Resilience and Warlocks

Well, As my first two posts have been PVE oriented, I will throw in some thoughts about the realm of player versus player combat, and why I think warlocks shouldn’t bother with it.

“What? Warlocks? NOT PVP!?”  The short answer is yes…

The long answer is resilience. (WARNING: The long answer is wordy)

Resilience has hit no class harder than the warlock, because it affects all of our possibilities for damage, a warlock has three tools to bring firey hurt and shadowy pain upon their enemies: damage over time spells, direct damage spells, and pets.  Resilience nerfs all three of these, and hard.

Damage over times spells are much like a rogue or warrior’s auto attack, all one has to do is land them and barring them being disspelled, they tick for damage, regardless of what the warlock is doing.  They are then reduced by up to 12.5%, making killing somone with them very very difficult, as they don’t do damage very quickly, they just provide a constant stream of it.  With DoTs being reduced by resilience a warlocks effective auto-attack is then reduced by resilience.

Our direct damage spells; Shadow Bolt, Incinerate, and to an extent Immol/Conflagr-ate, and then reduced by resilience in that their crit chance, and damge dealt is reduced significantly. Not to mention that we have to stand in one place for numerous seconds to cast them.

Our pets don’t gain any bonus from resilience, and die very very quickly in PVP because of it, so, they too are an unreliable source of damage to other players.

No other class in the game is hit this way; Mages have a number of instant casts and snares to keep their targets at range while dealing damage to them, albeit slowly.  Mages also have a much more reliable CC than warlocks with Polymorph.  Priests, while they do have DoTs as their main source of damage, have up to a 15% crit multiplier on Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death, which makes up a little bit for the resilience nerf to their crit rate, but also have the ability to snare, heal, shield and dispell.  Hunters have a number of snares as well as a stun via their pet that doesn’t have to be used at range.  Hunter pets can also be respec’d for more PVP worthy talents.  Rogues and Warriors and Paladins have auto attacks, which are not reduced by resilience, and often have very high crit rates to offset their target’s resilience, and Shaman have snares, heals, and a speed increase.  Druids have a number of things, Autoattack, Moonfire, and HoTs.

Warlocks are the odd ones out, as we have no damaging instant casts that can reliably be used in an arena.

Warlocks are forced to be the only DPS class not expected to deal damage in an arena, they are instead expected to outlast their opponent, slowly LoSing them until they run out of health and mana which was slowly drained to the warlock.

I agree that before Resilience affected DoTs Affliction was very powerful, possibly overly powerful in arenas, but with the changes made, Warlocks are now, in theory, the worst pvp class, in that they are hit the hardest by the new pvp stat that everyone in an arena is stacking.

Really, the only possibility to fix this would be to revert the changes to Resilience to not affect DoT’s.  Warlocks would then have the choice of whether they are a dps class, or a tanking class in arenas.  They would have the capability to kill somone if they needed too, which they sorely lack now, a SL/SL warlock does laughable amounts of damage.

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