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

[dakalro]

I remember on Patchwerk logs showed locks to be pretty middle of the pack, especially on first kills - due to not enough healer GCDs to get you heals for Life Tap. Weirdly enough my guild at the time had 4 locks on 1st Patchwerk kill and we did decently (all top 10-15). I do remember using a lot of consumables to be able to Life Tap without needing a healer, having calculated the time I could last. I do think I wanded a bit but got a hot from a druid in the end )

[tithian]

SM/Ruin was usually the best, and at a time we'd run MD/DS (Master Demonologist/Demonic Sacrifice) where we'd sac a succubus, and then use the engineering thingy to rez it before it despawned, so we'd have both the MD and DS buffs active (+25% shadow damage).

Playstyle was apply Curse of X (whatever the raid assigned you), apply dots and spam shadowbolt. You'd be usually running with an imp (unless you were being unique with MD/DS) for Blood Pact and generally having better survivability.

[luccadeo]

I loved my lock in vanilla and the early part of TBC. In pvp we were gods. In pve we were awesome. I still miss the Sm/ruin spec.

[Will]

@Dhrizzle

No, the 21/0/40 spec invested 21 points in Affliction for Shadow Mastery (increased shadow damage by 15%), and 40 points in Destruction (allowing you to get Ruin); there were no points invested in Demonology.
Improved Shadow Bolt didn't increase shadow damage, it increased Shadow Bolt damage and put a debuff on the opponent that increased your critical strike chance by 5% on that particular target for 30 seconds. . . Did you play a warlock in TBC?

It was easily the best DPS spec in the game (or, failing that, the best burst specialization). I've seen 13.5k Shadow Bolt criticals in a video.

Please don't be rude to someone with remarks like "Did you play a warlock in TBC?" when you yourself are completely wrong.

In TBC, Shadow Mastery requires 30 points in affliction. It's a 25-30 point talent that increase shadow damage by 3% per point, for 3/6/9/12/15%.
Demonic Sacrifice is a 15% shadow increase if you sac your Succy, admittedly you lose the Succy's DPS but it's still a better investment.

Also, Ruin is 30 points in Destro, not 40.

Also, In TBC Improved Shadow Bolt is a 4/8/12/16/20% shadow damage increase for the next 4 non-periodic hits.

So you were wrong, THREE times in a single post, yet talked so sure of yourself then rubbed it in by asking if they even played Warlock.

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Warlocks are OK in Vanilla. They can do some pretty nice single target if you have at least 1 spriest maintaining Shadow Weaving. If you're allowed to use Corruption and you have Nightfall spec you can do some nice multi-dot proc farming. They're not amazing though, and later in the game do start to fall behind Warriors, Mages and Rogues. In PvP they're strong.

In TBC they're single target BEASTS. Utterly disgusting single target. In PvP they're EVEN STRONGER.

[asil]

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.

This is pure delusion lmao. Fire mages are god tier in naxx.

You can literally go look at private server rankings to see the best dps specs:

> https://legacyplayers.com/Raids/Ranking/Default.aspx

It's not like warlocks were "bad" but they weren't actually on par with mages/warriors or even rogues overall.

[jackofwind]

This is pure delusion lmao. Fire mages are god tier in naxx.

You can literally go look at private server rankings to see the best dps specs:

> https://legacyplayers.com/Raids/Ranking/Default.aspx

It's not like warlocks were "bad" but they weren't actually on par with mages/warriors or even rogues overall.

Lol K3 parses, okay bud

[Cyanu]

I didn't play in vanilla and only joined late in TBC with a paladin, and with the MoP revamp the class has undeniably changed away from the original class.

so, how did warlocks work? I once heard a passing reference to the 0/31/30 playstyle being best, but what was that exactly? and were there alternatives that performed better or worse?

in vanila locks they were mostly utility bots, you just needed a couple at most, the reason they only spammed shadow bolt was the debuff limit: the slots were saved for more essential debuffs, curse of shadow/elements was one of them

in tbc the meta was a ridiculous spec that essentially grabbed all the talents that improved Shadow Bolt out of all 3 specs, in which shadow bolt gained improved casting time, raw damage, additional critical chand and critical dmg etc, additionally shadow priests (a debuff bot class) applied Shadow Weaving a debuff that increased shadow damage taken by the target (it had stacks and the priest was avoiding casting mind blast and the like in order for the much more powerful shadow bolt to benefit): the result was shadow bolt crits doing absurd amounts of damage (if i recall correctly ~9000 per crit which was insane back then) and locks being the top ranged DPS, heavily stacked which was further intensified by the fact that it was literally a 1 button rotaion that anyone could do

ah, good ol times... /s

[asil]

Lol K3 parses, okay bud

I actually played vanilla. The order those classes were in was exactly how it was in vanilla.

