Blood Pact: Goodies for warlocks in patch 4.2

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology and destruction warlocks. For those who disdain the watered-down arts that other cling to like a safety blanket ... For those willing to test their wills against the nether and claim the power that is their right ... Blood Pact welcomes you.

Today, class, we will begin coverage of the upcoming 4.2 patch. This patch contains the Firelands raid. It also has a new daily quest hub, both of which offer new rewards for you to work toward. There is also the introduction of the game's second caster legendary, Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest. Before we can begin, let me take attendance to ensure everyone is present. Bueller ... Bueller ... Bueller ... Bueller.

Right. Now that we got that out of the way, perhaps it's time that we can take a look at just a few of the things that you'll find in the next patch, which should be coming out the day after this post goes up. Even though this patch will involve quite a bit of saving cute, fluffy animals, we can still participate just like every one else. After you've finished running the new dailies, though, you may want to go bathe yourself in the blood of virgins or something to get the sweetness off.

Buying into the business

We will begin today's lesson by first delving into the new daily quest hub opening with patch 4.2. Before you are able to do anything in this area, you must first complete several of the initial quests in Hyjal. You don't have to complete the entire zone, but you do have to complete up to the saving of The Regrowth via the Aessina's Miracle quest. If you have not yet complete that quest, then the daily hub will be phased from you and you won't be able to get started. Once you have reached that point, you can begin gaining access to the new daily hub by picking up the starter quest located on the adventure boards in every major city.

Once you arrive in Hyjal, you'll find the druidic forces being attacked by a new wave of fire elementals. The first set of quests that you will complete will center around forcing these elementals back where they came from. From there, the daily quests will begin.

The quests you complete within this new hub reward you with a new token called a Mark of the World Tree. These will be essential in the new gating system that you'll experience. At first, there will only be three daily quests open to you, which reward you with four Marks in total. It takes 20 of these Marks to unlock the next stage of dailies. Since you gain some from the first quests you do here, it will take three days' worth of dailies to reach the next stage.

The second stage of the hub centers around entering the Molten Front itself and establishing a foothold there for the attack upon the Fire Lord and his minions. There will be another short quest chain before the dailies are unlocked, but the good news is that these quests do provide you with a few Marks of their own. This set of dailies, combined with the ones form the previous stage, provide of total of 14 Marks per day.

Despite how many Marks it may seem that you are getting, unlocking stage 3 requires a massive 150 Marks. With the few you gain from the startup quests, it should take 10 days worth of dailies in order to reach this point. This, however, is where your first choice comes into play.

The third stage involves unlocking either the Druids of the Talon or the Shadow Wardens. At this point, there is no difference in which you choose to unlock, as neither provides you with any rewards. The only thing you gain from this unlock is ... more dailies! In fact, you get around double the number of dailies that you've been completing up to this point. This will increase your Marks per day up to 24.

One snag, though: You cannot progress past this point until you have unlocked both the Druids and the Wardens, each costing you the same 150 Marks. Thankfully, with the increase in rewards, it should only take around seven days in order to get the second faction open. Unfortunately, doing this doesn't grant you any additional daily quests. You can only quest for either the Druids or the Wardens on any given day, so the second unlock only provides you with variety in terms of the quests that you do every day.

Now, you've finally reached the point where you can start getting stuff. After unlocking both the Druids and the Wardens, you'll be presented with three new unlock options: The Ancients, The Armorer, or The Moonwell. Each of these unlocks takes 125 Marks to get. You should be able to reach this in around five days of questing.

Which seat can I take?

For those of you at home who have been keeping score, it is going to take around 25 days of constantly doing these dailies in order to unlock the first rewards vendor. Each vendor that you unlock will provide a small increase in Marks per day, but it will always take five days' worth of questing in order to unlock the next vendor. You do not need Marks to buy anything from the vendors. Everything is bought with gold; the Marks are only used to unlock the vendors.

