PvP as a Warlock

Last night, I was PvPing for honor on my Druid. Turns out that PvP is still a good way to gear up your beartank, even with resilience being a pretty worthless stat, the high threat and stamina on battleground-honor purchasable gear is great. Especially compared to what you can get running heroics. I chatted with this warlock who I noticed was using Drain Life as her primary spell. But there's only so much you can do in whispers during a battle. So here we go.

Well, I'm in no way a PvP expert. You could say I'm a total loser - my arena rating is crappy. If, however, you're brand-new to PvP on the Warlock, you're even worse off than I. I managed to scrape together a full set of honor-costing gear through excessive battleground usage last season, thinking maybe I could team up with a disc priest or something. Didn't pan out (too many other things to do with my time, frankly), but I did get a feel for battleground PvP using Warlocks. Here's some tips.

You might want to respec. A thousand gold for a dual-spec isn't all that much (you can make it back in a day of doing quests you skipped in your push to 80, or dailies or whatever), and what are you, a Pure DPS Maven, going to do with that dual spec anyway? I prefer something like this destruction spec, but you could probably pull it off with demonology out of the box or a modified affliction spec. Soul Link is the key here - if you can get that, you're on the right track. Other damage reduction and pushback-protection powers are key. The destruction spec has a great amount of delicious burst in it - hit them hard with immolate, chaos bolt, conflagrate. Bam. Or save your chaos bolt for the priest bubbles and whatnot. If you spec affliction, just run around dotting EVERYBODY, don't hang around for the killshot (you probably won't get it, but you will annoy the crap out of a lot of people).

Petwise, you've got some good options nowadays. Personally, I prefer the Voidwalker in battlegrounds. My reasoning is that I'd rather have his shield (which you can pop while stunned, and no longer kills the VW) than the other, more offensive powers. That said, the felhunter is a very close second - having a dispel and interrupt available (again, off your personal GCD since it's the pet's ability) is pretty awesome too. Some people like succubus for the seduce, but personally I never have time to seduce people in battlegrounds. I'm too busy nuking their faces off. Any way you do it, learn to macro your pets. You should be using spell lock actively, not leaving it on passive for your felhunter to spam at the least opportune moment. Likewise, either put your pet on passive (so he doesn't wander off) or aggressive (so he starts hitting that rogue as soon as he detects it). Defensive pet = fail, and learn to pull him back. The amount of DPS your pvp pet does is relatively low, especially compared to the opportunity cost of not having your pet's defensive abilities on tap.

Remember to fear people. You can drop the fearbomb if nobody is hitting you (or if you've talented for instant howl of terror, or pop a voidwalker shield), which can be very amusing, but I tend to reserve fears for just gaining a little casting space. Lots of ways to break fear these days, so cast fear, and if you actually get it off and it lands, immediately start casting immolate->conflag (for the daze effect).

Keep some frostweave nets handy, or whatever other profession PvP boosters you've got. Nets are great - they last long enough for you to get away or get off a few good spells. Boom. If you're destro spec and have decent PvE gear, you'll burn people down FAST.

Use demonic teleport. I keep it macro'd to my PvP trinket, so with one press I can activate my trinket (to clear stuns and whatever) and teleport away. Dropping a circle takes very little time, and even if I'm assaulting a flag or tower or whatever, I'll take the time to drop the circle on the way in, so I can warp out when things look bad. On defense, it's even better, drop it in a useful location (remember that you don't need LoS to the circle to warp to it). Just don't, you know, stand on it while you're fighting. Then it's worthless.

Learn what the PvP gear looks like on the opposition, and RUN AWAY. No matter how great your gear is, if you face someone 1v1 who has 5/5 deadly gladiator gear and 700 resilience, your only hope is that they ignore you as they run past. Resilience matters a LOT. When you get some, you'll notice. I used to fear PvE rogues in battlegrounds, but nowadays I'm usually pretty good at killing them before they kill me, just because they do so little damage between my (glyphed) soul link and high resilience gear.

That last bit is more like tactics. And tactics are for another post. Hope this helps, mystery Warlock friend!