Warlock Threat Ideas

[zoso88]

Been reading recently about lock threat issues and to a certain extent I agree that there are threat problems for certain classes, namely the amount of burst that comes from a destro spec. It's easy to say give tanks a few more seconds etc, but in fights like Hodir hard mode and the likes where every last bit of dps counts its not always an option.

I think the answer lies in replacing our only aggro dump, an outdated one at that. The problem with Soulshatter is that its all but useless until about mid way through a fight, and the fact the cooldown is 5min.

So I got thinking about a couple of new abilities that could replace Soulshatter. I'm not really sure about exact numbers but I'll throw them out there.

First one is a self-banish. It would be an instant-cast channeled ability that costs a decent amount of mana and maybe a soulshard (or either of the two). While the lock is in this self-banished state he/she can't attack and loses 10% threat per sec. Could maybe make the lock untargettable during the duration of the spell (I was thinking of a 5sec duration). However moving cancels the spell, and for example purposes it could have a 2min cooldown.

I could see a potential problem with the untargettable part of the spell in PVP, and it could be a little OP.

The 2nd idea I had was a spell similar to Health Funnel but instead of health we transfer threat to our current pet. I was thinking it could have the same numbers as the spell above (ie 10% per sec, maximum of 50% threat transferred) and be on a similar 2min cooldown.

By no means are my numbers definitive but they give you a rough idea on how they would work, and how useful they would be. Feedback from the Warlock community is appreciated.



EDIT: Title - proof reading ftw.

[DruidFTW]

So... you cant hold dps for half a second because every bit of dps is needed, and your suggestion around this is a selfbanish where you cannot dps for 30 seconds?

1. Get better tanks.

2. Hold dps at the start of a fight.

3. Watch omen.

4. If your threat is too high, stop dps till it is low.

Back in the day, when raiding was about making intelligent decisions at the right time, and not just facerolling aoe with no cc, you had to do all four of these things. Im glad if they are bringing them back.

[Deleted]

Back in the day, when raiding was about making intelligent decisions at the right time, and not just facerolling aoe with no cc, you had to do all four of these things. Im glad if they are bringing them back.

Fine,

But then threat problems should be the same for all classes and specs.

By the way "Back then" everything was better and we were true mensch and the younger generation has it on a plate nowadays blah blah blah.

[zoso88]

I think you misunderstood me there DruidFTW. I'm not trying to suggest Blizz include an ability that makes it not worth your while to care about threat, allowing us to faceroll, as i'm against that. i think threat management is an important skill for a DPSer.

All I was doing was putting out a few suggestions for abilities that could help with the issues with threat us locks have. It's such a cliché response saying 'get better tanks' and it isn't always a viable option. My guilds tanks are extremely good and rarely have problems with aggro, but if there are its almost always from a warlock.

It is easy to sit there and say 'hold off dps for a few seconds', a point that I agree with btw, and 'Watch Omen'. But with dps intensive fights, for example Hodir, Thorim and Mimiron hard modes, it's not really a very viable option.

P.S Not sure where you got 30secs from DruidFTW, thinking of our current Banish spell perhaps? I stated my idea was for a 5sec (or thereabouts) channeled spell, which can be cancelled at any time.

[Saikred]

We have threat issues?

No... get better tanks and if you need to, take threat reducing talents / enchants.

I never have any issues. Although our tanks are imba.

[rabbimojo]

So... you cant hold dps for half a second because every bit of dps is needed, and your suggestion around this is a selfbanish where you cannot dps for 30 seconds?

1. Get better tanks.

2. Hold dps at the start of a fight.

3. Watch omen.

4. If your threat is too high, stop dps till it is low.

Back in the day, when raiding was about making intelligent decisions at the right time, and not just facerolling aoe with no cc, you had to do all four of these things. Im glad if they are bringing them back.

There's no "get better tanks" on some of these encounters. Plain and simple you can out-threat any tank with some fight mechanics, not to mention that if warlock DPS is capped because of tank skill, and nobody else's is.. How is that fair? hmm?

