Optimal Farming?

[Rife]

How are you guys farming normal mobs?

Single chain pulling as destro?

Multi dotting everything as afflic? Is this possible without decent gear? Harvest life doesn't look like it's enough to survive through 6+ dotted mobs on you?

Demo?

What setups/methods/specs have you guys found as the best way to farm?

[Nivrax]

Both Demo and Destro works fine for aoe farming. Demo, Dark Apo for safe version or Meta for bursting everything down before Shadowfury fades. Destro, you need enough targets to generate more embers than you spend, then just F&B huge groups with Ember Tap between each Incin.

[Bonkura]

I find Demo being superior with the demon zoo using harvest life and glyph of soul consumption. Insane AoE and uptime on Meta. I never understand how people manage to justify other specs in threads like this. I feel I need to make a video of me farming to finally end the discussions.

[Zumzumzum]

I find Demo being superior with the demon zoo using harvest life and glyph of soul consumption. Insane AoE and uptime on Meta. I never understand how people manage to justify other specs in threads like this. I feel I need to make a video of me farming to finally end the discussions.

Destro is awesome for solo farming too.

[Bonkura]

I find the survivability/mobility with Destro being a big problem. I guess ember tap and soul consumption might help out but you still need to spend a lot of time kiting and can't go man mode like Demo when you have pulled big packs and just tank the mobs.

[Lowdiskspace]

Grab soul leech as destro, use voidlord, fnb immolate, spam rof, embertap when needed, fnb backlash procs incinerate = profit im farming around 15-20 mobs at once easy all die around the same time shadowburn mobs at 20% for extra embers have fun. Btw dont forget soulink

[Nivrax]

You don't kite as Destro, you exploit infinite embers and heal through anything mobs throw at you.

[Shodan30]

I find destro amazingly easy to quest with. with supremacy, the voidwalker is an absolute amazing tank. Ill usually conflag one mob, tag a second with bane, chaos bolt a third, and i might get hit once before the voidwalker has picked up all three. Then i just RoF, burning ember immolate the lot, which alot of times pulls a few more mobs, then shadowburn the lot when they are in a nice circle. Then just burning ember conflag burning ember incinerate. heal if i get too many and need to but the void really never dies.

[ddk]

I find Affliction is pretty amazing for farming with the Soul Link and Soul Leach talents and the Soul Consumption and Siphon Life glyphs. I can basically chain-pull anywhere from 4-6 mobs continuously using Soulburn > Soulswap and making sure Drain Soul is up on the kill. This returns a huge amount of health through Corruption, Drain Soul, Malefic Grasp and the occasional Haunt, not to mention the constant return of GoSac (not to mention the massive amount of extra health) which is not to be underestimated. With constant shard replenishment and therefore redoing Soulburn > Soulswap on mobs, I can clear out an entire area in a few minutes and end with full health, shards and mana.

In the occasional instance where I might get overwhelmed by unexpected adds or respawns, the Shadow Bulwark from GoSac acts almost like a heal, plus with Archimonde's Vengeance and popping Dark Soul: Misery and bringing my Doomguard along and a Healthstone for good measure, I obliterate the crap out of everything and rarely die.

The only time I ever have trouble is when I get multiple mobs with multiple interrupts. That pretty much kills me because I don't get the huge amount of health return and shards replenished through Drain Soul. But then I'm guessing any caster will have difficulties in that circumstance.

[Nagassh]

Multi dotting everything as afflic? Is this possible without decent gear? Harvest life doesn't look like it's enough to survive through 6+ dotted mobs on you?

I was able to handle over 6 mobs while leveling as affliction, let alone at level cap with semi decent gear. Pretty sure I used dark regen over harvest life too, though I could be mistaken on that.

I generally do daily quests as affliction and just dot as much as I can see, then focus one mob down and drain soul it to death, get more shards and the glyphed hp restore, then repeat with the remaining mobs, dragging more in if I can. I prefer supremacy for this, but have sometimes been stuck with sacrifice if I don't want to swap glyphs between raiding and questing.

If I just want to farm up motes or something, I usually go demo and farm the waves of beer stealing sprites at one of the golden lotus daily hubs, harvest life + DA + Manoroths fury means I can aggro as many sprites as spawn and have zero trouble staying alive. Can get quite a lot of motes that way.

[Elanas]

I find Demo being superior with the demon zoo using harvest life and glyph of soul consumption.

This is how I'm doing it too, with Dark Apotheosis. Destruction has, of course, wonderful AOE oomph, but Dark Apotheosis makes me so much tougher and cuts down on the downtime almost to zero, or all the way to zero, depending on the luck of the RNG. It's fun.

[cronix]

I find Affliction is pretty amazing for farming with the Soul Link and Soul Leach talents and the Soul Consumption and Siphon Life glyphs. I can basically chain-pull anywhere from 4-6 mobs continuously using Soulburn > Soulswap and making sure Drain Soul is up on the kill. This returns a huge amount of health through Corruption, Drain Soul, Malefic Grasp and the occasional Haunt, not to mention the constant return of GoSac (not to mention the massive amount of extra health) which is not to be underestimated. With constant shard replenishment and therefore redoing Soulburn > Soulswap on mobs, I can clear out an entire area in a few minutes and end with full health, shards and mana.

