Originally Posted by
Fleckens
Oh right I forgot you actually have the shield even without speccing into it and it's already way stronger than ours even before ours got nerfed to a silly 4% of max health at most, our vt does have the added ability that it heals us when not at max health but luckily you warlocks have that self healing built into other abilities, just take a look at logs and you can see that warlocks generally heal a bit less than shadow but shield itself a lot more and to higher healthpools which is amazing for progress, and that's taking into account that we even have to use an active shield ability for mobility in PW:S. And no even with San'layn you'd still be gaining a lot more than us, not to mention that we would be using an inferior dps talent just to have a tiny bit more self healing.
Also vampiric embrace is our active skill, our passive healing only comes from vt ticks, but VE is a pretty damn unreliable cooldown to save yourself as it only heals a single target at a time and will often heal others instead of you if they are lower. It's not a terrible help and I tend to use it whenever I can as every bit helps but it doesn't heal for much more than a couple of heals from an actual healer. I will give you that dispersion is a better cooldown than unending resolve though, as while we do often have to use it offensively the much shorter cooldown and more powerful reduction as well as the healing does make it a really good spell.
Overall both locks and shadow(and mages) are amongst the ranged dps that are best at surviving, locks and shadow the constant small damage while mages being good at spike damage. However to claim that warlocks have much worse survivability than shadow is pretty silly.