mace rogue (but if i'm able to deny the opener its usually a kite fest)
undead ms/dw mace warrior with SH (it really depends on how many mace stun procs he gets)
undead destruction lock with nether protection
If i lose to other matchups it simply means that my opponent outplayed me or i made some terrible mistakes.
i am 27/34 specced too (only 200 resilliance) and i wanna know how do you deal with frost mages? Is it my lack of resilliance or am i doing sth wrong, because i find them close to impossible
My strategy with Frost mages is plain simple (as with every class to be honest ): outlast them
I stick the pet with autodevour on the mage, full dot him (coa, corr, sl and immolate) and then try to bait a Counterspell by faking a fear or a banish on the pet. If i eat the cs on the shadow tree i usually use the pvp trinket and/or spellstone to remove the freeze effect and avoid those nasty icelance crits (healthstone as needed ofcourse).
To be honest once they blow their cs you can just banish the pet and spam fear/drainlife to counter most of their dps (assuming you are not freezed of course), and when they try to cast a frostbolt just spell lock them with the felhunter. When they iceblock try to get a bandage off to recover the life you could have lost to the early burst and reapply dots, draw the cs, etc etc
With a UA spec, I only find rogues and warriors to be very hard and close to impossible. Frost mages are a pretty even match up, but UA locks still have an edge even with the double ice block, since mages can't heal themselves.
The biggest weakness warlocks have in PVP is their inability to get out of snares. Hamstring and crippling poison are the main reasons why we think warriors and rogues are so difficult to beat, since even as a Gnome, I can only remove a snare 2 times, and then I am toast.
Trying to "deadzone kite" a warrior can be next to impossible since with any latency differential you can be in range for a hamstring even though you don't see it that way on your monitor. Basically as soon as a warrior starts pounding, you have about 8 seconds to live in full PVP gear if he manages to pummel your drain life fake.
A Felguard spec is much better to handle one-on-one fights since you have a constant stream of damage on your target that you don't have to worry about. Plus when you get away, you can put your pet on hold and intercept to buy time as your opponent is chasing.
Hunters: BM is autoloss if they got a clue and/or has over 10-11k hp witch most of them has.
MM is tough if played exceptionally well else they are easy.
Rogues: It really does depend of how many cooldowns they wanna blow. If they use all of them and are undead they win else I do. Prep means he doesn't have to be undead.
Warriors: If they get the charge they win if they don't I win. Given of course that I have my trinket and/or deathcoil up or some sort of replacement for it.
Druids: Feral has an extreme amount of randomness to it. The 15% chance to resist fear seems more like 80% sometimes and in those cases I loose otherwise I win. Any other spec is an easy win though.
Mages: If they are frost and don't mind blowing anything they got it starts to get challenging and rather fun otherwise I win, easily.
Priests: Three kinds; Shadow, holy and dwarf. Shadow is easy unless they've got DP and are willing to use it. Holy is usually easy as well unless they are dwarfs and have LOS objects at their disposal.
Shaman: Nothing kills me faster than an unhindered enhancement shaman, however hindering them is ridicilously easy. Resto and elemental are cake.
i am 27/34 specced too (only 200 resilliance) and i wanna know how do you deal with frost mages? Is it my lack of resilliance or am i doing sth wrong, because i find them close to impossible
You are propably doing something wrong. Here are some pointers;
1. I start with Spell Lock + fear in order to force the first iceblock. This tactic can be used later too.
2. Unless you are draining or casting run away from him when hes personal Nova is off cooldown.
3. Devour OFF auto is a must. Use it to selfdispell or the shatter damage is going to kill you in the end.
4. This is quite obvious; agony over tongues at all times.
5. Banish the elemental, untill this is possible (after CS) stick a SL on it.
6. Fear him as often as possible, see point 1.
7. Again obvious; equip and use your spellstone, same goes for healthstones.
1 - The first fear will be broken by PvP trinket or WotF, no frost mage will ever waste ice block just to remove a fear. Maybe to remove a death coil-> nuke, but not a fear. All opening with spell lock really does is let him cast frostbolts, which hurt alot more than ice lances.
