Multiboxing 4 warlocks for 5v5

[Nikita]

So I decided to start multiboxing 4 warlocks, instead of my old elemental shaman team. As we all know, ele shamans hasnt been viable in 5v5 since WotLK.

Warlocks are know to be one of the tankiest, and hard to kill classes since forever. They have tons of mobility (port), self healing, burst, and pressure all around. Compared to ele shamans, warlocks are gods on paper (for now).


Since I havent dinged 90 yet, this will only be a theorycrafting thread.


Now, onto specs for multiboxed warlocks.


Offensive spells:

Destro locks have something called Fire and Brimstone which does this:

Your next Immolate, Incinerate, Conflagrate or Curse will hit all targets within 15 yards of the target and deal 43.40% of their normal damage.

Thats one cast to DoT the entire enemy team up with Immolate, to start building embers for chaos bolt or Ember Tap (20,73 % instant heal).

Also you have Curse of the elements:

Curses the target, increasing magic damage taken by 5% for 5 min. Have this on target arena 1-5, and you make sure their entire team is dotted up in 1 GCD.

Curse of Enfeeblement:

Binds the target in demonic energy, reducing physical damage by 20% and increasing the casting time of all spells by 50% (25% on player targets) for 30 sec. Have this also on a target arena 1-5, so you DoT the enemy team up.

So, we`re talking 3 GCD to DoT their entire team up, to start doing pressure and building embers for chaos bolt.

Here is a video (not mine) to show you what kind of DMG chaos bolt can do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UGp3HVHKeM

Chaos bolts dmg is increased by the warlocks critt chance, so the more critt you have, the harder it hits. Locks get a great spell called Dark Soul which does this:

Infuses your soul with unstable power, increasing your critical strike chance by 30% for 20 sec.

Which means, you are gonna hit hard as a truck!


Warlocks also get a execute spell, called Shadowburn:

Instantly blasts the target for (3365 ( + 350% of SpellPower) * (1.24)) Shadow damage. Only usable on enemies that have less than 20% health.

Restores 15% of your total mana after 5 sec. If the target dies within 5 sec, and yields experience or honor, the caster gains a Burning Ember instead.

This spell hits almost as hard as chaos bolt, and is instant.

You have castable fears, which you can spam fear 4 targets 24/7 if needed to take of some pressure for your healer. Make sure you put it in a macro with target arena 1-4.

Defensive CDs:

Locks have tons of defensive CDs. First one is:

1. Unending Resolve, 3 min CD spell.
The Warlock hardens his skin, reducing all damage taken by 40% and preventing his spells from being interrupted or silenced for 8 sec.


2. You can choose from these 2 spells:

Sacrificial Pact 1 min CD
Your demon sacrifices half its current health to shield its master for 200% of the sacrificed health. Lasts 20 sec.

or

Dark Bargain 3 min CD
Prevents all damage for 8 sec.
When the shield fades, 50% of the damage prevented is dealt over 8 sec. Can be cast while suffering from control impairing effects.


Health stones heals for 20 % of your health (3 min CD). Combine this with Dark Regeneration:
Restores 30% of you and your pet's maximum health and increases all healing received by 25% over 12 sec.

Here you got yourself an insane self heal, for when the pressure is just too much.


I will try out demo spec once I ding 90, dont know yet whats the best for boxing.


Havent really tried arenas yet, since Im only level 86. But will post lots of pics and videos once next season starts. If you have any input on this composition, post it! :)

Nikita

[smalltanker]

I play a 1500 RBG rated lock when I am not healing running as destro or occassionally affliction. For destro I like to use Conflagrate to slow opponents and build embers. If you are going destruction I would have a Havoc Macro to cast it on one target (Arena1-5) and then hard swap back to your kill target so 8 chaos bolts hit the two targets 4 to each... it is awesome when used in conjunction with any pvp trinkets, engineering, etc... and as a 25 second cool down should be used twice per minute to exert pressure via Chaos Bolt or any three single target spells.

Finally what level 90 talents are you looking at? I went with sacrifice to increase my health and damage by 20% or what ever. But for demo alot of them go with the 2 x pet macro for 20 seconds for more pressure.

[Nikita]

With Havoc you could probably one shot 2 targets at the same tine, depending on proff procs, weapons pros and other goodies.

I havent decided what to take in the last talent tier, have to try things out first.

[JohnGabriel]

What will the 5th be?

[Nikita]

Unsure atm, shaman would be good for all the AOE fears in the game, but having a paladin for bop and aura mastery is kinda crucial. Just have to wait and see how 5.2 turns out.

[Owltoid]

Isn't Chaos Bolt a 3 second hard cast? I really don't see a group of warlocks being able to cast that in arena, unless the opposing team is AFK.

