Warlock Enlightened Spirit w/Melee

[Pnumbra]

While there is a lot of feedback on the caster versions of Warlock; has anyone tried out the melee potential of a pure ES?

[Rhysem]

If by melee you mean heavily-spellpowered point blank area of effect (ie: the light "cleaves") melee, then yes.

It is actually pretty good. I think the temp hp pulsed by the aura is a bit weak (I was getting 92 per pulse -- bring it back up to 140-180ish like it had been a couple revisions ago and we'd be on to something), but it was doing fine in VON3 EE. Not exactly the hardest epic content by any means, but considering I was trying to kit the character out with moderate gear instead of top tier stuff, it was nice to see it work okay. I didn't go try it on the beholders though, they may be a lot more challenging if they can turn off eldritch blast.

There's little reason to actually melee. Walk in, burst, burst, drop consecration, bursts are almost recharged, so hardly worth swinging for ~50 damage. Better to fod or hurl through hell someone, etc. You need so wide a variety of SP for your aura + pact + light for the cleaves that you're going to have to sacrifice both weapon slots to spell power/crit and you're possibly still going to be missing out on one of them. I was running with consecration + its heal slumming in T4/T3 twist slots, while in sharadi destiny, fiend as my pact. I ended up, by what I did, having good fire and light sp, universal crit, and only a bit of force sp (close to universal).

A 4th twist of fate slot and the 4/3/2/1 would have been really nice -- slot in fire spell power, consecration x2, and cocoon.

[Pnumbra]

Ok, I was thinking along those lines. I can't see giving up 2 twist for Consecration with only 3 slots atm. I just hate creating a cookie-cutter model. I saw a vid of warlock holding two TF weapons and I was thinking this must just be for the weapons powers and not for melee. But this did get me thinking about using a melee weapon with EB-burst and if I could actually pull off some respectable damage - probably not.

Once the trees are finalized, I will play around with some combinations. Thanks for the feedback, appreciate it.

I wish there was a character builder for MAC users

[Rasputin]

Managed to copy my swashbuckler over to Lammania last night.

Heroic TRed him into a 2 Rogue, 5 Bard, 13 Warlock Enlightened Spirit Old One Swashbuckler.

On Sarlona, he is a 2 Rogue, 6 Bard, 12 Wizard Eldritch Knight Swashbuckler.

Here are my thoughts on the changes between the two builds:

1. I really miss the three Wizard bonus feats. It was very helpful to have Quicken, Eschew and Extend mixed in.
2. Warlock aura's DPS was lackluster. Counting all of the different damage types, it was MAYBE 100 per tick. You could double it and it would still pale in comparison to swinging my weapon. Barely noticed the increase in overall damage.
3. The temp hit points were reasonable. I was used to Eldritch Knight giving me temp hit points from my buckler, and the ones from the Warlock were about double what I was used to before, plus it refreshed FAR faster than before.
4. Warlocks should NOT require material components. No way, no how. We have so few spells--that is balanced in P&P by the fact that each spell does roughly two things at the same time, they last all day long, they take no memorization/daily slots, and no spell components. In DDO, we still have just as few spells, but most of them only do one thing, they last as long as their arcane counterparts, some of them take spell points, and they take spell components. Really detracted from the class.
5. And that brings me to Evard's Black Tentacles. I was really jazzed to try it until I noticed in the middle of the dungeon that it took a spell component (which I of course did not have). I exited the dungeon and bought some of them, then I went back into the quest. I checked the spell description and saw that it said the duration was 1 minute. I cast the spell and was dismayed to see that it only lasted maybe 10 seconds or so. Lame. The cultists in the first room of Lords of Dust also popped up with an IMMUNE snowflake, which made me wonder. The invocation in P&P is supposed to not only do grappling damage but cold damage as well. Was that somehow being stuck in but the enemies made immune to it somehow?

Lastly, the fact that the spell takes 30 mana is just adding insult to injury. I hope that was an oversight that will soon be rectified. Considering how very few spells and spell points warlocks get, the spell should: cost no mana, do cold as well as bludgeoning damage, and last the full 1 minute. Casting it again during that duration should get rid of the old spell and replace it in the new location.
6. The displacement enhancement is great, but there's no reason to make us have to cast it over and over. If we can cast it whenever we want for no spell points, there's really no point in not making it permanent unless dispelled.

The class has potential. The very few spells are a poor tradeoff of the number and utility of the wizard spells I had to trade for them. The healing ability is easily supplanted by Healing cocoon or bard healing, so it by itself isn't worth the sacrifices you have to make.

[Rasputin]

Went into Devil's Assault on EH. Level 22. Divine Crusader. Turned on all my assorted auras and stood there, allowing the monsters to beat on me for a while.

Curiously enough, when my warlock aura killed an enemy, I did NOT get healed thanks to my Divine Crusader aura. Seems like an oversight.

Also, at least one time, a frenzied bezekira stood next to me chewing on me (or trying to at least) in the middle of my eldritch warlock aura and remained completely unhurt. Lots of his brethren had been killed by that same aura, and every time it pulsed nothing happened to him. Bug.

[Rasputin]

Heroic TR-ing is painful. It's almost as if it is deliberately so. Emptying the TR bank, especially on Lammania where we're trying our best to help out the testing process, is an antiquated product of the days when server memory was expensive and in short supply. Today, when desktops are measured in terabytes, the fact that we have to empty it every single life rubs like two-ply sandpaper. The benefits don't scale into epic, so are almost totally unuseful when you consider the time investment needed to get them.

