[Warlock] Destruction that poor for PvP?

Tors · 09/26/07, 2:02 PM

I recently started playing again after taking a long break from the game and started leveling a warlock. I plan on PvP'ing exclusively.

I've been looking over the different lock specs and I haven't seen anyone using a heavy destruction spec that is ranked high in the arena. Is destruction really not viable at all at high levels of play?

I'm a bit fond of nuking, and I'm just wondering if anyone has had any luck with a destruction build. Maybe after the resilience negating DoT damage change destruction might see more play?

Anyway, just want to see what people think about the build.
I'm wondering how useful these talents really are:
Backlash
Aftermath
Soul Leech

Unfortunately it will be awhile before I have good enough gear to really give a destruction spec a good shot.

tristantio · 09/26/07, 2:15 PM

Backlash is a fair talent, and exceptional if the only thing beating on you to cause it to proc is a hunter or warlock pet.

Aftermath is really just "meh", it's a 10% chance that you may get to snare your opponent for 5 seconds. Relying on procs and luck in arenas will work against you to a large degree because while you may win one match due to it, you'll have it fail you 90% of the time you need it.

Soul leech seems promising, but unfortunately it pales in comparison to the other options for a warlock (Siphon life and even just drain life).

A talent you didn't mention/consider, which is arguably the best PvP talent in the destruction tree is Nether Protection, as the immunity is amazing against other warlocks/priests/fire mages.

There are two main problems with destruction in arena, and the first and most significant has nothing to do with resilience or any other stats, and that is line of sight dancing. As a warlock the only instant direct damage spells we can fire off are Deathcoil (2 minute cooldown) and Shadowburn if talented for it, as well as conflagarate which is somewhere inbetween a casted and an instant, since it relies on having landed a casted spell previously.

As the arena has progressed, even the "noobish" players have begun to catch onto line of sight dancing, so if you want to target a healer or someone else with nukes you can expect them to disappear out of your line of sight repeatedly, thus wasting your time and mana.

The second problem is with resilience slowing down most if not all direct damage burst setups (at least ones that don't have mortal strike/wound poison stacked as well) you will very rarely ever be able to burst anyone down before their healer can heal them back to full, meaning that any matchup you are involved in won't be a win condition based on bursting someone down, it will have to be won by outlasting, and destruction doesn't offer nearly as much in outlasting/sustained dps as Affliction/Demonology or a mix of the two do.

The ever popular SL/SL split, or even a full affliction spec both allow the warlock to have Instant Corruption, Siphon Life, and Curse of agony/exhaustion (all of which will be beefier/more powerful than a destruction warlock's versions). Being as the main spells you will use are the instants and the drains (drain life/drain mana) destruction, as you can see, really offers nothing in the way of improving any of these methods for winning.

Bogeywoman · 09/26/07, 2:15 PM

Aftermath is not good, since all the destruction spells require cast time, LOS at start, LOS at end, and front-half facing, and it only has a low % chance to proc so cannot be pulled out of your hat when you need it.

Backlash is also not great, because it only procs every 8 seconds. 8 seconds is a very long time to get beat on.

Soul Leech is essentially useless in arenas, as it's only about as good as a renew and you don't get to stand and deliver much if you're a clothie. If you're taking damage at all, you are going to need the focused attention of a dedicated healer and probably won't be getting a whole lot of spells off.

You didn't mention Shadowfury, which is about the only semi-interesting destruction talent for arenas. It too is not great, because although it cools down fairly rapidly and has a great interrupt effect and a little damage too, very often the people you're trying to interrupt are not all clustered inside its aoe radius.

By comparison, an Affliction lock gets instant Howl of Terror (just as good as Shadowfury from an interrupt perspective), Unstable Affliction to protect dot stacks, Siphon Life, and Improved Drain Mana -- all good for higher end arena. A Demo lock gets Soul Link, Demonic Resilience, Mana Feed and a beefier pet -- also all good for higher end arena. A SL/SL lock (current 2v2 flavor of the month) gets a combo of the latter -- survivability and good drains to annoy the enemy healers with.

Destruction's niche is twofold, imo -- 0/21/40 succubus sac for heavy hitting in stand-and-deliver pve with ssc-or-better gear and 3+ other sources of imp sb / shadow damage in the raid; or 0/21/40 void sac in 14k hp gear for farming and doing dailies. Unfortunately Destruction hits so damn hard in that former scenario that there is no chance that Blizz will buff them to be more useful in any other scenario.

