Warlock Tank Spec

[Computer]

Please gibbe lock tank spec , turtle devs even added a new stone "Wrathstone" which increases threat generated from hellfire , but we have no hard taunt. They removed the threat modifier from searing pain so that's no longer an option.

Hail Octo

- Microchip

[Bababooey]

Some mechanics I'd like to propose:
Voidwalker ability that transfers threat to the warlock.
Buff Soul Link when you have a voidwalker out, but gives voidwalker Sac a short cast time.
An armor spell that converts a percentage of all damage taken to shadow.
Wrathstone increases all threat.
Obviously a taunt.

The armor spell would allow the warlock to effectively obtain defense via shadow resist, so no major itemization changes would need to happen, and a lot of warlock tier already has some shadow resist. Plus shadow ward, shadow protection pot, and spellstone become active mitigation.
Wrathstone and voidwalker threat transfer would allow tanking in MC and BWL, plus it buffs melee weaving for some added engagement.
Soul Link was nerfed from vanilla for arguably good reason, but voidwalker with an interruptible sac doesn't really have any substantial PVP utility.

[Outed]

Wanted to toss a few more ideas into the pool.

First off, gearing needs a fresh look. Locks are basically sponge tanks like Druids—no parry, block, or base plate armor, just a massive HP pool. We really need more cloth gear itemized for this with high stamina, armor, and defense (similar to Cryptstone Circlet with 161 armor / 25 stam / 14 def). Ever since Soul Link got nerfed down from 30% -> 25% -> 20% over Turtle's lifecycle and we lost the VW bonus healing, taking big hits got way harder. Also spell hit rating is a huge issue right now—if your Searing Pain gets resisted in harder dungeons or raids, aggro is basically gone.

Agreed with #2 on the Wrathstone point. It really needs to boost threat on ALL damage types (shadow, fire, melee, and wand). Whenever you get kicked or silenced, you're forced to rely on melee/wanding to hold threat, so having Wrathstone cover everything would save lives.

As for talents:

Demonic Embrace: Adding ~10% defense here would help prevent getting crit by big elites and raid bosses.

Soul Funnel: Could add a mechanic where each tick transfers 3-5% of the locks armor to the demon (stacks up to 5 times, lasts 20s). This gives the VW/demon actual survivability to off tank extra mobs on 4+ pulls so the lock doesnt take every hit at once.

Demonic Aegis: Id drop the shadow res and HP5 from Demon Armor completely, focus purely on armor, and buff the talent from 20/40/60% to something like 40/80/120%. Losing the 24 shadow res for Twin Emps later is a downside, but honestly that feels very vanilla to have to gear around it.

I Have a bunch more ideas on lock tanking in general, might just start a separate thread at some point.

[Bababooey]

Demonic Embrace: Adding ~10% defense here would help prevent getting crit by big elites and raid bosses.

Demonic Aegis: Id drop the shadow res and HP5 from Demon Armor completely, focus purely on armor, and buff the talent from 20/40/60% to something like 40/80/120%. Losing the 24 shadow res for Twin Emps later is a downside, but honestly that feels very vanilla to have to gear around it.

Armor contribution from equipment might be more pertinent, and defense is half as effective for warlock (and druid) than for warrior because of the lack of block and parry.
I thought the damage conversion would be a good way to handle crit immunity without a boring buff like in sod, but another way they could go about it is to just have crits converted into shadow damage entirely, but regular damage is unaffected. Or even have crits redirected to your summoned demon, because the talent for health funnel makes it heal so much that it generates a shit ton of threat.

[Bababooey]

After thinking about it a while I came up with a couple more things that wouldn't effect anything but tanking.

-Resource gains are supposed to generate threat, as in blood rage, rage potion, mana potion, thistle tea, etc... Except Life tap is excluded from this rule. Reversing this exclusion when wrathstone or something similar is active would change life tap from lost tps into something you're excited to press.

-Imp health funnel heals so much that a full channel on a low health voidwalker often pulls aggro. My thought here is that Power overwhelming being made into a toggle would give the demon consistent damage that could be used to generate healing threat, and give the spec some engagement through resource management.

-I think spellstone was changed in twow to not remove friendly magic. IDK, would be nice.

-A talent or something that makes fire shield last longer so we can summon imp to buff then swap.

[Biggamehunter]

If you want something that can even be considered, you have to follow these design rules:

1) you can't remove anything from any existing spells so as not to disrupt the other playstyles.

2) you cannot add something that would disproportionately make other playstyles stronger.