2 - Can't really be done with cone of cold on you.
3 - Winter's chill makes this unlikely to happen, with 5 stacked debuffs on you, much better to use spellstone and the PvP trinket, and just devour all the mage's buffs.
That being said, at a certain amount of health/resilience it becomes pretty much impossible for a mage to kill a warlock. Between the drain/siphon life (or soul link) and healthstones he'll probably end up out of mana before you die, should he somehow survive that long (Ice Barrier is a crazy mana hog).
Last edited by Xunwael : 09/22/07 at 1:29 PM.
"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
- Clark's Law
1 - The first fear will be broken by PvP trinket or WotF, no frost mage will ever waste ice block just to remove a fear. Maybe to remove a death coil-> nuke, but not a fear. All opening with spell lock really does is let him cast frostbolts, which hurt alot more than ice lances.
2 - Can't really be done with cone of cold on you.
3 - Winter's chill makes this unlikely to happen, with 5 stacked debuffs on you, much better to use spellstone and the PvP trinket, and just devour all the mage's buffs.
1 - he does not "waste" iceblock to get rid of fear. He iceblocks to get rid of the 5 dots i have just applied to him. SL is a 3 second silence meaning i can get both UA and fear off easily. He can't CS immolate. Casting Frostbolts is NEVER an option, he has got a pet beating on him for the love of god....
2 - Unless he decides to blow 700 mana on a Blink he is not going to get near me before he gets his pet out. Furthermore he really doesn't want to get near me before after the initial phase as a howl would fear both him and his pet effectively making me able to banish it.
3 - Yes Winters Chill is quite the annoyance but obviously he is not going to have it stacked to 5 when we engage. Especially not since he is feared. Later in the match he is quite likely to have though and that is when you eat your spellstone. Chain DM'ing yourself delays this abit though.
This is not meant to be rude, but i find it quite hard to believe you have gotton any real insight into level 70 mage-warlock dueling at the level of 63 or on your 14xx rated mage.
Why would you ever banish a water elemental in PvP as affliction? Stay close to the mage and Howl of Terror the instant the pet is spawned, and dot it with CoA, Corruption, and Siphon Life. It will typically die as it runs back in range to frostbolt you, and at most will get the nova off. If the mage is smart and decurses, then just shadowburn the elemental as it comes back in range. Banish follows PvP ruleset on length of time banished, so just kill it with no chance of getting your shadow line counterspelled. This applies in any arena, if you kill the elemental then the mage has little to no burst potential considering you have a melee on him to prevent polymorph in most cases.
I don't really consider decursing a good way to spend my time against affliction warlocks, since it takes one cast to apply the curse and sometimes half a dozen to remove it.
Originally Posted by drole
1 - he does not "waste" iceblock to get rid of fear. He iceblocks to get rid of the 5 dots i have just applied to him. SL is a 3 second silence meaning i can get both UA and fear off easily. He can't CS immolate. Casting Frostbolts is NEVER an option, he has got a pet beating on him for the love of god....
Well, the felhunter silence is more in the area of 2.4 seconds (with my trusty Pendant of the Lost Ages, a must-have for all PvPers), and the mage'd be out of the fear before the UA is cast. I find that 0.2 - 0.3 seconds is enough time to counterspell if you can predict it, like with hammer of wrath. Counterspell ignores the global cooldown, so WotF invoking it is a nonissue and the PVP trinket isn't on it in the case of a non-undead.
The silence-Fear-UA isn't a hard move to see through so any fast thinking, properly geared mage will defeat this approach, not to mention that if he's really fast he could just ice block right away and counterspell your fear/UA even without the pendant or any other aid. Additionally, I'd like to add that the 2/5 T4 set bonus is by far the best two pieces of gear a frost mage could use for PvP in any of the two slots outside of 5v5, with it granting a 100% chance of resisting pushback on frostbolt (and fireball), making the puny felhunter prods ineffectual at their only real use of interrupting casts.