Ozzmar · 09/26/07, 2:24 PM

Originally Posted by Bogeywoman

Backlash is also not great, because it only procs every 8 seconds. 8 seconds is a very long time to get beat on.

Well...

Devastation
Increases the critical strike chance of your Destruction spells by 5%.

Backlash
Increases your critical strike chance with spells by an additional 3% and gives you a 25% chance when hit by a physical attack to reduce the cast time of your next Shadow Bolt or Incinerate spell by 100%. This effect lasts 8 sec and will not occur more than once every 8 seconds.

Ok, so the proc on Backlash may not be as useful as you'd like, but 3% crit for 3 talent points with a cool proc to boot is still nothing to sneeze at given that you generally spend 5 points higher up in the tree for less ROI.

Destruction will do just fine if you're running around in Battlegrounds earning some GM/HWL gear in hopes of doing Arena eventually. However if your goal is Arena, then yes, the previous posters are correct in their assessments of Destruction being too succeptible to LoS issues, etc.

Cronjob · 09/26/07, 2:30 PM

The biggest annoyance of a destro lock is nether protection. Everything else is horrible, with trinket normalization and resillience seduce nuking isnt as viable in world pvp and definately not in arenas. Players having 16k health at this level is normal and you wont burst them down fast enough. Current pvp specs include full Demo FG build, UA affliction and siphon/soul link builds.

Myonax · 09/26/07, 3:37 PM

I PvPed and PvEed as destruction for about 4 months. PvE wise, I am a bit low on crit so It was solid DPS, but not top tier. As for PvP in a 1900-2000k Arena team it was really over powered in some matches and Extremely underpowered in other matches. In battlegrounds it’s by far the most fun PvP spec I have had.

For PvP the talents that were a must for me are (best to worst)
Nether Protection: Amazing against 5 DPS shadow teams, between shadow priests and fire mages and locks if I was the first target it was guaranteed win.

Backlash: Amazing burst potential. When I was focused on I would often drop a target in 2.5 seconds with 3 shadow bolts. The 8 second between procs is better then it reads. When your being focused on it can often take about 6-7 seconds to get a shadowbolt off, if you proc the backlash on the first interruption, by the time you actually cast your casted shadow bolt, then the proc the 8 seconds are up to cast a third. Anytime I had two dps on me and was able to bait their interrupt with an immolate, someone would get the gift of 3 shadowbolts all at once. Also this talent combined with devastation gives you 8 of the 10% crit you need to overcome the resilience cap.

Shadowfury: All purpose spell, lifesaver giving you a 3 second interrupt of all incoming damage for the pally to BoP or heal you full. It is also a much needed second spell interrupt. My favorite application of shadowfury was as a coordinated medium term CC. You can shadowfury then immediately cast howl of terror, it’s almost a guaranteed 5-6 seconds of free casting time. It’s a decent opener as well to disorient a team that is stacked up behind a pillar since you can los around the pillar.

Talents I would never get for PVP (worst to best):
Aftermath: As many have said, it’s only on casted stuff and it’s not reliable since BoF is probably on your DPS target anyway.

Soul leach: Too little healing to infrequent sums this up.

Conflagrate: I am not blowing a 1.5 second cooldown and giving up the rest of my dot, in conjunction with shadowburn you can occasionally get lucky, but I preferred Searing pain in almost every situation, talented SP has a decent chance to crit in capped resilience.

I am affliction now and do enjoy it in arenas a little more, but I find it pretty boring in BGs. I am contemplating going back to destruction if the resilience change for Dots gives me more of an issue then I think it will.

Vazu · 10/02/07, 4:14 AM

Relies too much on overcoming players who will almost certainly have -10% to be crit. Lacks survivability. Can't function well with any single melee on them. Backlash is nice, but try casting Shadowbolts with a mace Warrior in your face. Destro Warlocks are like a mage, w/o any form of escape. The only thing they have going for them is natural stamina. Aside from that, they can't Blink, Block, Nova, etc etc. I can only see Destro working on a heavy, heavy burst team where you wouldn't naturally be a first target. Even then, in high rated play, it just doesn't work.