In the occasional instance where I might get overwhelmed by unexpected adds or respawns, the Shadow Bulwark from GoSac acts almost like a heal, plus with Archimonde's Vengeance and popping Dark Soul: Misery and bringing my Doomguard along and a Healthstone for good measure, I obliterate the crap out of everything and rarely die.

The only time I ever have trouble is when I get multiple mobs with multiple interrupts. That pretty much kills me because I don't get the huge amount of health return and shards replenished through Drain Soul. But then I'm guessing any caster will have difficulties in that circumstance.

Exactly this, only other this is rotating defensive cd's for an 'oh shit' moment. unending resolve, shadow fury, infernal, last stand/lay on hands. I combo my last stand (shadow bulwark) with my healing macro which is basically just healthstone (glyphed) and dark regen. This combo takes me over 700k health and the heals tick for 70k per sec, remember warlock heals are all % based more hp = more healing. Even while getting ganked by a deathknight at 100k hp today with 5 mobs on me i just poped this little sucker out healed his burst once it ran out (i was at full hp) shadow fury into fear if he breaks that i pop unending resolve for another fear (even if he breaks the fear he still gets slowed) and its all too easy. no pointless harvest life/drain life needed.

[heruka]

I never understand how people manage to justify other specs in threads like this.

Me neither. I sometimes use DA with grimserv and 2 fellies, sometimes no DA with grimsup and voidlord (I tend to pull aggro off Negatrax when in DA). Both with awesome results. Doing dailies I can easily pull 6 to 8 mobs and kill them all. Sometimes more accidentally join the party and I welcome them Sure it can get close, but it's a lot of fun. Glyph of Wild Imps gets your fury up quicker, combine that with Harvest Life and you're purple in no time. The more mobs, the quicker your fury gets up. Meta + ImmoAura + Harvest Life, Shadowfury to cool things down when needed. ToC to melt some faces in a jiffy. Sometimes guiding the voidlord onto targets bashing you (or Axe Toss even). And keeping HoG on CD, Corr and (for the longer fights) Doom up. You have a super healthstone with the glyph, maybe pop a health potion when needed (I started with 40 pots at around level 87 and still haven't used them all). If you play with DA, you have your own "bubble" on a very short cooldown. Towards the end you'll run out of fury but you'll sit with a boat load of MC stacks to spend on big hits with more HoGs and you're back to building fury quickly which you can usually spend on ToC to finish the last survivors off with. The intensity is matched by the amount of fun you're having. I seldom die, usually due to being too brave but then you just do another big pull to enact just revenge on their glutes.

I stack a lot of mastery (around 5300) and found it more suitable to my playstyle than going for any haste breakpoints right now.

As affliction it takes much longer for me to get down a lot of mobs and if you aggro off your voidlord you're rather squishy. For me, being tougher beats having more HP or health regen. Shard regen is more work when you have to single target mobs near death than the almost brute force purple power you have in Demo. YMMV, but just give demo a try, for me it is the most fun any lock spec has been since I started playing in Wrath and other than the silly wand bug, I have zero qualms with Demo.

I can't speak for destro farming, I gave it a brief try and just couldn't get into it. For me Demo > Aff >> Destro. But that's just my preference.

Again, ymmv, but whatever you choose, you can still laugh at those players you find out there only able to handle one or two mobs at a time. Let them try getting Nanners and a bunch of his elite sidekicks down on their own

Select the poor sod.
use this macro:

/lol
/say Look at me, I'm a warlock. Now look at you. Now look at me again. I'm purple.

[planktin]

aoe farming with affliction, i dot everything SB: Curse of Exhaustion, kite and spam fel flame
when the adds are a little faster to kill, i just SB:SoC, tab SoC and harvest life

[Iry]

Best farming? Dark Apotheosis - Dread Wastes - Raining Blood Enhancement - Soul Harvest - Kil'Jaeden's Cunning. Auto run up and down the main strip, tagging everything with harvest then blow everyone up when you have about 20-30 guys on you. I average about 4-5 Spirits per hour.

[Aianos]

Whoever said something about making a video on Demo farming, i wouldnt mind watching that. Upto now i've just been more comfortable pulling 4-6 mobs as affliction. Had a hard time as demo but i reckon its before i have no idea how to do it properly.

[ddk]

As affliction it takes much longer for me to get down a lot of mobs and if you aggro off your voidlord you're rather squishy.

If you have a voidlord up as affliction, then you're doing it wrong.

[Bonkura]

If you have a voidlord up as affliction, then you're doing it wrong.

So what you are saying is that it's a bigger DPS loss to use a VW/VL to make sure you can channel MG/DS than using GoSac and jump around fel flaming while hoping your dots will kill everything? Stop being silly.

[heruka]

If you have a voidlord up as affliction, then you're doing it wrong.

The voidlord is an incredible tank, he aggros quickly, heals himself and is a great demon to use for quests and farming. Having such an awesome tank outweighs the dps loss.

[Iry]

So what you are saying is that it's a bigger DPS loss to use a VW/VL to make sure you can channel MG/DS than using GoSac and jump around fel flaming while hoping your dots will kill everything? Stop being silly.

To be fair, MoP is not big on interrupting mobs so you can safely MG/DS with GoSac most of the time.