Nab Demonology Question 2.0Follow

My blueberry doesn't hold anything either (lvl75 Destruction), though I swear he got a little better post patch. I have him out when I want the bubble, use the succy when I want the CC, and the felhunter when I want the buff.





Works for me at least...

*shrugs*

Bubble and consume shadows are nice. I mean he'll hold threat and take a beating if I let him. Like when I'm attempting an elite I'll give him a couple seconds, then CoA, corruption, Immolate and watch my aggro until I'm ready to pull off of him. Something like that... He'll also tank a couple of extra adds if I pull multiples.

Certainly no hunter pet though.

The problem is, though, IMO is that the "DEMONology" Warlock should be focusing on their demons. The way it is now, the demon barely enters the equation, and you end up doing nothing but Hand of Gul'dan and Incinerate if you choose to fight mob-by-mob (I never really liked AoEing crap down, just not my style).

You said "Pets don't hold aggro unless you're BM". Beast Master hunters focus on... *gasp* making their beasts more powerful, and the BM build itself focuses around the Beast.

The Demonology Warlock should do the same -- focus around the demon more than the Warlock himself. No, the Warlock shouldn't be doing all the damage while the pet soaks all the incoming damage. The Warlock should be casting spells that make the demon more powerful (kinda like what Kill Command does for a BM Hunter), so that the Demon is doing a lot of the damage, rather than the warlock doing it. Instead of giving us something like Kill Command, they gave us..... Hand of Gul'dan. A spell that kinda-sorta buffs your demon, but does a huge amount of direct-damage. Errr. Okay, that doesn't make much sense. Hand of Gul'dan sounds more like a Destruction spell to me; it is a freaking flaming meteor kinda thing. That belongs in the Destro tree. What we should have had was a spell that causes a demon to royally smack the mob like Kill Command. THAT feels like a Demonology Talent/Ability.

So, if Warlock pets can't hold aggro, even the so-called "Tank Pet", then why even _Be_ a Demonology Warlock in the first place? If your demons can barely do much of anything, why not pick Destruction, or Affliction and just burn everything to death? IMHO, they ruined Demonology Warlocks by taking away a lot of the Felguard's utility. The Felguard itself was the main reason a Warlock would go Demonology in 3.x. It, along with a bunch of talents that increased the Felguard's effectiveness and of course the occasional Metamorphosis, was the whole point of the Demonology warlock, right?

Well, they take Felguard's taunts away, making it so that it can no longer be a tank pet (it was the only pet that had CHARGE!), so now it is like "Why even be a Demonology Warlock?"

I will probably find myself respeccing, and trying to re-learn how to play Warlock....

Probably end up doing Destro and just burning sh*t down before it gets to me, but that makes me feel like I'm playing a mage... oh well.

Edited, Nov 15th 2010 7:55pm by Lyrailis

Because, a pet that has charge can actually *get* to the mob faster. With no Dash talents that we can give our demons, it takes that stupid blueberry forever and a day to slowly crawl over to the mob TO hit it (since its taunt is now a MELEE attack, it can't even taunt on its way over to the mob). Therefore, you have to just stand there and wait.... and wait.... and wait... until it finally gets over to the mob before you can start attacking it. The sooner the pet reaches the mob, the sooner it can start building threat, and the sooner you can actually start DPSing it. Hence why as a hunter, I prefer pets that have charge over those that do not. The split-second stun is also nice too, but nowhere near necessary. I just want the pet to get to the mob ASAP.

Even if you open up with Bane of Agony, and just stand there and do nothing but wanding, I've found that the Blueberry nearly loses threat. Forget about casting anything else.

And yes, I don't care if they nerf Demonology DPS, or move more of its DPS to the Pet. As far as Self-Healing, every class except hunter has it. Even _rogues_ have Self-Healing now. Hell, they get a permanent HoT as long as you keep killing mobs now. The thing about hunters, though, is that they have Feign Death, something nobody else has (well, Rogues have it kinda-sorta).

