Scoop! Leaked notes at least partially accurate!

[mjdoom]

In group situations, you are #1 target. Protected? Ha! You're gang-&^$%'ed. Warlocks are considered an easy target. No instant cast defense, Weak snares (talent costly), backloaded damage, many of our dots and abilities are dispellable. Our main 'defense' fear, is highly resistable, or is downright immune by an ever increasing number methods, including battle stances, trinkets, WotF, blacksmithing, shadow resistence, etc. Its also dispellable, as opposed to psychic scream which has no diminishing returns, is not dispellable 'magic', and is instant. Many of our awesome abilities have long and mana costly preperation times.

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To be perfectly honest I have been in this situation. Granted my main experience with PvP is in group raid situations in open fields between SS and TM but I still consider this to be group PvP. Last I checked Priests are also high on the target list of the opposing faction. I have been lucky enough to die to a rogue once who kept me in stunlock for the entire time until I died. I didn't even have enough time to let off a psychic scream, so yes I have been there.

You say "Protected? Ha! You're gang-&^$%'ed.", to that I say it's exactly the same for all casters. If any caster gets ganged up on they WILL die. Maybe a priest can put off the inevitable a bit longer by using Psychic Scream but if you don't have any protection you will die anyway.

You can't have it both ways; you either have to talk about small scale group PvP where you don't have any real entourage to protect you or you have to talk about large scale PvP where all caster groups should at least have a rogue escorting them if you care about their lives.

In small scale PvP any one of the casters is going to die if they have 2 or more enemies on them most likely (and definitely if one is a rogue). Thanks to the cooldown on Psychic Scream a priest would have to be very skilled to survive against 2 enemies. You have the disadvantage of casting times on your fear spells but you still have both fear and Howl of Terror to use and you can still CC one of them in some capacity. Mages are stuck sheeping one and then trying to nuke the other one (or more) fast enough, then finish off the sheeped one; a dicey proposition.
If you want to talk about our (me priest, you warlock) relative merits if we are getting "gang-&^$%'ed" I say you have every advantage except that Psychic Scream is instant and HoT/Fear are on casting timers. Most likely the only effect this will have is how quickly we die though. No caster will win a 1v3 and it takes a lot of skill/luck to win a 1v2. Oh, and if you want to talk about ways to resist/be immune to fear then you are making priests even weaker vs. warlocks because that is our only trick.

If you are talking about large scale PvP you should have someone protecting your casters. If you don't that is simply foolhardy. At the very least you should have a rogue to counter-stun any rogue that comes along looking to kill one of your casters. In these situations casters should all have a chance to use their skills as you will be traveling in a group that is a smaller part of a whole and someone should always have your back. If the rogue gets a stun off that gives you plenty of time to cast a fear and get into your routine. Once again, if a single target (remember, diminishing returns only works if you are recasting on a single target) and you need to keep it perma-feared then you are probably overmatched in numbers or not concentrating your damage well enough. Kill one while fearing another. Once you kill the first one you can start fearing a third as necessary while you kill the second. This means you are still keeping one target at bay constantly and the "damage can break fear" effect shouldn't be an issue as you are just keeping that person feared away and not attacking them. Or alternate fears on targets. I'm sorry you can't fear someone all day; boo hoo.

Yes, my PvP experience is limited, but you haven't done anything to convince me that warlocks are at some disadvantage compared to priests/mages (your compatriots in cloth) when caught off guard in PvP. And even though shadow priests are pretty good in PvP those players are probably not 5-manning any instances or they are spending masses of gold on respecs. If I really wanted to build a char specifically for PvP that was gimped for handling high end content challenges I would have, but I don't.

- mjdoom