4 locks and priest

[Powerwar]

Warlocks themselves are known to be cloth tanks.

I have been MT in Onyxia and Ragnaros, even MTed Vaelstraz and Nefarian in BWL after getting aggro from the raid tank... as usual. That all before TBC lots of years ago when BWL was the end game content.

If you have a priest in the group I suggest you to try a mixed demo/affliction build in instances.

Try this build for your lock tank:
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/warlock/talents.html?tal=21500220302232100500000000001050330113521005031322 0000000000000000000000000000000

With this setup you are the tank and your pet is just a walking buff.
You must use a playstyle known as drain-tanking

Your rotation should look like:
1 ) Put soul link on
2 ) Use voidwalker because of the 10% melee reduction buff from master demo talent and the sacrifice shield in case of need. It also could offtank some add meanwhile if needed, but will never be the main tank due to your crazy aggro generation on single target and your passive healing on him with your damage, building more aggro for you.
3 ) Seed of corruption, immolation, curse of agony, syphon life (seed of corruption should have done it's AoE), fire a normal corruption. Except the seed of corruption and immolation that will hit your target by the same time all the other spells are instacast.
4 ) Drain life, Drain life, Drain life... reapply curse, corruption and syphon life (only these 3 that are instacast), drain life again.
5 ) Instant shadow bolt when nightfall procs.
6 ) Life tap and repeat rotation.

Remember to put curse of doom on some random target in long fights and curse the other targets with curse of agony. It builds damage over time (last 3 ticks to 45% of the total damage), so if you apply it to everyone at the beginning of the fight it's good bonus for damage and aggro.

The voidwalker will take 20% of your damage, but you will heal him for 15% of your damage, that is quite big number usually, specially if you multitarget curse, syphon life and corruption.

If things go wrong you can always sacrifice the voidwalker for the shield and ninjasummon a new one. Then hit demonic empowerment and use it's AoE taunt from the viodwalker. This will let you with only one mob hitting on your face.

When low on mana just life tap and continue draining life. The rotation is relatively easy but hard to amster life tap and drain life. Once you manage to master it properly you will be at a constant 90% mana and 90% HP during all the fight.

Other optopn is to sacrifice voidwalker for the stamina buff and summon doomguard or enslave some demon in the instance (TBC instances have several good ones enslaveable). This basically makes you to have a constant renew buff on you.

The priest only will need to throw a renew on the voidwalker and then heal you. The micromanagement is not difficult if you have played a hunter before.

This build gear priorities are the following:
1 ) Stamina
2 ) Intelect + spell power
3 ) Armor/defense on rings and cloak

The other locks you have should go affliction/destruction mix. Remember to SKIP the Ruin / devastation talents at the beginning till your tank lock has enough spell damage. Otherwise BIG crits will happen and he will lose aggro.

Things will go really fast if your support locks switch targets and toss a corruption and curse of agony on every target in the mobs pack. Seed of coorruption would create lots of aggro and will mess things.

Other option is to send the voidwalker, use it's AoE taunt ability and put 4 seeds of corruption on every target in the pack. They will lose aggro after the second AoE boom, but by the time that happens all the mobs will be almost dead on trash pulls. The only problem is that they will target a random lock and then destroy him Probably the one that critted them for more.

Plan 2...
Have one voidwalker + 3 succubus out. You can seduce 3 humanoids and destroy the other one or two mobs in no time. I personally dislike this way because it's very unreliable and doesn't allow you to use AoE spells like seed of corruption.

Also feel free to try this build (no idea why the url looks yellow, doesn't want to change colors):

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/warlock/talents.html?tal=21500220312200000000000000000052330113521005031312 0135100000000000000000000000000

It will work around demon form and it's fire aura. The downside is that demon form is on a large cooldown (3 minutes or alike) and you lose lots of damage from your instacast dots that you will use during most of the fight. also syphon life, that is an extra dot and is like another renew running.

[unseen]

I'd advise against Powerar's post.

That's just me talking, but I can say that even with 30% health reduction your warlock that is tanking is going to get stomped to the ground on most bosses. Additionally, this would put heroics completely out of the picture.

There is a lot to be said for keeping things simple and letting the demon tank.

[Powerwar]

The problem will be trash rather than bosses using a drain tank because it requires good tmining and watching lots of debuffs.

With spell damage (instance and quest rewards gear) and this build drain life is really killer spell recovering about 1k HP /sec while also damaging the mob meanwhile as long as the 3 instacast dots are up. With better gear it only goes more insane.

