They also save on trips back to the summon stone when your tank has to go make dinner half-way through the instance.
I hate healing instances with Locks - seeing their life suddenly start to plummet just makes me itchy.
Serious answer to Redwing’s question: DOTs and debuffs (curses), I’d say.
Shot From Guns: Good idea on the DK. I actually did roll one but only played her a bit. I wasn’t too hot on the mechanic at the time. Plus, my bank toon/enchanter is around 44 and I’ve had him quite a while. He’s at max enchanting for his level. Now that my mains are pretty much raid-ready (which is where I often get WoW fatigue) I might go back to leveling him. I stopped originally because leveling a pally was such a PITA, but that was just weeks before the major pally buff.
As for affliction locks, I love them. I usually solo like Redwing although, at 80, as affliction, you won’t use a tank at all. I just leave my felhunter up for the damage + int/spirit buff (which, in turn, buffs my dps). Once a mob gets near you, nightfall will most likely have procced and you can SB any left with a moderate amount of health or shadowburn them (if you took that talent). On my latest few talent respecs, I didn’t even take dark pact or improved life tap. You just have so much health pouring in from Haunt and Siphon Life that you don’t need either.
I am perhaps not using this as much as I should but I find that the mana I get from it isn’t enough, maybe I am leaving it too late to use it. I think I should be aiming to keep both mana and hp bars the same, am I right?
This is what I want to do as a warlock so affliction the way to go and I am now (aftre looking it up) very much looking forward to getting Haunt.
Farming or raiding?
Raiding, I usually tap once when I hit 30% mana or so, and then tap a couple times after I get a HoT or two thrown my way. Improved Soul Leech means it can take a while for me to hit 30% mana. Our healers will also occasionally call for locks to tap to full, which in addition to mana, means we aren’t generating threat for a couple of seconds.
Farming, I very rarely tap, as replenishment and Imp Soul Leech keep me topped pretty well.
Any lock who taps more than twice in a row during a pull with out being HoTted up needs to be slapped. Hard.
Shot from Guns all our debuffs have been take over by someone who can do them either better or cheaper than we can. While there’s nothing (IIRC) as good as talented CoE, asking an aff lock to use it will be cutting out a good percentage of his dps.
martu, I can’t tell you how SL will affect you, as it was a completely different talent when I went through those levels. If it’s as good as it was then, you should be able to kite around 3-4 mobs with corr and CoA on them, and end up with more life/mana than you started with.
One of the tricks to life tap, especially at earlier levels, is that if you’re at full health, you want to use it as soon as you’ve used more mana than it will give you. You gain health much faster than you gain mana, and the life gain will only grow with time.
Redwing: Damn. Well, do locks still have the best/most DOTs, or are they pretty much just portable stones of all kinds (summoning, health, and soul)?
Warlocks have the best spell crit debuff. The only other way to get it is from mages, and both versions they have reduce their DPS by significant amounts to employ them. A warlock merely throws a shadowbolt, which is something they do all the time anyway.
Warlocks have very good damage through movement. As raid progression continues, movement increases, always. The first fight of Karazhan involved the entire raid standing still the entire time. The last fight of Sunwell involved the entire raid performing coordinated condense & scatter maneuvers every 45 seconds, in addition to independently dodging falling meteors, dealing with reflection adds, and chasing around floating orbs. Warlocks are thus relatively future-proof, immune to many of the gimmicks of various fights in terms of how it impacts their DPS. Add to this some superior mobility in the form of teleport, which can even outright exempt the warlock from some fight mechanics (hi Malygos!)
Warlocks have high longevity and self-sufficiency, as good or better than the dps/healer hybrids. They never run out of mana as long as they have health, and they can generate their own health to boot. When it hits the fan, the mages are iceblocking and the rogues are bandaging, but the warlocks are simply draining through it. A warlock is thus an excellent candidate for the more exotic raid roles that involve someone doing something essential at some personal risk.
The only way warlocks can at all be considered weak is in terms of PVP, and even there, there’s been warlocks competitive in the highest arena brackets ever since the arena was added to the game. There’s really not a lot to complain about, especially compared to, say, shaman.
Re: mana
That’s low health, isn’t it? You sit down and eat and drink something or take a potion? Also were’s the indicator for that? I have something I downloaded off Curse that flashes “Low Health” at me, is that sufficient?
On one of the DM raids, the leader said to “mana up”, and I thought he was calling me chicken till I re-read! :D:smack:
Thanks
Q
Only spellcasters have mana. It’s what powers their magic. When someone says they’re “out of mana” that means they have to drink. Drinking replenishes mana. Eating replenishes health.
IIRC, you’re a warrior. Warriors don’t have mana, so you’re okay when someone says “mana up!” You don’t have anything to prepare.