Which of the unlocks that you take first really depends on what it is that you need; however, each vendor is rather biased towards a certain archetype. Here's a list of the vendors and what they will offer you; which do you think is best?

The Ancients

The Armorer
The Moonwell
Sadly, warlocks aren't able to use relics, and there are no wand rewards from these vendors. That is actually rather upsetting, to be quite honest, because there is a relic option for every imaginable spec choice that would use it; adding in wands as well would only seem fair. Blizzard, however, just seems to have a thing against wands in this expansion.

Overall, the Moonwell offers the best personal rewards, so if you are looking for gear for yourself, then that is where you are likely to find it. The big "however" is that it is the Armorer who offers all of the new fantastic blacksmithing plans. If your warlock happens to be a blacksmith, then it could be well worth it to unlock the Armorer first in order to be one of the firsts to have those stellar plans. Everyone want new weapons, and right there is an easy alternative for new players to get. Even some long-term raiders may want to get their hands on them, depending on their drop luck.

Cry, raider, cry

That brings up the next big point. While these items are fantastic, they may only be of limited value to anyone who is currently in the raiding scene. From a raw ilevel point, they are situated comfortably between normal and heroic itemization from the current raiding tier. It might be that some of them are fairly useful to you, but overall, if you've been raiding already at this time, then you may not really find too much here that's great for you.

More than that, it'll be almost a month before you can even get your first item. During this time, your guild should be making some Firelands progression, and if not, then they'll hopefully be going back to attempt some of the easier tier 11 heroics. Either option would provide better rewards than what you could get from here.

Of most note is the Moonwell Chalice, which is a rather decent trinket, and trinkets are pretty important item slots in terms of the damage that they can provide. Overall, as a current raider, I wouldn't put too much stock in the tangible upgrades that you could get out of the new dailies. Getting better is just far too easy. Instead, I'd work more toward the pets and mounts and such instead.

This stuff is far more geared toward newer players or far more casual raiders who may only pug here and there when they get a chance -- which, in my opinion, is a great thing. Those players need their rewards, too.

How to avenge Hyjal

Just as with most other raiding tiers, this new raid comes with its very own faction for you to earn reputation with. The newly minted Avengers of Hjyal will be the ones leading the assault against Ragnaros, and any destruction that you end up causing in this raiding zone will curry some favor with them. Unlike working some other factions out there, gaining reputation with this lot is totally worth it. See, warlocks do like some people!

Each new level of reputation with the Avengers of Hyjal will offer you a new reward that you can purchase from their cute vendor lady (or dude; I can never really tell with these types). Thankfully, this is one thing that Blizzard did right when it comes to itemization.

Friendly -- Cloaks

Haste and hit all rolled up into one neat little package? Yes, please! There's not really much to say about it; this is an awesome cloak. While there's a dropped cloak in Firelands, why bother getting it? It doesn't have hit.

Honored -- Belts

Sitting at crit/haste, it isn't a bad belt at all. Considering that it's essentially "free," there's nothing really bad that you can say about it. I wish it didn't have a blue socket? One interesting thing, though, is there is no spirit option on the belts for anyone. Pures don't get hit, hybrids don't get spirit -- sounds fair to me.

Revered -- Trinkets

It's a little miffy that hybrid casters do get two options here with the spirit trinket, but overall, it isn't all that terrible I suppose. Hit trinkets, great as they are, generally aren't favored by anyone because of how much itemization they eat up. The Rune itself is a pretty decent trinket. An on-use to buff intellect is splendid, the crit is hit or miss depending on spec, but you can always reforge it to something else if you need to.