Here's my suggestions:

Infinite TR bank. If it's really useful we'll take it out and it won't go back in until our next life. If it isn't all that useful it will be archived to semi-permanent storage so it shouldn't be that big a drain on the server.

TR bank needs to be sortable based on level requirement of the equipment. That in itself would turn it from excruciating to a blessing.

As far as Epic Tr goes, it would be so helpful if we could save a template of our character at level 20: levels, classes, feats, skills, enhancements. When you do the epic TR and you are getting ready to run through the levels all over again with your free lesser reincarnation, it would be amazing to instead just click the button and be popped back to that saved template at level 20 without having to choose the same things over and over again. Such a time saver.

[Rhysem]

Ok, I was thinking along those lines. I can't see giving up 2 twist for Consecration with only 3 slots atm. I just hate creating a cookie-cutter model. I saw a vid of warlock holding two TF weapons and I was thinking this must just be for the weapons powers and not for melee. But this did get me thinking about using a melee weapon with EB-burst and if I could actually pull off some respectable damage - probably not.

Once the trees are finalized, I will play around with some combinations. Thanks for the feedback, appreciate it.

I wish there was a character builder for MAC users

Don't worry, I'd kinda doubt the builders have warlock support yet, so no loss.

Twisting Consecration x2 and Cocoon felt really sold to me. YMMV. If I had all 4 slots at 1/2/3/3 I'd love to twist in those plus 30 fire spell power from draconic. I could though also see twisting the prism line and sitting in DC instead. Having Strike Down as an additional cleave to go with the bursts would be super.

The aura tick rate going up in the cores is perhaps bad design. The aura already scales with warlock levels in that it matters greatly how many EB and pact die you have. Having the tick time also drop means it scales exponentially -- so if you only have a few levels its basically worthless.

The problem with actually using your melee weapon is there's not a lot of time to do so. Between the bursts and your aura, on EN/EH you tend to be out of mobs, and the bursts cycle so fast they'll be up by the next spawn. Also given the SP you need, your weapons are likely dedicated to that purpose, since you don't find much SP/Spell Crit on non-weapons (maybe shields, and then maybe other slots in quest gear)

[Pnumbra]

Don't worry, I'd kinda doubt the builders have warlock support yet, so no loss.

Twisting Consecration x2 and Cocoon felt really sold to me. YMMV. If I had all 4 slots at 1/2/3/3 I'd love to twist in those plus 30 fire spell power from draconic. I could though also see twisting the prism line and sitting in DC instead. Having Strike Down as an additional cleave to go with the bursts would be super.

The aura tick rate going up in the cores is perhaps bad design. The aura already scales with warlock levels in that it matters greatly how many EB and pact die you have. Having the tick time also drop means it scales exponentially -- so if you only have a few levels its basically worthless.

The problem with actually using your melee weapon is there's not a lot of time to do so. Between the bursts and your aura, on EN/EH you tend to be out of mobs, and the bursts cycle so fast they'll be up by the next spawn. Also given the SP you need, your weapons are likely dedicated to that purpose, since you don't find much SP/Spell Crit on non-weapons (maybe shields, and then maybe other slots in quest gear)

Hummm, the idea of adding shield is tempting. Forget weapon, just spec shield use.I like your ideas but have heard that the aura in the epic levels is subpar. Has the two-seconds tic been added on Lama? I'm going Half-Elf with Paladin dilettante as a pure ES Warlock. Will work on the shield theory to see how it works out on paper. I really like the idea though, thanks for the feedback.

[Violith]

Went into Devil's Assault on EH. Level 22. Divine Crusader. Turned on all my assorted auras and stood there, allowing the monsters to beat on me for a while.

Curiously enough, when my warlock aura killed an enemy, I did NOT get healed thanks to my Divine Crusader aura. Seems like an oversight.

Also, at least one time, a frenzied bezekira stood next to me chewing on me (or trying to at least) in the middle of my eldritch warlock aura and remained completely unhurt. Lots of his brethren had been killed by that same aura, and every time it pulsed nothing happened to him. Bug.

would bug report that DC aura isnt working with warlock aura.

that said, what does the aura's kills show up as on the quest panel? (hopefully its not misadventure, since that would cut into remenant drops)

[Pnumbra]

would bug report that DC aura isnt working with warlock aura.

that said, what does the aura's kills show up as on the quest panel? (hopefully its not misadventure, since that would cut into remenant drops)

I don't know why it doesn't tic just as Consecrate does. Seems odd. I hope that it's fixed before launch.

Does ES offer something like EK core enhancements?

[Sthax]

Got a few Death-rezzes too, though it was an arrow in the knee. But maybe stanch mechanics persist through death and a normal raise isn't enough?

[jaedom]

While there is a lot of feedback on the caster versions of Warlock; has anyone tried out the melee potential of a pure ES?

Im doing a shuri tosser version works very nicely with one exception with aura when you die you can be tossed into a death loop where you die instantly on rez. The only fix we have found for this besides re-log is turning off the aura once dead so it does not kill you when you get back up. Hope they fix this bug soon have not seen it in known issues yet. I use holy symbol of lloth and shard in combustion for aura.Will switch out to sage ring tho for thunderforged next lvl.

[jaedom]

Got a few Death-rezzes too, though it was an arrow in the knee. But maybe stanch mechanics persist through death and a normal raise isn't enough?

We found the aura to be the cause of it just turn it off when you die rez then turn it back on