I would like to thank my family...

Wow... I went away for a few days to do house moving and came back to a link from BRK, a link from TeePee, who inspired me to write the lock leveling article in the first place and a whole bunch of nice comments. Thanks a bunch!

Looking back on it, it really does seem to favour the Affliction tree over the rest. I really want to try leveling as a Demonologist, but I guess the Affliction bug has bitten too hard. However, one thing I have noticed is that generally, it seems to level a lot like Hunters. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but since Mathe is also being leveled at the same time, I guess having Vis go Afflict would make more sense at the moment...

I am planning on a follow-on articles, mainly to take your toon from Lvl 18 to whenever is a good point to stop. But, I'm curious if it would be helpful?

In other news, there has been a whole bunch of leaks from the Wrath of the Lich King Friends and Family Alpha. I won't be repeating the info here (it's easy to find online anyway), but so far, there looks to be some neat additions to the talent trees.

One thing that is nice though is that having a level 55 character will unlock the death knight, who can be of any race! Guess the BECs will have a new sister come WotLK... :)

Leveling a Baby Lock

If you're a warlock and have yet to read TapTapPewPew, you really should. It's a nice collection of articles about the uber class that is Warlock. I found the link on BRK's blog and have been working my way through the archive...

One article I came to was a Leveling Guide for Warlocks. While the article had a lot of sound concepts and before my re-roll, I would probably have agreed with most of it, coming from the perspective of actually leveling one at the moment, I have to disagree with a few points. So, here's my take on it.

If you are completely new to WoW in general and warlocks in particular, the thing that affects your leveling speed the most is downtime. While a mage can tear apart the same mob in half the time, a mage will need to sit down to eat/drink every two to three mobs (depending on your gear), while a lock can generally go on forever without needing to stop; once you have gotten a number of key talents and spells.

First, a general tip. If for whatever reason, you rolled Horde but not a Blood Elf, then before you do anything, run. Just run over to Silvermoon City. I know that for Taurens, this might be a bit challenging, The Barrens is not exactly Level 1 friendly but if these guys can do it, so can you... The quests in the new area are much easier to follow and better designed and they reward much better, in terms of both quality and money... Compared to my broke and white/grey geared Tauren Druid who leveled in the Mulgore, my Blood Elves were nicely geared in greens and rolling in cash. Similarly, if you are Alliance, go to the space goat area. You won't regret it.

Now, the first step is Big Blue, aka Blueberry, or in official Wow-speak, your Voidwalker. It's usually maligned at being a useless tank and after level 50 or so, that's very true. Before that, as long as you keep his spells current, he is a more than credible tank. He might not always hold aggro, but usually he'll hold for long enough. He's also able to take a fair amount of damage so he should generally be able to keep pace with you. If not, I tend to use bandages on him as prior to end-game, a lock has little need for bandages but still need to have them made for training First Aid anyway.

The next piece of the puzzle is Life Tap. Trading one easily replenished resource (Health) for one that is not so easily replenished and utterly crucial (mana) is golden and a skill that every other mana using class in WoW will kill to have. However, to pair it with a spell that drains the health from the mob and replenishes your own, is to give you the tools to make your toon the killer energizer bunny.

On a side note, yes, I know there is a Drain Mana spell, which directly replenishes mana. However, this doesn't kill the mob and there are many mobs which don't use mana anyway, so the Life Tap/Drain Life combo is always better to use. In fact, you'll find that in PvE, there are very few situations where Drain Mana is required so much so that I've stopped putting it on my cast bar.

So, now that the basics are clear, how do we spec?

5/5 Improved Corruption - Level 10 to 14
Yes, I agree. It's ridiculous that three years later, we should be giving up talent points for this when spells like Innervate, and Ice Block were given as trainable skills to their respective class...

Until then, first five points into this. No question.

2/2 Improved Drain Soul - Level 15 to 16
This was such a useless talent but after TBC talent revamp, it's a beautiful soloing spell.

15% of your mana pool back when the mob dies. Think about it... Now the beauty of it? This is irregardless of your spell level. It procs just as well of Level 1 Drain Soul, which costs a staggering 55 mana. It's a spell that scales beautifully as you level (& increase your mana pool) and yet always cost 55 mana.

& to sweeten the deal, 10% less threat on your affliction spells means less likelihodd of you grabbing aggro from VeeDub. :)

Take this talent, and drain the soul (Rank 1) off every mob. You'll need to toss out the shards cramming up your bag every now and then, but you'll be peachy for mana.

