Out of curiosity, how did warlocks perform best in vanilla and TBC?

[Dhrizzle]

SM/Ruin in classic. A 30/0/21 spec. Basically just DOT damage plus a crit Shadow Bolt damage bonus.

TBC was a mixed bag, but by the end Destruction was the best spec (and generally had a 1 spell rotation).

Oh what, CoShadow doesn't count as a button now :-P

Although I seem to remember at some point fire destro began to outstrip the SB spam (meaning you also used Immolate!) for personal DPS, but you still needed a few shadow spammers to optimise the mana batteries.

We also had a spec that used Nether Protection, Shadowfury and spammed SoCorr to tank the imps on Illhoof.

[Deleted]

By the time we farmed Illidan for glaives during Sunwell progress, I did that fight just pressing Life Tap and typing /cast Shadow Bolt in the chat window. You got PRETTY used to the SB-spam towards the end of burning crusade

[Deleted]

Warlock did pretty poorly at the start of the game, not really beacause of damage (although Life tap not scaling, DoTs not scaling, and the 8 then 16 debuffs limitation were hindering us). The main problem until Naxxramas was threat generation, especially for those of us who were playing horde. I remember DPS Broodlord Lashlayer with my wand, because of constant aggro resets (literally every boss in BWL had some kind of aggro wipe mechanic). The 30 pts Mastery Demonologist Imp bonus which reduced threat generated by 30% did help. The fact that aggro reset kinda became more scare during Naxx and AQ allowed us to be pretty decent: we could spec either SM/Ruin or better yet 9/21/21 (Imp Life tap, Demo Sac, Ruin) and benefit from the pet res bug. Still rolling ignite firemages and well geared rogues and warriors were better.
At the start of TBC Aff was king (Enchant/tailor + Affli, to get the sick crafted pants and feets), until T6 where FnB/Demo Sac started outscaling Aff and shadowbolt spamming became better. All in all warlocks were in a very good spot for most of TBC.

[Deleted]

I remember DPS Broodlord Lashlayer with my wand, because of constant aggro resets (literally every boss in BWL had some kind of aggro wipe mechanic).

You bring back the ugly memories, thanks
Interesting.. allthough my class was in a very poor spot for most of vanilla, I actually enjoyed it and never really complained or went emo.
Mages are just the better casters to the point where they get the items first? I'm okay with that. DPS some of the bosses (nefarian first phase, if i remember correctly) with my wand? Go for it. I never really blamed blizzard for bad design back then. I actually thought, they were fucking geniuses, when they introduced the first trinket that would reduce the threat you generate.

[snaxattax]

TBC: Shadowbolt spam.

I liked Affliction best...and luckily my guild allowed us to play what we prefered.

affliction was still worthwhile if you had several warlocks & spriests. 13% CoS was really nice.

also, warlocks could do very strong damage in vanilla until they changed how resistance debuffs worked and then later changed demonic sacrifice to wipe when your pet got resurrected. being alliance helped a ton, as you got both blessing and judgement of wisdom for extra mana gains along with salvation for a higher threat ceiling.

[kendro1200]

TBC wasn't always spamming SB. Affliction was quite competitive in both T4 and T5 content.

^ This

Demo also had its short moment of glory with 2t5 and the TK trinket. 0/21/40 really didn't come into play until late Hyjal and BT.

In Vanilla though, yep, it was shadowbolt spam until AQ. In AQ they upped the debuff limit and so you could also put out corruption, but that didn't change sm/ruin (20/0/21 I think or something along those lines) too much apart from having shadow trance. As far as mana consumption, you could get ~8 shadowbolts out before you had to life tap, which wasn't too bad, since most top ranked spells were made so you could only cast them three or four times before they burned out your mana pool. Warlocks were brought to raids in vanilla for health stones, soul stones, curses, summons, banishes (for MC and BWL), mana drain and ranged tanking. Everyone seems to forget that some fights REQUIRED a warlock in resist gear and pvp gloves spamming searing pain, tanking the boss.
Anyways, MoP has been a huge quality of life improvement for warlocks, and I hope the trend in paying attention to the class and its mechanics stays. For a handful of xpacks warlocks got mage talents and mechanics pasted over with warlock flavor, and it plainly didn't work for the class.

[Shadowygoodness]

PvP in tbc entailed us putting up dots and then casting drain life in a desperate attempt to kill us. Drain life and a full round of dots including siphon life (it was a 30 second dot then not a glyph and UA did not exist yet) was usually enough to keep us alive and even have our health go up despite them dpsing us. Then they nerfed Drain life and made it affected by mortal strike effects which was a 50% reduction in all healing done by it if up.

