can't solo worth beans - lvl 19 Warlock - help and ideas please!

[Robotika]

so i've reached lvl 19 w/  my Warlock and, well, i just suck at playing her. i don't know if it's what i'm casting or something else. i'm finding her very frustrating to play and considering just deleting her and playing something else. which sucks since i just betrayed with her. can anyone give me pointers to playing this class? are there any guides out there? i die far too much to even get very far when fighting linked mobs. much hair pulling is happening here.thanks in advance!<div></div>

[Niun01]

Just hang in there, it gets better as you go.  You will get other spells to aid you in your journey.  Here is a great site with good info on our class and should help a lil.http://eq2.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&file=index&func=display&ceid=104&meid=137<div></div>

[carlspackler]

<BR> <BLOCKQUOTE> <HR> Robotika wrote:<BR>so i've reached lvl 19 w/  my Warlock and, well, i just suck at playing her. i don't know if it's what i'm casting or something else. i'm finding her very frustrating to play and considering just deleting her and playing something else. which sucks since i just betrayed with her. <BR><BR>can anyone give me pointers to playing this class? are there any guides out there? i die far too much to even get very far when fighting linked mobs. much hair pulling is happening here.<BR><BR>thanks in advance!<BR> <BR> <HR> </BLOCKQUOTE> <P><BR>At around that level, my strategy was root and nuke until they died. Actually that was my strat for a long time, now they just die too fast for me to bother with rooting! :smileyvery-happy:</P> <P>Start off with single target mobs, then you can work your way into the groups later on. Get at max range. I always started off with the Freeze line. It stuns and roots the mob and does some good damage. I followed that up with my root. This normally will root them just after the Freeze wears off. Do your HO starter, then drop the single target nukes on them. They are usually dead after a couple of nukes. Don't do any DoTs because they could break your roots early. If the mobs gets too close and their health is low, then drop a couple of DoTs on them, that should finish them off. If they still have a lot of health left, then root again, step back, and start nuking away again.</P> <P>Don't give up yet! Don't worry about linked mobs yet, you don't have all of your AE spells. At 20, you get Negative Absolution, which is our encounter AE spell. This is why you became a warlock and when you should start trying to pull groups! Start off with this spell, then follow it up with your PBAoE DoT spell (Gas Cloud, I think). The mobs will begin to drop fast! </P> <P>Ultimately, you will want to upgrade your spells before anything else. Your nukes and root are the most important. I was fortunate enough to have a rich main to trick out my warlock, so I have mostly all masters and pretty decent gear. For the most part, masters at your level and usually up to around level 40 sell for pretty cheap, <50gp ea. If this is your first toon or you can't afford that, then harvest, harvest, harvest and make some friends with a sage. You should get your spells up to adept3 at least, or at least your root. Your root is your best friend when soloing.</P>

[Jayad]

<P>Spend a lot of time harvesting, get upgrades to your spells.  As mentioned above, roots & nukes are the priority.  Also try to get the most INT you can for power pool and damage.  At level 20, the INT cap is about 160.</P> <P>Adept3 roots and nukes will make a HUGE difference.</P>

[Fael]

Well I will repeat what others have said.  At 20th you get a huge boost in power with Nul Absolution.At 22nd you get another big boost in power with Putrid Cloud.You really arent a Warlock until youve gotten one AE Poison and one AE Disease IMO.  Then with that and the PBAE you can really do some damage to encounters.Being only 22nd, I cant comment beyond that, but one more level and things will get better.Mal<div></div>

[Araxes]

SOme others might disagree with me ... but it's been my impression that warlocks -- and wizards for that matter -- are the least solo-friendly classes in the game.  Can we solo?  Yes.  Can we solo well?  Not really.  And I don't think it's where our strength lies -- particularly for the warlock class we really need a group protecting us to shine at our full potential.  But that's just my take on it ... others argue we can solo quite well.  Again - it's not that we can't solo ... I just don't think it's the best route to level a 'lock.<div></div>

[insano19t]

<DIV>When i made my warlock, I think I soloed pretty much all the time till atleast my 30's well due to the fact of just perfecting a couple things and knowingly what my class can or cannot do.. (plus remember this way before combat changes for dof)  but mostly dont try to solo too much or you will end up with lots of death.. but i have to agree past level 20 you will get a decent of spells that will just make you pretty darn powerful.  the AE spell at level 22 you will love it. untill you get dark distortion.. after that.. you might not die much.. but alot is trial and error  and yeah groups def make us shine alot </DIV>

[DuerganGr]

<BR> <BLOCKQUOTE> <HR> Vicontessa wrote:<BR>SOme others might disagree with me ... but it's been my impression that warlocks -- and wizards for that matter -- are the least solo-friendly classes in the game.  Can we solo?  Yes.  Can we solo well?  Not really. <BR><BR><BR> <BR> <HR> </BLOCKQUOTE><BR>That's a tough one to swallow. I was in Permafrost tonight and we were waiting for a couple replacements. Our entertainment was watching our Warlock solo even con ^^^ Heroics. I was pretty impressed when he killed the first one and thought maybe he burned some slow recharge spells to get through it, but he continued to do it consistantly. It's inspired me to try one out.

