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PvP Guide for beginners 4.0.1
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Post by
orloxgr
Seeing a lot of questions about pvp lately i decided to write a small guide for beginners. I will not try to cover in depth matters since thats something you learn it in time but Ill give a good start to people that want to do the sport.
Locks are a great class to pvp with. We are not underpowered nor overpowered. In 1 vs 1 we can kill most of the classes (all if we have the element of surprise in world pvp) and we do fairly well at 2v2 with various partners. 3v3 is our best. Our greatest weakness is the equipment part.
Equipment
If you are a lock you cant pvp with pve equipment. We generally are to vulnerable to attacks. So your first priority is to get dressed. Now days its easy to have enough durability without any rating to arenas. Lets see what you should get first. Remember even though you see them red and they look like they still requiere rating the bellow items are free of requiments. Just click on them at the ventor and youll have them into your inventory if you have the honor points.
Head:
Wrathful Gladiator's Felweave Cowl
with
Trenchant Earthsiege Diamond
,
Willful Ametrine
,
Arcanum of Dominance
reforge critical to haste.
Neck:
Wrathful Gladiator's Pendant of Subjugation
Shoulders:
Relentless Gladiator's Felweave Amice
with
Willful Ametrine
,
Inscription of Dominance
reforge critical to haste.
Back:
Wrathful Gladiator's Cloak of Subjugation
with
Enchant Cloak - Spell Piercing
Chest:
Wrathful Gladiator's Felweave Raiment
with
Willful Ametrine
,
Willful Ametrine
,
Enchant Chest - Exceptional Resilience
reforge critical to haste.
Wrist:
Wrathful Gladiator's Cuffs of Alacrity
with
Enchant Bracers - Superior Spellpower
Hands:
Wrathful Gladiator's Felweave Handguards
with
Timeless Dreadstone
,
Enchant Gloves - Exceptional Spellpower
reforge critical to haste.
Waist:
Wrathful Gladiator's Cord of Alacrity
with
Timeless Dreadstone
and an
Eternal Belt Buckle
with
Willful Ametrine
Legs:
Wrathful Gladiator's Felweave Trousers
with
Willful Ametrine
,
Timeless Dreadstone
,
Earthen Leg Armor
reforge critical to haste.
Feet:
Wrathful Gladiator's Treads of Alacrity
with
Willful Ametrine
,
Enchant Boots - Tuskarr's Vitality
Ring:
Ashen Band of Endless Destruction
with
Enchant Ring - Greater Spellpower
Ring:
Wrathful Gladiator's Band of Dominance
with
Enchant Ring - Greater Spellpower
reforge critical to haste.
Trinket:
Medallion of the Horde
or
Medallion of the Alliance
or
Maghia's Misguided Quill
if you are human
reforge hit to haste.
Trinket:
Battlemaster's Ruination
or
Battlemaster's Precision
if you are not human
reforge hit to haste.
Main Hand:
Wrathful Gladiator's Blade of Alacrity
with
Timeless Dreadstone
,
Enchant Weapon - Black Magic
Off hand:
Wrathful Gladiator's Grimoire
Ranged:
Wrathful Gladiator's Piercing Touch
These items will give you:
Enough hit IF you use pve weapons with hit to reach the all around pvp cap.You basically need:
4% for the "soft" cap witch cover all except racial and special skills. You need to aim at least that nubmer with items.
6% is the all-around ideal (158 rating).
10% would be ideal for UD classes.
Enough resilience to resist the burst that every class has now days.
Enough penetration thats needed to overcome those pesky druids partially mages, totems ayras and resistance buffs.
If you feel that you are too endurable you can start changing stamina enchants with spellpower ones.
Don't forget that these are starter items that you can obtain easy even with your rl buddy. If you are capable of getting an upgrade do it. Everything matters. Wrathfull equipment is available through VOA too.
Specs
Affliction
Destruction
Demo
Choose the one that fits you best.
Pros and cons:
Affliction:
+
Mobility, can damage multiple targets, instant fear, more healing, unlosable finisher.
-
No Burst, less damage mitigation, shared dr to fears
Destruction:
+
Burst, more cc, more damage mitigation
-
Less healing, One target damage, casting spells
Demonology:
+
Durability,
I win Button
, Strong vs Melee, Good for showing off at duels, nice pet stun, root, burst extra escape ability.
