Metaplanar Babel

Somewhat to my own amazement, I’ve been having a lot of fun in WoW lately. After giving a druid and a priest a try on Horde, I gave in to the Dark Side and made a warlock, which has since cruised to level 33 36 39 with minimal effort. It’s funny, because I never really wanted to play one at all - yet here I am, having more fun with the game than ever. In a way, I think the class is poorly represented - a lot of people seem to focus on the soloing ability and think that means they suck in groups, which, as we discovered last night, is complete bullshit. Like the hunter, the warlock is a class that’s easy to solo (though the warlock isn’t quite as easy as a hunter) but very difficult to play well in a group. The primary reason for that is because a good warlock (like a good hunter) is typically doing 5 or 6 different things at once, especially in a difficult instance.

For example, last night, Omasu (32-33 shaman), Ravenwight (30-31 warrior), and Vharie (my 33 warlock) decided to give Razorfen Kraul a shot. RFK is an instance in the Southern Barrens with lots of uh.. gnolls or kobolds or something. Most of the instance ranges from level 25 to 31+, all elites. Typically, the place would be a good challenge for a full group of players our levels. We decided to trio it, however, and somehow it worked. I had such a blast - I spent most of the fights seducing one of the mobs (like mez) with my succubus pet, Jhorva, putting my mad DoTs on the current target, and occassionally offtanking something else (not often though). I found it amusing to see that I had more hitpoints than either of my teammates and was almost as durable as the shaman despite my cloth caster status. We did die a few times, mostly to extremely large pulls (read: more than 4) or to a couple of nasty boss encounters that we weren’t quite expecting. But, thanks to my soulstone rezzing and the shaman’s self-rez, we never had to run back from a wipe, so we were back up and running very quickly.

It’s amazing how much a warlock can do under the right circumstances. I was doing damage, weakening the mob, crowd controlling as necessary, acting as secondary damage through my succubus pet, preventing runners, positioning mobs so mez didn’t get broken, etc. It was great to know that I could handle a bit of aggro, so the warrior didn’t have to drop everything and run over to save my ass and the shaman didn’t have to chain heal me to keep me up. I occassionally ran into a few mana problems (not many), but those will be mostly fixed when I get Dark Pact at 40. I felt extremely useful and vital to the group, without actually being able to directly affect my teammates at all - defensive in an offensive way, sort of. I was able to keep to the back, keep an eye on things, help with pulling thanks to Seduce.. I never really felt like I wasn’t in some control of the situation.

It’s very interesting, because traditionally I haven’t liked the characters who couldn’t directly aid their teammates (via healing, usually). But now I find myself really enjoying a character who has huge amounts of control over a situation and can very easily turn the tide of battle, without ever casting anything like a heal. It’s almost liberating not to have to watch life bars. I don’t, because I can’t do anything about them. I watch the battle and try to even the odds as best as I can, while trying to do as much damage as possible at the same time. Finally, I’ve found a class where my ability to multi-task is being tested. I love it! It’s a challenge, but not so hard and tedious that it’s frustrating. Of course, it helps that I have a steady group of friends who are also very good at what they do.

Best of all, I get a free flaming nightmare of doom at 40. I guess I really am evil at heart.