2 - Unless he decides to blow 700 mana on a Blink he is not going to get near me before he gets his pet out. Furthermore he really doesn't want to get near me before after the initial phase as a howl would fear both him and his pet effectively making me able to banish it.
He wouldn't really want to be in that close range of you anyway, it's really the other way around. With your shadow school locked you're pretty much a sitting duck for the freeze-frostbolt-lance combo. Only if you haven't used spell lock would he want to stay in range for spam and generally annoying running around in circles, since casting anything would get it locked immideately. Even if you didn't get shadow locked you still wouldn't be able to do anything other than spam fire spells or reapply dots without getting counterspelled, unless you can bait it.
Personally I just let them get off their fears (not a big problem for undeads) and banishes (I got my free nova anyway) unless I'm certain that I can counterspell it, since every second not spent life draining is a second I'm winning, especially after they made re-summoned water elementals stop sharing the cooldowns and states of any active elemental, if one was already up (increidbly annoying if it was banished, then I would basically waste the spell).
3 - Yes Winters Chill is quite the annoyance but obviously he is not going to have it stacked to 5 when we engage. Especially not since he is feared. Later in the match he is quite likely to have though and that is when you eat your spellstone. Chain DM'ing yourself delays this abit though.
True enough, but even at just one stack it has a 50% chance of failing. Personally I prefer to rob him of his dampen magic, armors and other buffs to make removing ice barrier easier, in the event that he makes use of it. Also it takes my focus away from the enemy and onto myself, which I don't really like, though that may just be me.
This is not meant to be rude, but i find it quite hard to believe you have gotton any real insight into level 70 mage-warlock dueling at the level of 63 or on your 14xx rated mage.
At the risk of sounding like yet another whining mage, I benched mine at the end of season one. Having played only 4 3v3 games with two warlock guildies this season, after which we went raiding and forgot all about it. The introduction of resilience and increased stamina pools without simmilar increases to mana pools reducing me to mostly a poly and crowd control bot irritated me enough to stop playing the class. Having had alot of playtime on, uh, parental guardians' warlocks I found myself liking the class and finally decided to reroll.
I haven't played the warlock class itself at higher tiers, but over two years of magering and tens of thousands of solo PvP kills leads me to believe that I know atleast a little of what I'm talking about regarding this matchup.
"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
- Clark's Law
I normally run with felpup out so Mages for me no matter the spec are a joke. I have yet to run into or duel a mage that can beat me in my pvp spec and gear, 1 v 1. Most try to stand and fight at first then decide to blink and run. Thats not to say that there isn't any but I just havent seen them.
FG locks are easy too, their pet just doesnt have the utility of a felpup and their damage is next to nothing against resillience. Typically I dot the lock fear the lock, dot the FG and it dies with the lock dying soon after. Devour keeps him alive so dotting the pup wont hurt him, well timed silences, death coils and fears control the lock.
Destro locks are annoying with nether prot but for the most part are manageable.
Pally's are also easy mode, espeically once they blow their bubble and lay on hands.
Some shaman can hurt but with them I either crush them or they get me. I just haven't found a good strat for them. We have one shaman in guild who is just plain nasty even with SL it seems he three shots me some times.
Warriors can go either way but if I know I am gonna duel on I bring out the void and I generally dont lose. I bait with Immolate for pummel and drain tank always keeping my void away so that he is not taking double damage. With any other pet however its a tough fight and depending on the gear of the warrior I could go down.
Priests, die end of story.
Rogues, are by far the hardest for me. They have a lot of interrupts and with Cloak of shadows and vanish they can reopen on me and finish me. I have to use stones, and both my healing trinkets against them.
BM hunters generally dont hurt me as much its MM hunters that hurt, well timed silencing shot, scatter shot, feign death and snake trap followed by concsussion shot seem to screw me over.