Exalted -- Rings

Another hit/haste item, which is absolutely fantastic, but more than that it has a gem slot! Oh, yeah, did I mention that it has the same ilevel as heroic Firelands gear? Well, it does. Reaching Exalted pretty much hands you the best ring that you're going to get from this zone. How much more could you ask for? Blood Pact is a weekly column detailing DoTs, demons and all the dastardly deeds done by warlocks. We'll coach you in the fine art of staying alive, help pick the best target for Dark Intent, and steer you through encounters such as Blackwing Descent and The Bastion of Twilight.
Tags: affliction-warlock-blood-pact, class-help, demonology-warlock-blood-pact, destruction-warlock-blood-pact, featured, guide, guide-to-locks, guide-to-warlocks, lock-guide, lock-info, lock-talents, patch-4.2, talent, talents, warlock-blood-pact, warlock-guide, warlock-info, warlock-talents, world-of-warcraft-class-guide, world-of-warcraft-guide, world-of-warcraft-patch-4.2, wow-class-guide, wow-class-help, wow-guide, wow-lock, wow-lock-info, wow-locks, wow-patch, wow-patch-4.2, wow-patch-4.2-news, wow-patch-news, wow-talent-guide, wow-warlock, wow-warlock-info, wow-warlocks

Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact

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Lichborne: Why the death knight blood tree needs tweaks

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.

Patch 4.2 will likely be on live servers by the time you read this, but I figure we've talked enough about the patch 4.2 in past columns. If you read those, you probably have a good idea of where everything is for death knights. This week, I've decided it would be a good idea to take a break and talk about something that didn't get much attention in patch 4.2: the plight of the death knight tank.

It's been sort of an undercurrent in the death knight community since the beginning of Cataclysm. The death knight blood tanking tree is just sort of gummed up. It's not that we're underpowered, per se. No, a well played death knight tank is pretty dominant in heroic dungeons and even normal raiding. You only start really falling behind in heroic raids, where the problem becomes really evident: You're doing twice as much work for the same results, more or less.

Most of the issues are centered around Death Strike and how it interacts with our resource system. The quirks of said resource system are so demanding that you end up staring at your rune bar more than the battle in front of you, trying to game the system just right to squeeze out one last Death Strike.

Spamming Death Strike works

In theory, Death Strike would be a great reactive ability. Getting low on health? Death Strike. Just took a huge hit? Death Strike, because you know that means you'll get a huge heal and thus a huge Blood Shield from the heal.

Unfortunately, in practice, all you really end up doing is spamming Death Strike. This is essentially because Death Strike and Blood Shield replace block, which shield classes get automatically. Without thinking, they just don't take as much damage at the base, because their shield automatically blocks it more often than not, especially once they get to decent levels of mastery.

As an example, consider a death knight and a warrior, each tanking the same raid boss. Let's say they have similar skill and gear levels, and they each take a huge spike of damage from the boss. Now, the warrior (thanks to high mastery) is going to end that streak of damage at 40% health because he had block. The death knight, in the meantime, is at 10% health because he can't block and is expected to make up that health gap by immediately throwing out a few Death Strikes.

Now, all well and good you say. Just spam Death Strike, and you're fine. In theory, this is true. The issue, though, is that in spamming Death Strike, you've immediately used 4 runes. That means 4 runes that can't be used for at least 8 seconds. Those runes could have been used to apply diseases or throw up Bone Shield or Death and Decay (or even, say, a Blood Boil or Heart Strike, if you were in death rune mode). Those resources are gone.

On the other hand, if you decide to use those runes to, say, refresh Frost Fever and Blood Plague, that's a whole mess of healing and blocking power you're giving up, and your healer either needs to pour extra mana on you or gamble that you won't get hit quite hard enough to die while you wait for those runes to refresh for another Death Strike.

In the meantime, the warrior is now free to throw up whatever threat-gaining abilities, defensive cooldowns, or debuffs he wants without worrying about wasting resources that should have been used to pull himself back from the brink of death. He will be, by definition, ahead of us.

Runic Empowerment: Surprisingly disempowering

Of course, even spamming Death Strike becomes a whole game in itself for a simple reason: Our rune system works against us when we try to get the maximum amount of Death Strikes out.