I thought the team would rely on the Chaos Wave, an instant spell. I know little about warlocks, but I know you have a much better chance if your arsenal is mostly instant cast instead of long hard casts.

[Nikita]

All you need is a Shadowfury which is an AOE stun for 3 sec. And you have that on round robin, which should be enough time to get that cast off. BUT, still unsure if I should go demo or destro, so gimme this weekend to ding 90 and try shit out :)

[Palee]

I don't mean to burst your enthusiasm (actually I do) but none of this will work in arena. Well, it will work but only at 1000 rating or so. But at 1000 rating almost any comp works.
Given that you're saying that ele shamans are no longer viable, it means you are aspiring for higher ratings. It just won't work.

The biggest mistake boxers do when they choose a comp, is they think of all possible ways to kill that other team, but they don't think at all at what the other team can do to prevent that from happening.
A rogue will make everyone invisible and open on you with so much CC that by the time you figure out what's going on at least one or two of your locks will be dead.
A mage will go invis and open with a ring of frost on you. Give you're all packed in one spot it's very likely you will get frozen. You have to use trinket, but the next CC is already incoming.
Druid will silence your ass off and make you not be able to leave the spot. By the time silence wears off you're dead.
Any melee will just run around you and you won't be able to cast shit, only instant spells that don't have facing requirement.
And the list goes on and on...

Just take any team you already have into arena now and experience wtf i'm talking about. The amount of CC in the game, and more specifically, AOE CC, is just insane.
Nothing works in arena at the moment at high ratings. Even the insta kills that enchancement shamans can do, only works on crap teams who don't know what's coming.
Do that once to a higher rated team and you will see how much pillar humping they will do until they catch you making a mistake.
Even if one goes down, if you can't get another kill in 3 mins you're likely going to lose even if it's 5 vs 4.

Bottom line: Stop trying to outsmart arena play, it doesn't work give the amount of CC out there. The only way you could be successful in arena is if you can out-CC them. Can you? You can't. A boxer doesn't have the right micro management to be able to CC better than 5 individual people. The classes that have easy way to CC are ironically the classes that are the hardest to box. Mage, rogue, druid have the most annoying CC in the game and none of them can be boxed properly in PvP. Also you have to take into account that the other team is scattered around. You are all clumped together in one spot which makes you a lot more vulnerable to CC then they are.

Save yourself some pain and just do arena for points and then rock the random BGs. That will actually make you feel like you enjoy the game.
Also, rating requirement are going away. So rating will no longer have any meaning. EVERYTHING will be viable in arena. It's just a matter of how fast you can get the T2 weapon.

[Nikita]

Ive played ele shamans at 1800 MMR this season! I know what Im talking about when it comes to 5v5.

[Palee]

And you honestly think a class like warlock that's less bursty that ele shamans will go above 1800?

[Nikita]

I don't mean to burst your enthusiasm (actually I do) but none of this will work in arena. Well, it will work but only at 1000 rating or so. But at 1000 rating almost any comp works.
Given that you're saying that ele shamans are no longer viable, it means you are aspiring for higher ratings. It just won't work.

You mean that YOU wont make it work, right?


The biggest mistake boxers do when they choose a comp, is they think of all possible ways to kill that other team, but they don't think at all at what the other team can do to prevent that from happening.
A rogue will make everyone invisible and open on you with so much CC that by the time you figure out what's going on at least one or two of your locks will be dead.
A mage will go invis and open with a ring of frost on you. Give you're all packed in one spot it's very likely you will get frozen. You have to use trinket, but the next CC is already incoming.
Druid will silence your ass off and make you not be able to leave the spot. By the time silence wears off you're dead.
Any melee will just run around you and you won't be able to cast shit, only instant spells that don't have facing requirement.
And the list goes on and on...

Well, if you cant even stop incoming CCs, then you have nothing to do in the arena to start with.


Just take any team you already have into arena now and experience wtf i'm talking about. The amount of CC in the game, and more specifically, AOE CC, is just insane.
Nothing works in arena at the moment at high ratings. Even the insta kills that enchancement shamans can do, only works on crap teams who don't know what's coming.
Do that once to a higher rated team and you will see how much pillar humping they will do until they catch you making a mistake.
Even if one goes down, if you can't get another kill in 3 mins you're likely going to lose even if it's 5 vs 4.

Ive played ele shamans at 1900 MMR this season, so I do know what Im talking about.