[Lenefir]

<div></div><div></div>Like people already have said, what you can do at level 19 resembles little of what you can do at higher levels, and upgrading a spell from apprentice 1 or adept 1 to adept 3 will help you a lot.  However, I will also like to point out that what they say they experienced at low levels also resembles little of what you currently are experiencing, unless of course they too levelled up from start very recently.The "strategies" (if you can call them that) I have used so far from relatively safe (but taking long time and consuming a lot of power) to risky (but usually fast) and all under the assumption you won't get any social adds or that is already taken care of with body pulling or other means:1) Root, start your HO, throw your posion/disease debuff, wait for recast time of root, then throw a direct damage spell, then re-root, wait for root recast again, do another direct damage spell.  Repeat until mob is dead.  Basically you just have to be sure you are able to cast a root at all times, so you have to watch both the recast timer of your root spell, and also the duration left of your current root.  At some points you can throw in some extra direct damage spells (this will happen more often as you get higher level roots with somewhat longer duration) and at some points you will just have to re-root because your direct damage spells haven't refreshed their recast or you will not be able to cast them in time before root expires.2) Root, start your HO, throw your poison/disease debuff, throw every direct damage spell you have as fast as they refresh, and hope you are able to cast root when the mob is running towards you.  You might want to avoid using stun until the mob is running to give you more time to reroot should root not have refreshed its timer.3) Root, start your HO, throw your poison/disease debuff, then throw every dot spell you have followed by every direct damage spell you have.  This option is bound to break root, so pray to your favorite god you are able to kill the mob before it kills you.  Timely casted root and stun might help you survive this option more often.Until you get the first encounter root at level 40, fighting any multi-mob single encounter is going to be hard, and even then you are bound for mobs to break off as your recast is longer than the duration, and also very often mobs are spread out so far away from each other that not all of them are in range of the encounter root.  When using the encounter root, always aim for the middle.That said, to be able to kill multi mob encounters at lower levels you have the option to hope the mobs hit so weak you are able to kill them all off with your few encounter and area spells faster than they kill you.  Timely inserted stuns from the encounter damage and single target damage can improve your survival chances, but you are highly dependant on your luck with not getting interrupted.Another option which will improve your chances a tad is to single out one of the mobs and keep it rooted all the time.  You have to expect the rest of the mobs come swarming at you though, so again you will have to be able to kill these off faster than they kill you, all the while dodging and keeping the one singled out mob rooted.  As your root durations gradually get longer you can hope to keep two or more of the mobs rooted at once, but more coordination and running around and dodging is needed.  Again, timely inserted encounter stuns and single target stuns can improve your survival chances, though this time you have to consider any encounter spell you use will most likely free the rooted mob(s), so you have to watch the distance, or count on luck.The more down arrows a mob has the faster it is to kill (since it has less hit points), so single out the one with fewest down arrows.  If they all have an equal amount of down arrows, single out the melee types in the encounter.  Spell casters will hurt you anyway, but a figher or scout will have limited abilities from a distance.  If it's not possible to guess the classes of the mob then luck is all you can hope for.A major flaw with any of these options are they require a lot of space, which, since SOE in their "wisdom" <span>:smileymad:</span> added social aggro, are very dependant on <i>where </i>and <i>what</i> you fight.  Very often you will have to go body pull a mob then try to run off to a safe spot before you try any of the above options, provided you have a decent chunk of health left that is, if not or if you got more than you can chew, just keep on running.  Also, if you end up with having to body pull you may want to remove any proc-spells casted on yourself that triggers if you are hit since they will put you into combat mode, reduce your running speed, and if unlucky, trigger the social aggro you wanted to avoid in the first place.  Any of these procs can also break a rooted mob.Again, depending on where and what you are fighting an option to body pulling is starting out with root, then your preferred choice of strategy from here on, but if you see a mob wandering close to your rooted mob (which may or may not be social until you learn from experience the hard way) cancel your root and start recasting it at once.  Depending on the distance you had from the mob it should now be rooted right in front of your nose, or with a little bad timing it will get in a few hits before it is re-rooted, but hopefully you should still only be fighting one mob.  So back up and start your preferred tactic again or run for whatever little health you may have left.Most animal types are not social aggro (with too many exceptions to even bother mentioning), however animal type of mobs starting in Antonica/Commonlands and higher level zones are very good at the warp-on-top-of-you-while-still-rooted trick so maximum distance (as far away as possible but still able to cast root and nukes) is important for these kinds of mobs if you want to avoid them to warp/teleport on top of you.  Once they have done their trick the recast timer for it is relatively long though, so if they do it you now don't have to back up that far.  Just far enough to avoid getting stunned and pounded on.If the mob is of any of the types you get as master 1 strike options during various levels (like gnoll, orc, skeleton, fairy, goblin, lizardman, harpy, djinn, droag, etc etc), or is of any of the races you can choose at the character selection screen (elf, halfing, human, gnome, ratonga, etc etc), expect the mobs to be social aggro more often than not.  Expect a lot of mobs to be social aggro and helpful to any of these above mentioned mob races/types to a degree that makes no real-life-type of sense at all.If you are in a dungeon instance, expect the mobs to be very social regardless of any type/race they are.Or in short, expect a mob to be social aggro until proven otherwise.<div></div>If you as a warlock come to hate the social aggro at low levels then don't expect it to become better (until the unlikely event SOE change their mind) so you might want to seriously consider starting an alt that can handle nose-to-nose fighting before you rip out too many hairs.  If you on the other hand enjoy the social aggro then all the more power to you, and you are really going to enjoy the higher level zones.  That said, don't expect to find it easy to do a lot of the solo kill-quests at their intended level, so if you like questing while solo you currently have picked (in my biased opinion) a bad class.As you get higher in levels, yes, you will be able to solo even con lonely heroic mobs, but it depends on a lot of things, of which most important is what class is the mob.  A heroic spellcaster will kill you so fast it's not even funny.  A heroic melee class will have very limited abilities if you can keep it rooted at a max distance all the time (like that mentioned giant in permafrost but some other classes could have done that much more effectively so at the current state of things I would personally not pick a warlock because of that reason only, but your milage may vary).  If it's a heroic multi-mob encounter then all you can do is pray you were not there, that it's green or grey, or that it's so many mobs in the encounter that they each have very little hitpoints so you can kill them off quickly with your encounter and area spells.  Same goes for a named heroic mob, but almost all named mobs also have some long ranged abilities so it really boils down to if you did your daily praying to your favorite god, most important of them the SOE god.Enough rambling I guess as this turned out much longer than intended.  Hopefully something of what I said can be considered useful...<p>Message Edited by Lenefir on <span class=date_text>08-14-2006</span> <span class=time_text>08:48 PM</span>

