Yet Another Warlock Nerf

The following post is submitted by Iseefnords as part of our TCG loot contest. Be sure to stay tuned to read the rest of the submissions and vote for the best one!

Blizzard said some time ago that each class should have unique things it can do. Class homogenisation has to some degree lessened this, as tanking classes have their specialties removed or made less important, debuffs and buffs stack less and the whole host of changes that “Bring the Player, not the Class” heralded.

Warlocks, however, still feel decidedly different. We still sacrifice our minions for our own gain (until the Minion Rights Act of 3.1 comes along), we still capture the souls of our fallen foes, and we still have Life Tap.

A passing note on Dark Pact - it’s next to useless. In a class that stresses efficient use of what we have, Dark Pact returns half the mana of a life tap, drains our pet of mana it could be DPSing with, and still takes the same single GCD as a life tap. The end result is that you have to DP twice as often as you Lifetap, and that means you have less time to spend throwing pain at ugly monsters.

Life Tap makes warlocks very different from any other mana-based class. We go from fighting a losing battle against Mp5 to managing our health-to-mana balance, and it’s a style of play I much prefer to the Mage’s game of “What mana regen cooldowns do I have remaining?”. Life Tap now scales with Spirit, which is present on most Warlock gear now; this doesn’t mean you should gear specifically for X amount of spirit to gain the “ideal” life tap – life tap is generally best when it’s biggest. The exact amount is 1490 plus three times your spirit. This means that if you use the 4t7 bonus, your second lifetap within a 10 second window is 900 bigger in both directions. Depending on your spec and the individual encounter, lifetapping twice in succession is either acceptable or a sign you’ve forgotten to manage your mana properly. Elitist Jerks has confirmed what we’ve known for some time about the warlock specs and their mana “regen”; Affliction can keep itself going almost indefinitely, while demo and destro require a few life taps in quick succession now and then (with the aid of a healer). I primarily raid as Affliction, so I’ve come to love the self-heal that Haunt provides. Haunt is refreshed every 10 seconds or so – this is also the amount of time the 4t7 bonus is up, but tapping every 10 seconds will end up wasting both converted mana and a global cooldown which might be needed to refresh a DoT or to start casting a filler spell.

The Glyph of Lifetap coming in 3.1 gives a 20 second buff to spellpower equal to 20% of your spirit. This should work out to around 100 spellpower in a mix of naxx25 and ulduar gear. Keeping this up is a much more achievable goal for lifetap frequency, and for Affliction is almost the perfect lifetap timer. The question of when in your casting sequence to lifetap is also rather easy for the Afflock – just after you cast Haunt. The travel time on Haunt, as well as the travel time on the returning heal, means that you’ll lifetap and almost immediately be healed for most of the damage you took. The addon Renew Alert plays a sound every time you get a HoT; the default file is over nine thousand a bit unusual, but can be changed by dropping a new wave file into the addon’s subfolder. I also use VisualHeal for its incoming heal bar. This displays a small health bar just above my cast bar which appears when a heal is being cast on me, indicating my current health as one coloured bar and the incoming heal as a second one, which sticks out over the edge of my total health frame if there will be overhealing. Seeing a greater heal headed my way because a healer has panicked (Say, you lifetapped during a boss where AoE damage is common) allows me to lifetap pre-emptively and make the most of the heal.

Talking to your healers is also important. Let them know if you change specs, and what this means for your lifetap frequency. If you’re going to be lifetapping every 15-20 seconds and healing most of the damage yourself, let them know that a renew or single lifebloom will do. If you’re going Destro and showing the mages a thing or two about nukes, inform your friendly neighbourhood raid-healer (don’t bother the MH!) that yes, you will be tapping several times when you hit a certain amount of mana, and that you would appreciate a full on heal, complete with cast time and a side of fries. Ask the raid leader to put all the ‘locks in one group, so you appear on Grid as a single column which can be expected to life tap. Of course, pester that raid leader further for a Draenei to go in the group with you for the delicious Hit buff.

Finally, a little cheat. We all remember the now-dead tradition of downranked casts, but there are two spells in our arsenal that still benefit from Downranking. Both Life Tap and Health Funnel have lower costs and well as lower benefits, and both can work wonders when cast just before the pull. If you are lucky enough to own an Illustration of the Dragon Soul, the wonderful OS25 caster trinket, fire off nine Health Funnel rank 1 in quick succession, then a life tap rank 1. This will give you ten stacks of the IODS and a Spirits of the Damned right from the get-go, and a single tick of Fel Armour will heal you back up to full. If you don’t own an IODS, you can of course make do with a single lifetap rank 1. Just remember that channelling Health Funnel turns you towards your demon; you’ll only run in the wrong direction once before you learn this, just don’t make it be on Sartharion.