Looking for tips to help our Warlock improve

[Lefty12]

Hey guys, I posted in the Warlock section last week to get help for one of our raiders on Council and it helped alot. His DPS went up substantially and we were able to down them. However we promptly moved onto Tortos and he's immediately struggling again. Of all the damage done to Whirl Turtles he was ~5% of it. Our tanks were often doing more DPS to them than he was.

I want to cut him some slack because we've only pulled Tortos ~5 times so i'm sure he will get more comfortable with the fight. Also MoP is his first raiding experience so he's essentially been playing WoW for ~4-5 months (we didn't start raiding until the very end of 5.1).

What I'd like to do is figure out a way to get him to improve as a player rather than continuing to beg for all your help every time we come to a new boss. Should I just have him practice on a target dummy all the time? Are there ways to track his "activity" because I'm assuming there are long periods of no casting (he was doing around 50k on Tortos if I remember correctly). Any basic tips to improve his fundamentals would be really appreciated.

Also please refrain from "replace him" comments. We're a group of IRL friends, not random strangers who formed a guild, and no one is going anywhere.

Thanks so much for any help! Here's logs http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ucakaq5icu542oql/

[Deleted]

What I'd like to do is figure out a way to get him to improve as a player rather than continuing to beg for all your help every time we come to a new boss.

Ideally it would be him on this forum, youtube and many other places, pursuing ways to improve his performance. That is what it is going to take.
I assume since you are here that his dps is an outlier on the low side, doesn't that already make him look around trying to improve? Perhaps he doesnt know where to begin?

[crakerjack]

Kick him out of the guild... are you his mom? If WoW is school... you're the over concerned parent who continues to do her sons homework because he's unwilling... Make him do his part and learn his class on each fight... if he doesn't know how to adjust, sit him. YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO A SINGLE THING ON HIS BEHALF. If he wants to be a better player, then he will go and research his class... if not... he gets sit. He's not going to learn when all you do is constantly help him... he's going to rely on you whenever there's an aspect of the game he can't comprehend. Take off the kiddie wheels and tell him to simply go on wowhead and do some reading. Not once when I played did I ever encounter someone like that... it's likely due to the fact that I was either doing high end raiding or high end pvp... i've never casually done something in WoW.

I can tell you this... if I were you... I would send him a tell after the first raid saying "Hey man, I understand you like playing, but so does everyone else... now is it fair when all of us research the fight and our class, but you don't? Is it fair that we put forth extra work outside the game when you don't? These are just simple requirements to play with us... we're all working hard to progress, I need you to do the same and if you can't, I'm sorry but you'll have to be benched." I just have a low tolerance for when people aren't trying or they come unprepared... no flasks no food no pots no nothing... they just walk in as if everyone else is on their timer.

oh and one more thing... make sure he doesn't click... clicking and raiding don't work... make sure he has atleast 20+ keybindings, not counting 1-12.

[Khargol]

So i'm guessing its your destro lock, but I see two in the logs. First off tell them to be aware that as ranged turtles will often decide to run way away. Setting up portals ore gateways to move quickly across the room can be helpful. Also in general getting a slow off as new turtles appear is critical to proper dps on them. Both locks should have snares. Affliction has curse of exhaustion (it can be glyphed for extreme slow but isn't needed on normal) and conflag can be glyphed to not need immolate to snare the target. Destro should be using this glyph since here for slows.

Just a general note, whoever is kicking needs to not be missing shells. If you are dying to furious breath you can either save a shell from each batch or you can try to kick a shell thru the next wave of turtles increasing damage done on them. It may help to loosely group in the middle as turtles spawn to help keep them together. Nothing is worse than one person out to the side and three turtles take off after them.

Also deadlockk seems to be gearing crit over haste. He should be fine, but he may have better returns focusing on haste and mastery. This tier has almost insane amounts of crit on gear and its hard to get away from.

[Deleted]

Kick him out of the guild... are you his mom?

Amazing contribution, did you actually read the whole OP?

Also please refrain from "replace him" comments. We're a group of IRL friends, not random strangers who formed a guild, and no one is going anywhere.

[ZakAtack]

Amazing contribution, did you actually read the whole OP?