[Chaosfairie27]

<DIV>I am playing a Warlock now for the first time.  I think I just hit lvl 11 and I am finding it so hard to take on "monsters" even the same level as me.  I have died way too many times to count already, but I am hanging in there in hopes it gets better :smileyhappy:</DIV>

[Magic]

<P>Dang!  I'm at level 6 and having a heck of a time doing the Circle of Elders quest on The Outpost of the Overlord with all apprentice I spells.  I start by attacking one of the elders.  Once the three elders are dead, I'm too low in HP and power to kill anything else and they come at me before I can heal back to full.  Too bad that none of the mobs on the Outpost drop spells.</P> <P>I can solo this quest with my Necromancer and Coercer at level 5 and 6 so I know that it can be done at those levels by those classes.  It was easiest with my Necro at level 5.</P>

[Cowdenic]

<BR> <BLOCKQUOTE> <HR> Aljola wrote:<BR> <P>Dang!  I'm at level 6 and having a heck of a time doing the Circle of Elders quest on The Outpost of the Overlord with all apprentice I spells.  I start by attacking one of the elders.  Once the three elders are dead, I'm too low in HP and power to kill anything else and they come at me before I can heal back to full.  Too bad that none of the mobs on the Outpost drop spells.</P> <P>I can solo this quest with my Necromancer and Coercer at level 5 and 6 so I know that it can be done at those levels by those classes.  It was easiest with my Necro at level 5.</P><BR> <HR> </BLOCKQUOTE><BR>welcome to the world of warlock.

[emagine]

Well to help you out i went from 18-25 in pvp (yes made another warlock) very quickly by fighting the group mobs in antonica, the West of Windstalker village, there are some group arrow down mobs, and you should get to 25 relitively fast.<div></div>