A Study of the Warlock

[Bolty]

Because there's just SO much posting going on around here (*cough*), where all the beta-testing Lurkers are sharing their experiences and thoughts on their classes (*cough*), I felt I'd join in (*cough*) with my thoughts on the Warlock thus far. *wheeze* *gag* What sarcasm?



After playing 2 mages - one to 23, another to 39 and awaiting the lifting of the level cap in the next phase - I felt like seeing something new. I started a Warlock about 2 weeks ago and have been enjoying the differences between the two classes since. I love spellcasting classes, and Warlocks provide a fun diversion from the pressures a Mage faces with each and every monster encounter. My Warlock is now level 20, which is the level when I find that characters start to get interesting. In general (at least at this point in game development), it's between levels 20 to 30 when your characters fill out their spell abilities and become fully mature. By the time you're 30, you have access to every spell in your arsenal. Of course, all this is subject to change, especially with the Talent system still hiding in the shadows. I consider levels 1-20 to be the "child" years of a character, since your character has a limited spell collection and has yet to realize its full potential. 20-30 is the maturing decade.

So anyhow, I just hit level 20 and I'm working on obtaining my third minion. Blizzard has not developed the Warlock to the same level as the other classes, since the Felhunter minion (apparently to be obtained at level 30) is not in the game. So currently, there are only 3 minions that can be obtained. I currently control 2 minions (not simultaneously, of course) - the Imp and the Voidwalker.

MINIONS

Blizzard's goal with the Warlock's minions was not to have them be replaced by better minions as you played on and advanced in level. Their goal is to give you a line of options with your minions so that you can pick the minion that fits the situation best. They're pretty close to this right now. Your minions, whether or not you use them, level up with you. Inexperienced players automatically assume that the Voidwalker is "better" than the Imp and never use it again, but I have found this not to be true.

The Imp is the basic minion you get when you're level 2-4. Imps are physically weak but perform a ranged fireball attack of decent damage. But what makes Imps really good in parties for which an additional tank is not needed (i.e. if you already have a warrior) is the spells it casts - Blood Pact and Fire Shield. Blood Pact will raise the stamina of everyone in your party by a significant amount. At level 20, it raises Stamina by 12 - which is a ton. It also casts Fire Shield on you and your mates so that any creature that hits you takes a minor amount of fire damage. It's not much, but it adds up. While the Imp is not the best choice when you're soloing and you need a tank to protect you, it's a highly useful party minion since it buffs and attacks.

The Voidwalker, "accessible" (haha) at level 10, is your super-tank. With gobs of hit points, its purpose in life is to get beat up. Unfortunately, inexperienced Warlock players are griping to high hills about the Voidwalker's damage - it stinks - because they don't understand its role. Hopefully, Blizzard will ignore the whiners and keep the Voidwalker like it is. Voidwalkers do NOT assist you with actually killing anything, and they shouldn't. Think of a Voidwalker as Diablo II's Iron Golem with reamloads of hit points. Voidies also possess one crucial ability: they "Torment" their targets, which is just another fancy word for a warrior's Taunt ability. Yes, Voidwalkers hold aggro away from the Warlock, a blessing that makes any Mage player drool. Those who complain about the Voidwalker's lack of damage usually aren't playing correctly.

I laughed above when I said the Voidwalker is "accessible" because the quest to obtain the Voidwalker, received at level 10, is totally impossible to do solo at level 10 and still very, very difficult in a group. I believe this was not intended, but we'll see in later pushes if it's tweaked. Any Warlock player will be able to tell you of their pains trying to get that Voidy at level 10, requiring you to make a foray into a cave filled with enemy Warlocks packed so tight you can't breathe...

There are still many, many Warlock players who start out every fight by attacking the mob themselves and waiting for the minion to react to its master being threatened. This is NOT how you should play the Warlock! There is a reason why Blizzard states clearly that Warlocks are NOT for newbies - you need to understand how aggro works and how to manage it, or your career will be very frustrating.