I just want my friggin pets to actually, uh, tank like they're supposed to. That's why I started demonology back in 3.x in the first place, to be honest. I like tanking pets.

Like I said before, Demonology locks were fine in 3.x. They had a nice balance of DPS, self-healing, and the pet's tanking ability. In 3.x, you could still easily rip threat off your bet, but Good God, at least you could cast a couple spells before you hit the yellow line. And the pet had Charge, so you didn't have to wait 5+ seconds per pull for your pet to get over to the mob.

Another note about Self-Healing, it appears they nerfed Drain Health, so now our only self-healing is a channeled spell that works almost just like Glyphed Evocate. Drain Health used to actually, you know, drain a noticeable amount? It seems after 4.0, I cast drain health and I don't really see much draining going on at all. So other than our EvocateSoul Harvest, what Self-healing are you talking about? All I see is a roughly 50-60% of your max HP over 6-ish seconds once every 2 min. And it can be interrupted, quite easily so, if you get hit while casting it.

And another note:

I'd be fine if they'd nerf the blueberry's damage in exchange for it actually being able to tank, but eh, it has to actually BE able to tank which currently, it simply is not. The only way it can actually hold a mob is if it decides to attack some add that I wasn't hitting at the time. As I said before, I was able to pull threat off of it by casting *one* spell -- Immolate. The spell that does "half damage now, half in DoT". The initial damage from Immolate was ripping threat off it. Seriously.

Edited, Nov 16th 2010 9:02am by Lyrailis

Voidwalker tanking was always sucky. I remember trying to do my Doomguard quest as Affliction a couple of months back with my Voidwalker losing aggro to Curse of Agony. I agree that the Voidwalker's tanking capabilities are underwhelming. Haven't tried it post-patch, but it sounds like they messed up something in the transition.

If you haven't tried out the new Felguard, I suggest you give it a go. It's extremely powerful now.

They didn't nerf Drain Life, they just shortened the cast and thus the healing per cast. Other healing methods include Healthstones, Death Coil and Fel Armor. Fel Armor returns 2% of your maximum health every 5 seconds, something the Beast Mastery Hunter has to spend talents on getting (and it's every 10 seconds for the Hunter).

I remember draining almost 400 per tick of Drain Life... I was a bit 'bleh' to find out that it is only 296 now after 4.0.

Given that they increased the mobs' damage they do to players, Drain Life won't let you drain-tank a normal mob, let alone anything Elite, unless you were maybe 80 with purples.

Edit: Looks like my only course of action is to simply respec Destro or Affliction and say "***** demo". But this leaves kinda sour taste in my mouth; I already have a mage. If I wanted a 2nd mage, I'd just roll one. Problem is, this warlock is already Lv70 and has 445+ Leatherworking and Tailoring. I'm not going to just dump that less than a month away from Cataclysm.

Edited, Nov 16th 2010 3:03pm by Lyrailis

I'm fairly certain you can still drain-tank stuff as Affliction. Maybe not as Demonology, but why would you? I don't try to heal with my Feral Druid.

Demonology has changed a bit since Vanilla. Back then it was the closest thing you got to being a Hunter. Basically, the three talent trees opened up three styles of play:

Drain-tanking
Drain-hunting
Nuking

With the changes to Demonology, it's moved towards being an AOE "toe-to-toe" tree. You get an AOE pet (Legion Strike, Felstorm), a channeled close cast AOE, and finally a cooldown that increases your damage mitigation and opens up more AOE (Immolation Aura, Shadow Cleave) as well as an AOE taunt(!). It's fairly obvious that the tree focuses on jumping into a group of mobs and dishing out pain in large quantities to everything. The Felguard is squishy because he's not supposed to tank stuff - you are.

That said, the Voidwalker is broken. I had a chance to get on my Warlock and test it last night and yes, it's broken. Horribly. Can't hold aggro and does less damage than anything else. Only thing it's really good for is the bubble so you can drain-tank some more. Which is fail.