Anyways, watching omen, waiting for tank to get a lead, those are fine. The lead thing is really just about giving yourself a buffer to react to crit strings, though, not about any sort of long-term threat rate workaround.

The problem here is that fights these days do not brook a warlock that "stop dps till it is low"s. That's the entire problem. We're running into situations where warlocks are a liability on many fights, demanding a lot of extra raid attention to keep viable. That just seems silly.

Realistically, locks don't need dramatic revamps on threat. It's not -that- bad. Hybrids as a rule have low threat, but no dumps, so it's not worth comparing against. A lot of conversations on this topic compare lock threat gen (arguably highest in game), with DK dps threat (which has pretty ridiculous reductions, as well as a solid amount offloaded onto a pet). Bad comparison.

Lock threat vs. hunter threat? Hunters have FD, they're blessed. Plenty offloaded to pet, MD, etc.
vs. rogue threat? Rogues have ToT, which not only reduces their own threat but buffs the tank's. Vanish is also instant and, with a tiny amount of thought, guaranteed to work. Also have reduced threat gen, but mostly this compensates for the lower cap from melee range.
vs. mage threat? Similar output, similar threat reduction talents (barring arcane). Invis has ups and downs, main down being how fragile it is. In bad shape like we are, for the same fights.

Amongst purists, it's really just the two casters that have trouble. Changing our 10% threat to be 15% threat (ours and mages') is probably about as much as we really need. I think it would be nice if shatter were 3 minutes, too, just to allow for fights with multiple resets, or where for whatever reason we had to shatter early. Beyond that, intelligence makes shatter go a long ways.

Oh, and we need our incidental aggro (heals/mana) to get the hell out, too.

[Bakis]

So... you cant hold dps for half a second because every bit of dps is needed, and your suggestion around this is a selfbanish where you cannot dps for 30 seconds?

1. Get better tanks.

2. Hold dps at the start of a fight.

3. Watch omen.

4. If your threat is too high, stop dps till it is low.

Back in the day, when raiding was about making intelligent decisions at the right time, and not just facerolling aoe with no cc, you had to do all four of these things. Im glad if they are bringing them back.

Sure if that went for all classes. At the moments warlocks suffer the most, the 2 most viable specs both can't afford max threatreduction. Basicly its our selfhealing + pet that bork us compared to other classes. Hell, when I started doing hc my pet would do like 3 times more % of my damage done, now it plummited to 6-8%, guess where the rest of the threat ends up zzzz. Ontop of this there is a suspected bug with warlocksthreat.
The "get better tanks" is so outdated, any good guild would have its tanks confirming that warlocks got a borked threatgeneration.

Hopefully BLZ is looking into this due to Ghostcrawlers response to a thread about warlock threat.

[rabbimojo]

We have threat issues?

No... get better tanks and if you need to, take threat reducing talents / enchants.

I never have any issues. Although our tanks are imba.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.
Hard to say from this: Maybe my tanks suck, maybe you/your locks suck. Either way I'm pretty sure your tanks aren't handily out-threatting you on Vezax. Hodir I can see a protadin keeping up fine.

Bigger concern here is not just at the top end of things, though. Even if -your- tanks are fine, mine are not. I personally think they're quite skilled, as I've run with them for years and know their ups and downs. Threat's never been an issue with them, and isn't now, with a handful of small exceptions. *shrug*

[Menestheus]

We have threat issues?
No... get better tanks and if you need to, take threat reducing talents / enchants.
I never have any issues. Although our tanks are imba.

Let's do a quick comparison to other ranged casters shall we?

