three warlocks looking for setup advice

[Malekyth]

Hey guys! My new team of three locks is not too hard to play as far as tearing stuff up goes, but has been hard to streamline. They feel pretty clunky, like I can't possibly be using them well. I expect I'll have settled in in about 20 levels, and I know so much depends on how the individual likes to play, but I'd appreciate pointers or info on how you do it in the meantime. :)

1) Demon-summoning. Do you find it worthwhile to devote three hotkeys to cover the three locks, or put them all on one hotkey and live with a full complement of fresh demons whenever one of them dies? I currently have all three voidies on one key; I can't help but think I'm wasting mana and shards when I resummon all of them each time, but three additional non-combat keys seems a bit extravagant.

2) Life Tap. Kind of a similar question. Do you use this on a hotkey per lock so you can economically tap, or assume that when one needs to tap, they all do? Currently I've got all three tapping from the same keypress, and it's scared me maybe just once so far (priest down, one lock hurt and tapped down to near-death because the other locks were low on mana), but wonder if it's worth anticipating in the future.

3) VW tanking multiple mobs. Has anyone had any experience assigning a voidwalker to each of a number of mobs to keep them occupied while a kill order is burned through? I'm careful not to dot up a mob til I've moved the voidies onto it, but I still get a lot of wipes from healing aggro: three voidies being ignored by all the mobs that are not currently being Tormented at, the moment the priest fires off his first heal. I wonder if it's a viable solution to give each voidie its own attack/leash hotkeys and assign each to its own mob.

Thanks. :)

[moog]

I'll answer from the perspective of a 5 x L63 Lock team.

1. Demon Summoning... no way you're going to have enough buttons to have them on a per-warlock basis, unless you go mad with something like Trinity bars.
If I lose 1 or 2 demons during combat then I'll just move the mouse to that client and manually click the button to summon.
If I lose 3+ demons then I will tend to just use KeyClone to summon on all 5 and then try and remember to drain soul on the next kill to make up for it :)
If I'm panicking mid-boss fight and am down 3+ demons then I'll use everyone's Fel Domination and get a fresh set of demons out pronto.

2. Life Tap... more difficult for me to answer as with a 5xWarlock team and no healer I actually tend not to use it much for the inherent danger of low-life and getting aggro.
However, again, I just have one button assigned and all Warlocks life-tap if need be but not that often, to be honest.
I took 3 of the girls out with a pally and a priest the other night and it was lovely to have dedicated healing for massive hellfire use and lifetap :)

3. I use the Pitbull addon to see who each Warlock and each Pet has targetted. I then have macros for all to take my target and 4 buttons set aside for the clones to individually take my current target.
That way, on a larger pull, I can assign 5 targets and send the pets in against those 5 targets, then re-assign the warlocks to the kill targets in turn.
I find this works really well for me.
I have another button, on RR, to send the next pet against my current target, should one of us get aggro and need a pet to relieve them of it.
Pitbull also has the huge benefit of being able to easily see each Warlock's life/mana and each demon's life/mana.
The default interface is way too small to see any of that detail.

Here's my Warlocks with Pitbull... and, yes, I do use raid icons a lot :)
The Felguards are targetting one tree, orange symbol, whilst the locks are all targetting the second tree, skull.
A simple example but it demonstrates how Pitbull makes it much easier to monitor all Warlocks and Demons and their targets.

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/5861/warlockspitbullby7.jpg

You don't mention your spec... have you improved your Voidy and bought the training books for torment/suffering etc?

[blast3r]

Pretty much what moog said. I have 5 Level 17 locks and found there were just way too many spells and such to use so I also use Voice Commander (voice recognition software) that lets me simply tell them what to do. I'm not at home to look at it but for the most part I have:

Pet Attack
Summon Pet
Life Tap
Drain Life
Drain Soul
Create Healthstone
Use Healthstone
Recall (tell demons to come back)
Create Soulstone
Jump
Shadowbolt
Immolate
corruption
agony
fear (round robin style)
Follow

I don't think I could run a team of locks without using voice. I get flustered when I get into a sticky situation and voice is easier for me. To me there are just way too many useful commands for a lock and I'm only at level 17 so far and it will be a lot more as they level.