2/2 Improved Life Tap - Level 17 to 18
This gives us 20% more mana from life tap. At level 16, you'll be using Level 2 Life Tap which gives 65 mana from 65 life. With 2 talent points, you immediately get 8 more mana. As your spell level increase and you start collecting +dmg gear, this gets more and more efficient.

Eventually, it'll be key to achieving the state where you can kill mobs and have a full green and blue bar.

With these in hand, usually, what I do in any encounter is the following (in sequence).
1) Send in Big Blue
2) Slap up the DOTs (Immolate, Corruption, Curse of Agony)
3) Lifetap
4) Drain Life
5) Just before the mob keels over, switch to Drain Soul.

You should end the encounter with two almost full bars.

When you are comfortable with that, stretch yourself by doing this.
1) Send in Big Blue after Target A
2) DOT up Target A
3) Lifetap
4) Send Big Blue after Target B
5) DOT up Target B
6) Lifetap
7) Drain Life on Target B (Target A will usually keel over now)
8) Just before B keels over, switch to Drain Soul

If things go bad, use your Fear to buy you some time to bandage if required. If things go really bad, remember your Big Blue will (after Level 16) have the Sacrifice spell. Use it as your oops button.

At this point, you need to make a decision. To level as Affliction, killing mobs with your DOTs and draining their life away, or to level as Demonology, to be a matched team with your demon. In my opinion, neither are really superior, it's a matter of preference but both will get you to 70 with a minimum amount of fuss (actually, you could probably not spend any talent points and get to 70 with a minimum amount of fuss). With Affliction, you'll really shine in a multi-mob grinding environment; you can literally dot up 2-3 mobs, Lifetap a couple of times for mana, Drain Life the life back, dot up another 3, lifetap, drain, rinse and repeat until the area is cleared of mobs. For Demonology, while you might not be able to keep this up as long as the Affliction lock, you'll definitely have better survivability and a more durable pet.

The talents you choose will be dictated by that decision. While this might be a decidedly Affliction-bent spec, I do believe that it's a lot more efficient as compared to spreading your points out across the three trees as recommended by TeePee.

Edit: Yes, the spell in the cast sequence should be Immolate... I don't know what I was thinking of... Thanks TeePee for the heads-up.

Pretty...

A run through Scarlet Monastary netted Vis some nice gear... While the rest of the instance was unkind, two visits to Doan had offered up Mantle of Doan, Robe of Doan and Hypnotic Blade! The best part was that again, Vis had nice matching clothes... Pretty nice...

But what's been making me pretty mad is that I would get 2-3 whispers every night selling gold or leveling services. I used to let these slide, but increasingly I would report spam them. It's getting to the point of EXTREME annoyance... It would be nice if there was a nice and easy way to catch these guys and perma-ban them before they even send their first whispers, but unfortunately, as long as there is a market for it, these jokers are going to be around... Which really begs the question, how much of a loser do you have to be to resort to these services? This is WoW... IT'S NOT EVEN REMOTELY HARD!!! But, we all know the answer, it's not that it's hard; it's that people are lazy... As long as there are people who access to more money than they have brains, and require instant gratification, not much we can do but just keep on right clicking and select 'Report Spam'. It doesn't help at all in the long run, but at least it makes you feel a little better... :p

Looking Good

While this happened a few days back, I didn't have time to get it written down till now... Bad me...

If you look at the screenshot of when my lock got her Felhunter (in this post), one thing you might notice is how nicely co-ordinated her clothes are. It wasn't planned, but just happened along the way...

For the record, if that's the look you want, Robe of the Moccasin, Feline Mantle, and Shredder Operating Gloves are the stuff you need.

However, since she is in her 30s, I went about getting her lock robes done. The first few parts were easy, a trip to the AH to buy an overpriced Robes of Arcana and get a Gold Bar out of the bank. Then, it's a round the world trips to kill some satyrs (which I managed slowly until Naraa came and mopped up the rest) and an inferno (which she one-shotted...) in Desolace... She had to go off, but Nraven was nice to help in AOEing down a bunch of Fire Elementals in Arathi.

So, Vis has new clothes, which were unfortunately, not an improvement (looks wise).

Now, the question is whether we should look into the Robe of Power, or hold out for the Shadoweave Robe?

The Big 3-0

I only managed to get Vis & Elainith's fishing to 100, mainly because I also spent quite a bit of time with Vis, getting her to 30 and finishing up her Felhunter quest.