This is how drain tanking works (no voidwalker, the warlock does it all):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziPQ8ukpuLA

Note what happens to the warlock HP after he hits drain life (the green beam)

[X-Ifist]

Drain tanking in 80 instances and heroic is inpossible to drain tank, they will still hit you for 8k so keeping youreself up just using drain life wont work.
Since you wont rly get anny agroo compared to 3 other locks thats known for pulling agroo the priest will go OOm before the boss is down.

Lets say a boss hit for 10k whit VW tanking it it will only hit him for 2-3k making it no problem healing, since Healt funnel heal 800per sec so that and a renew on VW and youre rdy to go.

[vic20]

The problem that I've found so far isn't that the vw can't take the hits it seems that's what it does best. The problem that I -have- found so far is the lack of threat generation by the voidwalker. Anyone know just how much threat the void can put out when decently geared?

[Hachoo]

The problem will be trash rather than bosses using a drain tank because it requires good tmining and watching lots of debuffs.

With spell damage (instance and quest rewards gear) and this build drain life is really killer spell recovering about 1k HP /sec while also damaging the mob meanwhile as long as the 3 instacast dots are up. With better gear it only goes more insane.

This is how drain tanking works (no voidwalker, the warlock does it all):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziPQ8ukpuLA

Note what happens to the warlock HP after he hits drain life (the green beam)

Yeah sorry that won't work - warlocks aren't going to have defense gear so they'll never be uncrittable, and there are plenty of heroic bosses that can crit for easily 15-20k per hit. Doesn't matter how much drain life gives you, 2 of those in a row will kill any warlock.

[unseen]

The problem that I've found so far isn't that the vw can't take the hits it seems that's what it does best. The problem that I -have- found so far is the lack of threat generation by the voidwalker. Anyone know just how much threat the void can put out when decently geared?

For trash I always just used felguards. They can take a hit, have decent health, and can hold aggro pretty well. This would leave me to dps down the mobs one by one.

For bosses I still had felguards tanking them unless the boss hit really hard (which required my voidwalker). With felguards they would bounce aggro back and forth amongst each other which would give a little more leeway for healing. For the voidwalker I would always be sure to use demonic empowerment and all his taunts to hold aggro. I was able to manage it pretty well.

Keep in mind I was doing not doing any heroics, just regular instances up to 70 in this manner.

[vic20]

The problem that I've found so far isn't that the vw can't take the hits it seems that's what it does best. The problem that I -have- found so far is the lack of threat generation by the voidwalker. Anyone know just how much threat the void can put out when decently geared?

For trash I always just used felguards. They can take a hit, have decent health, and can hold aggro pretty well.

How would you quantify 'pretty well'? Not trying to be presumptuous but I thought we were functioning on the idea that this was for heroic content only. Might just be the min /maxer in me but I would consider 'normal' content to have training wheels on :P .

[vic20]

Food for thought. Doom guards are being parsed at ~ 1k dps on patch. They also no longer kill the summoner at 80, they only cause damage and come pre-enslaved as well as lasting the full duration without break. This could be interesting. Although they only last 15 minutes 1k dps x 4 is virtually another dps'er while tanking. Once again the problem still lies in the threat generation. Is it enough to allow the locks to work to their potential? Or do they have to artificially increase the tank's threat by throttling their own threat?

[unseen]

The problem that I've found so far isn't that the vw can't take the hits it seems that's what it does best. The problem that I -have- found so far is the lack of threat generation by the voidwalker. Anyone know just how much threat the void can put out when decently geared?

For trash I always just used felguards. They can take a hit, have decent health, and can hold aggro pretty well.

How would you quantify 'pretty well'? Not trying to be presumptuous but I thought we were functioning on the idea that this was for heroic content only. Might just be the min /maxer in me but I would consider 'normal' content to have training wheels on :P .

Well, like I stated before all my experience has been in non-heroics with 4 warlocks + 1 priest. I was able to do all of them with very few problems up to 70. I don't believe heroics are possible with this composition (which is why I dropped a one warlock for a warrior).

For all the non-heroic content I almost never had problems with pulling aggro off of trash with my healer. The only real problem with trash is certain mobs would hit them pretty hard and they would die. In those cases I'd have to deathcoil/fear the mob and focus fire it down before it took out my priest. It wasn't a big deal 99% of the time, just something to remain aware of.

With the adjustment of demon health I'd suspect a lot of the heroic trash would be doable now, but I just don't see bosses being tanked effectively. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though!