If they don't have unstable affliction and don't have a felguard and don't have nether protection, I think I would probably have a shot at winning a duel with a warlock with inferior gear. Not a good shot, but still a shot. The combination of drain life, fear, and felhunter still makes things extremely difficult.
If they don't have unstable affliction and don't have a felguard and don't have nether protection, I think I would probably have a shot at winning a duel with a warlock with inferior gear. Not a good shot, but still a shot. The combination of drain life, fear, and felhunter still makes things extremely difficult.
How would you pull that off? The only spec that wouldn't have either of those 3 is 27/34 SL/SL, which will just mana drain you slowly and eat all your dots with a fellpuppy, and completely neuter your DPS with a CoT.
How would you pull that off? The only spec that wouldn't have either of those 3 is 27/34 SL/SL, which will just mana drain you slowly and eat all your dots with a fellpuppy, and completely neuter your DPS with a CoT.
I imagine he just dispels drains as soon as they are applied, which dramatically limits the drain strategy. It's just a matter of spending as much of the fight as possible un-feared, juggling fear ward (since the warlock is saving devour for DoTs), pvp trinket, psychic scream, silence, blackout procs, range, and line of sight.
And while it is only one spec, SL/SL and its variants account for a huge proportion of pvp warlocks, though 41 demo is admittedly over-represented in the dueling scene.
How would you pull that off? The only spec that wouldn't have either of those 3 is 27/34 SL/SL, which will just mana drain you slowly and eat all your dots with a fellpuppy, and completely neuter your DPS with a CoT.
I think he's being facetious, as in all 3 specs pretty much dominate shadow priests. I have the best luck vs affliction -- Soul Link is just too much damage to try to get through, and Nether Protection is just killer.
Forgot about Soul Link. Can't beat a warlock with Soul Link. Let me revise my statement: I have a shot at beating an incompetent, undergeared warlock who has also forgotten to spend his talent points. Not a good shot, but still a shot.
Forgot about Soul Link. Can't beat a warlock with Soul Link. Let me revise my statement: I have a shot at beating an incompetent, undergeared warlock who has also forgotten to spend his talent points. Not a good shot, but still a shot.
haha, i missed the sarcasm in the first post and I was actually curious how you were going to pull that off.
Warlocks are just in a league of their own for 1 vs 1, no class even comes close.
Some shaman can hurt but with them I either crush them or they get me. I just haven't found a good strat for them. We have one shaman in guild who is just plain nasty even with SL it seems he three shots me some times.
I assume Elemental here
Felhunter melee + CoT. That seriously screws them over. Bolts take ~5 seconds to cast witch literally means you have freedom to do whatever you want. Once he starts healing you've won.
Melee'ing the tremor followed by deathcoil + fear to force the trinket and then spell Lock + fear is nice if you need a breather.
I have heard talk about kiting as well. Personally i prefer to be in their face so i can stab their totems to get more use of my imp HoT, but it might be worth trying without.
As an affliction lock I seem to have trouble with Shadow Priests, not so much duels, but more "in the wild" 1 v 1s, especially if the Shadow Priest gets the drop on me.
Any thoughts on how to respond in these circumstances? What I see happening is something like:
Psychic Scream, SWP, VT
I trinket out of fear
I get silenced, SWD, Mind Blast, felhunter spell locks at some point
I get off Deathcoil, follow up with fear which gets trinketed
I get mind flayed, I cast some DoTs probably try to get fear off again.
by this point I am usually too far behind on health to recover and die to the next round of SWD/Mind Blast
Maybe there is just a huge first strike advantage here...
If you get jumped in the wild by another class while they are wearing a PvP trinket and you aren't, do you still expect advice on how to win?
Most often, if someone gets the jump in PvP they will win provided they aren't an idiot or aren't fighting an unwinnable match up (warrior vs shockadin)
09/21/07, 10:06 AM
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