Most of this is due to Runic Empowerment. This ability regenerates runes at random when you use your runic power dumps. On the face of things, this is great. If you're lucky, you get a quick streak of runes up, and you can immediately use theme for another Death Strike, building your blood shield up and avoiding more damage.

Unfortunately, the wrench in the works here are your blood runes. They simply can't be used for Death Strikes, Blood Tap aside. Now, that might encourage you to leave them unspent; just let them pool so any Runic Empowerment procs go straight to your frost and unholy runes. That doesn't work well either, though, because you do want your blood runes spent for Blade Barrier.

Thus, what you end up doing is staring at your rune bar, trying to balance all your runes for optimum generation of the frost and unholy runes you need for Death Strike. This generally means you have 1 blood rune spent at all times, spending the active blood rune only when the second blood rune is about to refresh. This allows you to keep Blade Barrier up as much as possible, while still keeping blood runes up as much as possible so the minimum amount of Runic Empowerment procs get wasted on them. Then, you just have to hope that any Runic Empowerment procs give you the right combination of runes to get off another Death Strike -- the last thing you want is a combination of 2 unholy or 2 frost runes.

In addition, you need to watch your runic power. If it's capped and you're still trying to get your blood runes balanced so you don't proc Runic Empowerment on them, you're probably losing threat and Runic Empowerment procs anyway. This whole system is popularly called "rune Tetris" and is considered the #1 issue with blood tanks by many people, just because of how much more involved and stressful it is to manage.

It is interesting to note that, these days, blood is the only tree that has to manage runes like this. Frost now has permanent death runes, which means just about any rune that refreshes for them will automatically be useful for their main strike, Obliterate. Unholy can spec into Runic Corruption, which just offers a quick boost to rune refresh rate in general. Again, no worries about getting the correct rune there, because they're all correct.

The most obvious answer here, then, is to give blood death knights one of these workarounds. Making Runic Corruption baseline would go a long way toward ending rune Tetris and allowing death knights to glance up from their rune bars every once in a while.

Fighting against themselves

Even beyond rune Tetris, there are other aspects of death knight tanking that are clunky enough to make playing the class frustrating in ways that just aren't true of other tanking specs. In short, a lot of our defensive abilities cancel each other out or at least are constantly vying for dominance.

At the most basic level, you can argue that avoidance (and thus Bone Shield) work at cross purposes with Blood Shield. Since your Blood Shield is only as powerful as how much damage you've taken, any avoidance of that damage weakens Blood Shield. That's sort of a low-level annoyance, arguably, but it's there.

The biggest issue, though, is the application of diseases and the debuffs they cause. The damage diseases cause is actually pretty solid threat, but where they really shine is debuffs. The reduced physical damage from Scarlet Fever and the reduced speed from Frost Fever are both incredibly powerful tools for making you take damage. The problem is that casting them when Outbreak is on cooldown requires a frost and unholy rune, which means you lose a Death Strike. This in itself can be lethal in the short term, even if those diseases will protect you from damage in the long term. In addition, spreading them to multiple targets requires the use of Pestilence, which could unbalance rune Tetris when used and, regardless, doesn't generate any extra threat. Compare this to, say, Thunder Clap, which does AOE threat at the same time it spreads both extra damage and the slowing debuff.

Blizzard CM Zarhym has already discussed the possibility of solving this by giving blood a reduced cooldown on Outbreak. This would at least give DKs a chance to refresh diseases without giving up a Death Strike. Another possibility is to give Pestilence or Blood Boil the ability to refresh all diseases. This wouldn't specifically solve the rune Tetris issue, but it would at least allow blood death knights to use all their defensive tools to the something approaching the same level that other tank classes can.