Rogues, warriors, mages. And I played a warlock. Yeah - warlocks weren't trash, they did damage, but the fire mage kit was simply better.

The idea warlocks somehow outscaled busted ass fire mages is just so absurd it borders on insanity.

[Dug]

6 year necro

[xuros]

Please don't be rude to someone with remarks like "Did you play a warlock in TBC?" when you yourself are completely wrong.

In TBC, Shadow Mastery requires 30 points in affliction. It's a 25-30 point talent that increase shadow damage by 3% per point, for 3/6/9/12/15%.
Demonic Sacrifice is a 15% shadow increase if you sac your Succy, admittedly you lose the Succy's DPS but it's still a better investment.

Also, Ruin is 30 points in Destro, not 40.

Also, In TBC Improved Shadow Bolt is a 4/8/12/16/20% shadow damage increase for the next 4 non-periodic hits.

So you were wrong, THREE times in a single post, yet talked so sure of yourself then rubbed it in by asking if they even played Warlock.

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Warlocks are OK in Vanilla. They can do some pretty nice single target if you have at least 1 spriest maintaining Shadow Weaving. If you're allowed to use Corruption and you have Nightfall spec you can do some nice multi-dot proc farming. They're not amazing though, and later in the game do start to fall behind Warriors, Mages and Rogues. In PvP they're strong.

In TBC they're single target BEASTS. Utterly disgusting single target. In PvP they're EVEN STRONGER.

No its not. It's only 21 into the destro tree.

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You could only do that in TBC and top damage and ONLY around mid T5 and on, because you just didn't have the hit rating to support it before then. It was definitely funny to top charts with one button, though. Same was true about warlock aoe.

AoE time?
SoC
SoC
SoC
SoC
SoC
SoC

Topped charts.

Yeah that was great until they super-buffed volley for hunters later into TBC lol.

[Moggie]

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.

Naxx gear... where the majority of raiders never set foot. And Mages, Rogues and Warriors were the top even in Naxx. We’re they better than before T3? Of course, but things had changed quite a bit from T1. It wasn’t until the TBC prepatch when Lock scaling was actually fixed, maybe a little too much but better than the 0 scaling they endured during Vanilla. Biggest motto, we ride single file to hide our numbers. There’s a reason that was the top slogan for the class.

As somebody said earlier, TBC had Aff for T4/5. SB spam didn’t really come into play until T6 during BT and Hyjal when they fixed some basic things with the class. It was also when they tried changing DP from scaling with Spirit to Intellect, I think it was. A change which was reverted quickly and not implemented until the WotLK prepatch.

[ovine]

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

This. UA / Ruin was actually more dps until you got 4 pieces of T6, then you respec'd for SB Spam.

[Kagthul]

@Dhrizzle

No, the 21/0/40 spec invested 21 points in Affliction for Shadow Mastery (increased shadow damage by 15%), and 40 points in Destruction (allowing you to get Ruin); there were no points invested in Demonology.
Improved Shadow Bolt didn't increase shadow damage, it increased Shadow Bolt damage and put a debuff on the opponent that increased your critical strike chance by 5% on that particular target for 30 seconds. . . Did you play a warlock in TBC?

It was easily the best DPS spec in the game (or, failing that, the best burst specialization). I've seen 13.5k Shadow Bolt criticals in a video.

lolwut?

/10char

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@Dhrizzle

No, the 21/0/40 spec invested 21 points in Affliction for Shadow Mastery (increased shadow damage by 15%), and 40 points in Destruction (allowing you to get Ruin); there were no points invested in Demonology.

Uhh... no? Shadow Mastery (even in TBC) was points 26-30 of Affliction. Ruin was still 21 points in Destro.

Improved Shadow Bolt didn't increase shadow damage, it increased Shadow Bolt damage and put a debuff on the opponent that increased your critical strike chance by 5% on that particular target for 30 seconds. . . Did you play a warlock in TBC?

Did you? Because Improved Shadow Bolt wasn't changed like you think until halfway through Wrath Until then, it did EXACTLY what he said. It applied a debuff to the target that made them take 20% extra Shadow Damage from all sources and had 5 charges; the charges were only consumed by non-DoT sources of Shadow damage. (And there was a brief period from 3.0.8 to 3.1 where it was a self-buff that applied to YOU that increased YOUR shadow damage by 20% until you used 5 non-DoT shadow damage spells).