-
Cast times, no in combat healing, key ablity still in big CD.
A pve spec its not recommended. If you get pawned assume that is natural. Pve specs has no damage reduction or CC talents.
Glyphs
Warlocks have a few options at pvp glyphs. It depence on what you want to achieve. Durability, more control or more damage. There are no standard rules. Choose what fits best to your playstile and partner.
Check in specs above for glyphs.
Thinks to consider
Affliction
Instead of Glyph of Shadowflame you can take
Glyph of Soul Swap
Destraction
Pretty much debatable glyphs. If you dont use succy use
Glyph of Sou Link
Demonology
Instead of Glyph of Felguard you can take
Glyph of Incinerate
Pets
Pet is dependent on the situation you face.
Felhunter: Felhunter is your silence. Do not ever have his silence on auto. Put it on a key bind and learn to use it. Have an enemy cast bar visible and start by silencing him at the start of a cast. Later your will adapt to fake cast or useless school casts.
His devour can help vs druids hots, paladins and priest buffs and vs other classes too.
He is also great at resisting magic. Though vs melee hits wont last long.
Voidwalker: Good vs warriors, feral druids rogues and anywhere you want to save your life with his shield. His consume shadows can help you expose rogues and druids (great starter at arenas) and his shield can save you from massive burst if your partner is cced. His taunt can get of you that hunter pet. Also he is durable to melee burst.
Succubus: Nice sexy pet. You can use her seduction to save yourself by a rogues hump or cc a healer. Her downside is that she is to easy to kill and the seduction shares dr with your fear. Also seduction wont work on doted targets. When damage occurs seduction fades.
Imp: The pesky little guy come to the pvp world at 4.0.1. He can dispel all spells from you or your friend and the stuns as kidney shot cheap shot and various other. His dispel can be one more trinket for you or your teamate. Key bind it and learn to use it. Some of the list you can dispel: DKS chains, Paladins stuns, mage sheep, fears from you or your partner. And you can do that with a macro while you target someone else.
Felguard: The demonology pet. His stun is a life savior. Hes dps in no joke either. With demonic empoerment becomes an unstopable killing machine. Learn to use him!
Choose your pet wisely. A general rule can be:
Arena: start with voidwalker. If invisible stay with him till you get them out. If casters summon felhunter or succubus depending on the situation and the tactic you will follow.
BG: As affliction: felhunter or void or imp. As destruction: Sucy or imp. As Demonogy: Felguard.
Duels: as arena
Since 4.0.1 locks must use more pets in different situations. With the soulburn effect this became possible. Dont be shy to summon a pet you need when you need it.
Macros
You can do anything without them but they can help you majorly.
Suggested Macros:
Totem destroyer
/petattack Blizzard nerfed our totem destroyer macro and we can no more target blindly the totems. But this one is pretty good to. Actually the pet will attack whatever the mouse cursor is on at the moment you will press the macro.
Heal
cast Create Healthstone
/use Healthstone
/use Battlemaster's Ruination
Meta bomb
#showtooltip
/use Maghia's Misguided Quill
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Metamorphosis
Single button dispell shelf
cast Singe Magic(Special Ability);Flee(Special Ability)
hold contol to cast singe magic or nothing for flee
Rogue - dudu finder macro (spam it hard)
#showtooltip Curse of Exhaustion
/console targetNearestDistance 15.000000
/targetenemy
/console targetNearestDistance 41.000000
/cast Curse of Exhaustion
/dismount
Post by
orloxgr
Addons
Choose the gui you prefer.
Shadowed Unit Frames
: I like to play with suf having enemy box with his cast bar just a little bit right of my toon and my box left of my toon.
Gladius
: Excellent for targeting and reminding you that an enemy is ready for a finisher. Customize it to 24-27% to warn you when to drain soul – shadowburn.
OmniCC
: OmniCC is an addon that adds a digit count to items/spells/abilities that are on cooldown to indicate when they'll be ready for use.
DrTracker
+
CCTracker
: Shows time left until diminishing returns on enemy/friendly/yourself, as well as how far the spell has diminished.
LoseControl
: LoseControl makes it easy to see the duration of crowd control spells on your character/target/focus/party by displaying them in separate cooldown icons onscreen.
WOOGLED
: A highly recommend addon. WOOGLED is an enemy spell timer mod for PvP for Cool Downs, .