Yeah but at the same time, people will inevitably get annoyed when they see a raid leader coming onto the forums every week posting the same "help our warlock improve on <insert boss here>." Before it was Council, now it's Tortos, will it be Megaera next week? And when you come ask for him, you're asking players who are on the forum already, meaning they put time and effort into their character. But you want them to help out someone who doesn't care enough to do it themselves? As good as it is for friends to raid together, is it fun for everyone when one person is lagging so badly but doesn't even want to try and improve themselves, and just lets their raid leader do it for them?

You can keep asking for help, I just wouldn't be terribly surprised at annoyed/hostile responses when you're basically asking the forum to help someone who doesn't want to look it up themselves. Not to mention you'd see a much greater improvement if this lock actually did this stuff on his own. Watching a video of a Destro lock on Tortos is going to help much more than relaying a forum post to him.

Anyways for Tortos, Destro locks should Havoc on to Tortos as much as possible, switch to turtles, and put up couple of Rain of Fires on bats when they come down to generate tons of Embers. For Quake Stomp, Sac Pact lines up with it perfectly, but Soul Link might work better if the damage is mitigated by it. I'm not 100% clear on how Soul Link works with Quake Stomp though. Not a terribly complicated fight for locks really. Blow up turtles, aoe bats, dps boss. Don't stand in blue circles. It's only tough for the shell kickers really.

[Lefty12]

You guys are right, it would be very irritating so see a new post from me every week asking about a new boss... which is why in my original post I specifically said I didn't want this to be about Tortos but rather general tips to improve his fundamentals so I wouldn't have to do this again.

I know he should be doing this on his own but he's new and clueless and i'm just trying to get him started. I'm looking for help not a rant. Like Mordors suggestion to have him watch Tortos from a locks perspective was helpful as I hadn't thought of that.

Essentially I want to know how to coach a brand new warlock raider to get him up to speed. What do good warlocks do before every new boss to make sure their DPS is up to snuff?

[Kink]

You guys are right, it would be very irritating so see a new post from me every week asking about a new boss... which is why in my original post I specifically said I didn't want this to be about Tortos but rather general tips to improve his fundamentals so I wouldn't have to do this again.

I know he should be doing this on his own but he's new and clueless and i'm just trying to get him started. I'm looking for help not a rant. Like Mordors suggestion to have him watch Tortos from a locks perspective was helpful as I hadn't thought of that.

Essentially I want to know how to coach a brand new warlock raider to get him up to speed. What do good warlocks do before every new boss to make sure their DPS is up to snuff?

Well, it's usually guess work when there's no documentation (and basic knowledge of your class, like any other class). You can't go strictly from videos as they're kill videos, not "this is how to play the encounter" videos which evrelia has made for last tier and probably plans to for this tier. When approaching a new encounter I will usually adjust my talents accordingly, i.e. following tips from the spec guides available on this forum you can figure out for example that if the fight has lots of travel time then you wouldn't want to go with grimoire of service but rather supremacy for demonology. It really comes down to your knowledge of the class and there's plenty of documentation of this class out there that if you truly cared, you'd learn all you need to know and then some.

[Rabidewok]

Which player am I looking at here?

[Mankirks Daughter]

You guys are right, it would be very irritating so see a new post from me every week asking about a new boss... which is why in my original post I specifically said I didn't want this to be about Tortos but rather general tips to improve his fundamentals so I wouldn't have to do this again.

I know he should be doing this on his own but he's new and clueless and i'm just trying to get him started. I'm looking for help not a rant. Like Mordors suggestion to have him watch Tortos from a locks perspective was helpful as I hadn't thought of that.

Essentially I want to know how to coach a brand new warlock raider to get him up to speed. What do good warlocks do before every new boss to make sure their DPS is up to snuff?

Has he read any of the guides here or elsewhere for tips? If he's understanding what he's reading, then it will probably be a good start. What kind of addons does he use? Getting things set up like weakauras could go a long way for him. Does he do any LFRs? Trying to apply what he reads in guide in LFR will slowly help him get the important stuff down for when he is raiding with you guys.

[Suave Zombie]

He should be the one coming here for help. There's only so much information he will pick up if its being relayed by another person. By coming here, he's showing an active interest in his character and will probably learn a lot more. Any of the stickied guides would be a great start. After that, even just looking at the replies in different threads could lead to a new trick he didn't know before.

