Level 57, having pet problemsFollow

Being relatively new to the game I am still working to pefrect my playing style but this is what I found works for me. I am a level 51 'lock and when questing/grinding junk mobs this is what I do. I have my VW on defensive and don't even send him in first. I actually hit the mob first with CoA and follow up immediately with Corruption. By the time the mob gets to me my VW has agro. Being only 51 I don't have UA yet but I follow up with immolate and I don't know how this compares to UA with threat. But here I found is the key, I have to wait till the mob gets to 1/3 - 1/2 life before I drain life are he does change targets. It may take a little more time to kill individual mobs but I have almost no down time. Once every 15-17 mobs I might have to eat something if I life tap too often but you are looking at 30 sec. sitting and off you go again. Using this method I am able to take down mobs usally 3-4 levels higher without being hit or sometimes hit once before VW takes agro back.

If you can afford to dump 8 points into Demonology, it would go well as you could max out Demonic Brutality. Do you have the area taunt on autocast for the VW also? If not you might want to do so. Your VW will lose mana, so you may end up with some down time though. I am so used to demonology build with Mana Feed and such. I only have down time if I go up a few levels or am dealing with multiple mobs.

If you like that playstyle, you could try switching some (or all) of your points into demonology, boost a bit of the damage the pets do, increase voidwalker taunt by 30%, keep their mana high with mana feed.

I'm no expert at all, and haven't really tried that playstyle in about a year. My lock is only 71, so I'm mostly affliction myself, but I play more of a drain tanking method and find no downtime myself. If you're waiting for 3 taunts (15 seconds) before even starting a rotation, that sounds too excessive to me, I find affliction a little slow at single target kills compared to burst damage specs (it excels at multi target killing though), and even then I'd have a mob fully dotted, drain tanked and dead while I'm moving to the next one at full hp/mana before your void even gets his 3rd taunt off.

I'd say if you want your demon to do all the tanking, try a full demonology build. Pets in general used to hold alot more aggro in TBC then they seem to now. You would really need to put all your points into beefing up your pets damage/taunts to make it a viable tank. But if you're going to put all those points in demonology, you might want to think about felguard leveling instead of voidwalker.


Also this might seem silly, but just double check your voidwalker next time he's out. Mouse over the tooltip for torment, make sure it's the maximum rank instead of a rank 1 or something. You probably have the max rank on your bars, but just to be safe might wanna double check.

As you said the VW has very little damage and his taunt isn't that great. Playing as destruction you can buff both but you'd end up using the felguard most of the time anyway. The taunt also gets weaker as you level up. Every 10 levels(I think it's 20, 30, 40 etc) he learns a new rank, what this means is at level 41 his taunt should be able to hold more as your spells are all lvl 40 and below, but at lvl 49 his taunt will seem weaker cause you've upgraded all your spells(some twice) while the taunt is still hitting for the same amount as it did 9 levels ago.

Your going to pull aggro unless you want to play very, very slow. I think the best method of drain hunting is to put your VW on something at max range and put all dots up right away, when you pull agro have your VW attack the next target, by the time the first mob reaches you he'll be almost dead, then rinse and repeat. Don't think of the fact that you pulled aggro as a bad thing, your VW isn't taking extra damage so he can start pulling the next mob and with decent gear the mob will die right as he reaches you meaning you'll rarely get hit. (This is not the ideal way to learn if you have never grouped before as pulling agro of your vw when you want to is good, pulling off a tank is bed)

Remember to stock some infernal shards, if you do get overwhelmed while trying this or going back to drain tanking the infernal is the best oh crap spell we have.

I leveled as affliction all the way up.

When using the voidy, here's what I generally did:
petattack -> DoTs (corruption, haunt, CoA, UA)(pre-haunt/UA -> CoA, corruption, Immolate)

Generally the voidy will hold aggro until the last DoT gets applied at which point the mob turns on you. By this point it should be at or below 50% though and by the time it reaches you gets maybe a hit or two in before it's gone while you DrainLife/DrainSoul/SB/wand/hack/ or whatever you decide to do from there. Different names for the playstyles but the idea's the same.

The premise isn't that the VW is going to perpetually hold aggro off of you, it's that he holds aggro long enough for you to not get chewed up too bad. If you use the imp, succubus, or to a lesser extent, the felhunter, you're taking 75-90% of the hits. With the VW it's more like 25% probably.

And if I'm using the VW to round up a group, I usually just [tab]petattack -> [tab]petattack until he has them all on him then start the rotations on the last one I sent him to. He'll keep the others on him while the one I'm after aggros on me and promptly dies with me taking maybe a hit or two. Same principle.

I leveled all the way up in Demonology and never had a problem with pulling agro. But if you don't like Demo them spend a few points like Mikelol said in the demonolgy tree on the voidwalker taunt boost...that could make the difference.

Edit:
You would need to spend 8 points in demo - Demonic Embrace/Fell Synergy/Demonic Brutality

Edited, Aug 24th 2009 4:42pm by Psychospy

Leveling is all about two things: survivability and sustainability. What this means is that you want to minimize your downtime as much as possible (stopping to regenerate health/mana) and as a physically fragile clothie you want to be able to avoid or absorb damage as much as possible.

I've found this spec very useful for leveling and utilized it to go from 70-80. Your pet is the Felguard, who gets face-to-face with the mobs and acts as your clean-up crew.

Essentially you constantly run around and DoT up mobs which your Felguard attacks. The multiple Siphon Life's up on mobs keeps your health high, and allows you to Life Tap to keep your mana pool up as well. As you continue moving, the mobs all die while trailing you as your pet and DoT's finish them off. Essentially, the only downtime I had on the way to 80 was stopping once I cleared an area to loot the corpses. This build also allows you to solo a lot of the group quests using your Felguard as a "tank" (of course, like all warlock pets, he doesn't hold aggro super well).

Unfortunately, this build doesn't gain its full potency until level 71, when you are able to put your 21st point in the Affliction tree into Siphon Life. Before then, you may have to stop more to regenerate. However, I think you'll find your grinding will go easier and faster using this spec and methodology.

Again, let me stress that this is a build designed for leveling and grinding; once you reach 80 you'll want to respec to something more suitable for running instances or PvP'ing.