My suggestion to you, if you want to remain Demonology, is to change your mindset about the spec's role. Drain-hunting is dead, at least until they fix the Voidwalker. If you want to sit back and pewpew while your pet gets shredded, start a Hunter.

If you want to solo elites and stuff, go Affliction and get the Voidwalker out for the bubble. Affliction has crazy survivability and the bubble is overpowered when you combine the two. Good stuff.

In any case, I suggest spending your first 100g on dual-spec.

On a completely different topic, are you having issues remembering names and such? Don't take this as a critique, I'm merely curious. You mention Drain Health and 'that HP>Mana spell'. Drain Life and Life Tap are sort of essential spells to a Warlock and perhaps it's because I grew up with it, but I can't for the life of me understand how someone gets to level 70 without remembering Life Tap.

Like I said, please don't take it as mockery, I'm just curious. I've got this hypothesis that it might be linked to the performance I'm seeing in random dungeons. Like the Death Knight who didn't know what Dark Command (taunt) was, or the level 80 Paladin who kept referring to his Blessing of Might as Blessing of Power.

^_^

Oh yeah, forgot about Soulshatter. And 90%? Holy crap.

I'll have to test some more tonight now. Always a good excuse to dust off the squishy.

Heh, you said 'tis'.

Unfamiliarity with the class and somewhat bad memory.

I leveled my warlock from 1 to 31 a couple years ago, not that far into BC. This was on a different server than my alliance characters and was only a little side-project. Then, I got pretty much "done" with Alliance, several 80s and what-not, and became Curious about the Horde side. This is about the same time that mom started the game, and we did a pair of Alliance characters with Recruit-a-Friend. Well, we also decided to do a couple Horde characters too, and so we went to that server.

I wound up using the Recruit-a-Friend's level granting feature to get my Warlock from 31 to 60. More time passed, where I did nothing but level his Tailoring and Leatherworking.

Then I brought him to Outland, and it took some tinkering but I eventually learned how to play the class for solo PvE and I leveled him to 70 and then put him on the shelf again. This was like 2-3 months ago. During that 2-3 Months, I used mats gathered by other characters to get his Tailor/LW to the 440s.

Fast-Forward to patch 4.0.1 and the fact that Cataclysm crafts probably take at least Lv75 to uncap, and I decided to take him out and level him again, hence the OP.

As I haven't played Warlock as much as I have, say, Paladin, I'm not as familiar with the names of the abilities. In fact, I tend to think of abilities as what they do, not what they are named. "Drain Health" is Exactly What It Says On The Tin, but then so is "Drain Life". They both mean the same thing. As far as the "HP>Mana" spell I mentioned above, I couldn't remember if that was called Life Tap or Mana Tap, but I recalled exactly what it does -- takes a chunk of health and converts it to mana. That, and in 4.0.1 I hadn't need to use it a single time, so I kinda forgot what exactly the name of it was.



I can understand the Blessing of Might/Blessing of Power confusion -- Blessing of Might in 3.x gave Attack Power. It could be understandable that one would call it "Blessing of Power" because that's what it actually does (or, rather, did until 4.0).

As for the DK not knowing what Dark Command is, that's a whole different ballgame when a player doesn't know that an ability exists... or did you mean that he knew that he had "a taunt other than death grip" but didn't know it was called "Dark Command"?

I had that problem when Death Knights were first released (and I'm still forgetting the exact name of some abilities, esp from the Unholy and Frost trees, as I played exclusively Blood in 3.x) -- I kept forgetting what exactly the abilities were named. This isn't a failure to know my class (I know the abilities exist and what they do), it is just me forgetting exactly what Blizz named it.

And no offense taken, I can understand the concern and curiosity.

some people are just overly forgetfull :p for example i suffer from a mild case of dysnomia.. which basically means i'm useless at remembers nouns... so you'll hear me refer to.. well most things with a name as "thingy" rather than what it's called cos the name always eludes me, so don't worry about forgetting the hp>mana thingy, i do it all the time too ^^ lol

Mazra wrote:





'tis or GTFO