Moonkin: 30% threat reduction from 2 talent points, no threat drop
Arcane Mage: 40% threat reduction from 2 talent points, Iceblock + Invis + Mirror Image
Fire Mage: 10% threat reduction from 2 talent points, Iceblock + Invis + Mirror Image
Frost Mage: 10% threat reduction from 3 talent points, Iceblock + Invis + Mirror Image
Shadow Priest: No threat reduction I can find outside of Fade and yet I never see them near the top of threat despite doing similar DPS to me, did I miss something?
Elemental Shaman: 30% threat reduction from 3 talent points and Lightning Overload causes no threat, no threat drop
Affliction Warlock: 10% threat reduction (on 75% of your DPS) from 2 talent points, Soulshatter
Destro Warlock: 10% threat reduction (on 94% of your DPS) from 2 talent points, Soulshatter

Mages have much more varied tools for dealing with excess threat even though some of their tools aren't proper threat drops they are still helpful. I don't know about other warlocks but I know that I've gone through Vezax fights where I needed 4 hand of salvs and a Soulshatter to avoid pulling aggro. And then I was behind other casters who hadn't had nearly as many threat issues.

The suggestion in the OP, while rough and in need of work, could solve two issues. Blizzard have acknowledged that warlocks are not where they want them to be in PvP and this would give us something resembling Iceblock as a defensive cooldown, everything that Demonic Circle promised to be but isn't. And it would also help our threat issues especially if we continue to be confronted by fights like Hodir and Vezax.

[Bakis]

We have threat issues?

No... get better tanks and if you need to, take threat reducing talents / enchants.

I never have any issues. Although our tanks are imba.

You dont exactly have tiptop gear if your the warlock on EU armory. You also gemmed -threat reduction metagem which is odd. You'r also affliction and they can have threatissues as well but not to the degree that the burstspecs got.

People from random guilds arguing the "get better tanks" is pretty lame since there seem to be a widespread consensus withing the hardcore guilds incl. forum analysis from both dps's and tanks that warlock threat in comparison to damage done are often weird, to say the least.
I keep comparing my lock with the other locks and mages in my guild. The mages can have a critstreak and be ontop of damage done and im still way above them.
It's still the same and now I picked 10% reduction. Just doesn't add up when I get fewer crits and less damage done and still suffer from ~20% more threat then them.

Anyone should understand that a 12k conflag crit followed by 13k CB will be huge in threat initially but if we think of the whole picture that warlocks are really concerned with, its the sustained high tps we sufffer during an entire fight. When then comparing that threatlevel to a mage something becomes obviously flawed in the lack of sync.

[Kalastårtan]

I agree that we locks don't got that much threat reduce like hunter FD and priest Fade WTF I always overaggro in ine way or another so I have to save my soulshatter until the boss goes on me then I use it it's like phu it was close and in the next moment I overaggro again and I die... The tanks are realy good and so on but locks takes to much aggro while dpsing so why don't give us another threat reduce or take away the damn cd we just keep praying that we survive the fight. My m8s don't wanna go anythimg with me cause I dies all the time.

[Screwtape]

I believe 30% threat reduction is built into shadowform. :P Hooray for parity.

I saw a Blue comment (maybe it was on the front page) that said that they did not want to reduce the cd on soulshatter because they didn't like the idea of hitting it every cd.

I agree with some of the previous posters in that I think the solution lies in increasing the threat reducing talents.

[Exorte]

I believe 30% threat reduction is built into shadowform. :P Hooray for parity.

I saw a Blue comment (maybe it was on the front page) that said that they did not want to reduce the cd on soulshatter because they didn't like the idea of hitting it every cd.

I agree with some of the previous posters in that I think the solution lies in increasing the threat reducing talents.

then at least give it no resist chance and always hits.

[gherkin]

I see a lot of people asking for a self-banish. And I understand this forum is filled with Demo/Destruction lovers, so here you go:

A Self-Banish will unfairly punish Demo and Destro locks and unfairly benefit Affliction locks. DoT's still tick whereas you cannot cast Incinerate or what have you. Thus, Affliction will be the least hurt by this.

Considering that Destruction is the one with the most threat issues at the moment I would say that this is a bad idea.