First of all, there are three minion "states" - aggressive, defensive, and passive. In aggressive mode, the minion will attack any mob it sees (read: gets close to). In defensive mode, the minion goes after anything that attacks it or you. Finally, in passive mode, the minion will only attack when you tell it to.

Experienced and/or intelligent Warlock players realize that 95% of the time, you should be using the passive state for your minions. Occasionally, you will use defensive to enable a faster-reacting minion to acquire targets quicker. But especially when using a Voidwalker, all fights should be initiated by ordering your minion to attack the target and waiting for it to Torment the foe and build up aggro. I've seen quite a few Warlocks play, and at the low levels they're getting slaughtered while their Voidwalker tries SO hard to pull aggro and can't because the Warlock is wailing away on the mob.

Anyhow, being a good Warlock player requires a high understanding of aggro and how much you can do to a monster without pulling the aggro towards yourself. Warlocks do NOT kill things quickly, but we DO kill things safely. I'm at level 20, and I've had to stop to eat and drink perhaps 5 times total so far. Comparing that to my Mage, it's not even close - he would be beat up constantly.

From what I hear, the level 20 minion is one that does more damage than the Voidwalker, but does not nearly have the hit points and tank ability. This would put the minion in the range of the Imp, in that it's good to have her along to kill things, but you can't count on hiding behind it while it takes the punishment.

So you can see that I'm in love with the Voidwalker - the ultimate soloing minion. It simply holds a monster's attention while my damage-over-time spells and various attacks whittle it down. Under most fights, I never take a lick of damage. The price I pay is in killing speed, but then again nobody likes those long walks as a ghost!

SPELLS

Warlock spells consist of curses (only one of which can be active on a mob at a time), direct attack spells, damage-over-time spells, and other life/mana management spells. Curses range from Curse of Agony, which does a little bit of damage per second over a LONG period of time, to the VERY useful Curse of Weakness, which reduces the damage done by a mob per attack. Shadow Bolt is the primary attack spell, along with others like Immolate which does burning damage over time. At level 20, I just now got my first Area of Effect spell, Rain of Fire, which is self-explanatory.

Utility spells include things like Underwater Breathing, Summoning (in which any 3 players can summon someone in your party to your location from anywhere in the world), and the making of Soulstones (can resurrect you when you die) and Healthstones (can heal you).

Something I wish my Mages had is the Life Drain ability, which simply transfers a chunk of your hit points to your mana. This is valuable when you're in a pitched battle and you run out of mana - your minion's taking a beating - and you can get a quick blast of mana by sacrificing your hit points. Who cares about the pain since you're not taking the beating, anyway? Also, you have the ability, via Health Funnel, to transfer your life to your minion's. This can be dangerous, since it tends to gain a lot of aggro on you. If you were a monster and you saw that some jerk in the back was healing the guy you were fighting, you'd want to go kick his butt too.

But these spells are difficult to use properly. You need a lot of situational awareness while playing the Warlock - more on that later.

Soul Shards are the bread and butter of a Warlock. They're used to raise any minion other than the Imp, along with being the reagent for the creation of Soulstones, Healthstones, and more. Soul Shards are obtained by stealing the souls of your victims as they die. You have to cast a spell on them, which is "channeled" (meaning not interruptable by normal attacks, and you have to stay still while casting) as they are killed. The catch is that you can't farm Soul Shards by killing wimpy monsters - you have to get experience off a monster to get its soul. That also means you can't grab one off of someone else's kill, either, unless they're in your party.

What has everyone complaining is Blizzard's design decision to make each Soul Shard take up one slot in your inventory. In order to prevent the stockpiling of Soul Shards, this was done, but it could be overkill. Since currently, Soulstones use 2 Soul Shards and I hear the upper spells use even more PER cast, you can easily be forced to sacrifice a huge chunk of your inventory space just to carry around Shards for use by a party. Five players times 2 Soul Shards per soulstone = 10 Soul Shards, ouch! Add that they can be difficult to collect when playing solo, and I can understand this gripe. Perhaps the Shards should be allowed to stack - lemekim was suggesting 5 Shards per slot - but I'll comment more on this later as I get access to the better spells.