(Just another hint…Deadmines isn’t a “raid” dungeon, though it can be run as a raid (10-man). It’s a regular 5-man dungeon (which can actually accommodate 10 people at maximum)). Raid dungeons require at least 25 people of a similar level to the dungeon’s challenge. They don’t really start showing up until you get into the 50s or 60s (I think the lowest-level raid dungeon is Upper Blackrock Spire, at a minimum level of 56).
I think raids are considered anything above a 5 man instance. So, for example, the regular, ten man version of Naxx is listed as a raid in WoW’s looking for group interface. I had no idea you could raid Deadmines though, that would be fun!
Yeah, but I think an actual “raid dungeon” is one that requires a raid of equivalent-level players.
IIRC, we “grouped” for DM, so I was wrong in calling it a “Raid”, right?
SHEESH! I think I need my grandson Julian here to play ol’ Wolkie for a while! 
Okay…let me try to explain it more clearly. Think of “grouping” as a general category, consisting of times when more than one player links up to another to form a party. Under normal circumstances and dungeons, there are usually five people in a party.
Think of a “raid” as a group of groups…each group still has five people, but there are more than one of them linked together. There can be 10-man raids (2 groups), 20-man raids (4 groups), 25-man raids (5 groups) and 40-man raids (8 groups). Most regular 5-man dungeons have an upper limit of 10 players that can be popped into an instance. Most of the time, until you reach around lvl 50, you’ll be doing 5-man parties (another word for “group”) in dungeons. 10-man raids are rare in lower-level content.
Uniquely we’re just stones. We are still decent damage, we just don’t own the meters like we did in BC. Every class in the game has a DoT or three, depending, of course, on spec.
Aff should be in the raid, if for no other reason than their version of scorch (imp SB) isn’t a dps loss the way scorch is. Demo can spec into a really good SP buff, but it’s inconstant, and that spec doesn’t perform well enough for it to be worth it yet. Maybe at the next gear level. Destro, which used to scale like nobodies business brings another replenishment, and can use a utility curse if that debuff doesn’t exist elsewhere in the raid. Destro and sometimes aff will have an imp out, but there should be a shout in the raid that overrides it. The felpuppy’s spirit bonus is covered by priests.
All in all, we’re not badly positioned for 10mans, as we can make up for all kinds of missing things, but at the 25man raid stacking level, we’re rather lackluster, as we don’t own the top slot buff or debuff without gimping our dps more than the buff is worth.
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Remind me not to go to meetings mid post.
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Warlocks have awful damage through movement, excepting low geared demo. Destro has one instant cast spell on a 10 second CD which requires a debuff to be on the boss, demo and aff have two, but aff should only cast one of them once, and one of them is dps loss if refreshed early. All locks need to stand and nuke to bring anything to the table, and only aff uses shadowbolts, and they are, oddly the most stationary of the specs (I say oddly, because they’re the DoT heavy spec,.
Demo doesn’t lose as much as destro or aff with movement, but they still lose more than a hunter will (provided the hunter knows when/how to move).
Teleport is nice for a couple of fights, but it doesn’t do anything important in Uld. I’ll cast more circles than I’ll use in any given raid week.
I run out of mana every week, and will continue to do so until Vezax changes completely. 
I really hate the whole teleport thing, it makes us closer to mages with pets than we were already. It’s nice for Vezax and Kologarn, but nothing special.
Not saying locks are weak, if I thought that I’d have rerolled when Wrath dropped. We’re just not special anymore. The utility curses are mostly pointless, everyone and their brother does replenishment, and while ISB is nice, it’s just scorch given to locks.
Ask Hal Briston about that!
And with the water elementals we frost mages get, it’s even closer than that.
Can you explain this a little better, since it’s just not clicking in my mind. It seems that, since the majority of affliction damage comes from DoTs, that they would keep up good damage through movement. It doesn’t make sense that another class, say one that must stand and whack away at a boss, could compare, since the lock’s DoTs are slowly ticking away. Sure, SB is a lot of an aff lock’s damage (a third maybe?) but why would they not shine, relative to non-DoT heavy classes through moving fights?
edit: grammar
Yes, they have DOTs, but we’re talking comparisons, not uniqueness–are they **better **than Lock DOTs?
Explanation for **Quasi **et al.: DOT stands for Damage Over Time, which is going to be magic damage or a bleed effect that is applied to your target and then does its damage over a set period, versus all at once when you hit the mob. An example DOT for your Warrior, Quasi, would be Rend.
And (just to get the XOTs out of the way at one time), a HOT is a “Heal Over Time”, like a druid’s Rejuvenation. It is similar to a DOT except that it does a set amount of healing over a set period of time, unlike, say that same druid’s Healing Touch.