Bottom line: Stop trying to outsmart arena play, it doesn't work give the amount of CC out there. The only way you could be successful in arena is if you can out-CC them. Can you? You can't. A boxer doesn't have the right micro management to be able to CC better than 5 individual people. The classes that have easy way to CC are ironically the classes that are the hardest to box. Mage, rogue, druid have the most annoying CC in the game and none of them can be boxed properly in PvP. Also you have to take into account that the other team is scattered around. You are all clumped together in one spot which makes you a lot more vulnerable to CC then they are.

Being succesfull in the arena for me means 2000 rating. Even this season, ele shamans should be good for 1800 rating tops. Given the fact that locks have tons more utility, shields and burst, ill take my chance.


Save yourself some pain and just do arena for points and then rock the random BGs. That will actually make you feel like you enjoy the game.
Also, rating requirement are going away. So rating will no longer have any meaning. EVERYTHING will be viable in arena. It's just a matter of how fast you can get the T2 weapon.

I didnt start multiboxing cus I loved doing random BGs, I did it for the challenge in 5v5.

[Palee]

Come and prove me wrong then. My hat off to you if you can get warlocks at 2000 rating in 5v5.

[Palee]

Oh and is it 1800 or 1900 that you reached with shamans? Your posts are a little confusing. From other posts around here, it seemed as if nobody was able to go much above 1500. You got a link to your team?

[Nikita]

Oh and is it 1800 or 1900 that you reached with shamans? Your posts are a little confusing. From other posts around here, it seemed as if nobody was able to go much above 1500. You got a link to your team?

Was 1700 rated, with 1900 MMR earlier this season with my ele shamans.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/arena/ravencrest/5v5/Pandas%20are%20chubby/

Havent played 5s in months thou. My 3 other shamans got so far behind the gear curve.

[Palee]

Ok so you start saying 1800, then you say 1900, then link a team with 1548 with 48% win/rate ratio :)
Anyway, let's say you did reach 1900 MMR whatever that means. Do you honestly feel like you can perform at 1900 rating 50% of the time consistently?

[Nikita]

Woops, saw it now. In my example I ment that as ele multiboxer you peak at 1800 rating this season max.

Ive been at 1700 rating and 1900 MMR this season with my shamans.

Sorry for the confusion, should have wrote MMR or rating behind the numbers I wrote.

I would never be able to be at 1900 RATING with win/loss ratio of 50 % with shamans this season. And I gave you that link to my team since you asked for it. I did good at the start, then got left behind the gear curve, and eventualy dropped both rating and MMR.

But if I didnt believe I could do that with locks, i'd never would have started with locks nor this thread :)

[Owltoid]

I agree with a lot of the concerns expressed by Palee (though not the tone of his concerns) and I really don't think this comp is viable, but I would love to be proved wrong!

Nikita, in the past you've mentioned difficulty finding a good healer for your shaman team. Won't you run into the same problem with this lock team?

[Nikita]

I really dont care what other people think or write, as long as I enjoy and are having fun its all good :)

Well, shamans dont have anything close to the self heals and defensive spells or talents that locks have. Finding a decent healer for this comp will be alot easier :)

[heyaz]

Even kruschpak with enhance geared out the ass only had about a 50% win rate and topped out at 1900 something with a gladiator healer.

All of the high rated 5v5 multibox teams have been dependent on an instant kill and/or a way to shut down the enemy team and put out absurd burst and sustain it with pressure and survivability (like kromtor 1x dk 4x ret in season 7/8).

Casters are already at a huge disadvantage with all the cc and blanket silences, even with instant casts. Forget hard casting unless you have a pretty elaborate cc system that is reliable.

I can't see any team above 1300 MMR actually allowing you to get 4x chaos bolts off, or hell, anything off, it's going to be one long cc chain that if you get out of you'll already be down 2 toons.

Back in the day:

Even instagib comps had significant issues when at competitive ratings. I played up to 2400 MMR in wrath as 4x elemental and if you do manage to beat them once by getting off that kill macro, believe me you are never going to beat them again. There were teams as low as 2100 MMR and 2k team rating that I only beat once and they countered me for the rest of the season.

To get over 2K and start facing 2200-2500 MMR and actual rating teams I had to set up a completely targetless system on my shaman where they were all targeting themselves and my burst macro would go to arena 1-5 to surprise them. That would only work a few times - then they'd come back with ice block/dispersion/divine shield bound to their entire keyboard.

Once we hit R1-R5 teams they were either 30 minute long matches where a decoy would run out and try to get me to waste my CDs, or their burst and cc chain was so good that they would just obliterate me, We faced the R1 team (>2600) a few times and those were a joke - those guys had defensive CDs and cc wired to their brains. I remember pumping lightning bolts and purges into a random target and instantly switching to a completely untargeted mage (Icefoxx) and he ice blocked while it was in mid-air, instantly canceled ice block, and my main exploded.