Mastering mastery may merit mastery modification

Of course, there's also another, more nuclear option to be had. Just give death knights a different mastery, one that isn't so focused on using a single attack as much as possible. One solution is to possibly give us the ability to proc a Blood Shield from multiple attacks, similar to the druid's Savage Defense. Of course, if you talk to many druid tanks, they'll tell you Savage Defense has problems of its own. Perhaps then, there could be a move to return death knights more to the unholy avoidance tank model from the Wrath era. Turn Bone Shield into a sort of passive mastery ability that procs more charges every time an attack is successfully avoided and/or absorbs damage based on previous damage taken just as Blood Shield does now.

There are a lot of ideas to fixing mastery and a lot of ways to go about it. There are still some big roadblocks, though. Since death knights, even with their clunky playstyle, are still more than adequate tanks up through heroic dungeons and even in normal raiding, a lot of players don't even realize they have issues. As long as they're surviving and downing content, players don't care that the player behind the blood death knight tank is working twice as hard as the warrior tank.

In addition, Blizzard has said in the past that it likes the "active mitigation" aspect of the death knight tanking model and would, in fact, prefer that all tanking classes have it. Now, many members of the death knight tanking community have pointed out that it's not really active if the only optimal way of playing is to spam the active button. It's a tossup as to whether Blizzard will buy that argument, but we have seen some blue posts in death knight tanking threads, so we can at least hope that Blizzard is aware of these arguments.

The real test, of course, will be when the theoretical patch 4.2.1 rolls around. Will we see some meaningful death knight tanking changes, or will we need to keep queuing up the Russian folk music remixes? Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear.
Tags: blood, blood-death-knight-lichborne, blood-plague, blood-shield, class-help, death-knight-blood-lichborne, death-knight-debuffs, death-knight-diseases, death-knight-guide, death-knight-info, death-knight-mastery, death-knight-talents, death-knight-tanking, death-strike, dk-guide, dk-info, dk-talents, featured, frost-fever, guide, guide-to-death-knights, mastery, outbreak, rune-tetris, scarlet-fever, talent, talents, tanking, world-of-warcraft-class-guide, world-of-warcraft-guide, wow-class-guide, wow-class-help, wow-death-knight, wow-dk, wow-guide, wow-talent-guide

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Blood Pact: On armor spells and warlock survivability

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology and destruction warlocks. For those who disdain the watered-down arts that other cling to like a safety blanket ... For those willing to test their wills against the nether and claim the power that is their right ... Blood Pact welcomes you.

I believe that somewhere along the line, I promised that I would write more this week about how terrible mages are -- which, you know, that's entirely possible, but I say lots of things. Trusting that what I said was accurate or true, well, that seems like a pretty big lead of faith; I personally wouldn't take it. Besides which, I feel that Archmage Pants does quite a good enough job of that for me. Why should I bother? It's like kicking a wounded puppy. Although I'm not entirely against that, either.

No, no, there will be no puppy kicking today -- well, perhaps minimal puppy kicking. Instead, we're going on an adventure -- a literary adventure! I know, get excited, because those are the best kinds. This week is all about keeping yourself alive. If you recall, a while back I wrote on the art of surviving as a warlock. This time, I'd like to take a look into exactly how this works, what's paying off, and what's better left off being passed down to mages.

The Basics: Armors

Right, so you can't have any talk about warlock survivability without dragging Fel and Demon Armor into the discussion. Now, to first focus on the PVE side of things, Fel Armor is liable to be the armor of choice. Do remember, though, that there is a time and a place to utilize Demon Armor, even in PVE.

Armors are the backbone of any cloth caster's defensive toolkit. Mages have armors, and even priests have their new flashy abilities that replicate armor effects. While damage is the objective that people zero in most on in PVE, it isn't your only goal; you also have to care quite a lot about the whole staying alive thing. It's pretty important, too.

In terms of damage, of course, Fel Armor is easily the best out of all of the armors available to any class. Fel Armor directly increases spellpower, which is something that mages don't know from any of their armors. That right there puts it well above anything that a mage could even dream of using. Inner Fire from priests also increases spellpower, but it gives less of it than our defensive tool does. I call this a solid win for the warlock department.

