A Study of the Warlock

[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.