[Caspian]

I have 3 locks at 22 (need to update my sig) and a shadow priest.
1. Same as above, solo spawn them
2. They all tap at once, so far
3. I don't care about void walker tanking at this point. Never been a big fan of it - have a solo 70 and the void walker couldn't hold aggo with just her after level 30 or so.

I recommend, for leveling at least, speccing affliction and do the run and DoT method. I VERY easily can run around with a cast sequence macro and DoT up 5 or 6 mobs at my level and wait for them to die. I use one imp for the blood pact and Succys on the other two. When I get high enough one lock will be CoE (no more shadow) and the other two will be imp agony and the priest will have all the cool regen DoTs. When I get dark pact every pet mana spell will be turned off, this is where the Succy's shine because they can do some DPS and not use any mana so their mana pool is yours while still doing DPS.

Run
DoT
Run
DoT
PROFIT!!!

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Here's what I did with my priest+4xLocks team on mag. Keep in mind mine are all demonology spec. (4x felguards > rogues & intercept stun > enemies trying to flee on mounts LOL)

1) Macros FTW! Check it out. Devote one button to all your pet needs.

[nomodifier] For normal world PVP or questing, I run 3x FG/1x felhunter.
[mod:alt] For hard PVE mobs, I run 4 VWs.
[mod:shift] For humanoid instances where succubus can mez and I can't just cheese it with voids/felguards, I run 2x voids + 2x succubus.
[mod:ctrl] For instances where I can just cheese it with felguards, I just summon 4x and watch the cleaves go to town.

Locks 1 and 2:
/cast [nomodifier][pet:felhunter][pet:voidwalker][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon felguard
/cast [mod:alt][pet:felhunter][pet:felguard][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon voidwalker
/cast [mod:shift][pet:felhunter][pet:felguard][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon voidwalker
/cast [mod:ctrl][pet:felhunter][pet:voidwalker][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon felguard

Lock 3:
/cast [nomodifier][pet:felhunter][pet:voidwalker][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon felguard
/cast [mod:alt][pet:felhunter][pet:felguard][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon voidwalker
/cast [mod:shift][pet:felhunter][pet:voidwalker][pet:imp][pet:felguard][nopet] summon succubus
/cast [mod:ctrl][pet:felhunter][pet:voidwalker][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon felguard

Lock 4:
/cast [nomodifier][pet:felguard][pet:voidwalker][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon felhunter
/cast [mod:alt][pet:felhunter][pet:felguard][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon voidwalker
/cast [mod:shift][pet:felhunter][pet:voidwalker][pet:imp][pet:felguard][nopet] summon succubus
/cast [mod:ctrl][pet:felhunter][pet:voidwalker][pet:imp][pet:succubus][nopet] summon felguard

With that setup, you just press one key with modifiers depending on what situation you're doing and they just automagically summon the right pet for the task. :)

2) I have a priest, so I just put it on one key for all 4, press it a few times for mana lovin', then cast prayer of healing. BAM! NEXT!

3) I have one key set aside with the following macro:

/stopmacro [noharm]
/petattack

For instances where I'm pulling 3x or more mobs, I will manually, individually target the 4 mobs I want to be tanked, then press that key. Then I go to town on them in order while click-healing with my priest. Works great until you get to the hard outlands instances where the pets just can't tank worth a shit.

Hope that helps!

[Malekyth]

Thanks for the advice y'all, it's much appreciated!

blast3r, you got me curious ... I looked up Voice Commander, saw the youtube vid and tried it out. I am now *Hooked*. This is awesome! As the kind of player who has the minimum presence of mind to scream "[character name], fear!!" while desperately searching the keyboard for the shortcut I don't remember ... well ... VoiceCommander is very nice for me. It's let me bind a lot more macros and spells than I otherwise would too, because now I can bind weird stuff like shift-ctrl-alt-F12, which I would never be able to hit with my fingers. It's great stuff!

[moog]

I used to use Voice Commands via the Microsoft GameVoice when I was only 2-boxing and knew nothing about KeyClone... it worked well until the midst of battle and/or panic when it would stop recognising my stressed out vocals... heal, Heal, HEAL, HEAL FFS!!! :)

I then moved on to a Belkin n52, which was great for 2-boxing with 2 PCs.

Months later I witnessed my first 5-box Shammy team in AV, did my research, invested in KeyClone and love 5-boxing now... in fact, it's very difficult to go back to 1 boxing!