Warlocks, like Mages, can only use cloth items and have few hit points. We have to be protected, and generally, if our minions die, we either run away or die. The only crowd control we have is Fear, a spell that causes a mob to run away from you for about 10-15 seconds. This sounds better than it is, since the mob can easily run off to another mob, say "hey Bob, you know, there's this guy over there who cast this spell on me - let's go kick his pitooter" and come back to you with a buddy or two. Thus, if the minion dies, I run 90% of the time. At least if I die, I have a soulstone to bring me back. :) But a Voidwalker should only die if you bit off more than you can chew or got piled on by added monsters during a fight. Since a Voidwalker is so good at pulling aggro, it makes fleeing easy - just tell the Voidy to sacrifice itself attacking whatever's bothering you while you high-tail it outta there. Poor guy.

GAMEPLAY

Warlocks are HARD for those new to MMORPGs. As hard of a time I had with my Mage on my first run through in Phase 1, it would have been much worse playing a Warlock. I hinted before about situational awareness - as a Warlock, you're not just playing yourself, you're playing your minion as well. Good Warlock players keep total control over their minions and can manage two sets of actions at once, as well as issue commands during a heated fight. Lately I've been playing in parties of 2, and I use the Voidwalker exclusively as a tank to keep mobs off my party member and myself. If we're fighting a mob and another one spawns by us or comes along, I immediately assign my Voidy to attack the newcomer and draw the aggro off my partner and/or myself. With 2-3 mobs pounding exclusively on my Voidwalker, my partner and I are free to concentrate attacks on each mob in turn and kill them in safety. Did I mention I love the Voidwalker? :) I hug him and squeeze him and call him George. And when he gets in trouble, I give my life (literally) to him by casting Health Funnel.

So in every battle, I need to be aware of:

1) My hit points (duh)
2) My mana
3) My minion's hit points
4) What mob(s) possess aggro on my minion
5) What mob(s) possess aggro on me or my party members
6) My party members' hit points
7) What curses are active on all mobs
8) What mobs are low on life so I can swipe a Soul Shard from them, if necessary

Sometimes I feel like a priest, because I'm not doing much attacking myself! :)

SUMMARY (so far)

Through my experiences with my Mage, each and every fight carried the threat of imminent death. If a monster managed to resist 3 or 4 attacks in a row (and it happens from time to time, just bad luck of the draw), I'd usually bite it. As a Warlock, that's reduced to an inconvenience rather than a direct threat to my life. That about sums up the difference between the classes. Warlocks are much safer with that fat tank out there. We're not flashy like those Mages with their massive damage instant attacks. Most of our damage comes from long-running damage-over-time spells and boring curses, but at the end of the day, we don't get killed by a little bad luck during a fight. Not that I'm complaining about the Mage - playing one is basically living life in the fast lane - doing gargantuan amounts of damage in what usually amounts to very quick fights, because either the mob dies fast or you do. For a more tactical experience, I heavily recommend you try the Warlock. Whole strategy guides could be written on how to effectively manage your minions for every situation, and I'm finding that the survivability of a party goes up when an expert Warlock player is around.

More to come as I go farther up the experience-grinding ladder... :)

-Bolty

[Ruvanal]

I laughed above when I said the Voidwalker is "accessible" because the quest to obtain the Voidwalker, received at level 10, is totally impossible to do solo at level 10 and still very, very difficult in a group. I believe this was not intended, but we'll see in later pushes if it's tweaked. Any Warlock player will be able to tell you of their pains trying to get that Voidy at level 10, requiring you to make a foray into a cave filled with enemy Warlocks packed so tight you can't breathe...

???
I soloed that quest. I just thought that it was somewhat tedious since every encounter was a pair (warlock+imp or warlock+voidwalker). Just needed to pay attention to which one of each pair that was attacked first with which skills and which of the two to take out first (not always the first attacked). There were a lot of pairs in there, but I found them to be well enough spaced out that there were only a couple of spots where I would have had to deal with taking on more than one pair at a time, if I had gone those routes. I did have to stop and wait for the mana/hp recover to work in many spots (mine and the imps) since many of the fight drained us down to the limit many times. As it was the imp had to be 'sacrifcied' about 6 times to make it through some of the fights.

