Laodaron

I agree completely. I even have a deaggro for my pet. But I raid with a Warlock who does sick DPS, numbers I've never seen before. Never seen him pull aggro. Not once.

Arangor

Your warlock is your number one parser?

And him not pulling aggro and doing good DPS is just good tanking and some discipline on the warlocks part. Although he could have amends on him every raid for all I know.

Laodaron

Nope, our group is a Fury, Troub, me, Warlock, Necro, SK. And he zonewides well over 2k in FTH for example. And the point I'm making is that with a good tank, and great tank setup, no casting DPSer has an issue.
I agree that you can't just mash buttons on a Sorc, but its the same on a Summoner as well.

Arangor

Yeh I would agree, I never tried to come across as saying sorcs have it way easier. I would say, however, that a wiz/warlock would have to be much more careful than a summoner on agro control. That's not to say, however, that summoners don't have anything to be on top of in a raid.

Honestly I've tried both and neither seems much more difficult. I would have to say that the difference between being an average wizard and an exceptional wizard is greater than being an average summoner and an exceptional summoner. IMO, there are more decisions to make with a sorcerer as far as timing goes, but that may be because I hardly played one compared to my conj.

Kahna

I have to disagree on that little bit, I'd say it's really even no matter what classes you match up. There is a big gap, and there always will be, between the people who play their class properly and those that don't have a fucking clue.

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Kahna - 80 Conjuror

GM Chandrok tells Level_70-79 (11), "Management had decreed that this issue will come to an end. This has moved beyond harassment and has become a serverwide disruption."
Imajin tells Level_70-79 (11), "Does that mean the whole server is getting banned?"
Kithicor, we know drama

Zahne

Well, there are two kinds of people that play Wiz/Warlock imho. The kind that avoid aggro by doing low damage, and the kind that look to do as much DPS as possible *without* taking aggro.

As you've said above, it is possible to stack enough hate reduction on a DPS caster that they simply cannot draw hate. I personally find that's the case for me 1 out of every 10 raids I attend.

You spend most of your time in groups or raids being able to do much more damage then your hate reduction will allow. Because the hate reduction you receive from other players is VERY fluid it's virtually impossible to become completely comfortable with where that line between tanking the mobs .. and doing sweet damage is.

With the warlock at least, it becomes extremely difficult.


See, the Warlock isn't equipped with a "Holy fuck, big damage" button. The key to really ripping off the big stuff for us, is by stacking DOTS .. and mixing in DD. We also have a spell that proc's damage every time any mob is touched with Disease or Poison. This happens AE of course. So your getting a large volume of very unpredictable damage.

You might have noticed that once your Warlocks *take* aggro, your sure as hell not getting it back until the warlock is dead. That's usually because you can't just switch off the dots once they're ticking.

Apocalypse for example, can tick for over 4,000 points of damage .. five times, on five mobs. So imagine dropping a DOT on a group of 5 Epic's that tears off up to 100,000 damage within around what .. 6 seconds? Now imagine adding several other dots to the mix, and toss in a few encounter DD's to boot.


This is all from my perspective of course, I haven't had a chance to play absolutely all classes out there. But I pool my perspective from running the odd raid, and playing these characters:

70 Warlock
70 Inquisitor
61 Berserker
57 Assassin
49 Dirge

So yeah, I'm limited in the sense where my viewpoint is based around observations playing those characters.

Out of these though, the Warlock really is the most challenging to play well. If I wanted to slack off like an idiot, it would probably be fairly simple. But I play my Warlock to do serious DPS at all times. I don't settle for any less.

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Zahne - 80 Warlock
Rikko - 80 Guardian
Mizcreant - 70 Dirge