I'm not really doing these dueling guides in any particular order, and they are all works in progress that I'll come back to as I learn new things, so keep that in mind!
Okay, it's time for -- (Oh Verona theme from R+J) WARLOCKS!
Once again, I'm going to use the format: Their Game, What You Need To Do, How We Win, How They Counter Us, and Mixups.
And as before, I believe that against non-SL locks you can play competitively without Cold Snap, but to beat top locks (even affliction), you will need a full set of cooldowns. With that said:
Deep Affliction Locks
Their Game:
What I see a lot is: Immolate, Corruption, Syphon, CoA, FelHunter Silence into a fear, when fear is trinketed, howl, UA, reapply CoA, and then kite the WE. Best case the lock wants to howl both you and your pet. Your first nova will be spellstoned, then they can either try to use the felhunter to dispel novas off themselves, or they can use it offensively to destroy your Ice Barrier, Fire Wards, etc. Best case is they force you to IB before they use Death Coil, then they can DC and DL to bate the CS, fake it out, and then fear and drain for the win. The goal is to deny you IBing Deathcoil, to remove your pet as a factor by kiting it, to avoid being CS'd by faking and not doing open shadow school casts, and once CS is down, Drain Life for the win.
What You Need to Do:
- Force the lock to Deathcoil early, while you aren't on hypothermia.
- Do NOT miss a Counterspell, it is better to eat a fear or a tick or two of Drain Life than risk interrupting a fake cast so the lock "knows" he can safely spam drains.
- You must keep the pressure on, the DoTs are destroying your health pool especially if the felhunter is aggressively dispelling your shields.
- Use you globals wisely.
- Remember you probably have mana to burn against an affliction lock, mana shield IS viable.
How We Can Win:
Summon your WE as the duel timer ticks, nova and opening lance as the duel starts. If he opens with immolate, your fire ward eats the damage, and hopefully you've done some okay damage, taken some damage, and he's burnt his spellstone at the end of one global cooldown. If he doesn't stone the nova, lance again if nova is still up, and lance a third time if nova is still up. You will eat corruption and a shadowburn as you lance and close the distance.
As he puts up Syphon and Agony, Cone of Cold and Fireblast. Hopefully between these instants and your pet, the lock is at 60-70% while you still have near full health, though are quite DoT'd up. If the lock goes for a fear at a time like this, it IS a fake. Eat the fear, and trinket it to keep pressure on. You're going to nova, lance next. Then another lance if the nova holds, Cone of Cold if it comes up (depends on your spec) while the lock is still frozen. So basically, you spend 3-4 globals pumping in damage while he either: fake-casts fear, fake-drains, burns howl, or tries to just trade damage with searing pain/immolate.
If he tries to just outdamage you, he will lose as long as you spend your globals intelligently. Decurses agony in between the cooldowns of Cone of Cold and Fireblast. Use this time to reapply Barrier, Mana Shield, or Fire Ward as they come up or as they are needed. If you know he's set to autodispel you, Mana Shield before you Barrier each time. Reapply shields BETWEEN Cone of Cold and Fireblast cooldowns, as you need your high damage instants to keep pressure on. It sounds pretty lame to just reshield, spam instants, and let your pet do damage, but you're dueling a WARLOCK. Remember that Cone of Cold is VERY important not just for the damage but to keep him close so that your pet is able to do solid damage.
If he starts legitimately trying to drain you, CS the drain because you have to, you should be able to force the healthstone during the spell lock, as he comes out he'll try to howl, avoid it if you can and force the deathcoil. IB the deathcoil best you can, if you're on global or are too close to react fast enough, too bad, but it doesn't cost you the duel. Sitting in block full duration is VERY dangerous here, if you sit full duration, and he silences you with felhunter shortly after coming out, you're going to eat a fear, as he'll either howl into silence->fear or silence->fear into howl. If he gets this, the lock has a solid 6-10 seconds to Drain Spam you, which really is pretty much GG. So hop out of block moderately early, and keep the pressure up. The goal is to burn him down before felhunter silence comes back up, if it does and he lands a fear->Drain, your pet nova should come up as the fear ends, so you can get one last attempt to burst him down before his DoTs kill you. You'll have your second CS here, if you can last to your second CS after him spending Deathcoil, Howl, and his most recent Felhunter Silence, the fight is likely yours.
If the lock deathcoils early after your initial burst, drop the IB instantly after the DC and keep up the pressure, if the lock doesn't get a long fear on you VERY fast after an early DC as affliction, he's done to your instants and pet.
If the lock after your initial burst starts fake-casting fears, let him fear you. Trinket the fear and keep up the pressure. If he lands a howl->drain, Ice Block QUICKLY. He'll like DC you, but it is better to eat the DC than a long fear+Drain Life. Sit in block for a moderate amount of time, Cold Snap when you come out and keep Counterspell in the bank to deny Drain spam. Let your pet do your damage while you perform your instants and shields rotation. If he kites a lot and you have a hard time keeping him in range, don't hesitate to bring out your second pet and NEVER hesitate to use cooldowns against any lock with the improved drains. A small amount of health can go a VERY long way when he's draining you.