In general the imps were the best to take out first and fast in those pairs. The warlocks would sometimes then lock themselves into trying to resummon it and be an easy kill then. If not then there was still less to worry about with out those dangerous fireballs being directed at you.

For the voidwalker pairs it was usually more critical to arrange for my imp to get its attention just before I nuked the warlock with a Shadow Bolt to focus his attention on me. The warlock would then at times start dividing his attention between myself and the imp who was putting a pounding on his tank that usually was dishing out too little damage compared to the what the imp could take. The enemy warlock was then only dangerous if he kept his attention on me and was using too many Shadow Bolts compared to DoTs or curses (I could stand several of those compared to the SBs). Then it was just a matter of deciding which of the two was more important to take out first. If I needed to finish the warlock first, it usually cost me the imp to the voidwalker but I could then finish the voidwalker due to it greatly reduced life and no backup.

I actually had more trouble in that cave later with a group when doing one of the other quests that takes you in there. Too many other palyers will end up not wanting to take the time to recover enough in between fights and start wandering an waking up pairs in multiple directions.

As for the soul Shards stacking, I would tend to agree with lemekin in the stacks should be up to 5. These can actually be very powerful items if you could stockpile too many easily. But at 1 per slot, it makes it a royal pain to be able to accumulate any items as a large portion of the inventory would start being taken up in just maintaing a reasonable reserve of them. You did not mention that the Soulstones, Healthstones and such can be traded to the other players (and many want them when they know what they do) and that they go "poof" when you logoff. This can mean needing to replace these item everytime that you log back on. This also makes this an unappealing class for those players that cannot affort to invest a more than short play sessions since they will likely be chronically short on enough shards to keep up the other items/minions.

[Thenryb]

[QUOTE]I actually had more trouble in that cave later with a group when doing one of the other quests that takes you in there. Too many other palyers will end up not wanting to take the time to recover enough in between fights and start wandering an waking up pairs in multiple directions.


I would say you were lucky there. When our group was in the same spot trying to help my Warlock, every warlock on the continent was there waking up everything from the beginning of the cave to the end. I cannot imagine soloing that quest, even factoring in my sucky warlock skills. Compare it to the comparable Alliance quest and it is no contest.

Any thoughts of which curses to use and when? Also, should a warlock be using his fire skills much? I try to remember to cast Immolate from time to time, but I assume shadow magic is the warlock's bread and butter.

[Nystul]

In my experience, any time you go into a cave or mine solo, you had better be willing to make some corpse runs, even if you are several levels higher than the mobs. Skull rock is not exceptional in this regard, but the fact that every enemy is a caster and has a minion can make it even more difficult. But in general, there is just a lot that can go wrong in these areas, and good play can't account for all of them. One of the biggest problems is respawns. When all of the monsters are up and you are working your way in, it is often possible to lure them in a manageable manner. But if you have to deal with respawns, it becomes almost impossible to ensure that nothing respawns on top of you while you are already in a deep fight. And if it happens, you will have no place to run because your retreat has been blocked off by the respawns.

Goldtooth is a great example of how screwed up things can get. Every single time I've attempted the Goldtooth quest (and I've completed this quest with probably 10 different characters), I've suffered multiple deaths. And that is often with characters who are in the level 10-12 range, while the mobs in the mine are more like 6-8. This is supposed to be a newbie quest! The geomancers are very dangerous, but they end up getting trained all over the place screwing up their positioning. You get kobolds randomly spawning/reappearing not one at a time, but in waves of 3 or 4. And of course you always have to deal with respawns, because Goldtooth has always already been killed by the last party/player to successfully find him.

[lemekim]

Something I wish my Mages had is the Life Drain ability...

Nit : hat's Life Tap ;) On the other hand, Life Drain ability is also quite useful, it simply channels Hit Points from your enemy to You at a certain rate per second, for several seconds at a cost of a good chunk of mana.