Its raw defensive abilities get a little bit trickier to define. Fel Armor doesn't have a defensive mechanic per se; instead, it allows you to regenerate 3% of all of the single-target damage that you deal. It can be quite easy to scoff at 3% as a trivial amount; perhaps it is. Assuming that you are capable of dealing 20,000 single-target DPS, then you would similarly be healing yourself for 600 HPS. Worth it? Probably not.

Fel Armor doesn't exist to try and give warlocks massive amounts of health return but instead to counteract the amount of self-inflicted damage that they deal. That's a decently fair trade-off when you look at it, but how practical is it? Life Tap is going to hit your health in one large "burst," whereas your health is only going to trickle back from Fel Armor. It might be balanced in the long run, but you'll just have healers negating the process through simply doing their jobs.

The other thing about the health return from Fel Armor that's upsetting, to me at least, is that Vampiric Embrace has a higher self-return. Shadow priests don't deal nearly as much damage to themselves as warlocks do; our armor should return just as much health to us as their silly little ... buff returns to them. It seems only fair.

On a plus note, Fel Armor is way more defensive than Molten Armor for mages is. Molten Armor provides the mage with a 5% chance to not be critically hit, which doesn't help them in PVE at all. Unless they start thinking they can tank a boss -- P.S., they can't -- nothing that will hit them is even capable of critting. We win this round.

Defensive utility of armors

Fel armor might have a rather decent use in PVE, but the downside of our armors really comes out in PVP. That isn't entirely true -- Demon Armor is a rather good choice for armor in PVP, and I would strongly suggest that you use it, unless you think that 3% health return from Fel Armor is going to outheal a rogue.

Demon Armor is a pretty sweet deal for PVP, but it does rely on having an actual healer around. In random queues, this may not always be possible, but you should never be without a healer in organized PVP; the exception is when you're running a double DPS 2v2 comp.

Comparatively, though, does Demon Armor really hold up against those of other classes? It's a tough call. In terms of damage mitigation, Demon Armor is actually the worst of all of the choices out there. Frost Armor reduces physical damage by 15%, while Inner Fire increases armor values by 60%. Both are different bonuses, but both are also above and beyond better than the 2,345 armor granted by Demon Armor. (As a side note: Really, Blizzard? Really? 2,345? Sequential order -- is that how we create spells now?)

Regardless of which of the three armors is the worst, it should kind of be noted that all of them are actually pretty bad. Physical damage is nothing but a different spell school that's pretty much as useful as Shadow Ward. There are only three things in the game that you'll run into that rely exclusively on physical damage: warriors, feral druids and possibly retribution paladins (I can't recall how much of their damage is holy and how much is physical). Sub rogues rely pretty heavily on physical damage as well, which is a great thing for our armor, but they still have pretty high poison damage. Marksmen hunters are fairly physical damage-based, as well.

That is the growing flaw with armor itself. There are far too many physical DPSers that don't deal physical damage any more. Survival hunters only have Auto-Shots that deal physical damage; death knights are pretty evenly split between some form of magical and physical. Assassination rogues deal nearly as much nature damage as they deal physical damage. As these classes gain more abilities that ignore armor, the value of armor in PVP decreases.

Why armors are useless

There has always been an arms race of sorts between armor and armor penetration. Although Blizzard has since removed the actual stat to allow for players to penetrate armor, it can't remove the ability to do so completely. Magical damage totally ignores armor, which is the crux of why armor penetration grew so powerful.

When Blizzard looks at PVP, there's a certain limit to how much damage that the developers want for each class or spec to be able to do within any given time frame. Given that magical attacks all ignore armor, physical attacks have to be balances around the factor of armor, which is much stronger now than it ever was.