Gameplay
Its almost impossible to cover every aspect of pvp. Everything changes depending on what your opponent will do. Ill give a few tips
Affliction
Always try to move. You are not a tank. You don't have burst. Try to use los (line of sight) slows, tp to damage your opponents while you are away. In every tick you get more health and they loose some. You don't have many spells with cooldowns but most other classes do. Use that to your advantage.
Fear is your friend. As affliction fear wont break easily. You can still dot dot dot drain life and fear wont break. I have beat numerous of times any class with me at 2000 hp and they at 20000. Fear, drains, dots, Haunt and suddenly you are at 15000 and they are at 0.
At bgs you can dot everything and keep going. Its nice to choose a stationary place (guard or abuse) where your tp will be at its best. Dont be at the front. If you get targeted go back and be safe. If you are dead you are no use to anyone.
At arenas always try to dot both targets in this priority Corr Coa on both haunt ua - ua. Ua after corr if dispellers opponents. (Tact is this is that they cant dispel coa but they ll try dispel corruption. if you are lucky they'll dispel ua). CC as possible both targets. Haunt whenever out of CD. When i get the opportunity to kill (when life is <25%) I silence healer with pet or cc him with any way possible and drain soul. A drain soul with dots on is almost a guaranteed kill even if the healer starts to heal those 7-8k hurt a lot. Your partner has to help a bit with damage or cc.
Destruction
You are a cannon. But not from glass. You have the power to burst down any non tank in 4 hits. But damage comes in cost of mobility or cast time. When pvping as Destraction try to use all your skills. There are there for a reason. Use them in a way to give you the freedom to cast. If you cast you win.
At bgs youll have a lot of fun. Even in pve gear if played right you will have a lot of kills. Try to abuse players. Immolate, Conflagrate, Incinerate, Chaos Bolt and most enemies will be at 10%. Kill fast - impress with your burst. Most fights will leave you half empty. If you get offguard by a rogue or a warrior calm down. Have sucy out, seduction the victim and let your enemy be the one offguard. Or despell - destun yourshelf and pew pew them.
In arenas you must micro a lot with sucy, void or felhunter. I favor sucy. You can use seduction on one target and damage another one on the same time. I find pairing with a dps most efficient but with a healer is very good too.
Comments are more than welcome. If someone wants to write something about Destruction pvp ill be great full
Post by
orloxgr
Footage
Destraction warlock guide
by zukuu: Exelent guide and video. You can learn a lot by watching this great video.
Affliction lock paired with a rogue 2500 rating
: Good video to see how can a lock can survive too long, even withought a healer.
Lolburst!
An exelent HD movie. Lock and mage at 2400 rating. POV is maily from the mage but its very detailed about tactics and explains a lot of things. Defently worth watching.
Post by
369076
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Kangi
Nice work.
Only thing I'd work on is its readability, probably spacing some things out or using some
of these
to help the neatness of it. But overall, it's a great guide for PvP beginners. Though some of the options you gave (such as with the gear) are a bit limited.
Post by
orloxgr
Thank you for your suggestions. Yes they are limited but well weighted. What i would change for a begginer gearing is to trade some of the stamina with spellpower but even then is it a fair trade at pvp?
Post by
Kangi
By limited gear options, part of what I mean is that you only chose Hateful head/shoulders/gloves/pants gear for availability in PvP for beginners, yet you could also get Deadly Gladiator's items in those slots from Emblems of Valor and VoA first. I think it'd be best for the guide to have more options per slot.
Edit: One minor detail, for the trinket 2 slot, it only lists Medallion of the Alliance, add Medallion of the Horde with it so people won't get confused. And I like the changes you have made with keeping it cleaner-looking.
Post by
Kangi
Deep Destraction
(
succubus
). Choose the one that feets you best.
Might need to work on a few spelling errors, also.
Post by
orloxgr
hehe i would like some help with that since english is not my mother language ^^
Post by
Kangi
First off, Destruction is the correct spelling of the tree, not Destraction. I think you mean "fits" not "feets", I don't want something to feet me.
I'm a bit busy right now, but I can help you with the spelling of things later. If there's something in the guide which has spelling you're not sure about, do what I always do. Google it.
Post by
161088
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
260787
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Nivrax
Blizzard stated they don't like totem stomping macros at all, while it still working it would be better if new players start practice manually sending pet for them (if being not targetable by macros would be a future fix to this).