As for the lvl 10 quest cave, when I was with Bolty there helping on that quest, it's not the little Warlocks that gave us trouble. Together, we slaughtered them with hardly a stop.

It was the fact that the lvl 11 named boss and the lvl 14 named boss (sorry, forgot their names) were standing together next to each other. You could not attack one without drawing aggro from the other. Even the tactic of attacking minion first did not work, it just aggroed both bosses. While I could see that taking on one boss, even if its level 11 and quite a bit more powerful then any regular level 11 mobs, is not too bad of a demand from a level 10 quest, but taking on BOTH bosses is impossible solo, especially with their minions. In effect, we were fighting 4 mobs at the same time. Perhaps we got unlucky in our spawn, but that's what we had to deal with. I don't think that many people would have been able to deal with that situation much better, at least in a group of 2.

[Ruvanal]

In reguards to their spawning locations, from having been into the cave on four occasions, I never saw those two bosses close enough together to even be a problem on attracting both at the same time. I did notice that one of the bosses (I forget which one) seemed like he may have had some sort of patrol path that he followed and would stop and lolly-gag at points for about a minute or two. I guess you were unlucky in that he came over to that area at that time. It is probably why I had trouble the finding him on occasion too due to the non-fixed home position.

Some other comments....

Thenryb,
The warlock that I started on the alliance side got locked before getting to the quest for the voidwalker, so I do not know what that quest was like to compare the differences. I may delete that character soon anyway if they do not get unlocked as it would really only be a loss of a few hours to catch a new one up to the same point.

When I see a tight area like many of the caves and a lot of players in there, I do a quick recon. If they are playing well in can be somewhat safe to venture in and only need to worry about the sudden respawns near my positions; the rest of the area is usually very well cleared. On the other hand if the there are many chaotic playing characters in the area I will quickly exit and try to find something else to do for awhile (fishing?) till the mess dies down (usually those players) and the area will restabilize. It is not worth the effort to try to deal with that type of mess.

When I personally had got my warlock to the point of doing that quest, I had a couple of things going for me. First was that Vrak had already done two trips in the cave for his own quests, so I had a fair idea of what I would be facing and which direction to go to minimize the number of encounters that I would need to deal with. The other thing was that I had 'dinged' to level 10 realatively late and seeing a mess in the cave, I then went to an inn a logged off. I resumed plaing at somewhere between 3am and 6am server time to continue the quest. At that point the only other characters that I saw around the cave were 2 or 3 others just exiting as I got there. That saved me bothering with the front two sets of guards, but after that I saw no one in the game until I got back to Ogrimar. That also meant that I had a relatively fresh and undisturbed set of spawns through out the cave. Sort of my own private instance that time.

As for which curses to use, it is like the D2 necromancer, it is very situational. And just like many necromancer players it can be too easy to fall into the trap of just sticking to one curse almost exclusively (I somewhat guilty of this and it sounds like Bolty is tending that way too). Many of the ranged attacker with their spells (unsure of the bow/gun/etc. missile users) will not be bothered much if you hit them with Weaken. Better to use Curse of Agony for its DoT effect on their usually low life amount. With two other DoTs on them (Corruption and Immolation) they will usually be losing life a rate that will force some of the caster types to start resorting to healing effects instead of hammering you or your minion with what are usually high damaging attack spells. A careful examination of the different curses and types of situations that can arise should point to which would usually be better to use. In party situations the use of the curses is probably more critical than when soloing due to the nature of some of them.

Also, should a warlock be using his fire skills much? I try to remember to cast Immolate from time to time, but I assume shadow magic is the warlock's bread and butter.