Ummmm UA did exist in TBC. It was the penultimate talent in the affliction tree.

[jackvii]

In Vanilla though, yep, it was shadowbolt spam until AQ. In AQ they upped the debuff limit and so you could also put out corruption, but that didn't change sm/ruin (20/0/21 I think or something along those lines) too much apart from having shadow trance. As far as mana consumption, you could get ~8 shadowbolts out before you had to life tap, which wasn't too bad, since most top ranked spells were made so you could only cast them three or four times before they burned out your mana pool.

A lot of raiders wound up switching to Rank 4 shadowbolt to reduce the lifetapping since spellpower scaling was good enough that you'd only lose about 60dps by downranking. About 90% of warlock spells scaled terribly until WotLK, hence the predominant shadowbolt spam.

Warlocks were pretty terrible throughout Vanilla, especially if you were on a pvp server. Pets would despawn because they couldn't keep up with a lvl 40 mount and there was no limit to pushback so a hunter could essentially shut you down by auto attacks + Brokentooth. My 1-60 experience was a hardship I'd never like to repeat.

[Cairhiin]

Warlocks actually outscaled Mages with Naxx gear in Vanilla...and when you can tap for mana it doesn't really matter what your costs are. Anyone who says locks weren't top-three competitive PvE DPS in Vanilla is just wrong.

And then you overaggroed, Horde had no salvation. Could barely DPS on most fights. Yes, later on in vanilla we had that tranquil air totem, but that was entirely useless for Warlocks as well, as we were always in tank group for Blood Pact.

[Gorthan]

I remember that during late tbc i macroed Sb spam to my G15. Fun times drinking negroni, moving my warlock every now and than to a random boss ability.

[Kanariya]

Warlocks performed pretty poorly in vanilla; we did pretty low damage for high mana and threat

This isn't true at all unless you spec'd wrong (aka Soul Link). SM/Ruin performed very well, and for tier 1 and tier 2 Warlocks were chart toppers when played right. A lock in proper gear with consumables did amazing damage, but yes they did generate a lot of threat. Mages only started beating locks when they could respec Fire and roll 5-stack ignites for 200% crit damage. Gimmicky, though raids were balanced around that.

[Asrialol]

This isn't true at all unless you spec'd wrong (aka Soul Link). SM/Ruin performed very well, and for tier 1 and tier 2 Warlocks were chart toppers when played right. A lock in proper gear with consumables did amazing damage, but yes they did generate a lot of threat. Mages only started beating locks when they could respec Fire and roll 5-stack ignites for 200% crit damage. Gimmicky, though raids were balanced around that.

Did they top the charts in normal or more hardcore guilds? Rogues were pretty beast in my guild back in Vanilla, which was more of a normal / relaxed guild.. Could be we just had shitty warlocks.

I regret I started playing a Mage in Vanilla (Did I say Mage? I meant Decurser). Love the whole feeling of the Warlock, they've been very interesting every expansion imo. I've always had my lock as my main alt.

[Kanariya]

Did they top the charts in normal or more hardcore guilds? Rogues were pretty beast in my guild back in Vanilla, which was more of a normal / relaxed guild.. Could be we just had shitty warlocks.

I regret I started playing a Mage in Vanilla (Did I say Mage? I meant Decurser). Love the whole feeling of the Warlock, they've been very interesting every expansion imo. I've always had my lock as my main alt.

Depends on your warlocks. The key was speccing right 30/0/21, using +damage consumables and gearing properly with spell hit. Spell Hit was probably the biggest thing that could make or break a warlock's DPS, because in Vanilla our spell hit talent only applied to Affliction spells, not Shadow Bolt. Other casters got their spell hit from talents for all their spells, we didn't. Therefore, Shadowbolt had a 17% chance to resist by default, and locks that took no spell hit were seeing a lot of resists. Big dps loss.

I geared up my warlock after ZG came out in mostly dungeon/brs blues and a couple ZG blues plus the Bloodvine tailoring set. Had ~350 spell damage, 8% spell hit and 2% spell crit from gear. Warlocks in some Tier 2 gear did not even come close to that because Tier 2 had no spell hit on it at all and a lot of wasted itemization in HP/5. Bloodvine set > Tier 2 set. The only drawback was the set had no stamina on it at all so I had mage HP.