Considering how wrathstone works, I don't think it'd be a terrible stretch to add defense rating to prevent being crit in pve or even a modified creature only version of minus chance to be crit since that's what we are really using it for and buffing the threat increase to apply across all spells though when I read it earlier I thought it already did that.

I did like the idea of shadow conversion for some of the incoming damage but realistically since we are demo tanks we should make better use what you really have and that's namely the Soul Link itself since that's the mitigation you'll be using to give yourself mail to plate ish armor levels, but that also presents the other limitation of having to micromanage your pet not dying or you'll lose the mitigation and health funnel takes away time you could be generating threat.

Part of me wants to suggest a new talent entire in the tree that requires Demonic Sacrifice since it only makes sense to a demonologist to only really have that if they're taking in the attributes for themselves, and the version of this new talent I'd call "demon within".

When you have no pet, your armor is increased by 360% like a druid, your chance to be critically struck is reduced by 6%, and your vampirism is increased by 10%.


The vamp offers a pseudo mitigation similar to how other classes can block and bears can self heal, the crit reduction and armor increase makes up for not having master demo or Soul link, and even can synergize with spell vamp you can get from items to keep you alive without having to have felatone as the only option since wrathstone is better for tanking and Firestone is great for crits.

Tldr you make the demonless demo spec the de facto tank spec but leave the first few alone so the other classes can still use it and demo sac becomes sought after for tanks too for the health regen effect.

[Bababooey]

If you want something that can even be considered, you have to follow these design rules:

1) you can't remove anything from any existing spells so as not to disrupt the other playstyles.

2) you cannot add something that would disproportionately make other playstyles stronger.

Considering how wrathstone works, I don't think it'd be a terrible stretch to add defense rating to prevent being crit in pve or even a modified creature only version of minus chance to be crit since that's what we are really using it for and buffing the threat increase to apply across all spells though when I read it earlier I thought it already did that.

I did like the idea of shadow conversion for some of the incoming damage but realistically since we are demo tanks we should make better use what you really have and that's namely the Soul Link itself since that's the mitigation you'll be using to give yourself mail to plate ish armor levels, but that also presents the other limitation of having to micromanage your pet not dying or you'll lose the mitigation and health funnel takes away time you could be generating threat.

Part of me wants to suggest a new talent entire in the tree that requires Demonic Sacrifice since it only makes sense to a demonologist to only really have that if they're taking in the attributes for themselves, and the version of this new talent I'd call "demon within".

When you have no pet, your armor is increased by 360% like a druid, your chance to be critically struck is reduced by 6%, and your vampirism is increased by 10%.


The vamp offers a pseudo mitigation similar to how other classes can block and bears can self heal, the crit reduction and armor increase makes up for not having master demo or Soul link, and even can synergize with spell vamp you can get from items to keep you alive without having to have felatone as the only option since wrathstone is better for tanking and Firestone is great for crits.

Tldr you make the demonless demo spec the de facto tank spec but leave the first few alone so the other classes can still use it and demo sac becomes sought after for tanks too for the health regen effect.

I specifically would not like them to just add SoD metamorphosis, because gear choice gets left entirely unaffected, and full crit immunity makes warlock a better bear druid just because they pressed a button a month ago. If my viability is determined by a single choice, it seems hollow. At that point, why wouldn't they just give everyone the exact same amount of armor and remove crits from the game so everyone can tank?

The best way to to not effect other builds would be to make the crit reduction scale with some kind of otherwise unused, but still attainable stat, i.e shadow resist. It would probably be pertinent to make the conversion only apply to crits and crushes, but increase the percentage until a determined amount of shadow resist gets the reduction to 33ish%, as a 33% damage reduction is effectively crit immunity, à la block's partial reduction that still does most of the damage, though it would only partially effective on crushes.

The amount of gear concessions you would make to achieve this would make it non-viable in anything other than tanking if you just add it as an exclusionary spell, like bear form where you can't heal or cast, or defense stance where you lose ability access, or a tier 5+ talent you can't incorporate while going deep in another talent tree.

As for effecting other builds, 10% vamp combined with 6% from imp stones, plus built in crit immunity, and without effecting damage output, would make that build near mandatory in pvp and most forms of pve.

Also, that's not how defense works. A casting warlock would need literally 2375 defense to crit cap, where a warrior struggles to get 140 while holding threat at lower tiers, and that would just make them immune to all damage. Even just a single point less leaves them open to being 1 shot by a crit crush.