Also, you mention about hit cap few times, but there is nothing about how much is it in pvp.
Post by
orloxgr
I never said its perfect ^^ We all can contribute for it to be a good guide since we miss one. Im still correcting it but i wanted it to be published for more people to help.
Why would you grab the Tireless gem instead of the ones with stun duration reductions?
Stun duration reduction is only 10% Generaly stuns dont last long. At a 4 sec stun you gain 0.4 sec? I try to stuck as much stamina I can for more durability and i think thats the best way for a rookie to begin.
not all Arena comps will need the same gems
This is not an arena guide but more of a general pvp guide for begginers. It would be too complicated for a begginer to choose whats suits to him best. I wanted to give minimal options for someone to start doing pvp.
You never posted the +hit cap for PvP or the amount of +Spell Penetration required for a warlock.
Ill do that
You only provided one set of PvP specs
I provided 3 specs. 1 affliction and 2 destro with the one using sucy and the other the void. But please as I posted above I am not a destrolock and I m not the best at it. So contribute by giving some advices or a spec that you think it will work better.
brb
Post by
161088
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
229105
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
orloxgr
Seems somewhat legit and Kangi's correct about the spelling errors. There's quite a lot... if someone were to fix them, they'd have to rewrite it all out again tbh. Not trying to be rude, just saying that there's a lot. I was going to point them out for you, but that would have taken too much effort on my part.
I ll fix the errors with openoffice spelling checker :P Im not offended at all. I know I have a spelling problem and I m not afraid to admit it :D
The only problem I see with this is that it's hard to give a gear outline for PvP. Your gear is basically a reflection of how well you do, so it's based differently person to person. I would change your gear outline so that you state which pieces are worth picking up, since Deadly is obviously the best.
It just seems iffy to me to give a PvP gear outline when there really isn't one aside from "pick up as many Deadly pieces as possible".
I disagree with that paragraph. A skilled (or not so skilled) player can do a lot better if his equip is tuned correctly. I see a lot of warlocks gemming crit or haste at yellow slots. Almost no one thinks hit is important to pvp and people think spell penetration is a joke.
Of course if you can get deadly you will wear it (not so easy because of the amount of eov given each weak + not everyone can be on a good raid) but the purpose of this guide is to help everyone. If you get a furious or a deadly part switch it, but keep the gemming and the enchants.
edit: I corrected most of the spelling at the mai post. Still waiting more feedback
Post by
abulurd
Specs
I sugest two trees for pvp. Before we start I want to note that im not a desto fun so I would need some help about spec and glyphs.
Deep affliction
Deep Destruction
Succubus Variant
Choose the one that fits you best.
Pros and cons:
Affliction: +Mobility, can damage multiple targets, instant fear, more healing, unlosable finisher.
No Burst, less damage mitigation, shared dr to fears
Destruction: +Burst, more cc, more damage mitigation
Less healing, One target damage, casting spells
Some wanna try a demo spec. Its not recomended. Paladins can fear you, warlocks can banish you and you only have 30 seconds of dominence. After that you run out of luck.
i personally have been thinking about using a build for pvp that uses the fel guard, grabs siphon life from the affliction tree and grabs molten armor from the destro tree, with that spec i almost always finish near the top of bgs in damage kills and honor. the build looks something like this
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#Icx0ruzhkZ0GchkAbissMzZVc
but could probably use a couple of tweaks
Post by
orloxgr
I know the spec. It is supposed to be the new sl/sl. They have it like
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#IcxMrzrboZ0GbhkAdicsRzZVc:wjo
at the arena junkies. Warlock become super durable but since its not really tested yet i didnt include it.
Post by
abulurd
yeah i dont really like what they did with the affliction side of things in that spec. number one how often does a lock lifetap in pvp, almost never, i would rather have the points in fel concentration or even better iCoA. number two one of the reason you stay alive so well is you hit everything with siphon life. well siphon life is 40% of your corr damage. so i would take the points out of grim reach and finish off empowered corr and put a point into CoEx. on the demo side why improved health funnel over demonic brutality. in addition take the point out of mana feed and put it into molten core, ill take an etra 10% fire damage that with how often im casting dots onto everything will be up almost 100% of the time im fighting. other than that i enjoy the spec, one funny thing is i find i oom more than i die in some battles, especially av
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