If your main tank is a warrior, tell him to Vigilence you. Especially if the fight is AOE heavy.
If your main tank is a paladin, he is bad. Paladin threat is, and should be, insane.
If your main tank is a druid or death knight, whisper a paladin healer (BEFORE THE FIGHT) and tell him to hit you with Hand of Salvation. This way he can macro it to you whenever you ask.

If you are still screwed, wait until 3.2, or 3.3 at the very latest.

[Tumdace]

The issue is that our threat per DPS is MUCH higher than any other classes. Its simply not an issue of just plain threat, but the amount of threat we deal per damage compared to other classes is ridiculously unbalanced.

I think buffing Destructive Reach to 10/20 or even 7/15% would be a huge improvement.

You say "get better tanks", but what you don't understand is that other classes doing similar or greater dps than a warlock will be much further behind on threat than a warlock.

I remember doing a fight in naxx where my mage was getting 7k dps right off the bat from spike damage and I only reached 5500 (this wasnt loatheb btw...) and the tank was at like 100k threat, I was at 90k, and the mage was at like 50k.

Sometimes in naxx or even ulduar, looking at omen, I can pump out upwards of 4000 threat per second due to my burst capabilities, and while my tanks aren't perfect, they are very capable and can only pump out like 3500 or so. Numbers could be off a bit but you get the idea.

Our dps should not be limited by having a super uber tank. My tanks are geared enough and knowledgeable enough, but the amount of threat warlocks put out compared to other classes is just ridiculous.

BTW, the self banish is the worst idea I have ever heard. Stopping dps to reduce threat is terrible. DR just needs a small buff, 5% at most and we would be fine. If I ran with a warrior tank all the time I would have 0 threat problems. Whenever I run 25 mans with our warrior tank (hes not always at the raids) and he puts vigilence on me, I have no problems at all with threat. I can stay at about 105 or 110% threat instead of the 120 or w/e the number is at which you pull aggro.

[Baako]

People who say get better tanks are full of themselves.

All warlocks on my server are having major threat issues.

I did a Maly 25 pug the other day. Had one of my guild tanks tanking it, he wears alot of uld10/25 tanking loot with a few naxx25 pieces thrown in.

His threat gen is far above everyone other than locks.

He put Vigi on me and a couple of Huntards MD onto him aswell.

Yet the 4 locks in the run all on his arse in threat. We all had to soul shatter b4 p2.

I was the most geared outta them aswell i got 4p t8 and TT all the others had 4p t7 with Life and Death or worse.

Locks just need a perma 10% threat reduction IMO and then talents do the rest.

[demonocus]

Stop spamming searing pain?

[aztek]

I did a Maly 25 pug the other day. Had one of my guild tanks tanking it, he wears alot of uld10/25 tanking loot with a few naxx25 pieces thrown in.

Ever heard about those shiny stuffs called Sparks? You know, the ones increasing your dps by A LOT. FYI, having an increased DPS means you will have increased aggro. Rocket science, huh? If a warlock doesn't have threat problems on a proper Malygos kill, then he is bad. Heck, I even had threat problems as affliction pre 3.1 when I didn't have so much burst as I do have at the moment - altough we were abusing Demonic Circle while the tank couldn't build aggro, we still managed it.

The key is the right time to use shatter. Reach 120%, use it, then you will never-ever have problems again. Even if you do (Hodir HM, Vezax, etc.) ask a paladin to Salvation you. Do not tell me that a threat-halving ability + 1 HoS is not enough per fight...

And yes, the people saying "get better tanks" might be full of themselves, but at least they have good tanks. Sorry for my arrogant post, but no locks should have threat problems in the current content ever.

[gherkin]

Also, people who complain about Malygos threat generally raided Affliction pre 3.1, whereas now they all reaid Destro or Demo. Malygos is not Affliction friendly because you have to recast dots while in the power spark to get the benefit.

Demo/Destruction doesn't have this problem. Thus threat issues become more apparent on this fight.

Not saying threat isn't a problem, its just not as bad as people make it out to be. Seriously - ask for Hand of Salvation.

[atf]

Wait for tank to get aggro?

Iono ???