At the start of Cataclysm, Blizzard made a big to-do about how it was going to be rebalancing armor values. It understood that cloth and leather were just a little bit too squishy in comparison to plate, and even mail was a little bit lacking. Yet the entire idea that this "solution" actually solved any form of problem is a fallacy; it ultimately didn't hold a large impact in reducing the overall physical damage than players take in PVP.

Why? Simple: Blizzard has expected values of damage that it wants for players to be able to deal. While Blizzard now has more freedom to increase the damage that warriors and the like are capable of dealing to high-armor targets without it causing them to utterly demolish low-armor targets, the overall damage output of a warrior really wasn't going to change -- and it hasn't. Warriors are still a really strong PVP class that deals punishing amounts of damage; rogues are still a powerful PVP class that can deal massive amounts of damage.

When it comes to survivability, everything is rather meaningless. Blizzard expects a certain amount of damage to be dealt. Passive damage reduction is a virtually useless stat in PVP. It does not exist to actually increase your expected survivability in PVP; it exists to allow Blizzard a tool to balance damage between PVE and PVP, wherein PVE damage is vastly higher.

Think of it this way: 20,000 damage per second is far too much for any player to be able to deal in PVP. A blanket silence, a single stun, and someone is going to go from 100% to dead before you can get out. So we want to reduce PVP damage. What's the best way to do that? Passive damage reduction. Toss in a talent for players, or give them some ability or another that just says "reduces the damage you take by 20%," and your problem is solved. Now you have two tools that you can adjust to tweak PVP damage -- the damage output itself and the damage reduction of players.

How to save a life

Passive damage reduction is important because you are expected to have it, but it isn't what will actually save your life in PVP combat. Again, everyone is expected to have whatever passive damage reduction effects that they can, so Blizzard balances PVP damage around that assumption. This is one of the primary reasons that raw defensive and escape mechanics are far more important than passive damage reduction.

Having the ability to temporarily drastically increase your damage reduction or to escape and avoid all incoming damage completely will always be the best defensive mechanic. This is because it's an intangible effect that you can't directly balance against. You cannot look at abilities such as Barkskin and say "Oh, it provides an average of 8% damage reduction." No, it doesn't. It provides 20% damage reduction for 12 seconds.

This is actually quite the downside for warlocks defensively, and it really shows why affliction does so well. We lack a lot of these defensive tools as baseline abilities. There's Demonic Teleport, but that is all we really have in terms of damage mitigating abilities; instead our focus seems to be more on passive damage reduction.

For example, when fighting a warrior, it is expected that you would have Curse of Weakness and Soul Link up, which would put a rather good dent in the damage that you take. Curse of Weakness is fairly strong, yet it too suffers form the same issue that it only reduces physical damage.

Warlocks do not escape damage as much as they are expected to tank damage, and they don't rely so much on damage reduction tools as they rely on a mixture of damage reduction, self-healing, and a passive increase to healing received. Theoretically, this is a great system; it's different than what you see for other casters, it's rather interesting, and it can be functional. The problem, however, is that only affliction really supports this.

Each spec has its own self-healing talent. Affliction has Siphon Life, destruction has Soul Leech, and demonology has Demonic Aegis. Realistically, it feels as though destruction should be the best in terms of self-healing; they can get the most damage talents while getting both Soul Leech and Siphon Life. This isn't the case.

Siphon Life is highly powerful, but the real draw of affliction isn't the ability to tank damage. Warlocks are designed to do this at a base. No spec is really much better at it than any of the others, yet affliction is better at putting out pressure and at avoiding damage, which is far more important.

Despite being designed to tank damage, tanking damage is a a flawed concept. Avoiding damage will always be vastly superior. The spec that is best able to avoid damage while dealing it at the same time will be the best PVP, and that is exactly what we see.
Blood Pact is a weekly column detailing DoTs, demons and all the dastardly deeds done by warlocks. We'll coach you in the fine art of staying alive, help pick the best target for Dark Intent, and steer you through encounters such as Blackwing Descent and The Bastion of Twilight.

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