Something like,

Mage (Fire)
Warlock (Destro)
Shaman (Elemental)
Rogue
Paladin

The new flavor of the season, since 2.2 is:

Warlock (UA)
Warlock (UA)
Priest (Shadow)
Rogue
Shaman (Resto)

drole · 10/02/07, 4:46 AM

Mana efficiency kills you without a healer and if you have one you'll either want UA to help your SPriest or Soul Link to help your healer.

The only reason to go destuction would be the ability to actually fear druids :P

Anvena · 10/02/07, 5:08 AM

I enjoyed playing destro in pve, but for pure pvp, I ended up going UA because of all the instant casts you get, and superior mana management abilities.

Standing still for 2.5 seconds to spam Incinerate or Shadow Bolt just gets you dead, or loss of line of sight.

With UA, I can toss on siphon life, curse of agony, corruption, howl of terror (all as instant casts.), then throw on unstable affliction so people are too afraid to debuff it.

At that point, you can los dance and just wait for the poor sod to die, which unless he's getting spammed with heals, he definitly will. :P

Destro is fun to play, but it if you like nukes more than anything, maybe rolling a mage might be better...

-Anvena

pheno · 10/02/07, 6:56 AM

Sadly enough that Destruction totally suxx since resilience found it's way into the pvp system, there is simply no hope that it will ever be what it was once, the most enjoyable and delicious way to pvp as a warlock. Buffing it would totally overpower it in pve and as we all know, pve is the content Blizzard is looking most after :<

Darkmantle · 10/02/07, 7:53 AM

Originally Posted by pheno

Sadly enough that Destruction totally suxx since resilience found it's way into the pvp system, there is simply no hope that it will ever be what it was once, the most enjoyable and delicious way to pvp as a warlock. Buffing it would totally overpower it in pve and as we all know, pve is the content Blizzard is looking most after :<

PvP changes
Cot tongues changed to last 12 seconds on pvp targets.
Fear breaking on more easily on damage.
Fear/seduce/banish duration reduced to 10 seocnds on pvp targets.
Resilience effecting dots.
Changing the way resilience interacts with increase crit damage talents.

I feel blizzard has not been paying attention to warlock pvp.

pheno · 10/02/07, 9:31 AM

Originally Posted by Darkmantle

I feel blizzard has not been paying attention to warlock pvp.

They have recognized that affliction/soullink warlocks are way overpowered, instead of buffing some destro talents to make it more efficient, they nerf down affliction talents and hope that the community stops whining :<.

TSxChickenx · 10/03/07, 6:35 PM

Destruction use to be great for PvP... but w/ all the resilence and trinkets.. your crits and fear/seduce will not be as affective... i agree aff/SL is out doing destro =(. They plan to nerf locks so i hope they will up destro capabilities and just nerf our dots

. Its fun and is still good for PvP. true it does lack in arena compared to UA or FG builds.. but our 3v3 pwned it up w/ me being FG and the other lock being heavy destro.. if you plan to spec destro i suggest lots of spell dmg. atleast 800+. Im think of respecing to destro.. although i usually respec every week :P. Gear also make a difference.. if you have high stam and resilence try destro b/c im sure it would be amazing w/ full merc/vet gear

. If you dont have such great gear i suggest going SL/NF w/ FG. although i would hate to lose bane and Shdwburn.

• sadris · 10/03/07, 7:42 PM

Originally Posted by TSxChickenx

Destruction use to be great for PvP... but w/ all the resilence and trinkets.. your crits and fear/seduce will not be as affective... i agree aff/SL is out doing destro =(. They plan to nerf locks so i hope they will up destro capabilities and just nerf our dots

. Its fun and is still good for PvP. true it does lack in arena compared to UA or FG builds.. but our 3v3 pwned it up w/ me being FG and the other lock being heavy destro.. if you plan to spec destro i suggest lots of spell dmg. atleast 800+. Im think of respecing to destro.. although i usually respec every week :P. Gear also make a difference.. if you have high stam and resilence try destro b/c im sure it would be amazing w/ full merc/vet gear

. If you dont have such great gear i suggest going SL/NF w/ FG. although i would hate to lose bane and Shdwburn.

Jesus christ, what grade school did you go to?

Mr. Troll · 10/04/07, 9:54 AM