What He Does to Counter You:
He will either: kite your pet if he's confident he can or he will kill your pet. Fearing and banishing the pet is not very effective for an affliction lock as eating the Counterspell even with a decent chunk of health remaining can be GG. It's safer to kite the pet or kill it with shadowburn and powerful DoTs. Alternately, the lock can howl you (and pet if he can) and as you trinket fear, he can silence->fear, corruption, shadowburn, deathcoil your pet and run. This trades deathcoil for your first pet basically, a trade that he can afford to make as it pretty forces the mage to burn an Ice Block if he wants to get his second pet out. And while I complain about how overpowered locks are, there isn't a TON he can do to counter what you're trying to do against him here.
Mixups:
Hypothermia means you REALLY need to put the lock on the defensive before you hop in your first Ice Block. Even though an affliction lock lacks the survivability of SL, his dots do huge damage, his felhunter is even more a nuisance than a felguard, and he's perpetually trying to outrange you and run away while his DoTs destroy you. You must keep him snared and close to you to maintain damage for both you and your pet.
- Save your pet nova until after he burns hunter silence->fear on you. When he does, trinket and quickly pet nova, try to cast a bolt on the lock. This denies howl pretty well and puts the lock in a strange situation where he needs to get close to howl, but needs to stay far away to kite your pet. If you space yourself away from your pet and deny him the howl by keeping range as you run from him, even if he Spellstones that nova, you can get a lot of damage in as he tries to land that howl.
- Time to go see Knocked Up, I'll add to this LATER!
8 comments:
Have you seen many Warlocks use the silence of the felhunter to ensure a safe Banish on your pet? It seems like a significant reduction in damage for the mage.
okay i understand that this is a detailed guide ure making and im not trying to diss it, but there is too much on the theory side. i admit that yes guides consists of a lot of theory work coupled with experiences but i feel that the way you write about affliction warlocks is as tho they are of a certain standard.
what i mean is, you wrote that after a full dot on you the warlock will either fake a drainlife, fake a fear etc. faking spells only works against players with lag or players who arent as good. i as a mage will never try to fake cast a spell against anyone who has a spelllock (be it mage or felhunter) if i dont know how good the player is, i simply wont risk it. and also, what i feel a stronger affliction warlock would do instead of pulling fakes off you would be to actually run. dot and run, dot and run. heck he can even mount when the duel is counting 3 2 1 and clear off an easy 30 yards range b/n you and him and start dotting you, assuming this is large area duelling like orgrimmar. if its arena its even worse coz of easily abused LOS.
what im saying is, if the warlock plays differently, like kites u out of range and waits for his dots to chew u down, your pet isnt doing damage coz of range/los, hes too far to nova, ure too far to fireblast and maybe u can only icelance. and even if u blink the warlock is just going to spelllock-->kite again, giving him 3 more seconds of dot damage.
your guide is good no doubt but there are many playstyles of a warlock. in fact for a warlock duelling a top mage its kinda stupid to even cast unstable affliction since a fear, wasting a wotf/trinket would be a much better tradeoff for a 1.5sec cast after a spell lock or something. so kinda your guide focuses on fight locks who do not use UA and only up to syphon, which i can add some top 5v5 arena team warlocks are specced SL/affliction/felhunter which means ure facing his high spell resist which is just going to be A LOT more problems when nova resists occurs.
Yeah I realize that affliction locks can play this fight with a lot of mixups. But I think the core of the fight doesn't change that much.
You should keep the lock snared with cone of cold to keep him in range of your pet as best you can to reduce how much he can simple kite you. If you never are able to close the gap to use cone of cold or nova, then of course, you are going to lose and this happens sometimes.
Fake casting is a huge part of high level dueling -- I disagree entirely. You make it sound like fast reflexes >> fake casts, but this is not the case at all.
And you can definitely cast UA against mages, if you open with it early, it is not always in the mage's interest to counterspell it.
I don't really do any theorycrafting in these dueling guides; I just go with what I use that works.
I agree, fake casting, for a duel, where you KNOW that the other person has only 1 target in mind (you) is solid. Although when I was Affliction, I'd never fake Drain Life against anything that could interrupt/lock down my Shadow school, but then again I never dueled much either.
How do you deal with DOT/COEx kiting? I don't think I've ever used Agony on Frost Mages as Affliction, as soon as I see the Ice Barrier, WE, or Winter's Chill debuff as tells, I kite the hell out of them. The global used to cleanse COA is not equal to the cleansing of COEx.
My key to dueling warlocks as a mage is to decline the duel :P
Reroll undead, WotF helps a lot.
;)
Good article but what i miss in your pvp guides is the element of surprise. Each time you see badass warlock(or whatever else oponent) comming for you you don't know what's his spec/gear etc etc(of course you can always predict) so it would be nice of you to cover some pre-combat part(yeah yeah you're mostly writing about duels but please share some thoughts about world pvp/bg's, arenas) and how do you approach your enemy.
1 ice lance or detect can usually tell you right away what specc he is. I prefer detection as the range is longer and GCD will be up before he or his pet have range.
I'll probably try a few of these strats against warlocks, the thing is, while there is no foolproof strategy to pvp I've found a good deal of warlocks do pretty much the same thing everytime, and I'll agree that even a warlock with poor skills can kill me 1v1 if I don't have atleast a handful of cooldowns available.
Post a Comment