Also, Mages were more than for Decursing. They were conjure water bots! But they did top DPS for AQ/Naxx because of rolling ignites, and were great on add fights as frost such as Gluth.

[Deleted]

one thing sure, pvp wise, SL/SL locks were the most op class in the arenas ever to date. And after the serious nerfbat affly was still very good. Fun times.

s5 dks? s11 rogues? s12 warriors? just kids

[Shadowygoodness]

one thing sure, pvp wise, SL/SL locks were the most op class in the arenas ever to date. And after the serious nerfbat affly was still very good. Fun times.

s5 dks? s11 rogues? s12 warriors? just kids

Have to agree with this. I felt like a god in season 2 and to a lesser extent in season 3.

[Cyner]

To be honest, the only think I remember about Vanilla is farming shards for hours. I'm pretty certain it's the only thing I ever did.

[Moggie]

''Warlocks performed pretty poorly in vanilla; we did pretty low damage for high mana and threat (when compared to mages) plus life-tap didn't scale with gear so you needed to use it every two or three shadow-bolts when mana got low. Also there was a very low limit to the number of debuffs the raid could put on a boss so the DoTs didn't really work. Mostly they were taken for Curse of Elements (which only affected Fire, Frost and Nature back then; Curse of Shadow was for Shadow, Arcane and Holy), Soulstones and the occasional Banish.''

??????? Warlocks did excellent damage in vanilla with SM/Ruin. Was one of the top damage classes in the game then along side combat rogues. Then when 2.0 talent came about you could go deep demonology for the fel guard and really tear shit up. Sucked when he died to AE though. I paid a healer stacks of mana pots before raids to keep it alive ).

In Vanilla? Nope. Warlocks (assuming your raid wasn't fail and didn't take more than 2 locks tops) were were the bottom of the totem pole. GG 6-7 Mages, 6-7 Rogues in the raids vs. you and only you. Lol. Zero scaling, poor quality of life vs. utilities, etc... CoS wasn't really used much. You casted CoW and CoE. That's it. If you were seriously trying to put Corruption on a boss, then I feel for your raid since it was a waste what with the 8 (eventual) 16 debuff slots. It wasn't until TBC when Warlock damage jumped through the roof. And SB wasn't entirely the best spec until the latter part of T5, T6 when you had the gear. Demo was *never* viable. It was a gimmick toy spec that had zero place in an actual raid environment. Lol

[Tidezen]

Ah, SM/Ruin...I loved that spec. Though I seem to remember another that was good for awhile that I haven't seen mentioned, 9/21/21. Anyone remember that one? 9 afflic for instant corruption and some other stuff, 21 demo for...sacrifice pet I believe? And 21 destro for ruin still.

Warlocks were great back then, but they really took some getting used to. I was on the #2 guild on my server at the time, consistently was in the top 1-3 on damage, in 40-man content. Although to be humble I'll say we also only had one truly great mage and one really good rogue at the time. Also a fury warrior who had Grand Marshal gear, holy cow was he good.

But the other people telling you warlock dps was low back then...I believe them. I was class leader for I think 7 locks at the time, and none of them were even close, more middle of the pack to lower end. I guess I was a bad class lead at the time, didn't know how to help them up. Although I also think a huge part of it was the debuff limit...if you coordinated really well with your raid team and made sure you had the essential debuffs up and no extraneous ones at all, then locks could really shine. You really couldn't stack locks in a raid, you needed two at most (for the two curses), and past that, their dps would really start dropping off, due to dots falling off.

Still, all that said, warlock dps is much, much harder these days, even though we're still great. Waaay more dependence on procs. I HATE proc-based classes. And yet here I am, stubbornly sticking to my lock and feral druid, hoping blizz will someday wake up and let me play the class I truly enjoy again.

[Deleted]

I cant live without droping a qq on the lock revamp- but warlocks before mop felt hell more evil with the old talents and builds And much more fun. Just to drop the qq bomb.

[Tidezen]

I cant live without droping a qq on the lock revamp- but warlocks before mop felt hell more evil with the old talents and builds And much more fun. Just to drop the qq bomb.

LOL, again just one of the perks of being an officer, but back in vanilla I could sometimes get my guild to do the doomguard summon (which at the time required five people to summon, and outright KILLED one of them as a sacrifice). Also, I made it a habit in Molten Core to summon the last three people into midair above the lava, for being the laziest to get there. Yeah, warlocks were definitely more evil back then.