Warlock Fun
The last few days I've only played on my Warlock. He's level 62 now. For several levels it was getting a bit boring since all skill-ups consisted only of higher levels of existing spells. I had been hoping for new spells to change the experience/rotation. I finally got something new -- Haunt. It has been fun to see the healing come from mobs and I've been enjoying trying to maximize the amount of healing it gives. I also just last night got Fel Armor, which should make my DPS go up.
Last night I found a Ramps and Blood Furnace group. They both went well, though I was really disappointed with my DPS. There was a Demonology Warlock in the group as well, so I was mostly comparing myself to him. And, considering he was one level below me, I expected to have higher DPS on bosses. (I ignored trash DPS, since Affliction locks don't have enough time for their spells to ramp up before trash dies.) So, on bosses I did the recommended rotation of spells, followed by refreshing them as they expired. His DPS was in the 500s. Mine was in the 300s. Very disappointing. The bosses went down fairly quickly, which might have made a difference. Affliction locks are all about sustained DPS over long periods of time. I can see that against raid bosses I'll do a decent amount of DPS. But, my guess is that I'll never get impressive numbers in 5-mans because the bosses go down far too quickly.
Why does this concern me? Because I want to make sure to get invited back to groups, especially when I hit Northrend and start finding more grouping opportunities. If my DPS is low in 5-mans, people will not want to invite me back.
I'll have to do some research to see which spec is the best for 5-mans. Perhaps I'll need to dual spec, saving the Affliction spec for raids. I'm still 18 levels away from raiding, so I theoretically have a lot of instances to run before then.
On another note, I got my first complaint about life-tap from a healer last night. First, he asked me and the other lock in the party why our life suddenly dropped to 1/2 health. Oooh...it brought back memories of me asking the same question when I was leveling my priest. The one warlock in our guild had never used life-tap, so I was completely surprised to encounter it when healing a PuG (this was a LONG time ago). I remember how concerning it was as a healer to see someone's life drop suddenly.
So, the other lock and I explained how the spell works and assured him not to worry about us -- we also had Drain Life and Haunt, so we could generally take care of healing ourselves, unless we were actually taking damage.
After a brief pause, he responded, "Please stop using it in combat."
Ah...the memories. I completely sympathized with him. I remember how long it took me to get used to Warlocks and their fluctuating health. (As a healer I watch both the health and the mana of Warlocks. If I see a drop in their health but no increase in their mana, I throw a heal on them, knowing that they are actually taking damage. Also, if I have mana to spare, I'll throw a Renew on them if they're just tapping.) I tried to kindly assure him that he really could ignore our health bars unless we were getting attacked directly. But, he insisted. And it got to the point that he refused to heal us when we life-tapped. The funny thing was that between battles when we life-tapped, the tank used bandages to "heal" us. I couldn't help but laugh.
It's so good to see the game through the eyes of each class. It makes you understand why they do certain things that are foreign to you otherwise.
Naxx (heroic)
This week is our 25-man Naxx week. So, tonight I'll stop hiding on my lock and go to Naxx on my mage. I hope it doesn't take an hour to gather 25 people!
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The life tapping conundrum is something the healers will have to get used to. You can solve the issue partially by telling the healer beforehand not to bother too much with healing beyond the occasional hot because you can regain most of your own health. Other than that you can make a cast macro that also puts a message on raid chat stating xxxx is lifetapping.
ReplyDeleteWarlocks do not work without lifetapping and the sooner your healers realize that the fewer problems you have. If you can't lifetap you can kiss your dps goodbye.
As for 5-mans... use seed of corruption if the tank is any good. Simply focus on aoe in 5 mans and then bring your affliction rotation to bear on the bosses.
If you need a little bit more oomph in terms of burst then I'd probably dual spec destruction if I were you.
You can then switch back and forth. Personally I have a pvp destruction spec as a dual spec which works fine in 5mans.
But then again I really couldn't care less if my DPS is low compared to other people... did we finish the instance or not?
Gear will eventually fix the dps you're seeing with affliction. but when playing affliction remember this: DPS isn't the same as Damage.
Check your damage out not your dps...
Since I posted this I've gone back again to Ramps and Blood Furnace. I gained a level and some new spells and equipment, so I thought I'd see an improvement in my DPS, but it was only slight. But, I think that's because no boss lasted long enough for me to even reapply my DoTs. The other dps were so good that everything went too quickly. So, probably not a true measure of my dps.
ReplyDeleteI did look at my overall damage and it was even lower than that of the others.
The healer this time understood about life tap and it went well from that perspective.
I'm not actually obsessed with dps, like it might sound. I agree that getting the boss down is the goal, and if that happens, no need to worry. But, I do want to be as good as I can in the process. So, compared to other toons of my level, I've noticed my DPS and overall damage are both substantially lower than theirs. Nothing monumental...just an observation.