And now in Mop:

Since then arena players have only gotten better and more responsive. You'll play people at 1200 MMR who will react like the gladiators of BC and Wrath. The learning curve to be "good enough" has been significantly reduced.

Now they can even see your comp and respec to talents that counter you before the game starts. Premades already do that to my DKs in battlegrounds - suddenly every warlock is specced shadowfury, every mage is specced presence of mind, every other class picks aoe stuns/disorients.

In my opinion it's just not viable. You're taking what you observed a single class/spec doing and multiplying it by four and expecting four times the result without regard to how the class is played, how they will be affected standing still and on /follow, and how you will micromanage your cooldowns. Multiboxing PVP never worked like that. If it did, we'd all be gladiator with 5x frost mages.

But hey, if you enjoy it, the challenge just to see if it will work, don't let us discourage you from what you find fun. But you, as most boxers who do arenas are, looking for a competitive rating and I don't think you will get it, or if you do it will be more frustration than fun. I quit boxing ele shaman in arenas because past 1800 team rating and >2000 mmr and up, it wasn't even almost fun. It was stressful and frustrating to all hell. If you reach that point at 1500 mmr, and you will, I can't imagine it even being worth the time.

[Palee]

I agree with a lot of the concerns expressed by Palee (though not the tone of his concerns) and I really don't think this comp is viable, but I would love to be proved wrong!

Nikita, in the past you've mentioned difficulty finding a good healer for your shaman team. Won't you run into the same problem with this lock team?

My tone? :)

[fleaplus]

My friend did arenas with his 10 warlocks (specced demonology) back in cataclysm. While he never got over 1200 rating, he did do well enough to cap points and get decent enough gear to do some fun world pvp. I was also able to do the same with my 5 feral druids (it was quite fun for about half a season when swipe was buffed and could almost global an enemy team if they were bunched up!). Either way neither of us really took it seriously enough to get a decent rating but we did have fun.

[Ellay]

Since 5's give the same amount of points as 2's or 3's. There is no rating requirement for t2 weapons. There should be a refocus on what works for rbg's, warlocks might be a good candidate for that not sure but going to agree with the sentiment on cc's in general. They are honestly out of hand. The fact Blizzard openly says they don't like instant cc yet it's still all over the place is troubling. If they reduced the cc generated. Maybe stuck everything on one shared Diminishing return.. It would become more viable.

[smalltanker]

I could see some Demonology locks being pretty effective if the AOE effect talent was taken. Run with the Succi's on defensive for some "smart" counter CC/rouge pushbacks, plenty of AOE via hellfire and hand of guldan to pull out stealthies. Some decent DOTs/self heals via doom and I think corruption + you could do the who swarm of imps (glyph? if I recall) + shadowbolt summoned imps. Demo locks have some mad survivability but it would be more of a grind them down and survive the intial burst vice an insta-kill team that Detro locks are.

I just want to see the stream and watch the set-up as well as initial fine tuning for the team.

[sethlan]

I really would like to see it... How you can deal with all stuns at higher rating I not saying it can't be done but its going to be a challange . I face people in open PvP world and fight them in groups they are good players and sometimes I wanna cut my wrist

[Nikita]

Well, the burst is there for sure. Just have to wait and see once next season starts. Got a glad disc priest healing me next season, so will be fun and challenging :)

Gonna put up a few vids this week about locks mechanics, burst and so on

[sethlan]

yeah, a nice healer is good to have, btw whats your youtube channel?

I wish i could have that ability and have someone to stick with me and heal my team - gotta make my priest to go holy and fix few things.

[Nikita]

So, next season is coming up soon. Still capping JP and honor for next season on my locks, will be a blast to try em out :)

[Shodokan]

Good luck.

Honestly though stacking locks is just not viable.

Like others I'd love to be proven wrong but theres so much crap to deal with and warlocks just don't have the tool kit to deal with things on their own.

[Nikita]

I got this bro! ;)

Worst thing is, that my locks are critting with chaos bolt + trinket close to the same amount as my half in half male/dreadful geared ele shamans.

[Meathead]

You got nothing with no follow :)

[MiRai]

You got nothing with no follow :)
Surely you've read the blue post (the only one we have that's useful) about the change to follow and how they're looking to bring it back to arena?

[Nikita]

And how would you farm gear? Spam dungeons and convert?

[Multibocks]

Hope for no shows in arena?

[Nikita]

Unsure at this moment, I have scratched my subs. Im starting school this fall, so might be a good thing this crap went through! Sucks thou with all the time I put into my teams :/

[boxblizzardd]

yes it will come back into arena, and this is the only reason i would do pvp again.