I use Immolate a lot when soloing, just not as a lead in attack in most cases as it will pull too much aggro to quickly. From my looking at the skill mix for the warlock, I assumed that the real strength of the warlock was the manipulation of hit points primarily through the use of the various DoTs that they have. Most of these DoTs let the warlock deal a considerable amount of damage with drawing a massive amount of aggro onto him with only one or two castings. My perception of the Shadow Bolt was to either set up the already DoTed target for the final coup-de-grace of Drain Soul or Life Drain when soloing or to be used in group situations when the targets will not last long enough to place more than one of the DoTs on before they are near death. Even in the second situation you may be better off doing something like Drain Soul so that you would have the shards for creating the various stones for other party members.

Nystul:

In my experience, any time you go into a cave or mine solo, you had better be willing to make some corpse runs, even if you are several levels higher than the mobs. Skull rock is not exceptional in this regard, but the fact that every enemy is a caster and has a minion can make it even more difficult. But in general, there is just a lot that can go wrong in these areas, and good play can't account for all of them. One of the biggest problems is respawns. When all of the monsters are up and you are working your way in, it is often possible to lure them in a manageable manner. But if you have to deal with respawns, it becomes almost impossible to ensure that nothing respawns on top of you while you are already in a deep fight. And if it happens, you will have no place to run because your retreat has been blocked off by the respawns.

I do agree that most cavelike areas will be as you describe if you are playing solo. Especially if there have been several groups working the area at or near the time that you enter. But you should not have the problem of their respawning on top of you if you are one of the few players in the area at the time. The respawn timer on most of the mobs is long enough to usually have spell caster like a warlock to be able to eat/drink up to three times with mana depleting casting in between before that mob will respawn. The problem you are referring to is from not knowing how long before the mob was killed to know when the respawn should occur and/or not even knowing that you are near the respawn point due to another player having pulled the mob away from its usual position. Take those two problems out or minimize them and it is a whole lot safer to venture into those areas; you can then have some degree of control of where the danger will be coming from. If you can maintain a resonable pace of moving through the mobs under the conditions that I described, then you should have at least the previous mob position to fall back to and be safe from a respawn for about a minute (enough to do at least a one rest and rebuff if needed). Under these conditions it is the mobs that have patrolling routes that make the situation rather dangerous.

For Goldtooth, I agree that the geomancers are the greatest danger and will probably kill you before you can get to Goldtooth in most cases. It takes a very quite mine to be able to solo yourself there without getting killed. Yes, I did it with a mage one time under the same type of situation as described above for the warlock cave quest. This was part of the reason I felt that I had a chance to pull off the warlock quest solo. Also with Goldtooth, you can stand within about 2-3 steps of where he spawns and the other nearby mobs will never come close enough to you unless they are chasing someone else through the area. Just wait for him to respawn almost on top you and you should be able to get him then (and yes I did this with a different mage in a chaotic mine setting and it did not kill me...close, but a minor healing potion made it possible).

Also lest you think that I downplayed the situation for the warlock cave quest, my first thought when I saw where they were sending me was "They have got to be kidding to even sending warlocks there to do this quest. They would need to get an agreeable party to help them complete it." After pondering the situation some and seeing what was happening in the cave on the first approch, I decided that would safer to actually try to solo it at least once before caving in and waiting until I could get some others (probably one of the other lurkers that had been near his level at teh time) to give a hand with it. I do think that quest is set a bit too hard to be done reasonable by most players considering the conditions that they would typically need to do it under. Not everyone would have chance to try it under what I consider to be the dead period on the server like I was able to.

[lemekim]

On the note of bosses again - neither of them did any kind of patrolling. If he did, this wouldn't have been an issue.

As for warlock himself, last push I did get voidwalker on Alliance side, and got him to 21 I think (but never went over to Kalimdor to get my 3rd minion, as I was unfamiliar with that continent). The quest involved killing (for those who remeber) one of the trio named bosses at the farm where the Princess pig is. Those guys were level 14 through 16 afaik, and pulling one certainly triggered others.

On the good side, those guys are invloved in a lot of quests, so you can often find a party or just party up with people nearby to get the kill. Being the soloer that I am, I decided to solo them. Of course, I could not, but I managed to pull off the guy I needed when some hapless lowbie drew them out of the house and then started running for his life. So it's certainly not a piece of cake either, although it is relatively easier to find a party to do it.