Not for PvE; we burned through mana too fast, had no threat reduction and our abilities scaled nowhere near as well as a mages, mostly because DoTs didn't gain any benefit from gear.

Ehh... wat?

The other common spec (DS/Ruin) for Vanilla had 20% threat reduction if needed, our nuke scaled better than mages default nuke (because of cast time reductions from Bane), and DoT's gained plenty of benefit from Gear (as the only stat that didn't affect them in Vanilla was crit because haste wasn't a thing) - you just couldn't use them because of the debuff limit.

The major issue was just threat. Until tanks got a lot better gear, you couldn't go ham, and therefore couldn't top the meters, but we never did BAD dps. We werent the only class that was threat-limited this way. Fury warriors could top the charts with their eyes closed - if they wanted to die. Shadow Priests could also do amazing DPS (until they OOMed, at least) but theyd almost instantly pull aggro.

Vanilla PvP was a different story though, warlocks were pretty strong with fear lasting up to 20 seconds and breaking randomly (not by damage),

Except it did break on damage, as the threshold of damage that could break it was lowered no less than THREE TIMES during Vanilla.

It could ALSO break on the server heartbeat (it would do a resist check)

Mind, even after all three nerfs, it was still possible for it to last a full 20 seconds as long as you didn't nuke the target or they didn't take a pile of damage from someone else.

However, this was also literally the worst incarnation of the game to crutch on fear, as any PvP spec warrior was outright immune to it. (Trinket, Berserker Rage, Deathwish, Immune, could also have a Shadow Reflector AND the 30-second fear immunity Blacksmith Trinket).

we also had more health than just about anyone in the game besides a top geared tank meaning unlike most we could survive those instant pyroblasts. Felhunter came with an innate huge chunk of spell resistance meaning he was basically immune to magic spells and would tear up most casters. Our dots were mostly strong enough to kill a person no matter what they did and even classes that stomped on us (warriors and rogues-more specifically undead rogues) would often fall over shortly after killing us.

Only if you had a LOT of spellpower and they didnt use a single consumable. And by a lot i mean about 500. WHich is not easy to reach while still having a good HP pool until you get to Naxx gear (which about 5% of people ever even had access to).

TBC i did not play pve warlock but others have got it pretty much on the spot...spam shadowbolt.

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)

... UA was the 41 point talent of Affliction as of 2.0. That was literally its "thing". What are you on?

Do you remember when they first allowed spell-power to scale with spell damage and it was way over-buffed?

You mean from Beta Patch .5?

Because spells ALWAYS scaled from Spellpower in the live game. Spellpower scaling was added in the early Beta.

Even as destro you could run around tab-targeting and spamming Corruption and CoAgony to watch players drop like flies.

Only if they were in greens with no stamina. But this has a lot more to do with talents not being nearly as game-changing in the old system as people want to pretend. Full Aff got you... 6% stronger Agony and 10% shadow damage. In toto. Which means, even as Destro... all your DoT's still scaled just fine.

Although I seem to remember at some point fire destro began to outstrip the SB spam (meaning you also used Immolate!)

You used Immolate anyway. Even as deep Affliction. Its Damage Per Cast Time, even if HALF of your +spell damage was +shadow, was still higher than any nuke. You used Immolate as any spec all the way up until it became spec-exclusive in Cata.

The push back problem wasn't warlock specific either, every caster had that issue.

Warlocks and Boomkins had this issue, realistically, (as it was specifically mentioned against hunters with 1.0 attack speed pets). Any caster with a shield could just ignore it long enough to get the necessary spells off (Poly the pet, blow out the hunter, etc).

Thats why if you were rolling with your VW out, Hunters were basically free kills. You could just pop your VW Sac shield and there was nothing the hunter could do. You could fear him, HOwl the pet, load him up with DoTs, and that was the fight. He might not even break the shield before he died.

Still warlocks weren't completely awful, a smart warlock could literally kite a warrior or rogue while running around naked with corruption and siphon life in vanilla.

No you couldn't.

Not only would a PVP spec'ed warrior two-shot you if you were naked (without even criting, and a rogue wouldn't take much more), they both have easily or PASSIVELY applied 50-70% snares, and the BEST you can get is 30% if you talent deep enough into Aff for it. Youll literally never get away from them, as you will be snared 100% of the time at a high higher snare than you can apply.