I've always figured Blizz got a little lazy with this. For the Imp and Voidwalker, there is a different line, depenind on your race. That's pretty much to be expected, since at Lvl 10, all races are understandably still in their starting areas. At lvl 20, with the Succubus, they probably got a bit lazy and made the Blood Elves do the same quest as the Undead, which is fine, since at lvl 20, it's a good chance to start branching out into the 'real world'... (Seems that all the ally locks have the same quest by now... Too bad... But at least it's still different to the Horde version.) By lvl 30, everyone, irregardless of race and faction do the same quest for Felhunter, and the remaining pets... The RPer in me really liked the backstory and lore involved in those earlier quests. The Felhunter questline seems to be run around the world just to get some stuff, then summon one to kill.

For this questline, my lock started at Undercity (since she was at TM questing), went to Barrens (Ratchet), returned to Undercity, then back to Hillsbrad to pop some murlocs. Once that is done, took the balloon to Kalimdor and went down to Thousand Needles, to knock off some centaurs, before returning to Undercity again. From there, it's Wetlands to pop some Orcs, before a return to Ratchet. Finally, summon the bugger and killed it... Including my travelling time, that was about two hours, but about 60%+ of the way to lvl 31... But, at least I got one with a nice name. :)

Wailing Caverns Loot

WoW is such a wonderful game. If you've always wanted to look like the purple teletubby, you can in WoW...

All you need is the Embrace of the Viper set, from Wailing Caverns.

As all the chicks are in the level range, we've been running them with other low level alts of the guild a lot... So much that we are all officially sick of the place. The result though is that N's shammy alt is sporting four pieces of the set (he's missing the belt) but I doubt we'll be farming for that one... But he really does look like the silly purple teletubby... All he needs is a purple hood....

Vis did get the Robes of the Moccasin which is a much nicer (especially in terms of aesthetics) than the ugly Apron.



Kell has also dropped Mining to take up Blacksmithing. Thankfully we had a rather large store of copper bars and rough stone as we managed to just about exhaust it. Of course, we're hoping the Shea will have a nice spot of luck in mining as she tries to get out of Ghostlands. :)

RNG Hates my Lock

Bloody Apron is ugly... Vis got it on the Shaman/Rogue dream-run of SFK...

The joke is that someone (Xig thinks it's Bact, but when Bact came online later, he claimed he just got home... Probably Nraven then) started a shaman alt and he had just hit lvl 14, the minimum required for SFK. We asked him along, but he claimed he was going to bed...

First, Rethilgore dropped Rugged Spaulders (I think he drops that all the time anyhow), which we promptly linked... Then we linked Silverlaine's Family Seal off the Baron... That probably depressed him enough to log off and miss Girdle of the Blindwatcher. Didn't help that Black Wolf Bracers and Wolfmaster's Cape dropped next. You'll figure that Arugal would at least be kind to my lock... Well, it was something she could use... Meteor Shard...

Bloody
Hell
........

Makes me wish Elainith had gone instead...

& I didn't even get the Large Soran'ruk Fragment for my quest... Xig was nice enough to try the run again, and had better luck with drops that time... At least for my lock... But I'm still stuck with the Bloody Apron...

Warlock Speccing

Since I'm starting over, I had entertained the thought of leveling as a Demo lock. It's something I've never done and the Felguard certainly looks like it's worth a trial...

Then, while leveling to level 10, I realise that unfortunately, I'm an Affliction lock to the core and the thought of having my pet be anything except a mana battery is just counter-intuitive to me... :p

So, do I go for the cookie-cutter 41/0/20 spec? Well, the thing is, the Affliction tree has quite a few lemons in them so the decision isn't hard. But I did make some changes based on my play-style and goals. BTW, anyone looking for a good guide on Warlock talents, nothing beats Maso's guide which can be found here on the Official Warlock's forum.

Suppression

I've considered this talent as 'not bad'. I mean, your DOTs need less spell hit at 70 letting you use gear with higher stats.

But the problem is that a large chunk of your damage are still going to come from Shadow Bolts, which do not benefit from Suppression. Which means, you still need to gather the +spell hit gear anyway. So, the points invested in this talent seems wasted. While leveling, spell hit is also less of a concern. It only becomes an issue while raiding, but again, you need the hit from gear for Shadow Bolt anyway.

Besides, with Improved Corruption in the same tier, it's not like you needed the five points as filler.

Improved Curse of Agony

While this talent is generally overlooked, I tend to like it. For one, it now scales with gear as the bonus is applied after your spell damage is added. Also, I tend to use Curse of Agony a lot more often in 5-mans and solo. Mobs don't stay alive long enough for Curse of Doom and the other curses are not as effective. To spare the points for this, I gave up Amplify Curse and Curse of Exhaustion. Decent talents, but not always as useful.

If I was raiding, it might make sense to change to Amplify Curse to boost Curse of Doom, but until then...

The rest of the talents are pretty cookie-cutterish, so I basically ended up with this.