Most importantly though, have him watch other warlocks play. Either through kill videos from the Lock perspective, or watching high end raiders stream during raid time. Watching a wipe could prove just as useful as seeing the boss die. Lots of things can happen with RNG mechanics, and its a good idea to see how better players react.

[Deleted]

Council of Elders 10N (07:27)
Havoc 5
Shadowburn 1

[ati87]

First who is kicking the turtle? The person doing the kicking will see his dps drop by allot
Second its hard to defeat the tank (for most range) who are doing aeo on the bats and are on the boss full time.
Third: your best try is 2 minutes something, don't judge how bad or good your dps is on a such a short attempt. The very nature of the warlock class is that they never start doing the highest damage at pull, they start actually low. But by that same nature we start doing more damage the longer the fight last (in comparison to others)


About your lock I will look at the first boss since that's a kill and any mistakes found their will be worse in a more complex fight:
First he uses mastery on bracer, tell him to get a decent enchant (intellect), the only reason why secondary status are better is because they have double the status this expansion (gems only)
Second: guessing he raids as destro, tell him to go mastery instead of crit because their is probably 2 fights in all of ToT where single target (crit) will pull ahead of mutli target (mastery) since most fights have adds and damage buffs.

The first boss has the damage pools
Second boss has adds
Third boss will allow you to target 3 targets sometimes with RoF and he can use havoc thus allowing him to damage the empowerd with chaos bolt
Fourth boss: a single RoF on the bats will grant him more embers then he can cast Chaos Bolt

Third: tell him to macro Dark Soul if needed, looking at the first boss dps he only used it once at a 4.32 min fight. The first time he should use after 30 secs when you get the first damage pool, second time he should wait till for execute phase (or the last 20 secs if execute is to short).

fourth:the uptime on immolate is 83.5%, the damage may be small but as a warlock your losing out embers

fifth: I don't see any shadowburn cast

Six: Not sure if he does (impossible to tell from numbers) this but tell him to start casting his next spell while he is still casting his first to reduce the effect of latency.

[Deleted]

The other posts are already good (let him search forums etc). Some tips he might find a use for:

- Never stop casting! Seriously, as a warlock you should *always* be casting something. Especially since our KJC talent you should always be casting all the time unless you're out of range or there is nothing to hit. Also note as ati87 said: make sure he starts a cast even before a previous one is finished. There is a small queue system in the game to eliminate wasted time from latency.

- Shadowburn. Let him make a macro with:
/stopcasting
/cast [@mouseover,harm] Shadow Burn; Shadow Burn;

Then let him set up his nameplates with an addon like TidyPlates in such a way that flat out doubles the size of any mob at 20% or less health.
During combat, when a plate "jumps up" like that, mouseover and spam that burn hotkey. Preferably with Havoc on another target.
The nameplate is to see possible targets instantly and the macro means whatever you were doing is stopped immediately and you instant burn that low target. The second "Shadow Burn" goes for whatever your current target is and only triggers when nothing is under your mouse cursor; useful on some fights.
He needs to understand one thing: Shadow Burn is *by far* our highest dps spell and on adds it's the most insane Ember generator. Your Immolate ran out, RoF isn't raining, you have 2 conflags off cooldown but you have 1+ Embers and a <20% hp add? You BURN that target. The rest can come later.

- Havoc. Same macro as Shadowburn, only with Havoc. On a multi target fight, pretty much use it on cooldown. Even if you don't have a Chaos Bolt or Shadow Burn ready, drop it on something so your next casts are duplicated. It's 1 global cooldown for essentially 3 nukes. There is no reason not to use it on any fight with more than 1 target. Only reason to delay Havocs is when you think you can get Shadow Burns or a buffed Chaos Bolt in the next <30 seconds.

- He also really needs to get a feel for synergy in the spec. Immolate and RoF are nice by themselves, but better when combined. So he needs to try to keep both up on as many targets as possible.
There is also the feeling for the fillers. You don't want to cast Incinerate as much. If you do have to Incinerate, try to only cast them with a Conflag proc up. If he finds himself casting Incinerates without conflag proc, he's probably forgetting Immolate or RoF. Otherwise he needs to understand that he shouldn't cast Chaos Bolts with Conflag procs unless he has massive ember income (ie. RoFing bats at Tortos).