The pain of soloing northrend as a lock

I made no secret of the fact that i hated my warlock. No feign death, the pet can't hold aggro, you wear cloth...but she is the tailor/enchanter of the guild, not to mention my personal cook. So, what to do? Ask WowInsider!

And I got a great bunch of responses.

Here is one:

emerge said...

As for a Northrend leveling spec, starting at Level 72 imho nothing beats http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#Ibxrdh0hoZ0GfhkAdV0sxz . The Felguard is leaps and bounds above the Voidwalker for holding aggro on both single and multiple mobs and after the recent stamina nerf to the VW, the felguard is probably also the better pet for tanking elite group quest mobs, with nearly similar armor mitigation and even better avoidance.

For grinding, you'll send in your Felguard from range, after the FG has unloaded Anguish and Cleave on the mob, you'll dot up with Corruption and CoA, Immolate might not even be needed. Tab to the next mob in range, Ctrl+1 to have the FG attack that target. Let him grab aggro, dot up that mob, rinse and repeat for all mobs that dare to be in your range. By the time your dots pull aggro, the mobs will be almost dead and most of the time not even reach you before the last ticks of CoA finish them of. If they do reach you, either fear-dot them or finish them off with a couple ticks of Drain Life.

For soloing elites, send in FG and pop Demonic Empowerment right away to make him build aggro faster. Spend a couple of seconds watching how much damage he takes and start Health Funneling him while he builds aggro. Do not overheal with Healthfunnel, as to not build surplus aggro. Once the FG has a healthy threat lead, start dotting the elite in between your funnels. Soulshatter as needed, nuke when there is time and enough threat cushion. Voila, dead 5 man group quest mob. Only very few quests where the mechnics of the mob or the fight make this impossible.

As for downtime, there is none. Use Drain Soul finisher for Mana Return and between Fel Armor and Siphon Life you'll be able to apply Lifetap liberally, at the same time filling up your FGs mana (which he'll burn through like crazy) thanks to Mana Feed. Fel Synergy will keep the FG topped off in all but the hardest fights, where a couple of ticks of Health Funnel will bring him back to full in no time.

From pure leveling perspective, no 51 point talent will beat the beauty that is an awesome pet combined with strong instant cast self-healing dots. Deep Affliction is pure overkill, why would you want to apply enough dots to kill a mob 3 times over, wasting mana and GDCs, Meta is fun but situational and on a too long CD to be used efficiently in grinding and Deep Destro is severly limited in multi-mob and elite mob situations.

Here is another:

Cool Story Bro said...

The leveling spec is entirely based on your comfort level with mobs in your face and you being a cloth-wearing class. If you've leveled two hunters than you're probably going to be most comfortable with a felguard spec that dips into the destro tree since a felguard's threat is pretty insane and with the cleave you can actually hang on to more than one mob. I personally preferred leveling affliction. Others really like destro.

I've found that the easiest way to level for people who prefer pets is with a Felguard/SB spec and then (if you like the Felguard) moving over to a more traditional 41/30 spec when you get more comfortable with your demon. A 41/30 spec uses fire instead of shadow spells and only uses Corr/CoA to proc MC but the rotation can get some getting used to. Being able to toss Corr/CoA and then just SB spam is a hell of a lot easier.

Here is an example of a Felguard/SB spec for a level 71: http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=9&tal=000000000000000000000000000000320330113521250013500100005033005220001000000000000

I went with some talents that are normally associated with PvP to increase survivability but there's a lot of leeway and depending on whether or not you're dying all the time you can choose talents that are more dps related.

Once you hit around 75 you should have your pet under control and can then start picking talents up like Decimation where you get to shoot massive fireballs at mobs when they're at or below 35% health or you can grab some more resillience for your pet so he can tank elites for group quests that you feel like solo'ing. Kind of up to you and how much you feel you've gotten the hang of it.

With the nerfs to SL and fear the new affliction spec might be slightly more difficult to level with than the old affliction spec but it's still viable. Even now when I'm doing my JC or cooking daily I just run around casting CoA/Corr on as many mobs as I can until they all die. I don't even lose health. Farming has never been so easy.

As for gear - every spec really likes spellpower. Crit/haste is secondary and a balance of both is fine for leveling. If you prefer quest-grinding rather than instances you don't really have to worry about hit too much but if you see a piece with it pick it up and toss it in your bank. Stamina is nice to have but don't gem for it. If you go demonology you're going to pick up extra stamina from your tree anyway.

And that's basically it. Locks have tons of ways to heal themselves (Drain Life and Fel Armor; SL/Haunt if Affliction) so you have little to no down-time if you're smart about LTing and you can always buy sauteed gobys in the AH for super cheap.

TBH, after leveling a druid (to 80), priest (to 60), lock (to 80), and a shammy (got the shammy to level 25 lawl) the lock was by far the easiest.

Good Luck!

These all seem very fun, i'll have to give it a shot! After i level the DK to 80 probably (who dinged 74 this morning after my daily 'kill the pups' quest in Dragonblight)