For quite awhile you could seduce, soulfire, rinse and repeat, then when the dr was introduced

DR was in the game from day 1. It was introduced in Beta patch .8

Also, Warriors at the very least could become immune to Seduce with Deathwish. Rogues had a somewhat harder time but if they were smart, theyd just blind the Succy after the first cast or blind you and and kill the succy. Also, not sure how you back-to-back those Soulfires, what with that 60 second cooldown.

you could add fear in there. Up until patch 1.10, I think it was, fear had a pretty low chance to break on damage and had a baseline 30 second duration.

10, 15, and 20 seconds for ranks 1, 2 and 3. From day 1. The amount of damage required to trigger a resist check to break was lowered three times during Vanilla. After the second nerf, any nuke would break it instantly unless you had zero spellpower.

Now PvP is a whole nother beast. We had our our periods of extreme gimpness but we also has periods of insane OP'ness. Here are some highlights:

- Will of the forsaken was a flat 20 sec fear immunity instead of removing it once, UD rogues were LITERALLY impossible to kill.

It was reduced to 5 seconds pretty quickly (By July of 2005, only 5 weeks after Battlegrounds were released)...

And it was LITERALLY easy to kill any rogue if you were a proper PvP spec. Once you put a DoT on them, they're done. They cant re-stealth. Maybe, if they blow EVERY cooldown to wait you out... but it was pretty easy to kill even Forsaken Rogues. I dont even have to use fear on rogues atm in Classic. I usually finish the fight near full life. Only occasionally do i even have to use my Healthstone.

Far worse was Warriors - they had their PvP trinket, Berserker Rage, and Deathwish, all of which broke fear (and Zerk Rage and Deathwish provided immunity).. making them effectively immune to it.

- Drakedog and his videos making "seduce/SB" legendary. There was a period when I could kill fresh 60's in greens with a shadowbolt crit and a death coil / alt. two SB's. All whilst they were seduced.

Those videos were highly cherrypicked. He had about a 16% crit chance, which means any video in which you see him get back to back massive crits is the exception, not the rule.

- Using the felhunter and spell lock correct would make you awesome against mages and any other casters, but it was a bit less common and took more effort.

It didn't take more effort, it just wasn't common because even without a Felhunter you could often wreck other spellcasters, but needed the Void Sac shield against warriors, hunters, and potentially rogues.

Filling up every single free bag slot you had with shards before raids or long BG sessions. Seriously what the hell were Blizzard thinking on that one? xD

Or you can just bind rank-1 Drain Soul to a key and hit it on targets about to die. I have a full Core Felcloth bag+ at all times, even in AV and WSG right now.

This, although Warlocks didn't scale at all until 2.0.

Uhh.. wut?

Spells scaled with spell power just fine, even DoTs. The only other stat they COULD scale with in Vanilla was Crit (which they did not), but their DPCT was so high that if you had been able to use them, theyd have competed just fine. Remember, there was no Haste (introduced in TBC) or Mastery (introduced in Wrath).

They also didn't scale at all in TBC from Haste or Crit (DoTs, meaning). That wasn't added until Wrath, as a Glyph... and their Coefficients (which is what made their DPCT so high) were nerfed to take this into account.

Then, you didn't use Life Tap, you used Dark Pact. (Pet -> Lock mana transfer) Nobody remembers the uproar and 100s of pages when they tried changing Dark Pact from Spirit to...Int? SP? I don't remember which stat they tried changing it to that was reverted and put in at 3.0 for WotLK.

Dark Pact never scaled from Spirit. It always (only) scaled from Spellpower, after that was added (it previously scaled with nothing). Life Tap was changed in.. LK i believe, to scale from Spirit and not spellpower (and they added a talent or glyph to make Spirit = Hit so that more people could viably roll on gear) but, as you noted, promptly changed it back.

Also, no one ever seriously used Dark Pact in a raiding environment, even in TBC and Wrath.

Soul link has always been 20% shared.

... lolno.

It was 50% until patch 1.8, and was then reduced to 30% (and 3% bonus damage), where it remained until TBC, where it was changed to 20%/5%, and then it jumped up and down between 15% and 30% and going away completely since.

This. UA / Ruin was actually more dps until you got 4 pieces of T6, then you respec'd for SB Spam.

That would have been a treat.

You cant have UA and Ruin.

[lockedout]

I guess this is what you get with no moderator a necro'd thread from 2013....
Just to clear it up in TBC it was 0/21/40 you needed to sac your succubus and get to ruin, then spam shadowbolt.
Worst geared lock put up the debuff.