Shadow priest or warlock? Arena-wise.

[Deleted]

Hi there,

I'm having a hard time choosing between those two, what are your thoughts? Some pros and cons would be awesome!

[Galbrei]

Well, since the nerf to chaos wave warlocks have been a bit grumpy. Don't know about the situation with S priests though.

[Resentful]

Not exactly an arena god here but here

Demo
+ Still decent burst every 2 mins even after the nerf; Not truly as viable
+ Mobility Jump
+ Knockback and Interrupt via Carrion Swarm
- When your CD's are gone you really don't have anything else outside of demo form or Dark soul combined with your Double pet and imp swarm
- Aura of X spell has been nudered and thus I believe It's not worth casting?

In short your damage is awful without your CD's, You're like a better rogue.

Destro
+ Chaosbolt
+ Defensive Embertap
+ Execute
+ Bane of Havoc and Execute = Painful

Destro's Execute will annihilate a person 99% of the time. It hurts A LOT

Affliction

- I honestly do not know the goods and bads
+ I have seen amazing affliction locks via stream but well you can't really judge the spec because of one person or a hand full anyway.

[Redversion]

In short your damage is awful without your CD's, You're like a better rogue.

This is off target. Out of all 3 specs, demo has the most pressure outside of your CDs.

But anyway since you didn't ask about the differences in warlock specs...

Overall if you are only interested in arenas I would recommend shadow priests. Shadow priests have damage, but they also provide a lot of support. An incredible amount of support. You will be communicating with your healer a lot. You have life grips, health swap, mass dispel, and offhealing to help your team. Mass dispel by itself is also a nice offensive spell.

Locks focus more on damage and lose out on the utility of a priest. For the most part, a lock will do more damage than a spriest will, especially because spriests spend time in arena playing defensive with heals and such.

Spriest are very popular right now. You can play shadowplay, god comp, euro comp... you can almost pair with any DPS and healer and be 2.2k viable. Locks are by no means shit, but they are definitely not as dominate as they were last season.

Overall, both are viable choices for arena, but currently spriests are more viable.

[kharyll]

I think that Spriests have a healthier balance of dots/direct damage/utility compared to warlocks. Warlocks have always either dots or burst outweighing the other two.

My 2 cents.

[SnorlaxJeng]

Spriest.

Bubble , Life Swap , Dispersion, Damage while on the move, Burst, Fade Peels, Stealth Escape, Strongest Off-healer, Blanket Silence, Fear, A very strong defensive fear.